Klaus Störtebeker

Overview

Klaus Störtebeker was a Low German pirate captain whose career in the 1390s and the closing months of the fourteenth century operated against the merchant shipping of the Hanseatic League in the Baltic and the North Sea. He was the most prominent commander of the Victualbrüder (“Victual Brothers”) — a fraternity originally licensed in 1392 by the dukes of Mecklenburg to provision the Swedish capital Stockholm during a siege by the Danish queen Margaret I, who continued operating piratically after the political circumstances that had created them dissolved — and later of the splinter Likedeeler (“Equal Sharers”) fraternity. He was captured by a Hamburg fleet in October 1401 and beheaded with seventy of his crew on the Grasbrook outside the city.

Origins

The contemporary documentary record on Störtebeker’s origins is sparse and contested. The name — Störtebeker, “empty-the-tankard,” from the verb stürzen (to upend) and beker (tankard or cup) — is a nickname rather than a family name, and is reported in the 1395 Wismar town records as having been earned for a feat of drinking. Wismar, Rügen, and Bergen-auf-Rügen all have local traditions claiming him as a son. None can be verified. He first appears in Hanseatic archival records around 1394 as one of the captains of the Victualbrüder operating from the Mecklenburg port of Wismar.

Career

The Victualbrüder originated in 1392 as a licensed fleet of privateers raised by Albert and John of Mecklenburg to relieve their nephew Albert of Sweden, then besieged in Stockholm by Margaret I. The fleet ran provisions through the Danish blockade — the “victuals” that gave the fraternity its name — and supplemented its income with attacks on Margaret’s allied Hanseatic merchant shipping in the Baltic. When Stockholm was finally surrendered in 1398 under the terms of the 1395 Lindholm Pact, the licensing political situation dissolved, but the fleet, by then several thousand strong, simply continued operating without authorisation.

From 1396 the Victualbrüder reorganised under new captains and a new internal structure as the Likedeeler (“Equal Sharers”), an arrangement under which prize cargoes were divided equally among the entire crew rather than along the conventional hierarchical shares. Störtebeker and a captain named Goedeke Michels were the most prominent commanders. They operated from bases in the Frisian Islands and in West Friesland, where the small inland nobility of the region was tolerant or actively complicit. The fleet’s operations against Hanseatic Baltic and North Sea trade through the late 1390s were extensive enough to produce a coordinated Hanseatic naval response and a series of diplomatic exchanges between the League and the Frisian magnates who sheltered the pirate crews.

The Hamburg town council fitted out a major suppression fleet in 1401 under the command of Simon of Utrecht. The fleet engaged Störtebeker’s squadron off Heligoland in late summer 1401 and captured him after a hard sea-fight; Goedeke Michels was captured separately later in the year. The principal source for the engagement is the Hamburg town chronicle, which is detailed and broadly contemporary but contains elements (notably the legend that the Hamburg vessels disabled Störtebeker’s ship by pouring molten lead into her rigging) that later sources have not been able to corroborate.

Fate

Störtebeker and seventy of his crew were beheaded on the Grasbrook — the public execution ground on a small island in the Elbe outside the city walls — on 20 October 1401. The Hamburg chronicle preserves the famous (and not corroborated) story that Störtebeker requested, and was granted, that as many of his men as he could walk past after his own beheading should be spared; he is said to have walked past eleven before the executioner kicked over the upright trunk. The heads were displayed on stakes along the Elbe estuary as a warning to future pirates. A skull recovered in 1878 during construction work on the Grasbrook was identified by craniologists at the time as Störtebeker’s; the identification rests on circumstantial evidence and is contested. The skull is held at the Museum of Hamburg History.

Legacy

Störtebeker has a substantial and continuing legacy in German popular culture: the annual Störtebeker Festival on Rügen is one of the largest open-air theatrical events in Germany, the German Federal Post has issued commemorative stamps, and his name has been attached to streets, ships, beers, and a Hamburg bar district. The historical record on his career is, however, fragmentary, and the secondary literature is dominated by nineteenth- and twentieth-century romantic-nationalist reconstructions that should be treated with caution.

Associates & contemporaries

• Goedeke Michels — Co-commander of the Likedeeler fraternity; captured separately by Hamburg forces in 1401 and executed.