Part 1 (1/2)

Bartholomew Sastrow.

by Bartholomew Sastrow and Albert D. Vandam.

INTRODUCTION

If we wish to understand the pedestrian side of German life in the sixteenth century, I know of no better doc.u.ment than the autobiography of Bartholomew Sastrow. This hard-headed, plain-spoken Pomeranian notary cannot indeed be cla.s.sed among the great and companionable writers of memoirs. Here are no genial portraits, no sweet-tempered and mellow confidings of the heart such as comfortable men and women are wont to distil in a comfortable age. The times were fierce, and pa.s.sion ran high and deep. One might as well expect to extract amiability from the rough granite of an Icelandic saga. There is no delicacy, no charm, no elevation of tone in these memoirs. Everything is seen through plain gla.s.s, but seen distinctly in hard and fine outlines, and reported with an objectivity which would be consistently scientific, were it not for some quick touches of caustic humour, and the stored hatreds of an active, unpopular and struggling life. n.o.body very readily sympathizes with bitter or with prosperous men, and when this old gentleman took up his pen to write, he had become both prosperous and bitter. He had always been a hard hitter, and at the age of seventy-five set himself down to compose a fighting apologia. If the ethics are those of Mr.

Tulliver, senior, we must not be surprised. Is not the blood-feud one of the oldest of Teutonic inst.i.tutions?

I frankly confess that I do not find Mr. Bartholomew Sastrow very congenial company, though I am ready to acknowledge that he had some conspicuous merits. Many good men have been naughty boys at school, and it is possible that even distinguished philanthropists have tippled brandy while Orbilius was nodding. If so, an episode detailed in these memoirs may be pa.s.sed over by the lenient reader, all the more readily since the Sastrovian oats do not appear to have been very wildly or copiously sown. It is clear that the young man fought poverty with pluck and tenacity. He certainly had a full measure of Teutonic industry, and it argues no little character in a man past thirty years of age to attend the lectures of university professors in order to repair the defects of an early education. I also suspect that any litigant who retained Sastrow's services would have been more than satisfied with this swift and able transactor of business, who appears to have had all the combativeness of Bishop Burnet, with none of his indiscretion. He was just the kind of man who always rows his full weight and more than his weight in a boat. But, save for his vigorous hates, he was a prosaic fellow, given to self-gratulation, who never knew romance, and married his housemaid at the age of seventy-eight.

A modern German writer is much melted by Sastrow's Protestantism, and apparently finds it quite a touching spectacle. Sastrow was of course a Lutheran, and believed in devils as fervently as his great master. He also conceived it to be part of the general scheme of things that the Sastrows and their kinsmen, the Smiterlows, should wax fat and prosper, while all the plagues of Egypt and all the afflictions of Job should visit those fiends incarnate, the Horns, the Brusers and the Lorbeers.

For some reason, which to me is inscrutable, but which was as plain as sunlight to Sastrow, a superhuman apparition goes out of its way to help a young Pomeranian scribe, who upon his own showing is anything but a saint, while the innocent maidservant of a miser is blown up with six other persons no less blameless than herself, to enforce the desirability of being free with one's money. This, however, is the usual way in which an egoist digests the popular religion.

Bartholomew Sastrow was born at Greifswald, a prosperous Hanseatic town, in 1520. The year of his birth is famous in the history of German Protestantism, for it witnessed the publication of Luther's three great Reformation tracts--the _Appeal to the Christian n.o.bility of the German Nation_, the _Babylonish Captivity_, and the _Freedom of a Christian Man_. It seemed in that year as if the whole of Germany might be brought to make common cause against the Pope. The clergy, the n.o.bility, the towns, the peasants all had their separate cause of quarrel with the old regime, and to each of these cla.s.ses in turn Luther addressed his powerful appeal. For a moment puritan and humanist were at one, and the printing presses of Germany turned out a stream of literature against the abuses of the papal system. The movement spread so swiftly, especially in the north, that it seemed a single spontaneous popular outburst. But the harmony was soon broken. The rifts in the political and social organization of Germany were too deep to be spanned by any appeal to merely moral considerations. The Emperor Charles V, himself half-Spanish, set his face against a movement which was directly antagonistic to the Imperial tradition. The peasants revolted, committed excesses, and were ruthlessly crushed, and the violence of anabaptists and ignorant men threw discredit on the Lutheran cause. Then, too, dogmatic differences began to reveal themselves within the circle of the reformers themselves. There were disputes as to the exact significance and philosophic explanation of the Lord's Supper. A conference was held at Marburg, in 1529, under the auspices of Philip of Hesse, with a view to adjusting the differences between the divines of Saxony and Switzerland, but Luther and Zwingli failed to arrive at a compromise. The Lutheran and the Reformed Churches now definitely separated, and the divisions of the Protestants were the opportunity of the Catholic Church. The emperor tried in vain to reconcile Germany to the old faith. Rival theologians met, disputed, formulated creeds in the presence of temporal princes and their armed retainers. In 1530 the Diet of Augsburg forbade Protestant teaching and ordered the restoration of church property. Then a Protestant league was signed at Smalkald by John of Saxony, by Hesse, Brunswick-Luneberg, Anhalt, and several towns, and the emperor was defied. This was in 1531. It was the beginning of the religious wars of Germany, the beginning of that tremendous duel which lasted till the peace of Westphalia in 1648, the duel between the League of Smalkald and Charles V, between Gustavus Adolphus and Wallenstein, between the Protestant North and the Catholic South.

In the initial stage of this combat the great military event was the rout of the Smalkaldic allies at Muhlberg, in April, 1547, where Charles captured John Frederic of Saxony, transferred his dominions--save only a few scattered territories in Thuringia--to his ally, Maurice, and reduced all north Germany save the city of Magdeburg. It seemed for a moment as if this battle might decide the contest. Charles summoned a Diet at Augsburg in 1548, and carried all his proposals without opposition. He strengthened his political position by the reconst.i.tution of the Imperial Chamber, by the organization of the Netherlands into a circle of the empire, and by the formation of a new military treasury. He obtained the consent of the Diet to a religious compromise called the Interim which, while insisting on the seven sacraments in the Catholic sense, vaguely agreed to the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith, and declared that the two questions of the Communion in both kinds and the celibacy of clergy were to be left till the summoning of a free Christian council.

The strict Lutheran party--and Pomerania was a stronghold of strict Lutheranism--regarded the Interim as a base betrayal of Protestant interests. Their pamphleteers called it the _Interitum_, or the death-blow, and the conversion of a prince like Joachim of Brandenburg to such a scheme was regarded as an ominous sign for the future.

In reality, however, the success of the emperor rested upon the most brittle foundations. That he was chilly, reserved, un-German, and therefore unpopular was something, but not nearly all. The princes of Germany had conquered practical independence in the thirteenth century, and were jealous of their prerogatives. The Hanseatic towns formed a republican confederacy in the north, corresponding to the Swiss confederacy in the south. There was no adequate central machinery, and the Jesuit order was only just preparing to enter upon its career of German victories. The Spanish troops made themselves detestable, outraging women--a dire offence in a nation so domestic as Germany--and there was standing feud between the famous Castilian infantry and the German lansquenets. The popes did not like the emperor's favourite remedy of a council, and busily thwarted his ecclesiastical schemes.

Henry II of France was on the watch for German allies against a powerful rival. The allies were ready. A great spiritual movement can never be stifled by the issue of one battle. For good or evil, men had taken sides; interests intellectual, moral, and material had already been invested either in the one cause or the other; there had been brutal iconoclasm; there had been ardent preaching, so simple and moving that ignorant women understood and wept; there had been close and stubborn dogmatic controversy; there had been the shedding of blood, and the upheavals in towns, and the building of a new church system, and the growth of a new religious literature. Almost a whole generation had now been consumed in this controversy, a controversy which touched all lives, and cemented or divided families. The children were reading Luther's Bible, and singing Luther's hymns, and learning Luther's short catechism. Could it be expected that such a river should suddenly lose itself in the sand? Nevertheless there is something surprising in the quick revolution of the story. In 1550 Maurice of Saxony intrigues with the Protestants, and in the following year definitely goes over to their side. In 1552 the emperor has to flee for his life, and the Peace of Pa.s.sau seals the victory of the Protestant cause.

One of the first provinces to be conquered for Lutheranism was the duchy of Pomerania. John Bugenhagen, himself a Pomeranian and the historian of Pomerania, was the chief apostle of this northern region, and those who visit the Baltic churches will often see his sable portrait hanging side by side with Huss and Luther on the whitewashed walls. Sastrow gives us an excellent picture of the various forces which co-operated with the teaching of Bugenhagen to effect the change.

In Eastern Pomerania there was the violent propaganda of Dr. Amandus, who wanted a clean sweep of images, princes, and established powers.

There was the democratic movement in Stralsund, led by the turbulent Rolof Moller, who, accusing the council of malversation, revolutionized the const.i.tution of his city. There was the mob of workmen who were only too glad of an excuse to plunder the priests and break the altars.

But side by side with greed and violence there was the moral revolt against ”the fables, the absurdities, and the impious lies” of the pulpit, and against the vices of priest and monk. The recollection of the early days of Puritan enthusiasm, when the fathers of the Protestant movement preached the gospel to large crowds in the open air, as, for instance, under ”St. George's churchyard elm” at Stralsund, remained graven on many a lowly calendar. Even the texts of these sermons were remembered as epochs in spiritual life. Sastrow records how, ceding to the request of a great number of burgesses, Mr.

Ketelhot (being detained in the port of Stralsund by contrary winds), preached upon Matthew xi. 28: ”Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest”; and then upon John xvi. 23: ”Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in My name, He will give it you”; and, finally: ”Go ye therefore and teach all nations.” The general pride in civic monuments proved to be stronger than the iconoclastic mood. Certainly the high altar in the Nicolai Kirche at Stralsund--probably the most elaborate specimen of late fifteenth-century wood carving which still survives in Germany--would have received a short shrift from Cromwell's Ironsides.

It was Burgomaster Nicholas Smiterlow, of Stralsund, who brought Protestantism into the Sastrow family. He had seen Luther in 1523, had heard him preach at Wittenberg, and became a convert to the ”true gospel.” Smiterlow's daughter Anna married Nicholas Sastrow, a prosperous brewer and cornfactor of Greifswald, and Nicholas deserted the ma.s.s for the sermon. Their eldest son, John, was sent to study at Wittenberg, where he made the acquaintance of Luther and Melanchthon.

He became something, of a scholar, wrote in praise of the English divine, Robert Barns, and was crowned poet laureate by Charles V in 1544. The second son was Bartholomew, author of these memoirs. Three years after his arrival the family life at Greifswald was rudely disturbed. Bartholomew's father had the misfortune to commit manslaughter (uncharitable people called it murder), and Greifswald was made too hot to hold the peccant cornfactor. The father of our chronicler lived in banishment for several years, while his wife brought up the children at Greifswald, and carried on the family business. It happened that Bartholomew's great-uncle, Burgomaster Nicholas Smiterlow the second, of Stralsund, was at that time residing at Greifswald. He possessed the avuncular virtues, had his great-nephew taught Latin, and earned his eternal grat.i.tude. In time the heirs of the slain man were appeased and 1,000 marks of blood-money enabled the elder Sastrow to return to his native city. He did not, however, remain long in Greifswald, but sold his house and settled in the neighbouring city of Stralsund, the home of his wife's relations. Bartholomew received his early education at Greifswald and Stralsund, but in 1538 was sent to Rostock (a university had been founded in this town in 1415), where he studied under two well-known pupils of Luther and Melanchthon, Burenius and Heinrich Welfius (Wulf). The teaching combined the chief elements of Humanism and of Protestant theology, the works of Cicero and Terence on the one hand, and the _De Anima_ of Melanchthon on the other.

Meanwhile (1534-37) there were great disturbances in Stralsund. An ambitious demagogue of Lubeck, George Wullenweber, had involved the Hanseatic League in a Danish war. Smiterlow and Nicolas Sastrow thought that the war was wrong and foolish, and that it would endanger the interests of Stralsund. But a democracy, when once bitten by the war frenzy, is hard to curb, and regards moderation in the light of treason. Stralsund rose against its conservative council, forced Smiterlow to resign and compelled the elder Sastrow to remain a prisoner in his house for the period of a year. Father and son never forgot or forgave these years of plebeian uproar. For them the art of statesmans.h.i.+p was to avoid revolution and to keep the people under. ”I recommend to my children submission to authority, no matter whether Pilate or Caiaphas governs.” This was the last word of Bartholomew's political philosophy.

In 1535-6 the forces of the Hanse were defeated both by land and sea, and the war party saw the error of its ways. Sastrow was released, and his uncle-in-law was restored to office to die two years later, in 1539. But meanwhile things had gone ill with the Sastrow finances. Some skilful but dishonest ladies had purchased large consignments of cloth, not to speak of borrowing considerable sums of money from Nicholas Sastrow, and declined to pay their bill. During his imprisonment Nicholas had been unable to sell the stock of salt which he had laid in with a view to the Schonen herring season. A certain Mrs. Bruser, wife of a big draper, with a hardy conscience, had bought 1,725 florins'

worth of the Sastrow cloth of the dishonest ladies. The Sastrows determined to get the money out of the Brusers. Bruser first avowed the debt, and then repudiated it, taking a mean advantage of the civic troubles of Stralsund and the decline of the Smiterlow-Sastrow interest. Thereupon began litigation which was not to cease for thirty-four years. The case was heard before the town court of Stralsund, then before the council of Stralsund, then before the _oberhof_ or appellate court of Lubeck, and finally before the Imperial court of Spires. Bartholomew accompanied his father on the Lubeck journey, obtained his first insight into legal chicanery, and was, no doubt, effectually inoculated with the anti-Bruser virus. In 1541 the elder Sastrow obtained permission to return to Greifswald, and Bartholomew attended for a year the lectures of the Greifswald professors. The family circ.u.mstances, however (there were by this time five daughters and three sons), were too straitened to support the youth in idleness. Accordingly, in June, 1542, the two eldest sons left their home, partly to seek their fortunes, but more especially to watch the great Bruser case, which was winding its slow and slippery course through the reticulations of the Imperial Court at Spires.

There is no need to antic.i.p.ate the lively narrative of Bartholomew's experiences in this home of litigation long-drawn-out. The reader will, however, note that he was lucky enough to come in for a Diet, and has an excellent story to tell of how the emperor was inadvertently horsewhipped by a Swabian carter. On May 19, 1544, Sastrow received the diploma of Imperial notary, and a month later he left Spires and entered the chancellerie of Margrave Ernest of Baden, at Pforzheim.

This, however, was destined to prove but a brief interlude. In the summer of 1545 Sastrow is in the service of a receiver of the Order of St. John, Christopher von Lowenstein, who, after his Turkish wars, was living a frolicsome old age among his Frisian stallions, his huntsmen and his hounds. The picture of this frivolous old person, with his dwarf, his mistress, and his chaplain, is drawn with some spirit.

Sastrow, who had so long felt the pinch of poverty, was now luxuriating in good fare and fine raiment. He has little to do, plenty to eat and drink, and his festivity was untempered by moral considerations. ”Do not think to become a doctor in my house,” said the genial host, and it must be confessed that the surroundings were not propitious to the study of the Inst.i.tutes.

The news of John Sastrow's death put an end to this jollity. The poet laureate had been crossed in love, and sought oblivion in Italy. The panegyrist of Barns entered the service of a cardinal, and died at Acquapendente, without explaining theological inconsistencies, pardonable perhaps in lovelorn poets. Bartholomew determined to recover the property of his deceased brother, and set out for Italy on April 8, 1546. He walked to Venice over the Brenner, thence took s.h.i.+p to Ancona, and then travelled over the Apennines to Rome, by way of Loretto. The council was sitting at Trent, but theological gossip does not interest our traveller so much as the alto voices in the church choirs, and ”the tomb of the infant Simeon, the innocent victim of the Jews.” Nor is he qualified to play the role of intelligent tourist among the antiquities and art treasures of Italy. He was not a Benvenuto Cellini, still less a Nathaniel Hawthorne, bent on instructing the Philistine in the art of cultured enthusiasm. ”A magnificent palace, a church all of marble, variously tinted and a.s.sorted with perfect art, twelve lions and lionesses, two tigers and an eagle that is all I remember of Florence.”

Many modern tourists may not remember as much without Sastrow's excuses. Italy was by this time by no means a safe place for a German.