Historic Countries Germany : Magdeburg Law

Kyritz

Small Hanseatic Town – Self-confident Civic Community

Much about the medieval town history of Kyritz remains in the dark. Almost the entire stock of deeds, files, town books and other documents was destroyed by various fires in the 17th and 18th centuries. This particularly affects statements about the constitutional evolution of the town. Little is known about the local legal customs within the town community. Nevertheless, the known developments of the municipal rights in Kyritz and the extension of its privileges can be outlined. From this, the picture of a self-confident civic community striving to expand its privileges can be gained.

Fig. 1: Seal of the Kyritz City Council (1476).

In the course of the 13th century, Kyritz evolved into a town of law. This process did not take place without the help of the von Plotho family, which held the town lordship during this time. This family was one of the ministerials of the archbishop of Magdeburg and possessed, among other things, landed property near Altenplathow between Jerichow and Genthin.[1] Land expansion and Christianization enabled the lords of Plotho to develop an independent dominion in the Prignitz in the area around Kyritz, which already had important center functions in Slavic times.[2] The town itself was rebuilt around 1200 with the support of the lords of Plotho, starting from the church of St. Nicholas. At the express wish of the settlers, they were granted the Stendal law in 1237, which was closely related to the Magdeburg law.[3] The town thus had a council-like constitution, which allowed the citizens to regulate their own affairs legally. This right found a material expression in the use of a seal, with which legal transactions were confirmed. A particularly beautiful version of the Kyritz council seal has been preserved in a document from 1467, which has been archived in the Tallinn city archives. It contains the characteristic lily of the von Plotho family in the center of the seal image.

The sovereign research estimates that gradually about 1,000 to 3,000 people settled in Kyritz.[4] Within this population, a flourishing economy developed during the first half of the 13th century. A vivid example of this is a privilege of the lords of Plotho dating back to 1245, with which they confirmed the rights of the local garment tailors. It is interesting that they referred to an older statute of the local guild of garment tailors from Stendal (“[…] fratres Gilde et incisores panui in stendal […]”).[5] Accordingly, the wording of both documents is identical, with the exception of the adapted names of persons and places. Thus, the legal customs within the city of Stendal proved to be exemplary for Kyritz and were transferred here in the course of a longer-lasting transfer of rights. The “honorable men” (“honesti viri”) named at the end of the document and residing in Kyritz, who are mentioned as witnesses of the legal negotiation, may have played a decisive role in the establishment of the garment tailor privilege in its present form. This evidence also deserves attention since it can be assumed that transfers under town law were often negotiated between the town lord and the civic community.[6]

Fig. 2: Market square in Kyritz. The town was laid out according to a planned urban scheme in the first half of the 13th century, and traces of its medieval urban layout have survived.

An additional source that provides information about the rights of the town of Kyritz dates back to the year 1259 and has also been handed down in the form of a document of the lords of Plotho. It primarily concerns the municipal trade because the citizens of Kyritz were confirmed with the document to navigate the Jägelitz River flowing through the town and its tributaries up to the Havel River without any restrictions. This regulation referred to the trade intended by the Kyritz council, which was directed to the Hanseatic area and took place by water during the shipping time. An important stage destination mentioned in the document was Havelberg, where a margravial customs duty had to be paid. The citizens of Kyritz had to pay a coin for every ship’s load that passed through here. Conversely, the citizens of Kyritz received the assurance that the shipping they carried out was not to be interfered with by anything. The permission to navigate the Jägelitz was an essential right for the still young Kyritz since a large part of the goods transport must have taken place over this river further in the direction of Havel and Elbe. Grain, wood and cloth were among the goods Kyritz merchants and carters transported primarily to Hamburg.

Fig. 3: The Jägelitz River flowing through Kyritz. In the Middle Ages, the town council secured important rights, including those relating to navigation, milling, and fishing (view from around 1900).

These citizens, who were active in long-distance trade, as well as the other inhabitants of Kyritz, experienced a change in the rule of the town in the period between 1259 and 1307. During this period, the Margrave of Brandenburg must have succeeded in gaining possession of the town of Kyritz, although more precise details remain unknown due to the already mentioned unfavorable source situation. From 1325 on, however, Kyritz can be regarded as a sovereign town. The leading figures in the town’s politics were wealthy merchants, who, as in many other Brandenburg communities of that time, traded in cloth. [7] They accessed the goods of the cloth manufacturers, who, for their part, were largely excluded from the cloth trade. Often they rebelled against the town government for this reason, examples of which can also be found in Kyritz. In 1383, the cloth and garment makers succeeded in enforcing a limited sales permit against the prerogatives of the cloth cutters.[8] In this way, they no longer had to sell white and gray cloth to middlemen but were allowed to offer it themselves at markets. Kyritz is thus a typical example of intra-urban conflicts over civic rights and political participation, which were mostly carried into the population by guilds, quartermasters and neighborhood masters. In the middle of the 14th century, such forces succeeded in gaining a say in the appointment of the Kyritz council.[9]

The interests of the Kyritz council were not only related to trade far beyond the city limits. The same was true in political and sovereignty terms. Thus, in 1325, the city of Kyritz participated in the formation of an alliance between towns of the Prignitz and various representatives of the Moravian knighthood living in its vicinity. Since the Ascanian dynasty, which ruled Brandenburg, had become extinct a few years before, this circle saw the necessity to guarantee legal security and the maintenance of old privileges in joint responsibility. In the case of legal disputes or the questioning of privileges, it was determined that related arbitrations should be handled as was customary in the times of the margrave (“bi der marcgreuen tiden”) [10]. These and other regulations were negotiated beforehand at a meeting in Kyritz between the parties involved so that the town became the place of issue of the mentioned document. The guarantee of land peace also played an important role here, which was not only discussed in 1325 but also provided the occasion for another meeting in Kyritz in 1363. Duke Albrecht of Mecklenburg took part in this meeting, as did Prince Lorenz von Werle. Undoubtedly, this shows that Kyritz, as a prosperous town, was able to make all the necessary arrangements for the holding of such a day, including quartering, catering and entertainment. Last but not least, this reflects the reputation of the small Hanseatic town and its self-confident civic community in the late Middle Ages, although the historian would like to get hold of far more such informative and insightful sources.

Autor: Sascha Bütow

Citation:

Sascha Bütow: Kyritz. Small Hanseatic Town – Self-confident Civic Community, 31.07.2020, https://magdeburg-law.com/historic-city/kyritz/

Footnotes:

[1] Römer, Christof, Genthin, in Handbuch der historischen Stätten, vol. 11: Provinz Sachsen Anhalt, edited by Berent Schwineköper. 2nd edition Stuttgart 1987, pp. 133–135, here p. 133.

[2] Kirsch, Kerstin, Slawen und Deutsche in der Uckermark. Vergleichende Untersuchungen zur Siedlungsentwicklung vom 11. bis zum 14. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart 2004, p. 76.

[3] Lück, Heiner, Stadtrechte in der Altmark – ein Überblick, in Sachsen und Anhalt 32 (2020), pp. 41–77, here p. 54.

[4] Beck, Lorenz Friedrich, Die Prignitzstädte Perleberg, Pritzwalk, Kyritz und Havelberg und die Hanse, in Jahrbuch für die Geschichte Mittel- und Ostdeutschlands 52 (2006), pp. 89–152, here p. 126.

[5] Riedel, Adolf Friedrich (ed.), Codex Diplomaticus Brandenburgensis, series A, vol. 1, no. II, pp. 366–367, here p. 366.

[6] Lück, Heiner, Sächsisch-magdeburgisches Recht zwischen Elbe und Dnjepr, in Kulturelle Vernetzung in Europa. Das Magdeburger Recht und seine Städte, edited by Gabriele Köster, Christina Link and Heiner Lück. Dresden 2018, pp. 13–27, here pp. 25–26.

[7] Helbig, Herbert, Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft der Mark Brandenburg im Mittelalter. Berlin/New York 1973, pp. 18–22.

[8] Gressel, Hans, Die Stadt Kyritz: Entwicklung, Verfassung und Wirtschaft bis zur Städteordnung 1808/09. Berlin 1939, p. 93.

[9] Beck, Lorenz Friedrich, Die Prignitzstädte (same as note 4), p. 150.

[10] Riedel (same as note 5), no. XXVI, pp. 136–137, here p. 137.

Images:

Fig. 1: Tallin, Tallinna Linnaarhiiv Tallinna Magistraat TLA.230.1-II.107 (Tallinna Linnaarhiiv Tallinna Magistraat TLA.230.1-II.107, in: monasterium.net, URL </mom/EE-TLA/TallinnaMagistraat/TLA.230.1-II.107/charter>, accessed at 2020-07-27Z)

Fig. 2: photo: W. Bulach, 2015

Fig. 3: zeno.org

Neuruppin

Reichenbach (Oberlausitz)

Eilenburg

Lebus

Nienburg (Saale)

Riesa

Eisleben

Leipzig

Endowed with Halle and Magdeburg law between 1156 and 1170:

The city of Leipzig in the German state of Saxony has a current population of almost 600,000, making it the largest in the German region encompassing Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia. The most powerful influence in Leipzig’s rich history is its long tradition of hosting trade fairs and serving as a mercantile centre of significance at European level. Its university, founded in 1409, was and remains an important institution of education, research and culture. Among the many giants of German intellectual and cultural life who lived and worked in Leipzig, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) is perhaps the most towering. In its more recent history, Leipzig is credited with substantially driving the peaceful revolution of 1989 that toppled the East German regime. Leipzig’s role in the history of Magdeburg law lies in the fact that it is one of the earliest examples of a municipality’s endowment therewith; Otto, Margrave of Meissen from 1156 to 1190, a relative of Magdeburg’s archbishop Wichmann, granted the charter, and Magdeburg law remained in place between 1156 and 1170.

Leipzig, located somewhat over 100 kilometres south-west of Magdeburg, stands at a crossing of the Weisse Elster river. The first written record of the city, dated 1015, is its mention as urbs Libzi in the chronicles of the bishop Thietmar of Merseburg, who held office between 1009 and 1018.[1] In the environs of the castle referenced there, several core settlements subsequently emerged, populated, inter alia, by craftspeople, and frequented by merchants. In the mid-twelfth century, Margrave Otto, who had originated from House of Wettin and later received the epithet ‘the Rich’ due to the discovery of silver in the eastern Ore Mountains, presided over building works which brought the core settlements together; he also elevated the thus emerging community to the legal status of a town, making Leipzig likely the first municipality to have received town privileges from the House of Wettin. This was the first of a series of towns established in the area east of the river Saale in the context of the expansion of territories that took place in the Middle Ages. The medieval princes and rulers hoped to advance their lands’ economic development by promoting the development of urban communities.

A notable and significant document, of great value to research on the history of civic life in general, has survived the centuries to tell us the story of Leipzig’s elevation to civic status: the Stadtbrief. In the thirteenth century, written documents rarely recorded the granting of town privileges, with an oral proclamation regarded as entirely sufficient. Documents exist in isolated cases, as in the German municipalities of Augsburg (1156), Stendal (after 1160), Jüterbog (1174) and Lübeck (1188). Leipzig’s Stadtbrief, which also makes reference to the conferment of Magdeburg law upon Leipzig circa 1160, is a retrospective record, presumably drawn up in the second decade of the thirteenth century; there is academic consensus that its content is true to the actual events. One persuasive view of the document’s origin suggests a connection to an uprising of Leipzig’s citizenry in 1215/16 against Margrave Dietrich, a son of Otto who ruled between 1198 and 1221. The citizens, who were seeking at the time to attain a greater degree of self-determination, had joined forces with members of the local nobility to rebel against Dietrich, initially with some success. It was not until 1216 that the Margrave, with the aid of Frederick II of the Hohenstaufen dynasty (who ruled 1212–1250), managed to quell the insurrection and re-establish his authority in the city. The Stadtbrief is not a charter in the precise sense, but rather a written record of the event it details. About the size of a modern-day postcard, and bearing script on both sides, this piece of parchment bears a genuine seal of Margrave Otto, depicting him mounted, albeit applied upside-down. The document is undated, but we can identify the approximate period of its creation by the dates of Otto’s accession (1156) and the death of the bishop John of Merseburg, whom the document names as a witness (1170).

The detailed stipulations set out in the Stadtbrief commence with the proclamation that Margrave Otto has portioned the town for the construction of buildings and founded it, with the assurance of his grace, under Halle and Magdeburg law: ‘O[tto] dei gratia Misnensis marchio Lipz edificandam distribuit sub Hallensi et Magedeburgensi iure additto pietatis promisso constituit’.[2] The document pledges to the citizens that only in the case of a campaign against Italy will the Margrave require of them the payment of a small tax. There follow determinations on the area to which the municipal law shall apply, known as the wicbilede, and on the position of the signs at its boundaries. Among the Stadtbrief’s further provisions were the order that, in line with Magdeburg law, every eighteenth bushel was to go to the town miller as his fee, and the dictum that the customary law of the march was to govern possession by the Leipzig citizenry of inheritances and fiefdoms (‘secundum fori conventionem’).[3] Assuming, as we may, the authenticity and accuracy of its content, Leipzig’s Stadtbrief simultaneously constitutes one of the earliest written mentions of Magdeburg law, the oldest document attesting to the Halle law which drew on it, and one of the first instances of the term wicbilede (in modernised German Weichbild) in a document.

In contrast to Magdeburg, Leipzig and the other municipalities in the Wettin dominions did not gain independence from their civic lords; Leipzig remained within the Wettin territorial state that was emerging in the late Middle Ages despite having already established a council constitution during the thirteenth century. This lack of municipal autonomy did not inhibit Leipzig from flourishing; it is likely that the city was of significance in this area of the German lands as early as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but its trade fairs rose to attain pre-eminence across the Holy Roman Empire from the mid-fifteenth century.

Written sources that testify to the structures of jurisdiction and the practice of law in Leipzig exist only for the fourteenth century onward. The year 1304 sees the first reference to lay judges forming the city court under the auspices of the sheriff installed by the territorial ruler. The administration of the court passed into the hands of the city authorities in 1423 against security and in 1435 in full and in perpetuity, presided over thereafter by an employed judge appointed by the Council. The city’s Schöffenbücher, records preserved to posterity from the fifteenth century onward, note that the municipal court, which continued to use a bench of lay judges, had authority over cases brought voluntarily as well as over ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ criminal matters; this former area of law in particular saw its offices overlap with those the Council exercised. Alongside their authority in the court, limited to the city itself, we are in possession of evidence that, from the fourteenth century, Leipzig’s lay judges served as a body which issued legal opinions and administered justice, including to those coming from outside the city to seek justice, in which case a Schöffenmeister presided over their deliberations. Their learned reputation was similarly distinguished to that of Magdeburg’s bench, and they received regular requests for pronouncements on a legal issue, issuing opinions far beyond the bounds of the Wettin territories.

One significant difference between Leipzig and Magdeburg consisted in the constitution of their lay judges’ benches, called Schöffenstühle. In Magdeburg, the Schöffen and the Council were two strictly separate groups; in Leipzig, by contrast, the lay judges who sat in the municipal courts were drawn exclusively from the members of the Council, and, from the second half of the fifteenth century onwards, it was usually a mayor who held the office of Schöffenmeister. This extensive entanglement between the Council and the bench led in the 1470s to the practice of university-trained legal experts joining Leipzig’s Schöffenstuhl; the first was the mayor Johann Schober (c. 1425–1480), holder of the degree of Magister. A history of the city notes that ‘[t]his [made] Leipzig’s Schöffenstuhl the oldest German regional court in which individuals learned in the law sat in judgement’.[4]

In 1409, Leipzig acquired a university, founded with the particular impetus of the Meissen margraves Friedrich IV, who reigned from 1381 to 1428, and William II, who held the office from 1407 to 1425; both rulers were keen to take advantage of the German exodus from Prague to the end of founding an institute of higher learning in their territory. During the fifteenth century, the university’s faculty of jurisprudence evolved into an additional collegial body of legal opinion and arbitration in Leipzig, frequently receiving requests for their learned view from outside the city and working alongside the Schöffenstuhl. On occasion, the latter, when faced with a complicated case, sought advice from the faculty; in some instances, the two bodies collaborated to produce legal expertises. As in the case of the Schöffenstuhl, the university faculty pronounced on cases far and wide, considerably beyond the Wettin lands.

As early as 1432, Frederick II, Elector of Saxony, who ruled from 1428 to 1464 and whose father, the erstwhile margrave Frederick IV, had received investiture as Elector of Saxony from King Sigismund (reigned 1411–1437), had issued a prohibition on his subjects seeking legal instruction or opinion in Magdeburg, ‘as had been the use hitherto’, instead requiring them to turn primarily to sources of advice in Leipzig, either its ‘presiding citizens’ (i.e. the lay judges’ bench) or the ‘honourable doctors’ of the university’s faculty of jurisprudence.[5]

Alongside the activities of its lay and learned legal institutions, Leipzig came to further prominence as legal centre of the Wettin lands through the establishment in 1483/1488 of a regal high court of law (Oberhofgericht). In 1574, Leipzig’s Schöffenstuhl was removed from the auspices of the city and reconstituted as a court of the sovereign which remained in place until 1831, dispensing justice for the entire kingdom or electorate (Kurfürstentum). It was on the basis of this enduring tradition of jurisprudence that Leipzig became the home of imperial Germany’s highest court, the Reichsgericht, in 1877. In 2002, the building that once housed this institution became the seat of the German Federal Administrative Court.

By Henning Steinführer

Notes

[1] Geschichte der Stadt Leipzig. Bd. 1: Von den Anfängen bis zur Reformation, ed. Enno Bünz with contributions from Uwe John, Leipzig 2015, pp. 86–89.

[2] Urkundenbuch der Stadt Leipzig, vol. 1 (= Codex Diplomaticus Saxoniae Regiae, second principal division, vol. 8), ed. Karl Friedrich v. Posern-Klett, Leipzig 1868, no. 2, pp. 1 f.

[3] Urkundenbuch der Stadt Leipzig, vol. 1 (= Codex Diplomaticus Saxoniae Regiae, second principal division, vol. 8), ed. Karl Friedrich v. Posern-Klett, Leipzig 1868, no. 2, p. 2.

[4] Bernd-Rüdiger Kern, Rechtspflege, in Geschichte der Stadt Leipzig. Bd. 1: Von den Anfängen bis zur Reformation, ed. Enno Bünz with contributions from Uwe John, Leipzig 2015, pp. 213–221; reference here is to p. 218.

[5] Theodor Distel, Beiträge zur älteren Verfassungsgeschichte des Schöppenstuhls zu Leipzig, in Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte. Germanistische Abteilung 20 (1887), 89–115; reference here is to pp. 110 f.

Sources

Jens Kunze, Das Leipziger Schöffenbuch 1420–1478 (1491). Edition (= Quellen und Darstellungen zur Geschichte der Stadt Leipzig 4), Leipzig 2012.

Urkundenbuch der Stadt Leipzig, Bd. 1 (= Codex Diplomaticus Saxoniae Regiae, second principal division, vol. 8), ed. Karl Friedrich v. Posern-Klett, Leipzig 1868.