II. Evidence Supporting the Wattenbach-Kurze Dating

There are two pieces of evidence that support the established dating, both already been referred to above. They are not, however, uncontroversial. The first is the short notice written by someone at the Prenzlau Dominican convent after the last deposition, that of Sybert Curaw on March 25, 1394. The notice states that Zwicker “started in the year of the Lord 1393 in the month of January and continued through the following year until the month of February in the said diocese” and that he “deposed the above-written and diligently collected register at the Prenzlauer convent among the Friars Preachers in the year of the Lord 1394, and left it to their custody.”Footnote ²⁸ Kurze noted that the notice is likely written in 1432, as its author has first written that year, struck it through, and replaced it with 1394. The slip probably refers to the current year at the time of writing.Footnote ²⁹ The notice, therefore, was written 38 years after the end of Zwicker’s inquisition, and although it is valuable evidence of Zwicker’s register’s transmission history, it is extremely unlikely that the Prenzlauer Dominican who wrote the notice possessed any first-hand information about the process in the 1390s.

It is also worth noting that the 1432 notice contains blatant mistakes about the details of Zwicker’s process and that these cast doubt on its value as a source. First, it proposes that Zwicker was commissioned for the diocese of Cammin by the apostolic see. However, the Stettin depositions list only commission by the archbishop of Prague and the bishops of Brandenburg, Cammin, and Lebus,Footnote ³⁰ and the scholarly consensus is that Zwicker never was a papal inquisitor.Footnote ³¹ In addition, the notice claims that the process ended in February [1394], even though it is written after a deposition that clearly gives the date March 25. The author also presumed that the trials started in January 1393, but the first depositions date to November, not January. It is, of course, possible that some depositions were lost already by 1432, and that the Dominicans at the time possessed depositions only from January onwards.Footnote ³² This theory presupposes that (a) the register was already damaged or split in the early 15th century (b) after the damage, it still had more depositions than now, as none of the extant January depositions give the year explicitly and (c) the year stated in the lost January depositions was indeed 1393. There is, however, a much simpler and likely explanation: the author of the notice had only superficially browsed the register, found years 1393 and 1394 mentioned there, and misread the starting month as he did the end month.

The second piece of evidence is the jump from March 6 to February 14 between the depositions with medieval numbers 279 and [280],Footnote ³³ which have the medieval folio numbers 275 and 276. The deposition on March 6 (279) has been written by an anonymous notary who wrote most of the extant depositions, and the deposition on February 14 by a public notary Mattheus, whom Kurze has identified with “Matheus Hyldebrand of Stettin, a cleric and a public notary,” who repeatedly appears as a clerical witness in other depositions, and who possibly was identical with a certain Mathias Brant mentioned on March 1, 1392 as a vicar of the Church of St Mary in Stettin.Footnote ³⁴ As stated above, already Wattenbach and later Kurze interpreted this leap in dates to also mean a leap in the year, from March 1393 to February 1394.

There is, however, little reason to assume that the change of the notary also marked a long break in the inquisition. Rather, it seems that there are two notaries working simultaneously,Footnote ³⁵ and that the quires where they recorded the proceedings were included in the register volume in an order that was roughly but not uniformly chronological. Kurze himself admitted that towards the end of the process, the numbering did not always follow the chronology: depositions with the medieval numbers from 390 to 401 should be between the medieval numbers 432 and 433 if chronology would have been strictly followed.Footnote ³⁶ In the quires written by Mattheus Hyldebrand, the order had changed when the records were joined to the main register volume, and the depositions on February 9 and 11, are located after those on February 19.Footnote ³⁷ At least in one case the anonymous notary filled in blank pages left by the notary Mattheus without any regard of the chronology: the deposition of Jacob Hukman on March 2 and 5, 1394 (medieval number 296) has been written by the anonymous notary on the two empty pages that the notary Mattheus had accidentally skipped over when he wrote the deposition of Alheid Wegener on February 11 (medieval number 295).Footnote ³⁸ This practical solution also demonstrates that the two notaries shared their notes and writing material.

There are reasons to believe that these are not the only inconsistencies. There are 78 depositions missing between the medieval numbers 91 (January 12) and 174 (January 26).Footnote ³⁹ If all of them had been held from January 12 to 26, it would have meant five to six interrogations every single day, which is a possible but unlikely pace when compared to the rest of the register. It is much more likely that the missing depositions were based on interrogations held over a longer period in January–February.

What speaks most against the supposed 11-month break in the inquisition between the medieval depositions 279 and [280] is that there are no traces of it in the register. The anonymous medieval numerator, who most probably belonged to Zwicker’s staff and made several comments on the margins,Footnote ⁴⁰ simply continued the numbers and folio numbers without any remarks. He clearly worked immediately after the trials with a complete set of records, and if the depositions till number 279 had belonged to a different year than those from 280 onwards, he would almost certainly have made some note about it in the register. No such remarks survive. The lack of comments by the numerator corresponds to the similar lack of references to a pause in the depositions, which will be discussed below.

How would the collaboration of the notaries look like if we assume that there is no pause in the inquisition? Due to the lost depositions, it is impossible to say when Mattheus Hyldebrand joined Zwicker’s inquisition as a notary, but it is possible to make an educated guess. The first time he is mentioned as a witness is on January 26, [1394] in the deposition of Margaretha Sibe from Mohrin.Footnote ⁴¹ Around the same time, Zwicker and the anonymous notary started to have problems dealing with the number of deponents. On January 27, starting on the third hour of the day (around 9 a.m.) and continuing till Vespers (around 6 p.m.), Zwicker interrogated seven deponents, one of whom, Joris Buchult, had arrived the day before (January 26) and taken his oath then.Footnote ⁴² Work started to pile up, as in the evening of January 27, Zwicker received oaths from four additional deponents, whom he then interrogated on the following day, January 28.Footnote ⁴³ These depositions are also very concise, the notary using even more abbreviations than normal. Clearly, more people were coming in than the inquisitor and the notary were able to handle. The first preserved deposition written by Mattheus is on February 9, but he was probably at work already before that. Mattheus had a distinct way of numbering the quires he used. The folio where the deposition on February 9 starts has the marking “tercius sexternus” (that is “the third quire of six” = twelve folios), whereas on February 14 he starts “quartus sexternus.”Footnote ⁴⁴ It is not too big a leap of faith to assume the existence of the sexterns one and two by Mattheus, corresponding to 24 folios and as many depositions, dating prior to February 9. Therefore, Mattheus probably started to work for Zwicker in early February or even late January [1394].

With the two notaries, Zwicker was able to interrogate as many as 10 (February 14, [1394]) and 11 (February 18, [1394]) deponents per day. There are some indications of the notaries taking turns. On February 14, the anonymous notary started at the third hour (around 9 a.m.) and took notes of seven depositions. According to his concise dating practice, “in the year and so forth as above,” they all took place on the third hour, but more probably throughout the morning and early afternoon. In any case, at the ninth hour Mattheus took over, and wrote down three depositions in the ninth hour, after it, and at the time of Vespers, that is around 6 p.m. On February 18, Mattheus worked from the first hour (around 6 a.m.) till third hour, writing down two depositions. The anonymous notary took over at the third hour and continued till the ninth hour with seven depositions. At the ninth hour Mattheus returned to the afternoon shift, taking notes of two additional depositions. The work of two notaries on February 18 totaled 11 interrogations between early morning and Vespers.Footnote ⁴⁵

All in all, it appears that the inconsistency in the medieval numbering and folio numbers that puzzled Wattenbach and Kurze is simply a result of compiling together the depositions written by two notaries working simultaneously for the inquisitor. They took notes mostly on their own sheets of paper, with one exception mentioned above, and because they worked on the same days, it was no longer possible to retain a strict chronological order in the records, if that ever was the goal of the medieval numerator. What led Wattenbach and Kurze to look for a break in the records was the note from 1432 stating that the inquisitions started in January 1393 and continued through the following year in February. As the author of this remark is mistaken about the start and end month of the inquisition, there is no reason to trust his estimate of the inquisition’s duration. What sustained Wattenbach’s and Kurze’s interpretation was the assumption that Zwicker visited Upper Austria in the middle of the Stettin inquisitions. As the notion of Zwicker’s working in Austria before 1395 has now been thrown out, there is now very little that supports the idea of a break between March 1393 and February 1394. Instead, the dating causes numerous problems that are solved with the new proposed dating: from late November 1393 till March 25, 1394. Appendix presents a revised dating for all 195 preserved depositions, organized from the earliest to the latest. Appendix also gives Kurze’s dating and his running number for comparison. In the following, Section III presents the arguments in support of the new chronology.

III. Arguments for the Revised Dating

The greatest support for the revised dating, November 1393 to March 1394, is the internal evidence of the Stettin depositions themselves. First, if there had been an 11-month hiatus in the inquisition process, there should be at least some references to it by the inquisitor, notaries, or deponents. There are none. No one said that their relative had been in front of the inquisitor already a year ago. There are no inquiries into possible relapsed heretics, and neither the notaries nor the numerator working after the inquisition make a single remark on two different stages in the process. Everything in the records points to a single, uninterrupted process. For example, in the introductory note to the depositions of the five Waldensians from the diocese of Poznań, explicitly dated March 12, 1394, the anonymous notary states that “Brother Petrus, provincial of the brethren of the order of the Celestines in Germany, inquisitor of heretical depravity commissioned by the archbishop and bishops of Prague, Lebus and Cammin: Because he discovered, examined, convicted and gave penance to more than 400 heretics of both sexes of the Waldensian sect in the diocese of Cammin […].”Footnote ⁴⁶ The purpose of the note is to explain to the bishop of Poznań why Zwicker examined five of his subjects, over whom he had no authority, but who had appeared before him to receive absolution and penance. If the inquisition process had been going on for more than a year, one would have expected some kind of temporal reference in a note of this nature, but there is none. The absence of evidence is not, as it is well known, evidence of absence, but in this case, it strongly points in one direction: the absence of the conjectured pause in the inquisition proceedings.

Second, there are several pieces of internal evidence that support my proposition for the dating. The most important of these is how the deponents remember when their last confession to a Waldensian Brother took place. Human memory is extremely fallible, and one cannot presume that temporal information in medieval inquisition depositions, especially relating to events that had taken place years or decades earlier, is accurate in the usual sense of the word. One should regard any individual memory with suspicion. Taking that into account, we see interesting contradictory patterns emerging from the data. They relate to the last confession the deponents had made to a Waldensian Brother, an event that we can assume they probably remembered relatively well. The examples in Table 1 demonstrate that the established timeline has several implausible references to time.

Table 1.

Selected deponents and their statements concerning the last confession to a Waldensian Brother

Especially blatant is the contradiction in Alheid Wegener’s deposition, who on February 11, 1394 said that she had confessed to a Waldensian Brother named Nicolaus (there were several of that name) “more than a year ago” in the house of her father-in-law Heyncze Wegener alde (“Old”) in Gross-Wubiser. That would mean that a Waldensian brother visited the village of Gross-Wubiser when the inquisition in Stettin was already underway, and several villagers had already been convicted by Zwicker. Heyncze Wegener alde himself had confessed his heresy on February 10, 1393, according to Kurze.Footnote ⁴⁷ If Alheid had told Zwicker about a Brother visiting a partly converted Waldensian community, it would certainly have caused a strong reaction from the inquisitor, resulting in further inquiries and accusations of relapses into heresy, of which there is no trace either in Alheid’s deposition or elsewhere. The apparent contradiction is solved by the revised dating. Both Heyncze Wegener alde and his daughter-in-law Alheid were interrogated in February 1394, Heyncze on 10 February and Alheid the following day.

Another remarkable feature is that the deponents from the two supposed stages of the inquisition, presumably separated by circa a year, seem to describe similar events with similar temporal markers. Grete Wegener, the daughter of Heyncze Wegener alde, gave an extraordinarily accurate dating for her last confession: around the past Michaelmas, a year had elapsed from it, and it had taken place in her father’s house. As Grete’s trial was on February 19, 1394, her last confession had been around September 29, 1392. Interestingly enough, Katherina Currebuch also told the inquisitor about confessing to a Waldensian brother in Heyncze Wegener alde’s house around Michaelmas over a year ago. However, if we follow Kurze’s dating, Katherina gave her deposition on February 14, 1393, dating her last confession to Michaelmas 1391. Of course, we could assume that meeting Waldensian Bretheren at Heyncze Wegener alde’s house around Michaelmas was a yearly event, but there is a much simpler explanation through the revised timeline: both Grete Wegener and Katherina Currebuch confessed in February 1394 and described the same event in late September 1392. Even Alheid Wegener’s and Heyncze Wegener alde’s vague temporal references (over a year ago, almost 2 years ago) in February 1394 concerning their last confession at Heyncze’s house probably point to September 1392.

A similar case comprises the numerous deponents who told Zwicker that their last confessions were approximately a year ago in Peter Gossaw’s house in Gross-Wubiser. Depending on the trial date, such statements seem to refer either to autumn 1391 or 1392 (see Geze Walther, Katherina Wideman and Grete Polczman in Table 1). Based on the revised timeline, I am in a position to propose that all these statements refer to the same occasion that took place in the autumn of 1392. In fact, with the revised dating, one can, with greater confidence than before, date and locate the last visits of the Waldensian Brethren in Pomerania, which I shall do in the last section of this article.

A problem caused by the Wattenbach–Kurze dating is that there are cases where members of the same household or close family seem to confess a year apart for no apparent reason. I referred earlier to Heyncze Wegener alde and his daughter-in-law-Alheid. In Table 1 one can see that in Kurze’s dating, a year also separates the depositions of Heyncze and his unmarried daughter Grete, still living at her parent’s house. It is extremely improbable that she would have been interrogated over a year after her father, who had denounced her in his deposition.Footnote ⁴⁸ A similar case is the interrogation of the married couple Claus and Geze (or Gertrud) Walther from Gross-Wubiser. According to Kurze, Claus was interrogated on February 10, 1393 and Geze over a year later on February 18, 1394. Again, such a delay is improbable given that Claus had denounced his wife.Footnote ⁴⁹ The most likely explanation is again the dating. When all February depositions are dated to the same year 1394, the timeline becomes much more plausible. First, Heyncze Wegener and Clauss Walther, who had come in front of the inquisitor voluntarily, without summons, appeared in court on February 10. A little over week later their denounced family members were summoned to court. Geze Walther is mentioned to have been summoned personally with a letter by her parish priest. Such a specific form of summons is a logical outcome of the inquisitor learning about her involvement in heresy from her husband.

One of the rare cases of resistance to the inquisitor during the Stettin trials took place in the village of Klein-Wubiser, one of the settlements where a majority if not the whole population was Waldensian. Led by a man called Sybert Curaw, the locals imprisoned the inquisitor’s messenger, Fikke and prevented the summons letters from being read out in the village church. Sybert and his companions also slandered Zwicker and some of the people who went to the court voluntarily, and for a while some of them were fugitives from the inquisitor.Footnote ⁵⁰ One of the fugitives was Tyde Rudelbeke, whose own deposition has been lost, but whose wife Beata admitted that Tyde had slandered the inquisitor and called him Antichrist, and that Tyde and Sybert had escaped from the inquisitor. At first, Beata said that she did not know where her husband was, but she then admitted that she had heard from a certain Creter de Costriniken that Tyde was in Fredenwalde, which is located in Uckermark at a distance of more than 60 km from Klein-Wubiser.Footnote ⁵¹ Later, Heyne Smerwynkel, one of the rebels in Klein-Wubiser, confirmed that he had been on the run with Sybert Curaw and brothers Tyde and Claus Rudelbeke.Footnote ⁵² Finally, Sybert himself said that he had escaped from the inquisitor with “three others,” of whom Claus Rudelbeke was to only one left.Footnote ⁵³

All these deponents, as well as others recounting the events in Klein-Wubiser, speak of them as something recent, without any temporal references, as one would speak of the events of past weeks or months.Footnote ⁵⁴ However, the established dating would place a year between Beata Rudelbeke’s deposition on March 1, 1393, and those of Heyne Smerwynkel and Sybert Curaw in March 1394. While one can easily imagine an escape of more than a year, there would have been some talk about time in the depositions if the opposition in Klein-Wubiser had lasted that long. Again, a much more likely explanation is that Sybert’s and his comrades’ acts of rebellion all took place in February–March 1394, meaning that neither the inquisitor nor the accused had any particular need to date the events.Footnote ⁵⁵

It is also highly improbable that Zwicker would have left the process interrupted after the interrogation of approximately 280 deponents, as Wattenbach and Kurze proposed. It is actually surprising that no one has thought about what such a hiatus would have meant for the partially converted and convicted communities. The established dates would mean that for a year or more, some family members were converts that had abjured their heresy and were undergoing a public penance, while others were unrepentant heretics. When one abjured one’s heresy and received absolution and penance for it, the abjurer renounced all heresy and communion with heretics, under an oath and the pain of death.Footnote ⁵⁶ The requirement to abstain from contact with one’s former sisters and brothers in faith was not an empty legal detail: in late 14th-century Germany, it was monitored. When the Waldensian Johannes Örtel had sought help from Konrad Huter, a converted Waldensian in Regensburg, Huter had turned his back on Örtel, not wanting to have anything to do with him. Soon afterwards, in 1395, when Örtel was accused by the bishop of Eichstätt, he implicated Konrad Huter. Örtel’s implication was enough to bring Konrad with his family to trial. They were acquitted only after the inquisitor Martin of Prague, with whom Zwicker collaborated on numerous occasions, provided assurance, in a letter of May 1396, that, after making enquiries among recently converted Waldensians, he was convinced that neither Konrad nor his wife Elizabeth had been in any contact with Waldensians after their abjuration.Footnote ⁵⁷ While it was possible to turn back to an old acquaintance, following the strict conditions the abjuration imposed upon converted heretics would have been simply impossible for a prolonged period of time inside a family or close-knit village community. An 11-month break would have generated cases of suspected relapses, of which there is no indication in the register.

In addition to such implausible legal and practical consequences, a half-converted community would have posed serious spiritual threats, according to the way Zwicker saw things. I mentioned earlier his justification for interrogating and convicting the five Waldensians from the diocese of Poznań, which was outside his jurisdiction. Zwicker stated that releasing them without a trial would not ‘be safe either for the souls of the mentioned persons [converts] or the orthodox Catholic faith in general’ as the converts could easily relapse into heresy if Waldensian ministers were to visit the neighboring diocese.Footnote ⁵⁸ Partly converted families and villages would have been a much greater danger than Waldensians in the nearby diocese. One can, of course, invent any number of other reasons for Zwicker interrupting his interrogations, but we must emphasize this again: there is not the faintest sign of such an interruption within the depositions themselves.

A final piece of evidence that refutes the possibility of a break before the depositions written by Mattheus Hyldebrant from February 9, 1394, onwards and those written by the anonymous notary before that comes from the list of witnesses. Each interrogation had clerical and/or lay witnesses listed at the end of each deposition. Table 2 presents the witnesses in three depositions, two of which are dated by Kurze to February 1393 and one to February 1394. The witnesses demonstrate that they were all conducted in February 1394.

Table 2.

The witnesses of three depositions in February [1394]

Three remarks on the table:

1. 1. The trials of Mette Dorynk and Sophya Myndeke, presumably separated by a year, had an identical set of witnesses.

2. 2. Some of these witnesses were outsiders, present only in a couple of trials. Corte Lepkyn, or Lempky, was a city council member from the nearby city of Wollin (now Wolin), mentioned only in these three depositions. Arnaldus Borst, or Berss, was a layman from Salzwedel in Saxony, more than 250 kilometers from Stettin.Footnote ⁵⁹

3. 3. It is nearly impossible that both Corte Lepkyn and Arnaldus Borst would have happened to be in Stettin on February 9, both in 1393 and 1394.

Consequently, the deposition of Mette Dorynk, as recorded by the anonymous notary, and the deposition of Sophya Myndeke, the earliest document produced by Mattheus Hyldebrant, both took place on February 9, 1394.

Finally, a couple of words should be said about the turn of the year, as obviously the first deposition of the new year would have had the complete date. Most probably the turn of the year the notaries used was December 25, which was at the time the most widespread practice in Germany and the norm both in the diocese of Cammin and also in the archdiocese of Prague, Zwicker’s home diocese.Footnote ⁶⁰ Unfortunately, several dozen depositions have been lost between the medieval number 52 (December 23, [1393]) and the next dated deposition number 91 (January 12, [1394]). So, whether the new year began on December 25 or on January 1, the first deposition of the year 1394 is lost to us. The number of missing depositions indicates, however, that Zwicker and his staff continued hearings over Christmas and New Year.

The internal evidence in the deposition thus points to a continued process without any breaks. There is no significant evidence contradicting what we propose: that the revised dates from November 1393 till March 1394 presented in the Appendix should be taken as the probable timeline of Zwicker’s inquisition in Stettin. The revised dating has several implications for the study of these inquisition records. In the last part of this article, I shall show that with the new dating, it is possible to reconstruct the last visits of Waldensian ministers to the dissident communities in Brandenburg and Pomerania.

IV. Who was the Last Waldensian Minister to Visit Northern Germany and When?

The revised dating solves certain contradictions in the references to the last Waldensian Brethren visiting Brandenburg and Pomerania. In this final section of the article, I shall consider the identity of a Brother called “Nicolaus conversus” and attempt to date his last visit to the area.

Scholars agree that the conversion of Waldensian ministers in 1390 or 1391, whose names were compiled in two lists circulating with other polemical descriptions of Waldensians, was a decisive blow for German Waldensians and provided Zwicker and other inquisitors with the names and locations of their followers.Footnote ⁶¹ Not all Brethren, however, converted. Deponents confessing in the final weeks of the inquisition in February–March 1394 refer to their last confession having taken place over a year ago, pointing to late 1392 or even early 1393. It is clearly after the conversion of the ministers by 1391, and in the following, I demonstrate that at least one Waldensian Brother was active in late 1392 and that he is not identifiable with any of the Waldensian Brethren named in the lists of converts from 1390/1391.

Among the Waldensian Brethren visiting Brandenburg and Pomerania, the most often mentioned is a certain Nicolaus, usually designated as “now/recently converted” (iam conversus). This converted Nicolaus is usually identified as Nicolaus Gotschalk, also known as Claus of Brandenburg, a Waldensian Brother born to non-Waldensian parents in Altenkirchen near Königsberg (Neumark) and introduced to Waldensianism 26 years before the Stettin inquisitions, together with his mother Gyrdrud and sister Geze, the latter of whom was among the Waldensians Zwicker questioned in Stettin. Having discovered Geze’s deposition, who stated that her brother was “once a heresiarch, now a Catholic priest living in Vienna,”Footnote ⁶² Kurze established the identity of Nicolaus Gotschalk with “Claus de Brandenburg” mentioned as a convert and priest in the so-called long list of converted Waldensians, dated to 1391.Footnote ⁶³ In his edition of the Stettin protocols, Kurze further confirmed that Nicolaus Gotschalk was the same person as “Nicolaus iam conversus,” and indexed both under one and the same entry in his index.Footnote ⁶⁴ Following Kurze’s edition, Euan Cameron gave an explicit timeline for Nicolaus Gotschalk’s conversion: in autumn 1392 he was still a Waldensian Brother, in December 10, 1392 a deponent referred to him as “a heresiarch now converted at Prague” and on December 23, Geze Gotschalk stated that he was a Catholic priest living in Vienna. Cameron described Gotschalk’s conversion “as a major coup for Zwicker.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Cameron’s reconstruction of Nicolaus Gotschalk’s conversion and career is, however, too quick to be true, not to mention that Gotschalk is listed among the converted masters in 1391.Footnote ⁶⁶

A careful reading of the Stettin depositions indeed reveals that “Nicolaus iam conversus” is not identical with Nicolaus Gotschalk, nor with Nicolaus Solothurn, Nicolaus of Plauen, Nicolaus of Poland, or Nicolaus of Vienna, all Brethren named Nicolaus and mentioned in both the Stettin depositions and the lists of converts.Footnote ⁶⁷ Indeed, the designation iam (“just now,” “recently”) might well refer to the fact that he had converted after the major conversion in 1390–1391. He was the converted “heresiarch” that Peter Gossaw from Gross-Wubiser, the most important host of the local Waldensians’ meetings, knew was staying in Prague in December [1393].Footnote ⁶⁸ Thus, he is not to be confused with Nicolaus Gotschalk, living as a Catholic priest in Vienna.

The most convincing evidence for the disambiguation of the two men, “Nicolaus iam conversus” and Nicolaus Gotschalk, comes from two Stettin depositions, above all from Geze Gotschalk’s statement. Although she was sister to Nicolaus Gotschalk and confessed to Brethren regularly, she was rather ignorant of their names in a way that was typical of Brandenburg-Pomeranian Waldensians in general. First, she claimed that she did not remember their names, but then, apparently pushed by Zwicker, she said that she had thrice confessed to her brother, once to a heresiarch whose name she did not know and the last time to “Nicolaus also heresiarch, recently converted.” When read directly from the original manuscript instead of Kurze’s summary edition, it becomes evident that, with the last Nicolaus, Geze (and the notary) meant a Nicolaus who was not her brother.Footnote ⁶⁹ The two Nicolauses are even more evidently separated in Sybert Curaw’s deposition. On March 25, 1394 Sybert, the very last Waldensian convicted in Stettin, said that approximately 2 years earlier he had confessed “to Nicolaus heresiarch now converted and to Nicolaus Gotschalk.”Footnote ⁷⁰ It is evident that both Sybert Curaw and Nicolaus Gotschalk’s sister Geze regarded the recently converted Nicolaus and Nicolaus Gothschalk as two different persons.

When did the last Waldensian Brethren visit Brandenburg and Pomerania, and who they were? First, one has to note that the Brethren identifiable with the converts of 1390–1391 do not, with two exceptions, feature among those to whom the deponents had last confessed. Jutta Rudeger from Stettyn knew several Brethren by name, and said that she had confessed to Nicolaus Gotschalk, Conrad de Toryngia (Thüringen) Condrad de Gemunde (Schwäbisch-Gmünd) and Nicolaus Solothurn. Her last confession had been to Nicolaus Solothurn 1 year earlier.Footnote ⁷¹ Her memory must have failed, as both Kurze’s dating of her deposition (November 24, 1392) and my revised dating (November 24, 1393) would place this confession after Nicolaus Solothurn’s conversion (by September 1391). The second exception is the already-mentioned Sybert Curaw, who on March 25, 1394 (an undisputed date) said that he had confessed “for the last time in the house of Hennyng Vischer in Gross-Wubiser in a room, and it was around 2 years ago that he confessed to heresiarchs Nicolaus-now-converted and Nicolaus Gotschalk; he cannot name others.”Footnote ⁷² As often with the concise Stettin depositions, the statement is ambiguous. One reading is that Sybert’s last confession had been 2 years earlier (Spring 1392) to Nicolaus-now-converted and Nicolaus Gotschalk, another is that his last confession had been at the time, and that the only Waldensian confessors he knew by name were the two Nicolauses. I incline to the second. The evidence of the Stettin depositions thus by and large supports the information of the lists dated to 1391: the Waldensian ministers mentioned in these lists of converts had stopped visiting the area a couple of years earlier.

In total, 26 deponents named a Waldensian minister to whom they had confessed 2 years ago or later, that is after 1391. The single references to Nicolaus Gotschalk and Nicolaus Solothurn are questionable, as discussed in the previous paragraph. In comparison, 19 deponents said that their last confession had been to “Nicolaus conversus,”Footnote ⁷³ and an additional six deponents named a more general “Nicolaus the heresiarch” or similar,Footnote ⁷⁴ in this context probably referring to the recently converted Nicolaus. On February 18, [1394] Tylss Hockman said “that in the autumn it had been a year” from her last confession, ergo it had been in late 1392, and she “named Clauss and Conrad.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Again, it is a bit uncertain if she meant that her last confession had been to confessors named Clauss (=Nicolaus) and Condrad, of if those were the only named “heresiarchs” she remembered in the first place. If she meant that her last confession had been to them, her deposition implies that Nicolaus was accompanied by another, probably younger, confessor named Conrad. The Waldensian Brethren are known to have followed a sort of apprenticeship or novitiate, where a young Brother accompanied a senior master for several years before he was allowed to hear confession independently – the short De vita et conversacione tract written in the 1390s speaks of a period of 6–10 years.Footnote ⁷⁶ The evidence is, however, indecisive, and it might just as well be that Tylss was referring to earlier confessions to Conrad of Schwäbisch-Gmünd.

It is thus evident that a Waldensian Brother named Nicolaus was the last confessor or the Waldensians in Brandenburg and Pomerania. From the Stettin depositions one can with relatively high confidence reconstruct his visits. My reconstruction is based on a dataset recording all social interaction mentioned in the Stettin depositions, and it follows the revised timeline presented in this article. The dates given below are not “real” dates given in the depositions but inferred from these premises. Therefore, no references are given to individual depositions, and the reader is again reminded that the following is only this: a reconstruction.

There are two quite accurate dates provided in the depositions. Lucia Scroeter from Stettin, interrogated in the very beginning of the process in November 1393, said that her last confession had been a year ago on the Feast of the Assumption of Virgin Mary, that is August 15, 1392. She did not mention a Brother Nicolaus, but others in Stettin did, referring also to the autumn of 1392. The deponents from the city of Stettin were summoned to court at the beginning of the process, where many depositions are badly damaged or lost, and do not allow a closer reconstruction.

Nicolaus’s next traceable step is the village Selchow. Arn Enghel from Gross-Wubiser said that his last confession was there in Ebyl Vilter’s house before Michelmas 1392. He did not name Nicolaus, but he is mentioned as visiting Selchow in the autumn of 1391. Katherina Mews also spoke of a meeting at Ebyl Vilter’s house around Michelmas but referring to the year 1391. There are other depositions divided between autumn 1391 and 1392, and it seems that Nicolaus visited there both in 1391 and 1392.

Most meetings took place in Gross-Wubiser, where Brother Nicolaus visited Heyncze Wegener alde’s house on or around Michelmas 1392. It was not the only house in Gross-Wubiser where meetings were held in late 1392: Peter Gossaw, Hennyk Joris alde, Hans Mews, and Otto Pamill are also mentioned as hosts. The town of Bärwalde is mentioned in a dozen depositions, and Peter Beyer, Tyde Cremer, and possibly also Peter Newman hosted sermons and confessions in the autumn of 1392. In Klein-Wubiser, the house of Hennyk Vischer was the meeting place, mentioned by six deponents, all pointing towards late 1392. Other places where Nicolaus probably visited in late 1392 were Gossow, Dramburg, Gräfendorf, Mohrin, Bellin, Gross-Mantel, and Voigtsdorf, each having one to four deponents stating that their last confession had taken place around that time.

Interestingly enough, 16 deponents from the village Kaakstedt, which was one of the most important Waldensian communities, all said that their last confession had been 2–3 years ago (1391), and no-one named a Brother named Nicolaus. It thus seems that he skipped Kaakstedt, at least in 1392. The same seems to apply to Kerkow and Wilmersdorf, though evidence is very scarce. In Prenzlau, Nicolaus is mentioned, but all eight deponents consistently refer to two or more years ago.

It is actually remarkable how consistent the deponents’ memories are: within one residence, they typically point to the last confession having taken place either 1–2 or 2–3 years ago, Selchow being an exception. This is further proof of an uninterrupted process from November 1393 to March 1394: if there had been almost a year’s break in between, one would expect more dispersed statements.

Nicolaus, the last Waldensian Brother, thus arrived in Stettin in August 1392. He probably stayed there and the surroundings for several weeks, before moving upstream the river Oder, where we can trace him in the Waldensian villages of Selchow and Gross-Wubiser around Michaelmas in late September. The furthest point to the east he visited was Dramburg (now Drawsko Pomorskie), some hundred kilometres east of Stettin (See Image 1). Interestingly, Nicolaus stayed on the right bank of Oder, skipping towns and villages in Uckermark. It is possible that he remained in the area till early 1393, but this is speculative. Soon after this, he converted, and in November 1393 Zwicker commenced an inquisition against his followers in Stettin, possibly armed with information from the “recently” converted Nicolaus.

Image 1.

The places visited by Nicolaus, recently converted in 1392. Map: author, created with Palladio.Footnote ⁷⁷