The jet trade of Bern

In 1507, the city of Bern was shaken by the so-called Jetzer trade. The then 23-year-old journeyman tailor Hans Jetzer from Zurzach had just been admitted to the Dominican monastery in Bern when the Virgin Mary appeared to him regularly, accompanied by various saints. Before that, he saw the ghost of a former Prior of the Bernese Monastery who was deposed 160 years ago and then died in a brawl in Paris, leaving him in purgatory since his death.

The spirit told him that there were many Franciscans in purgatory because they believed in the teachings of Mary’s Immaculate Conception and had to pay for it. He was talking about one of the most important theological problems of the time. According to this, the Dominicans, who assumed that Mary was conceived in original sin (i.e., “spotted”), were on the “correct” path.

This was confirmed when Jetzer appeared on the night of March 24 to 25, just in time for the Feast of the Annunciation, the Virgin Mary herself, accompanied by Saint Barbara, whom Jetzer particularly venerated. Maria brought Jetzer several relics and placed a first stigma on his right hand with the promise that the remaining four would follow within six weeks. That was also very revealing, because unlike the Franciscans with Saint Francis of Assisi, the Dominicans did not have a stigmatized saint until then. Several attempts to produce such a saint or such a saint had already failed.

However, the Dominicans did not wait out the six weeks, instead having a white host in Mary’s hands changed to a red one in mid-April. Jetzer discovered that Mary was played by the monastery’s reading master, Stephan Boltzhurst, and the two angels accompanying him, by Prior Johann Vatter and Subprior Franz Ueltschi. The trio stood on a balance beam, which was operated from the adjacent cell by conductor Heinrich Steinegger.

The opposite cried out in frustration and anger as the reading master tried to calm him down by saying that they were trying to see if he could tell real from false apparitions. However, he insisted that the white host had actually been turned into a bloody one, and this was subsequently exposed several times in adoration – a first class sacrilege for the host.

By mid-April, the action had essentially failed, and if the monastic leaders had abandoned their plan at the time, the matter would not have ended fatally for them. Instead, they unsuccessfully tried several times to poison Jetzer, who had become a great danger to them. At the beginning of May, the subprior gave the other four stigmata the opposite. Every day around noon, under the influence of a drink given to him by his superiors, he played a strange passion play that everyone in Bern watched.

The monastery leaders went even further: on the night of June 24 to 25, 1507, they painted bloody tears on the face of a statue of the Virgin Mary in their church. The seated Mary held her dead son on her lap. According to the masterminds, his mother asked why she was crying and was told that she disapproved of his Immaculate Conception being passed on to her as well. The whole city was in an uproar, all the more so when Mary announced a night or two later that a great plague was coming to Bern because the chiefs of the city repeatedly took bribes from foreign princes they had actually renounced. This prophecy thrilled the Bernese much more than the question of Mary’s conception.

By the end of July, Jetzer’s stigmata had disappeared overnight, probably because the bishop of Lausanne had expressed the intention to have them examined by a doctor. Then the bloody wafer, which was displayed for veneration on the feast of the patron saint of the Dominican Church on July 29, 1507, also became a problem. However, because one was not allowed to just throw away a wafer, the monastery leaders tried to force Jetzer to swallow it. When he resisted and the host vomited on a chair, leaving a red stain, they tried to burn the chair in an oven. The furnace and the whole room seemed to explode, which even the monastic leaders interpreted as a miracle of the Host.

The last apparition was that of a crowned Mary in the night of September 12 to 13, 1507 in the Dominican Church. The apparition was planned in such a way that Jetzer himself could also be blamed for it, but Jetzer overheard the corresponding conversation of his superiors and received Maria with stick and knife, but was unable to catch and expose her. The Small Council had Jetzer arrested on 1 October 1507 and handed over to the Bishop of Lausanne for investigation.

The first trial took place in Lausanne and Bern in the winter of 1507/1508 and focused solely on the inverted brother Hans Jetzer. The bishop of Lausanne proceeded very carefully and tried to find out what heresy he was holding. He was not deterred by the city of Bern, which demanded that Jetzer be tortured. The city authorities finally succeeded in returning Jetzer to Bern before the end of the year, where he was tortured several times in early February and accused his superiors.

Since the Dominicans were members of an order exempted by the bishop, an extraordinary trial approved by the pope was necessary, which took place in Bern in the summer of 1508. Judges were the bishops of Lausanne and Sitten, Aymo von Montfalcon and Matthäus Schiner, and the provincial of the Upper German Dominican province, Peter Sieber. He tried to prevent his fellow brothers from being tortured as long as possible and left the court when the corresponding decision was made anyway.

He first had the weaker links in the chain, the conductor and the deputy prior, tortured, and then condemned the prior and the reading master with their confessions. Although confessions obtained through torture should always be suspected, a coherent story eventually emerged of five defendants (including Jetzer) who had been held separately since February 1508.

After the provincial left the court, the defendants were also questioned as to whether the Upper German Dominican province was jointly guilty, and it transpired that the plan to perform miracles in favor of the Immaculate Conception had already been discussed in early May 1506 at a provincial chapter in Wimpfen (D) was caught. The city of Bern was chosen for the execution because it seemed powerful but stupid in the eyes of the Dominicans.

In Wimpfen the Dominicans were particularly annoyed by the fact that an Italian Franciscan friar, Bernardin de Bustis, had published a pamphlet in the 1490s in which he listed numerous miracles in favor of the Immaculate Conception and triumphantly noted that in favor of the Immaculate Conception it was still was still unsuccessful. miracle.

Yet no verdict came at the end of the main trial, because the bishops of Lausanne and Sitten disagreed: Montfalcon pleaded for life imprisonment for the Dominicans, Schiner for death at the stake. He was supported by the leaders of the city of Bern, elected by the Dominicans for his stupidity and criticized for his unreliability in pension matters. Here a remnant of the Swabian war polemic becomes understandable, because since the federal cities had allied themselves with the provincial cities, they also fell under the judgment of the Swabians in the eyes of the Swabians «(stupid) cow Swiss».

Given the open-ended nature of the main process, permission from the Pope was required for any revision process. For this process, which took place in Bern in May 1509, an Italian bishop, Achilles de Grassis of Città di Castello, was placed in charge of the bishops of Lausanne and Sitten. This caused a stir in Bern because he wore a set of “ivory teeth”.

On May 23, the Dominicans were demoted (desecrated) by the ecclesiastical court on a scaffold on Kreuzgasse and handed over to the secular arm. The charges were heresy, sacrilege, poisoning, idolatry (violation of the host), and practice of the black arts. They were crimes Jetzer had nothing to do with. At the end of May, the secular court, probably the small council, pronounced the death sentence on the monastic leaders and had it executed on May 31.

Until the end of the 19th century, no one doubted the guilt (in the sense of the accusation) of the four Dominicans – until in 1897 the German church historian Nikolaus Paulus published a work entitled Committed the judicial murder of four Dominicans. Documented revision of the Bern Jetzer Trial of 1509, published. In it he accused the city of Bern of judicial murder. At that time, however, only the files of Jetzer’s trial in Lausanne and Bern (winter 1507/1508) were known, so that one can hardly speak of a “documentary revision”.

The files of the three Jetzer trials were not published until 1904 by Rudolf Steck, professor of New Testament at the University of Bern, but he also spoke of a “judicial murder”, which he attributed to the pope. As a result, Jetzer was portrayed throughout 20th-century Bernese historiography as the sole culprit, even if it was impossible to explain how he could have single-handedly staged all these phenomena.

The longer one is involved in the Jetzer trade, the greater the doubts about the unilateral debt to Jetzer. He was the only one in history and historiography who did not lobby. Jetzer Handel’s relatively high intellectual level, which could not have been his, also contradicts Nocher’s sole guilt. But above all, the source of inspiration for the Jetzer profession could be found: the writings of Bernardin de Bustis, which Jetzer had certainly not read.