"Evil People": A Comparative Study of Witch Hunts in Swabian Austria and the Electorate of Trier (Studies in Early Modern German History)

A conflict then broke out among Christoph Wendler and the gang of nobles over the quantity of the imprisonment expenses and the bail given for von Sontheim’s unlock. The negotiations quickly got here to an deadlock, specifically simply because von Sontheim’s relations refused to pay numerous hundred florins in imprisonment fees and to publish bail of 10,000 florins. To once more win the flagging aid of his archduke, Wendler offered a completely new argument to Innsbruck: via condemning von Sontheim—or, at the least, through sequestering Nellingsheim for the restitution of trial costs—it will be attainable to reintroduce into Nellingsheim the Catholicism that von Sontheim had lately suppressed. All of those conflicts and von Sontheim’s imprisonment had rested on Wendler’s declare that Nellingsheim used to be certainly subordinate to Hohenberg’s jurisdiction in felony circumstances. In October 1593, although, the archducal govt decided that there has been no proof in its information that Nellingsheim was once really subordinate to Habsburg overlordship or to the Rottenburg excessive courtroom. It had develop into transparent that, via misrepresentations, Wendler had introduced an enduring felony dispute during which he had used the authority of the archduke for his personal own achieve. In reaction, Wendler repeated his “re-Catholicization” argument with larger insistence. He was once truly enjoying at the Counter-Reformation zeal of Archduke Ferdinand II right here; it was once no longer the center of the conflict. The case of Agatha von Sontheim took a strange flip, even though, whilst the imprisoned ladies protested opposed to her deliberate liberate. She feared, most likely rightly, that her family members desired to have her declared insane to carry Nellingsheim lower than their keep watch over. She herself then offered Nellingsheim— in all likelihood at Wendler’s suggestion—to the Austrian archduke as safety for being published with out subjecting her to her relatives. Ferdinand permitted and finally gave Wendler the duty of re-Catholicizing Nellingsheim. Agatha von Sontheim used to be left in peace until eventually she died years later in the home of a Protestant minister. The case of Agatha von Sontheim indicates basically that even in conflicts with different states, the vicegerent might manage the Innsbruck critical govt virtually at will. together with his keep watch over over details, he may perhaps make sure the archduke’s suggestions and salary a right away conflict with the neighborhood knighthood over jurisdictional rights. “Let nobody Accuse Us of Negligence” 159 One encounters an analogous primacy of the neighborhood, a communalism that interlinked neighborhood officials and peasant topics, within the conflict surrounding the village of Neuhausen. The conflict over Neuhausen used to be complicated. Neuhausen sat in a single of the few components the place the precise obstacles of the Duchy of Württemberg have been doubtful. either Württemberg and the Habsburg Landgraviate of Nellenburg laid declare to lordship over the village and its beneficial wooded area. on the grounds that 1560, the officials of the landgraviate were attempting to dislodge the Protestant minister whom Württemberg had appointed in Neuhausen. The minister had already disrupted a Catholic procession in Nellenburg and had berated such rituals as “idolatrous and legal.