Having spent the last few days blogging about events in England in July 1476 I shall remain in that year to look at, and share, one of the more notable events of that spring and summer, the story of the Drummer of Niklashausen.
I first encountered these events in the pages of Norman Cohn’s fascinating and stimulating The Pursuit of the Millenium about popular movements with apocalyptic or chiliastic aspirations or claims.
Some years later I discovered Richard Wunderli’s Peasant Fires: The Drummer of Niklashausen which I strongly recommend as a piece of history about localised events and their implications. In it Wunderli looks at the events of those months in 1476 when the eponymous drummer, an eighteen year old shepherd called Hans Boehm ( Böhm), attracted a considerable following which, moving from being a religious revival with bonfires of the vanities in no short order to calls for social and religious revolution and alarmed the local seigneurial and ecclesiastical authorities into taking drastic action which culminated in Boehm being arrested, convicted of heresy and burned at the stake in Würzburg on July 19th. Even with his final and fiery end the movement he had initiated retained some life into the next year.
Wunderli’s book investigates these events rather like Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie did with his study of residual Catharism in Montaillou and allows the reader through such mentalité history to enter into the world of communities in the past.
There is a review of Wunderli’s book which may also be of interest
here
Another article which has a number of sayings made by, or attributed to, Boehm, and which also stresses his illiteracy can be seen at
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Hans Boehm was apparently born at Helmstadt, mid-way between Wurzburg and Niklashausen, in 1458. His surname might possibly suggest that his family originated in Bohemia, with its Hussite and Taborite ideas, or that it was a nickname associating him with such radicalism. In 1466-7 a feud between the local landowner, John Count of Wertheim, and the Teutonic Knights had resulted in Helmstadt and two neighbouring villages, Roßbrunn and Uettingen being burned to the ground.
Niklashausen today
Image: Wikipedia
Boehm worked as a shepherd and as an entertainer playing his pipe and drum at village celebrations in the Necker valley around Niklashausen. That, as the accounts linked to above recount, all changed the cold winter night early in Lent when young Hans, watching over the sheep, had, or claimed to have, a vision of the Virgin Mary.
Hans Boehm has his vision of the Virgin Mary
A woodcut from 1493
Image:jenikirbyhistory.getarchive.net
This event set in motion the events at Niklashäusen when, renouncing his vanities Hans burned his drum and pipe. One suspects this was a real sacrifice as he probably owned very little.
Visions are unquantifiable. Those who receive than are often disbelieved as we know from seers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We have no way now of establishing whether Boehm’s vision was genuine, an innocent mistake, a delusion or fraudulent.
Nor can we be certain whether he was an innocent abroad, or a victim manipulated by the beghard hermit, or deluded by becoming a popular hero and the centre of attention.
The Beghard’s cave Niklashausen
Image komoot.com
His increasingly radical message may be a result of whatever his original message was running out of control as he responded to the crowds. He may have been illiterate, but he appears to have been an effective public speaker.
Did he consciously or unconsciously say what the peasants wanted to hear? Why did it also appeal to townspeople, people perhaps more likely to have the vanities, the pointed shoes and the long hair to sacrifice to a bonfire of vanities?
Niklashausen from the Beghard’s cave
Image: komoot.com
His message was in many ways very localised to the Necker valley and its economic and social structure. He may well have never travelled further than the area around Helmstadt, Niklashausen and Wurzburg.
The Marianberg castle at Wurzburg where Hans Boehm was imprisoned and interrogated
Image: Facebook
The fears of the crowd, and indeed of the executioner, indicate a series of beliefs about the supernatural that probably seem strange to most modern people, but which in the late fifteenth century were very real for the people, peasant and townsfolk alike, of the Main and Necker valleys.
The execution of Boehm and his two companions from The Nuremberg Chronicle
Image: executedtoday.com
There are modern memorials to Boehm in Wurzburg in the site of his execution and in Helmstadt.
There are significant similarities to the events of the Peasants War of 1525 or to the 1514 Hungarian peasant revolt led by Győrgy Dózsa to make the modern observer see more than just peasant disgruntlement. The Wurzburg authorities in 1476 may well have nipped in the bud a much more serious uprising.
It was also at this time that writers in Germany began to compile and publish works on witchcraft which was increasingly coming to be seen as actively evil and Satanic rather than as something that was not approved of, but which the Church could contain, tolerate and marginalise.
Cohn’s study of such radical movements was in part a response to the events of the twentieth century, notably in Germany. It is perhaps not entirely facetious to wonder if the German synodical church movement has older roots than Vatican II.
Was Hans Boehm an unrecognised saint, a gullible victim of manipulative people, a proto-social revolutionary, a deluded or dangerous simpleton, a mixture in differing ways of these and other factors? We cannot know, but we can be intrigued by his story.
