A Prince’s Credit
In Nuremberg, Gabriel Wolff had devised an expedient to appear wealthier than he was: he came to solicit loans in the name of one who had no need to appear in person. The letter bore the authority of Elector John George of Brandenburg; an impression of a seal lent it the solemn weight of an official instrument. Wolff passed himself off as Georg Windtholtz, secretary to the prince in Berlin. The city council advanced fifteen hundred ducats. The prince had asked for nothing.
The name of the counterfeit secretary might well have vanished along with the gold. Instead, it re-emerged in a book where names were no longer employed to obtain credit: the journal of Franz Schmidt, executioner of Nuremberg. Under the date of October 11, 1593, the headsman inscribed Gabriel Wolff among the condemned whose sentences he had carried out. The man of many identities had returned to his native city; this time, he had not chosen the title under which he was to be received.
Schmidt records him as the son of a Nuremberg burgher, adding the alias of Glaser. He then recites an inventory of identities that resembles a wardrobe: Jacob Führer, Ernst Haller, Joachim Fürmberger. One name was suited for service; another for a letter of recommendation; yet another would open a purse. His career was said to have spanned twenty-four years. This tally belongs to the judicial summary compiled by the executioner, but it suffices to distinguish Wolff from the novice venturing a solitary forged letter: this was a lifelong profession.
The Man of Errands
He had served as a domestic or confidential agent to men whose affairs kept him in perpetual motion. Such employments provided an education of a peculiar kind. He who bears a petition learns how it is received; he who collects a disbursement discovers the formalities required to carry it away. Between the master’s signature and the debtor’s hand, the courier occasionally finds a space wherein no eye observes him.
In the Low Countries, one of his masters dispatched him to claim a debt from the Duke of Parma. Wolff returned with two thousand crowns and delivered them. According to the account preserved by Schmidt, he subsequently claimed he had been denied his expected reward; he seized fourteen hundred crowns and departed for the Ottoman Empire. His justification possessed the perilous simplicity of private accounts settled by oneself: something is owed to me, and so I take what seems my due. The journey lent this seizure a depth of field that legal complaints would struggle to bridge.
In Constantinople, a man named Jacob Führer died. Wolff, again according to the register, laid hands upon his garments, his books, a ring, and his personal seal. Clothes might be sold or worn to rags. The signet ring possessed another value entirely. It served to prolong the civil existence of a man who could no longer raise a protest; with his effects and his name, the deceased unwittingly furnished the means for the living to travel.
The record does not transform all these adventures into triumphs. In Danzig, Wolff demanded two thousand ducats from the town council in the name of the Swedish sovereign. The fraud was detected, and he came away empty-handed. Another enterprise, involving money advanced by merchants, concluded with the recovery of the sums. The impostor thus encountered resistance; yet such checks were not always sufficient to halt him. A failed venture could be abandoned upon his next departure, while a success paid for the road ahead.
Petty Thefts Behind Grand Names
Princes provided a lustre that ought not to obscure his humbler victims. In Prague, where the register places him for a time in the imperial service, a woman entrusted him with two silver cups and a girdle so that he might sell them on her behalf. He carried them off and disposed of them elsewhere. Here there was no longer any question of deceiving a city council with an Elector’s coat of arms, but rather of betraying the trust of a woman awaiting the proceeds of her own property.
A knight of the Order of Saint John likewise lost a small silver clock and other articles; a horse was led away. The sums varied and the victims shifted in rank, but the mechanism remained unmistakable: Wolff obtained access, converted access into possession, and rode away before the discrepancy was fully grasped. His grand tales of high diplomatic missions and his ordinary thefts were part of the very same trade.
He possessed, writes Schmidt, some seven languages. One readily imagines this gift employed to negotiate, to explain away a delay, or to fathom what an interlocutor believed he knew. Yet the executioner’s register records no conversations; it records results. What remains certain in his portrait is the combination of languages, aliases, and forged instruments. To cross borders, Wolff relied not merely on legs and horses: he relied on characters.
The choice of Nuremberg rendered his final venture singularly audacious. He presented himself before his native city vested with the authority of an absent prince. The seal and the letter were intended to divert scrutiny away from the man and toward the purported principal. If the credit originated in Berlin, it became less pressing to examine the pedigree of the bearer. Fifteen hundred ducats were thus paid out under cover of a political relationship that did not exist.
Return Under Escort
Wolff was apprehended in Ratisbon and surrendered to Nuremberg. The register details neither the initial suspicion nor the dispatches that exposed the forged commission. It summarizes the case after the fact, when the magistrates were able to connect the fraudulent loan to a long trail of embezzlements and fabrications. Distances, which had so often separated the victims, ceased to keep the facts apart: they were assembled against a single man.
The indictment did not rest upon a single copied signature. Schmidt mentions several seals of personages of rank that Wolff had procured to be forged, together with numerous falsified documents. The whole collection revealed to the judges the scope of an organized enterprise. The names once intended to conceal their bearer became the very instruments of his identification. That which had multiplied his lives now multiplied the evidence of his presence.
The sentence originally included a mutilation: his right hand was to be severed. Preparations had been made, the executioner notes, when this part of the punishment was remitted. Wolff was beheaded, and his body was subsequently burned. The word mercy appears in the account; here it denotes the relative mitigation of a penalty whose end remained death, not the possibility of taking to the road again.
On October 11, 1593, twenty-four years of alleged wandering thus came to an end in Nuremberg. An executioner’s journal preserved that which a man had spent a lifetime scattering: his true name, his false names, and the transactions that bound them together. The authorities had not merely condemned the man who had obtained fifteen hundred ducats. They had gathered back into one flesh the prince’s secretary, the unfaithful servant, and the traveler laden with the spoils of the dead.
There remains an irony from which Wolff could derive no benefit. The counterfeit seal of John George had purchased the city’s trust; the true name of Gabriel Wolff secured him above all an enduring place in the ledger of the man who put him to death. He had commanded so many ways to announce himself. Only one survived long enough to lead us back to him.