Gabriel Zeilinger. Lebensformen im Krieg: Eine Alltags- und Erfahrungsgeschichte des süddeutschen Städtekriegs 1449/50. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2007. 285 S. ISBN 978-3-515-09049-0.
Reviewed by Brian G.H. Ditcham (Independent Scholar)
Published on H-German (May, 2008)
Living through War in Late Medieval Germany
The conflict that came to be known as the "South German City War" saw a loose alliance of thirty-one imperial free cities in southern Germany confront an equally loose alliance of imperial nobles headed by Margrave Albrecht of Brandenburg-Ansbach. Its effects spread widely across southern Germany for exactly a year, from July 1449 to July 1450, though peace was not formally concluded for a couple of years after the end of active hostilities. Triggered by a mass of separate local disputes over jurisdictions and landownership, it came to take on something of a social and even cultural confrontation between civic and rural elites over the definition of their roles in the late medieval empire (despite some cases of divided loyalties within families, it is striking how strongly the two groupings aligned on each side). While no clear-cut winner emerged, Albrecht and his allies probably came out more victorious--for instance, Nuremberg, the core member of the city alliance, ended up paying reparations to him.
Gabriel Zeilinger's book does not claim to be a full operational or diplomatic history of the conflict (though in fact he does provide a useful overview of both aspects). Instead, he seeks to provide an account of how the war influenced the different social groups in the affected region. After setting the scene, he examines issues of military organization and logistics, public order matters, the spatial dimensions of the war, the impact of violence, communications in wartime, and the effects of war on the economy. He then looks at different social groups--the landed aristocracy, urban elites, greater and lesser city folk, the peasantry, the clergy, and others--to examine their experiences in the war. The work ends with a rather brief conclusion.
Zeilinger does not really succeed in delivering the promised comprehensive overview of how south German society experienced the war. To a considerable extent, this is the result of uneven archival survival. Despite Zeilinger's comprehensive work in a wide range of archives across the region and beyond, his conclusions are inevitably affected by the fact that the urban side in the conflict left far more comprehensive records than its aristocratic opponents and that material from Nuremberg tends to dominate what has survived from the urban camp. Documentary survival is also slanted towards men (very heavily) and elites. City chronicles and ordinances survived fairly well, as did some financial records. The war gave rise to large amounts of correspondence as both alliances sought to compensate for underdeveloped formal institutions by incessant letter writing to pass on news and rumors about troop movements and other events. The war memoirs of Nuremberg patrician Erhard Schürstab (compiled at least in part to serve as guidance to future generations on the practical aspects of how to conduct a war) are of considerable interest. Literary sources ranging from anonymous poems glorifying Albrecht to the texts of witnesses like Nuremberg amateur poet Hans Rosenpült or Augsburg guildsman Burkhard Zink offer some insight into broader social attitudes. Very few sources allow us to hear the voices of the urban and rural masses, however problematic such material may be (Natalie Zemon Davis did not refer to French judicial records which appear to offer this possibility as "fiction in the archives" without reason). Some intriguing accounts are available, such as the interrogation by the council of Windsheim of a spy for the aristocratic party who had been caught on their territory, but these are rare. It is worth noting that the book contains an appendix with a selection of primary sources.
However, it is clear from Zeilinger's account that urban and rural experiences contrasted strongly ("urban" in this context includes walled towns within the domains of the territorial nobility as well as the members of the city alliance). The key weapons of war in this conflict were the lighted torch, cattle prod, and axe, rather than crossbows or artillery. Though Zeilinger suggests that the two sides approached their military activities differently (with Albrecht and his allies conducting longer range campaigns than the city forces), in essence, both sides waged an identical war of devastation in the rural territories of their enemies. Crops were burned or reaped while still green, livestock driven off, fruit trees picked bare or chopped down, houses and mills burned, and churchyards transformed into battlegrounds. Individual country dwellers might be taken and held for ransom or driven to take refuge in or near the cities.
On the other hand, since neither side appears to have possessed a siege train of any significance, this was a war without formal sieges. Consequently, no population of an urban center of any size ever faced the horrors of being besieged, let alone stormed, by a hostile army. On the other hand, insecurity in the countryside saw city dwellers increasingly cooped up within their walls. Zeilinger cites impressive data that demonstrate the almost total collapse of traffic passing through one of Nuremberg's gates in the later months of the war. One of the most interesting parts of his book deals with the problems of communication and transmission of news in this environment. An unspecified but deadly pestilence affected Nuremberg (and possibly other cities). While Zeilinger has surprisingly little concrete information on the impact of the effective suspension of trade and commerce on urban artisans and workers beyond a brief comment that Nuremberg's gunsmiths were running short of raw materials by the time peace came, it is hard to see how this disruption could fail to have had a serious effect on most of the urban population. Little evidence of famine survives--bread prices, though high, never increased to intolerable levels and there were even temporary gluts of meat as looted livestock was slaughtered. Beer and wine were, however, in increasingly short supply. The Nuremberg council, without a guild organization to regulate bakers, eventually set up its own municipal bakery to provide affordable bread and established a soup kitchen as well. The Nuremberg council and other city councils also sought to ensure the local clergy's absolute obedience in ways that called the independence of the clerical estate into question; neutrality was not permitted. In many places, the cityscape was at least temporarily altered as the properties of hostile noblemen and even religious houses under their patronage were seized by city authorities and demolished or converted to other uses. Physically, and even psychologically, this was a stressful time for the urban population.
The main burden of the war, nevertheless, clearly fell on the countryside. One should, however, be wary of casting the peasantry as passive victims of the conflict. Zeilinger produces considerable evidence to demonstrate the existence of a layer of conflict below that of the "formal" campaigns, in which small groups drawn from the rural population themselves conducted raids on "enemy" territory in the name of their overlords--assisted by the fact that the level of ownership of firearms in the south German countryside was remarkably high. No doubt the local contexts for these activities would repay further examination.
In fact, it is not entirely easy to determine just how serious the long-term impact of the war was on the countryside. It would be very easy to conclude that the whole of southern Germany was devastated (and Zeilinger's choice of language tends in that direction). The lands of the Holy Ghost Hospital in Nuremberg show a considerable turnover of tenants in the years after the war, with holdings abandoned or let on easier terms. On the other hand, local truces and non-aggression agreements existed in some places and village communities could buy freedom from plundering by paying a collective ransom. It might be advisable to exercise some caution in taking every claim of devastation drawn from listings created to solicit compensation entirely literally. Little in the book enables readers to judge just how much long term damage the war did even in the most affected areas.
This issue underlines one problem with Zeilinger's work--its very close focus on the year of the war. While some attention is given to what came afterwards, the overwhelming impression left is one of a conflict with limited long-term effects other than a surge of weddings in the months after peace returned. Trade apparently resumed. Albrecht, who had led from the front with almost reckless gusto and was wounded on the battlefield, emerged with an enhanced reputation among his peers. Some individuals moved more rapidly than usual to positions of civic prominence. Others on both sides were not so lucky, ending up with reputations clouded by defeat or drawing allegations that they had surrendered positions rather too easily or created financial burdens with ransom payments. Nuremberg took pride in its victory at Pillenreuth and hung the banners captured there in the Marienkirche. Many of the members of the city league felt the financial consequences of the war for years to come, as deficits had to be repaid painfully, though apparently not to the extent that any city went bankrupt or undertook radical changes to its tax system in consequence. Life, it seems, returned to normal. One would like to know what happened to the workers in the Nuremberg municipal bakery when peace returned, or whether demolished properties were rebuilt, but Zeilinger does not mention these points or other, larger issues relating to the long-term consequences of the conflict.
Zeilinger's narrow focus also largely excludes potentially fruitful comparisons with experiences during other late medieval conflicts within the Empire, let alone Europe. For those more accustomed to warfare west of the Rhine or south of the Alps in this period, some interesting comparisons could be made. Everything in the Städtekrieg was conducted on a much smaller and more informal scale, with very little of the increasingly complex military bureaucracy to be found in, say, France or the major Italian states. Civic militias retained their importance, at least in a defensive role (the Nuremberg victory at Pillenreuth was to a considerable extent a triumph of the city militia). Professional soldiers certainly participated; Nuremberg hired seven hundred Swiss and was in the process of engaging Bohemian troops when the war ended and most of the cities employed contingents of paid soldiers (usually drawn from the same lower aristocratic grouping that supplied a major part of Albrecht's armies and those of his princely allies). However, it is hard to gain much detailed insight into how they were organized--no muster rolls appear to have survived--and their numbers could sometimes be almost risibly small; Windsheim relied on some twenty professionals, Schwäbische Hall had only twenty-five to thirty men bolstering its militia. High command functions tended to reside with members of the city elites rather than professionals--not always happily as the defeat of the allied army on the Plienshalde demonstrated.
On the princely side, Albrecht relied on a mix of hired men and formally independent allies from the minor nobility--though Zeilinger shows that at least some of these "independent" figures supposedly pursuing their own parallel disputes with the cities were in fact in receipt of wages--coupled with his own town militias. A visiting Italian like Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II, must have found German warfare very under-administered and informal in comparison with practice in his homeland, even if the practice of devastation would have been sadly familiar and the number of hand firearms in use would have been impressive by any European standard.
Zeilinger's book contains much of interest both to the historian of late medieval Germany and the student of late medieval warfare. Despite his best efforts, however, it does not entirely work as a presentation of the experience of warfare in late medieval Germany and its relatively narrow focus weakens its potential impact.
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Citation:
Brian G.H. Ditcham. Review of Zeilinger, Gabriel, Lebensformen im Krieg: Eine Alltags- und Erfahrungsgeschichte des süddeutschen Städtekriegs 1449/50.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
May, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14547
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