Vitalis Night
In the Hersfeld Vitalisnacht from April 27th to 28th 1378 , but very likely only the night after, the abbot of the Hersfeld Monastery , Berthold II von Völkershausen , tried to gain control of the city of Hersfeld with the help of the Sterner Ritterbund . However, due to a previously sent feud letter , the attack failed.
April 28th is the feast day of the martyr and saint Vitalis , from which the event gets its name. It is a so-called battle commemoration in the sense of Klaus Graf .
Date transmission
The feud letter quoted below has not survived in the original, but is quoted in several historical works. After that, the feud letter was only issued on April 28th and probably also delivered. Thus, the clashes could not have taken place until the night of April 28th and the morning of April 29th. The canons' lawsuit against the city also speaks for this period, addressed to St. Vitalis at night. The hospital master Johann von Baumbach wrote , “ because they (the citizens of Hersfeld) were there . Vitalis Nacht “entered his house by force. In the “News and documents for the Chronicle of Hersfeld” Volume 1 by Louis Demme, Johannes Nuhn is quoted as saying “on St. Vitalis night the attack should happen” .
prehistory
Around the year 1370 the influence of the Landgraves of Hesse and Thuringia on the Principality of Hersfeld grew. In 1373 the city of Hersfeld formed an alliance with the Landgrave of Hesse, while Abbot Bertold allied himself with the diocese of Mainz . To restore his dwindling influence on the city, the abbot also allied himself with the Star League , which consisted of knights and counts who, in turn, had united against the Landgrave of Hesse. However, the Star Wars ended in 1373 with a victory for the Landgrave.
The plan
Abbot Berthold wanted to make the city leaderless with a "decapitation blow". To do this, he hid several armed Sterners in his dean's city apartment . The dean himself should invite the councilors and aldermen to a private celebration. As soon as the city leaders were drunk, the stars were supposed to kill them and then occupy the city gates. In the early morning the knights were supposed to occupy the undefended city.
Bertold's plan failed early on, as the knight Simon von Haune sent a letter of feud to the city leaders in the evening of April 28th. He wrote:
“Do you know from Hersfeld that I want to be Simon von Hune
Ritter, your enemy and yours, with all
my helpers and allies, and I don't want to
stand alone for good, but for body, honor and
good, and I want that this night do, according to it you have
to judge. Date under my seal on St. Vitalis
evening AD 1378. "
Probably von Haune considered it his duty as a knight not to secretly ambush his former friends in the city like a robber. This warned the citizens and the city guards stormed the dean's apartment and arrested the knights who were hiding there. That same night they were convicted and executed by an express court. After that, the citizens occupied the monastery district, which was deserted because Berthold and his guards had already united with the stars outside the city.
When the knights attacked the city in the morning from the west, from the direction of the Finstertal (am Tagberg), instead of open gates they encountered defensive walls. While trying to storm the walls, one of the leaders, Eberhard von Engern, was hit in the head by a crossbow bolt and killed. Then the Sterner broke off the attack and retreated to the abbot's palace near the oaks and the Johannesberg provost, which was also fortified at the time . From there, they destroyed the area around the city for another five days. They destroyed the stone bridge over the Fulda, the village of Oberrode and the mills outside the city. Fields, meadows and gardens were devastated and vines, fruit trees and forests felled, and the Sterner even took cattle with them. Citizens found outside the city feared for their lives. The Sterner killed eleven citizens, hanged nine, two whacked and one drowned. Even women and girls were ignored, and sexual abuse occurred.
The city then sued the attackers before the king and gave the damage at 40,000 guilders . After the verdict, the abbot had to pay 10,000 marks and each of the eighteen knights involved 400 silver marks .
aftermath
Despite the success of the Hersfelds, both sides emerged from the fight as losers. The relationship between the city and the abbey was disturbed for generations.
The city had already concluded a protective alliance with the Landgrave of Hesse on January 28, 1373 and the abbey followed with an inheritance treaty in 1432. From this time at the latest, the Hersfeld Empire was dependent on the Hessian landgraves. At the latest after the German Peasants' War , when the landgrave also owned parts of the city and the monastery area, the city descended from a residential town to a second-class country town.
Vitalis cross
At the place where the Sterners wanted to climb over the outer city wall, the Hersfelders erect the Vitalis cross on the top of the wall. It is a memorial or atonement cross made of sandstone. It is 121 cm high, 74 cm wide and 17 cm deep. Both the head, arms and the shaft have an octagonal cross-section with thorn-like tips. The shaft widens at the foot, so the cross has the typical shape of a Gothic gable cross, which could have stood on the west gable of a church or a chapel. The Abbey District, the Propstei Petersberg and the Klauskirche could be considered as the place of origin. All three places were heavily devastated during the Star Wars and the clashes between the city and the abbot.
On the arms of the cross is written ANmo DoMini MCCCLXXVIII (translated: In the year of the Lord 1378) in Gothic minuscule, and on the base of the cross, the cross ISTIC HERSFELDis FUIT TRADITA NOCTE VITALis (translated: Hersfeld was betrayed on Vitalsnacht).
When the outer city wall was pulled down in the 1860s, the cross was put up again in the same place. In 1878 the cross was placed on a newly erected base. In addition to two texts in German, there is a Latin chronogram written by Konrad Duden on the base, which gives the year 1878. On the opposite page is another Latin text. It is another rhyming chronogram (Chronostichon), a Leonine rhyming pentameter: Vespera VItaLIs CrVX saCra pLena MaLIs (translated: The evening of Vitalis, holy cross, was full of evil). This rhyme is significantly older and probably comes from a plaque on or under the cross when it was still on the city wall.
Others
A main street in Bad Hersfeld is now called "Simon-Haune-Straße". In 1973 the "Vitalisklinik" was founded as a rehabilitation clinic for digestive and metabolic diseases.
swell
- ^ Wilhelm Neuhaus: From 12 centuries . Ott Verlag, Bad Hersfeld 1984 (page 60, Vispera Vitalis).
- ↑ a b c Michael Fleck: Vitalis Night and Vitalis Cross in Hersfeld . In: Journal of the Association for Hessian History (ZHG) . tape 115 . Self-published by the Association for Hessian History, 2010, ISSN 0342-3107 , p. 21–32 ( vhghessen.de [PDF]).
- ^ Homepage of the city of Bad Hersfeld bad-hersfeld.de
- ↑ Klaus Graf: "The nobility that purger meets hate". Enemy images and conflicts between the urban bourgeoisie and the rural nobility in the late Middle Ages . In: Noble and bourgeois cultures of remembrance of the late Middle Ages and early modern times. Edited by Werner Rösener (= forms of memory 8), Göttingen 2000, pp. 191-204 online .
- ↑ a b c Georg Landau : The Hessian knight castles and their owners. Volume 1. Sänd Reprints Verlag, Vaduz / Liechtenstein 1990 (unchanged reprint of the 1832 edition), pp. 92–94. The feud letter on Google Books.
- ↑ Quotation from Georg Landau's Hessian knight castles: "Girls and women who had the misfortune to fall into his hands were - it is outrageous to have to say this from a clergyman - undressed, even desecrated in the crudest way!"
- ^ Heinrich Riebeling: Stone crosses and cross stones in Hesse Werner Noltemeyer Verlag, Dossenheim / Heidelberg 1977; ISBN 3-88172-005-7 , pp. 110 and 111.
- ↑ the first known quote of this rhyme comes from an unpublished Schweinfurt city chronicle by city physicist Johann Laurentius Bausch (1605–1665)