I was thinking of telling you today about some of the thoughts, customs, and convictions of the robbers. After all, it’s hard to form a clear picture of such bands from story after thrilling story about figures with names like Schinderhannes, Lips Tullian, or Damian Hessel.2 However, more interesting and more important than knowing the life stories of a few robber captains is understanding how the bands arose, which principles they upheld among themselves, how they waged their battles against kaisers, princes, and commoners, and later against the police and law courts. In this vein I must reveal one of the best and most important of the robbers’ secrets, which we’ll talk about later, namely the language of the robbers and their robber script, their so-called Zinken, or secret signs. This Rotwelsch language alone tells us a quite a lot about the origin of the robbers. Next to German, Rotwelsch contains more Hebrew than anything else, evidence of the close ties the robbers had with the Jews from early on. Later, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, some Jews themselves became feared leaders. At first their involvement with the bands had been mainly as fences, or buyers of stolen loot. Since they had been barred from most honest trades in the Middle Ages, it’s not hard to see how this came about. After the Jews, it was the Gypsies who played the greatest role in the emergence of robber bands. It was from the Gypsies that these crooks learned their peculiar brand of artistry and cunning, along with how to commit a myriad of brash and daring misdeeds. From them they learned to turn crime into a profession, and eventually absorbed a number of their artful expressions into Rotwelsch. From both Jews and Gypsies the rogues and robbers also adopted quite a few unusual superstitions as well as hundreds of magic spells and recipes of the Black Arts.
Early in the Middle Ages, the robber bands’ main business was highway robbery. Because the princes were unable to keep the roads safe for travel, banditry, under certain conditions, became almost a proper occupation. This is indeed rather the way we view the robber bands, with whom the great merchant caravans often had to negotiate a certain sum to secure free passage through an otherwise perilous region. So it’s no wonder that very early on the robber bands developed a sort of gallant or martial disposition. I will read to you now a genuine robber oath from the seventeenth century, which goes like this:
On the head and soul of our robber captain, I swear: 1. that I will obey all of his commands; 2. that I will remain faithful to my comrades in all their undertakings and ventures; 3. that I will attend any such gathering that the captain may appoint, here or at any other location; my absence must otherwise be authorized; 4. that I will be on call and eagerly awaiting orders at all hours of the day or night; 5. that I will never leave my comrades in danger, but will stand with them until the last drop of blood; 6. that I will never flee before an equal number of adversaries, but will fight bravely to the death; 7. that we will readily offer a helping hand to anyone who may be captive or sick, or who has suffered some other misfortune; 8. that I will never leave one of my comrades, be he wounded or dead, in enemy hands if I can do otherwise; 9. that, should I be captured, I will confess nothing and, most importantly, will not reveal or betray the location or dwellings of my confederates, even should it cost me my life. And were I to break this oath, may I be beset by and succumb to the greatest of plagues, the most horrible punishments in this world or the next.3
Such chivalrous oaths are consistent with the information we have about other bands, namely, that they had their own administration of justice, the so-called Plattenrecht, or gang law — in Vienna today crooks are still called Plattenbrüder, or gang brothers. We even know of several bands that had elaborate hierarchies. There were privy councilors, senior magistrates, governing councils; some robber captains were even given titles of nobility. The leaders of one famous Dutch gang carried crowbars in their hands as a sign of prestige. The strong loyalty within a single band was in proportion to the low cunning of the tricks sometimes played by one band against another. One of the strangest was the trick the robbers Fetzer and Simon played on Langleiser and his associates, when he wouldn’t let them take part in the planned heist of a banker in Münsterland. In revenge, Fetzer and Simon and their companions committed a string of daring robberies in that area just before Langleiser’s, so that everyone was on the lookout for trouble and the planned hold-up could not be risked.
Betrayal was the worst crime of which a robber could be found guilty. The power of the robber captains was often so great that captured comrades who had only just informed against them retracted the accusations before the captains had even been confronted. In my interrogations, said a famous policeman, I witnessed the incredible power that a robber’s mere presence, his mere intake of breath exerted over others tempted to confess. Nevertheless, there were always some gang members who would betray their comrades in order to be treated more mercifully. The strangest such offer came from a famous robber, the Bohemian Hans, who promised, in exchange for his freedom, to write a compilation of crime lore that could be used to prevent crime in the future. This friendly proposal was not accepted; in those days there were already many similar books. The most famous was the Liber Vagatorum, or the Book of Vagabonds and Beggars, which was first published in 1509 and included a preface written by Luther,4 part of which I will read to you now.
This little book on the villainy of beggars was initially published by someone who, without giving his name, referred to himself simply as a man experienced in the art of deceit. He needn’t have told us so; the booklet bears it out. It’s a good thing that such a book should be not only printed but widely read, so that people can see and grasp how mightily the devil rules over this world, and perhaps will become wiser and learn, once and for all, to tread warily. However, the Rotwelsch language that appears in the book comes from the Jews, as it’s filled with Hebrew words; anyone who knows Hebrew will notice this.
Then Luther goes on to describe other advantages of the book: one learns that it’s better to fight beggars with charity and compassion instead of forfeiting, having fallen for their roguish tricks, five or ten times as much money as one would voluntarily give. Of course, these beggars, as they appear in the book, were not genuine beggars as we conceive of them today, but very dangerous characters who moved about in hordes and, like swarms of locusts, infested the city, often feigning illness or frailty. Not for nothing did cities in the Middle Ages appoint so-called beggar bailiffs, whose job was nothing more than to oversee the unending influx of vagrant beggars, thus minimizing any harm to the city. There were many fewer resident beggars than tramps from foreign lands, and to distinguish between them and the robbers was often as difficult as telling the difference between some tradesmen and robbers. Some pretended to be peddlers, lugging around their wares only in order to deceive people as to their true profession, thievery. As we have already said, the business of being a crook has changed over the course of time. The artful feigning of illness, a common practice in the Middle Ages, vanished over time as the influence of the Church weakened and alms grew more scarce. We can no longer fathom the number of tricks people used back then to prey on the sympathy of their fellow men. Such false afflictions had the advantage of giving the most dangerous burglars and murderers a semblance of harmlessness. There were people who attended church and, during the benediction, made themselves foam at the mouth by chewing soap, as though they were suffering convulsions. They then collapsed to the floor right before everyone’s eyes, ensuring that they would receive donations from the devout. The steps of the church were strewn with such riff-raff. You would find people there showing off arms painted with false shackle wounds: they made people believe they had been on a crusade, had fallen into the hands of heathens, and had languished for years as galley slaves. Others would shave the top of their heads, claiming they were priests on a pilgrimage and that robbers had stolen their belongings. Still others shook rattles, as lepers did in those days, so that people would not draw near but could leave them alms from a distance. To get a better sense of these wild and dangerous mobs, one can look to the secluded square where the same sort of riff-raff gathered in Paris at the time. Bleak and desolate, it was popularly known as the Court of Miracles because it was where the blind would regain their sight, the lame walk, the deaf hear and the dumb speak once more. There was no end to the list of ruses they attempted. Besides pretending to be deaf, which made it so easy for the crooks to overhear the location of things to steal, a particular favorite was acting the imbecile. For instance, if a hoodlum had the misfortune to be caught keeping lookout, he simply played the idiot and acted like he didn’t know how he got there or why.