The Saxon Elector August I, “the strong”, has gone down in history as a great charmer, patron and baroque potentate. But he also had another side. Although he was the presidency of the “Corpus Evangelicorum” in the Holy Roman Empire, he converted to the Catholic faith in 1697 in order to increase his chances in the Polish election as king. He did so with exorbitant bribes, ruined his countries in the Great Northern War (1700-1721) and relied on tough Realpolitik until his death in 1733 in order to remain King of Poland as Augustus II.
One of his victims was Johann Gottfried Rösner (1658-1724). The wealthy merchant, who among other things ran a schnapps distillery, was one of the dignitaries of the city of Thorn (today Torun) in West Prussia and had held office since 1703 as one of the up to four mayors of the city. In 1724 he held the presidency of this body. This gave him a key role in an affair that caused outrage throughout Europe as the “Thorn blood court”.
The merchant’s son Rösner had attended the famous grammar school in Thorn and, after studying law in Leipzig and Frankfurt an der Oder, had married the daughter of a mayor. With that, he rose to the better circles of the city, which he – as best he could – steered through the horrors of the Great Northern War and a plague epidemic.
Since the Reformation, the overwhelming majority of the citizenry have adhered to the Lutheran faith. This made Thorn, like Danzig (Gdansk) or Elbing (Elblag), Protestant centers in Poland, which was predominantly Catholic. Because the west of Prussia had already broken away from the Teutonic Order state in the 15th century and joined Poland as an “autonomous German corporate state under the Polish crown”. After the order’s secularization in 1525, he retained his privileged position, which included the freedom to practice religion. This made Poland-Lithuania a model for tolerance in Europe.
But the Counter-Reformation did not stop at the noble republic either. After the victory in neighboring Warmia, the pressure also increased on Thorn. Catholic mass was said in most churches. The city received an expensive garrison, the Crown Guard, and a Jesuit college, where many children of the surrounding Polish nobility went to school. The citizens’ children, on the other hand, attended the city’s Protestant grammar school, which Rösner, as a former student and “protoscholarch”, dedicated himself to caring for.
During a Catholic procession on July 16, 1724, the situation escalated. Because a Jesuit student was angry about the participants of a protestant funeral service, he was arrested by the Thorn city guard. As a result, his fellow students abducted a student from the Protestant high school to their college. Citizens immediately ganged up in front of the house, who were reinforced by craftsmen who were returning from their beer gardens.
Rösner tried to defuse the situation. The Jesuits complied with his request to release the student. The commander of the city’s citizens’ militia, however, refused to disperse the crowd, citing an impending intervention by the Crown Guard. But the mayor left it at that. Finally, the besiegers stormed the school and monastery and devastated the facility. A statue of the Virgin Mary is said to have been burned. Only the arrival of the Polish soldiers put an end to the spook.
Since the city administration apparently made no effort to bring the ringleaders to justice, the Jesuits instituted proceedings at the Court of Augustus II in Warsaw. That dispatched a commission that arrested 23 city notables. The verdict was announced on October 30. Rösner and his colleague Jakob Heinrich Zernecke and twelve other citizens were sentenced to death, the Marienkirche, the last Protestant church, was handed over to the Cistercians, half of the council seats were occupied by Catholics, and the Protestant grammar school was dissolved.
At first it looked as if the executions would be suspended. Anyone who converted to Catholicism was released immediately. Rösner asked for time to think it over, but finally told his judges: “Have fun with my head, Jesus must have the soul.” Nevertheless, he is said to have hoped for a pardon from the king on his last walk.
He hoped in vain. Scaffolding had been erected in front of Thorn’s town hall, in front of which Polish soldiers took up positions on December 7th. With Rösner there were ten more convicts who mounted the scaffold. There, before the eyes of the horrified citizens, their hands and then their heads were cut off.
If Augustus the Strong believed that ostentatious faith would strengthen his position, he was soon disappointed. For the European public, the “Thorn blood court” of Rösner and his co-defendants immediately became proof of anachronistic intolerance. Hundreds of newspaper articles and pamphlets denounced the atavistic act of violence, which generations after the end of the Thirty Years’ War had no longer been believed to be possible.
Poland’s rivals won a powerful argument. Tsar Peter the Great called Poland “the most barbaric nation in Europe”. George I of England protested in Warsaw and before the Reichstag in Regensburg. The Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm I even considered declaring war on the neighboring country. The image of Poland as an “unhistorical region in which wildness and intolerance reigned” solidified, writes the Eastern European historian Martin Schulze Wessel.
The effect was demonstrated by none other than the enlightened Voltaire, who, with reference to the “Thorn blood court”, saw the Russian army as a guarantor of religious freedom in Poland. When the Tsarist Empire, Austria and Prussia divided Poland among themselves for the first time in 1772, the Frenchman declared this a groundbreaking of tolerance.
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