20 November 2024

Anyone born into a noble dynasty in the early modern period was obliged to subordinate their own interests to the good of the aristocratic family. Conflicts occurred, of course, especially with respect to changing power structures such as the introduction and enforcement of primogeniture, a practice under which the eldest child would inherit everything. Rulers – and anybody who wished to become one – had several strategies at their disposal for dealing with problematic relatives, one of which was to lock them up.

A total of 39 cases have been found of aristocratic families in the Holy Roman Empire resorting to this method for regulating disputes between 1400 and 1700. The Hohenzollern dynasty periodically used Plassenburg Castle near Kulmbach as a prison: four members of the family were interned there for various periods between 1467 and 1527.

[Men / Women / Released / Escaped / Died / Unclear]

The captors – exclusively men – often describe the imprisonment as custody, and this might be ‘good’ or ‘diligent’ or even occasionally ‘royal’. The prisoners themselves saw things rather differently. In 1404 Wilhelm von Berg accused his son of having ‘imprisoned and woefully betrayed’ him. And Anna von Sachsen concluded a 1571 letter from her prison with the words ‘afflicted, imprisoned Anna’. It was typically close family members that were imprisoned, with a clear majority of captors being brothers. This is possibly because the struggle to assert dominance, which lay behind so many of the imprisonments, was often a conflict between male siblings.

[Captors / Cousin / Father / Brother / Son / Husband]

This was the case, for example, with Heinrich der Jüngere and Wilhelm von Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, when a conflict that had long been smouldering finally broke out in 1523. Encumbered with debt, Wilhelm was completely dependent on his older brother financially because he had no lucrative religious sinecures at his disposal, nor did Heinrich grant him any part of his sovereign rights. So Wilhelm endeavoured to get married without Heinrich’s knowledge – even though he was contractually obliged to obtain his brother’s permission beforehand – and sought out a position with, of all people, allies of Heinrich’s foes. When he learned of Wilhelm’s plans, Heinrich reacted immediately, ordering that his younger brother be taken prisoner. This cut Wilhelm off from all his potential allies and rendered him powerless to act.

But now Heinrich was faced with a problem. His actions had not escaped public scrutiny within the empire, and he was evidently accused of seeking to cheat Wilhelm out of his ‘patrimony’. According to the prevalent tradition in their father’s and grandfather’s generations, Wilhelm, as the second-oldest brother who was in religious orders, was entitled to a stake in governing Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel. Heinrich consequently justified his behaviour both in a public pamphlet and in private letters to several related and allied royal houses, in which he claimed that he had taken his younger brother ‘into royal custody for urgent reasons’. In the pamphlet he explicitly identified these reasons as Wilhelm’s alleged plans to drive him out of the duchy and replace him as regent.

After Heinrich had insisted that he did not wish to deprive Wilhelm of his inheritance, he went ahead and did precisely that. While Wilhelm remained in custody at an unknown location, Heinrich made provisions that would guarantee his status as the duchy’s ruler for himself and his eldest son. For this to happen, however, Wilhelm had to surrender his claims to power. Wilhelm spent 12 years imprisoned by his brother before gaining his freedom in 1535, in exchange for signing Heinrich’s primogeniture arrangement.

Wilhelm tried to challenge the contract after his release. He commissioned a legal report that accused Heinrich of ‘most onerously … holding him captive without any cause’. His agreement to the contract, he claimed, had been obtained under duress and was thus invalid. Yet all his attempts were futile.

Even though family imprisonment may seem drastic, it was only one of many options for limiting relatives’ freedom of movement, and, moreover, it was often not the first means to be selected. In the 15th century Agnes von Baden was initially prohibited from entering her brother’s royal capital before being imprisoned for illicitly reviving contact with a former lover. In other words, first she was locked out, then locked in. Heinrich, too, initially limited Wilhelm’s opportunities to travel before finding out about his plans and taking him prisoner. Custody was a serious escalation in restrictions on the right to travel and move freely, which were heavily regulated in any case among the nobility. Yet an exploration of this complex phenomenon in all its different facets has never been undertaken before – hence my choice of this subject for my dissertation.

Title image: Plassenburg Castle, in Martin Zeiller, Topographia Franconiæ: Das ist, Beschreibung, Und Eygentliche Contrafactur der Vornembsten Stätte, Und Plätze des Franckenlandes, und Deren, die Zu Dem Hochlöblichen Fränkischen Craiße gezogen werden (Frankfurt am Main, 1656), HAB Wolfenbüttel: M: Cd 4° 67, http://diglib.hab.de/drucke/cd-4f-67/start.htm?image=00059a.

PURL: http://diglib.hab.de/?link=199