Battle of the Hartwarder Landwehr
The battle of the Hartwarder Landwehr (also called the battle of the Hartwarder Schanze ) took place on January 21, 1514 near Rodenkirchen in the Stadland .
prehistory
In 1488, Duke Albrecht the Brave of Saxony (Meißen) marched against rebellious Flanders to free Maximilian I, who had been captured by the citizens of Bruges . Maximilian made him governor of the Netherlands . In 1498 he received the inheritance of Friesland as a reward for coping with the same and as a replacement for the costs incurred , but he would have had to subjugate its sub-areas from Westergo to Sylt first by force of arms.
After initially paying homage to Albrecht, Count Edzard I of East Frisia resisted the plans of the Saxon dukes. In 1505 he supported Frisian rebels in the city and province of Groningen , which he tried to incorporate into his county, and was then banned from the empire at the instigation of Georg von Sachsen , Albrecht's successor . A church ban against Edzard followed. With that the Saxon feud began .
In 1507 the Saxons made an alliance with Count Johann V of Oldenburg and the Dukes of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, who were supposed to oppress East Frisia from the east, although the Oldenburgs tried to implement plans to conquer Butjadingen and the Stadland as early as 1500 and thereby the claims of the Saxons ignored this area. Edzard promised his protection to the neighboring Frisians between Jade and Weser, who then paid homage to him. Since the Archbishop of Bremen was a Guelph at that time , no support from the Butjadinger and Stadlander in the fight against the Oldenburg was to be expected from him, although there was a traditional rivalry between the Bremen and the Oldenburgers.
Course of the battle
In the course of 1514 events precipitated: On January 17, 1514, the enforcement of the imperial ban against Edzard began. Bound by attacks on his own territory, he could not come to the aid of the Butjaders and Stadlanders.
On the morning of January 21, 1514, the Count of Oldenburg and several Guelph dukes met for a final briefing in the St. Paul's Monastery outside Bremen and probably left on the same day. Because of the harsh winter, rivers and moors were frozen, so that the advance progressed quickly and the attackers could even use the frozen Weser as a transport route for their guns. After a short siege, the attackers get the income from Golzwarden and Rodenkirchen. At the Hartwarder Landwehr, the Butjadinger and Stadlander Frisians had built a jump from blocks of ice up to the moor at Strohauser Sieltief and took up positions behind it. In the subsequent desperate battle, most of the defenders fell. In contemporary chronicles there is talk of up to 700 fallen. The last defenders were able to retreat to the church in Langwarden and holed up there. As soon as the attackers had brought their guns, this last bulwark also fell, and the last defenders died on the Langwarder Burmeide. Now that the last resistance was broken, the rural communities were thoroughly robbed and plundered. The surviving Frisians became subjects of the Counts of Oldenburg and the Dukes of Braunschweig through the Esenshammer Peace Treaty. The land was initially divided between the Counts of Oldenburg and Heinrich the Elder of Braunschweig , Heinrich the Middle of Lüneburg and Erich von Calenberg , but when it was bought in 1523, it came completely into the possession of the Counts of Oldenburg.
Significance of the battle for the development of the Wesermarsch and the House of Oldenburg
The second decade of the 16th century brought about a turning point for the western Wesermarsch in several ways :
- The lost battles for the Hartwarder Landwehr and the church of Langwarden in 1514 sealed the end of the " Frisian freedom ". The time of a self-determined community of the Butjadinger and Stadlander in peasant republics based on cooperative traditions was finally over in 1514. Over the centuries that followed, the Counts of Oldenburg established the feudal system common in the interior of the region .
- By 1511 the Jade Bay had formed and enlarged in a series of devastating floods. During this time a Weser delta had formed, which had made islands out of Butjadingen and the Stadland. Immediately after taking power in the Wesermarsch, the Counts of Oldenburg set about gradually draining the waters between the Jade Bay and the Weser by building dykes and drainage systems or turning them into small watercourses. In this way, large areas of fertile land were "valued", which enabled the Counts of Oldenburg to breed cattle and horses at high yields. This contributed significantly to the rise of the House of Oldenburg .
The Protestant parish Rodenkirchen emphasizes that Butjadingen and the Stadland "[under] the new state rule" experienced a sustainable economic and cultural bloom: "Well-educated pastors and wealthy, self-confident representatives of the parishes ensured that the churches were extraordinary at this time received splendid furnishings for worship according to the Lutheran order. The important sculptor Ludwig Münstermann from Hamburg created an ensemble of unique works of art for Rodenkirchen .
The last great heyday of the cattle trade in the 2nd half of the 19th century left clear traces in the townscape of Rodenkirchen with the spacious layout of the market square and a large number of representative buildings in the style of historicism.
Others
The Hartwarder Friesen memorial in Hartwarden , erected in 1914, commemorates the battle.
Individual evidence
- ^ Paul Baks: Albrecht the brave as hereditary governor and potentate of Friesland. Motives and course of his Frisian "adventure" . In: André Thieme (ed.): Duke Albrecht der Beherzte (1443–1500). A Saxon prince in the empire and in Europe . Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 2002, p. 105
- ↑ Henning Bielefeld: Lecture - The Frisian freedom is just a myth. Gerd Steinwascher puts the battle near Hartwarden into context . Nordwestzeitung , January 16, 2014
- ↑ Jens Schemeyers: Geschichte ( Memento of the original from March 20, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Open-air spectacle Stadland e. V.
- ↑ Evangelical Church Rodenkirchen: Historical development of the church and the place
