"Blood Pentecost" at Hannoversch Münden!


On June 5, 1623, the imperial general Johan Tsaerclas von Tilly...



...with eight regiments in front of the small but well-fortified town of Hannoversch-Münden, located at the confluence of the Werra and Fulda as the Weser...:



In the town is a Danish garrison of 800 soldiers commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Eusebius von Lawich and his deputy Lieutenant-Colonel Clout (or Glotte).

This occupation had been imposed on the 2568 inhabitants against their will - and when Tilly now asks the city to surrender, the citizens are immediately ready to spare life and property.

The Danes, however, prevent this - for reasons that are not entirely selfish!

Because the Danish deputy commander Clout...



... is a deserter - he had previously served as a cavalry captain in Colonel Anholt's Tilly regiment...



If the city is handed over, Clout faces imprisonment - and inevitably death on the gallows!

The Danes therefore reject the demand for surrender.

A contemporary source reads it this way:

"Alone Tilly tried / to get the city with an accord / insofar as he sent a trumpeter to the city at 3 times / but no other resolution was made by the colonel people's office Glotten / than that he meant to fight until death / and the garrison poured out many mocking and defamatory words against the outsiders"

With the Danes, Clout seems to have been the strong man and the real commander of Lawich only for the sake of form.

Tilly then encloses the city with his troops and has the walls shot down with artillery from the other side of the Werra.



A chronicler in the city counts a total of 748 cannon shots.



On June 9, 1623, the bombardment reaches its full force and lasts without interruption from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Then it's storming!

The regiments of Colonels Gronsfeld...



...and Fürstenberg...



... advance to attack...



...and are beaten back ten times against the walls by the desperately defending Danes!

At the Werrator stands a Danish cannon, which is operated by citizens of the town, who were master linen weavers, Asmus Teufel...



...leads and which is loaded with chopped lead and nails to be fired whenever the charging ones get close.



The eleventh attack of the decimated regiments is finally successful, the cannon has nothing left to shoot.!

Then everything happens very quickly - the Danish resistance suddenly collapses - in just 15 minutes the small town is completely taken! Tilly has recorded around 100 dead and 300 wounded in the assault and the ensuing, albeit brief, street fighting.

The two Danish commanders are killed in action.

The Imperialists are looking all over the city for the master linen weaver Teufel, to whom they owe most of their fallen soldiers - but he is able to save himself by swimming through the Fulda and flee to Göttingen under cover of night.

In retaliation for the rejected demand for surrender, Tilly leaves the city to his vengeful soldiers - and what they are doing there is nothing less than anticipating the "Magdeburg Wedding", eight years later!

More than 1,800 residents of the city are brutally slaughtered.



Let's let the chronicler speak again:

"Wives and children innocently died so miserably and were killed, including pregnant women and nursing underage children, and neither old nor sick people who were spared, but at and after the incident bit into the next day, all those who died of the soldiers Occurring, without which God particularly preserved, cut down with hoes [halberds], therefore the same long time before they give up their spirit, have to torture themselves, some are thrown into hot water and burned, some fell down from the tower and other high ears, some powder seized and martyred with it, some bound and roasted against the fire...



...some ropes were wrapped around their heads, some were hanged up, some had their eyes gouged out, sick weak people were killed on their sick beds, young children were stabbed with spears and left to wriggle on them, a number of distinguished old councilors of 70, 80 and more years, also a stone-old skipper, so hundred and eight years old, and almost childish, also cut down, some on the tower by the city wall smoked with fire and powder, the dead bodies in the streets partly exposed...


...among them also a pregnant woman's son, dead but the fruit, salva reverentia (= it is permissible to say that), half stuck in the fee and still stirred, a number of fat people that pain and intestines, others the heart cut out of the body, partly thrown down from the roofs like birds. (...)"
When Tilly's big competitor Wallenstein reads about these events, he thinks Tilly wasted her time:

"Gen. Tilly writes to me that he has burned Münden and is planning to attack, I don't like to see it, because that will prevent us from doing the main work."
Since this happened at Pentecost in 1623, it went down in the history of the city as "Blood Pentecost".