Black pile
The Black Heap was an Odenwald peasant army during the German Peasant War under the leadership of Florian Geyer .
history
The black heap was distinguished by its special military order and martial prowess. At its head was the nobleman Florian Geyer from Giebelstadt . He had equipped the squad of around 100-200 men at his own expense with, among other things, black uniforms, from which they got their name.
Another department was under the command of the Ballenberg innkeeper Georg Metzler . This bunch, which called themselves the Evangelical Army , because they thought “to handle and protect the word of God”, set out from the Odenwald on April 1, 1525 in the direction of the Jagst , where they conquered the Schöntal monastery with its supplies initially secured the material basis for further actions.
There were other peasant groups , especially from the area around the imperial city of Hall , who had not joined the peasant uprising, mainly because of the sermon of Johannes Brenz . Other farmers came, for example, from Öhringen under the command of the former Hohenlohe Chancellor Wendel Hipler or from the Heilbronn area under Jäcklein Rohrbach , an innkeeper from Böckingen , who, however, was notorious for particular violence.
Reinforced in this way, the peasant army was now called the Heller Haufe . At that time his strength was about 8,000 to 10,000 men.
The first blow was aimed at the Counts of Hohenlohe. After unsuccessful negotiations between the counts, which were only aimed at gaining time, the crowd set out for Neuenstein . The town and castle fell into the hands of the peasants almost without a fight. The counts gave in and, as Brother Georg and Brother Albrecht, swore by the Twelve Articles , the main demands of the peasants.
Other feudal lords followed their example. The three main leaders now led their heaps to the Neckar . In small towns such as Öhringen , Mergentheim and others, the rebels did not encounter any resistance worth mentioning. Most of the residents joined them. The wealthy residents of the Free Imperial Cities were rather hostile to the farmers.
The farmers' actions were very often motivated by fatalism, hatred and bitterness. There was a lack of tight organization; the journey of the heap was accompanied by pillage and senseless destruction. The castles of Öhringen and Mergentheim and several rich monasteries were set on fire. On the other hand, the behavior of the peasants was characterized by respect for the authorities. So the Counts of Hohenlohe could refuse to surrender cannons, powder and bullets.
The next attack was directed against the city of Weinsberg with its fortified Castle Weibertreu , which Count Ludwig Helferich von Helfenstein , favorite of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria , defended. He refused the handover.
The storming with the participation of Florian Geyer - stylized by some sources as a leader - and the Black Heap succeeded on April 16, 1525 (Easter) through an open door; a bloodbath was wrought among the defenders. It was here that the notorious Weinsberg bloodshed by Jäcklein Rohrbach, who had his prisoners sentenced to death by running the gauntlet in a farmer's court, took place.
Under the influence of this act of violence, the entire nobility from the Odenwald to the Swabian border accepted the laws of the peasants. The Counts of Hohenlohe now also willingly surrendered their guns.
Around April 18, 1525, the Black Heap turned to Heilbronn with the whole peasant army . They plundered the most Mönchsee located Carmelite monastery and threatened to pulling the vines outside the city and with the destruction of the economic base. The Heilbronn council had displeasure with the demands, but was "forced by the common mob". Therefore, it did not even need a serious attack, since most of the city's citizens sympathized with the insurgents and had already opened a gate. The Heilbronn preacher and reformer Johann Lachmann sent three letters to the farmers in vain, and the call for help from the Count Palatine and the Swabian Federation was not answered.
The city council admitted four peasant leaders to the city who made their demands. These enforced that on April 19, 1525 a small part of the peasant army (200 men) could come into the city to "punish" the clergy and the German rulers. Of course, the council's solemn fraternization with the peasants did not protect the city from this pillage.
When the peasants moved out on April 20, 1525, a group of Heilbronn citizens joined the peasant army as free flags . The fact that the peasants roamed the country without the town's colors or coat of arms later gave the council the opportunity to shift all responsibility for this little flag from itself.
While one fortified place after another fell into the hands of the peasant army, successes and the availability of food and wine made a lack of discipline and order noticeable. Therefore, the leaders chose a universally recognized personality, the knight Götz von Berlichingen "with the iron hand" as the highest field captain. However, he only accepted the command with reluctance and for a short time.
The conflicts with Florian Geyer led him to leave the Hellen Haufen and join the Frankish Army , another group of rebellious farmers whose core was the so-called Tauberhaufen . Numerous castles and monasteries were destroyed. With the Franconian Army , the Black Heap took part in the storming of Würzburg on May 6, 1525 , which only partially succeeded because the dominant fortress Marienberg (Burg Frauenberg) on the opposite bank of the Main could not be conquered. Nothing changed about that when Götz von Berlichingen arrived to support him with the light heap , as he was now called. After several days of siege, the farmers tried to storm the fortress on May 15, 1525, even before the siege ring was completely closed. The storm was repulsed by the troops of the Bishop of Würzburg, who had previously fled to Heidelberg . Of the more than 400 dead or wounded, many came from the ranks of Florian Geyer's heap.
Because the name is identical to the fortress near Würzburg, it is not possible to prove with certainty from chronicles whether the Black Heap also took part in the siege of the Benedictine monastery in Frauenberg near Fulda . This was surrounded by fortifications in the 14th century, but these did not withstand the peasant army for long. It was looted on the Tuesday after Easter (April 18, 1525) and so destroyed that it was only usable again after more than 100 years. Since the Black Heap was in the Weinsberg area on that day, its participation in the events in Fulda is excluded.
The Black Heap then turned to Rothenburg ob der Tauber , and Florian Geyer's negotiating skills brought the city to fraternization with the farmers.
While Geyer continued to negotiate with various Lower Franconian princes and cities, the military situation changed: If the peasants had hitherto been confronted by essentially weak and unorganized forces whose leaders had also underestimated the peasant army, the Swabian Confederation appeared under the violent regime of Waldburg was a serious military force on the theater of war.
So the Odenwald heap came into distress, and the Franconian army , at that time over 4,000 men strong, turned against Würzburg again. On the way there, on June 4, 1525, near Sulzdorf and Ingolstadt (both today Giebelstadt ), the Federal Army, a strong, well-armed and trained, well-organized military force led by tried and tested commanders, met with. The peasants formed a wagon castle, but soon panicked and tried to save themselves in the open field. After a brief struggle, the peasant army collapsed, the escape led to its catastrophic dissolution, 4,000 peasants are said to have been slain in an hour.
But the Black pile kept discipline and about 600 men retreated to the village of Ingolstadt, of which about 200 came into the fortified churchyard, where the battle of tough troopers stood up to the federal army. Other farmers holed up in the ruins of the castle and temporarily covered the escape of the surviving farmers. The peasants in the churchyard were attacked by fire, and guns were aimed at the walls of the castle. Few survived.
Then around 200 men fought their way to the Gaildorf farmers, who had regained a strength of 7,000 men. Demoralized by the bad news, the bunch soon broke up.
Florian Geyer was killed a little later, on June 9, 1525, in a fight with servants of his brother-in-law Wilhelm von Grumbach in the Gramschatzer Forest near Würzburg. The probable reason for its end was probably differences in the Grumbachian deals .
reception
The deeds of the Black Heap, and in particular of Florian Geyer, were increasingly glorified over time and downright glorified, especially during the German Romantic era . In this context the song Wir sind des Geyer's black heaps is to be seen, which is based on the demands and rhetoric of the farmers of the 16th century. After the First World War, the text was written in circles of the youth movement using parts of the poem I am poor Kunrad by Heinrich von Reder (1885), the melody by Fritz Sotke in 1919. Later it was also used as a moral justification for revolutionary changes and was part of the curriculum in the polytechnic high schools of the GDR . But it also belonged to the songs of the SS, for example.
Individual evidence
- ↑ http://www.retrobibliothek.de/retrobib/seite.html?id=114590 Article about the Swabian Uprising
- ↑ Cf. “We are Geyer's black heap”, in: Songbook SS, Rasse- und Siedlunghauptamt SS (ed.), Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Munich 19 ??, p. 51, f.
literature
- Christa Dericum: Geyer's black heaps. Florian Geyer and the German Peasants' War . Kramer, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-87956-184-2 .