CHAPTER 7

The Last Emperor and the Beginning of Prophecy

“Friess I” versus “Friess II”

The previous chapters have allowed us to connect the numerous editions of “Friess I” printed in Nuremberg in 1558 with the appearance of “Friess II” in Basel beginning in 1577 by establishing a chain of textual and historical connections through Antwerp in the 1560s and Strasbourg in the 1570s. Rather than two isolated events twenty years apart that share only a name and a genre, “Friess I” led to the publication of “Friess II” through a sequence of cause and effect and a network of personal relationships. The first prognostication of Wilhelm Friess, printed by Frans Fraet in Antwerp, had mounted a critique from within the hegemony of Habsburg power, using the narrative elements of imperial prophecies to attack Habsburg rule over the Netherlands. In Nuremberg, however, “Friess I” appeared as a text that reiterated and stabilized narratives of the existing order of society at a time when their foundations had become uncertain. The L version of “Friess I” continued working out a specifically Lutheran loyalist position with respect to secular authority. Following the humiliating Calvinist surrender of 1567 in Antwerp, the second prophecy of Wilhelm Friess reacted to the galling accuracy of the Lutheran prophecy by turning the logic of “Friess I” on its head, much as Fischart did with Catholic saints’ lives in his Protestant polemics and with astrological argumentation in Aller Practick Großmutter. Some parts of the web of connections between the two prophecies are clear and robust, while others are fainter or only partially visible. If one strand proves untenable—for example, if it could be definitively shown that Johann Fischart was never in Flanders during 1567—that connection could be replaced by a less visible alternative, such as the quite likely possibility that Fischart read about the tense standoff between Calvinists and Lutherans that had taken place in Antwerp.

While “Friess I” and “Friess II” both claim to be prophecies found with Wilhelm Friess of Maastricht after his death, they had different religious contexts and therefore distinctive views of the future. Lutheran apocalypticism, as Barnes has shown, foresaw gloom and decay for Germany that would be repaired only by Christ’s Second Coming.1 Rather than undermining medieval fears of the world’s imminent end, the Reformation heightened them, leaving Lutherans looking in increasing anticipation for the fulfillment of biblical prophecies.² Following this tradition of Lutheran apocalypticism, “Friess I” presented the traditional end-time drama as still valid in the religious and political context of the late 1550s, with a bishop and emperor playing their customary roles in the fulfillment of eschatological hopes. The L redaction, printed in 1566–68 in a time of hardening confessional boundaries, explicitly condemned Calvinism along with Catholics and Anabaptists. “Friess II,” in contrast, represented Reformed Protestantism of the late sixteenth century. Although Samuel Apiarius’s editions omitted the prophecy’s warning to the Lutheran clergy (the one overt reference to confessional strife in “Friess II”), the second prophecy was printed predominately in Basel, a center of Swiss Reformed Protestantism, and by a printer whose voluminous output included many works of Reformed theology and devotion. Where “Friess I” had recalled the Angelic Pope of pre-Reformation prophecies in the form of a highest bishop, the Reformed churches had eschewed the office of bishop, and the fine honorable man in “Friess II” holds no ecclesiastic office. After the Calvinists’ interests had been entirely ignored by the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, emperors and bishops were figures not of hope but of oppression.

Reformed apocalypticism in the later sixteenth century usually lacked the Lutheran sense of pessimism and expectation of decline, instead displaying, in most cases, a characteristic militant optimism and expectation of gradual improvement. There were notably few Calvinist counterparts to the many Lutheran apocalyptic pamphlets published at the time.³ One exception is found in the work of Wilhelm Misocacus, a Dutch Calvinist refugee living in Danzig, who disguised anti-Habsburg agitation as astrological prognostications from 1579 to 1591.⁴ Perhaps due to the unique circumstances of Strasbourg in 1574, the bleak outlook of “Friess II” represents a departure from the Calvinist apocalypticism found in other sources of the same period.

As a consequence of their allegiance to opposite sides of the widening confessional divide, the understanding of imperial geography in each prophecy is fundamentally different. For Georg Kreydlein and his customers in 1558, the imperial city of Nuremberg, lying halfway between Vienna and Maastricht, easily took its place along the central axis of empire. Basel, however, where Apiarius maintained his workshop, had not been part of the Holy Roman Empire since 1501. From the point of view of Switzerland’s Reformed Protestants, Vienna and Madrid were aligned with Rome in the Antichrist’s own triple alliance.5 For customers of Samuel Apiarius in Basel, Wilhelm Friess’s home of Maastricht, newly engaged in the struggle to leave the Habsburg political sphere, was a potential fellow member of an independence-minded bloc at the margins of the empire.

“Friess I” viewed the Holy Roman Empire hopefully and from within. For all the radical intentions of Frans Fraet in Antwerp, the prophecy that was popularized in Nuremberg was one that saw the culmination of history in the continued validity of traditional medieval narratives about church and empire. “Friess I” consequently saw the prophesied disasters as the occasion for introspection, unity, and repentance. In contrast, “Friess II” surveyed the geography of imperial Europe at a distance and foresaw only blood-drenched catastrophe in its future. In “Friess II,” the nobility do not fulfill national destiny. They are instead alien tyrants. “O you miserable people,” the prophecy concludes in Apiarius’s editions, “what kind of foreign people has risen up among you? They are not rulers but destroyers, not protectors but oppressors of orphans and widows throughout Germany” (appendix 2, 112–14). The only hope foreseen in “Friess II” lay in escaping from imperial narratives, as the Swiss had done decades earlier and the Dutch had just recently started to do. As viewed from the Netherlands, the Holy Roman Empire would become a foreign country by the early seventeenth century.⁶ For “Friess II,” salvation is not the culmination of empire but exit from it.

The Long Afterlife of “Wilhelm Friess”

The later receptions of the first and second prophecies of Wilhelm Friess are as different as their origins and outlooks. Fortunately for the inhabitants of Germany, the years 1558–63 did not turn out to be as dire as the first prophecy of Wilhelm Friess had predicted, although a severe famine and the outbreak of the Dutch Revolt did make “Friess I” a printable commodity again in 1566–68, at least after some revision. The days of the Last Emperor as a figure in the Lutheran apocalyptic narrative were limited, however. In a book published in 1596 and again in 1597, the Lutheran clergyman Andreas Schoppe (1538–1614) condemned false prophets who claimed to know the time of the Second Coming. He specifically attacked the invocation of the Last Emperor by “Wilhelm Friess from Nose-Wipe,” as clear evidence that the prophecy was the devil’s handiwork. Responding to the Last Emperor’s abdication, Schoppe asked in indignation, “How could such a pious, God-fearing, and peaceable secular ruler and a loyal caretaker, nurturer, and protector of the true church and religion lead a holier life than by remaining in office and serving God and man according to his calling?”7 For mainstream Lutheranism, the swan song of the Last Emperor appears to come not long after 1568. Johannes Wolf did include a Latinized version of “Friess I” in his Lectionum memorabilium, but Wolf’s excerpt of the prophecy included only the sections on clerical poverty. Except for Schoppe’s mocking rejection and Wolf’s antiquarian collection, the record of popular interest in “Friess I” falls silent after 1568.

Active engagement with the second prophecy of Wilhelm Friess continued rather longer. Where the text and title pages of Georg Kreydlein’s editions of “Friess I” remained much the same, Samuel Apiarius and other printers of the second prophecy continually altered the title woodcuts and title formulations, combined the prophecy with other texts, and moved the year of Wilhelm Friess’s death into the more recent past. An anonymous edition printed in 1579 dates Friess’s vision to that year, while the 1586 edition of Samuel Apiarius specifies that Friess had his vision on 28 December 1585 and died in 1586. Johann Beck’s Erfurt edition of the same year omits the date of Friess’s vision and the fact of his death altogether (appendix 2, 15). In similar fashion, later editions preserved the details of the “horrible and shocking prophecy” but altered the context in which it was presented. For editions of “Friess II” in the later 1580s, Apiarius adopted the title page configuration from practicas, annual astrological prognostications with title illustrations composed from small woodcuts of the year’s governing planets. Apiarius’s 1587 edition (F17) illustrated the title page with Mars and Mercury and changed the title to Ein Grausame unnd Erschröckliche Pratica oder Propheceyung (A terrible and shocking practica or prophecy). Some of the latest editions (F24–F26) took the generic migration one step further by titling the pamphlet “Recent Events” (using the protojournalistic formula of Newe Zeittung) and combining the second vision of Wilhelm Friess with signs of the Last Days and a report of notable events in France. Where the earliest title pages of “Friess II” had invoked sober reflection, later illustrations turned to alarming scenes of greater emotional force. But by the late 1580s, the support of another author or genre was needed to make the prophecies of “Wilhelm Friess” marketable.

“Friess II,” unlike “Friess I,” did not begin as a Dutch text, but it was translated into Dutch at least once. In 1587 and 1588, one German and one Dutch edition (F27 and F28) combined “Friess II” with the “Short Prophecy for 1587–88 of the Pilgrim Ruth Hidden in the Forest,” a prophecy that elsewhere is attributed to “Johannes Doleta.” The Dutch edition from the press of Cornelius Claesz in Amsterdam identified itself as a translation from German.8 This translation was later combined with a prophecy of Paul Grebner in five Dutch editions published between 1601 and 1607 (G1–G5) and attributed variously to Grebner or to “Jerrassemus van Eydenborch” or “Johannes Ulpus.” The “Pilgrim Ruth” was an authorial pseudonym used by Johannes Lichtenberger in the first editions of his Prognosticatio a century earlier, while “Johannes Doleta” is the same as “John of Toledo,” the authorial name sometimes attached to the twelfth-century “Toledo Letter.” The “Short Prophecy” printed together with “Friess II” in these editions is a combination of the “Toledo Letter” and a few extracts from Lichtenberger’s Prognosticatio.⁹ Following a comprehensive study of the centuries-long transmission of the “Toledo Letter,” Dirk Mentgen concluded that the prophecy was absorbed into the controversy over the second deluge predicted for 1524 and that it did not reappear after that.¹⁰ The “Toledo Letter” was only lying dormant, however. The “Johannes Doleta” version of the “Toledo Letter” was printed in at least five pamphlet and four broadside editions in 1586–88, and another version was printed in 1629.¹¹ Prophecies, it seems, are not forgotten once unfulfilled. Instead, they hibernate for a time and then return.

Andreas Schoppe regarded “Friess I” as a prophecy that had failed in most points, and he rejected its hope for a Last Emperor, but the prophecies of doom offered by “Friess II” fared better in later decades. Wilhelm Eon Neuheuser, author of numerous prophetic works between 1594 and 1626, gave “Friess II” an optimistic reading in 1618 as a prophecy that true Christians would escape from papal oppression and “finally gain the advantage under a large white flag in which perhaps stands the sign of Tau, as has already begun to be done in the Netherlands.”¹² Neuheuser was referring to Ezekiel 9:4, where the inhabitants of Jerusalem who lament the sins committed there are marked on the forehead with a sign, which some traditions and translations identified as the Greek letter tau. Those who do not receive the sign are slaughtered. In a scene reminiscent of “Friess II,” the prophet Ezekiel falls on his face at the sight of this vision, but the explicit reference to this chapter is found in “Friess I.”

“Friess II” enjoyed a longer continuous reception than “Friess I,” partly because the Germany of the following decades more often resembled a desolate battlefield than the site of a golden age of peace and harmony. The latest known edition of “Friess II,” published in 1639, reflects international involvement in the ongoing Thirty Years’ War: the first demonic general in the 1639 edition commands his army to wait specifically for its “Danish allies” (appendix 2, 25). Considering the devastation wrought by foreign armies on many German regions during the Thirty Years’ War, it is not surprising that “Friess II” would strike observers as an all-too-accurate vision of the times in which they lived.

The influence of the second vision of Wilhelm Friess can be seen not only in the number of editions but also in how it provided a template for later prophecies. Just as “Friess II” made use of elements of earlier prophecies, the prophetic grammar and vocabulary of “Friess II” reappeared several times in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While the precise degree and path of influence is uncertain, the use of a similar model in which a vision guide shows scenes to a narrator according to the cardinal directions is strongly reminiscent of “Friess II.” The visions of Johannes Kose published in 1601, for example, offer precisely dated visions (the first on a Sunday morning in 1591, the second from 16 to 22 February 1599) in which a vision guide shows the narrator evil spirits and their human followers who assail a small band of pious Christians from the west, followed by the Christians’ later salvation approaching from the east, before the vision guide disappears and the narrator regains consciousness.¹³ In the Dutch vision of Intje Jansz of Oosterzee, frequently reprinted after the earliest known edition of 1623, the narrator encounters three figures at night on 8 December 1622: one figure gleaming like the Sun and holding a fiery rod that dripped blood, a second figure resembling Death, and a third figure appearing as a warrior with a bloody sword in his right hand. The three figures proclaim woe on Brabant, Flanders, Friesland, and Germany and tell the narrator to look to the southwest, north, and east. The narrator sees the land first full of riders and soldiers and then full of corpses, and he witnesses, among other things, the arrival of a man wearing foreign clothing and a four-cornered hat, who delivers letters from his basket.14 The precisely dated night vision, the proclamation of woe, the guides who direct the narrator’s view to various directions, the armed conflict and bloody desolation, and the arrival of a man with written messages all reflect a pattern previously seen in the second prophecy of Wilhelm Fries.

Gottfried Arnold’s Impartial History of the Church and Heretics, first published in 1699, records other visions that follow the same template, including Stephan Melisch’s prophecy of woe upon Poland, Sweden, and France. In this vision of 19 April 1656, Melisch encounters an unfamiliar man who asks Melisch about his origin (Polish) and religion (Reformed) and also asks if he sang Psalms (enthusiastically). The man then sets Melisch on the south side of a square table, where he sees the king of Sweden sitting to the north; the prince-electors of Heidelberg, Saxony, and Brandenburg to the east; and a cardinal in between the king and the princes. On the west, Melisch sees one like “Ragozi” (perhaps György II Rákóczi, prince of Transylvania in 1648–57) next to several ambassadors and three mighty potentates. The cardinal dashes a papal crown to pieces, a queen arrives, and the guests at the table praise the Swedish king, who then places a new crown on the cardinal’s head.¹⁵

Arnold also records a series of visions following a pattern similar to “Friess II” and seen by Joachim Greulich beginning on 21 May 1653. On midnight of the fifth day, for example, Greulich sees an angel wearing armor and holding in his right hand a bloody sword, with which God will punish the world for its sins. In a vision of 15 July, the armored angel shows Greulich how a king from the Netherlands will lay waste to all of Germany for the sake of God’s word, while a Swedish king will resist the Dutch king. Then Greulich sees two armies battling within his bedroom, as a precursor of the devastation that awaits Germany. The angel lifts two crowns (one to the east and the other to the west), states that the kingdom will be entirely exterminated, and names himself as the Destroying Angel who has annihilated thousands for their sins. On 23 July, the angel brings Greulich to Poland, where he sees “two mighty armies like Tatars and Cossacks.” After the armies join together, they fight against and defeat the Poles, and then the angel says, “Poland, you are cursed by God, and through this land the Turk will come to Germany.”¹⁶ On 12 August, the angel commands Greulich to look into heaven, where he sees nine hundred thousand men approaching from the east, leading sixty wagons and calling out, “Where are the Christian dogs, where are the bloodhounds?” Greulich asks the angel about the wagons, and the angel informs him that they are meant to carry the decapitated heads of the Christians in Germany.17 Numerous additional visions address the fates of European nations and German cities. Although Greulich’s complete vision is much longer than “Friess II,” it makes use of a symbolic inventory very similar to that found in the second prophecy of Wilhelm Friess.

Even as late as World War I, a circulating “birch tree prophecy,” first recorded in 1701, foresaw terrible battles in the middle of Germany between peoples of the north and south, which would lay waste to towns and cities and force their inhabitants to flee into the forests and mountains. In the final, three-day battle, accompanied by a threefold cry of woe upon Germany, the army of the north would be victorious, while their enemies would flee to the shore of a river, where their last remnants would be destroyed.¹⁸ Given the similarity in motifs, one is inclined to see the second prophecy of Wilhelm Friess as one of the precursors of the “birch tree prophecy,” although one must assume that a long and complicated path lies between them.

Even the first prophecy of Wilhelm Friess enjoyed one more burst of popularity over a century after the last edition of the L version had been printed in 1568. In 1686, four editions appeared (N21–N24) of a “wonderful prophecy reaching from 1686 to 1691 in which great changes are revealed by a highly learned man well known to the world,” attributed in one edition (N21) to a “Christian Engelmann.”¹⁹ The attribution to Engelmann and the author’s alleged fame are, of course, pure fiction, as the text is the N version of the first prophecy of Wilhelm Friess, a pseudonym that had last appeared in print over a century earlier. The prophecy as printed in 1686 is primarily interested in the tribulations expected in the coming five years (especially the false emperor of the west and his eastern allies), which were updated by the expedient of adding around 130 years to the original dates in most cases. The prophecy of woe to the clergy is deleted, and the careers of the final emperor and highest bishop are reduced to bare mentions of their existence and to the promise of a time of peace and prosperity to come under their leadership.

The new relevance of “Friess I” in the late 1680s is not difficult to understand. France was near the height of its power during the long reign of Louis XIV and had annexed Strasbourg in 1681, while an Ottoman Turkish army again besieged Vienna in 1686. The false emperor of the west and his eastern allies were again an acute threat, which gave the first prophecy of Wilhelm Friess a new relevance and likely led the former owner of a copy of N21 now in Weimar to include it in a volume otherwise composed of pamphlets on the military affairs of the French and Turks.20 Making predictions, especially about the future, is very easy: one need only have enough patience and sufficient imagination to recognize their fulfillment.

The late version of “Friess I” was printed again in 1689 (N25), in a short compilation of prophetic works. By then, the Turkish threat had passed. But the French king received special mention on the title page, which lodges a “melancholy complaint and appeal to the highest and eternal Majesty on behalf of all the lands and cities of the Palatinate and the Rhineland against the most cruel acts of Louis XIV of France.” The compilation was reprinted in the next year (N26), ostensibly because of popular demand.²¹ The compilation opens with “Friess I,” claiming that the prophecy had first been printed in 1686. The next work is an extract from the “Postilla” attributed to Johannes Lichtenberger and allegedly printed in 1512, although Lichtenberger was not the author and the “Postilla” was likely a recent composition.²² Luther’s 1527 preface to Lichtenberger’s Prognosticatio comes next, followed by the pseudo-Paracelsian prophecy of a “Lion of the North.”²³ The final section is the lament to God against Louis XIV, and then a short conclusion ends the work. The text of the conclusion is familiar: “Wake up, you Christians, from the sleep of sin! Open your ears, sharpen your senses, and hear my words” (appendix 1, 465–68). The compilation’s conclusion is, in fact, the conclusion of “Friess I,” itself a citation of prophetic compilations going back at least to Grünpeck’s Speculum of 1508, so that the first prophecy of Wilhelm Friess forms both the beginning and the ending of the entire work.

The Textuality of Prophecy

The literary merit of the prophecies of Wilhelm Friess may not be immediately apparent. They are short pamphlets of a few leaves, and one will not find in them surprising plot turns or characters with rich interior lives. Both prophecies reflect the influence of earlier works, and they were meant to be accessible to a broad audience that included those of modest economic means and limited educational attainment.

Yet each prophecy is, in its own way, a sophisticated work of verbal art. The first prophecy of Wilhelm Friess attempted to subvert traditional imperial prophecies in order to deliver a covert revolutionary message. It failed as a pseudonymous work of anti-Habsburg agitation, but it was a resounding success as a recapitulation and updating of traditional narratives. It concisely expressed one aspect of public perception of the religious and geopolitical situation of Germany in the mid-sixteenth century, and it succeeded so well in this that it was used again for the same purpose at the end of the seventeenth century. Having geopolitical relevance for 130 years is quite an accomplishment for a little pamphlet. The second prophecy, with its ominous armies led by demonic generals, used overlapping systems of geographic, religious, and astrological imagery to express the fears of Reformed believers at a critical moment. In its complex and interlocking symbolism, “Friess II” may be one of the most original and sophisticated prophecies of the early modern period.

Apart from any literary qualities that the prophecies may hold, the visions of Wilhelm Friess are significant for how they changed. Between the annual prognostications of Willem de Vriese in Antwerp, the imperial narratives of “Friess I” printed in Nuremberg, the prognostications of Nikolaus Caesareus that appeared under the name of Wilhelm Friess, and the nightmare vision of “Friess II,” four entirely separate texts were attached to Friess’s name in the space of two decades. Both prophecies have textual histories that branched into different traditions within the space of a few years, including the four different versions of “Friess I.” The variety and frequency of available editions have allowed us to undertake a fine-grained examination of the prophecies’ textual history, which brings into new perspective a question raised by Robert Lerner and others: where do prophecies come from? If we have properly understood the history of Wilhelm Friess’s visions, we might say that there are four basic moves that typify their development, including how the texts changed over time and how they responded to their historical context.

1. Selective reception of an earlier prophecy

The first prophecy of Wilhelm Friess appears to have responded to the general pro-Reformation tenor of Willem de Vriese’s practicas, while establishing a textual continuity, even in the vaguest sense, with only a single passage, the proclamation of calamities upon the clergy. The second prophecy treats “Friess I” in the same way, by adopting, at most, a few details, including the author’s name and the prediction of invasion by various enemies. In other cases, such as those of Joachim Greulich and Intje Jansz, prophecies borrowed not a passage of text but a visionary template or prophetic grammar. For these prophecies, faithfulness to the exemplar was not of any concern. What mattered was not the accurate transmittal of a complete text but the recognition of perhaps just a single passage as being of special significance.

2. Expansion into a complete prophecy

Expansion of the borrowed element often took the form of creating astrological scaffolding for prophetic statements or adopting a prophetic framework for an astrological prognostication. The prognostications of Willem de Vriese published in Antwerp appear to have given astrological cover to a prediction of woe for the clergy that ultimately derived from prophecies such as Rupescissa’s Vademecum or pseudo-Vincent Ferrer. The opposite process is also common. The Prognosticatio of Johannes Lichtenberger consists of a few sections from a 1484 astrological prognostication by Paulus de Middelburgo supplemented by extensive borrowings from several prophecies of the late Middle Ages.24 A dramatic example of prophetic expansion of astrological prognostication is the 1499 compendium of planetary ephemerides of Johannes Stöffler and Jakob Pflaum, which consists of hundreds of pages of astronomical details and one brief note couched in apocalyptic language concerning the planetary conjunctions of 1524. The consequences included popular fears of a second deluge and the publication of hundreds of pamphlets that addressed the ensuing controversy; the citation of Stöffler and Pflaum’s apocalyptic passage in prophetic compilations; and the publication, in 1520 and later, of the disorganized compilation of prophetic tropes ascribed to Jakob Pflaum.²⁵ In similar fashion, layers of meaning built from prophetic tropes were added to the astrological symbolism of “Friess II.” Astrological prognostication made it possible for the stars to portend something that could not be desired openly, and then the astrologer’s interpretation of the heavens could be extracted and given prophetic coloring.

According to the rules of the textual game of prophecy, it was permissible to supplement a prophetic extract or a complete prophecy by drawing on the stock of prophetic truth wherever it could be found. This might take the form of adding biblical citations and allusions, as the L version of “Friess I” does, or it might entail supplementing the text with something else from the prophecy’s conceptual world. In this manner, the translation of “Friess I” from Dutch into German added a citation from the Extract of Various Prophecies, itself derived from Grünpeck’s Speculum. In similar fashion, a redactor of “Friess II” added citations from “Dietrich von Zengg” as preserved in the “Prophecy Found in Altenburg,” as well as from Lichtenberger’s Prognosticatio. Despite occasional protests from some theologians and astrologers, many readers saw prophecy and astrology as belonging to the same conceptual world. As complementary methods of placing the present moment into a narrative that extended from the Creation to the Last Judgment, astrological prognostications and end-time prophecies could be combined without most contemporaries sensing any contradiction.

3. A need to veil the message

Both the first and second prophecies of Wilhelm Friess gave expression to ideas beyond what was permissible to say at the time. The limits on expression were particularly acute in the case of “Friess I” in the context of the Habsburg Netherlands, where sympathizing with the Reformation or resisting imperial domination could end in execution. While Strasbourg in the 1570s was a more tolerant place, criticizing orthodox Lutheran sacramental theology, the primary point of contention with Calvinism, was a precarious undertaking. The recourse to a prophetic mode of communication made it possible to write and publish what was otherwise unprintable. The turn to prophecy and other forms of veiled language was a consequence of a message that exceeded what was permitted to be spoken aloud in the face of censorship and oppression, let alone printed in inexpensive pamphlets and distributed to a wide audience.26

4. Adaptation to a new context

Veiling the message has the added and important effect of priming readers to be alert for hidden meaning while at the same time broadening the range of meanings that readers can find in the text. This allows prophecies to be transmitted and thus to survive the passage of time and to gain popularity in new places, even if the meaning that most readers find in the prophecy is fundamentally different from what the author intended. Because so many prophecies from the late Middle Ages and early modern period claimed to have been discovered in old books or found hidden in a trunk or within the walls of a church or similar places, contemporaries mocked the trope as a worn-out stereotype that undermined, rather than added to, a prophecy’s authority.²⁷ Yet the claim of discovery, like the claim of foreign authorship for a prophecy like “Alofresant,” may have been a sober acknowledgment that a new significance had been discovered in an older text and that meanings change as geographical borders are crossed. The first prophecy of Wilhelm Friess had to develop in Antwerp, where the context of censorship and religious oppression required the resort to prophecy, but it could only become successful in print in Germany, where it took on an entirely different meaning. “Friess I” would be entirely unknown today if it had not found its way to German Gnesio-Lutherans and then to Nuremberg, where its veiled anti-Habsburg message was lost behind a surface meaning that reaffirmed imperial narratives. “Friess II” arose in the specific context of Strasbourg in 1574 as the former king of Poland was on his way to France to be crowned as Henry III, but the prophecy experienced its success in print beginning in 1577 in Basel. Transmission across language boundaries opened up new gaps in meaning that translators then filled with various levels of artistry and accuracy. Ottavia Niccoli has observed that many readers misunderstood much or all of a prophecy’s significance for its prior or original context.28 But this is not only inevitable: it is necessary. Finding new significance in a text written long ago or in another place is not a regrettable misreading of an author’s original intent; rather, it is constitutive of how prophecies are created and preserved as living texts. Because prophecy as a genre depends on crossing boundaries and finding new contexts, prophecies are able to move from marginal or border regions, against the prevailing tides of cultural dissemination, toward the cultural center. While the Reformation may have emanated from Wittenberg to the Netherlands, the mode of prophetic writing made it possible for—or perhaps even required—the first prophecy of Wilhelm Friess to move in the opposite direction.

The four moves of prophetic textuality mentioned above do not necessarily proceed sequentially, and none of them should be considered the logical first step. The generation of prophecies was less a matter of creation followed by dispersal and corruption than a continual and cyclical process of extraction, accretion, and adaptation. This was already true of medieval prophecies, as Lesley Coote and Robert Lerner have separately noted. The thirteenth-century “Cedar of Lebanon” prophecy was “built from extensive plagiarism and provided material from which others plagiarized in their turn,” according to Lerner, while Coote notes that “writers, copyists and audience all participated in the creation” of a prophecy “and might go on re-creating it as circumstances changed.”²⁹

The prophecies of Wilhelm Friess are typical of the early modern period, as virtually all prophecies of any degree of popularity in Germany at that time underwent the same kinds of borrowing and adaptation during the course of their transmission. Where the German translation of “Friess I” expanded by incorporating citations from Grünpeck’s Speculum into the text, the one edition of the D version filled the last page with prophecies borrowed from Paracelsus and Lichtenberger. These two types of compilation, what we might call “expansion” and “accretion,” differ only in degree, and they eventually may not differ at all. Over time, a series of what were once clearly identified extracts can be forged together into a single organic prophecy, as happened in the case of Martin Luther. When extensive compilations of Luther’s statements with an apocalyptic tone appeared following his death, the compilers were careful to identify the sources of each quotation. Producers of later pamphlets for broader audiences selected the most noteworthy material, omitted the textual references, and combined the diverse statements into integral prophecies ascribed as a whole to Luther. In a similar way, texts can be combined with their own commentaries, as Robert Moynihan argues for the Joachite Super Hieremiam. In his view, an original and authentic short commentary by Joachim of Fiore on the book of Jeremiah was annotated by Joachim’s later disciples, and the marginal commentary was subsequently incorporated into the text.30 What was then printed in the sixteenth century as a prophetic book of Joachim of Fiore was, in fact, a commentary on a commentary.

To trace the relationship from the end back to the beginning, we could say that the second prophecy of Wilhelm Friess was a Calvinist reaction to a Lutheran reworking of a covert anti-Habsburg rendering of a fifteenth-century French redaction of a fourteenth-century Latin prophetic summary, itself a compendium of many contemporary and older prophecies whose author seems, furthermore, to have created two different redactions of the work.³¹ In tracing the prophecies of Wilhelm Friess back to the Vademecum of Johannes de Rupescissa, we find not the original source but only the earliest point before the chain of transmission is lost in a patchwork of citation, allusion, and commentary. Given the textual cycling and recycling we have observed with the visions of Wilhelm Friess and others, we cannot avoid the possibility that most prophecies are commentaries on commentaries or compilations of extracts from compilations of extracts all the way back, with their moment of origin entirely lost to view. Coote even claims, “It is not possible to create stemmata for prophetic texts. There is not, in most cases, an ‘original’ from which other versions deviate.”³² What we can still hope for—and what justifies the stemmata included in this book—is what we have in the two prophecies of Wilhelm Friess: not the beginning of a text where an author creates something entirely original, but a particular place and time where a writer finds meaning in and gives particular form to an arrangement of preexistent textual building blocks. Because so much of the premodern textual tradition took place outside of our view, we cannot ever be certain that we have found the moment where inspiration first took written form, rather than one more occasion where an existing prophecy was adapted to a new context. Perhaps the right question to ask is not where prophecies come from but, instead, what the discourse of prophecy allows one to do.

While the transmission of prophetic texts permits radical innovation, the textual rules of the genre also constrain what can be done, so that prophecy is both innovative and antiquarian. Frans Fraet was a skilled and experienced rhetorician, but when he printed a critique of Habsburg religious oppression in the form of prophecy, he did not invent a new vision. He instead adapted an existing text, expanding some sections and removing others. A later Gnesio-Lutheran found Fraet’s text worth translating into German and, at the same time, supplemented it with additional prophetic elements, including a citation that ultimately derived from Grünpeck’s Speculum. Even as Frans Fraet violated the emperor’s decrees against heresy, he was obeying the discursive conventions of prophecy. As a consequence, later authors recognized Fraet’s redaction as something that could speak to their own moment in history, even when they extracted just one passage from the whole, as Johann Wolf did in 1600, or when they supplemented “Friess I” with additional prophetic texts, as the Wonderful Prophecy Reaching from 1686 to 1691 did a century later. The majority of prophecies in print during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were not texts that had been invented; instead, like the prophecies of Wilhelm Friess, they were reworkings of texts that had been found. The imperative for redactors of prophecies was not maintaining textual integrity, as it was with biblical copyists, but following a set of rules that allowed expansion, deletion, and rearrangement in order to make the text a truer and more powerful pronouncement on the present moment. One might say that prophecy is the genre with the greatest discrepancy between its claims of originality and the reality of textual transmission. Both claiming to offer an unmediated divine vision and actually providing a text shaped by numerous borrowings and multiple adaptations are typical elements of the genre.

While “Friess I” and “Friess II” have all the characteristics of medieval prophecy identified by Robert Lerner, including the “assumption of false identity, prediction of events that had already happened, the introduction of meaninglessness, and the resort to plagiarism,” these should be seen as more than evidence of fraud, pious or otherwise. 33 While the sixteenth century and earlier times certainly had their share of cynics and deceivers, we have not seen evidence of bad faith in the history of Wilhelm Friess. It is hard to fault Frans Fraet for assuming a false identity when the alternatives were submission to tyranny or a shortened path to martyrdom. It is likewise difficult to accuse Johann Fischart of meaninglessness—if we have correctly identified him as the author of “Friess II”—for using symbolism that was sometimes opaque to express covertly what could not be spoken aloud. Later redactors of the prophecies took pains to create sensible readings when they perceived that meaning had been lost, as might easily happen in the process of translation.

While the L version of “Friess I” printed from 1566 to 1568 indulged in prophecies ex eventu, the charge of fraudulently predicting events that had already happened is less grave if one does not conceive of prophecy’s primary function as providing knowledge of things to come. The prophecies of Wilhelm Friess were instead comments on how the present moment should be understood with respect to a narrative that included both past and future. In that context, a prophecy ex eventu is less a fraudulent claim of accurate prognostication than it is a way for readers to recognize the present moment in the grand scheme of history. Helping readers to orient themselves in society and the cosmos was a function of both apocalyptic prophecies and astrological prognostications.34 In the same way, the disconcerting regularity with which the year of Wilhelm Friess’s death was updated becomes more understandable if we consider that its function was to anchor the narrative to the then-present moment. Plagiarism, which implies the illegitimate appropriation of another’s text, is the wrong word to use for the extracting and compilation of texts according to the implicit rules of the genre. Prophecies were rhetorical constructions that might be assigned to children as translation exercises in their Latin education, as Andreas Engel recalled in 1597 about his school days. Even for Johann Hilten, reputed, at the time, to have been Luther’s teacher and a martyr for the Reformation before the letter, the question people asked was, according to Engel, “From where did the good Hilten take his conjectures and prophecies?”³⁵

If we recognize prophecy as a discourse operating under a particular set of rules that govern textual acts, prophetic authorship becomes, in turn, a way to identify a specific variety of those rules, just as Spenserian and Petrarchan sonnets are so called not because of the particular poet who composed them but by their allegiance to textual conventions. In the succession of texts ascribed to Wilhelm Friess, we can recognize a recurring pattern. First, Hans van Liesvelt had published prognostications for 1555 and 1556 by or attributed to Willem de Vriese. Frans Fraet then appropriated the name for a different prophecy in late 1557. An anonymous translator Germanized the prophecy and its author in 1558. Christian Müller of Strasbourg used the name for yet another prognostication (whose actual author was Nikolaus Caesareus) in 1562. For Müller, it seems, having a live German astrologer as author was not as useful as having a dead Dutch prophet. Finally a new prophecy under the same name was composed in Strasbourg in 1574 and began to appear in print in Basel and other cities in 1577.

It is uncertain whether the astrologer Willem de Vriese was ever a living human being, and the Antwerp trial documents do not treat him as such. It is even more doubtful that Wilhelm Friess ever enjoyed a human life before his often-cited death, a singular and punctual event that printers turned into a process lasting three decades. There is no doubt at all that Wilhelm Friess never wrote a prognostication that was actually written by Nikolaus Caesareus. The attribution of authorship to Wilhelm Friess or Willem de Vriese had little to do with the writing activity of some flesh-and-blood citizen of Maastricht in the sixteenth century. These texts do not share an author. What they have in common, instead, is a combination of astrology and prophecy that addressed the current situation and future prospects of Protestantism. The attribution of authorship to Friess was a way of legitimating particular textual acts in the minds of the text’s composer and creating a set of expectations in the minds of a printer’s customers. This kind of authorship does not convey information about the original composer of a text but, instead, identifies a particular way of speaking about the religious and political conditions of sixteenth-century society. Early modern authorship in the genre of prophecy, far from what modern conventions would lead us to expect, was one more way that a literary work identified the textual acts in which it was engaged.

Friess’s name served the same function as that which Roger Chartier finds in authorial portraits in early modern books: to “reinforce the notion that the writing is the expression of an individuality that gives authenticity to the work.”36 Sixteenth-century readers of a prophecy by Wilhelm Friess had no knowledge of its origins beyond the authorial name, location, and manner of discovery offered by a pamphlet’s title page. All the pamphlets claimed to contain the prophecies of the aged Wilhelm Friess of Maastricht that had been found with him after his recent death. In reality, the date of Friess’s death was malleable, and the textual unity suggested by the alleged circumstances of discovery was equally fictional, but the flexibility with respect to biography and bibliography made Wilhelm Friess all the more useful as an author figure. Rather than a permanent feature of a text and a key to its source, this kind of authorial identity could circulate among different texts of diverse origins. In similar fashion, a text once attributed to Friess could circulate under the names of Christian Engelmann, Paul Grebner, or Jerassemus van Eydenborch if the historical context changed. The authorship of Wilhelm Friess and his multiple prophecies arose in a specific historical context where readers desired a certain kind of literature, both readers and authorities demanded an authorial identity, and printers were anxious that someone else, even a fictive person, bore ultimate responsibility for the work.

Frans Fraet certainly would have been well served if responsibility for the seditious prognostication of Willem de Vriese had remained with its alleged author, but Fraet’s attempt to remain anonymous failed. One might even say that Frans Fraet failed twice over. First and most obviously, he was unmasked as the source of the prophecy, which led to his arrest and execution. Following this came what would surely have been an even more bitter disappointment (had Fraet lived to see it), as the work he printed as an anti-Habsburg protest became a frequently reprinted reiteration and reinforcement of imperial narratives in Germany. Fraet had his posthumous revenge, however, in the second prophecy of Wilhelm Friess. If author figures enabled writers to express things that could not be said in other ways, then Fraet’s creation of the first “Wilhelm Friess” helped make possible the second prophecy’s radical vision of exit from empire and rejection of imperial narratives.