One of the pleasures of reading history is to be transported somewhere, even if we aren’t sure we want to go.
A public execution, for example.
The scene that opens Joel F. Harrington’s new book is of an impatient crowd in 1617 Nuremberg that waited hours to observe the final moments of a counterfeiter. As people jostle for a good view, they are rendered so vividly by the historian that one can almost smell the concessions—sausages, roast chestnuts, salted herring—on hand to sate before the main event.
Eventually the condemned man appears, and is led in a procession to the site of execution. He is pleading for his sins to be forgiven, but also for the mercy of being beheaded by the sword, instead of the prescribed end for counterfeiters: death by fire. Authorities refuse. His closest companion at the end is the German city’s master executioner, an elderly man who seats the prisoner in a chair and builds the fire.
Writes Harrington: “One outcast departs this life; another remains behind, sweeping up his victim’s charred bones and embers.” The outcast remaining is Frantz Schmidt, the enigmatic center of Harrington’s The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century, just out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Whether despised or pitied, executioners have rarely been considered as “genuine individuals,” writes the author, a professor at Vanderbilt University. Harrington’s acquaintance with his subject, who ended 394 lives over a 45-year career, began in the local history section of a bookstore in Nuremberg. There he found a journal written by Schmidt comprising two lists of entries: the executions Frantz had completed from 1573, his first year on the job, to 1618, his retirement, and the floggings, brandings, finger choppings, and other brutal but nonlethal punishments he had also performed. Many entries were just a few lines of description, but others went on for more than a page.
Harrington found the document fascinating, but noted there was very little of the “I” to get a hold of in the text. Many historians would not even consider this an “ego document,” he writes, or the kind of source “scholars look to for evidence of a person’s thoughts, feelings, and interior struggles.” Was that why it had yet to be a biographical resource?
Two additional discoveries fleshed things out. Harrington learned of a document in a Vienna archive in which an elderly Frantz petitioned Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II to restore his family’s honor, wholly lost because of Frantz’s, and his father’s, dark profession. While it was probably written by a notary, under instruction from Frantz, the petition offered a new backstory to the journal. Equally pivotal was the discovery of an older manuscript copy of the journal that had substantial if subtle differences that brought a more pronounced identity to Frantz. Plus, not so subtle, there was wording that indicated the son was writing for his father. Frantz was building a case, seeking through his life and his lists, to present himself as a sober, faithful, willing, and skilled civil servant who deserved an end to his family’s stigma.
Schmidt’s family lived originally in Hof, a remote town in the “Bavarian Siberia,” writes Harrington. When an alleged assassination plot against the margrave, the local authority, was uncovered and three gunsmiths arrested, the margrave opted for his right to choose a bystander to execute the men. Frantz’s father, Heinrich, was selected and threatened with death if he refused. Dishonored after he complied, Heinrich, once a respectable woodsman and fowler, became an executioner, shunned by society, and even forbidden in many towns to enter churches. With their children’s prospects limited also by the stigma, many executioner fathers passed the trade, well paid at least, to a son.
Thus we meet Frantz, a professional killer and torturer who combined those roles with family man, pious Lutheran, and healer. Of the last, many executioners held the two professions. One grim reason was to mend prisoners well enough, after torture in interrogation, to ultimately put them to death. But Frantz went farther, seeing patients over the course of his life who numbered in the thousands. Even those who would shun him socially sought him out for treatment.
In fascinating if often gruesome detail, Harrington takes his “faithful executioner” from youth to old age. Snippets from the journal combine with narrative to reveal the crimes that left Frantz enraged or indifferent, the terrible skills he perfected, and a Nuremberg where both actual and perceived criminality fed a growing demand for law and order.
Harrington portrays a man who, though methodical, was anything but an automaton. We see Frantz’s obedience but also his agency. For example, when noting in his journal the women he executed for infanticide, his language stressed the vulnerability of their victims. However, when it came to their punishment, Frantz proved merciful if still deadly. Ordered to drown three such mothers, he, along with prison chaplains, pushed for the mercy of beheading by the sword, “a punishment unprecedented for women.”
The authorities balked, but eventually agreed if the severed heads of those executed would be nailed to the scaffold as warning to others. (I said it would be gruesome.) This compromise solution, Harrington writes, was a template for Frantz’s career, balancing officials’ “demands for both ‘shocking’ public examples and smooth, orderly demonstrations of their authority.”
Following that logic of authorities’ needs, the punishment for lesser crimes than murder could be equally as rough. Take recidivist thieves for example. In Frantz’s Nuremberg, it was often less what you stole then how often you were stealing. In a kind of early-modern version of a three-strikes law, hanging was considered the last resort for thieves for whom repeat banishment and punishment had not worked. We might ask “How could a society hang a man for stealing honey?” Harrington writes. For Frantz, however, the question was more, Why would a man repeatedly risk the rope for such a theft? “Transportation” was not the option for landlocked Nuremberg that it was for Britain and its export of convicts to the colonies. Long-term incarceration was considered too costly, and interestingly enough, also too cruel. That left the gallows as an option for officials anxious to assert their authority over chronic and chronically punished offenders.
