In the early years of the fifteenth century, Gdansk, a member of the Hanseatic League and an important harbour, had grown increasingly independent from its landlord, the Teutonic Order, which nonetheless continued to be represented by the commander (Komtur) of the castle in Gdansk and through the various economic connections between the town and the Großschäffer, the officials of the Order responsible for trade. Like most late medieval Hanseatic towns, Gdansk was a community with complex social dynamics that occasionally resulted in violent uprisings and riots. Two events in particular warrant attention; or rather one event stretching over several years and culminating in two uprisings, in 1411 and 1416. These uprisings occurred after the Order lost the war against the Polish-Lithuanian union, completely changing its circumstances, but before the Prussian estates had organized themselves and their resistance against the Order in the 1440s. The events in Gdansk in 1411 and 1416 have not to date been addressed in the comparative research into urban conflicts, because, it has been alleged, they have very little in common with the events in other Hanseatic towns. There is a notable lack of chronological concurrence between Gdansk, on the one hand, and towns such as Lübeck, Braunschweig and Hamburg, on the other hand: while Gdansk and its landlord had very harmonious relations during the fourteenth century, by the fifteenth century Gdansk was struggling to gain privileges and increase its autonomy,Footnote 1 the situation was the reverse for the other towns, which had been largely autonomous during the fourteenth century, with the landlords regaining considerable control during the fifteenth century.Footnote 2 Gdansk's membership in the Hanseatic League did not play a significant role in the conflict between the town and the landlord: there are no reports about any other large Prussian town intervening in the conflict, or even of communication with any of the other towns about the conflict.Footnote 3 During the war with the Polish-Lithuanian union, Gdansk had remained faithful to the Order for as long as possible, but had finally surrendered and pledged allegiance to the Polish king, receiving substantial urban independence in the process. When the Order regained control of parts of its former territory, including Gdansk in the Peace of Toruń, the town found itself facing repressive measures, which fuelled conflict. When the High Master announced a tax (Schoß) in the Prussian lands to replenish its finances following the huge war losses, Gdansk refused to co-operate, in the long run attempting to replace the Teutonic Order as its landlord with the Polish king.
Superficially, the instances of urban rioting described in the historical accounts occur for different reasons: in February 1411, they were a reaction to the Order's repressive measures, while in 1416, the town's population rioted against its own mayor – however, the protracted conflict with the Order was also the source of the latter conflict. Between 1411 and 1416, two mayors and several council members were murdered, taxes were increased and the city council was replaced with close allies of the Order.
Two aspects of the Gdansk case are interesting from a comparative point of view: first, the historical processing of the events was initially limited to a number of chronicles written from the perspective of the Teutonic Order and some from other Hanseatic towns, with the Gdansk perspective not available for 100 years.Footnote 4 In the case of other towns, such as Ghent, the chronicles vary in nature, as well as in their biases, allowing for a nuanced view of both the events and the factors underlying them. In the case of Gdansk, the later urban chroniclers had to rely on sources that had a pro-Teutonic Order bias, transforming the arguments they presented into a narrative of resistance.
Even though the sources usually present the rioters’ actions as incomprehensible, chaotic and senseless, Paul Strohm proposes that medieval rioting might be best understood in ‘its own terms’. His suggestion that the internal logic that the rioters would have relied upon to clarify their political actions for their contemporaries be reconstructedFootnote 5 offers interesting possibilities when, as is the case with Gdansk, we have sources written between 70 and 100 years later representing the rioters’ perspective. These accounts express solidarity with the 1411 rebels, but do so in the context of entirely different political circumstances. It is, of course, of no small significance that often these accounts were constructed using existing sources expressing the landlord's point of view. Differences become apparent when the urban chronicles of the Gdansk events are compared to the historical accounts from other, better-known, conflicts, particularly sources depicting the Lübeck Knochenhauer rebellion,Footnote 6 the Hamburg brewer's rebellion of 1481Footnote 7 and the 1449–53 Gentse opstand.Footnote 8 A key difference is the extent to which chroniclers understood and portrayed the ritualized action that occurred in the urban uprisings.
Second, the reasons for and circumstances of the riots do not significantly differ from those in the other towns – tax riots of both an economic and political nature were an impetus for the Gentse opstand, and conflicts between different wings of the city council shaped the conflict in Hamburg in 1481. In Lübeck, the conflict lasted several years – but the descriptions of the riots indicate minimal ritualization in the collective actions. A careful comparison of the relevant sections of the sources will help determine whether these dissimilarities reflect actual structural differences between the conflicts or are best explained by the nature of the source tradition.
The sources: Hanseatic, Order-related and urban chronicles
The texts were written with a clear bias determined by the chronicler's relationship to a specific conflicting group. In the case of the Hanseatic area, there are numerous layers of bias: chroniclers from other towns often expressed solidarity with a town's struggle against the landlord's policy regarding taxes or trade restrictions, while evincing a distinct dislike for rebellions directed against city councils, and generally opposing disunity within the towns. The chroniclers were often town scribes with access to the town's archives, allowing them to collect, copy and insert diplomata and letters into their chronicles. The first contemporary Hanseatic chronicles describing the events in Gdansk are of this sort, and their bias becomes evident when they address rebellions in their own hometowns. Several Lübeck-based chronicles exhibit a distinct interest in depicting urban conflicts in other towns; e.g. the Franciscan Detmar's chronicle and its sequels, also known as the Lübecker Ratschronik, which drew upon the Toruń Anonymous’ Annales, and thus includes a fair amount about Prussian events,Footnote 9 and the Rufus chronicle.Footnote 10 The Lübeck rebellion is said to have inspired the Franciscan Detmar to chronicle the town's history, to which he added numerous accounts of events in the other towns of the empire.Footnote 11 In Hamburg, one of the mayors, Herman Langebek, wrote a report about the rebellion of 1481, in which he was at pains to justify his own role: this report became the major source for the humanist Albert Crantz's sixteenth-century chronicle of the events.Footnote 12 There are no available accounts written from the rebels’ point of view – if such accounts once existed, they have not survived. The situation is slightly different in the case of the 1447–53 Gentse opstand, where a number of chronicles still extant favour the duke of Burgundy, and a number of local accounts present an urban perspective.Footnote 13
Gdansk and Königsberg were the only large Prussian towns that actually developed an urban historiography. The conflict with the landlord seems to have provided the major motivation for this delayed production: the events of the early fifteenth century were reconstructed by Gdansk burghers approximately 100 years later.Footnote 14 However, the early texts by the town's apologists, which had attempted to find tendentious arguments in the Order's tradition, no longer existed and could only be the subject of conjecture in the sixteenth-century works. The concrete relationship between the four (or possibly more) distinguishable authors/compilators active during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries has been obscured by the only attempt to edit them in the Scriptores rerum prussicarum (SRP) series, which printed parts of a sixteenth-century compiled manuscript under the title Danziger Ordenschronik.Footnote 15 Recent research sees it as part of the complex Danziger Chronik vom Bunde, a chronicle meant to justify the Prussian town's participation in the anti-Order alliance.Footnote 16 Other chronicles covering the situation in 1411–16 that include relevant material are also not available in critical editions: the late fifteenth-century chronicle by Heinrich von Reden;Footnote 17 an anonymous version of the Preußische Chronik from the late sixteenth century;Footnote 18 Bartholomäus Wartzmann's Chronik des Deutschen Ordens;Footnote 19 and part of the Eberhart Ferber-Buch.Footnote 20 With the exception of the Wartzmann chronicle, all of these include descriptions of both the 1411 and 1416 events.Footnote 21
The main source addressing these events from the perspective of the Teutonic Order is the chronicle by the Riesenburg official (previously ascribed to John of Posilge, †1405), which recounts the events of 1411 and 1416 as if they were unconnected.Footnote 22 Other accounts include the Jüngere Hochmeisterchronik (SRP, vol. V, 126, late fifteenth century), one manuscript of the Ältere Hochmeisterchronik (c. 1440)Footnote 23 and the High Master's articles opposing the town and addressing both the 1411 and 1416 uprisings (SRP, vol. III, 398–401).
Additional information from both of the conflicting sides can be gathered from the scattered collection of letters and notes in the Ordensbriefarchiv (OBA), including a 1411 letter of complaint written by the High Master Michael Küchmeister about the town of Gdansk's lack of loyaltyFootnote 24 and a letter from the aldermen at the Hanseatic League's trading station in Bruges to the High Master about the 1416 uprising.Footnote 25
Starting a riot: the rumor
One term occurs frequently in the sources about all conflicts investigated, whether contemporary or late, and regardless of their bias: the rumor. The rumor is usually connected to the murmuratio, a non-specific muttering of discontent for which no individual can be held personally responsible – in none of the sources is a specific person said to have started a rumor. For example, in the historical accounts of fourteenth-century revolts in Flanders, the spread of a rumor is treated as one factor leading to a murmuratio, which for its part is usually the prelude to a mass uprising, and is thus taken very seriously by the authorities. Characteristically, the rumor circulated in a private or semi-private environment, not at the market place or in a tavern – therefore neither the authorities nor the chroniclers necessarily knew exactly what had been murmured.Footnote 26
In some English chronicle traditions, the rumor, in the sense of noise, became effectively synonymous with rebellion, indicating the term's ambiguous meaning;Footnote 27 the assessment of the role that acts of speech played in events in Gdansk in 1411 and 1416, however, differs from chronicle to chronicle, with a rumor not necessarily being treated as a full-blown uprising. The Riesenburg official's chronicle speaks of rumor and rumor unde uffgeloff in reference to both 1411 and 1416, while the Ältere Hochmeisterchronik only refers to an uffgeloff in 1416, with no mention of a rumor preceding it. In this case, the rumor appears to refer to a slightly more precise and more open murmur, a pronouncement that eventually became public knowledge. As a result, the uffgeloff constitutes the climax of the revolt that was started by an act of speech. Later chronicles claim that the actual uprising was not connected to the mutterings of discontent, but was a reaction to the Order's repressive measures during the period when the mayors were murdered. ‘Die gemein hier sehr umb murmelte, doch so dorfte sich niemands hier gegen setzen’ (There were many rumours in the community, but no one was allowed to oppose this) states the Eberhart Ferber-Buch, noting a moral verdict against the knights with the black crosses in the margins of this chapter: Nigra crux mala crux.Footnote 28
The report about the Knochenhauer rebellion in Lübeck identifies semi-public illicit speech as a reason for the rioting that occurred right before the planned ritualized denouement of the 1384 conflict and the public repentance of the leaders of that rebellion: ‘Dar wort echter eyn opstodt; dat quam van unnutten worden’ (Then there was another uprising: this was the result of futile words).Footnote 29 The exact nature of the futile words is not reported – it could be that this is not a reference to the words of anonymous rioters, but to something a council member said, which was meant as or perceived to be a provocation – as we will see later, this kind of speech act also played a role in triggering a riot in Gdansk.
On 11 August 1451, in Ghent, instead of going to work, a crowd gathered, because they had heard a rumor that three men who had been sent to the prince had been killed. It was impossible to placate those gathered until the men's wives provided assurances that they had heard from their husbands. Even the prince himself sent sealed letters to be read to the crowd, verifying that the men were still alive.Footnote 30 Although this rumor had been refuted, the rebellion continued.
Rumor and mormelunge are signs of discontent and bear the seeds of anger. However, riots do not inevitably follow these acts of speech – they can be avoided either by oppression or, at least for a time, by winning over public opinion, as was the case in Ghent. The prominent role the chronicles assign to these unspecified acts of speech expressing discontent points to a certain fear of the power of the masses, the impossibility of guaranteeing control over their feelings and the need to choke off the growing anger already present at the stage of whispering and grumbling. The masses’ utterances of discontent feature prominently in sections of the sources that address urban conflicts, helping to establish the masses as subjects: they are whispering, thus they exist.
The reasons for rioting
A major difference between the events in Gdansk and the other urban conflicts is that the authorities in Gdansk did not seem to recognize the rumor as the beginning of a rebellion and did not take action to silence it. The scandal in Gdansk in 1411 was precipitated by the murders of two mayors and a council member, which, when all of the sources available are considered, seems to have been entirely unprovoked. In fact, the murders were committed on Easter Sunday 1411, during a phase of reconciliation between the burghers of Gdansk and the commander of the castle, following the pacification of the tax riots that had occurred in February of the same year. In a concerted action involving the Großschäffer of Marienburg Ludeke Palsat and the commander of the castle, the two mayors, Conrad Leczkow (also: Letzkaw) and Arnt Hecht, as well as a member of the council, were invited to the castle, imprisoned and killed the same evening. The commander initially denied the murders, but eight days later, following much mormelunge in the town, he turned over the already decomposing corpses to their families.Footnote 31 Shortly thereafter, the Leczkow and Arnt families had their possessions seized and were forced to leave the town. Despite the scandal this caused, there were no immediate riots, but rather the complete surrender of the town to the High Master – as such, the murder of the mayors can be seen as a final action undertaken by the Order's officials in an attempt to pacify the rebellious town. This was followed by the replacement of the city council with people who had previously maintained good trading relations with the Order, both in Gdansk and in Toruń,Footnote 32 a measure that also brought to an end the previously high representation of artisans and craftsmen on the councilFootnote 33 – this is the inverse of the situation in many other towns, including Hamburg and Lübeck, where brewers and butchers, as members of lower crafts, rose up to demand political representation.
The sixteenth-century urban chronicles claim that Conrad Leczkow was killed because he stood up to a fellow mayor some time earlier. Benedict Pfennig had been renting the coin privilege from the Order – a violation of the town privileges established by the Polish king – and therefore was held responsible for the considerable decline in value of the valuta at the time. Because of his apparently good relations with the High Master, he felt confident enough to tell the burghers of Gdansk:
Noch must yr die muncze nemenn, vnd wenn yr euch gleich am Arße vnnd sunder denn Ohren klamptt. Diese und andere spitzige wortt kamenn vor die gancze borgerschafftt, vnnd darauß warth ein groß vnwillen, vnd auch eyn groß Rumor, die burger wolthen denn ganczenn Rath habenn erschlagenn.Footnote 34
You have to take the coins anyway, even if you scratch yourself on your ass and behind your ears. These and other sharp words were directed at the entire community, leading to great indignation and also a widespread rumour, with the burghers wanting to have killed the entire council.
The mayor's words were reported in all subsequent chronicles with only slight variations.Footnote 35 It is said that only the intervention of Conrad Leczkow prevented the town's people from killing the entire city council. Leczkow also tried to talk sense to Benedict Pfennig, and in doing so fuelled the Order's anger. The distinction made here between indignation – unwille – and rumour is interesting, since the latter seems to mean the violence planned by the dissatisfied burghers in response to the mayor's words.
It is also interesting that the disunity among the mayors is treated as a positive development – many chroniclers identify some initial dissonance between different factions of the city council as the basis for rioting: the people recognized that the authorities were not united and seized the opportunity to create conflict around a number of issues. The sixteenth-century humanist Albert Crantz wrote the following about the Hamburg riot:
Daher viel gemurmels unter ihnen gespuret worden, welchs die Auffrührer & den gemeinen mann vollend zu tumultieren angereitz & bewogen / weil sie sahen, das auch die Obersten den Rath gern in die Wolle gewesen weren.
A considerable amount of murmuring arose among them as a result, which strongly spurred the rebels and the common man to disorder / because they could see that even their superiors were in the mood to quarrel with the council.Footnote 36
Financial policy was also central to the original conflict in Hamburg. The daher in Albert Crantz's chronicle identifies discord between certain city council factions and some of the merchants as the initial reason for the gemurmel. Discord in the upper echelons of society spread downward – a significant observation concerning what motivated the masses.
The chronicles present the slechte mynt as the major connection between the 1411 and 1416 riots, regardless of whether the murder of Conrad Leczkow is mentioned as an aggravating event – as in the urban chronicles – or left out entirely – as in the pro-Order chronicles. Furthermore, according to a chronicle from Lübeck, the 1416 uprising occurred ‘because of the coins – van der munte’.Footnote 37 The Riesenburg official's chronicle provides an even more precise explanation for the town population's opposition to Mayor Gert van der Beke that closely resembles the explanation for the population's anger at Bernd Pfennig four years earlier:
Wendt se ym schult gobin von der moncze wegin das her eyn sache were, das sy so arg was gewordin, also was dy gancze gemeyne weder yn beweget.
Since they blamed him for the valuta becoming so weak, the entire community was mobilized against him.Footnote 38
There is a major difference between the pro-Order chronicles and the reports from an urban perspective. The pro-Order chronicles treat the events of 1411 and 1416 as completely distinct, identifying the 1416 money devaluation as the sole cause of that year's riot, not mentioning the Order at all. The causes underlying the town's disobedience during the 1411 riots remain a mystery: Gdansk ‘was gar unwillig czu allin dingin iren herrin’ (was very disobedient to its lords in all things), as the Riesenburg official's chronicle puts it. The later urban chronicles, on the other hand, portray the 1411 and 1416 events as clearly connected by the murders of the mayors, thereby presenting them as part of an overall narrative of the town's resistance against an unjust landlord. Reference is made to the Order's repressive measures to explain the interval between these two events.
A delay in the escalation is a common feature of urban conflicts. The Lübeck Knochenhauer rebellion unfolded in two phases. First, an armed rebellion of the guilds against the council in 1380 was pacified with a phoney compromise in which the council only pretended to inscribe the rebels’ demands in the town book. Four years later, a similar group of rebels, along with sections of the local lower nobility, planned a second uprising, but their plans were disclosed and their leaders killed.Footnote 39 In Ghent, the centralization policy issued by the count of Flanders led to a series of uprisings, first in 1379–85, then again in 1447–51, in a phase of open rebellion in the town that was only ended by the duke of Burgundy declaring war on the town, and then finally winning it over. The fact that most of the uprisings failed to result in substantial favourable change for the rebels, but usually ended with their defeat and punishment, while the factors underlying the conflict remained unaltered or were, at best, subject to some cosmetic changes, encouraged new revolts – contemporary chroniclers often recognized this and reported a close connection between the events, but the contemporary chroniclers of the Teutonic Order refused to see the connection.
In Hamburg in 1481, a rebellion occurred in response to trading restrictions that exacerbated starvation among the town's inhabitants during a period of famine – the merchants on the council directly profited from high prices.Footnote 40 As in Gdansk, here too the underlying factors were complex and the masses’ anger was not initially directed at the entire council, the focal point instead being the defence of a monastery from a planned visitation by representatives of the archbishop accompanied by representatives of the city council, which would likely have led to reforms. The townspeople's reasons for resisting any reform attempt were, however, of a different order: it is interesting that the chronicler Herman Langebeck, himself the mayor of Hamburg, claims that this delegation was the first target because it was under the council's protection, and thus provided a suitable arena for staging an internal urban conflict. He identified both long-standing economic complaints and immediate triggers as leading to the revolt.Footnote 41
The rioters and their enemies
Paul Strohm holds that the presentation of the rioters as members of the lower classes was an attempt on the part of the chroniclers to undermine their legitimacy. This is just as true for the cases investigated here. The sources primarily identify members of the different guilds as those punished for having incited the crowd against the city council. In Lübeck in 1384, it was the Knochenhauer after whom the entire uprising was named. In Hamburg, the chronicler attempted to portray the rioters as entirely lower classes, but the only woman whose name he provides, Catharina Arends, was in fact the daughter, the wife and the sister of members of the city council. The Ghent situation is complicated by the fact that different groups and networks participated in the rioting. The chronicles stress the anonymity of the crowd (t’ volck), but present a very accurate list of the (supposed) leaders of the rebellion. The counterpart is the duke himself, presented as min herre.Footnote 42
In Gdansk, the Teutonic Order chronicler distinguishes between das commune, who break into the town hall, and das povel, who break into the mayor's home – it is difficult to determine whether this also implies a social distinction, particularly as the entire conflict is said to have occurred between the gemeyne and the city council.Footnote 43 Unlike modern historiography, however, the medieval chronicles do not portray ‘the Teutonic Order’ as a collective counterpart to the rioters. Both in the case of 1411 and in the case of 1416, individuals are identified: the commander of the Gdansk castle, the bailiff of Dirschau, the mayors who were forced to flee to the castle, and above all the High Master himself – this is probably the result of the chronicles using the articles signed by the High Master as sources, which clearly distinguish between the masses and individuals. In this case, there is actually a clear moral significance attached to this distinction: the individuals, who have titles, names, positions and offices, are attacked by the masses, who have none of this. This pattern resembles that found in the accounts of rebellions in late medieval England, and it is also similar to the chronicles about the Gentse opstand, since in that case the duke of Burgundy and all of his allies, who are identified by name, were the counterpart to the undifferentiated masses, thereby ignoring – or likely not grasping – the distinctions among the urban interest groups, such as merchants, guilds, artisans and the dispossessed. Consequently, in keeping with this, the later urban chronicles from Gdansk do not mention any names except those of their martyrs, the murdered mayors. Even the names of those punished as leaders of the rebellion go unmentioned, and the conflict is portrayed as one between the ‘common man’ (de gemeyne) and the Order – unlike sixteenth-century England, the term gemeyne did not denote the lower classes for these sixteenth-century chroniclers, but the entire community.Footnote 44 That an entirely different political agency had to use the same distinctions between the name-given Order officials and the anonymous masses shows that this narrative pattern is not necessarily indicative of the chronicler taking sides against the masses.
More and less ritualized action
Transgression is a central aspect of urban rioting; either the violation of old boundaries or the establishment of new ones. In most cases, the symbolism is very obvious: the keys to the town hall are seized and the guards on the town walls are replaced. There are also clear manifestations of violence, primarily looting, but in some cases lynching as well. At times. a certain semantic blurring serves to obscure the actual riot, which is only made obvious by certain highly symbolic acts, as was the case in Hamburg in 1481. The violation of certain spaces and their boundaries is characteristic of this riot, with townspeople ‘violently pushing their way into the monastery, some climbing onto the walls and making a lot of noise outside of the chapter house’. The riot culminated in the obscene gesture of a woman lifting her skirts in front of the archbishop's chaplain, but no physical violence was reported.Footnote 45
During the lengthy period of rebel government in Ghent, the chronicles identify several concrete events that might be called riots, and they all occurred during a phase of collective action in the town that stretched across several months from August to November 1451, with the central event being the wapeninge. As Jelle Haemers has pointed out, the wapeninge had a defensive character, as it was a justified reaction to a violation of urban rights – a desire to return to old customs came into play, so to speak, as did various reactions to perceived provocation on the part of the landlord. The wapeninge was an orchestrated action, with events unfolding in a typical way, and as such distinct from spontaneous actions on the part of the amorphous masses: the members of the guilds gathered in their guild houses and armed themselves, the town bells were rung and the armed men left the guild houses and paraded through the streets carrying the banners of their guilds.Footnote 46 What is interesting about the wapeninge in this context is that it had a clearly designated group of actors, the members of the guilds, and thereby functioned differently from the riots that are ascribed to an amorphous mass. Nonetheless, the term wapeninge is not used in all chronicles; rather the collective action is portrayed as chaotic, the masses as undifferentiated and the armed procession under banners as spontaneous and incomprehensible. It is said to have been preceded by a three-week strike and to have culminated in an assembly at which three new bailiffs were elected.Footnote 47
It is not only the Flemish urban sources that have a term for an orchestrated collective mobilization as a reaction to a violation of urban rights. Bannerlop is a term first used in the context of a 1365 urban conflict in Bremen. The term thereafter became synonymous with uprisings in general. Gatherings and processions of armed men are reported in other German areas, including Cologne in 1391, Munich in 1397 and Rapperswil in 1489, where ‘poor people’ gathered at the town hall. In Cologne, the wapenlop was followed by actual battles that resulted in the guilds defeating the urban patriciate. In Munich, the collective action resulted in the dismissal of the old city council, with the town keys, bell and banners being turned over to the rebels.Footnote 48
Obviously ritualized collective action, with or without violence, is not restricted to the Low Countries, but a legal framework is lacking in the towns in Prussia, so the chroniclers neither recognized nor acknowledged these rituals or their protagonists. The violation of urban rights and privileges was, however, mentioned – the renting and devaluation of the valuta, the murder of the mayors – but in the case of Gdansk, there is little information about what actually occurred during the riot, and a definite paucity of ritualized actions. The only aspect that calls to mind the elaborate dynamics of social unrest in the older urban centres with a more established relationship between the population and the authorities is that the Gdansk riot of 1416 starts during the Corpus Christi procession – a festivity that played a prominent role in social conflicts in Florence, for example.Footnote 49 Most of the urban population would be out in the streets on this day, with many joining in the procession, where the host would be on public display and the authorities would be mingling with the population. While the Corpus Christi feast had a special significance in Florence, because of where it fell in the calendar of urban administration, thus making the authorities particularly vulnerable, it is unclear why riots broke out in Gdansk at this specific procession, but not at any of the others that occurred during the year.
The most extensive descriptions of the riot are found in the sixteenth-century chronicles from Gdansk. Here, the mayor following the host in the procession appears to provide an easy target for attack. While it is likely that his role in the procession was intended to underscore his position, it was presented in a way meant to undermine him.
Hiernach anno 1416 auf des Heiligen Leichnams tag, war ein gemein Gerüchte, wie einer von den vier Bürgermeistern mit Namen Gert von der Becken alles was heimlich binnen raths war dem orden verlautbarte, do dis unter die gemein kam, und auch von der müntz wegen, wardt ein auflauf von der gemein, und derselbige Gert von der Becken wardt gewarnet, sonst hetten sie ihn todt geschlagen, wan er dem Heiligen Sacrament were nachgevolget. Als ihm aber ein solchs wardt angesaget, entwich er auf den pfarrhof, und do ihn die gemein nicht kriegte, lieffen sie sein Haus auf, und zurhieben alles was da war, und zerrissen die Bette, und zurstrewten die Federn auf die Strassen. Dis kam vor den Hohmeister, er kam gen Danzig und lies vielen Bürgern die Köpfe abschlagen, etliche entwichen, und eins theils musten sweren, das sie nicht mit weren gewest.Footnote 50
After this, on Corpus Christi day, a rumour spread that one of the four mayors, Gert van der Becken, would tell all of the council's secrets to the Order. When this became public knowledge in the community, and also because of the valuta, the common people began gathering, and the same Gert van der Becken was warned, otherwise they would have killed him when he was walking behind the Holy Sacrament. But when he was told this, he fled to the churchyard, and when the common people could not get hold of him, they stormed his house, and smashed everything in it, and ripped the beds apart, and spread the feathers on the streets. The High Master was told, and he came to Gdansk and had many burghers decapitated, many others fled, and some had to swear that they had not participated.
The feathers from the bedding scattered in the streets is the most consistent aspect of the narrative tradition – like the mayor's statement about the burghers scratching their asses being the source of a rumor in 1411, the feathers from the bedding are mentioned in all of the sixteenth-century urban chronicles. That the High Master reacted to this relatively minor transgression with harsh measures and severe punishments is crucial to the overall political objective of later urban chronicles: it was intended to portray the 150 years that Gdansk was under the control of the Teutonic Order as a period of misery and oppression. Neither of the themes that recur in the later chronicles – the mayor's provocative statements and the feathers from the bedding scattered in the streets – are to be found in the earlier preserved texts. While it is unclear if these details derive from a now lost source or from an oral tradition, what is clear is that the various sixteenth-century chroniclers shared an understanding of what would make a good story and what should be remembered. None of the earlier chronicles, whether coming from Hanseatic or Teutonic Order sources, presents nearly as clear a narrative of the 1411 and 1416 events. The actions themselves are reduced to se begingin grosen frebil (Riesenburg official) or se schynneden [de huse] (Rufuschronik). The Rufuschronik also speaks of a vordreet, a term for an annoyance, a source of annoyance or something that leads directly to a quarrel.Footnote 51 Even in the texts that report the riot, the events of the riot itself remain unclear.
Nigra crux mala crux: from propaganda to counter-propaganda
In the case of Gdansk, the chronicles exhibit no uniformity in their description of the course of events: there was an initial quarrel – the commander of the castle had blocked the harbour because of unpaid taxes. A rumor about the commander's action spread ‘within two days’, accompanied by several other more minor anti-Order complaints. Then, the truly scandalous murder of the two mayors occurred – another rumor, but still there was no riot. When the riot finally occurred in 1416, the main factor seems to have been the hatred felt for one specific member of the city council, whose major offence was to threaten the unity of the town's administration by siding with the Teutonic Order.
From the point of view of the reasons given for rioting and the language used to describe the riots, the 1411 and 1416 events in Gdansk do not appear to be an exception in the history of late medieval urban revolts: initially a tax riot, the delay in the events and the intervention of the Order's officials turned the riot into a conflict in which the town's population identified and punished disloyal council members. Rioting, along with the transgression of the boundaries of both space and social order, are found in numerous detailed descriptions in historical sources, especially urban chronicles, from all over Europe. The wapeninge in the Flemish sources finds its parallel in Hanseatic towns, but differs from the riots in Gdansk; although neither was successful and both included ritualized and symbolic elements, the relationship between town and landlord was less formalized in Prussia. The Teutonic Order failed to recognize that the rumor, the mormelunge and the uffgeloff were reactions to its violation of privileges, instead seeing them as provocations in their own right, provocations so severe that detailed reports treat them as part of an internal urban conflict: rat und meynheyt were presented as counterparts in the case of the intense 1416 conflict, not town and Order. The ritualized transgressions or, in the case of the wapeninge, the threat of actual violence were factors that allowed conflicts in other towns to unfold without bloodshed and destruction. Were the rebels’ rituals a reaction to the state's aggressive ritual, as Peter Arnade claims is the case for the Dutch revolts?Footnote 52 It seems more likely that neither the townspeople of Gdansk nor the Teutonic Order's officials actually possessed such means of ritual communication.
The rebellion in Gdansk is both paradigmatic and exceptional: paradigmatic with regards to the reasons and the course of events; exceptional because of the specific situation of the Prussian Hanseatic towns that had the Teutonic Order as their landlord. However, the historical accounts exhibit a certain Ungleichzeitigkeit that parallels the delayed development of the town's struggle for independence itself: the highly ritualized acts of collective violence described in the sources about urban conflict in other towns do not turn up in Gdansk urban historiography until the end of the sixteenth century. The medieval accounts, which show a lack of clarity about what exactly it was that had happened, fail to recognize ritualized forms of collective action, seeing only blunt violence. Comparing the contemporary chronicles of the Gdansk events (both Hanseatic and Order-related) with the town's urban historiography 100 years later shows that this early conflict with the landlord later played a significant role in urban self-definition as the struggle against external forces. Nigra crux mala crux, the note in the margin of the Eberhart Ferber-Buch, became the key theme in urban historical writing, with its interpretative scheme being attributed to a period that predates the Prussian towns organizing themselves and their resistance to the Order. The later chronicles integrated the economic explanation for the conflict with the basic chronology of events found in the earlier ones, while bringing to the whole episode a distinctly different bias. The more colourful aspects, such as the Mayor Bernd Pfennig's offensive statement, the details of the Leczkow murder and the attempted murder during the Corpus Christi procession, either come from a different, now lost, tradition which either the Teutonic Order's chroniclers and the Hanseatic chroniclers were unaware of, or had no interest in.
