Narratives of Youth

Strikingly, beyond the dynamics of his courts-martial, many of the details of Franz von der Trenck's life remain fluid.Footnote ⁵ Contemporary sources, both biographical and autobiographical, are uncertain and untrustworthy and the problem of sources is complicated by the writings, legacy, and personal interests of his cousin, Friedrich von der Trenck, among others. The Trenck family's origins were Prussian, but as a family that built its position and wealth in part on military service, they did not long remain solely Prussian. Franz von der Trenck's grandfather made a name for himself as a cavalry captain in the service of the Hohenzollerns, but his son Johann split from the Prussian family before the War of the Spanish Succession and entered Austrian service. Johann was, as many who served the Habsburgs at this moment, rewarded for his service with vast estates on the Hungarian border with the Ottomans.Footnote ⁶ Most sources list Trenck's birth as 1 January 1711 in Calabria, where his father was in command of the Habsburg fortress at Reggio.Footnote ⁷ In the memoir attributed to him, Trenck claimed that he learned military skills “from the ground up,” namely in the field with his father from a young age, developing into a “bold, resilient military man of enormous power and size.”Footnote ⁸ Trenck's legendary height and strength became part of his reputation and subsequent legend, as did various stories of extraordinary childhood exploits and miraculous near-death experiences. Although he had no direct experience of his cousin's early exploits, Friedrich later insisted that Trenck could sever heads from bodies with such speed and ease that it resembled “cleaving turnips.”Footnote ⁹ The narratives make explicit that his capacities and his character were not just results of his time in war, but reflections of a man who had been uniquely lucky, powerful, and larger than life from a very young age.

Trenck was educated at the Jesuit colleges in Oedenburg and Possega/Požega.Footnote ¹⁰ As with his childhood, Trenck's schooling became another narrative location for exploring his essential character. One of the many evocative stories of his youth involved his expulsion from Oedenburg for bashing a fellow student who had insulted him over the head with a processional holy candle. As described in the memoir, after being shoved by a scholar, “being sorely incensed, I took my taper with both hands, and belaboured his skull with it till I broke my taper to pieces.”Footnote ¹¹ Trenck's education and early experiences yield glimpses of alternative portraits. One biographer suggests that it was Trenck's peripatetic childhood that lay the groundwork for his eventual mastery of seven languages and describes his musical abilities—aspects of cosmopolitan, cultured achievement so at odds with other elements of his reputation.Footnote ¹²

After his basic schooling, the teenaged Trenck entered Austrian military service in Belgrade as a cadet. By 1732, the problems that eventually shadowed his career led to his first discharge, as his commanding officers felt that his brawling, dueling, gambling, and insubordination made him a poor fit for the Austrian military. Trenck returned home to the familial estate at Brestovac in Slavonia for an interlude as a noble landlord on the imperial border and a brief marriage to Josephine von Tillier, the nature of which is only one of the many unfixed aspects of his narrative. To see Trenck at this stage of his life is to recognize the many Trencks—enlightened landlord, violent vigilante, grieved (or indifferent) widower. Balanced against accounts that insist that Trenck's estate records demonstrate the work not of “an ignorant barbarian, but an enlightened spirit,” is the reality that his reputation for plunder in his subsequent military exploits effaced his noble upbringing and lineage.Footnote ¹³ In terms of his married life, his relationship with his wife, and the number of children they had (or whether there were any at all) varies in different accounts.Footnote ¹⁴ Domestic bliss was not in Trenck's future, but his desire for it is unclear. By 1737, his four children (if he had them) and his wife Josephine (if they were married) were all dead or at least gone from the narrative.Footnote ¹⁵ He supposedly resisted all attempts to marry again because he “had already made an experiment of this kind of life, and taken a strong dislike to it.”Footnote ¹⁶ In the memoir, Trenck's family is overshadowed by accounts of his various sexual exploits and successful campaigns to deflower virgins. The details of these stories are meant to shock and entertain and the girls and women—free and unfree, consenting and assaulted—are objects of a particular sort in the narrative. The many affairs and relationships he describes, including during the brief period of his marriage, served to demonstrate not just his virility but also the adventurous qualities of an unconstrained martial man in constant competition with other men. The setbacks Trenck encounters in the context of the memoir are presented as the result of the jealousies of lesser men. Similarly, the many brushes with death from sword fights, fist fights, ambushes, near drownings, and so on become narrative evidence of Trenck's extraordinary abilities.

In the 1730s, Trenck set out for Kiev as a cavalry captain to fight against the Ottoman Turks.Footnote ¹⁷ By virtually all accounts, there was little in his experience on the Russo-Turkish front to curb his particular habits of war. The lore associated with his Russian career is rife with stories of Trenck returning from missions with the heads of his enemies as trophies, duels with fellow officers, and plundering that included free and slave women among the booty. Like other aspects of his private and public lives, Trenck's Russian career and his relationship with his commanding officers are slippery terrain. The denouement of his tenure in Russia suggests that it did not take long for the same problems that had erupted in Austria—particularly Trenck's capacity to irritate his superiors—to also emerge during his time in Russia.Footnote ¹⁸ After being sent as a courier to Astrakhan and subsequently wounded in an engagement with Tartar forces, his return to duty was marred by an enraged encounter with his commanding officer. Reportedly assaulting his commander and accusing him of cowardice, Trenck was court-martialed and initially sentenced to exile in Siberia.Footnote ¹⁹ Russian Field Marshal Burkhard Christoph von Münnich interceded and managed to gain Trenck's freedom, but the intervention was a short-lived reprieve. Trenck subsequently punched another commander and was again incarcerated. The common outlines of these events show up in some form or another in multiple accounts, and Trenck's Russian experiences are another flashpoint in the ensuing fashioning of his reputation. Trenck's disinclination to follow the orders of less capable or less ambitious men became in Friedrich's narrative, for instance, a story about his cousin's vital energy and brutish affinities. According to Friedrich, Trenck rejected the lassitude of his commander, took a unit to confront the Turks, and “routed the enemy, made a horrible carnage, and returned intoxicated with joy, accompanied by prisoners, and loaded with dissevered heads.”Footnote ²⁰ Similarly, the motivations for Münnich's interference in the courts-martial are muddied in the narratives by the ambitions, characters, and even romantic machinations of the men involved. According to Friedrich, Trenck and Münnich struck a deal for a requisite number of Tatar heads and when Trenck returned with them knotted to his saddle, Münnich promoted him.Footnote ²¹ Regardless of what transpired on the ground, and while no one seemed to doubt his tactical brilliance or personal courage, Franz von der Trenck was at twenty-nine sentenced to death for his transgressions of disobedience and misbehavior. Münnich once more subverted the outcome and managed to save Trenck's life, but the latter's Russian career was over.Footnote ²² He was banished from Russian soil and forced to leave—without his slave women.Footnote ²³

Making his way home to his familial lands in Slavonia in the spring of 1740, Trenck embarked on another stage of his life that became fodder for myth-making. For Trenck, the porous nature of the border between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans and its poor administration highlighted a need for a local fighting force that he was uniquely positioned to create. He intended this corps of pandurs, essentially armed free farmers and servants, to stand in for the authority of the state, perhaps, but more critically, to answer to his authority.Footnote ²⁴ Trenck's pandurs possessed an origin story tailor-made for his reputation. The borderlands had long yielded military hybrids, namely armed farmers and gangs of heiducken who formed the bulk of irregular forces in the eighteenth century. It is unclear if boredom or need incited Trenck's desire to create a corps of men focused allegedly on the “maintenance of order and security” in a region—the intersection of Croatia, Hungary, and Ottoman Turkey—that was plagued by raiders.Footnote ²⁵ The notoriety of the border skirmishes refined Trenck's reputation for brutality. In one particularly gruesome and often-repeated episode, Trenck pursued thieves to the border and over it in the company of a small group of pandurs. He and his men reportedly strung up the bodies of some of the bandits as a warning, decapitated others, and reveled in the corporal justice imposed on the imprisoned remainders.Footnote ²⁶ The torture and murder of the border clashes were ostensibly done for “the public welfare,” as the author of the memoir embraced the gore of combat and the killing by Trenck's own hand of seven of the “strongest and stoutest” Turks: “I then laid hold of my sword with my left hand, and stuck it cleverly into his body, till the blood spouted into my face. Whereupon I flung him from me, and as he fell, I cut his head from his body at one blow. This being done, I took hold of the head by the hair, and carrying it over the river with me, I flung it before his father, who was somewhat though not very much, shocked at the spectacle.”Footnote ²⁷ This account combines several themes that surface repeatedly in the memoir and other versions of Trenck's life and career: the efficiency of his fighting skill, his embrace of the tactile experience of hand-to-hand combat, his personalization of the confrontation, and his notion of retributive, violent justice as performance. As one biographer noted, hunting border bandits provided Trenck greater sport and entertainment than hunting animals in the woods.Footnote ²⁸ The father's “somewhat” shocked response encapsulates another motif: these were brutal men in a brutal region.

Trenck in the War of Austrian Succession

Trenck's unacceptable traversal of the border at the River Sava in pursuit of bandits and what was perceived by local administrators as his unacceptable vigilantism eventually yielded a summons to the magistracy in the Croatian town of Osijek/Esseg. The timing was fortuitous, at least for him. In January 1741, the call for mustering in the Hungarian counties had been issued.Footnote ²⁹ Trenck decided his best opportunities lay in Vienna.Footnote ³⁰ Although earlier in his career Trenck had faced a monarch and military establishment who rejected him for both his character and his unwillingness to accommodate himself to military norms and practices, by late 1740, the situation had drastically changed. The death of Emperor Charles VI and the subsequent attacks on the inheritance of his daughter Archduchess Maria Theresa left the Austrians facing the possibility of dissolution and partition. After the outbreak of war, the beleaguered Maria Theresa, attempting to defend her inheritance, found herself dangerously short on funds and fighting forces. She recognized that her hopes for the political survival of the unified Habsburg lands required the use of both official and unofficial means of support.Footnote ³¹ Gaining an audience with the Archduchess through the mediation of her brother-in-law Charles of Lorraine and Field Marshal Ludwig Khevenhüller, Trenck deflected criticism of his actions in Slavonia by arguing that he was in Vienna to offer at his own cost a corps of men from the borderlands to fight in Silesia against Frederick of Prussia.Footnote ³² Maria Theresa approved his commission and ordered him to assemble and arm his force with all possible speed. The understanding was that Trenck's pandurs would be responsible for their own maintenance when they reached the front.

Franz von der Trenck returned south and, despite the difficulties, managed within a few weeks to build an initial armed fighting force of one thousand men, comprising largely his own pandurs, supplemented with highwaymen and the criminally vagrant pressed into service, it was rumored, by being offered the choice of the uniform or decapitation.Footnote ³³ The integration of “pardoned thieves” simultaneously raised Trenck's recruitment numbers and theoretically pacified the border regions.Footnote ³⁴ According to his cousin, Trenck recruited men who were unusually tall—at least six feet in height—and who could swim and run for miles through forests. As he described, “They were partisans, and must therefore be more capable of supporting fatigue, than any regular troops; more desirous of daily seeking the enemy, and hazarding their lives.”Footnote ³⁵ The pandurs who assembled in Osijek/Esseg had been assured that with the exception of necessary war materiel, the spoils of the fighting would be theirs to keep, even as they were forbidden to extort, steal from, or injure enemy subjects.Footnote ³⁶ It was a recruitment promise with deep contradictions and with wide-ranging consequences for the activities of Trenck's soldiers in the war.

Whatever the hopes of the Austrian high command that these men could be shaped into (and used as) “proper” soldiers, they were initially a corps armed, provisioned, and largely commanded outside the full control of the military hierarchy. If mercenaries in the eighteenth century were not just soldiers paid for war or serving as daggers for hire in an enemy state's causes but fighters dependent on a “contractor who had negotiated his own bargain with government,” Trenck and his men were in a liminal space between mercenaries and the regular army.Footnote ³⁷ Trenck had certainly bargained his way from war to war, but his new connection to the court and the official order for the formation of his corps yielded a fighting force simultaneously under and outside of the Austrian military. The question of how to fit him and his men into the military hierarchy remained a persistent one that defined the relationship of Trenck to the Austrian state and to his men. Histories of irregular, guerilla, and partisan warfare generally point to Trenck and the pandurs as a watershed for the reintegration of these methods of fighting into military culture and practice. The military gray zone that he occupied also helped create the legends that endured beyond his life. Maria Theresa's apparent embrace of Trenck and his methods seems to run against the progressively more distinct line drawn between regular and irregular forces with the creation of standing armies in the seventeenth century.Footnote ³⁸ By mid-century, the notion of a mercenary conjured a portrait of a completely amoral soldier willing to kill and destroy primarily to enrich himself and who was bound to social norms and the emerging laws of war by only the thinnest possible threads. As Christopher Duffy describes for the Austrian army, “[T]he free corps and free companies offered the nearest military equivalent to the licensed piracy of the naval privateers.”Footnote ³⁹ The popular notion of a mercenary—“Greedy, pitiless, godless, cruel, brave but roisteringly self-indulgent, drawn from the dregs of a society against whose restraints they revenged themselves through theft, rape, pillage and intimidation”—became the description of Trenck's pandurs.Footnote ⁴⁰ Maria Theresa knew of Trenck's reputation, but she was focused on survival.Footnote ⁴¹ The challenges and possibilities of using irregular troops applied not just to Trenck and the pandurs. The correspondence between General Bernklau and Bartenstein highlights some of the problems of pillaging, violence, and desertion commanders encountered that extended beyond the logistics and strategy of irregulars.Footnote ⁴²

In April and May 1741, Trenck and his pandurs made their way to Vienna to parade in front of Maria Theresa before being sent to the Silesian front. Although there had been setbacks in the war, the public in Habsburg cities had been regaled with the many celebrations that followed Archduke Joseph's birth. In Vienna, the court regularly turned out to watch the parade of columns as men marched through on the journey to Silesia. The performative aspects of the pandurs’ arrival north was an important ingredient of their military participation. In Moravian Olomouc, the population ogled the corps who marched through in “beautiful groups in Hungarian dress under the command of an Obrist = Wachtmeister.”Footnote ⁴³ Their “extraordinary spectacle” made an impression on the crowds who turned out to see them.Footnote ⁴⁴ With bright red Hungarian coats, open shirts, flowing Turkish pants, and armed with pistols and Turkish weaponry, the soldiers under Trenck's command awed their viewers with their manner and their “Turkish” marching music—an impressive combination of shawms, drums, and unnerving cymbals.Footnote ⁴⁵ The “Turkic” enemy had become the Habsburgs’ defenders and “the Viennese population had never experienced such a thing on their streets.”Footnote ⁴⁶ In the same way that line formation, strategy, and provisioning had all changed with the professionalization of military forces, the adoption of standardized uniforms in the eighteenth century was part of the regularization of the military. Uniforms set soldiers apart from civilians and, theoretically, regular soldiers from guerilla fighters (or bandits). The un-uniformed fighter was not entitled to the protections afforded by the norms of war.Footnote ⁴⁷ In the case of Trenck's pandurs, however, their “uniform”—derived but separate from ethnic attire—was part of their ethos of exception and their style and regular weaponry was inseparable from their reputation for wildness. Trenck acknowledged and implicitly embraced the fear that the appearance of the pandurs incited, noting that they “struck people as ghastly and particularly frightful because their heads had been shaved, leaving only a scalp lock.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Despite the public fanfare and curiosity that followed the pandurs north, the relationship between Trenck and his Austrian commanders was complicated by the residue of his reputation and fears of what his men understood by the spoils of war. Trenck's initial orders were to report to Wilhelm von Neipperg in Silesia. One would be hard-pressed to find two more dissimilar individuals and, from the beginning of their encounter, there were significant problems between not just the two men but also between two different approaches to war. The manner of Trenck's arrival was not likely to recommend him to Neipperg, and as Alfred von Arneth described, “Although Trenck possessed a large and fine figure, charming manners and was also not without some learning, his own unbridled wildness on a par with that of his people created a fundamental aversion in the strict, methodical Neipperg.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Arneth's description, attuned to his own nineteenth-century sensibilities, captured the durable contradictions in people's assessment of Trenck: charm and wildness. The ambivalence of the Austrian commanders graduated to alarm with their experience of the pandurs on military missions. Sending Trenck out on forays, Neipperg gave him strict orders to engage only armed enemies and to prevent violence against defenseless locals. Trenck and his men reportedly did the opposite, attacking and robbing traveling merchants, plundering houses before setting them on fire, and “committing all manner of horrors” in Silesia.Footnote ⁵⁰

For critics, the pandurs’ focus on booty subverted strategic goals, and they were accused of pursuing goods rather than military victory.Footnote ⁵¹ Neipperg quickly discovered that there was little that he and Trenck agreed on, and he came to believe that Trenck did not have the character, experience, desire, or ability to command the pandur forces in a way that would work to Austria's benefit. As Neipperg wrote to Trenck in July 1741, “You know yourself that you were not called here to plunder the land and make mischief, but to give aid against the enemy. To date the enemy has experienced no worry, but the inhabitants of Silesia bring lamentations from all sides, against the land and its citizens, such as beatings, extortion, and violence of every kind.”Footnote ⁵² Neipperg reiterated that such practices were strictly forbidden, as he had explained earlier, and continued, “If you have not enough authority to elicit respect from your people and make them obedient, I do not see how you can be of service to me here.”Footnote ⁵³ Neipperg's criticism highlighted the contradictions confronting the Austrians and their use of irregulars only loosely under their command. As things stood during the first clashes between Neipperg and Trenck, Prussia had occupied Silesia and other parts of the Bohemian Kingdom and the Bavarians (with French help) were poised to overrun Upper Austria and maybe Vienna. Austrian military misfortunes of war seemed to demand an embrace of a new skill set. When the Austrians needed information, when they needed to disrupt enemy entrenchment, when they needed men to hide in the forest and “alarm the enemy,” they sent men like Franz von der Trenck.Footnote ⁵⁴

The consequences, however, affected not just military strategy, but how the citizenry experienced the war. The Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel, an influential voice on the notion of the limits of warfare in the eighteenth century, described the normal tranquility that citizens should expect even under occupation: “At present war is carried on by regular troops: the people, the peasants, the citizens, take no part in it, and generally have nothing to fear from the sword of the enemy. Provided the inhabitants submit to him who is master of the country, pay the contributions imposed, and refrain from all hostilities, they live in as perfect tranquility as if they were friends: they even continue in possession of what belongs to them; the country people come freely to the camp to sell their provisions, and are protected, as far as possible, from the calamities of war.”Footnote ⁵⁵ As Michael Glover suggests, Vattel's portrait was normative, not reality, but it was the intent of commanders to approach it. The trend was to deny the participation of the occupied civilian population in the conflict as a way in part to limit the excesses of war. By deploying Trenck's men and other irregular forces, the Austrians upended that trajectory. In practice, the laws of war left interesting loopholes for military needs that the use of irregular troops exploited. As Horst Carl notes, “The indiscipline of the Freicorps ensured that they were seen by the defenders of regular warfare as being reminiscent of an irregular ‘Asiatic’ form of war.”Footnote ⁵⁶ In her fear, Maria Theresa undermined the separation of soldier from civilian by urging the rural population of her territories to take up their farming implements against their invaders. When civilians took up arms against the pandurs later in the war, the results were fatal.

The task of the pandurs as both Trenck and his Austrian commanders saw it was to make the lives of enemy soldiers intolerable.Footnote ⁵⁷ In an embellished form of “every man for himself,” the pandurs strove to make it impossible for their enemy to rest by attacking flanks, food supplies, and baggage trains, and encouraging desertions.Footnote ⁵⁸ Often on the move and undercover, they were also an important conduit for information of the location of enemy troops. In activities beyond regular engagements between armed forces, the impact of Trenck and the pandurs was apparent. Even as opponents of the Austrians condemned these tactics, they made plans to emulate them. That the pandurs engaged in acts contrary to the military ethos embodied by Neipperg was only problematic at some points. The Austrians were largely willing to look the other way, provided that Trenck's actions served either to advance the Austrians militarily or to fill their war chest. But it was a delicate line to hold and, for citizens, requisitioning and looting were often functional equivalents. Moreover, if the pandurs reduced everything to ash and terrorized the population, the army and the population would starve and any potential peace would be lost. From Neipperg's perspective, Trenck and his men were renegades from decent values who defied the interests of good military order, so his task was to find a way to use them to gain an advantage but keep the men in control.

That conclusion led to the first confrontation between the Austrian desire to discipline and Trenck's desire to resist in the wake of their first campaigns in Silesia in 1741. Neipperg attempted to put in place some measures of control to limit what he believed to be Trenck's dangerous autonomy. He therefore attempted to arrest Trenck, remove him from command, and give control over his solders to Johann Daniel Menzel, who spoke “Slavic” because he had spent some time in military service in Russia and Poland.Footnote ⁵⁹ Trenck was essentially presented with an ultimatum that he submit himself and his men to the authority of the hierarchy embodied by Menzel or suffer arrest. He appeared to concede and was returned to his corps, but his agreement quickly evaporated, if it had ever truly existed. Trenck allegedly incited some pandurs to assault Menzel, hoping to remove him as a challenger to his own authority.Footnote ⁶⁰ Neipperg placed Trenck under arrest, along with several of his most intransigent men, in not the last official attempt to grapple with Trenck's particular brand of insubordination. He stood accused of a variety of crimes against military discipline and his case went to the War Council. If it had been left to Neipperg, Trenck would once again have been discharged, but the case became entangled in the political dynamics of the court and the bitter realities of Austria's military position. Khevenhüller, serving as vice president of the War Council, argued in Trenck's favor and blamed his egregious conduct on Neipperg, who had failed to integrate the pandurs into the regular army. While Khevenhüller admitted Trenck's lack of prudence and judgment, he also lauded Trenck's “courage and boldness.”Footnote ⁶¹ Khevenhüller recommended that Trenck's corps be divided in half—one part of it returned to Trenck's command, the other to Menzel—and Trenck's time in jail be deemed punishment enough.

While Trenck's court-martial proceeded in Vienna, Menzel's command of the “south Slavic” neighbors of the Hungarians required that he change their supposedly natural tendencies to unnecessary violence, wanton rioting, and plunder to create “usable” solders.Footnote ⁶² Writers damningly assessed the pandurs’ notoriously boundless greed for booty as the primary motivation for their violence. Orders from Vienna insisted “their avarice and addiction to stealing had to be suppressed and they must become accustomed to the strictest discipline.”Footnote ⁶³ There was, in these orders, a fundamental disconnect between the desire for full control over these forces and the perceived need for their methods of war. Menzel did not have enormous success in disciplining Trenck's soldiers. A contingent of pandurs, incensed at the lack of credit they received from Neipperg, decided to desert and return south. Trenck, who had in the interim been released from prison, caught up with them in Vienna and guaranteed their services to Khevenhüller in a different theater of the war.Footnote ⁶⁴ The reasons for Trenck's release were manifold, but chief among them was the dangerous situation in which the Austrians found themselves. The Bavarian declaration of war was followed by the quick advance of Bavarian forces into Upper Austria and Austrian retreat. By the middle of September 1741, Linz and much of Upper Austria were occupied. As the Bavarians unexpectedly turned toward Prague, Maria Theresa and Khevenhüller made plans for reclaiming their territories in the northwest. What the Austrians required at that juncture was precisely what Trenck was best at: ignoring an enemy's superior numbers and abilities to engage in conflicts in the shadows that struck at supply lines and picked off enemy soldiers.Footnote ⁶⁵ Khevenhüller gave Trenck and his men the task of harassing and pressuring the French and Bavarian soldiers who had remained behind to protect Bavarian territorial gains.

Unstable Narratives

The war against the Bavarians and the French included some of Franz von der Trenck's most famous exploits and most notorious crimes, though the details, dates, and locations of individual episodes shift according to the perspectives of those writing about them. There was and is a narrative essentialism in these stories as they were told, retold, and deployed. They took on a life of their own, contributing to a particular rhetoric about Trenck, as well as about the men under his command. The legendary brutality of Trenck's methods in his corps and in the field was one more tool in his arsenal.

Trenck succeeded in engagements in part because he cultivated fear, so that his targets could “never enjoy peace.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Rumors about the pandurs and about Trenck softened the strategic ground, so that just news of their arrival in a district was enough to sow confusion and send enemy forces and civilians into disarray.Footnote ⁶⁷ His apparent embrace of prevarication, tricks, sabotage, and the inchoate terror of those who encountered him all worked to his military advantage and formed a core of the narratives that celebrated his exploits; this was dialogic performance and violence. Just a few examples suffice to capture the dramatic residue of these narratives. In January 1742, Trenck supposedly donned clerical attire to trick the Bavarian town folk in Plattling to build bridges across the Isar for the Austrian forces, while a couple dozen of his men “with wild look” stayed on a river raft, visible to the townsfolk. Fake cleric Trenck assured the townspeople that he had overheard these pandurs’ plans to turn the town to ash if the bridge was not rebuilt in two days. The stories concur that this worked. Similarly, at Deggendorf down river, the pandurs reportedly terrified the population just by singing songs about burning the town to the ground and massacring without constraint. The people of the town fled to the nearby woods with lyrics about fire and death ringing in their ears.Footnote ⁶⁸

Trenck's successful taking of important fortifications with similar tactics burnished his growing reputation, but the inherent tension between Austrian military ideas and pandur practices that had erupted in Silesia were even more obvious in Bavaria.Footnote ⁶⁹ Maria Theresa's nascent hope that the lost territory of Silesia could be recouped or supplemented through alternate lands in the west required not just military victory but also political outreach. More pointedly, in the short term she could not serve her people in upper Austria under occupation if the violence they experienced came from her own men. Maria Theresa ordered that acts of violence were strictly forbidden and in particular that the watchful eye of the state had to be kept on the “Hungarian insurrectionary troops, the hussars, and the frontier soldiers.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Military regulations insisting on the “most exacting regulation of conduct” had embedded within them the fear that southern irregulars had no sense of what good conduct was.Footnote ⁷¹ This is not to suggest that only the Habsburg irregular soldiers committed atrocities in the war. Reports reprinted by the Vienna Diary emphasized irrational French attacks against civilians and their property.Footnote ⁷² But, the subtext of the court's attempts to control the southern fighters displayed an unspoken anxiety that to pandurs and other soldiers from the frontier, everyone was an equal target and the ostensibly different (just or unjust) causes of war irrelevant. Trenck's reputation both fostered and drew on the notion that for the pandurs, war was opportunity and its violence was an excellent smokescreen for plunder.

Partly because of Trenck's military engagements, Bavaria began to succumb to Austrian military advance in early 1742, even as the Bavarian Elector Charles Albert prepared for his imperial coronation in Frankfurt. In an inauspicious start to Charles VII's brief reign as Holy Roman Emperor, he was displaced from his own state. Given the limited resources of the Austrian treasury, it was widely recognized that the armed forces moving into Bavaria would supply themselves from the land. This was theoretically to be achieved in an orderly, Austrian system of requisitioning. Trenck and the pandurs, however, continued to relieve citizens of money, goods, health, and sometimes life. According to Alfred von Arneth, the pandurs behaved well as long as they encountered little resistance. The moment real conflict began, “[T]he natural wildness of these armed posses oppressed the unhappy Bavarians.”Footnote ⁷³ Maria Theresa attempted to intercede with a personal reiteration of official Austrian policy that “soldiers must restrain themselves from every extortion, every unjust appropriation.” As she reiterated, “Out of inborn Austrian clemency,” she did not want her troops to perpetrate the same ruin as she had seen done to her own people in the Austrian provinces.Footnote ⁷⁴

For Maria Theresa and Khevenhüller, the question became whether the pandurs’ successful military exploits outweighed the costs of the devastation they brought to their enemies and sometimes their allies.Footnote ⁷⁵ This was not only a question of the unruly conduct of irregular soldiers who might endanger long-term Austrian prospects, but the difference in their motivations for transgressing the expected behaviors of the war. Some financial expropriation was, from the Austrian perspective, a necessary outcome of the straightened circumstances in which they found themselves. In fact, the reputation and behavior of the pandurs allowed the Austrians to deflect responsibility for the hardships created by the war. In the eyes of the public, the reality of “pandur destitution,” namely the hunger created by plunder, was an outcome tied specifically to “foreign” fighters. Austrian success in Bavaria meant that resources there would be funneled to the treasury, but too little of the money was finding its way there.Footnote ⁷⁶ Increasingly, Austrian bureaucratic and military officials came to see the pandurs as the reason. Moreover, funds and goods could not be collected in orderly “contributions” to the Austrian military if the population was embittered and set against them or if the pandurs burned everything to the ground.

In September 1742, as the Austrians attempted to reclaim territory, Khevenhüller ordered Franz von der Trenck to open the road to Bohemia, which required taking the walled town of Cham near the Bavarian border. No engagement distills more clearly the nature of Trenck's military career and the power of the complicated and conflicting tales about it. The destruction of the city is a fixed historical point, but the events leading up to that tragic end are wrapped up in the constantly shifting narratives about Trenck. The most common sequence of events incorporates all the features of Trenck's methods of war: subterfuge, inflected concepts of personal honor, violent inexorability, and retribution. Broadly, in the midst of his negotiations with Cham's garrison leader, who had pled for respite and received a peremptory notice to clear out, an unexpected shot from the city wall fatally wounded one of Trenck's men. The garrison refused to hand over the shooter and insulted Trenck in the process. His response was ostensibly to send pandurs dressed as women to gain access to the outer city, which they lit on fire.Footnote ⁷⁷ The blaze quickly spread from street to street and the city's powder tower exploded into the air. By several accounts, anyone who tried to flee the town across the river was cut down by pandurs at the bridge. As the reports back to Vienna attested, “[E]ven more terrible than the unleashed element was the rage of the stormers against the garrison and unlucky inhabitants of Cham. Horrors of every kind were committed, many people wantonly murdered and the remnants of the garrison arrested.”Footnote ⁷⁸

The ruin of the city became synonymous with Trenck, but his direct participation in the massacre at Cham is another unstable narrative. Writers who sought to adulate him for his military vision made sure to emphasize that Trenck was reportedly not present for the worst, as he had been chasing fleeing Bavarians down the river and delivering prisoners to army headquarters. The text of his memoir reflects more than once on the laws of war, but the concern of the memoir was not what we would term crimes of war relating to treatment of civilians or prisoners, but the expectations of honor and parole—the idea of how conduct in war should be negotiated between men of war. Richard Rolt's multivolume work on the war published in 1749–50 described the fires that decimated the town, but attributed the ferocity and speed of the flames to the power of the wind that day, so that “the whole, in a short space of time, was all in a combustion.”Footnote ⁷⁹ As the pandurs overran the town, the fire spread to the powder and ammunition storage, which “blew up all in the air,” and after which “not a single house in the town, but what was on fire.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Rolt was careful to assert that essential first blame for the conflict at Cham should be ascribed to the garrison leader, Count Joseph Künigl, who behaved “contrary to the laws of war.”Footnote ⁸¹ Rolt makes no mention of the shot from the walls, instead seeing Künigl's dismissive and insulting response to Trenck's demand of surrender as a provocation justly deserving a response. There is no mention of unconstrained violence against civilians or soldiers, just that the pandurs took advantage of the considerable riches of the town and that Trenck ran down the escaping population.

Civilizational Divides?

Whatever Rolt and others might have suggested, Trenck remained coupled with the atrocities committed at Cham and a consensus emerged that Trenck had exacted retribution because of the delay in surrendering. The reports to Vienna of the pandurs’ massacre of citizens, burning of the city, robbing of churches, and desecration of reliquaries were supplemented with accounts of Trenck's violent extortion of booty from his men.Footnote ⁸² The city ultimately became a potent symbol of the consequences of unrestrained war fought by men who did not belong in Central Europe and marked a turning point. French and Prussian writers delighted in comparing Trenck leading a “horde” against the population to Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun.Footnote ⁸³ The labeling confusion of contemporaries and subsequent writers regarding the southeastern soldiers captured the linguistic, textual confusion of Westerners hoping to “unscramble” eastern Europeans.Footnote ⁸⁴ Conflicting accounts of plundering by Trenck and his troops and sources that mixed up days, locations, and participants contributed to the indistinct fix that contemporaries (and later biographers) had on him. Trenck's culpability for the crimes of the pandurs was inevitably linked to writers’ inclination to see him as hero, antihero, or villain. His reputation during his life and after was shaped in no small measure by both Austrian desire to disavow the “excesses” committed by his men and by later adulators of Frederick like Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle repeatedly referred to the Croats specifically as a “waste-howling tagraggery,” and he emphasized the inhuman nature of Trenck's actions and appearance:

When in doubt, eighteenth-century observers were inclined to group perpetrators together as “wild men.” William Coxe's old description captured this well: “These troops, under the names of Pandours, Croats, Sclavonians, Warasdinians, and Tolpaches, exhibited a new and astonishing spectacle to the eyes of Europe; by their dress and arms, by the ferocity of their manners, and their singular mode of combat, they struck terror into the disciplined armies of Germany and France.”Footnote ⁸⁶ This dovetailed with the popular assumption that their nature derived from the purported barbarism, savagery, and backwardness of the southeastern frontiers of Europe and their “othering” was caught up in retellings of their fighting culture. In Bertling's assessment, “With their terrifying death cry, ‘Allah! Allah!’ they usually sprang against their enemies, who were terrified by the violence and wildness of their attack.”Footnote ⁸⁷ The pandurs were reported in the press and tavern to be so immoderate in the application of their perverted sense of justice that they had not “ever so much as spared the infant, even in its mother's womb,” in response to betrayal.Footnote ⁸⁸ Trenck regularly played on public perceptions that the norms that might have constrained regular soldiers did not apply to those who were so wholly foreign.Footnote ⁸⁹ His reputation was bound to that of his pandurs and the implication was either that he shared their “raw wildness” or that command had rendered him “a monster.”Footnote ⁹⁰ The language of the sources thus supported and replicated conceptual threads in the eighteenth century that read the violence of Trenck and the pandurs as natural, the result either of their civilizational backwardness or their internalization of foreign norms of violence.Footnote ⁹¹

Trenck's injuries in the course of his career became part of the narrative of strangeness and fear. He was shot on multiple occasions, and in romantic accounts of his physical capacities, he invariably returned to the field after only short convalescences. Each injury added to his reputation, as well as the fear that his appearance engendered. Describing the aftermath of Trenck's severe burns at Dießenstein, Teichman writes, “The citizens, who had heard of the Pandours’ atrocities, shuddered when they saw the latter's dreaded leader; owing to the explosion and consequent burns, his face had assumed an almost diabolical appearance—it was scarcely human—and ever afterwards it retained a dusky blue colour on account of the tattooing effect of the gunpowder.”Footnote ⁹² Friedrich von der Trenck described his cousin's visage as “impregnated with black spots,” like the residue of malignancy.Footnote ⁹³ The abbot of cloister Niederaltaich described him as “a savage man.”Footnote ⁹⁴ The implications of the texts linking atrocities and origins repeatedly return to a motif that Franz von der Trenck was “a man born to this murderous trade” because of both his personal experiences and his geographical origins. Apocryphal stories of his actions on the border, including the kidnapping or impaling of an opponent's father, became part of a language of uncivilized, foreignness associated with Trenck and his men.Footnote ⁹⁵ Yes, the Bavarians ran from them, writers suggest, as the sight of the pandurs “must have been for them a glimpse into another world.”Footnote ⁹⁶

The common assessment that these were “wild” men was also shaped by the notion that their behavior was conditioned by a land that was morally bereft and lawless. That was part of the lore in the 1740s and remained so, with writers describing the men from Slavonia as a “terrible swarm of barbarian pandours and all the rabble of the Turkish border.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Both contemporary observers and subsequent writers returned to “swarm” imagery to capture an essentially inhuman quality of both behavior and collective movement in the southern soldiers. The viciousness of retribution in a region of “cutthroats” ostensibly cured one of “stubborn humanity.”Footnote ⁹⁸ The “swarm” implied the victims’ inability to escape the onslaught and the unpredictability of the pandurs as a fighting force. For the “civilized” of Central Europe, enlightenment had a border, and they were looking at it when they looked at Franz von der Trenck and his men.Footnote ⁹⁹ The man of the south, with “his savagery, his inhuman appearance, his incapacity for reason rendered the tender standards of the Enlightenment irrelevant.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ To face the pandur was to encounter the frontier of civilization and to move backward through Europe's civilizing experience: chronology collapsed and the barbarian invasion and the contemporary pandur became one and the same.Footnote ¹⁰¹

The perception of a civilizational “gap” between east/west and north/south is conceptual terrain brilliantly explored by Larry Wolff, who argues that travelers (both real and armchair) to southeastern Europe regularly “effaced the borderline between fantasy and reality.”Footnote ¹⁰² As he demonstrates, the language of civilizational difference endured and “the whole vocabulary in which the issues of Eastern Europe were defined was that of the eighteenth century: barbarism and civilization, wildness and the frontier, the picturesque and the instructive.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Those binaries remain in the accounts of Trenck's career, whether he is portrayed as romantic hero or inhuman monster. This language of the “uncivilized” ran through contemporary eighteenth-century sources, but it is also prominent in later narratives about the war and the men who fought it. Skill in subterfuge and ferocity in armed, hand-to-hand combat stood in stark relief to an enlightened, orderly, “reasoned” warfare. As portrayed in the memoir, he “winked” at the barbarity, the riots, and the “thirst of pillage” as a means of maintaining command over the uncontrollable.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ These men, with their “terrible Turkish scimitars,” or Franz von der Trenck, who reportedly dispatched enemy commanders with his bare hands, were men set apart.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ As Philipp Batelka argues, perceptions of barbarism and foreignness were locked together for contemporaries, as they were for the luckless Charles VII, who condemned the Austrians for setting on the march “the most barbarous and least known nations.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶

As Friedrich von der Trenck concluded, his cousin was the first man “who rendered the rude and savage Croats efficient soldiers” and it was “impossible to perform among a stupid and blood-thirsty people, without being guilty himself of extravagant and cruel acts.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ This was fear assigned not just to Trenck and his men but to the culture of the southern soldier. As William Biggs described, a group of soldiers under another commander attacked a French force of five hundred so “briskly” that only forty escaped, noting:

That these men were violent was, therefore, obvious to contemporaries.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

The notion of foreign lawlessness was not merely imposed on the pandurs as cultural critique but also featured in their own self-presentation. Those who used them as tools of war and those who encountered them embraced the language of wildness, even after the integration of the pandurs into the regular Austrian military in the mid-1740s. Austria's opponents recognized their military value and adopted the use of irregular troops, but Maria Theresa was still criticized, naturally by Prussians in particular, for putting such men from the “fringes of civilization” in the field and therefore committing an affront and dishonor to “real” soldiers on both sides.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Maria Theresa was squeamish about the violence, particularly against churches and women, but she and others in the Austrian high command were willing to look away from sacked villages if they were accompanied by military victory. The “foreignness” of the pandurs created an unacknowledged moral space between the Austrian military and the reprehensible actions of Trenck's men. The nature of irregular warfare was such that, sometimes, just having the pandurs show up was enough. Popular beliefs recognized that the consequences of resisting them were deadly and towns would preemptively surrender to escape destruction. But the problem for the Austrian military was still that the pandurs were by definition unreliable and “their inferior status was reinforced by the fact that they were initially recruited from the east … outside the regular formations.”Footnote ¹¹¹

After the Austrian defeat at Hohenfriedberg in 1745, Maria Theresa sent four thousand soldiers, including pandurs under Trenck's command, to serve in the field with Prince Charles of Lorraine.Footnote ¹¹² But, the chorus of voices against Trenck both inside and outside the Austrian military had become deafening and had added treason to the crimes of church desecration, rape, and the expropriation of wealth that should have gone to the Austrian treasury. The chatter in Vienna, fed by rumors in the military, claimed that Trenck had captured the Prussian King Frederick II and allowed him to go free in return for a large sum of money. Trenck's reputation never recovered. The outcry was impossible for Maria Theresa to silence, even if she had wished to do so. She was particularly sensitive to the feeling of being betrayed, but more critically, by 1745, the pivot to security, the hope for an end to the war, and the isolation (and then death) of the Bavarian Emperor Charles VII made her reliance on the “skills” that Trenck provided no longer supportable or desirable. The state Maria Theresa envisioned could not depend on the chaos of unrestrained military activities and Trenck's notoriety had become a liability and a potential threat to political and social order. In 1746, his military and court nemeses had their way and he was called to Vienna for a military court-martial to answer for his alleged crimes. By many accounts, he and his men had committed terrible acts against both civilians and soldiers, but the Austrian military focused on his subversion of the hierarchy of command, diversion of resources, and the rejection of order and control. Trenck's form of war was a direct challenge to the deeply hierarchical, tradition-laden culture of the Austrian military, but it had been from the beginning. Only the perceived needs had changed. In addition to the accusations of rape and murder of women, he stood accused of embezzlement, with the implication that the looting and extortion he and his troops had committed were in direct competition with the requirements of the Austrian state. After Trenck's arrest, the pandurs were “regularized” by decree as a “Slavonic” infantry regiment.Footnote ¹¹³

If convicted, the magnitude of Franz's transgressions according to military code should have meant a speedy path to the executioner and he was indeed sentenced to death in August 1746. After the military court rendered its judgment, however, Maria Theresa interceded against the recommendation of her advisors Count Ulfeld and Johann Christoph von Bartenstein, who had argued that she should respect the independence of the military court and the law.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Instead, she requested a second trial under the auspices of Chamberlain and Field Marshal Königsegg. After two years of disagreements and intrigue and another death sentence, Maria Theresa stepped in again to commute the original death sentence. Trenck was instead sentenced to permanent incarceration. Rumors had often circulated of the vast riches that Trenck had plundered and sent down the river to his estates in Slavonia. Whatever the truth of those stories, by the end of his trial, Trenck's finances were a mess and made more so by the sentencing, which required not just that he be entirely stripped of his military titles but also be responsible for paying damages and financial settlements related to his career and his trial.Footnote ¹¹⁵ That he ended up experiencing a sentence of rather gentle imprisonment rather than the blade was a result of Maria Theresa's sense of loyalty, which was the flip side in the often-deployed and dramatic feelings of betrayal that infused her assessments of her enemies. As Maria Theresa explained, if she were to judge based purely on the rules of war, he would have long past earned death. She understood that public opinion excoriated Trenck's excesses and she denied favoring him. But, as she admitted, “I cannot lie that it is harsh to me to punish someone who did great deeds for me.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ In August 1748, Trenck was transported to Moravia to serve out his sentence in Spielberg/Špilberk Castle and awarded a maintenance fee and the right to keep a servant. He did not remain long. He died in Moravia on 4 October 1749, after developing a fatal case of dropsy and discovering religion.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Learning of his death, Maria Theresa reportedly asserted, “This man found a better end than his accusers and judges will.”Footnote ¹¹⁸

Trenck's Posthumous “Lives”

In the wake of his death, the flesh-and-blood Franz von der Trenck gave ground to new appropriations of his character and his narrative. He became a stylized, unhinged villain in some retellings of the experience of the war, while his military talents and Don Juan sexual exploits were celebrated in others.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The tension in the stories between ostensibly honorable virility, on one side, and uncivilized inhumanity, on the other, remained in play. The idea—the person—of Trenck became a cipher for others’ desires, embodying at times a wild, romantic, purportedly Slavic freedom fighter; a barbaric, inhuman foreigner terrorizing Central Europe; an astute, loyal, noble servant of Maria Theresa; an irresistible Lothario; or a German national hero. The romanticization of Trenck as a Croatian hero—as “our Francis”—portrayed him as more, somehow, than a regular man.Footnote ¹²⁰ Ferdo Šišic concedes Trenck's participation in some violent acts, but couches them as either justified or as honor in disguise. Even Trenck's methods of retaining command and loyalty, which included the brutal whipping or beheading of disobedient pandurs, could be reframed as honorable acts. As one example, Trenck's care in the disposition of goods and prisoners after one mission in Silesia was followed by chaos. His men, left to their own devices with barrels of impounded brandy, got spectacularly drunk and ended up shooting some merchants. Trenck's response was, according to the memoir, to “examine” the affair and behead the ringleaders “as an example,” and then make a full report to the high command; savagery and order in one episode.Footnote ¹²¹ His memoir, replete with stories, dialog, and memories of events, people, and places he was absent from or could not possibly know or remember, shaped that romanticization. Trenck's many supposed brushes with death, even as a toddler, show up as evidence in these stories of the ingrained nature of his invincible martial spirit. The elusive details of his early years take on very difference valences in romanticized treatments that sought to exculpate him. His cousin Friedrich argued whether such a man should be “judged by common rules.” The tragedy of his cousin's life comprised being condemned by those “who had grown old in a soldier's uniform, without ever having stained it with their own blood.”Footnote ¹²²

Authors of popular biographies took on Trenck's own unauthenticated voice, and he exists in these narratives as a hero beyond the constraints of “normal” men. Stories in the memoir of his “encounters,” namely constant duels with other soldiers, are a litany of quarrels settled by sword fights and injuries, punctuated by his sexual, but seldom consensual, conquests. In the memoir, he celebrates the burning of Cham by having two of the “prettiest girls in the whole town” brought to him. A sudden disturbance gave them an opportunity to flee, but “they went from me much wiser than they came, and must acknowledge themselves indebted to me during that time, for having given them some lessons and practice upon a very useful, and to me, agreeable subject.”Footnote ¹²³ Romanticized narratives of Trenck serve as forerunners to popular fascination with the transgressive sexual adventures of Casanova in a later generation.Footnote ¹²⁴ Sexual violence, kidnapping, and female slavery were recast as seduction to create a romantic Trenck whose subsequent “career” in popular culture played on a prevalent adulation of “bad boys” challenging stultifying social norms. Casanova is not the only one with an echo of Trenck. The language about the inhuman nature of Trenck and some of his soldiers anticipated the cultural iterations of Vlad the Impaler—the vampire as animalistic predator and then romanticized, charismatic seducer. As Friedrich reflected, “The Croats at this time were undisciplined, prone to rapine, thirsting for human blood, and only taught obedience by violence and blows: these had been the companions of his infancy.… His habitual intercourse with such a species of men gave him that fierceness of character, which has been so often remarked in tyrants.”Footnote ¹²⁵ As he continued,

In popular culture, Franz von der Trenck's actual career in the military was overshadowed by the appropriation of his name and different iterations of his reputation. There were multiple popular renderings of his life story across Europe in the nineteenth century. The enormously popular writer Luise Mühlbach—the pseudonym of the German-language writer Clara Mundt—had a hand in keeping the Trenck legend alive. Her historical novel, Maria Theresia und der Pandurenobrist Trenck, published in Brno in 1862, described Trenck as simultaneously svelte and herculean. As in other fictional renderings, Mühlbach's Trenck makes everyone else seem small and insubstantial. He dominates the room with his vitality in his first encounter with Maria Theresa, as he passionately throws open the door to the audience room.Footnote ¹²⁷

In unexpected ways, the imagined Baron Trenck also found new life as an adventurer and dramatic and comedic foil. In 1911, the libretticists A. M. Willner and R. Bodanzky wrote a comic operetta in three acts entitled, Baron Trenck (Der Pandur), with music by the Croatian composer Felix Albini. In the context of the operetta, Trenck was fully rehabilitated and refashioned into a romantic noble lover. As one reviewer described, “‘Baron Trenck’ is one of Nature's noblemen, provided one has the point of view that considers bluster and conceit necessary to the condition. After all, the main qualification necessary to become an operetta hero is the ability to wear a dainty moustache, in combination with a brave uniform upon a manly bosom.”Footnote ¹²⁸ In 1935, the Burgtheater in Vienna staged Otto Emmerich Groh's comedy, “Baron Trenck der Pandur.” The dialog of the play highlights Trenck's noble spirit and the incorruptible nature of his soldier's sensibility. Like the earlier operetta, the action hinges on a princess Trenck has sworn to protect and his encounters with the bumbling, old police and emasculated, French-speaking court officials, as well as Trenck's dutiful pursuit of traitors in the highest military ranks serving Maria Theresa. In the play, Austrian losses in the war are not a result of Austrian weakness or incompetence but of betrayal from within. In Groh's dramatization, the character of Trenck—craftier, more honorable, more dynamic, more loyal—is the necessary man of the moment. Amidst the jokes and the shenanigans of the play, Trenck emerges as a romantic icon of a particular type of masculinity—larger than life, legendary, charismatic, the center of every room, the desire of every woman. The ballad of the pandur keeps reappearing in the play to the noise of drums: “The Baron von der Trenck, the Pandur General, has arms of iron and nerves of steel. His eye is fire, his breath is storm. No fort can hold him, no citadel, no tower. Even Hell flees as blood is the drink of the clever Pandur, the Baron von der Trenck.”Footnote ¹²⁹ While the play includes an amusing encounter between the two Trencks, complete with mistaken identities, and Friedrich's inadvertent arrest, the more salient issue is that both fictional Trencks recognize the power of blood to bring them together to do what honor, family, and fatherland demand. Trenck's “kidnapping” of a princess who was on the brink of being forced to marry a corrupt, cowardly Russian spy becomes the source of the rumors calling him a thief, murderer, and robber. In the context of the play, his alleged calumny and all the crimes of which he is accused are misunderstandings, the jealous machinations of lesser men, or the nefarious plans of traitors to the crown. Those who stand in the way of Trenck doing the right, honorable thing are themselves blinded by their slavish, unhelpful devotion to superannuated norms and hierarchies or by their betrayal of their duty to their fatherland. Written this way, Franz von der Trenck is portrayed as legitimately beyond the law because he recognizes that the fatherland was above everything. In the play, Trenck is a German patriot who “rightfully” rejects the shackles of bureaucratic bumbling and bourgeois morality. He is also completely stripped of the southern, Slavic culture that defined other characterizations of his “wildness.” It should perhaps not surprise us that Groh's play was later filmed in Germany and had its premiere in National Socialist Vienna in 1940 as “Trenck, der Pandur,” with nationalist, anti-French, and militaristic panegyrics on display.

Not just Franz von der Trenck's legend, name, and image endured in popular culture. After his death, he was interred at the Capuchin monastery in Brno and his naturally mummified body became a site of veneration and popular interest, as visitors and tourists came to gaze at him through the glass-topped coffin. For unknown reasons, one of his fingers was missing—an outcome of particular mystery—until the appendage was located in the City Museum of Brno and returned with ceremony to the Capuchins.Footnote ¹³⁰ In 2017, the museum and some of the medical faculty of Brno undertook an investigation that included x-raying Trenck's corpse, thereby putting to rest the legend that he carried around ordnance in his body and throwing into doubt stories of some of his more dramatic injuries.Footnote ¹³¹ Moreover, the investigations of Trenck's body and separated skull allowed the Czech experts to reconstruct his face and form for eventual public display at Špilberk Castle—Trenck re-embodied.

It can be difficult to see the historical Franz von der Trenck—he remains elusive, a casualty of adulterated sources, obscurity, ideology, and time. There are many images of Trenck and his men, but all are partially imagined, including that of his cousin Friedrich.Footnote ¹³² Indeed, the imagined Franz von der Trenck lives on. His very plasticity—the possibility of being many things to many people—is a partial explanation for his cultural longevity. Austrian, Croatian, Hungarian, or German? Nobleman, brilliant strategist, soldier of fortune, plunderer, or rabble-rousing pugilist? Rapist, lover, or romantic lead? All the above. Trenck's popular culture presence as a character on screen and stage has been supplemented by other commercial and creative appropriations of his name, image, and reputation, including for a special Czech light beer from the Starobrno brewery in Moravia, a Eurocraft yacht for hire, and a jazz tune. Commemorations in Požega, Croatia, have continued to celebrate Trenck's legacy. With an understandably different focus, the Bavarian town of Waldmünchen has for more than sixty years offered holiday getaways for the staging of the Trenckfestspiele—open-air recreations of the experiences of the 1742 conflict, courtesy of the Trenck-Verein. This is not precisely brutality as entertainment, but experiential spectacle tourism that commodifies the local legends of virtue, heroism, true love, and the paying of sums of money to prevent the town's destruction. It is designed as a popular living-history experience.Footnote ¹³³ Certainly, Trenck remains a part of communal memories in Bavaria, Moravia, and the Balkans. His rather menacing eighteenth-century portrait, which highlights a mature Trenck in Hungarian noble dress, was featured in the 2001 Bavarian exhibit, “Bavaria-Hungary: A Thousand Years.” The “real” Trenck is in essence a cultural avatar who stood in for what his contemporaries and subsequent audiences imagined of military exploits, the uncivilized, and the titillating adventurer's place in their cultural and political imaginaries. Although our understanding of Trenck's brutality and his impact on irregular warfare has long been a feature of military histories, his durable cultural presence—at Waldmünchen and elsewhere—remains fluid and shaped less by his history than our own.