1537: Jurgen Wullenwever, Burgermeister of Lubeck
September 24th, 2013 Headsman
On this date in 1537, Jürgen Wullenwever was decapitated and quartered at Wolfenbüttel.
Wullenwever (English Wikipedia entry | German) was a merchant from Hamburg who came to the fore of a popular Lutheran movement in the Hanseatic port of Lübeck that claimed the power of its old aristocratic council for the city’s burghers.
In this capacity, Wullenwever maneuvered — vainly as it turned out — to arrest the century-long wane of the city’s influence. Lubeck in its day had been “the Queen of the Hanseatic League”. Come 16th century, it was struggling to maintain its trading preeminence against the inroads of Dutch merchants and the fragmentation of the once-mighty Hanse.
This project was doomed in its conception — there was nothing Lubeck could really have done to hold back the historical developments happening around it — and bungled in its execution. The merchant magnates of Wullenwever’s democratic coalition grew suspicious of (too-)popular religiosity.
And Wullenwever’s political high-wire act involved arrangements of convenience with the Anabaptist commune of Münster — spurring rumors of his own radical baptist conversion* — and fomenting Catholic peasant uprisings to meddle in the succession of the Danish-Swedish crown. Whatever else one could say of him, one can’t fault him for a want of daring, a quality that stood him in good stead with romantic era writers.
But Wullenwever’s allies lost their fights, and the political coalition that supported his municipal leadership soon broke up under the pressure of events.
The aristocratic party re-took power in 1535 and didn’t immediately persecute Wullenwever. But the hostile Archbishop of Bremen eventually seized the man on his territory and turned him over to a Catholic Saxon duke for punishment.
* I’m certainly not a specialist, but I’m skeptical of the claim in some sources that Wullenwever was an Anabaptist Manchurian candidate type. Wullenwever confessed to a great Anabaptist scheme … but that was under torture of enemies determined to do him to death, and it was retracted before his execution. The claim implies that all of northern Germany might have gone over to a radically democratic Anabaptism had not the ancien regime overthrown the Burgermeister, and for that reason it’s gained Wullenwever the surprising latter-day embrace of nationalists and revolutionaries.
On this day..
- 1947: Yoshio Tachibana, ravenous - 2020
- 2002: Robert Anthony Buell - 2019
- 1788: Levi and Abraham Doan, attainted Tories - 2018
- 1815: St. Peter the Aleut, the martyr of San Francisco - 2017
- 1986: Adolf Tolkachev, the Billion-Dollar Spy - 2016
- 1482: Richard Puller von Hohenburg and Anthony Mätzler - 2015
- 1651: Marubashi Chuya, Keian Uprising conspirator - 2014
- 1830: Stephen Simmons, the last executed by Michigan - 2012
- 1896: Four in New Mexico, in three different towns - 2011
- 1858: Qualchan - 2010
- 1749: Antonio Camardella - 2009
- 1652: Captain James Hind, royalist highwayman - 2008
Entry Filed under: 16th Century,Beheaded,Businessmen,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Denmark,Dismembered,Execution,Germany,God,Hanseatic League,History,Politicians,Power,Public Executions,Torture
Tags: 1530s, 1537, geopolitics, jurgen wullenwever, lubeck, Protestant Reformation, september 24, trade, wolfenbuttel
