Wilhelm Ulenoge

Wilhelm Ulenoge (* early 16th century in Westphalia ; † March 28, 1572 in Güstrow ) was a German notary and document forger on behalf of Mecklenburg noble families.

Live and act

Wilhelm Ulenoge was born in Westphalia, moved to Rostock in the mid-16th century and moved into a residential building with his wife on Hartestrasse . He worked as a notary and traveled through Mecklenburg and Pomerania . Thanks to this practice, he had detailed knowledge of the legal and financial circumstances of many families of the Mecklenburg nobility. From the mid-1560s onwards, due to financial difficulties, he produced forged documents for the benefit of his aristocratic customers. He entertained scribes and seal-etchers. It caused the greatest forgery of documents in Mecklenburg history.

The forgeries mainly concerned Elisabeth von Halberstadt, Carin Moltke's widow in Teutenwinkel (today: Toitenwinkel , Rostock district). After his violent death, she faced family and economic problems. She is believed to be the instigator of the forgeries and is complicit in supporting Ulenoge's attempt to escape after his fraud was exposed.

Once captured, both were charged and received different sentences. Elisabeth von Halberstadt's goods were confiscated and expelled from the country. Ulenoge, on the other hand, was publicly executed on March 28, 1572 on the market square in Güstrow.

To date, 108 forgeries of documents made by Ulenoge have been found, which concern the period from 1348 to 1569. Of these, 47 documents alone were forged in favor of the Teutenwinkler Moltkes. There are 78 copies of the forgeries in the holdings of the Schwerin State Main Archives .

Escape

Escape route of Wilhelm Ulenoge, Mecklenburg 1569

In mid-November 1569, the Rostock engraver Lambrecht Albrechts was arrested for divination and magic. When the house was searched, the authorities found prints of several old ducal Mecklenburg seals. Lambrecht Albrechts confessed in his interrogations that these seals were commissioned by Wilhelm Ulenoge. According to Ulenoge, they should be for the dukes. Since Ulenoge was now under suspicion of forgery, he was forced to stay away from Rostock.

First of all, Ulenoge fled to Ribnitz (see Escape route, station 1) . On Friday, November 18, 1569, he drove to Teutenwinkel to see Carin Moltke's widow, Elisabeth von Halberstadt (2) . She was a client of Ulenoge who profited from the forgeries. A day later he drove back to Ribnitz to Gottschalk Preen , in whose house he was a guest (3) . Together with him he drove to Heinrich Preen (4) in Wehnendorf on Monday, November 21st . Ulenoge was supposed to broker a contract there. On November 23, he returned to Teutenwinkel (5) . Two days later he returned to Gottschalk Preen in Ribnitz (6) , where his brother from Stralsund visited him on December 1st. Ulenoge went to Stralsund (7) with his brother . Four days later he went back to Ribnitz and stayed two days (8) .

On December 7th, the search for Ulenoge was extended to the entire country, as the dukes confirmed to the mayor and the city council of Rostock that they did not give Ulenoge any orders to order seals. On the same day he drove to Teutenwinkel (9) . Elisabeth von Halberstadt was waiting for him there. Since she no longer wanted to accommodate him, for fear of punishment, her daughter, Ilse Moltkes, was supposed to take him with her car to Neukirchen ( Klein Belitz district ) the next day (10) . Once there, he spent five days on site. On the night of December 12th to 13th, he and Ilse Moltkes fled to Tüzen (11) . Ilse left the same day and came back on December 17th with new news: the Moltke's clerk, Nicolaus von Stade, and Ulenoge's wife were arrested. The fear of Elisabeth von Halberstadt and her daughter increased. They had to get rid of Ulenoge and advised him to take his own life. He refused. However, Ulenoge had to submit a written declaration which Elisabeth von Halberstadt acquitted of complicity in the forgeries. In the afternoon of the same day Ulenoge was rowed across Lake Tüzen in a small boat by a Moltke wagon driver. Until nightfall he hid in an adjacent forest. From there he was picked up by the Tüzer Vogt Hans Arendes in a car. In the front of the car were Ilse Moltkes and a nun. Wilhelm Ulenoge had to hide under the cloth in the back.

On the morning of December 18, 1569, they arrived in Groß Trebbow ( Klein Trebbow district ), where he was supposed to hide in a barn until the journey continued. Under the same conditions as the previous night, Ulenoge was driven to Klein Trebbow (12) . There he stayed with the Raben couple. After a day he asked her to drive him to Ratzeburg , as he assumed he would be safe there. The couple refused to allow him to ride because of the ailments on the horses. Despite this, they agreed to a trip to Camin near Wittenburg . On December 20, he was placed with the local pastor in Camin (13) . On the following days he lost more and more the strength and the courage to continue the flight.

On Monday, December 26th, 1569, he was picked up by a servant of Halberstadt and taken to his farm in Camin. From there, Wilhelm Ulenoge was picked up the following day, transported to Schwerin and taken prisoner.

Captivity and death

Already on December 29, 1569 Ulenoge stood before the court of Duke Johann Albrecht in the court room at Schwerin. At the first interrogation, Ulenoge tried to gloss over his actions with fictitious motives. The re-engraving of the seals of the three dukes Albrecht III. , Henry IV. And Magnus II. He did not deny it. However, he claimed to have been seduced by the Rostock engraver Lambrecht Albrechts. He prematurely stated that he had thrown the forged ducal seals on his escape into the Recknitz . Ulenoge's willpower failed and he saw that his punishment would be inevitable and made a comprehensive confession in further interrogations. As initially claimed, he did not throw the stung seal into the Recknitz. He himself commissioned the engraver to have the engraving done. He also confessed to having delivered forged documents to members of the Vieregge , Schmeker, Behr auf Nustrow , Preen , Kardorff , Zepelin families and the city of Sülze . Ulenoge insisted, however, that Elisabeth von Halberstadt was not only an accomplice but also an instigator in his machinations.

In the meantime, Ulenoge's wife and the Moltke's clerk were released from prison in Rostock in the face of a lack of evidence of complicity.

The Duke could not avoid taking action against Elisabeth von Halberstadt on the basis of these serious allegations of complicity. She was captured on March 6, 1570, and the first interrogation followed on March 20. At that first hearing, she denied all of Ulenoge's allegations. Even the confrontation with him did not result in a confession. Ulenoge was tortured for several hours. Nevertheless, he stuck to the fact that Elisabeth von Halberstadt instigated him and knew about every single fake. She also corrected his concepts. Elisabeth von Halberstadt helped to attach old, genuine seals to the forged documents by melting them with a red-hot iron and to seal them with the stamped seals. More interrogations of the accused followed and she admitted her complicity. After the executioner was introduced to her and a screw was briefly placed on one leg, she confessed to all allegations. She soon retracted her testimony and charged the court with dishonorable detention. The process dragged on for two years.

No one worried about Ulenoge throughout the trial until his death. For Elisabeth von Halberstadt, however, her influential aristocratic relatives got involved just one day after her arrest, so that her imprisonment was relatively mild. Ulenoge, on the other hand, suffered scorn and harassment from the Guardians until he finally wished himself dead. An inquisition-like procedure is reported which has completely undermined his physical condition.

The verdict said, "that he should be judged from life to death with the sword, then cut into four parts and hanged up on the four ways that cross the city." According to the ducal decree, this judgment was read out again on Friday, March 28, 1572, between 9 and 10 a.m. and publicly carried out on the market in Güstrow.

It was not until months later, on November 19, 1572, that the verdict against Elisabeth von Halberstadt was pronounced and enforced on the riding track in front of the castle bridge in Schwerin: her property was confiscated and her land was permanently expelled, which - as it later turned out - only lasted temporarily.

The investigations against other noble confidants and clients came to an end quickly.

literature

• Witte, Hans: Wilhelm Ulenoge and his falsifications In: Lisch, Georg Christian Friedrich (Ed.): Yearbooks of the Association for Mecklenburg History and Archeology 1901, pp. 7-64 (Volume 66), ( digitized ).
• Funk, Udo: Boom in the forgery workshop: forgery of documents in the Middle Ages and early modern times. In: Mecklenburg-Magazin. No. 7, 1997, p. 8.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Münch, Ernst : Wilhelm Ulenoge. In: Sabine Pettke (Ed.): Biographical Lexicon for Mecklenburg. Rostock 2004, p. 298/299 (volume 4)
2. ↑ Münch, Ernst: Noble widows in possession of the Toitenwinkel near Rostock (16th to 18th centuries) , page 362, in Martina Schattkowsky (Ed.), Widowhood in the Early Modern Age, Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2003, ISBN 3936522790 , Google Books
3. ↑ Inventory overview (1.9-1) ( Memento of the original from March 14, 2011 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. . State Main Archive Schwerin. Retrieved March 17, 2011. 
4. ^ Münch, Ernst: Wilhelm Ulenoge. In: Sabine Pettke (Ed.): Biographical Lexicon for Mecklenburg. Rostock 2004, p. 299 (Volume 4)
5. ↑ Gloeckler, Albrecht FW: The composition system and the criminal law process in Mecklenburg in the 16th and early 17th centuries. In: Lisch, Georg Christian Friedrich (Ed.): Yearbooks of the Association for Mecklenburg History and Archeology 1850, p. 146 (Volume 15)
6. ^ Witte, Hans: Wilhelm Ulenoge and his falsifications In: Lisch, Georg Christian Friedrich (Ed.): Yearbooks of the Association for Mecklenburg History and Archeology 1901, p. 24 (Volume 66)