Hi All,

The presence of bandits on the roads is an oft-sighted reason for the popularity of swords among civilian travelers in Late Medieval Europe. With that in mind, I'm curious if we have much in the way of evidence for how a bandit attack on a Late Medieval road might actually have played out. I know Cellini discussed surviving one in the 16th century, but I'm curious if we have any other accounts of what a fight between travelers and bandits might have looked like.

(Full disclosure: like approximately 37% of the HEMA community I'm in the process of writing a historical novel and I'm trying to figure out how to write something a little more realistic than your standard D&D-esque bandit encounter.)

Cheers!
Dashiell

Here is a brief description of an encounter with bandits, from the Travelogue of Leo of Rozmital, circa 1460

"Item, we then rode through the country of Hohenlohe. Here in two places certain men set upon my lord with intent to overthrow him. But as everyone, lord, nobleman and page carried his crossbow on his saddle they came to the conclusion that we were too strong for them."

This was 40 men though, of whom about half were fighting men. And all carrying crossbows.

This is a more detailed incident from the 16th Century autobiography of Bartholmew Sastrow the burgomeister of Stralsund. He's describing an incident that happened to his brother in Mecklenburg in the early 16th century.

"The brigands came up with them and entered into conversation. Suddenly one of them snatched the loaded pistol Lagesbusch was carrying at his saddle-bow - the fashion of carrying two had not come in - fire it at Lepper, who was galloping back to the carriage, killing him there and then, while Lagesbusch set spurs to his horse in time to warn Sonnenberg, who hid himself in the brushwood. My brother, armed with a pole, and standing with his back against the carriage to prevent an attack from behind, offered a stout and not unsuccessful resistance. He managed to wound in the thigh an assailant who, carried away by his horse, bit the dust further up the road.

But another miscreant, charging furiously, sliced away a piece of my brother's skull as big as a crown (the fragment of bone that adhered to the skin was the size of a ducat), and at the same time dealt him a deep gash at the throat. As a matter of course, my brother lost consciousness; nay, was left for dead while the bandits sacked the carriage, caught the horse of their wounded comrade, but seeing that he could not be transported, abandoned him and decamped with their spoil. They, however , did not take the carriage team [horses]. In a little while Sonnenberg emerged from his hiding-place, and with the aid of the driver, hauled my brother into the carriage. The woman bandaged his head and kept it on her knees. Lepper's body was placed between the legs of the wounded young man, and in that condition they reached Ribbenitz, where the surgeon closed the gash in the neck by means of pins."

Sastrow says these robbers were nobles, as was often the case with 'banditry' - it was often really Raubritter who from their own perspective were honest knights pursuing a legitimate feud.

Very complex subject in other words.

I have a few more incidents of violence from Sastrow and from Cellini's autobiography which you can read here in an article I did for the Acta a few years ago.

Jean

Hi Jean,

Thanks for commenting! As it happens I am a great admirer of your work and read your article when it came out. Fascinating stuff!

I don't suppose you have any recommendations of where one might look for other accounts of bandit encounters?

-Dashiell

Keep in mind that the word "brigand" in the 16th century meant "soldier", not "bandit". Though sometimes it was difficult to tell the difference.

I'd loook for books with titles like "crime and violence in medieval Europe: a sourcebook" (hypothetical title) or "travel in the middle ages." Trevor Dean has a book on "Crime in Medieval Europe 1200-1550."

Paul Hansen wrote:

They maybe tried to spin it that way but I doubt they even believed it themselves.

Medieval people liked to tell a very old story which St. Augustine used in one of his writings. Alexander the Great is resting on campaign when his men bring him a pirate or robber. "What should I do with you?" he asks. "Honour me like a king" the strong man says. "Why?" "Because you despoil the world with great fleets and mighty armies, but I do it with just a band of companions. So if I am a criminal, what are you?"

I would recommend to try to narrow your focus on specific regions or places, and specific time periods. Say within 1000 km and 100 years at least.

One of the reasons it's so difficult to make sense of Medieval Europe is that there are so many books and documentaries (etc.) which try to look at it (or some aspect of it like 'knights', 'travel' or 'crime and violence') but do so across 4,000 km and 7 or 8 centuries of time. You can't actually make sense of anything when bouncing around between 13th century France, 16th Century Hungary, 11th Century Finland and (inevitably) several different periods in England.

Imagine if you did a history of the modern era while more or less randomly pulling facts from Victorian England, the Soviet Union during WW2, and 21st Century San Francisco. You get a similar mish-mash as you do with a lot of 'medievalist' books, especially those from the 20th century. You'll have movies with Civil War soldiers carrying M-16s and flying helicopters...

Well I don't have anything quite that specific on hand haha, but I bet you can find something real close because there are so many of those Swiss chronicles, plus Austrian and Italian ones, I'm sure one of the above would have some kind of interesting story about the Brenner pass in the late 14th Century. Unfortunately, so far as I'm aware most of them are untranslated, but if you go find one of them online and go through the entries you can definitely find that specific year and seeing as bandits were a near constant problem, I bet you could find at least a reference to such an incident.

In other words, it's not so much so much that sources are thin as you would need to go through a bit of effort to find and make use of them. But on the plus side, if you successfully transcribed and translated a few pages and found an interesting incident of banditry you could probably write an academic article on the side...

Here is one of the Diebold Schiling Chronicles - good luck and let me know what you find!

https://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/list/one/bbb/Mss-hh-I0001

Since you are working on a novel, here are three somewhat overlooked literary sources you might want to look at -

Louis L"Amours The Walking Drum, an earlier period and a bit further north, but in the ballpark of your subject and surprisingly good.

Mika Waltari's "The Adventurer" - a picaresque novel set in Central Europe (mostly) in the 16th Century, but this guy really understood the late medieval mindset, both the scholar's and commoners point of view.

Finally Tim Powers "Drawing of the Dark" is quite interesting. Also in the 16th Century, in the HRE, but this guy too does a good job getting into the mindset and IIRC some of the action does take place in the Brenner Pass. Plus I think Marozzo is in it..? Or Fiore? I forget which fencing master. But one of them.

The motivation for the feuds was indeed also quite often directly about money - typically loans that hadn't been repaid.

That depended on the specific town an the particular Emperor. Often they played both sides against the middle, and few Emperors had the power to enforce their rules anyway. For example Frederick III who reigned for half of the 15th Century (1452-1493) barely had control of his own corner of Austria let alone the entire HRE. His predecessor Sigismund is the one who lost control of Bohemia. He tended to play both sides in such conflicts, such as was the case during the incident with Talhoffer. Maximillian made a concerted effort to enforce a 'universal peace' but with decidedly mixed results. The Swabian league - at the instigation of Nuremberg, burned 23 castles of Robber knights during the Franconian War in 1523 but even that didn't end the pillaging by robber knights (and they were unable to catch their main target).

The article in question shows how the towns attempted to enforce their Landfrieden or 'peace of the roads' with mixed success in Franconia. In certain other local areas they achieved near complete success (such as in Upper Lusatia under the Lusatian League) but that was a decidedly local control. Several regions of the HRE and neighboring districts, including Mecklenberg, Pomerania, Silesia and Thuringia remained plagued by robber knights well into the Early Modern period. It didn't really end until the Peace of Westphalia after the 30 Years War.

The real issue with medieval feuding is that you had several different concepts of law and order, and rights, according to the different estates. The low ranking nobility and ministeriales (who made up a lot of the robber knights) had one version of what they thought justice was, the middling nobility another, and the princes quite another entirely (more or less 'L'etat, c'est mois'). The larger towns and Free Cities had their own perspective which was partly at odds with the whole feudal system - and in some towns they routinely referred to all nobles as habitual liars and thieves in period documents. And the Church had it's own ideas, which didn't even necessarily synch up internally as there were various factions within and between the different Orders and prelates of the Church. The Dominicans hated the Franciscans and condemned their interpretations of law, one Pope declared the previous Pope an anti-Christ and vice versa. And the Universities kept stirring the pot by coming out with new ideas and variations on previous notions of law, justice, ethics, and morality. And the peasants also had their own concepts - the split between their traditional values, Luthers ideas of reform, and the emerging laws (also called 'reforms') pushed by the lawyers of the princes triggered the Peasant War of 1525.

Sometimes each estate could recognize the reality that their view wasn't the only view and they had to compromise with the others. The Germans called this the rezeß, i.e. 'backing down', as in the First Rezeß of Hamburg in 1410. The Poles and Czechs were also fairly quick to reach such compromises, as were the Swiss, who made it the basis of their Confederacy and nation. However, before these compromises were reached, and sometimes they never were, there was typically an extended period of violence as one estate attempted to impose their will over another. And this could be exascerbated by religious tensions such as during the Hussite Wars in the 1420s-1480s and later of course in the religious wars after the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in the 16th Century, culminating in the terrible 30 Years War of the 17th.

On a local level sometimes cynical third parties would instigate trouble. Much of the violence going on between the lower nobility and Nuremberg for example was instigated by the Margraves of Brandenburg, who had previously controlled a lucrative burgravate within Nuremberg that the citizens seized control of, and they wanted it back. This went on for half of the 15th Century and well into the 16th. The Ottomans also did their best to instigate similar factional disputes within Hungary and Austria, as a prelude to invasion.