Rostock in the Sixteenth Century

Rostock, 1572 (the prints of Wismar and Rostock were mixed up and have the wrong names)

The Civitates Orbis Terrarum contains two views of Rostock. Both depict the city in profile from the east, with the Warnow River in the foreground. The first appears in volume one of the Civitates, first published in 1572. It is on a page with three other images. The view is mistakenly titled Wismaria (Wismar), the city Kiechel was actually travelling to when he left Copenhagen before the weather forced him to change plans. The engravers of the plates for Rostock and Wismar presumably mixed up the images.

The view shows Rostock as a large port city with many church towers. The river and harbour are busy with ships of various sizes. Compared with the second image, published in volume five in 1598, the first lacks detail and appears to be a copy of an older woodcut. While Rostock’s silhouette is clearly recognisable, it looks rather generic. The second view contains much more detail, from the names of various buildings to the distinct shapes of the town hall (Curia) and St. Mary’s Church (D. Mariae) to the busy quayside with people and cargo.

Rostock, 1598

During Samuel Kiechel’s visit to Rostock, the city was experiencing rapid economic growth after a period of decline and political turbulence.

Compared with other cities along the Baltic Sea coast, where the Protestant Reformation had already taken hold in the 1520s, Rostock adopted it only in 1531, after resistance from the city council and the university. In addition, a conflict was brewing in Rostock between the council’s magistrates and the general population. Over time, it had become a rule to allow only members of Rostock’s patrician families to serve on the council. Everyone else was excluded. As a result, the majority of Rostock’s population had no representatives to speak on their behalf. They demanded that a second chamber be established, particularly to give craftsmen and artisans a voice.²

The second view in the Civitates Orbis Terrarum includes costume prints of Rostock’s inhabitants. The first image shows peasants, the second shows a council member and two citizens, and the third shows three women.

Rostock’s territorial lord, Johann Albrecht I (1525-1576), Duke of Mecklenburg, became involved in the growing conflict on the side of the old city council and eventually occupied the city in 1565. Attempts by the populace to establish a second representative body to counter patrician influence were thwarted. The Duke ordered the city walls to be torn down to prevent resistance.³ Samuel Kiechel noted that the city was not heavily fortified.

In two subsequent treaties in 1573 and 1584, Rostock came under the Duke’s full control. The struggle for autonomy was typical of German cities in the late medieval and early modern periods. Some cities, like Ulm, Hamburg and Regensburg, managed to maintain their freedom, while others, like Rostock, lost their autonomy and became subjects of their territorial lord. However, with the loss of autonomy, tensions within the city eased, laying the foundation for Rostock’s second economic boom.⁴

Samuel Kiechel noted that high-quality beer was produced in Rostock. Beer was a key product in the city’s economy in the late sixteenth century. The right to brew beer and trade in the necessary ingredients (barley, hops and malt) was strictly regulated. A seventeenth-century property register lists about 250 houses where beer was brewed.⁵ Many of those houses were private residences rather than commercial breweries. Beer brewing was therefore not confined to a specific part of Rostock, unlike other trades, but was found throughout the city.⁶ In private residences, beer was produced for daily consumption and also exported. The beer trade was lucrative, and professional brewers were among the city’s wealthy elite.⁷

Samuel Kiechel in Rostock

Samuel Kiechel wrote that Rostock has a university, and that some of the noblemen who studied there had their meals at the inn where Kiechel stayed. During his time in the city, other noblemen visited the house to see the students, and together with our traveller, they enjoyed two entertaining days of eating, drinking, dancing and other activities.¹⁴

This comment concludes with Kiechel referring to a letter he wrote. It is the only point in the journal where he mentions writing letters home. While the revelation that Samuel communicated his experiences to his family in Ulm should not surprise us, it seems odd that there are no other references to it. We do not know how many letters he wrote or how often, and none of them has survived.

In the journal, Kiechel continues that one morning some of the university’s professors were outside the inn in the market square. When the noblemen in Kiechel’s accommodation saw them, they grabbed some of the innkeeper’s books and threw them out the window into the street. Kiechel assumed they did this to honour the professors, a somewhat strange conclusion.

As usual, Samuel Kiechel wrote little about his stay in Rostock. I went to the city’s archive hoping to find additional information. Unfortunately, neither the name of Kiechel’s innkeeper, Niclas Bergman, nor the inn itself was mentioned in the sources I consulted.

The town hall of Rostock on the Mittelmarkt

Regarding the inn’s location, Kiechel wrote that it was at the market. In the late sixteenth century, Rostock had several market squares. The Mittelmarkt (Middle Market; today called Neuer Markt/New Market) and the Hopfenmarkt (Hops Market; today called University Square) were the two largest and most important. On the Mittelmarkt stood the town hall, the city’s wine cellar and the houses of many influential citizens. At the Hopfenmarkt were various university buildings.

The University of Rostock was founded in 1419 and is one of the oldest in Germany. The Auditorium Magnum (large lecture hall) stood in the centre of the Hopfenmarkt. The Philosophical College, the houses of several professors and five houses with accommodation for students and rooms for teaching (called Regentien) were around the square. These Regentien houses were essentially student dormitories, and each had a name. They were called: Porta Coeli (Heaven’s Gate), Roter Löwe (Red Lion), Einhorn (Unicorn), Halbmond (Half Moon) and Adlerburg (Eagle’s Castle).¹⁵ According to the “Regentienordnung” (Regulation of the Student’s houses) of 1569, each house was overseen by graduates who had to offer lectures in writing and disputation. Two professors in turn oversaw them.¹⁶

Two of Rostock’s five Regentien houses: the Eagle’s Castle (Adelers Burck) on the left and the Unicorn (Einhorn) on the right.

Two houses on the Hopfenmarkt. Maybe one of them was the inn where Samuel Kiechel stayed?

The inn where Samuel Kiechel stayed and where students from noble families went for lunch could have been at either the Mittelmarkt or the Hopfenmarkt. A property register of Rostock compiled fifteen years after Kiechel’s visit contains no mention of an inn at any of Rostock’s markets.¹⁷ But that does not mean such an establishment did not exist in 1586. It could have closed in the meantime, or it may not have been an official inn but rather private accommodation. Proximity to the university suggests the inn was located at the Hopfenmarkt. However, the Mittelmarkt was where wealthier citizens lived, and noble visitors usually stayed.¹⁸

Having young noblemen study at a university was no longer unusual in the sixteenth century. The time when influential positions in the Holy Roman Empire and the Church depended solely on being born into the right families was past. Education became a key requirement, and the wealthy citizenry became serious competition. As a consequence, more and more young noblemen were sent to universities in the Empire and across Europe. According to the Matriculation Register of Rostock University from 1585, nine young noblemen were studying in the city and may have been Kiechel’s acquaintances. Three of them were from the province of Mecklenburg, two from Pommerania, three from Schleswig and Holstein and one from Brandenburg.¹⁹

The Auditorium Magnum stood in the middle of the Hopfenmarkt. As one of the few glimpses of city life, Vicke Schorler depicted a procession of students in front of the building.

While life in the Regentien-houses had been strictly regulated, the growing number of noble students meant that regulations were relaxed. Wealthy students increasingly stayed in private accommodation, and students’ lives grew closer to what we might consider today.²⁰ Samuel Kiechel wrote that he spent a few relaxed days with students, eating, drinking and dancing. As for the students throwing books out of the inn’s windows when they spotted their professors in the market square, I doubt Kiechel’s explanation that this was done to honour the professors.

Our traveller spent five days in Rostock to recuperate from his previous endeavours. He left the city in a coach on 5 May 1586, heading east along the Baltic Sea.