Tag Archives: war of spanish succession

1719: Frans Anneessens, Brussels guildmaster

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On this date in 1719, Dutch guild chief Frans Anneessens was beheaded on Brussels’ Grand Place.

The southern Low Countries — today’s Belgium — had remained in Spanish hands when the northern part — present-day Netherlands — broke free back in the 16th century.

That meant it was one of the lots on the table when Europe bargained the Spanish patrimony by arms in the early 18th century. For geopolitical reasons (basically, as a bulwark against France, who had lost the war), this proto-Belgium was handed over to Austria.

Neither the empire nor its ward greeted this absentee-landlord arrangement with enthusiasm.

The city of Brussels at this point* was governed by the “nine nations”, nine craft guild consortiums wielding privileges dating to the medieval economy who together dominated the city. Defending these privileges against absolutist states intent on rolling them back was a major bone of contention in Brussels, even years before the Austrian handover.

Monument in Brussels to Frans Anneessens. (cc) image from EmDee

Frans Anneessens (English Wikipedia entry | Dutch | French) who was dean of the “Saint Christopher” nation (comprising dyers, cloth shearers, lacemakers and chairmakers), had a prominent part advancing the (losing) argument for maximal guild privileges.

Just what the ancient rights of the guilds embraced had long been contested with the Spanish crown, and apparently the Brussels town council kept the charters enumerating a very expansive grant of them locked up — until they were accidentally revealed thanks to a bombing in the Nine Years’ War, then published widely.

So did the guilds get these rights or no?

Anneessens in 1698-99 argued the nations’ case before the equally ancient Council of Brabant, and lost: Spanish Austria was suffered to curtail the Brussels guilds, and although the guilds provocatively refused to swear their customary oath to the new arrangement the Spanish were able to squelch the ensuing disturbances by 1700.

The tensions rested, unresolved, through the war years but come 1717 they resurfaced when the Austrian-import governor the Marquis of Prie demanded fresh oaths upon the hamstrung guild privileges, and new taxes to boot. Again the guilds refused — not only in Brussels but Ghent, Antwerp and Mechlin.

Prie only quelled this half-revolt in 1719 but when he did,

he took drastic measures. Five leaders, including Anneessens, were arrested. They were all locked inside the Stone Gate, and a scandalous trial followed, during which Prie did everything he could to get Anneessens, whom he viewed as the brains behind the resistance, convicted. Anneessens received a death sentence, which he proudly refused to sign, and was beheaded on 18 September 1719 [sic**]. After the execution the people of Brussels mourned and collected his blood as relics, and priests in some of the churches held requiems in spite of strenuous attempts by Prie, supported by the higher clergy (the Archbishop of Mechlin) to prevent this. Prie had wanted to “make an example” with this execution and in fact succeeded, despite the sympathy of the people of Brussels for their martyr. (Hetty Wertheim-Gijse Weenink, “Early 18th Century Uprisings in the Low Countries: Prelude to the Democratic Revolution,” History Workshop, spring 1983)

* The guild-nation governance system would persist until Belgium was occupied by France after the French Revolution.

** Literally every other source I found, including the inscription on the Anneessens monument, prefers September 19 for the man’s execution.

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1706: Matthias Kraus, Bavarian rebel

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On this date in 1706, Bavarian butcher Matthias Kraus was beheaded and quartered for an anti-Austrian rebellion.

This commoner was the victim at several orders’ remove of distant imperial politics; as such, he will enter this story only as a coda. Instead, we begin in the 1690s, in Spain, with the approaching death of the childless Spanish king Charles II.

The question of who would succeed Charles presented European diplomats the stickiest of wickets: there were rival claims that augured civil war, which was bad enough, but such a war’s potential winners could themselves be scions of the French Bourbons or the Austrian Habsburgs … which meant that Spain’s world empire could become conjoined with that of another great European power and unbalance everything.

Now, it just so happened that the Elector of Bavaria Maximilian II Emanuel had a ball in this game — because his marriage to a Habsburg princess had produced a kid who could plausibly receive the throne, Joseph Ferdinand of Bavaria. (The mom died in 1692, but had she been alive, she would have stood to inherit Charles II’s throne.)

For a while this whelp looked like the answer the continent’s schemers were searching for, since neither the state of Bavaria nor his father’s House of Wittelsbach was already a great power — and thus, they could be elevated without creating a new hegemon. But in 1699, months after the infirm Charles had designated the little boy “my legitimate successor in all my kingdoms, states and dominions,” Joseph Ferdinand too dropped dead.

The boy was only seven years old — but he had lived long enough to whet his father’s appetite for a more substantial patrimony. When Charles II finally died in 1700 with the inheritance situation still unresolved, Max Emanuel entered the resulting continental war — the War of Spanish Succession — allying himself with France with the intent of supplanting the Habsburg dynasty on the Austrian throne.

This was a bold gambit to be sure but in the war’s earliest years it looked like it might really work. The Elector of Bavaria parlayed his strong position on the Danube (and ample French support) into a menacing thrust into Austria that threatened to capture Vienna. For the Wittelsbachs, this would mean promotion to a higher plane of dynastic inbreeding; for France, it would mean a lethal blow to the rival Austrian-English-Dutch “Grand Alliance”.

But things went pear-shaped in 1704.

Marlborough mounted a famous march to Austria’s rescue and trounced the Bourbons and Bavarians at the Battle of Blenheim, completely reversing the tide of events. Bavaria now came under Austrian occupation, as Max Emanuel hightailed it to the Low Countries.

All this statecraft brings us as a postscript the unhappy fate of our butcher, Herr Kraus.

The Austrian occupation of Bavaria — complete with punishing wartime levies — triggered in 1705 a peasants’ revolt grandly titled the Bavarian People’s Uprising. Matthias Kraus was a leader in this rising.


Matthias Kraus in Kelheim (Via)

Like the Wittelsbach pretension writ small, Kraus was intrepid but doomed. Having seized the town of Kelheim with a force of 200 or so, he held it for just five days. Austrian forces appearing at the gate negotiated for a peaceful surrender of the city, but as soon as they got the gates open they ran amok in a general massacre.

Kraus himself, interrogated under torture in Ingolstadt, was returned to Kelheim for public execution — his body’s quarters to be mounted around the city as a warning.


Detail view (click for a full image) of an Austrian leaflet publicizing the fate of the rebellious Kraus.

His martyrdom at the hands of a foreign occupation has stood Kraus in good stead in posterity. There is a Matthias-Kraus-Gasse in Kelheim, as well as a fountain memorial put up to celebrate the 1905 bicentennial of his his fleeting moment of heroism.

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