The Holy Roman Empire poet laureate — self-proclaimed, at least — Michael Lindener was beheaded with a sword on this date in 1562 in Friedberg as a murderer.

Lindener (German Wikipedia entry) routinely signed himself “Poeten”, or “P[oeta].L[aureatus].” — for instance, in the preface to his vernacular satiric classics Rastbüchlein and Katzipori.

Whether Lindener really was an official poet laureate of the empire, however, is not so clear. Lindener was a bit of a hustler and in scrabbling to support himself with his pen in Nuremberg and then Augsburg in the 1550s did not shrink from forging the likes of Savonarola, Melanchthon, and Hessus. (He also worked as a proofreader and a teacher.) His honorifics might also have been fraudulent.

Lindener’s mischief was not confined to literary offenses; he led the roguish life of a Villon-esque picaro.

But while that latter author, a mere thief, escaped the fate anticipated in his “Ballad of the Hanged Man”, Lindener found that stabbing an innkeeper to death was an offense much beyond his eloquence to excuse.

On this day..

• 1524: The rulers of the K'iche' kingdom
• 1679: Four at Tyburn
• 1829: Jane Jameson
• 1764: John Prince, dissembler
• 1748: William Whurrier, War of Austrian Succession veteran
• 1884: Two abusive husbands
• 1968: Veyusile Qoba, the last of the Langa Six
• 1905: Two murderers beheaded in French Indochina
• 1811: Thomas White and John Newbolt Hepburn of the Vere Street Coterie
• 1842: Maketu Wharetotara, New Zealand's first execution
• 1937: Alexander Yulevich Tivel
• 203: Perpetua, the earliest Christian woman whose writings survive