A Brief History of Prussia
Ask any of our Landwehr family where our family originated, and the reply will undoubtedly be "Germany". And, if you refer to a modern world map, that answer is correct. Our earliest record of our ancestors comes from the small German village of Schildesche, and they emigrated to America in 1859 from the nearby village of Joellenbeck. You won't find the villages of Schildesche and Joellenbeck on your map, but you may find the city of Bielefeld, about sixty miles south of the German seaport of Bremen, and 180 miles west of Berlin. The villages of Schildesche and Joellenbeck were located near Bielefeld, and today form suburbs of that city.
But to state that the Landwehr family came from Germany is an oversimplification. The history of Europe is a history replete with military and diplomatic victories and defeats, shifting boundaries and changing names. A more accurate answer to the question of the Landwehr family's origin would be "Prussia". And the history of Prussia cannot be explained without some understanding of the history of the Holy Roman Empire. So, to provide a brief summary of the history of the lands where our forefathers lived, loved, fought, and toiled for untold generations, we will rely on The World Book Encyclopedia:
"About 1000 B.C., warlike tribes began to migrate from northern Europe to what is now Germany. They wandered from place to place, and lived by hunting and farming. During the 100's B.C., they moved south to the Rhine and Danube rivers, the frontier of Rome. The tribes included the Cimbri, Franks, Goths, Vandals, and Germani. The Romans called all the tribes Germani, and called the tribes' land Germania."
"In A.D. 9, Rome tried to conquer Germania, or Germany, but Germanic warriors crushed the Roman armies. By 400 A.D., the power of mighty Rome had begun to collapse. During the 400's, Germanic armies poured into the weakened West Roman Empire and broke it up into tribal kingdoms. The kingdom of the Franks became the largest and most important."
"In 486, Clovis, a Frankish king, defeated the Roman governor of Gaul (now France). Clovis extended his territory by defeating other Germanic tribes in Gaul and parts of western Germany. He became a Christian, and also introduced other Roman ways of life into his kingdom."
"The greatest Frankish ruler, Charlemagne, came to power in 768. He established his capital in Aachen. Charlemagne expanded his kingdom east to the Elbe River. In 800, Pope Leo III crowned him emperor of the Romans."
"In 843, the Treaty of Verdun divided Charlemagne's empire into three kingdoms, one for each of his grandsons. Louis II (called the German) received lands east of the Rhine River. His kingdom became what is now Germany. The western part, later called France, went to Charles I (the Bald). Lothair I received the middle kingdom, a narrow strip that extended from the North Sea to central Italy. He also kept the title of emperor."
"In 911, the German branch of the Frankish royal family died out. By then, the German kingdom consisted of five powerful duchies (territories ruled by a duke)--Bavaria, Lorraine, Franconia, Saxony, and Swabia. The German dukes elected Conrad I of Franconia as king. In 919, Conrad was followed by Henry I (the Fowler) of Saxony, whose family ruled until 1024. With the founding of the Saxon dynasty, Germany became permanently separated from France."
"Henry's son, Otto I (the Great), drove invading Hungarians out of southern Germany in 955, and extended the German frontier in the north. Otto also won control over the old middle Frankish kingdom, which gave him the right to claim the title of emperor. In 962, Otto was crowned emperor in Rome. This marked the beginning of what later was called the Holy Roman Empire."
"The Holy Roman Empire, under the Saxon emperors, became the most powerful country in Europe. It also had the best-organized government. But under the Salian dynasty (1024-1125), a long power struggle began that left the empire weak and disorganized. In 1075, Pope Gregory VII disputed the right of Emperor Henry IV to appoint bishops. Many German princes sided with the pope, and fought a series of civil wars against the emperor. The princes grew stronger, and by the 1300's the emperor was almost powerless."
"The Hohenstaufen emperors (1138-1254) re-established some order. But after the dynasty died out, great disorder returned. The German princes did not elect an emperor until 1273. He was Rudolf I of Habsburg (or Hapsburg). Rudolf seized Austria from a rival prince, and it became the main duchy of the Habsburg family. After Rudolf, emperors of various families reigned. Beginning in 1438, the Habsburgs reigned almost continuously until 1806, when the empire came to an end."
"Before the fall of the West Roman Empire in 476, Roman towns stood along and near the Rhine and Danube rivers. These towns were centers of trade between the Romans and the Germans. They included what are now Bonn, Cologne, Regensburg, Trier, and Vienna. After the fall of Rome, the towns almost disappeared. Trade gradually developed again under the Saxon and Salian emperors. The old Roman towns grew again, and new ones appeared around the castles of princes and bishops. Many cities became so large and rich that they gained self-government."
"Beginning in the 1100's, the powerful German nobles forced the peasants to become serfs and work for them. The serfs were not free to leave their lord's estate."
"In regions where towns grew, as in the Rhineland, many serfs were granted freedom to become town laborers or merchants. In such regions, serfdom gradually disappeared. Serfdom lasted longest where there were few towns, as in Prussia, where it lasted until 1807."
There were three kinds of states in the Holy Roman Empire. There were the princely states--duchies, margraviates, etc.--each a little hereditary dynastic monarchy in itself, such as Saxony, Brandenburg, or Bavaria. There were ecclesiastical states--bishoprics, abbacies, etc.--in which the bishop or abbot, whose rule was of course not hereditary, conducted the government. A large portion of the area of the empire consisted of these church states. Thirdly, there were the imperial free cities, some fifty in number. There was in truth also a fourth category, made up of some thousands of imperial knights, noblemen of minor consequence who possessed a few manors, but who belonged to no state, recognizing the supremacy of none but the emperor.
The history of Prussia really begins in 1417, when the Hohenzollern family came to rule the margraviate of Brandenburg, which was centered about the city of Berlin. Brandenburg had been founded in the Middle Ages as a "mark" or "march" of the Holy Roman Empire, to fight the battles of the Holy Empire against the then heathen Slavs. Brandenburg would become the nucleus of modern Prussia.
In 1517, Martin Luther, a German monk, began to attack many teachings and practices of the Roman Catholic Church. Nobles, peasants, and townspeople joined this Protestant movement, called the Reformation, and it spread quickly. Some princes were sincere reformers, but others became Protestants only to gain church property. Many peasants hoped the movement would free them from their lord's control. They revolted against the lords in the Peasants' War of 1524-1525, but were brutally crushed.
Neither the pope nor Emperor Charles V could stop the Protestant movement. In 1555, Protestant princes forced Charles to accept the Peace of Augsburg. This treaty gave each Lutheran and Roman Catholic prince the right to force those under him to accept his religion. It also established a division of church lands between the two religions. The Germans, because of conditions in the Holy Roman Empire, were the one large European people to emerge from the religious conflict almost evenly divided between Catholic and Protestant. Lutheranism prevailed in the north, and Catholicism prevailed in the south. The area where Schildesche and Joellenbeck are located, and our Landwehr ancestors probably lived, undoubtedly became Lutheran at this time.
During the mid-1500's, the Roman Catholic Church began the Counter Reformation. In this movement, the church won back many Protestants by peaceful means or by force. By 1600, relatively few Protestants were left in Austria, Bavaria, and parts of Bohemia and the Rhineland. The rest of Germany remained chiefly Lutheran.
Modern Prussia appeared, and the Hohenzollern family began its rise to the leadership of a united Germany, in the seventeenth century when a number of territories came together in the hands of the Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg. Through the play of inheritance so common in the Holy Roman Empire, the Hohenzollerns fell heir, in 1614, to three small territories in western Germany. They were the Duchy of Cleves, on the Rhine at the Dutch border; the County of Mark, just to the southeast of Cleves; and the County of Ravensburg, located about 180 miles west of Berlin. Each of these three small territories were separated from the main mass around Brandenburg by many intermediate German principalities. Schildesche, the ancestral home of our Landwehr family, lay in the County of Ravensburg.
Four years later, the Hohenzollern family inherited the Duchy of Prussia, which was located a considerable distance to the east of Brandenburg. Today, part of this area lies in northen Poland, and part in the U.S.S.R. This was the first significant step in the territorial growth of modern Prussia.
By 1600, great tension had developed between the Protestant and Roman Catholic forces in Germany. They began to arm for a new struggle. In 1618, a Protestant revolt in Bohemia set off the Thirty Years' War, the greatest of all European wars before the time of the French Revolution. It began as a civil war between the Protestants and Roman Catholics in the German states. But before the conflict was over, most of the nations of Europe were involved, and the war had become a general struggle for territory and political power. Most of the battles were fought on German soil.
The war ended with the Peace of Westphalia, signed at Munster (forty miles west of the Landwehr home) and Osnabruck (twenty-five miles northwest of the Landwehr home) in 1648. At the Peace of Westphalia, the Hohenzollern family further expanded their holdings when they received Farther Pomeriania, which abutted Brandenburg to the east and gave the Hohenzollerns a port on the Baltic. At the same time, they also received the large bishopric of Magdeburg, which lay immediately south and west of Brandenburg.
The Landwehr family surely suffered as a result of this war. Physically Germany was wrecked by the war. Cities were repeatedly sacked by mercenary soldiers. Whole areas were systematically looted to maintain foreign armies. By 1640, the population of Berlin had fallen from about 14,000 to 6,000, and that of Frankfurt-on-the-Oder from 12,000 to 2,000. Hundreds of villages had been wiped out. Wolves roamed over the countryside. The peasants, murdered, put to flight or tortured by soldiers, ceased to give attention to farming. Agriculture was ruined, so that starvation followed, and with it came pestilence. In Joellenbeck, the village where our Landwehr family would later live before they emigrated to America, only seven families survived the plague that struck during this war. Even revised modern estimates allow that in many extensive parts of Germany as much as a third of the population may have perished. Art, science, trade, and industry declined. Except for some free cities, Germany was a patchwork of hundreds of states ruled by princes and nobles. It took almost two hundred years for Germany to recover from the effects of the Thirty Years War. And the animosity between the Protestants and the Catholics would live on for centuries, as evidenced by the attitudes of the Landwehr family, and other German immigrants, who came to Missouri from northern Germany more than two hundred years later.
The Hohenzollerns built a large, well-trained professional army and a capable civil service. With their army, they defended their state and expanded it. Through their civil service, they improved farming and industry, and filled their treasury with tax money. They built canals, schools, and roads, and promoted the arts and learning.
By 1650, then, the dominions of the House of Brandenburg were in three disconnected masses. The main mass was Brandenburg, with the adjoining Pomerania and Magadeburg. There was a detached eastern mass (the Duchy of Prussia), and a small detached western mass on or near the Rhine (the three small territories, including Ravensburg, acquired in 1614). The middle and western masses were within the Holy Roman Empire. The eastern mass was outside the Empire. To connect and unify these three masses became the underlying long-range policy of the Brandenburg house.
But to state that the Landwehr family came from Germany is an oversimplification. The history of Europe is a history replete with military and diplomatic victories and defeats, shifting boundaries and changing names. A more accurate answer to the question of the Landwehr family's origin would be "Prussia". And the history of Prussia cannot be explained without some understanding of the history of the Holy Roman Empire. So, to provide a brief summary of the history of the lands where our forefathers lived, loved, fought, and toiled for untold generations, we will rely on The World Book Encyclopedia:
"About 1000 B.C., warlike tribes began to migrate from northern Europe to what is now Germany. They wandered from place to place, and lived by hunting and farming. During the 100's B.C., they moved south to the Rhine and Danube rivers, the frontier of Rome. The tribes included the Cimbri, Franks, Goths, Vandals, and Germani. The Romans called all the tribes Germani, and called the tribes' land Germania."
"In A.D. 9, Rome tried to conquer Germania, or Germany, but Germanic warriors crushed the Roman armies. By 400 A.D., the power of mighty Rome had begun to collapse. During the 400's, Germanic armies poured into the weakened West Roman Empire and broke it up into tribal kingdoms. The kingdom of the Franks became the largest and most important."
"In 486, Clovis, a Frankish king, defeated the Roman governor of Gaul (now France). Clovis extended his territory by defeating other Germanic tribes in Gaul and parts of western Germany. He became a Christian, and also introduced other Roman ways of life into his kingdom."
"The greatest Frankish ruler, Charlemagne, came to power in 768. He established his capital in Aachen. Charlemagne expanded his kingdom east to the Elbe River. In 800, Pope Leo III crowned him emperor of the Romans."
"In 843, the Treaty of Verdun divided Charlemagne's empire into three kingdoms, one for each of his grandsons. Louis II (called the German) received lands east of the Rhine River. His kingdom became what is now Germany. The western part, later called France, went to Charles I (the Bald). Lothair I received the middle kingdom, a narrow strip that extended from the North Sea to central Italy. He also kept the title of emperor."
"In 911, the German branch of the Frankish royal family died out. By then, the German kingdom consisted of five powerful duchies (territories ruled by a duke)--Bavaria, Lorraine, Franconia, Saxony, and Swabia. The German dukes elected Conrad I of Franconia as king. In 919, Conrad was followed by Henry I (the Fowler) of Saxony, whose family ruled until 1024. With the founding of the Saxon dynasty, Germany became permanently separated from France."
"Henry's son, Otto I (the Great), drove invading Hungarians out of southern Germany in 955, and extended the German frontier in the north. Otto also won control over the old middle Frankish kingdom, which gave him the right to claim the title of emperor. In 962, Otto was crowned emperor in Rome. This marked the beginning of what later was called the Holy Roman Empire."
"The Holy Roman Empire, under the Saxon emperors, became the most powerful country in Europe. It also had the best-organized government. But under the Salian dynasty (1024-1125), a long power struggle began that left the empire weak and disorganized. In 1075, Pope Gregory VII disputed the right of Emperor Henry IV to appoint bishops. Many German princes sided with the pope, and fought a series of civil wars against the emperor. The princes grew stronger, and by the 1300's the emperor was almost powerless."
"The Hohenstaufen emperors (1138-1254) re-established some order. But after the dynasty died out, great disorder returned. The German princes did not elect an emperor until 1273. He was Rudolf I of Habsburg (or Hapsburg). Rudolf seized Austria from a rival prince, and it became the main duchy of the Habsburg family. After Rudolf, emperors of various families reigned. Beginning in 1438, the Habsburgs reigned almost continuously until 1806, when the empire came to an end."
"Before the fall of the West Roman Empire in 476, Roman towns stood along and near the Rhine and Danube rivers. These towns were centers of trade between the Romans and the Germans. They included what are now Bonn, Cologne, Regensburg, Trier, and Vienna. After the fall of Rome, the towns almost disappeared. Trade gradually developed again under the Saxon and Salian emperors. The old Roman towns grew again, and new ones appeared around the castles of princes and bishops. Many cities became so large and rich that they gained self-government."
"Beginning in the 1100's, the powerful German nobles forced the peasants to become serfs and work for them. The serfs were not free to leave their lord's estate."
"In regions where towns grew, as in the Rhineland, many serfs were granted freedom to become town laborers or merchants. In such regions, serfdom gradually disappeared. Serfdom lasted longest where there were few towns, as in Prussia, where it lasted until 1807."
There were three kinds of states in the Holy Roman Empire. There were the princely states--duchies, margraviates, etc.--each a little hereditary dynastic monarchy in itself, such as Saxony, Brandenburg, or Bavaria. There were ecclesiastical states--bishoprics, abbacies, etc.--in which the bishop or abbot, whose rule was of course not hereditary, conducted the government. A large portion of the area of the empire consisted of these church states. Thirdly, there were the imperial free cities, some fifty in number. There was in truth also a fourth category, made up of some thousands of imperial knights, noblemen of minor consequence who possessed a few manors, but who belonged to no state, recognizing the supremacy of none but the emperor.
The history of Prussia really begins in 1417, when the Hohenzollern family came to rule the margraviate of Brandenburg, which was centered about the city of Berlin. Brandenburg had been founded in the Middle Ages as a "mark" or "march" of the Holy Roman Empire, to fight the battles of the Holy Empire against the then heathen Slavs. Brandenburg would become the nucleus of modern Prussia.
In 1517, Martin Luther, a German monk, began to attack many teachings and practices of the Roman Catholic Church. Nobles, peasants, and townspeople joined this Protestant movement, called the Reformation, and it spread quickly. Some princes were sincere reformers, but others became Protestants only to gain church property. Many peasants hoped the movement would free them from their lord's control. They revolted against the lords in the Peasants' War of 1524-1525, but were brutally crushed.
Neither the pope nor Emperor Charles V could stop the Protestant movement. In 1555, Protestant princes forced Charles to accept the Peace of Augsburg. This treaty gave each Lutheran and Roman Catholic prince the right to force those under him to accept his religion. It also established a division of church lands between the two religions. The Germans, because of conditions in the Holy Roman Empire, were the one large European people to emerge from the religious conflict almost evenly divided between Catholic and Protestant. Lutheranism prevailed in the north, and Catholicism prevailed in the south. The area where Schildesche and Joellenbeck are located, and our Landwehr ancestors probably lived, undoubtedly became Lutheran at this time.
During the mid-1500's, the Roman Catholic Church began the Counter Reformation. In this movement, the church won back many Protestants by peaceful means or by force. By 1600, relatively few Protestants were left in Austria, Bavaria, and parts of Bohemia and the Rhineland. The rest of Germany remained chiefly Lutheran.
Modern Prussia appeared, and the Hohenzollern family began its rise to the leadership of a united Germany, in the seventeenth century when a number of territories came together in the hands of the Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg. Through the play of inheritance so common in the Holy Roman Empire, the Hohenzollerns fell heir, in 1614, to three small territories in western Germany. They were the Duchy of Cleves, on the Rhine at the Dutch border; the County of Mark, just to the southeast of Cleves; and the County of Ravensburg, located about 180 miles west of Berlin. Each of these three small territories were separated from the main mass around Brandenburg by many intermediate German principalities. Schildesche, the ancestral home of our Landwehr family, lay in the County of Ravensburg.
Four years later, the Hohenzollern family inherited the Duchy of Prussia, which was located a considerable distance to the east of Brandenburg. Today, part of this area lies in northen Poland, and part in the U.S.S.R. This was the first significant step in the territorial growth of modern Prussia.
By 1600, great tension had developed between the Protestant and Roman Catholic forces in Germany. They began to arm for a new struggle. In 1618, a Protestant revolt in Bohemia set off the Thirty Years' War, the greatest of all European wars before the time of the French Revolution. It began as a civil war between the Protestants and Roman Catholics in the German states. But before the conflict was over, most of the nations of Europe were involved, and the war had become a general struggle for territory and political power. Most of the battles were fought on German soil.
The war ended with the Peace of Westphalia, signed at Munster (forty miles west of the Landwehr home) and Osnabruck (twenty-five miles northwest of the Landwehr home) in 1648. At the Peace of Westphalia, the Hohenzollern family further expanded their holdings when they received Farther Pomeriania, which abutted Brandenburg to the east and gave the Hohenzollerns a port on the Baltic. At the same time, they also received the large bishopric of Magdeburg, which lay immediately south and west of Brandenburg.
The Landwehr family surely suffered as a result of this war. Physically Germany was wrecked by the war. Cities were repeatedly sacked by mercenary soldiers. Whole areas were systematically looted to maintain foreign armies. By 1640, the population of Berlin had fallen from about 14,000 to 6,000, and that of Frankfurt-on-the-Oder from 12,000 to 2,000. Hundreds of villages had been wiped out. Wolves roamed over the countryside. The peasants, murdered, put to flight or tortured by soldiers, ceased to give attention to farming. Agriculture was ruined, so that starvation followed, and with it came pestilence. In Joellenbeck, the village where our Landwehr family would later live before they emigrated to America, only seven families survived the plague that struck during this war. Even revised modern estimates allow that in many extensive parts of Germany as much as a third of the population may have perished. Art, science, trade, and industry declined. Except for some free cities, Germany was a patchwork of hundreds of states ruled by princes and nobles. It took almost two hundred years for Germany to recover from the effects of the Thirty Years War. And the animosity between the Protestants and the Catholics would live on for centuries, as evidenced by the attitudes of the Landwehr family, and other German immigrants, who came to Missouri from northern Germany more than two hundred years later.
The Hohenzollerns built a large, well-trained professional army and a capable civil service. With their army, they defended their state and expanded it. Through their civil service, they improved farming and industry, and filled their treasury with tax money. They built canals, schools, and roads, and promoted the arts and learning.
By 1650, then, the dominions of the House of Brandenburg were in three disconnected masses. The main mass was Brandenburg, with the adjoining Pomerania and Magadeburg. There was a detached eastern mass (the Duchy of Prussia), and a small detached western mass on or near the Rhine (the three small territories, including Ravensburg, acquired in 1614). The middle and western masses were within the Holy Roman Empire. The eastern mass was outside the Empire. To connect and unify these three masses became the underlying long-range policy of the Brandenburg house.
