On 23 April 1543 Susanna of Bavaria passed away from this mortal existence. She was the cousin and wife of Count Palatine Ottheinrich of Neuburg as well as the widow of Margrave Kasimir of Brandenburg-Ansbach and the daughter of Duke Albrecht IV of Bavaria and Duchess Kunigunde of Austria. Exactly where she went after this life was a question addressed by different cultural mediators in Neuburg and Munich, and the diverging responses reflected confessional divisions within the ruling house of the Upper Palatinate and Bavaria, the Wittelsbach dynasty. Nevertheless, gendered expectations for charitable acts bridged the confessional divide that allowed both parties to envision Susanna's soul in a state of grace. Susanna's death, as well as birth and marriages, also mirrors the continuity following the Protestant Reformation in regards to gendered expectations for females that emphasized piety and family loyalty. Her funeral also reflected the changes this movement brought in terms of devotional practices, aesthetics, and dynastic identity as defenders of the faith, which significantly altered the dynamics of dynastic interactions between the Palatine and Bavarian Wittelsbachs, the Habsburgs, and the Hohenzollerns. Thus, a comparison between the circumstances surrounding the Protestant and Catholic funeral literature for Susanna demonstrates that Susanna's identity and final destination were envisioned along the lines of gender, kinship, and confession.

Susanna of Bavaria, like most women and men at the time, understood her personal significance within a familial context that promoted family honor and piety.Footnote ¹ Indeed, as Heide Wunder has shown, the term “gender” (Geschlecht) from the late Middle Ages to the 1700s most often meant not a modern sociological category, but the connection between generations.Footnote ² In Susanna's case, her own name reflected this broader perspective. In 1499 a child named Susanna was born to the Wittelsbach Duke Albrecht IV of Bavaria-Munich and his Habsburg consort, Kunigunde of Austria, sister of Emperor Maximilian I. However, the infant died within the following year. On the second of April 1502, another daughter was born, and Albrecht and Kunigunde gave her the same name, Susanna.Footnote ³ On the first of May 1543, this Susanna of Bavaria, in accordance with her own request, was buried in the Frauenkirche in Munich with Catholic rites next to her sister of the same name.Footnote ⁴ Not only Susanna's name but also her marriages with first the Hohenzollern Kasimir of Brandenburg-Ansbach and later with her Wittelsbach relative Ottheinrich of Palatinate-Neuburg were products of dynastic identity and strategy that were influenced by Wittelsbach and Hohenzollern relationships with the Habsburgs.

As Charles Ingrao noted, King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary (1458–90), who was once a disappointed suitor for Susanna's mother, Kunigunde, coined a famous phrase that epitomized Habsburg dynastic success. Ingrao also noted how it likewise epitomized the limitations of war alone since Corvinus was not able to sustain his hard-won empire when he died without a legitimate heir:

Ingrao also astutely stated that Susanna's uncle, Emperor Maximilian I, was able to have such an expansive marriage diplomacy “because Maximilian's dynastic partners shared a mutual concern over the growing threat posed by rival powers to the regional balance of power.”Footnote ⁵ Susanna's marriages were examples of this type of interaction among the Habsburgs, Wittelsbachs, and Hohenzollerns.

Unlike her burial wishes, Susanna's first marriage to Margrave Kasimir of Brandenburg-Ansbach was not a personal decision, but a family affair, reflecting the power of dynastic identity over her sense of self, as it was for many in this era. When Susanna reached the ripe age of one, her father, Albrecht IV, began discussing marriage plans for Susanna with the Hohenzollern Margrave Friedrich V of Brandenburg-Ansbach in order to create a dynastic and military alliance. Albrecht IV was concerned about garnering allies for a potential inheritance dispute with his Wittelsbach relative Duke Georg the Rich of Bavaria-Landshut. The Hohenzollern's good relationship with Emperor Maximilian I was seen as an advantage.Footnote ⁶ Maximilian I encouraged the wedding of his niece in order to bring Friedrich's son, Kasimir of Brandenburg, even closer under Habsburg influence.Footnote ⁷ In fact, Maximilian I was present at the wedding with a retinue of 3,000 cavalrymen, representing the Empire and Brandenburg as he personally accompanied the sixteen-year-old bride whose groom was thirty-seven years old. The four-day festivities for the wedding all took place at the Imperial Diet of Augsburg in 1518.Footnote ⁸

Susanna's marriage arrangement also makes salient the power of female members of a dynasty to expand dynastic spheres of influence into other courts in a manner that the eldest males through primogeniture could not.Footnote ⁹ The political alliances engendered with the marriage proved successful for the Bavarian Wittelsbach and Habsburg interests at the time of the Bavarian War of Succession between the Palatine and Bavarian branches of the Wittelsbach dynasty (1504–05).Footnote ¹⁰ Kasimir supported his future father-in-law, Albrecht, and Maximilian's position during the ensuing war, which ensured a Bavarian triumph.Footnote ¹¹ However, the same political bonds uniting Kasimir and the Hohenzollerns with the Bavarian Wittelsbachs and the Habsburgs also unintentionally led to Kasimir's death in 1527 at Buda, where he died defending Ferdinand I's claim to the crown of Hungary against János Szapolyai's. Like Susanna's marriage to Kasimir, even Ferdinand's claim to Hungary was a product of Maximilian I's earlier strategic dynastic marriage diplomacy. Kasimir's death left Susanna a widow with three children.

With her second marriage to Count Palatine Ottheinrich of Neuburg, Susanna again demonstrated the potential of female members of a dynasty to create or renew dynastic bonds. Susanna and Ottheinrich's marriage symbolized the reconciliation of both halves of the dynasty, which had experienced the sorrows of the Bavarian War of Succession. In this sense, her marriage was like that of her mother, Kunigunde of Austria, whose marriage to Albrecht IV was promoted by her brother Maximilian I to reconcile the two houses after Albrecht IV had seized Regensburg from the Empire.Footnote ¹² In 1528 negotiations for Susanna's marriage with Ottheinrich were led by Susanna's brothers, dukes Wilhelm IV and Ludwig X of Bavaria, and Susanna's brother-in-law, Georg of Brandenburg-Ansbach. Ottheinrich had, along with his brother Philipp, inherited the “Junge Pfalz” at Neuburg newly created out of Bavarian territory as part of the settlement ending the Bavarian War of Succession negotiated at Cologne by Maximilian I. Besides genuine affection, another factor for Ottheinrich's interest in the marriage with his cousin was the fact that Susanna had a significant dowry. Wilhelm IV and Ludgwig X were interested in the prospect of reuniting the “Junge Pfalz” (Palatinate-Neuburg) via marriage and family ties. Wilhelm IV and Ludwig X also wanted to keep Ottheinrich more in line with the Bavarian interest rather than that of the electoral palatinate. Unlike her first marriage, Susanna's marriage to Ottheinrich in Neuburg in 1529 was a much smaller affair because many of their relatives, including Ottheinrich's brother Philipp, were off assisting in the defense of Habsburg Vienna against the Turks.Footnote ¹³

Currently housed in the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen in Munich is a 1533 portrait painting of Susanna by the Nuremberg painter Barthel Beham that offers a visual representation of generational dynastic identity. In 1530, only a year after Susanna's marriage to Ottheinrich, her brother Wilhelm IV commissioned Beham to paint a series of fourteen portraits for a family gallery depicting Palatine and Bavarian Wittelsbachs for a generation. Next to Susanna's portrait was that of Ottheinrich. The early years of their marriage were pleasant ones with their shared interest in dancing and hunting. The initials H.O.S. (Heinrich Otto and Susanna) were carved into the hunting lodge at Grünau, and appended to a variety of other objects, including Susanna's jewelry, and even clothing.Footnote ¹⁴ The fact that Beham did not take artistic liberty in painting the initials on Susanna's clothing in the portrait is evident in the description of the clothes recorded in Susanna's funeral inventory.Footnote ¹⁵ The sartorial significance of the initials is that even here Susanna's identity is connected with her husband and their broader dynastic sense of self. As Miriam Hall Kirch demonstrates, Ottheinrich used the same cipher on his clothing; thus, it symbolized the unity of husband and wife and was not uncommon at the time.Footnote ¹⁶

Despite initial connubial bliss, their marriage did begin to break down over several issues. Ottheinrich's financial instability was one factor. He was an avid Renaissance patron of arts and letters, but his desire to satisfy his aesthetic tastes outstripped his financial resources. Another factor was a failure to have an heir. Because Susanna suffered several miscarriages, Ottheinrich used astrology to find out whether he should seek another marriage if he outlived her.Footnote ¹⁷ Ottheinrich and Susanna went on numerous pilgrimages and journeys to baths in hopes of getting offspring, but to no avail.Footnote ¹⁸ The link between pilgrimage and potential posterity was not unusual among Catholics at the time, and it continued with the Bavarian Wittelsbachs and Habsburgs well into the Baroque era as part of their respective dynastic mystiques whereby they believed that God had chosen their dynasties to defend the Catholic faith: the pietas bavarica and the pietas austriaca.Footnote ¹⁹

Besides financial and fertility frustrations within the marriage, Susanna was also very disturbed by Ottheinrich's increasing sympathies toward Protestantism, which culminated in his public conversion to Lutheranism in 1542.Footnote ²⁰ Not only did he reject pilgrimages that he once believed would help him get an heir, he even became convinced that his inability to have an heir was a form of divine punishment due to his forebear, the Palatine elector Ludwig III, and his role in suppressing the Hussites.Footnote ²¹

In the emerging age of confessionalization their marriage, once a symbol of Wittelsbach reconciliation, became one of renewed dynastic tensions. Cooperative Wittelsbach dynastic relations often waxed or waned depending on united or divided religious allegiances intimately connected with dynastic identity in the form of territorial and titular claims. The confessional differences marked an end to reconciling Wittelsbach differences with marriages between the Palatine and Bavarian branches of the Wittelsbach dynasty. This ultimately led Protestant Palatine Wittelsbachs to have greater marital ties with Protestant Hohenzollerns than with their Bavarian cousins. Concomitantly, the Catholic Bavarian Wittelsbachs became much more dynastically bound with the Habsburgs. Indeed, both the Protestant and Catholic dynastic leaders considered themselves defenders of the “true faith.”Footnote ²²

Initially, Ottheinrich had a very good relationship with his Bavarian relatives and the Habsburgs. The relationship soured, however, following Ottheinrich's support of Protestantism; Susanna's brothers even offered him financial assistance to get him out of his bankruptcy caused by profligate patronage if he renounced his sympathies for Protestantism. Ottheinrich rejected the offer and became more decidedly Lutheran.Footnote ²³ In the period from 1540 to 1550, Ottheinrich patronized Lutheran propaganda in his court at Neuburg in the Upper Palatinate. For example, he had broadsheets published that claimed pilgrimage was a form of idolatry that would bring natural disasters.Footnote ²⁴ In essence, he was helping to create a confessional frontier bordering his Bavarian relations.Footnote ²⁵ In Neuburg, warnings were issued against intermarriage between evangelicals and Catholics, and in Bavaria intermarriages were forbidden.Footnote ²⁶ There would not be another marriage between a Palatine and Bavarian Wittelsbach until 1613 when Wolfgang Wilhelm of Palatinate-Neuburg converted to Catholicism and married Magdalena of Bavaria, a daughter of the Bavarian Duke Wilhelm V and Duchess Renate of Lorraine.Footnote ²⁷

The religious tensions between Susanna and Ottheinrich culminated in a confessionalized funeral setting for Susanna. In a sense, the event reflects the revival of late medieval competition for leadership within the Holy Roman Empire among the Wittelsbachs, Habsburgs, and Hohenzollerns within a new confessionalized context.Footnote ²⁸ Even before her marriage to Ottheinrich, confessional tensions had led to an acrimonious guardianship dispute between Susanna and her Hohenzollern brother-in-law Margrave Georg of Brandenburg-Ansbach concerning Susanna and Kasimir's underage children. The guardianship controversy raged because Georg considered himself a rising defender of Protestantism and did not want Catholic Habsburg influence over his nephew, Albrecht Alcibiades, and his nieces Marie and Kunigunde. Susanna's brothers Wilhelm and Ludwig supported her claim; nevertheless, Georg was able eventually to obtain the guardianship through a legal settlement mediated by Susanna's Habsburg relative, King Ferdinand I.Footnote ²⁹

Georg and his younger brother Albrecht, Grandmaster of the Teutonic Order, had been influenced by Lutheran preachers in Nuremberg, such as Andreas Osiander at the Church of St. Lorenz, during the 1522 Imperial Diet. Due to his faith and dynastic interest, Albrecht eventually secularized the Teutonic Order's estate in Prussia. Osiander also played a prominent role in the creation of Georg's church ordinance when Osiander served as an advisor for the Nuremberg City Council. This joint effort culminated in the new Brandenburg-Nuremberg Church Ordinance of 1533.Footnote ³⁰ As Thomas Brady has noted, the very cooperation between the Hohenzollern margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach and the Nuremberg City Council in this new church order reflects one of the profound realignments that occurred in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, since these two entities had been long-standing competitors.Footnote ³¹ Osiander was also the author of Ottheinrich's new church ordinance introducing the Lutheran Reformation into the territory of Palatinate-Neuburg in 1543.Footnote ³²

Susanna died of an unknown sickness on 23 April 1543, and two days later Ottheinrich held a funeral service for her in his own fashion. Ottheinrich's asked the Nuremberg preacher Andreas Osiander to write a funeral sermon for Susanna at the same time that Osiander was assisting him in introducing the Palatinate-Neuburg Church Ordinance.Footnote ³³ Prior to composing the new Palatinate-Neuburg Church Ordinance in the summer of 1542, Osiander visited Neuburg for four weeks and preached four times in the parish church and six times in the castle. Only a few weeks before Susanna's death, a copy of the new church order was even sent to Ottheinrich's brother-in-law, Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria.Footnote ³⁴

Osiander used the funeral sermon as an opportunity to bolster Ottheinrich's new church ordinance by practicing the art of persuasion. He tried to convince his audience that the Catholic belief in Purgatory negated the possibility of Christian comfort for the living and the dead. This was a theme he had already preached on during his stay in Neuburg.Footnote ³⁵ His sermon offers further textual evidence supporting the idea that Protestants continued the didactic element of medieval funeral literature to comfort the living. It also lends further credence to Susan Karant-Nunn's recent argument that Protestants attempted to “suppress” the emotional content of funeral rituals as one means of “purging” the funeral from supposed “heathen” traditions.Footnote ³⁶ This attempt carried over into the Lower Palatinate when Ottheinrich became elector, and his 1556 church ordinance specifically sought to expurgate all “heathen” remnants from funerals.Footnote ³⁷ Thus, Osiander was participating in what Craig Koslofsky has called the “Reformation of the Dead.”Footnote ³⁸

Osiander devoted most of his funeral sermon for Susanna to an impersonal exegetical treatise denouncing Purgatory. He did not even begin to talk about the personal life of the deceased until the very end, and even then he was rather generic.Footnote ³⁹ In the preface to the published edition of his funeral sermon for Susanna, Osiander commented on how Ottheinrich wished for this sermon to be published because it contained so much useful information concerning the papal fictional foundations for Purgatory. The theme of the sermon was Paul's discussion of the resurrection in 1 Thessalonians 4:14. Osiander first told his audience that they should be aware of not only what Paul said, but also what he did not say. He stated that if Purgatory existed, then Paul would have written about it. Osiander also put in a common Lutheran quote from Paul that they should not lament “like the heathens.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Osiander had an apocalyptic outlook on his age that was similar to what Heiko Oberman elucidated for Luther,Footnote ⁴¹ and there was an eschatological tone when Osiander referred to the pervasive “false” belief in Purgatory “in these last times.” Osiander argued that Paul would never have told anyone to take comfort in the temporal death of a loved one if he believed that they were destined to suffer in Purgatory. Osiander remarked that Paul had contended that the heathens had no reason for hope because they believed that the body and soul perish at death, probably referring to the denial of the immortality of the soul by Epicureans.Footnote ⁴²

Osiander also sardonically quipped that heathens would have less cause to fear death than Christians who believed in Purgatory.Footnote ⁴³ Actually, the concept of Purgatory was promoted in the high Middle Ages as a message of hope and comfort. Interestingly, just as Osiander used sermons to pronounce the death of Purgatory in an urban environment, it was the sermons and exempla offered by medieval preaching friars in the cities who enlivened the opportunity for sinners to escape hell through intercession in Purgatory. It was not uncommon to describe sinners as usurers, and the expansive treatment of Purgatory in these sermons was connected with papal efforts to stamp out usury, reflected in the second, third, and fourth Lateran councils, the second Council of Lyons (1274), and the Council of Vienna in 1311.Footnote ⁴⁴ There were more elaborate descriptions focusing on the punishments in Purgatory in the late Middle Ages, possibly connected with the sale of indulgences, and it was in the same era that the theological confirmation of the place of Purgatory peaked with the Council of Florence in 1439.Footnote ⁴⁵

Osiander attributed the creation of Purgatory to papal imagination perpetuated by poetic fables, most likely an oblique reference to Dante.Footnote ⁴⁶ Jacque Le Goff has argued that it was the power of imagination that helped give “birth” to Purgatory as a locus rather than a state of being, and Dante's literary magnum opus, the Divine Comedy, was instrumental in popularizing the same.Footnote ⁴⁷ Osiander also claimed that St. Augustine was the only one to offer a vague rationale for belief in Purgatory, and he had done so about four hundred years after Christ at a time when the Church had lost a portion of the truth. Osiander also stated that the concept of Purgatory denied the atoning power of Christ to cleanse people of their sins. Hence, Osiander claimed that all those who perpetuated the belief in Purgatory were acting as the Antichrist:

In the most sensory portion of the sermon, Osiander, like Dante, used the power of imagination to paint a verbal picture of his vision of the end for the righteous—without Purgatory. Osiander, knowing his audience well, invoked popular images of princely processions and glorious entrances to describe the triumphal return of Jesus and the gathering of the righteous as described by Paul in 1 Thessalonians. He also mentioned the sounds of blasting trumpets announcing the event.Footnote ⁴⁹

This element of the sermon, along with Ottheinrich's continued patronage of the arts, represents an emerging Lutheran aesthetic. Ottheinrich not only commissioned Osiander to compose the funeral sermon, he also commissioned the famed Renaissance composer Gregor Peschin of Bohemia to write the funeral music for the service at Neuburg. Peschin originally studied music at the court chapel for the Jagiellonian ruler Lajos II in Buda until Lajos's death at the Battle of Mohács in 1526. Peschin then entered the service of Matthäus Lang, the prince-bishop of Salzburg, where he composed music for the court chapel from 1527 to 1539 before he left to work for his new patron, Ottheinrich, in Neuburg. Later, when Ottheinrich became the palatine elector in 1556, Peschin followed him to Heidelberg. There he continued to develop Lutheran choral music as the choir director for the court chapel. Thus, Peschin's composition of funeral music for Susanna was an early example of the developing devotional aesthetics for Lutheran funerals: music and the spoken word without the sacrificial element of the mass.Footnote ⁵⁰ Osiander certainly appreciated the power of music for devotional purposes. In a letter to Albrecht von Hohenzollern, the first duke of Prussia, in 1542, Osiander reported on his visit to Ottheinrich's court at Neuburg. In this letter, Osiander praised not only Ottheinrich's commitment to the Protestant Reformation, but also his church choir.Footnote ⁵¹ Finally, as part of the Palatinate-Neuburg Church Ordinance of 1543, Osiander wrote in detail the music that should be sung at funerals.Footnote ⁵²

Osiander also believed there was an appropriate place for visual aesthetic experiences associated with worship. For example, the same year that Susanna died, Ottheinrich commissioned the Salzburg painter Hans Bocksberger to create frescoes for the Neuburg court chapel. The selection of themes dealing with the Old Testament and the two Lutheran sacraments, baptism and the Lord's Supper, mirror Osiander's influence. Osiander was simply following Luther's lead in distinguishing images for worship or veneration as opposed to didactic images depicting the history of salvation. One of the frescoes illustrating Old Testament plagues was that of the death of the Pharaoh's firstborn. This was possibly a visual reminder intimating that Ottheinrich's failure to have an heir was a divine punishment for not acting sooner to support the Protestant Reformation.Footnote ⁵³ The fresco depicting Abraham with Hagar may have symbolized Osiander's desire to have Ottheinrich recognize that it was necessary for him to part from Susanna.Footnote ⁵⁴ Nevertheless, Ottheinrich did not forget about Susanna.

Not long after her death, Ottheinrich commissioned a bronze relief from the Vischer workshop in Nuremberg with the theme of Jesus's departure from Mary, an image believed to represent Ottheinrich and Susanna's love and devotion.Footnote ⁵⁵ It was placed at the entrance of the court chapel. A manuscript dating from 1558–59 demonstrates that Ottheinrich commissioned a mass for five voices to be sung in an evangelical church service in Neuburg in memory of Susanna. The music was probably composed by Peschin and influenced by the Flemish composer Orlando di Lasso's chanson “Susanne un jour” published a few years later.Footnote ⁵⁶ These commissions echo the same cultural orbit of Habsburg patronage. The Vischer workshop had previously sculpted statues of King Arthur and Theodoric the Great as part of the Habsburg dynastic display surrounding the cenotaph originally envisioned by and for Emperor Maximilian I that ended up being housed in the court church in Innsbruck sponsored by Maximilian's grandson, Ferdinand I.Footnote ⁵⁷ Also Ferdinand I's daughter, Anna of Austria, and her husband, Susanna's nephew, Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria, patronized Lasso at their court in Munich.Footnote ⁵⁸

In his last year of mortality (1559), Ottheinrich had an image of Susanna made standing behind him in a drawing that could represent not only dynastic continuity but also continued conjugal love and devotion.Footnote ⁵⁹ Additionally, Susanna's Lutheran daughter, Kunigunde, preserved her mother's Catholic prayer book.Footnote ⁶⁰ Both of these acts demonstrate the power of familial love in the early modern era as Steven Ozment has argued.Footnote ⁶¹ Likewise, the preservation of Susanna's prayer book suggests that gendered expectations of female piety could transcend confessional boundaries.

Furthermore, even though the exact location of Susanna's soul was confessionally contested ground at the time of her funeral, gendered roles of Christian self-sacrifice and charitable works closed the confessional gap: they permitted Osiander in his funeral sermon to envision Susanna's soul in a state of grace:

Osiander stated that Susanna's faith was sufficient through the grace of Christ for salvation, and the evidence of that faith was manifest in her performance of numerous charitable works for the poor: “For she believed in Christ and was baptized and planted in his death and confessed her faith in him, and all kinds of her works of love and charitable deeds for the poor testify that in the end, her life is settled securely in the grace of God through Christ.” It is here at the end of the sermon that Osiander finally makes reference to Susanna by envisioning her caught up with the righteous for Christ's return. He had already set the stage for his verdict on Susanna's final destination by preceding it with quotes from Matthew 25:31–46 describing the Final Judgment and Christ accepting those who had showed charity to the sick and needy because “they had done it unto Him.”Footnote ⁶³ Charitable works for the poor were associated with dynastic piety in general, but especially female piety, both before and after the Protestant Reformation. Charitable deeds were often praised as proof of female virtue in funeral literature. In this manner funeral sermons for both Catholic and Protestant women continued to act as a form of Tugendspiegel that transcended confessional divisions.Footnote ⁶⁴

However, Osiander was clearly not pleased with Susanna's refusal to accept Protestantism. Osiander's dissatisfaction with Susanna's confessional choice is evident in his funeral sermon when he stated that Susanna's salvation was possible “although her faith was weak and darkened with all types of ignorance.”Footnote ⁶⁵ In the same letter to the duke of Prussia in 1542 praising Ottheinrich and his choir, Osiander did not mention Susanna, but he did state his disgust that her brother Wilhelm IV vowed to hold to the “old custom.” Osiander then remarked that “horrible darkness still reigns in certain places.”Footnote ⁶⁶

The confessional intent of Osiander's funeral sermon as well as his description of Susanna's charitable works to close the confessional divide for her soul were also manifest in Osiander's second sermon delivered the same day in Neuburg. The sermon was on Matthew 15:13: “Every plant that my Heavenly Father did not plant, shall be uprooted,” and it focused on weeding out ‘false’ teachings and practices.Footnote ⁶⁷ In this sermon Osiander stated that some of these weeds were the use of Latin in baptisms instead of the vernacular, the denial of wine for the laity in the Eucharist, belief in Purgatory, and the efficacy of masses for the dead. Osiander struck an eschatological tone in this sermon by referring to how Paul in 1Timothy 4:1–3 warned that in the “last days” the devil would lead people astray with false teachings. Much more frequently than in the funeral sermon, he also made several references to the Antichrist spreading these ideas. Finally, he warned that if these “false” ideas were not rooted out God's wrath would allow the Turks to come upon them, an admonition made by Osiander and a number of Protestants at various occasions during this era.Footnote ⁶⁸ Osiander preached this sermon in the same month that Suleiman the Magnificent launched a military campaign into Hungary to take cities that had been seized when Ferdinand I besieged Pest in 1542 to challenge the rival claim for the Hungarian crown made by János Szapolyai's son, János Zsigmond Szapolyai.Footnote ⁶⁹ Osiander also warned of the Turks as instruments of God's wrath in the introduction of the Palatinate-Neuburg Church Ordinance.Footnote ⁷⁰

After mentioning Purgatory again near the end of the first part of his second sermon, Osiander remarked that “although it is appropriate to mourn and to lament that the most esteemed house of the Palatinate and Bavaria has been saddened and caused to bear grief because of the death of the illustrious high-born princess and wife, Lady Susanna,” people should “gladly see” that changes in ceremonies would take place. Osiander then repeated the claim he had made in the funeral sermon that Susanna's charitable service to the poor ensured her salvation.Footnote ⁷¹ As mentioned previously, acts of charity were signs not only of dynastic piety, but particularly of female piety for both Protestants and Catholics; thus, the repeated reference to her acts of charity served to underscored his assertion that she had attained salvation. His intent is also clear in that he noticeably abstained in both sermons from mentioning a common Protestant criticism that asserted that Catholic relief for the poor was primarily motivated by fear of damnation if they did not perform good works.Footnote ⁷²

Nevertheless, as stated earlier, by her own wishes, Susanna was buried not in Neuburg, but in the Frauenkirche in Munich, and according to Catholic rites. Although males and females could leave bequests specifying the place and nature of their burial, it did not always mean these were fulfilled by the living.Footnote ⁷³ However, Ottheinrich did allow for Susannah's bequest to be satisfied. She had been in a situation that Merry Wiesner-Hanks described for many women in this era of religious change: “Women had to choose between what male political and religious authorities, and sometimes even their fathers and husbands told them to do, and what they perceived as God's plan for their lives.”Footnote ⁷⁴ For Susanna, as well as other Catholics, it was a soteriological necessity to be buried with Catholic rites. Thus, not surprisingly, Catholics were concerned about Protestant denials of Purgatory and the sacrificial component of the mass, and these issues were addressed at the Council of Trent.Footnote ⁷⁵ It is worth noting that the Council of Trent began only two years after Susanna's funeral. Furthermore, Catholics also responded to Protestant criticisms by continuing to emphasize the role of the Virgin Mary as intercessor for those in Purgatory. Likewise, they made a conscious effort to extend the emotional experience of death.Footnote ⁷⁶ From the remaining documents describing Susanna's funeral procession in Munich, it is clear that she was buried with full Catholic rites, accompanied with vigils for her soul.Footnote ⁷⁷ Furthermore, a surviving letter from Susanna's brothers to the convents of the landed estates in the Bavarian duchy also indicates that they ordered members of the convents to perform masses and hold vigils for her soul. Finally, the letter expresses their personal sorrow over the loss of their sister by referring to her destination from this “vale of tears” to God's “grace,” the very same terms Osiander had used.Footnote ⁷⁸

Because of the confessional tensions and diverging views of what constituted appropriate burial practices, most scholars believe that Susanna's husband did not attend her funeral in Munich.Footnote ⁷⁹ It is clear from the remaining funeral documents in Munich that an entourage of Ottheinrich's nobles was present and participated in the procession. They were the ones who delivered her body to the nobles of Susanna's brother, Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria. It is also evident from these documents that her son, Margrave Albrecht Alcibiades of Brandenburg-Kulmbach, was also present with his nobles, and that he was the first family member in the procession. After Albrecht Alcibiades were his two sisters, Marie and Kunigunde.Footnote ⁸⁰ Because Susanna had lost the guardianship dispute, her surviving children, Albrecht Alcibiades, Marie, and Kunigunde had been raised Lutheran under the guardianship of Susanna's brother-in-law, Margrave Georg of Brandenburg-Ansbach. The impact was significant. Albrecht Alcibiades became a Lutheran prince who challenged many as a robber baron. He also made an uneasy alliance with Emperor Charles V and ultimately tested the limits of Charles's brother Ferdinand I.Footnote ⁸¹ Albrecht Alcibiades's sisters demonstrated the potential of wives to influence their husband's religious beliefs. In 1551 Kunigunde married Karl II of Baden-Durlach and five years later he made Lutheranism the official religion of the territory. In 1553 Marie married the Palatine Elector Friedrich III and helped convert him from Catholicism to Lutheranism, though he later became a champion of Calvinism.Footnote ⁸²

During the Renaissance, the story of the pagan Roman matron Lucretia's suicide for honor became a symbol for suffering Christian martyrs, especially women. Linda Hults suggests that it is not coincidental that Albrecht Dürer created an extensive panel painting depicting the death of Lucretia in Munich during the same time as Susanna's marriage with Kasimir in 1518. Dürer was present at the occasion as a representative of Nuremberg and the painting may have been a wedding gift to attract her future patronage. Susanna became known as a patroness of Dürer, visually evident in the drawing he made of her that is now located at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard.Footnote ⁸³ Ottheinrich was also present at Susanna and Kasimir's wedding, serving as a page for Emperor Maximilian I's entourage.Footnote ⁸⁴ As stated earlier, the wedding itself had taken place in the context of the 1518 Imperial Diet at Augsburg. It was the year that Kasimir and his brother Georg formally took control of Brandenburg-Ansbach after imprisoning their father three years earlier.Footnote ⁸⁵ A list of all those present at the time of Susanna's first wedding makes salient how from cradle to grave, the events shaping Susanna's identity were intimately connected with the burning issues of the day.