Some day someone will perfect time travel, opening an extreme time travel tourism industry for the German medieval ages. War, famine, plagues, massacres, bad food, awful hygiene, and religious fanaticism will appear on our social media feeds. If the past gets 3G coverage.
While we wait for time travel scientists to get it together and discover how to bend time and space so we can take selfies with Charlemagne, we must settle on seeing what’s left of medieval Germany right here.
North Rhine-Westphalia, the state I live in, is a fine place to discover German’s violent and, with the benefit of hindsight, exciting medieval roots.
Münster I
This calm city, named for that Addams-esque TV family, is an easy-going university town today with street-side cafes and bike lanes leading every which way along its tree-lined avenues.
During the Reformation, it was a little less academic and a lot more anarchic. Anabaptists revolted against the Catholic-Protestant government and took control of the city. They were early Amish, Quakers, and Mennonites – although these guys were more violent and dogmatic than their kinder, friendlier, barn-building ancestors.
They renamed the town New Jerusalem and established a proto-communist state, abolishing private property and rebaptising its people.
This angered both the Catholics and the Protestants, so in a rare show of cooperation, they gathered an army and laid siege to the town.
Nerves frayed in the city. People were going hungry. There was talk of surrender. After the Anabaptist leader was killed in battle, his successor made polygamy legal and rushed to marry Münster’s prettiest women before telling the townspeople.
The town fell and was promptly looted and pillaged. The generals tortured and executed the leaders, and, deciding that wasn’t bloody enough, stuffed the bodies into cages hanging from a church tower. The cages are still there. Münster is macabre too, man.
 |
| Look a little closer... |
 |
| There are the Anabaptist death cages. |
Kaiserspfalz of Kaiserswerth
Sitting upon a throne, waited upon by servants, receiving supplicants, passing down judgements and wisdom, this was the stuff of kings, not the Holy Roman Emperor.
The Holy Roman Empire, was, to paraphrase a smarter person, neither holy nor roman nor an empire. It was a collection of hundreds of small states run by princes, counts, bishops, kings, and dukes who elected an emperor with just enough power not to annoy any of the princes, counts, bishops, kings, or dukes.
Think of it as a feudal European Union. Its borders included modern day Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Northern Italy, and parts of Poland, France, Belgium and Holland.
Emperors mostly ruled from horseback. They traveled all over the realm, dealing with complaints, but mostly putting down rebellions.
To make things easier, the emperor and his imperial posse stayed in a network of castles, called Kaiserspflazes. It was safer, and he could count on good food and clean bedsheets, and he knew where the secret passages were.
The castle at Kaiserswerth used to be on an island in the Rhine, so it was an important defensive fortification and an imperial crash pad.
 |
| What's left of the imperial crash pad at Kaiserswerth. |
Münster II
Most medieval towns’ story would end after a bloody suppression of a revolt, but Münster would bounce back because the whole Catholic-Protestant mess was still unresolved.
The Catholics and Protestants within the Holy Roman Empire made peace. If your prince was of a certain religion you had to convert or leave, this applied to Catholics, Calvinists and Anabaptists – but not Lutherans, who could stay and still be Lutheran.
The new Catholic Holy Roman Emperor tried to make everyone in the empire Catholic, which angered the Protestants. The Protestants of Bohemia (part of today’s Czech Republic) stormed Prague Castle, and threw the Catholic leaders out a window – who survived, due to divine intervention, or the short fall, depending on who you asked.
This started a war. The emperor fought the Bohemians with the help of the Catholic Bavarians. It was a stalemate until the Saxons joined the Catholics, who started winning the war.
To even things out for the Protestants, Sweden joined the war against the Catholics.
The Swedes and all the Protestant Germans were now winning, so Catholic Spanish joined the war to bail out the emperor (who was related to the king of Spain) and also fight the Dutch, who they've been fighting before this war.
Now the Catholics were winning, but Catholic France was not comfortable with being surrounded by two rivals (Holy Roman Empire and Spain), even though they were all Catholic. So they joined the Protestant side.
This went on for 30 years, which is what the war was called, because originality was killed in the war along with millions of people. They ran out of energy and signed a few treaties, known as the Peace of Westphalia, ending the 30 Years War and, the equally original 80 Years War.
This treaty changed how states interact with each other. They had to respect other states’ sovereignty, especially over territory, politics, and religion. It also recognized Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists were all given legal rights – not Anabaptists, sadly they would be considered heretics, which is really unfair since most of them were pacifists.
This was also the first major international political conference, which changed how states make and keep peace. We wouldn’t have the UN or EU without the Peace of Westphalia, which was signed in Münster.
 |
| Munster's city hall, where they signed my favourite peace treaty: The Peace of Westphalia |
Walkin' in Aachen
This city is tucked in a far corner of Germany, close to France and Belgium. It isn’t big, maybe 200,000 or so people, but back in the day when kings were kings with beards and swords, it was Charlemagne’s capital city. He lived here when he wasn’t putting down rebellions, which was mostly what he did.
There isn’t a lot left from those days. Years of kings and other important people who try to outdo the previous generation have torn down and rebuilt the city until it was decimated in the war.
One of the old survivors is the Palatine Chapel. It isn’t the biggest church around – Cologne’s Dom and all those fancy French gothic cathedral are much bigger – but damn is it lovely in its simplicity.
It’s based on a Byzantine design – because it was built in the 800s – so it’s circular, not the usual rectangular or cross shape, and its interior covered with mosaics. It has a vaulted dome, a short tower, and a bell tower.
It’s ancient. It’s understated. It’s one of the nicest churches I’ve visited in Europe (when you travel in Europe, you poke your head into a lot of old churches).
 |
| The Palatine Chapel of Aachen. |
 |
| The vaulted, mosaic-ed dome inside the Palatine Chapel. |
 |
| That gold box is Charlemagne's tomb. |
No comments:
Post a Comment