CHAPTER 6

“Wilhelm Friess” in Strasbourg

Despair at the sight of enemies on all sides and from all nations, which is so vividly depicted in “Friess II,” had also been the experience of the embattled Calvinists of Antwerp in March 1567, whose defeat would have been made more humiliating by the stridently Lutheran prophecy of “Friess I” circulating in the Netherlands at that time. Seven years later, a rejoinder appeared in the form of the second prophecy of Wilhelm Friess. Although the earliest known editions of the second prophecy appeared in 1577 and were primarily printed in Basel, we have been able to establish Strasbourg as the place, 1574 as the year, and Reformed Protestantism as the religious environment of the origin of “Friess II.” The connection between “Friess I” and “Friess II” that links Antwerp and Basel remains to be explained.

The second prophecy of Wilhelm Friess not only offers a number of parallels with other sixteenth-century texts but also appears to be part of a literary tradition of prophetic writing in southwestern Germany. As this chapter will argue, the second prophecy of Wilhelm Friess, one of the most intricately constructed prophecies of the sixteenth century, employs multiple symbolic systems to address the interrelated theological and geopolitical concerns of Strasbourg’s Calvinist sympathizers at a specific time. The prophecy united geographic, astrological, and religious symbolism with a skill that rivaled those who, in 1574, were completing a new astronomical clock for Strasbourg’s cathedral. While evidence for the authorship of “Friess II” is largely circumstantial, it suggests an unusual combination of religious sympathies, international orientation, intellectual ability, and rhetorical talent. There was just such a person with these characteristics among the clock builders’ associates in Strasbourg, which offers intriguing evidence that the author of “Friess II” was Johann Fischart, the most skilled satirist of sixteenth-century German literature.

The Home of Wilhelm Friess’s Second Prophecy: Sources and Templates

Apart from the quotations drawn from Lichtenberger and “Dietrich von Zengg” noted in the previous chapter, “Friess II” does not borrow passages from other works. Instead, it makes use of elements and structures found in earlier prophecies, what we might call their “prophetic vocabulary” and “prophetic grammar.” The allegory of worms, beasts, and birds in the first prophecy of Wilhelm Friess encoded its political significance using living creatures, a prophetic vocabulary that was common since at least the Middle Ages and that Rupert Taylor considered as one of the two basic symbolic systems of prophecy.1 The second prophecy of Wilhelm Friess took a different approach, and several elements of its symbolic inventory are consistent with a geographic origin in the region around Strasbourg.

As Barnes has noted, “Friess II” has elements in common with a late fourteenth-century text known as the “Gamaleon” prophecy.² The text of that prophecy has a complex manuscript transmission history in various Latin and German versions, and it is usually regarded as a German reaction against the pro-French prophetic compilation of Telesphorus of Cosenza that appeared in 1386.³ The “Gamaleon” prophecy enjoyed a resurgence of interest beginning in the mid-sixteenth century. It was printed as a separate pamphlet only once, by Johann Prüß of Strasbourg in 1538, but it also appeared in the collections of primarily Latin prophetic material published by Wolfgang Lazius in 1547, by Matthias Flacius in 1556, and by Johannes Wolf in 1600. The similarity in some motifs is so specific that it is likely that the author of “Friess II” knew “Gamaleon.” Like “Friess II,” it opens with a young male vision guide waking the narrator and directing him to view the four cardinal compass points. In “Gamaleon” as in “Friess II,” letters are interpreted, objects are cast down, and terrible armies approach.

While “Friess II” appropriates prophetic vocabulary and grammar from “Gamaleon,” they are used to express a very different message, as the two prophecies are nearly opposite in outlook. The casting down of a golden chalice and a child’s head in “Friess II” are the gruesome conclusion of a perversion of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, while the young vision guide himself dashes his own crown against the ground in “Gamaleon.” The letters engraved on a demonic general’s armor in “Friess II” represent the plagues he will inflict, while the images engraved on each piece of the vision guide’s crown in “Gamaleon” represent seven ages of the world. Similar to the hellish Völkerwanderung of “Friess II,” a cruel and terrible host comes from the north in the “Gamaleon” prophecy, while a false emperor wearing red armor and holding a bloody sword and a royal orb arrives from the south and is crowned by the pope. In “Gamaleon,” however, the terrible people from the north, whose reign will last until the end of the earth, apparently represent the German nation against whom none can prevail. The conclusion of the “Gamaleon” prophecy invokes an emperor, selected in infancy, who will regain the Holy Land, subdue his neighbors, overthrow the papacy and clerical power, and establish Germany as the seat of secular and spiritual dominion. The anticlerical sentiment, regard for an all-powerful German emperor, and hopeful outlook found in the “Gamaleon” prophecy are much closer to the optimism of “Friess I” than to the hopeless desolation of “Friess II.” Despite the differences in intention between these prophecies, we can recognize in “Gamaleon” a template for prophetic expression that influenced the writing of “Friess II.” Just as the citations borrowed from “Dietrich von Zengg” derive from a version whose two earliest editions were printed in the southwestern cities of Freiburg and Speyer, the only pamphlet edition of “Gamaleon,” printed in Strasbourg in 1538, also suggests an origin in the German southwest.

Those who composed, read, and revised “Friess II” in the 1570s were clearly interested in Strasbourg and in prophecies from decades earlier. Over forty years before the honorable man of “Friess II” knelt with his surviving followers on the banks of the Rhine near Strasbourg, the radical reformer Melchior Hoffman (ca. 1495–1543) had declared that Strasbourg was the prophesied New Jerusalem.4 One of the most esteemed members of Hoffman’s circle of Strasbourg prophets was Ursula Jost, whose visions Hoffman regarded as equal to those of the Old Testament.⁵ The Strasbourg printer Balthasar Beck printed Jost’s visions together with a preface and conclusion by Hoffman in 1530. Jost made use of a visionary vocabulary reminiscent of that found in “Friess II,” with armies, riders, banners, blasts delivered on horns or trumpets, and helpful vision guides contrasted with the approach of threatening figures. In the twenty-third vision, Jost sees the wounded Christ, as well as armies and a man with a horn: “After the previous crowd of people, a great swarm of riders came riding who had peacock feathers hanging from their hats down their backs. I saw further that a large man came after these armies who let forth a strong and mighty blast of wind and water.”6 In the seventy-second vision, Jost sees the approach of a man in black armor riding a white horse, as well as “two standing next to him who smeared the armor dark and black so that he might travel safely through all lands.”⁷ The menacing figure in the sixty-fifth vision is another horribly large man who becomes embodied as a darkness that is accompanied by black tears full of the Eucharist wafer.⁸ Melchior Hoffman died in prison in Strasbourg in 1543, but those who were influenced by him and his prophets, such as the “Lichtseher” movement of Martin Steinbach, continued to be active in and around Strasbourg into the late 1560s.⁹

One of the most recent prophecies of the German southwest prior to “Friess II” was a pamphlet that claimed to have been written in a Franciscan cloister in the year 1300 and whose one edition was printed by a pseudonymous “Christian Mundanus” of Freiburg in 1573. This prophecy of “Brother C.” describes the death of Martin Luther and the Interim quite exactly and then predicts three invasions by a false emperor from the north and south.¹⁰ The French king would be deposed for persecuting the faithful but would then be returned to the throne as a true Christian, and a certain Friedrich of the Rhine would come to power (probably Friedrich III, Count Palatinate of the Rhine in 1559–76). All of this would be accomplished by 1578 or 1579, after which a time of peace and harmony would follow.

In addition to a particular prophetic vocabulary that appears to have been popular in southwestern Germany, “Friess II” has an internal structure that might be summarized as a guided prophetic vision according to the four cardinal directions. Not only is this structure found in “Gamaleon,” but it occurs already in Ezekiel’s temple vision (Ezek. 40–48) and, to a lesser extent, in Zechariah’s vision of chariots drawn by horses of various colors (Zech. 6). The advent of ominous riders on various types of horses was a motif of the Apocalypse (best known from the woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer) and had also stirred the interpretive faculties of Martin Luther and Melchior Hoffman.¹¹

The compilations of Martin Luther’s writings as prophetic oracles that were published by Johannes Timann and others following Luther’s death in 1546 emphasized a pessimistic view of German geography. As a consequence of greed and ingratitude, Luther foresaw that the “Turk, Pope, and uncountable other devils from Italy, Spain, and all corners of the world” would come and plague the German people.12 Already in a commentary on Psalm 124 written in the early 1530s, Luther had compared the situation of the evangelicals to that of Israel under siege: “We Jews are like the lowest dregs of the globe and the least part of humanity. Men rise against us, that is to say: Kings, princes, rich men, wise men, and whatever is powerful and great in this age, all of them neither oppose nor hate us in the usual way, but rather they rise up against us in the attempt to overwhelm and annihilate us completely. If you turn to the east, to the northeast, to the north and south and consider how many and how powerful are the kingdoms that surround us, and with what deadly hatred they are angered against us, clearly we can be considered to be little sheep encircled by a hundred wolves, and every moment they try to attack and devour it.”¹³ Although “Friess II” takes sides with Calvinism against Lutheranism, it shared the pessimistically prophetic view of German geography found both in Luther’s writings and in compilations of his teachings published after his death.

Strasbourg and Sacraments: The Religious Home of “Friess II”

Strasbourg, like Nuremberg, enjoyed the status of a free imperial city. It was the leading economic force of its region, and its significance as a printing center extended throughout southwestern Germany. After the Reformation took hold in Strasbourg in the early 1520s, the city became known for its religious tolerance, and several radical leaders and various Anabaptist groups found a home there for a time. Beginning in the 1530s, however, the city became harsher in its treatment of nonconformists, and most Anabaptists eventually left the city or were reconciled with mainstream Protestantism. Under the city’s guiding reformer, Martin Bucer, Strasbourg charted a middle course between Martin Luther and Jean Calvin from the 1520s into the 1540s. From 1538 to 1541, Calvin lived in Strasbourg and attempted to win Anabaptists for the Reformed cause. In later decades, Calvinism in Strasbourg continued to receive strength from Huguenot refugees, as French Calvinists were frequently forced to seek refuge abroad.

In the decades after 1550, however, any Strasbourg resident who chose to follow the tenets of Jean Calvin found himself or herself in an increasingly untenable position. The years following Bucer’s death in 1551 were marked by confessional conflicts between Lutheranism and Calvinism in which orthodox Lutheranism gained firm control over the city’s institutions. Reformed teaching and worship were threatened with official sanction and eventually forbidden. Calvinist worship had been increasingly forced underground after 1563, and in February 1577, the city authorities closed the French Calvinist congregation that had served Huguenot refugees. Johann Sturm, the first rector of Strasbourg’s humanistic school (which he had led since the 1530s) and a proponent of Reformed views, was forced from his office in 1581, after years of conflict with the second generation of the city’s Lutherans leaders.14 By the end of the century, Strasbourg had committed itself to orthodox Lutheranism and prohibited its citizens from participating in Reformed services.¹⁵

The confessional conflicts that set Lutherans against Calvinists in Strasbourg included a fierce controversy in the 1570s over the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. In the New Testament accounts of Christ’s last meal with the apostles on the evening before Christ’s arrest and crucifixion, Christ “took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to them, and said, ‘Take; this is my body.’ Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, and all of them drank from it. He said to them, ‘This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many’” (Mark 14:22–24 NRSV). What exactly Christ meant when he said, “This is my body,” has been subject to vigorous discussion up to the current day. All strains of Protestantism rejected the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, which held that the Eucharistic wafer and wine were transformed into the substance of the body and blood of Christ, but common ground among Protestants in the matter of sacramental theology nevertheless remained elusive. In 1529, Luther and Zwingli had debated the merits of two alternative interpretations that would eventually become one of the key points of separation between the Lutheran and Reformed churches. Zwingli and the Reformed churches after him held that the bread and wine of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper were only symbols of Christ’s body and blood. Luther, however, insisted on a literal understanding of “This is my body,” which he interpreted as implying Christ’s real presence in the sacramental emblems. Luther’s position was eventually formulated as the doctrine of ubiquity, which many Reformed regarded as little better than transubstantiation and a return to Catholic heresies. Attempts to negotiate a sacramental theology agreeable to both sides over the following decades ended in failure, and the differences became increasingly bitter. Already in 1532, Martin Luther recorded that followers of Zwingli had mocked the Lutherans as flesh eaters and blood drinkers.16 This was precisely how the Calvinists of Antwerp insulted their Lutheran fellow citizens in the fall of 1566, as Godevaert van Haecht recorded (“gy syt vleescheters en bloetdrinckers”).¹⁷ The L version of “Friess I” is the only version to include a reference to the Whore of Babylon and her bitter cup, a frequent image in contemporary polemics concerning sacramental theology, providing another point of contact between “Friess II” and the L version of “Friess I.”¹⁸ In the environment of acrimonious contention over sacramental theology, the Lutherans enshrined the doctrine of ubiquity in the 1577 Formula of Concord, which struck many Calvinists as all but establishing an alliance between Catholics and Lutherans.¹⁹

It was perhaps inevitable that “Friess II,” a prophetic expression of a society’s hopes and fears, written in the religious environment in or near Strasbourg in the 1570s, would take the sacrament, the central symbolic ritual of Christianity, as its central concern. In the final scene before the narrator’s collapse, the narrator witnesses the monstrous leader of the combined armies holding a golden cup full of blood in one hand and a young child in the other. The demonic general drinks the blood and consumes the child, then casts the remnants down to be trampled. This perversion of the sacrament is not only Saturnine and diabolical but also a rather uncharitable Reformed reading of Catholic and Lutheran sacramental theology. If the blood of Christ were truly present in the sacramental wine, participation in the sacrament would involve a ghoulish drinking of blood. If Christ had a deified human nature from the moment of his birth and if his body were truly present in the sacramental wafer, the Eucharist must involve the ghastly act of consuming a child. Such were the doctrinal stakes for Calvinists while Lutheran theologians were constructing the Formula of Concord, and its ratification in 1577 helped make the second prophecy of Wilhelm Friess newly relevant and a steady seller for Samuel Apiarius in Reformed Basel for the following decade.

“Friess II” arose in a religious environment that was shaped by hardening confessional boundaries between competing Protestant denominations and, as Lutheranism gained the upper hand, a growing sense of besiegement. Particularly in terms of civic power, the Calvinists of Strasbourg were a weak and embattled flock, and “Friess II” refers to the few survivors of the envisioned catastrophe as a “klein haufflein Folcks,” a “little gathering of people” (78). One finds a similar outlook among Dutch Protestants under Habsburg oppression, who used the same and similar terms, referring to themselves as “the ‘little gathering of the elect,’ the ‘congregation covered in blood’” that had been driven out of the land to live in exile.20 Another image common among Calvinists in the Netherlands compared the Reformed to the Hebrew slaves in Egypt or to the exiled Israelites wandering in the desert.²¹ The “hidden transcript” of “Friess II” is its veiled critique of Lutheran sacramental theology at a time when Lutheran orthodoxy was decisively establishing its hold over Strasbourg’s civic and religious institutions. For the Calvinists of Strasbourg in 1574, doctrinal concerns had an additional political dimension. If we follow the interpretation of Aby Warburg, the planets in astrological prognostications can also refer to particular social classes.²² In this reading, the author of “Friess II” saw not just enemies on all sides but also attacks emanating from particular occupations and social classes: Saturn would represent church prelates, Mars would lead the armored might of secular power, and Mercury would direct the scholars and other learned figures in their oppression of the embattled Reformed congregation.

The Geopolitics of “Friess II”

Beyond local struggles, Calvinists in Strasbourg in 1574 faced threats on a larger geographic scale. In France to the west, the struggle between the Reformed Huguenots and the Catholic king Charles IX was, on the whole, going quite badly. The Duke of Anjou, who was the king’s younger brother and a commander of the Catholic armies, had led the royal forces to victories at Jarnac and Moncontour in 1569. The truce signed in 1570 had been shattered in August 1572 by the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, in which thousands of Huguenots had been killed in Paris. Following the outbreak of renewed hostilities, the Duke of Anjou led a months-long siege of La Rochelle, the Huguenots’ most important center of power in France. The siege ended with a negotiated settlement only because the Duke of Anjou, as Henry of Valois, had been elected king of Poland. Henry began his reign in February 1574, but it would not last long: Charles IX died in May, and Henry left Poland in June 1574. He was crowned King Henry III of France in February 1575.

The religious and political events threatening the Reformed cause in the early 1570s were reported widely in pamphlets printed throughout Germany.²³ Pamphlets published in 1573, which reproduced a letter allegedly written from Poland by Cardinal Charles de Lorraine to French legates, further incited fears of invasive religious persecution. According to these pamphlets, the cardinal proposed an alliance—between Spain, France, and the pope—that would eradicate the Huguenots of France and the Calvinists of the Netherlands, assist the Spanish invasion of England, and prepare a worse fate for the German Lutherans than the French Huguenots had experienced on St. Bartholomew’s Day in 1572.24

However credible such pamphlets may have been, actual developments were ominous enough to justify a bleak outlook among Calvinists in 1574, particularly in Strasbourg. In addition to their losing struggle against Lutheranism at home, their antagonism toward Lutheranism and enmity toward Catholics left the Reformed seemingly surrounded by enemies: German and Scandinavian Lutherans to the north; French Catholics to the west; and Habsburg Catholics and, beyond them, Ottoman Turks to the east. The impending arrival in France of Henry III, former leader of the victorious Catholic armies, from Poland to the northeast, would have been an omen of even worse persecution to come.

The geography of religious oppression faced by the Calvinists of Strasbourg in the 1570s is not only reminiscent of what the Calvinists of Antwerp had experienced in 1567, when they had found themselves surrounded on every side by enemies from every nation, but is also precisely the geography of horror in the second prophecy of Wilhelm Friess. In “Friess II,” with its demonic invaders from the west, north, east, and northeast, the monstrous leader approaching from the northeast was meant to be understood as Henry III arriving from Poland, a figure with whom Calvinists were already familiar. While the orientalist Francis Balodis considered “Friess II” to be based on the Russian czar Ivan IV’s violent waging of the Livonian War (1558–83), an understandable interpretation for a Latvian scholar writing in 1941, the second prophecy of Wilhelm Friess dealt with more immediate concerns of Calvinists in southwestern Germany.²⁵ While later editions of “Friess II” omitted any reference to Strasbourg, at least one contemporary reader suggested a similar geopolitical interpretation in marginal notes that identified the approaching armies as the Poles, a coalition of the pope with Spain and Austria, the Turks, and the Tatars.²⁶

Two of Samuel Apiarius’s 1577 editions of “Friess II” preserved the significance of Poland, calling the work a prophecy upon “Poland and Germany, Brabant and France,” but the later editions of Apiarius omitted Poland from their titles, until one of the last Basel editions of 1587 added it again. After Henry had ascended the throne of France, the reference to Poland lacked political significance and it was dropped from later title pages. Fortunately for French and German Protestants, the fears expressed in “Friess II” proved unfounded, as Henry III took a moderate approach to religious affairs during his reign as king of France. After a Dominican monk assassinated Henry III in 1589, pamphlets announcing the news in Germany commemorated the king with a few lines of verse, allegedly a century old, that had prophesied his death.27

It is conceivable that part of the motivation for composing “Friess II” in 1574 was to oppose Henry’s election to the French throne or to hinder his return to France through German territory. There were precedents for enlisting prophecies in the cause of dynastic politics: for example, the “Alofresant” prophecy, which foretold glorious things for a certain Habsburg heir, may have arisen in the contested election of 1519 that ultimately brought Charles V to the imperial throne.²⁸ If “Friess II” was meant to oppose Henry III, it would not be the only prophetic comment on his coronation. The oration of Jan Dymitr Solikowski to the French and Poles in support of Henry III’s election and greater cooperation between the two nations, published in Basel in 1575, closed with an excerpt from Lichtenberger’s Prognosticatio that foresaw the conjunction of the lily and the eagle of the north, to which Solikowski added a point-by-point explication to prove that the prophecy referred to Henry III.²⁹ The prophecies of Paul Grebner, known only from later sources but dated to 1574, also addressed Henry’s reign in Poland and France.³⁰

If the leader of the combined armies in “Friess II” represented Henry III of France, then the “honorable fine man” from the south with a gray beard, a “golden book in his left hand and a golden trumpet in his right hand” is likely a reference to Jean Calvin. Calvin had been headquartered south of the Alps in Geneva, and for many German Calvinists, Switzerland was an unspoiled island amid the corruption of imperial Europe.³¹ In “Friess II,” the honorable man’s followers come from over the mountains and emerge from the forests, and they are identified by their black clothing. Not only is Calvin the eponymous originator of black clerical garb, but sixteenth-century Lutheran sources report seeing the devil wearing black robes like Calvin’s.³² Calvin had died in 1564, so his followers a decade later had to rely on his doctrine and writings. Fittingly, the implements of teaching borne by the “honorable fine man,” his trumpet and his book, stand in stark contrast to the diabolical ritual objects held by the leader of the combined armies.

The second prophecy of Wilhelm Friess was not the only German-language work of 1574 that connected the persecution of Protestants and the election of Henry III. That year also saw, for example, publication of a “thorough and true description of how the reformed religion has been persecuted in France by Henry II and his sons Francis II and Charles IX up to the present day,” to which was attached a report on how “Henry, Duke of Anjou, was elected and crowned king in Poland and then departed to Venice.”33 In Strasbourg, Bernhard Jobin printed a report in 1574 on Henry’s election in Poland and, in the next year, published one French and two German editions of the Reveille matin attributed to the French Protestant Nicolas Barnaud. The Reveille matin had been intended to convince the Polish nobility not to elect Henry to the Polish crown.³⁴ Referring to the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the author of the Reveille matin wrote, “No house or family in the entire world is so besmirched by such shameful disloyalty and betrayal as this House of Valois,” and the author encouraged the Polish nobility to elect a “cow herder or an ass driver” rather than “one of these murderers or bloodhounds.”³⁵ These works share not only a pro-Calvinist, anti-Valois outlook but also the identity of their compiler or translator: Bernhard Jobin’s brother-in-law Johann Fischart (1545/46–91).

Johann Fischart, Author of the Second Prophecy of Wilhelm Friess?

Johann Fischart is today acknowledged as the most talented satirist and one of the most important German writers of the sixteenth century. Born in Strasbourg, Fischart likely began his schooling at Johannes Sturm’s academy. Fischart’s student travels took him to the Netherlands, Paris, Italy, and perhaps England as well, in the late 1560s. On his return to Strasbourg in the early 1570s, Fischart began working with his brother-in-law and publishing his early works, primarily religious polemics. Fischart remained in Strasbourg until the summer of 1574, when he traveled to Basel to complete his legal education.³⁶

The wanton attribution of anonymous sixteenth-century works to Johann Fischart has a long history that is rightly met with more skepticism now than it was in the nineteenth century.³⁷ One hesitates to add to the tradition, especially on the basis of circumstantial evidence. “Friess II” lacks any of the features that might provide positive evidence for Fischart’s authorship, such as using his motto (“Alors comme alors”) or one of his known pseudonyms, and it largely lacks Fischart’s characteristic inventive use of language and playful word creation. Despite this, the accumulation of evidence brings Johann Fischart into question as the author of “Friess II.” What we know about the composition and outlook of “Friess II” corresponds to Fischart’s biography, views on religion and politics, and authorial method, and there are connections between the prophecy and Fischart’s works of the 1570s.

Fischart was in the right places at the right times to acquire the knowledge and form the views that are expressed in the second prophecy of Wilhelm Friess. Fischart was born in Strasbourg and spent much of his life there. The texts that served as sources and templates for “Friess II” circulated within his vicinity, and he shared the prophecy’s high estimation of his native city. After secondary schooling in Worms and university study in Tübingen from October 1564 to July 1566, Fischart traveled to Paris to study there in 1567, but he most likely left Paris later in 1567, after the expulsion of Protestants by royal decree.38 From Fischart’s report, in his 1571 Life of St. Dominic, that he had heard a Dominican preach in Flanders, a region that includes Antwerp, it is clear that Fischart’s travels had taken him to the Netherlands by then, most likely either just prior to his studies in Paris or on his return from there in 1567.³⁹ Fischart was thus in the vicinity of Antwerp around the time of or shortly after the dramatic conflict between the Calvinists and the city’s other residents, when the L version of “Friess I” was in circulation in the Netherlands. Following additional study in Siena, Fischart returned to Strasbourg and worked there in the workshop of his brother-in-law Bernhard Jobin from 1570 until 1574, which was also Fischart’s most productive literary period.⁴⁰ In the early summer of 1574, Fischart left Strasbourg to complete his academic qualification in Basel, where he was named a doctor of law in August 1574.⁴¹ The stations of Fischart’s biography, including Antwerp, Strasbourg, and Basel, are also those of the second prophecy of Wilhelm Friess.

Fischart’s path from Antwerp to Strasbourg runs curiously parallel to that of Mathias Flacius, who has appeared already as a possible link between Gnesio-Lutheran polemic prophecies and Antwerp at the time of the Dutch Revolt. Flacius had come to Antwerp in the autumn of 1566 to tend the Lutheran congregation in Antwerp, but he was forced to flee by the outbreak of violence in 1567.⁴² Flacius sought refuge first in Frankfurt and then in Strasbourg, where he remained until 1573, two years prior to his death in 1575. In 1571, Tobias Stimmer created a portrait of Flacius that was printed on the press of Bernhard Jobin along with laudatory verse written by Johann Fischart.⁴³ Fischart’s verse praises Flacius’s continuing willingness to face the enmity of the world in the fight for truth, although Fischart did not share Flacius’s unyielding commitment to Lutheran orthodoxy. Another broadside with Flacius’s image printed by Jobin in 1577 contains a somewhat more extensive biography in Latin that notes all the stations of Flacius’s life, including his time in Antwerp.44

Johann Fischart’s religious allegiance was as complicated as the religious affairs of Strasbourg itself. In 1541, his father had been a witness at the wedding of the prominent author and spiritualist nonconformist Sebastian Franck. Fischart purchased Franck’s collection of proverbs in 1584, and Fischart’s Die Geleherten die Verkehrten of the same year was based on writings by Franck, which had earlier been read and owned by Fischart’s family.⁴⁵ During the 1570s, as Lutheran orthodoxy was being enforced in the civic institutions of Strasbourg, Fischart was becoming increasingly aligned with Calvinism.⁴⁶ Bruno Weber refers to Fischart as a “devout Calvinist,” and Wilhelm Kühlmann calls him a “resolute partisan for the Calvinists,” although Kühlmann sees Fischart as avoiding internal Protestant disputes until 1579.⁴⁷ One notes, however, that Fischart appears to have dissented on the point of sacramental theology with a particular vehemence. He opposed the Lutheran Formula of Concord, and in his 1576 verse interpretation of the Strasbourg cathedral’s animal figures, he wrote that Catholic usage turned the sacramental chalice into the “Whore of Babylon’s cup, fitting for the Antichrist.” Adolf Hauffen, the leading scholar on Fischart in the early twentieth century, surmised that Fischart’s criticism of the doctrine of transubstantiation was so excessive that it also injured Lutheran belief in Christ’s real presence in the sacrament and offended the civic leaders of Strasbourg.⁴⁸ While Fischart’s personal religious convictions during the 1570s are not entirely unambiguous, his growing allegiance to Calvinism and understanding of sacramental theology are in accordance with the perspective of “Friess II.”

In addition to his religious views, Johann Fischart’s international interests and sympathies are quite clear from early on in his literary career. He lent his support to the French Huguenots in their struggle against the Catholic monarchy and to the Dutch Protestants in their struggle against Spain.⁴⁹ Fischart aided their causes by his own propagandistic writing and by translating anti-Catholic and pro-Protestant works from French and Dutch, such as the Bienenkorb des heiligen römischen Immenschwarms (Hive of the Holy Roman bee swarm) of Philips van Marnix. Fischart also held Switzerland in particular regard.⁵⁰ In his 1576 verse tract Das Glückhafft Schiff von Zürich (The fortunate ship from Zurich), Fischart recalled and encouraged the renewal of the alliance between Strasbourg and the Swiss cities of Zurich, Basel, and Bern. Fischart also took note of the reign of Henry III, and Weber cautiously suggests Fischart as the author of texts on Henry III published in two broadsides from the press of Bernhard Jobin.51

One might object that Johann Fischart, author of Aller Practick Großmutter (Grandmother of all practicas), a parody of astrological prognostications, could hardly have created a work like “Friess II,” which has astrological symbolism at its core. However, Fischart’s Aller Practick Großmutter does not offer a rational critique of astrology but, rather, satirizes popular gullibility, printers’ avarice, and the methodological incompetence of the astrologers.⁵² Fischart could not have written Aller Practick Großmutter, first published in 1572 and expanded in 1574, without first acquiring considerable knowledge of popular astrology. While the iconography of Mercury as pipe player that was seen in the astrological symbolism of “Friess II” was relatively uncommon, Fischart was familiar with it: his Geschichtsklitterung, his reworking of Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantegruel first published in 1575, refers to the “Mercurial pipe player who lulls hundred-eyed Argus asleep.”⁵³ Other passages in the Geschichtsklitterung refer to Saturn as the devourer of children or orphans. Fischart’s monogram, JFGM, standing for Johann Fischart genannt Menzer, also appears in a mythologically coded resolution as Jove Fovente Gignitur Minerva, “Minerva is born with Jupiter’s favor.” Fischart knew the Lutheran antiastrological contraprognostication of (probably pseudonymous) Urban Luginsland, published in Strasbourg in 1569 and 1574 following earlier editions in the 1550s. From references in his Catalogus catalogarum, a satirical list of real and fictional books, it is clear that Fischart also knew contemporary “planet books,” popular compilations of astrological knowledge, as well as the authoritative ephemerides of Cyprian Leowitz.⁵⁴

Fischart was not reluctant to engage with astrological symbolism and prognostication in his own writing. In 1573, Bernhard Jobin printed a broadside addressing the supernova of 1572 from a devotional perspective. The verse text treats the appearance of this “comet” as an omen of the world’s end and calls on Christ to save his Völklein, his “little band of people” from the Beast and from tyranny. The preceding prose introduction, which Hauffen also attributes to Fischart, notes that the “comet” portends drought, war, plague, and fever, among other kinds of misfortune, and states that astrological prognostications are not worthless when they are in accordance with God’s will and scripture.⁵⁵ In 1578, in response to recent appearances in the heavens, Bernhard Jobin printed a broadside that combined a woodcut presumably by Tobias Stimmer and a text attributed to Johann Fischart. The text calls two recent lunar eclipses and a recent comet God’s miraculous preachers (not Wanderprediger but Wunderprediger), whose responsibility for earthquakes, pestilence, and war goes without saying.56 The broadside devotes most of its attention to a discoloration of the sun among the clouds that was recently observed near Tübingen. Echoing the prophetic vocabulary of “Friess II,” the broadside describes how soldiers and cavalry in black armor had seemed to emerge from a cloud and travel to the east, followed by a gigantic man and then another army splattered in blood. Such appearances in the heavens, the broadside concludes, are God’s warning to the world and should be met with a willingness to repent.⁵⁷

Johann Fischart also had a specific cause for contemplating the stars over Strasbourg in 1574: the completion in late June of that year of the cathedral’s astronomical clock. It was built by the mathematician Konrad Dasypodius and decorated by Tobias Stimmer, an artist whose woodcuts had frequently appeared in print together with texts from Fischart. The publication of laudatory broadsides and pamphlets marked the clock’s completion.⁵⁸ For a broadside published by Bernhard Jobin in 1574, Fischart himself composed a poem to accompany an illustration of the astronomical clock.⁵⁹ Strasbourg’s clock was a technological marvel. In addition to marking the passage of the hours, each day of the week was represented by one of the seven planets in human form drawn by wagons, a form often seen in the “planet books.” The clock included both a celestial globe and an astrolabe that displayed the positions of the planets, which were flanked on each side by tables of solar and lunar eclipses visible from Strasbourg for the upcoming decades.⁶⁰ The first lunar and solar eclipses displayed on each table are those for December 1573 and November 1574, the same two depicted on the title page of the earliest edition of “Friess II.”⁶¹

Between the tables of lunar and solar eclipses stood a circular calendar whose outer disc rotated once each year while the inner disc rotated once in a hundred years. The calendar displayed the day, year, number of years since the Creation, and information that was necessary for determining feast days. The corners behind the circular calendar each bore a representation of one of the four historical world empires: Assyria, Persia, Greece, and Rome.⁶² The iconography of these four figures is, in most cases, threatening: Assyria is represented as a turbaned man whose shield bears a winged lion; Persia is represented as a crowned man whose shield displays a bear; the Greek representative has a laurel crown and a shield with a winged, four-headed leopard; and Rome is represented as a helmeted warrior whose shield displays a beast with ten horns—one notes the allusions to the beasts seen in the visions of Daniel and the Apocalypse (Dan. 7:1–7, Rev. 13:1–2). At the center of the calendar, unmoving, was a circular map of Germany on a rectangular field, most prominently displaying the Rhineland.63 Each side of the map was labeled with a cardinal direction, while Strasbourg’s cityscape occupied the center. As Fischart composed verses praising the clock and its capabilities, it is clear not only that he knew the configuration of the heavens for 1574 and the anthropomorphic symbolism through which the planets were represented but also that he had a particular cause to contemplate Strasbourg’s place in the world in that year. The geography of “Friess II,” with four armies approaching Germany, corresponds to this representation of Strasbourg and Germany surrounded by four world empires, which suggests that “Friess II” can be seen as an apocalyptic ekphrasis inspired by the astronomical clock in Strasbourg.

In addition to astronomical and astrological works, Fischart also knew the prophetic pamphlet literature of which “Friess II” is an example. The “Parat oder Beraitschlag,” an introductory chapter in the Geschichtsklitterung, mentions Lichtenberger and refers to an episode in the Sibyl’s Prophecy.⁶⁴ Fischart owned a copy of Savonarola’s Oracolo della renovatione della chiesa (Prophecy concerning a renewal of the church), as well as a prophetic explication of mysterious characters discovered in fish (VD16 J 217). Fischart left numerous marginal notes and underlinings in his copy of this work, most prominently at a passage predicting that God would bring all the peoples of the world together.⁶⁵ In the mid-1570s, Fischart worked on a translation of Wolfgang Lazius’s work De gentium migrationibus, including chapters on the ancient Germanic tribes and the relationship of their languages to Greek and Latin. (Another of Lazius’s works, the Fragmentum vaticinii, contains excerpts of many prophecies, including Lichtenberger’s Prognosticatio, “Dietrich von Zengg,” and “Gamaleon,” but it is unknown whether Fischart knew this work, and the excerpts found in Lazius’s compilation are not from the same versions or same passages as those found in “Friess II.”) Fischart’s reference to Lazius’s De gentium migrationibus in his Catalogus catalogorum places the migration of peoples in the context of cardinal directions and eschatology, calling it a “prophecy that the Japhetic language of the north will decree laws and measures to the whole earth shortly before the end of the world, and also that monarchies have always moved from south to north.” The prophecy is attributed to “D. Wickart of Mainz,” which is possibly a reference to Fischart himself.⁶⁶

One might be reluctant to regard Johann Fischart as the author of “Friess II” because the prophecy lacks the typical linguistic features and spelling conventions used by Fischart in Jobin’s workshop and shows no sign of the inventive word creation that is the signature of Fischart’s style. Language and orthography may be less of a concern, as the early F3 edition, probably printed around 1577, was likely not printed in Bernhard Jobin’s workshop, where Fischart was employed only until 1574. A later typesetter or one working at another press need not have followed Fischart’s patterns of language and orthography. Fischart’s linguistic artistry characterizes much of his work, but not all of it. For example, Fischart’s prologue to the Emblematum tyrocina of Mathias Holzwart lacks the playful word invention typical of Fischart, as does Das Glückhafft Schiff von Zürich.67

In its original version, the second prophecy of Wilhelm Friess was perhaps not entirely lacking in wordplay. The monstrous leader of the demonic armies and the fine honorable man with a gray beard are implicitly compared by their emblems and what they do with them. The demonic general holds a child and a golden cup, which he empties, while the righteous leader has a trumpet and a golden book, from which he teaches the people until his preaching is completed. “Friess II” notes his completion with the phrase “Und als er nun außgeleret hat” (and when he completely taught them), using the unusual construction außgeleret (86). That word is a homophone of ausgeleeret, a more common word meaning “drained, emptied” that could easily describe the monstrous general’s draining of the chalice full of blood. The printed text in the earliest editions uses not this word but forms of austrinken (60), however.

While the second prophecy of Wilhelm Friess may not display Fischart’s typical wordplay, it does have several other features of his writing. As others have noted, Fischart’s works often addressed current affairs in Strasbourg and responded quickly to the literary marketplace. Fischart enjoyed creating complex puzzles in which to conceal the meaning of a text from his audience, and his works combined popular elements with learned ones, such as the mythological encoding extensively used by Fischart. Vulgarity and grotesque excess were other characteristic features of Fischart’s work.⁶⁸ All of these traits can be found in “Friess II,” a work that hides its meaning behind a combination of learned mythological symbols and the form of popular prophecy and whose central message is found in a scene of demonic cannibalism—surely a grotesquely excessive way to critique sacramental theology. Wilhelm Kühlmann notes Fischart’s “vigorous emphasis on the narrator,” which can perhaps be seen in the contrast between the impersonal reporting of future events in “Friess I” and the creation of a narrative voice who reports on a vision in “Friess II.”⁶⁹

Fischart’s contemporaries were already aware that he published many works anonymously or under pseudonyms. Johann Jacob Frisius’s 1583 revision of Conrad Gessner’s catalog of literary works included a brief biography of Fischart that notes that Fischart “also wrote many other things that were published with his name either changed or omitted.”70 As Jan-Dirk Müller notes, Fischart created his works in dialogue with other texts more than did any other sixteenth-century German author, through “translation, paraphrase, amplification, parody, allusion, citation and other methods, usually—but not always—in comical distortion.”⁷¹ To the extent that we understand the composition and publication of “Friess II,” its development matches the methods of Johann Fischart. As Fischart was accustomed to revise his own work and publish it in expanded versions, he may also be the redactor of “Friess II” who added excerpts from Lichtenberger and “Dietrich von Zengg,” along with the pointed remark against the Lutheran clergy.

If the interpretation of “Friess II” and the attribution to Fischart are correct, the second prophecy of Wilhelm Friess may not have been the first time that Fischart addressed the threat he saw in Henry III in the guise of a geopolitical prophecy. Fischart is regarded as the author of an anonymous tract that Jobin printed in 1574 (using the pseudonymous imprint “Valetin Gutman von Wildtberg”), entitled Von erwölung des Königs in Poln / samt kleiner weissagung ihres nachgestelten erholten dancks (On the election of the king in Poland, together with a small prophecy of their subsequent gratitude).⁷² The author of this verse tract, who castigated the Poles as fools, grievous sinners, and dishonorable oath breakers for allying with France rather than Austria so soon after the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, foresaw the same kind of ignominious end for Henry III that Elias had foretold for Jehu and Jezebel.⁷³ If the French and the Polish, bordering Germany on the east and west, should think to make a joint attack, their lands would be visited by “armies and whatever belongs to and is necessary for such things: armor, weapons, shield and spear,” not to mention artillery and cavalry.⁷⁴ The pamphlet compares the future fate of the Poles to the fates of the Anabaptists of Münster and the peasants who rebelled during the Peasants’ War, and it foresees a fearful invasion from Russia, “burning your whole land, murdering both wife and man.”⁷⁵ Any promise of aid from the Turks is unreliable, because as soon as an impoverished Poland no longer offers tribute, the Turks will join in the invasion.⁷⁶ The Poles’ only recourse lay in repentance, faith in Christ, and leading a life of good works, including the correct use of the Eucharist instead of the heresies taught by Caspar Schwenckfeld and the pope.⁷⁷ The pamphlet warns that Germany, which is beset no less than Poland by sin, could also expect punishment, but it adds that the Germans had never in their history broken their oaths.78 Although the predicted invasions are of similar severity, Von erwölung des Königs in Poln sees Henry of Valois as the trigger of attacks on Poland from Germany and other nations, while “Friess II” treats the same king’s ascension in France as the final step in Germany’s utter devastation.

As a citizen of Strasbourg who had contact with Antwerp and Basel, was engaged with astrological symbolism in 1574, sympathized with Calvinism and rejected the Lutheran view of the sacrament, and had the habit of expressing himself anonymously through a combination of the learned, the popular, and the grotesque, Johann Fischart was in the right place at the right time and had the right rhetorical talent, perspectives, and sympathies to come into consideration as the author of “Friess II.” Moreover, several points of similarity exist between “Friess II” and other works attributed to Fischart. While the case for Fischart’s authorship is circumstantial, the similarities are so numerous and so striking that the author of the second prophecy, if it was not Johann Fischart, must have been something like Bernhard Jobin’s other brother-in-law.

If we accept the attribution of the second prophecy of Wilhelm Friess to Fischart—and there are grounds for caution; one noted expert on Fischart, Ulrich Seelbach, finds it entirely implausible—we gain a somewhat different understanding of the most accomplished satirist of sixteenth-century German literature.⁷⁹ We discover an earnest, rather than playful, Fischart, vehemently rejecting the Lutheran doctrine of ubiquity and engaging in confessional debates some years earlier than previously thought, and Fischart’s travels to Paris and Flanders in 1567 gain additional significance for his later work. Above all, if we read the prophecy of Wilhelm Friess as an apocalyptic ekphrasis on Strasbourg’s astronomical clock, we discover a Johann Fischart whose usual biting sarcasm gave way to an earnest pessimism in view of the ominous portents he observed in the late spring of 1574.