The traveller had left his sack at the inn to repair to the baths. Such was the gesture, thoroughly mundane, by which the street-ballad cast down the very man it had just rendered invisible. A sorcerer reputed capable of traversing whole realms beneath the guise of a beast, of deceiving every gaze and eluding all pursuit, had entrusted his worldly goods to an innkeeper’s care. The sum of his dread power henceforth reposed behind a tavern counter.
In the sung tale of Peter Niers—spelled likewise Nirsch—Neumarkt thus became the ultimate snare. The year was 1581. The man had arrived from the vicinity of Ratisbon, journeying toward Nuremberg; he alighted at the sign of the Bell, took lodging, and resolved to wash himself. He had wandered too many highways to believe himself imperilled by a chamber where honest burghers came to ease their limbs. Yet it was there that the rumours caught up with him: men were speaking of Peter Niers, of his slaughters, of his countenance. He whose likeness they were drawing sat within earshot of their voices.
Popular recitation had long prepared this encounter. Before Neumarkt, it had led its quarry through a Germany of treacherous roads, thence into Austria and Bohemia. The Rhine, Württemberg, Ulm, Augsburg, Prague aligned themselves like so many stations of a single reign of terror. To each province belonged fresh victims; the tallies swelled with that peculiar assurance of tales that never submit their reckonings to scrutiny. The wayfarer was becoming less a man than an ambulatory scourge, nimble enough to answer for every misfortune that befell between two garrison towns.
This reputation had not waited upon his final apprehension. A broadsheet printed at Tübingen by Alexander Hock in 1577 had already heralded the crimes of Niers and his company. Its title ascribed four hundred and forty murders to the confessions of ten souls. The figure crushed the reader long before he had encountered a single victim. Collective liability allowed a multitude of outrages to be gathered beneath a handful of names, the causal chain of which the pamphlet promised to reveal. Four years on, the terror was still travelling; Niers had outlived the first printed circulation of his name.
The ballad lent him yet another dimension. A confederate was said to have initiated him into the black arts; the devil had become his partner. Thenceforth, a he-goat by the wayside, a cur trailing a passer-by, an indistinct shape glimpsed in the gloaming could all pass into the legend. The slayer was said to shift his shape. This explanation possessed a formidable utility: every failure of his pursuers only confirmed the preternatural faculties of the man they had failed to take. They had not permitted a mere mortal to slip through their fingers; they had encountered a being against whom ordinary precautions were of no avail.
Pregnant women held a dreadful place among these charges. The ballad attributed to them an exquisite vulnerability and made the crimes committed against their persons the very matter of his necromancy. Unborn babes became instruments of unholy power. Such episodes belong properly to the register of murderous folklore and sensational news-sheets; they in no wise constitute a ledger of established facts. Their purpose in the song was to bar every avenue to human pity. Confronted with such an adversary, the magistrates might carry the torment as far as the verses had carried the horror.
In the bathhouse, however, there was no need to exorcise a demon. A cooper was describing human marks: two crooked fingers, a scar, an advanced age. The likeness narrowed. The stranger might well change his country and recount another life; his hand remained beside him, as did his face. The ballad depicts him affecting indifference while two citizens conferred apart. Their inquest began with a very short journey: they quitted the baths and hastened back to the inn.
The host had received a pledge. He now found himself plied with questions concerning his guest: how long had he lodged there, how did he deport himself, what had he brought with him? The sack was brought forth, then unfastened. Into it the song deposited those human relics to which it tied the fugitive’s unearthly faculties. It was the consummate device to untie the plot: that which had shielded Niers became that which doomed him. The tavern, the baths, and the magistrate’s residence henceforth formed a closed circuit. The two citizens bore their discovery to the authorities; eight men were charged with taking the traveller into custody.
The number of officers is of consequence in this scene. It required eight men against one, so far did the suspect’s renown outrun his limbs. He was pinioned and brought before the magistrate. The man then assumed the identity of a soldier returned from Hungary. He demanded his knapsack and requested that his papers be read. The very same piece of baggage supported two irreconcilable histories: to him, it held the proofs of a lawful existence; to his accusers, it enclosed the mark of the monster. No passport could ever again be viewed with innocence.
Then came the question. The ballad caused the racking of the body to be followed by the acknowledgment of his name and the confession of his atrocities. It set forth this sequence as a revelation; yet in the very same movement, it disclosed how that speech had been wrung from him. In lieu of an inquest patiently setting forth each murder, the public was presented with a grand total. Five hundred and twenty appeared in the ballad, to which were added four-and-twenty pregnant women; a printed news-sheet of 1582 recorded five hundred and forty-four. The numbers might well be reconciled through simple addition without ever becoming an inventory of verified victims.
The conclusion was an execution at Neumarkt, in September 1581, attended by torments of singular barbarity. Ancient texts vie with one another in recounting the specifics of the ordeal and diverge upon its duration. The printed relation of 1582 distributes the agonies over three days, then depicts the breaking upon the wheel and the quartering; the ballad adds refinements of its own. At the close of these narratives, the remains are exposed upon the public highways. The man whom legend had caused to wander from land to land was still, once dead, to serve as a beacon to travellers at several gates of the town.
Yet his chastisement did not bring an end to the commerce of his name; rather, it provided it with a denouement. The song could begin anew before another audience, ascend the Rhine, enter an alehouse, and bid men and women alike to lend an ear. It gave assurance that crime would be punished and exhorted all to lead a godly life; yet beforehand, it had laid bare to the eye the very abominations it claimed to make abhorred. Niers had lost his sack, his borrowed name, and his life. The tale, for its part, surrendered none of its dominion: it shifted shape, crossed frontiers, and found welcome wherever men looked with dread upon the stranger seated at their side.