The baron had discovered a singularly convenient manner of travelling: he carried with him the very men who could see him hanged. In livery, their countenances were vastly improved. A servant handing open a carriage door, an outrider steadying a horse, a messenger soliciting an audience no longer resembled the confederates of a common thief; they contributed to the consideration due a gentleman. The costume changed nothing of Nickel List’s past. It altered everything as to the welcome he received.
Johann Rudolf von der Mosel: such was the name beneath which the former soldier had sheltered a portion of his undertakings. The patronymic possessed that reassuring breadth which at times dispenses with the need to produce patents of nobility. In the likeness preserved in a nineteenth-century biography, List wears the full-bottomed wig and offers himself as a gentleman immersed in chemical arts. His laboratory concealed a craft far less arcane: within it, instruments were prepared to force the locks of other men. The gold he pursued already existed; it was merely a matter of transferring it from one hand to another.
This performance partakes somewhat of the theatre, and early biographers did much to embellish its shifting scenes. Yet the mainspring of the affair belongs entirely to history: List knew how to turn honorable appearances to account, and his accomplices did not form a band perpetually gathered around a forest fire. They assembled for an enterprise, divided the spoils, and resumed their separate lives. To uncover the gang, one had to discern the ties binding men who had ceased to appear together.
The House Whence None Emerges Honest
Before these disguises, there had been horses, military service, and subsequently his establishment at Beutha, in Saxony. A man acquainted with the highways commands a knowledge that property registers cannot bestow: he knows where fresh mounts are to be found, where travellers are subjected to question, and where a stranger may pass the night without reciting his pedigree. Such intelligence might nourish a trade. It might also facilitate an escape.
In the early 1690s, several burglaries remained long unpunished, justice failing to trace them back to List. This delay bore its price. Each affair left in obscurity afforded him the freedom to entertain, to travel, and to consort with those who would later find it perilous to account for their acquaintance with him. The wanted man was not yet banished from civil society; he still retained his entry into it.
Then a fresh robbery set the authorities upon his scent. At Beutha, in June 1696, the attempt to seize him concluded with the slaughter of two officers of justice. List slipped through the fingers of those who came to take him. The fugitive left behind more than a dwelling: he forfeited any remaining possibility of giving an ordinary explanation for his presence in the land. His house was razed; a sentence pronounced in contumacy consecrated his rupture with the community.
It now became necessary to track him across roads that traversed a multitude of distinct jurisdictions. The territory in which a bailiff might command a hue and cry was not necessarily that in which the quarry chose to lay his head. A frontier, often well-nigh imperceptible to the wayfarer, was enough to require entirely new warrants and supplications. List had no need to vanish from the face of the earth; he had only to keep ahead of the post bearing his description.
Ancient accounts imputed to him a wondrous invulnerability. That reputation spoke above all of the bewilderment of those he plundered. It was less mortifying to imagine a villain shielded against shot than to concede how greatly borders, distances, and administrative rivalries aided his passage. While one tribunal compiled its dossier, the fugitive compiled another identity.
The Portal of Saint Michael
The enterprise destined to impart an entirely new gravity to the pursuit concerned a church in Lüneburg. Saint Michael’s preserved a treasure known as the Golden Table: a masterpiece laden with precious metals, pearls, and gems, whose sacred figures had never been fashioned to survive the division of spoils. For the faithful and for the monastery, each element belonged to an inviolable inheritance. In the eyes of thieves, this aggregate admitted of partition.
On March 6, 1698, List took part in the theft. Implements of entry had been prepared; the lock was to yield to a key that did not belong to its custodians. The breach accomplished, the holy vessels and plates changed masters. What could be borne away held merchantable value; what was broken lost its sacred form without losing its metal. Herein lies a singular cruelty of such sacrilege: a work requires generations to become a shared memory, and a handful of cold tools to become a mere parcel of bullion.
On the morning of the discovery, therefore, it was not solely wealth that was missing. The sanctuary that antiquity, holy purpose, and barred portals had seemed to guarantee was refuted at a single blow. The crime could not remain an ordinary complaint, confined to the ledger of a petty magistrate. The renown of the Golden Table gave those who pursued its despoilers every cause to persevere beyond initial hindrances.
Duke Georg Wilhelm of Brunswick-Lüneburg-Celle lent his weight to the hunt. At Celle, an inquiry directed under the authority of Amtmann Dietrichs endeavoured to assemble the scattered offenses and their perpetrators. They were obliged to retrace in reverse the very path the malefactors had trodden: to connect distant towns, secure extraditions, collate aliases, and recognise the same man beneath divergent guises. That roving vagrancy, which had once dispersed all proof, itself became the object of the inquest.
The Accomplices Reassembled
Apprehended in 1698, List passed through the gaols and courts of Hof. A first capital sentence did not terminate his judicial progress. Celle demanded the man whom other judges already held the right to put to death. The extradition was indispensable: a corpse might have satisfied a local decree; the living prisoner could shed light upon thefts committed elsewhere, identify confederates, and supply the missing link between estranged dockets.
At the close of the year, List was brought under heavy guard to Celle. The counterfeit baron no longer commanded his retinue; the authorities were assembling the accused for their own reckoning. Those who had known how to scatter after a burglary were henceforth reunited by the interrogatories put to them. Every confession had the power to drag a fresh name into the record.
The magistrates put several prisoners to the question. List had tasted torture at Hof; the records of the proceedings declare that it was not renewed against him at Celle, where he made ample confession. Such distinction does not render the trial a free colloquy. The depositions took shape within a system of justice where torment was an ordinary instrument of investigation, and wherein the condemned man knew that his manner of speech might yet temper the rigor of his demise.
He acknowledged facts, named participants, and helped send other men to the scaffold. The figure of the contrite ringleader soon occupied a preeminent place in the published narratives of the affair. Pastor Sigismund Hosmann was to draw from the judicial files a tale of sin, discovery, and retribution. To the thief who had assumed many masks there succeeded one final persona: that of the exemplary penitent; between the culprit and the reader there now stood a pious interpreter.
Beginning in March 1699, executions struck several of the accused. On May 23, it was List’s turn. The sentence passed upon him decreed that his limbs be broken on the wheel before he was put to death; yet justice represented an alteration in the execution as a mitigation vouchsafed in reward for his admissions. This word of clemency, set beside such an apparatus, measures the gulf between the language of the court and the flesh condemned to suffer it.
The prosecutions did not end with him. Other men were judged and executed still, while the Golden Table remained the absent center of the entire tragedy. List had known how to lend a workshop of skeleton keys the appearance of an alchemist’s study, and his ruffians the dignity of a noble household. He had not the power to restore to the dismembered relics their lost unity. The judges had at last reassembled the thieves; no sentence on earth could reassemble what they had broken.