HANS KOHLHASE (1547)

Merchan turned brigand who spent the later 1530s in a feud with Saxony causing considerable disruption until he was caught and executed.

While Kohlhase was on his way to be Leipzig fair in 1532, two of his horses were confiscated by a Saxon nobleman. Unable to obtain redress from Saxon courts he two years later issued a Fehdebrief (feud letter) not only to the agressor but to all of electoral Saxony.

For the next six years he and the band he had collected terrorized the border region between Saxony and Bradenburg. The elector of Saxony set a price on the head of Kohlhase who was always able to find sanctuary in Brandenburg.

His downfall came when he also began operating in Bradenburg. Captured by the elector Joachim II in 1540 he and his principal associate were broken on the wheel in Berlin.

Heinrich von Kleist celebrated the man whom denial of justice turned to crime in the story Michael Kohlhaas in 1810.