Death and the Devil

The origin of this privilege went back to the end of the previous century and the conflict between the emperor Frederick Barbarossa and Pope Alexander III, in which the archbishop of Cologne was involved—on the emperor’s side. As far as the peasants were concerned, it made no difference whose army happened to be passing through. Their womenfolk were raped, their children murdered, and they themselves held over a fire until they revealed where they had hidden what few valuables they possessed. Their farms were burned down, their stores requisitioned or consumed on the spot, and, since it was clear to the soldiers that a farmer couldn’t survive without his farm, they saved him from starvation by hanging him from the nearest tree.

Nothing for people to get worked up about.

Philip von Heinsberg, the then archbishop of Cologne, joined in the pillaging and plundering with a will and was not above razing the occasional monastery to the ground and massacring the monks. Perhaps surprisingly, this did not stop the pope, when he finally made peace with Barbarossa, from confirming him in his office of archbishop. The only loser in the whole affair, apart from the poor peasants, appeared to be the duke of Saxony, Henry the Lion.

Things started to get critical for Cologne only when the archbishop, having decided to extend his territory at Henry the Lion’s expense, made the mistake of squabbling with his allies and found himself facing an angry Lion with only his Cologne foot soldiers. He was forced to retreat, and the ugly mood of his troops threatened to bring disaster down on them all. The Cologne warriors slew everyone and everything that came within range, thus considerably increasing the chances of hostilities spreading to the city’s own territory. And if that happened, as everybody was aware, the first to be killed would be those who had nothing to do with this obscenity of a war.

Now they were landed with it.

So far the city council had supported their archbishop, but this was too much. In his absence they started to build new fortifications, which, legally, was the right of the emperor or the archbishop alone. The result was the inevitable bust-up. Philip was furious, forbade the wall, was ignored, appealed to Barbarossa, and in the end was bought off with a payment of two thousand marks. There was nothing to stop the good citizens from building their wall.

Now, in the year of our Lord 1260 and a good eighty years later, it had finally been declared completed. Five miles long, with twelve massive gate towers and fifty-two turrets, it literally dwarfed all other town walls. As well as the city proper, it also enclosed farms and monasteries, productive orchards and vineyards, which until then had lain unprotected outside the city gates, making Cologne an almost self-sufficient world.

For the citizens the great wall was a symbol of their independence and bolstered their self-confidence, much to the disgust of the present archbishop, Conrad von Hochstaden.

For Jacob it was a blessing.

He knew nothing about politics, nor did he want to. However, the men who designed the wall had included an architectural feature of which he and others like him had made good use. At regular intervals along the inside there were arches that were deep and high enough to provide shelter from the worst of the weather and the seasons. Eventually someone had the idea of making a lean-to shack out of planks, branches, and rags, and others followed suit. One of these was an old day-laborer called Richolf Wisterich who managed to keep body and soul together by working in the tread wheel for the hoists on the cathedral building site. When Jacob came back to Cologne a few months previously he had made friends with the old man and, when he died, inherited his shack. Thus he possessed what soon became mockingly referred to as status muri, the privilege of a roof—of a kind—over his tousled head.

In contrast to Jacob, who had virtually nothing, Tilman had nothing at all. He usually slept at the Duck Ponds, a miserable patch of ground at the back of a section of old wall left over from the tenth century. It had no arches to shelter under. The moat had more or less filled in and consisted of a series of putrid, stagnant pools where ducks dabbled. Beyond it willows and poplars rose out of the mud, and then began the extensive gardens of the monasteries and convents. The stench was awful. Tilman used to say living there was probably worse than dying out in the open fields, underlining his opinion with a barking cough that sounded as if he was unlikely to be around to reflect on such matters much longer.

When Jacob eventually found him he was sitting with his back to the wall at the Ponds, staring at the sky. His scrawny body was clothed in a long, tattered shirt and his feet wrapped in rags. He could have been an imposing figure of a man, but he was skinny as a rake.

Jacob sat down beside him. For a while they both observed the clouds slowly sailing past.