When his horses were detained, Hans Kohlhase asked merely that they be returned; he demanded neither the burning of a village nor the ruin of a province, and those who would later utter his name with terror would have been astonished to find so vast a confluence of violence originating in the mean dispute of a few men over two beasts.
He was bound for the Leipzig fair. To a merchant, a fair is no leisurely journey to be deferred until the morrow when the roads turn foul; it is a mart where opportunity arrives in the train of the buyers and departs alongside them, where the loss of a single day may sweep away the profit of many months. His horses therefore represented far more than their market price: they bore all that he had prepared, the outlays already ventured, and the engagements he was bound to honour upon his return.
The men of the Saxon nobleman Günter von Zaschwitz refused to let them pass.
Two Beasts in a Courtyard
The year is 1532. Kohlhase is a Brandenburg merchant, and the border he crosses is no mere line upon a map; it divides sovereign authorities, systems of protection, and differing avenues of redress. Before the retainers who hold the animals, he asserts his right to continue upon his way. They counter with pretexts he deems worthless. Time slips away. In that protracted wait, he already feels his venture unravelling.
He arrived too late for his commerce to unfold as he had hoped. Upon his return, when a sum was demanded of him for the release of his horses, he would no longer pay: he demanded to be indemnified. The beasts they now consented to return could not bring back the lost buyers. Someone must answer for the harm.
The scene might have ended like any bad bargain, dismissed with a few oaths such as merchants carry home alongside their ledgers. Yet Kohlhase could not bring himself to enter his humiliation as a mere item of loss. He demanded reparation; and, as he waited for his injury to be reckoned, it grew larger in his mind with every abortive petition, with every day squandered in compelling others to acknowledge what appeared to him self-evident.
His horses were ultimately returned to him against payment. He formally reserved his right of action. Henceforth, it was this right, far more than the animals themselves, that he carried with him.
The Paper That Opens No Doors
He solicited the backing of his sovereign, resorted to the instruments of the law, and waited for some magistrate to grant legal consequence to the grievances he laid forth. The ancient chronicles do not permit us to reconstruct every encounter with certainty; yet they reveal the inexorable chain whereby the merchant, denied the satisfaction he deemed his due, drifted steadily from the lawful channels wherein he had first sought it.
By dint of rehearsing a grievance, a man may at last become incapable of speaking of aught else. Those close to him learn the names of his adversaries, the sums, the dates; they know the precise moment when they must nod, and this assent, meant initially to console, may turn into fuel for a wrath that can no longer be checked without seeming to betray the sufferer.
Let us picture Kohlhase before the papers he had amassed. The table where profits once were reckoned now served to preserve official refusals. Each sheet bore witness that he had made the attempt; none brought him what he desired. In their accumulation he no longer saw a reason to surrender, but the proof that he was being unjustly compelled to do so.
Thereupon he altered the nature of his response. He issued a challenge, a formal declaration of private feud, looking beyond his initial adversary to strike at Saxony itself.
The horses had long since left the courtyard. The dispute had not.
The Debt Levied upon Strangers
Acts of violence were soon laid to Kohlhase’s account. A parley failed; the Saxon authorities set a price upon his head. Around him gathered men to whom his cause offered less a wrong to be redressed than an occasion for plunder. Thenceforth, travellers were despoiled, villages put to the torch, and towns made to endure the passage of his band.
Here one must arrest the impulse that inclined us to sympathise with the merchant. The peasant whose roof is ablaze detained no horse. The traveller halted upon the highway may never have heard the name of Zaschwitz. They enter a chronicle already underway, bringing only their goods and their terror, and from them is wrung payment for an outrage in which they bore no part.
Kohlhase might still recount the origin of his grievance. His followers might listen. Yet that tale, however righteous the original injury, could no longer repair the fresh havoc; it served merely to licence it. Vengeance had found an expedient that justice had denied: it is under no constraint to present its reckoning to the proper debtor.
Thus the merchant became the man against whom doors were barred. His name outran his company along the roads. Perhaps a few, as they shot their bolts, had felt some pity for him when the matter first came to light; they checked their latches nonetheless.
Berlin, 1540
In March 1540, Kohlhase and his principal lieutenant, Georg Nagelschmidt, were taken. They were broken upon the wheel in Berlin. A life begun in trade terminated in public torment, whereby the sovereign power hoped to restore to the highways that peace it had failed to preserve.
The scaffold did not retrospectively transform the edicts of magistrates into righteous judgments. Nor did it restore to the merchant the innocence he had perhaps retained when his horses were first withheld. Two truths may abide together, even when the spectacle of an execution urges all present to choose a faction and cease examining the rest.
Much later, Heinrich von Kleist would take this matter as the foundation for his Michael Kohlhaas. The fictional figure would lend to the pursuit of right an intensity that would long disturb the minds of readers; yet the historical merchant and the hero of the novella must each retain their own name.
For us, there remains an image anterior to the conflagrations: two horses held fast in a courtyard, a man who still believes himself capable of obtaining justice through speech, and several souls close enough to hear his petition. In that hour, a single decree would have sufficed; when all was ended, whole chronicles were required to explain why none had ever pronounced it.