The prisoner clamoured for his combs, his knee-buckles, and the monies owed him. To read his demands, one might have fancied a traveller vexed by the tardiness of his correspondents. Yet the combs were meant to pass inside a fortress; the correspondents had ample cause for mistrust; and the letters, before ever reaching their intended recipient, passed through the hands of those bent on sending their author to the scaffold.
Lips Tullian believed he had preserved a line of retreat. His body lay locked away, but a fellow captive penned his letters, and a woman carried the messages. He had even devised a secret cipher for Michael Schmied, his former host: Alibrunnen, a word recalling an eel they had once stolen and cast into a well. This shared memory was to furnish proof that the entreaties truly came from him. Little did he imagine that so trifling an eel-theft might serve to unearth matters of vastly graver consequence.
His correspondent, however, remained hesitant. Tullian redoubled his tokens of recognition: a horse that had cast a shoe, a journey by sledge, a meal shared between them. With every doubt raised, he surrendered an additional recollection. The magistrates kept fair copies. While the two knaves strove to verify between themselves the authenticity of their dealings, the law was discovering precisely what those dealings were made of.
What Lay Within the Chests
This surveillance came after a protracted succession of robberies, arrests, and escapes. The name of Lips Tullian concealed a man who ultimately declared himself to be Philipp Mengstein, having also gone by the moniker of Schönknecht. The obscurities of his early years were destined to nurture legend. His entanglements with the law present a far less romantic fabric, wherein broken doors and plunder count for more than the fabulous origins of a highwayman.
On 16 November 1702, he had taken part in the burglary perpetrated at the residence of Count von Beichlingen on the Old Market of Dresden. Silverplate, gold, and specie were carried off. Once the spoils were divided, Tullian and an accomplice made for Halle to convert their share into ready coin. Precious metal is a cumbersome encumbrance; the proceeds of its sale allow a rogue to take to the road again. Yet this transaction introduced into their business individuals capable of tracking them down.
Upon returning, the two men took manifold precautions to conceal their lodgings in Leipzig. They parted company from their wagoner outside the city gates, had their chests brought within the walls, entrusted them successively to various porters, and did not repair to their true tavern until after these circuitous diversions. The stratagem was designed to render their final trail impossible to follow. It did not succeed: the buyer, disgruntled by a bargain struck by his wife in his absence, caught up with them alongside his son and summoned the constables.
Brought before the magistrates, the prisoners tendered a singular explanation. They claimed to have encountered two strangers in the night bearing a heavy chest; these unknown fellows had allegedly taken to their heels, abandoning the gold and silver where they stood. The tale had the virtue of causing the treasure to fall as though from heaven itself. It suffered from the fatal defect of demanding from the bench a credulity which neither the circumstances nor the seized goods were calculated to inspire.
Tullian maintained his denial under torture. The judicial relation published in 1716 reveals the contradictions of a procedure that, wanting a confession, could fail to secure the capital sentence sought, while still upholding against the accused sufficient suspicion to bar him from regaining his liberty. A decree of banishment was followed by an order consigning him to hard labour upon the fortifications of Dresden. He made his escape in the company of several fellow captives.
The Doors Give Way Anew
Recaptured in Leipzig at the commencement of 1705, he spent some five years in penal servitude. The contemporary relation attributes to him the memory of sleepless nights, his limbs aching from the heavy toil imposed upon him. The ordeal did not wean him from housebreaking instruments. He contrived to take an impression of a key to the house of correction and to fashion what was needful to pass the threshold.
During the New Year fair of 1710, he slipped out alongside seven companions. At Niederbobritzsch, Michael Schmied afforded him a hiding place. By night, the fugitives slept in a hayloft; by day, they scattered. They scouted opportunities for theft, concerted their enterprises, and met again to execute them. The churches of the surrounding country furnished several of their marks.
At Glashütte, Tullian boasted of having forced a sacristy door by dint of immense bodily exertion. He vaunted his brute strength against the picklocks of those thieves who prided themselves on sparing the mechanisms. What he accounted a feat of prowess had left behind a plundered sanctuary. The costly chain carried off in that burglary was destined to resurface in his clamorous demands for coin once he was back in ward: a portion of the plunder remained yet to be settled. Even the gang’s successes could not guarantee that each scoundrel received what he deemed his rightful due.
On 19 September 1710, his passage through Freiberg brought him face to face with an inspector of passports. The official was a bookbinder by trade. Tullian possessed no such document as was demanded; he made reference to a captain quartered in the town, and the officer accompanied him thither. Near a doorway, within a dark alley, an altercation erupted. Tullian drew his blade and dealt two blows. The inspector expired; bystanders rushed forward and overpowered the assailant.
This time, it was no longer merely a matter of discovering whence stolen valuables had come. A servant of the state had been struck down in the execution of his office. Tullian disputed whether the mortal thrust had been dealt with malice aforethought; he underwent fresh interrogations and the question. Following these proceedings, the authorities resolved to return him to the fortifications of Dresden, where he arrived in November 1711. The date of his return to ward would sometimes be confounded, in later accounts, with that of the slaying itself.
The Final Recourse
A plot for a prison break was discovered at last. Implements had been smuggled within the walls; several prisoners confessed to the preparations. Tullian denied it still. For six-and-twenty days, he was placed in irons that bound his hands behind his back. The narrative, though partial to the authorities, depicts his arms swollen and lacerated. When, some pages later, it extolled the voluntary nature of his confessions, this cruelty lingered only a leaf away.
It was during this period of confinement that the correspondence with Schmied took root. The magistrates, having intercepted the traffic, permitted the letters to pass. They had before their eyes a testimony far different from the denials wrung from the prisoner upon the rack: demands for funds, measures of caution, and instructions as to what an accomplice ought to disclose or conceal under examination. The cant was at times obscure, but Tullian ended by unravelling his own allusions. The eel in the well resumed its place in the tale; with it came the unpaid shares and the fellowship that the assumed names were meant to shield.
His depositions inaugurated a monumental labour of verification and cross-examination. The commission framed more than a thousand interrogatories, followed by supplementary articles. Tullian was confronted with other prisoners; he recalled to them places, circumstances, and words which the official relation asserts were indeed exchanged. The commissioners laid great stress upon the utility of his disclosures, as much for bringing confederates to justice as for clearing those wrongfully suspected.
For his part, he sued for a less agonizing death. He no longer pleaded for his release from prison, but for the substitution of the sword for the wheel. The instruments reproduced in the volume of 1716 render this petition singularly vivid: the memorial to the sovereign, the reply, the sentence, and the act of clemency. Augustus granted the commutation. On 8 March 1715, Tullian and four other condemned men were beheaded; their remains were thereafter exposed upon the wheels.
The doors had ceased to yield for him. Yet something survived of his final stratagem: five letters preserved within a printed book, with their petty reckonings, their anxieties, and their domestic trifles. One finds therein less of the romantic forest outlaw than of an inmate desperate for a few thalers, persuaded that the mention of a shared memory would dispel his accomplice’s suspicions. That very memory had furnished the inquisitors with the means of hearing them both.