From the Walhalla we have a glimpse of the kind of country through which for many miles the Danube winds its tortuous length. On the left bank are generally the lower hills of the Bayerischer Wald, though for a part of the way these recede to some distance; on the right, “low sedgy and Dutch like,” is an almost unbroken plain extending far to the south. This plain is now well cultivated, and here and there is broken by groups of farm buildings, by small villages consisting frequently of but a few houses (many of them with wooden balconies like those of typical chalets) dominated by white churches, the warm red minaret-like steeples of which—“Little Kremlin-looking cupolas” one visitor has termed them—form a notable feature in the landscape. On this plain we have great stretches of various crops merging the one into the other without any hedges or other division. Cattle may be seen ploughing the fields, and perchance a man sauntering along a road driving a couple of pigs—a cord from the right hind leg of one to the left hind leg of the other, each thus checking the other’s wanderings.
Along the ever-winding river on either bank are occasional villages, but there is no place of special interest for some distance along the stream, which here and there almost doubles upon itself, and here and there receives the water of some small tributary. At Wörth, on the left bank—to which point the Walhalla railway runs—used to be a palace of the bishops of Ratisbon, later a residence of the Princes of Thurn and Taxis. Beyond Wörth the country on the left also becomes flat.
The great plain of Bavaria is known as the Dunkelboden (dark soil) and also as the granary of Bavaria, from the nature of its rich cultivable earth. It is suggested that this was once a great morass—it may perhaps be the bed of some ancient lake. In the days when education was a luxury reserved for the few, the words Bauern von Dunkelboden, or peasants of the dark soil, were used as a term synonymous with boor. Sossau, a village on the left bank as we approach Straubing, is chiefly remarkable for a miracle that is supposed to have happened in the year 1534, when a picture of the Virgin was brought thither by angels. The story runs that the picture was originally in another church in a village where the Lutheran doctrine had been adopted, and that angels took it by boat up the Danube and deposited it at Sossau as a more orthodox place. Sossau belonged to the monks of Kloster Windberg, and they were duly authorized to publish an account of the miracle, and for the benefit of those who could not read a pictorial representation of the transporting of the picture was duly painted on the walls of their monastery at Straubing.
Straubing is an interesting old place on the right bank of a right arm of the Danube, which some distance before reaching the town forks round a large island. It is said of the people that they “ploughed the Danube,” because they dammed up the old bed of the river and so diverted the stream so that it should flow directly by their walls—in proof of which the town arms are decorated with a plough. It is, as has been said, an old town—it has indeed been identified by some historians as Castra Augustana one of the many Danubian stations of the Romans. There are a number of picturesque old buildings, including the tall quadrangular turreted Town Tower, erected early in the fourteenth century. The Gothic churches have notable monuments and stained glass, and in the graveyard of St. Peter’s on the high bank to the east is a chapel to which a romantic and tragical story belongs. This is the Agnes Bernauer Chapel, the name of which is that of a girl who loved too well but not wisely, seeing that she was of humble origin and her lover was heir to the Dukedom of Bavaria. The story may be borrowed from Planché who declared that he doted upon old stories.
“Albert, the only son of Duke Ernst of Bavaria, was one of the most accomplished and valiant princes of the age he lived in. His father and family had selected for his bride the young Countess Elizabeth of Würtemberg. The contract was signed and the marriage on the point of taking place, when the lady suddenly eloped with a more favoured lover—John, Count of Werdenberg. The tidings were brought to Albert at Augsburg, where he was attending a grand tournament given in honour of the approaching nuptials; but they fell unheeded on his ear, as his heart, which had not been consulted in the choice of his bride, had just yielded itself, ‘rescue or no rescue,’ to the bright eyes of a young maiden whom he had distinguished from the crowd of beauties that graced the lists. Virtuous as she was lovely, Agnes Bernauer, had obtained amongst the citizens of Augsburg, the appellation of ‘the angel’; but she was the daughter of a bather, an employment considered at that period, in Germany, as particularly dishonourable. Regardless of consequences, however, he divulged his passion, and their marriage was shortly afterwards privately celebrated in Albert’s castle at Vohberg. Their happiness was doomed to be of short duration. Duke Ernst became possessed of their secret, and the anger of the whole house of Munich burst upon the heads of the devoted couple. Albert was commanded to sign a divorce from Agnes, and prepare immediately to marry Ann, daughter of Duke Erich of Brunswick. The indignant prince refused to obey, and being afterwards denied admission to a tournament at Regensburg, on the plea of his having contracted a dishonourable alliance, he rode boldly into the lists upon the Heide Platz, before the whole company declared Agnes his lawful wife and duchess, and conducted her to his palace at Straubing, attended as became her rank. Every species of malice and misrepresentation was now set at work to ruin the unfortunate Agnes. Albert’s uncle, Duke Wilhelm, who was the only one of the family, inclined to protect her, had a sickly child, and she was accused of having administered poison to it. But the duke detected the falsehood and became more firmly her friend. Death too soon deprived her of this noble protector, and the fate of the poor duchess was immediately sealed. Taking advantage of Albert’s absence from Straubing, the authorities of the place arrested her on some frivolous pretext, and the honest indignation with which she asserted her innocence was tortured into treason by her malignant judges. She was condemned to die, and on Wednesday, 12 October, 1436, was thrown over the bridge into the Danube, amidst the lamentations of the populace. Having succeeded in freeing one foot from the bonds which surrounded her, the poor victim, shrieking for help and mercy, endeavoured to reach the bank by swimming, and had nearly effected a landing, when a barbarian in office, with a hooked pole, caught her by her long fair hair, and dragging her back into the stream, kept her under water until the cruel tragedy was completed. The fury and despair of Albert on receiving these horrid tidings were boundless. He flew to his father’s bitterest enemy, Louis the Bearded, at Ingolstadt, and returned at the head of a hostile army to his native land, breathing vengeance against the murderers of his beloved wife. The old duke, sorely pressed by the arms of his injured son, and tormented by the stings of conscience, implored the mediation of the Emperor Sigismund, who succeeded after some time in pacifying Albert, and reconciling him to his father, who, as a proof of his repentance, instituted a perpetual mass for the soul of the martyred Agnes Bernauer.”
The bridge from which this terrible tragedy—one of the most terrible of the many recorded in the annals of the Danube—took place no longer exists. The date 1436 on the tomb of the murdered Agnes is supposed to be an error, as her husband married Ann of Brunswick in that year. The present bridge connecting the island with the town is of later date. The island, known as Donauwiese (or Danube Meadow) was at one time the annual scene of an eight-day’s fair—known as the Sossau Fair—beginning on the Sunday after Michaelmas. The good folk of Straubing do not seem in the Middle Ages to have been particularly intelligent, for about forty years before the tragedy just chronicled the town was destroyed by fire, and as this originated in a joiner’s shop, no joiner was permitted to reside in the place afterwards; and this regulation was maintained for about a century and a half! The wisdom shown seems to have been similar to that of the Hamelin folk, who would listen to no itinerant musicians after the Pied Piper had (in consequence of their own municipal meanness) spirited away their children.
Like so many other towns that we shall have to visit, Straubing had to bear the brunt of much fighting in the olden times. In 1332 it was besieged for about six weeks by the Bavarians (having been taken by the Austrians about a dozen years earlier) before being captured. In 1663 it had again to stand a severe siege when attacked by the Duke of Saxe-Weimar; and on that occasion the burgomaster of the town, a noted marksman, himself shot upwards of thirty of the duke’s best officers. In 1704 it was again taken by the Austrians. Possibly the reputation of Burgomaster Höller’s marksmanship saved the place from being one of the scenes of fighting in the Napoleonic wars. The Gothic castle—long since converted into barracks—was built in 1356 by Duke William of Bavaria who had married an English princess. On the south side of the castle is a portrait-memorial to a distinguished native of Straubing, Joseph von Fraunhofer (1787-1826) a celebrated optician. Fraunhofer, the son of a poor glazier, being left an orphan when young, was apprenticed to a glass polisher, and when fourteen years of age nearly lost his life, but the accident was indirectly the means which led him to success. On 21 July, 1801 the house in which he was lodging fell down and, fortunately for the poor lad, at the moment that he was being extricated from the ruins, the Elector Maximilian Joseph happened to be passing, and salved his wounds with a present of money which enabled him to obtain release from the last few months of his apprenticeship and to purchase a glass-polishing machine for himself, and so to start upon a distinguished career of study and invention.
North-east of Straubing—in which general direction the devious river flows for some distance—is to be seen the pyramidal Bogenberg about half a dozen miles away. Before reaching it, however, the river receives some further of the many small tributaries that flow down from the Wald, and passes several pleasant, but not otherwise remarkable villages, notably, where the little Aitrach comes in from the south, the triplet-village of Unter-, Mittel-, and Ober-Öbling. The beautiful hills are here again closer to the river on the left, while the plain on the right becomes more diversified. The first place of interest is found shortly before the point at which the railway from Straubing crosses the Danube to Bogen, where on the left stand the conspicuous buildings of the ancient Benedictine monastery of Ober-Altaich. So many were the Benedictine establishments along this river that Schultes, in his “Handbuch für Reisende auf der Donau,” published nearly a century ago, coming to describe one of them wrote: “‘So soon another!’ I think I hear the traveller and the reader exclaim, who may not be acquainted with the magnitude of this Order.” And he then goes on to summarize thus, in a way to delight those with a taste for statistical tit-bits, the number of notables who had belonged to the Benedictine Order up to the time of Hemmauer: “Sixty-three popes, two hundred and twenty-three cardinals, two hundred and fifty-five patriarchs, sixteen thousand archbishops, forty-six thousand bishops, twenty-one emperors, twenty-five empresses, forty-eight kings, fifty-four queens, one hundred and forty-six imperial and royal children, and four hundred and forty-five sovereign princes and dukes.”
The “Kloster” of Ober-Altaich was first founded in the eighth century by a duke who brought Benedictines from Reichenau to people it, and it was built where a chapel had been erected earlier by “the Holy Parminius.” Here, still earlier, had stood a Druidical altar, and Parminius, having destroyed it and with his own hands cut down its sheltering oak, built the chapel which was succeeded by the first Kloster. That was destroyed by the Hungarians in 907, and a couple of centuries passed before it was rebuilt by the Count of Bogen and started on a long period of continuous prosperity. When the Thirty Years’ War was devastating so much of the Continent, Ober-Altaich was not spared, for in 1634 it was destroyed by the Swedes, only to rise, phœnix-like, more splendid than before, thanks to the wealth possessed by the monks. The fresco-paintings in the monastery church illustrate the old-time feeling against Lutheranism, for “monks are drawn exorcising Straubing, and Luther is seen running away in the shape of an unclean spirit, riding on a hog, with the Bible under his arm, a sausage in one hand, and a beer glass in the other.”
Beyond the railway bridge is seen the Bogenberg at the foot of which is the pleasant village of Bogen. On the top of the ’berg is an old pilgrimage church, erected in consequence of one of the various miracles that belong to the neighbourhood, and the ruins of a castle, at one time the seat of one of those robber-nobles who must have made travelling in these parts a terrible thing in the olden days. To Sossau we have seen—and with the particularity of a date not often attached to such happenings—a picture was brought by angels; to Bogen there floated, up-stream, on the waters of the Danube a hollow stone image of the Virgin. Here it grounded, and the hill-top chapel was duly built to house it, and in course of time became famous as a pilgrimage church. Sometimes, it is recorded, as many as eight thousand pilgrims at a time have journeyed to Our Lady of Bogen. Owing to its exposed position—the hill-top is nearly four hundred feet above the river—the church has often been damaged by storm, and once when it was crowded with pilgrims. This was on Whit Tuesday, 1618, when the tower was struck by lightning, and the congregation, in the panic that ensued, crushed several of their number to death. Æmilius Hemmauer, a prior of Ober-Altaich, who recorded the tragedy in verse, describes how—
when the church was closely crowded the tower was struck and fell in; two people were killed outright, and in the subsequent struggle—
The account is not very explicit; presumably one of the men and three of the women recovered.
The ruins of the castle which once proudly dominated the hill-top speak of a past when the lords of Bogen were possessors of the country north of the Danube from the Regen to the Ilz and far up into Bohemia; when they were welcomed as allies, and feared as enemies, by the monarchs of near-by principalities. In the Middle Ages there seem to have been periods of terrible lawlessness in the various German states, and the nobles whose castled homes were perched on the crags bordering the great rivers, the Rhine and the Danube, appear to have been some of the most lawless people of the time. “The terms noble and robber were synonymous, and the higher the rank the more lawless and rapacious were the deeds of the titled ruffian. The castle of Bogen was admirably adapted for a bandit’s hold. Seated upon the apex of a pyramidical rock, inaccessible but by one narrow pass on its eastern side, which a handful of determined men might keep against a host, and commanding a view over nearly half the dukedom of Bavaria, its lawless lord watched from its battlements, like a vulture, the approach of his unsuspecting prey, and, pouncing upon it, bore it up in triumph to his mountain aerie, where he feasted at his leisure in security.” The miraculous arrival of the stone figure of the Virgin at Bogen made the Count of that day repent somewhat of his evil ways and, possibly on receiving a hint as to the best way of cancelling some of his sins, presented this castle on the Bogenberg to the monks of Ober-Altaich; having done what they would on the earth, it may have appeared prudent to seek to ensure a comfortable reception in heaven.
The Counts of Bogen seem to have married women well fitted to be their mates, if we may judge by the story that is told of the mother of the last of these nobles—the family became extinct about the middle of the thirteenth century. This lady was Ludmilla, a Bohemian princess, who had married Count Albert the Third of Bogen. After the death of her husband, Duke Louis the Second of Bavaria heard so much about Ludmilla that he offered her marriage, but, like a shrewd man, knowing the unveracity of Rumour, and her sister Report, he made the offer conditional upon his liking her when they became personally acquainted. In other words he expressed a desire to meet the Countess “with a view to matrimony.” The lady agreed to the terms, and duly received her ducal visitor and prospective suitor. Doubtful as to the impression that she had really made upon him, and suspicious of the sincerity of her wooer, she one day, in seeming playfulness, suggested that they should plight their troth in the tapestried chamber in which they happened to be, and that the three knights figured in the tapestry might be regarded as witnesses. The Duke, unsuspecting any trick, humoured the apparently playful widow, and took the oath required of him—and on the instant three living knights stepped out from behind the hangings, and compelled him to ratify his pledge! Had Duke Louis but suspected that there was a “a rat i’ the arras,” the story might have had another ending.
A little beyond Bogen the Danube trends in a southerly direction, and once more the hills of the Wald recede for a time, though after a few miles the stream turns again towards the mountains, the wooded heights of which are never many miles away from the left bank. Among the villages along the banks, Wischelburg is worthy of mention as being the modern representative of the Roman Bisonium destroyed by Attila and his Huns. As the river nears Deggendorf, there is on the right bank the Natternberg, an isolated hill nearly three hundred feet above the river, and notable as the first hill of any size that has broken the plain for many miles—eighty, says one stickler for the definite—on that side of the river. The great mass of granite certainly seems to belong more fittingly to the north side, and if geologists fail to explain its state of splendid isolation on the south, folk-lore is more resourceful. The legend runs that the devil, having a grudge against the too-good people of Deggendorf, brought this little hill all the way from Italy for the purpose of destroying the town. Having reached the south side of the Danube with his burden, he heard the ringing of the Ave Maria bell at the monastery on the other side of the river, and so was compelled to drop it just short of the mark.[5] On the top of the Natternberg are the ruins of an old castle, never restored after its destruction by the triumphing Swedes during the Thirty Years’ War.
Another similar legend of this part of the Danube concerns a large flotilla carrying crusaders towards the Holy Land, a sight which so enraged the devil “that he plucked up rocks from the neighbouring cliffs, and pitched them right into the channel of the river, thereby hoping to arrest their progress. But in this he was completely deceived; for after the first rock came plunging down amongst them, every man made the sign of the cross, and uniting their voices in a holy anthem, the fiend was instantly paralysed, and slunk away without further resistance. So huge, however, was the first stone which he threw, that for ages it caused a swirl and swell in this part of the river, which nothing but the skill and perseverance of Bavarian engineers could remove.”
At the river-side foot of the Natternberg, is the village of Fischerdorf, and across the stream, beautifully situated, is Deggendorf, backed, as it were, by terraced hills, each semicircle rising higher than that in front. These mountains of the Bayerischer Wald, which rise at their highest to nearly five thousand feet, are still largely covered with forests in which pine and beech are the preponderating trees.
Kloster-Metten, the ringing of the bells at which caused the devil to drop the Natternberg, and so saved Deggendorf from destruction, is on the left bank where the Unternbach joins the Danube. The monastery owes its origin, says legendary lore, to the following series of strange occurrences. A herdsman, belonging to the village of Michaelbuch, Gamelbert by name, having been sleeping for some time under a tree, awakened to find that a book was lying on his breast. This book was written in English, of which language the simple herdsman was, of course, wholly ignorant, but, nevertheless, he at once began reading it, and, reading it, was so greatly edified, that abandoning his simple labour as herdsman, he journeyed to Rome and became a priest. On his way he baptized a boy named Utto, desiring that when he became a man the lad should seek him out. This in due time Utto did, when Gamelbert made him priest of Michaelbuch; but Utto did not care for his new task, and so, deserting his flock, he crossed the river and wandered into the woods, and there—close to a spring since known as Utto’s spring—built a hermitage which he dedicated to the Archangel Michael.
It came to pass that the mighty Emperor Charlemagne hunting in the neighbourhood discovered the holy hermit engaged in the curious whim of hanging his axe upon a sunbeam! Astonished greatly by what he saw, and recognizing in it proof of Utto’s holiness, the emperor offered to grant the hermit any request that he might prefer. Utto asked that a convent might be built, and Kloster-Metten was in due course erected in fulfilment of Charlemagne’s promise. Those who are inclined to be sceptical can see the monastery, can visit the spring and the little church of Uttobrunn near by! If these do not persuade them of the truth of the legend, they will, at least, readily admit that the beautiful wooded hills hereabouts, and the delightful mountain streams, form an appropriate setting for the mediæval story.
Deggendorf has the usual tale to tell of suffering during wars, indeed it suffered more than some of its neighbours, for not only was it partly destroyed by the Swedes, but much of what the enemy spared fire destroyed a few years later—including all the town records. But some good old buildings, including the Rathaus and a fourteenth century pilgrimage church escaped destruction. This church is said to date from the year 1337, when a woman and some Jews were concerned in stealing and insulting the Host. Their efforts to destroy the consecrated wafer, by eating, by hammering on an anvil, and other means were miraculously frustrated; and when they flung it down a well, the well was immediately surrounded by a nimbus. However the story arose, the fanatical passions of the populace were aroused against the Jews, and a horrible indiscriminate massacre of those people took place, after which the miraculously preserved wafer was solemnly taken back to the church from which it had been stolen. The massacre took place on the day after that dedicated to St. Michael and a century and a half later the Pope issued a Bull giving general absolution to those who paid a Michaelmas pilgrimage to the Gnaden-Kirche or Church of Grace. In consequence of that, many thousands of pilgrims annually visited—and I believe still visit—Deggendorf. A hundred years ago the pilgrims on one occasion are said to have numbered fifty thousand.
Near to this pleasant old town of unpleasant memories are a number of “bergs” offering easy climbs and magnificent views up and down the Danube and over the Bayerischer and Böhmer Wälder. Indeed there are not wanting enthusiasts who regard this as one of the most beautiful bits of the beautiful river. One feels so often tempted to say this while at a “bit” which is specially pleasing that such a summing up has really but little value. Beautiful indeed is much of the journey between here and Passau—to say nothing of the further beauties beyond—but to pick out the best would be difficult.
Just below Deggendorf, comes in on the right another of those sixty navigable tributaries which, as Gibbon pointed out, go to swell the volume of the mighty river. This is the Isar, the river on which, some eighty miles away, stands Munich. Across the level land about the Isar’s many mouths may be seen the spires of the old market town of Plattling—the last town upon that river. It is inevitable, when mentioning the Isar, that one should think of Campbell’s “Hohenlinden,” with its opening verse—
It has not much to do with the Danube, perhaps, but it may be pointed out here that Hohenlinden is about twenty miles as the crow flies from the nearest point on the Isar, and that the river nearest the battlefield is the Isen. Either Campbell misspelt the name of the river and was a little “out” in his geography, or else his printers made Isen into Iser—and since then the misprint has been generally adopted.
The poet’s sojourn in Bavaria in the year 1800, was indeed fruitful of several verses besides the famous “Hohenlinden,” which was written after his return to London, while three years earlier he had written “The Wounded Hussar” a piece of mechanical romanticism which was at one time widely popular—
Where the Isar joins the Danube we may more fittingly recall the poet’s “Song translated from the German.”
About this bit of the Danube there are a number of islands caused by the small branches of the Isar where it reaches the greater river. Still with the beautiful hills on the left and the plain on the right, the river goes on past small villages and hamlets. The next place with an arresting story is Nieder-Altaich, the site of another Benedictine monastery, and that at one time the most important of all which this powerful Order held in Bavaria. Here St. Parminius went through the same performance as at Ober-Altaich—destroying a Druid altar and cutting down its sheltering oak with his own hands—and here, also as at the other place, came the destroying Hungarians in the tenth century. The Benedictines showed again their great recuperative power, for the monastery was rebuilt and re-endowed before the close of the same century. Hither came St. Gotthard (born at Reichersdorf in 965) as a barefoot candidate for a monk’s cell; here he rose to be abbot, until he was transferred as bishop to Hildesheim, where he died in 1035. Two and a half centuries later the monastery seems to have had a less worthy head, for it is said that in the year 1232, the monks of Nieder-Altaich lay in ambush and shot their abbot with arrows as he was crossing to Thundorf on the other side of the river.
The chronicles of the place have to tell of another unpopular abbot—one, however, who was removed from the post in a less drastic fashion, for in an old Bavarian history there is record of an abbot of Nieder-Altaich who seems to have interpreted the rules of the Benedictine Order in a very liberal fashion, so far as he himself was concerned: “Besides his valet he had two pages. On his name-day all the principal persons of the government of Straubing assembled in the grand refectory of Nieder-Altaich. A band of trumpets and kettle-drums was in attendance from daybreak, facing his chamber window, and the moment his Excellency (for he had purchased the title of a privy councillor) opened his eyes, the pages undrew the curtains of cloth of gold, amidst a flourish from the trumpets and kettle-drums without, while a battery of small mortars proclaimed in thunder to the surrounding country, the dawning of the name-day of this important personage.” It is said that not only did this worthy spend upwards of ninety thousand florins a year, but when he was made to retire he had run his monastery into a debt of over a hundred thousand florins. In his retirement he was reduced to an annuity of two hundred ducats. This abbot may well have thought that he was only ordering his life in a manner befitting the head of so magnificent an establishment, for it is recorded that ten times was the “Kloster” burnt down, and each successive destruction was only made the occasion for rebuilding it more splendidly than before, until “the very oxen of the community eat out of marble mangers.” It is, perhaps, not surprising to find that this worthy was one of the last of the abbots of Nieder-Altaich.
The winding river goes by village after village, with here and there fresh ruins testifying to the past importance of the natural frontier afforded by the Danube. Inland, on the left, is the old castle of Hengersberg, said to have belonged to a mediæval St. Maurice, who is not to be confused with the Theban Christian martyred with his legion by the orders of that Cæsar whom he sought to serve. Where the stream takes a short semi-circular bend to the south, a little way inland, on a low hillside, is Osterhofen, which is described as one of the oldest towns in Bavaria and the Castra Petrensia of the Romans, where a notable victory was won over the long-victorious Avars, who, introduced by Rome to Europe as allies, remained to be a standing menace to the Roman power. These Avars, who seem finally to have merged in the Huns, are described as at first appearing at Constantinople with their long hair hanging in tresses down their backs, and the description suggests that the gipsies to be met lower down the Danube may be their descendants. The defeat of the Avars at Osterhofen is said to have happened upon an Easter Sunday—in consequence of which the town gained its present name and right to bear a paschal lamb as its insignia. In the Oster-Wiese—or Easter Meadow—on which the battle was won, that Duke Uttilo, who had founded the monasteries of Ober- and Nieder-Altaich, is said to have erected yet another Benedictine monastery—only to have it destroyed by the vengeance-seeking Avars in 765.
Bending north again from Osterhofen the river soon reaches Winzer, with the ruins of a castle reduced to their present state by “the whiskered Pandoors and the fierce hussars” of Maria Theresa in 1741. At Hofkirchen, also on the left, we reach the ruined castle of another of those families of robber barons who were a law unto themselves, for Hofkirchen was the seat of the Counts of Ortenburg renowned as the persistent enemies of the Counts of Bogen, whose ruined place the Danube passed some distance to the west, and who were, as well, a standing danger to those who went down the Danube in boats. The quarrels between Bogen and Ortenburg were not of the kind of falling out among thieves by which honest men come to their own, for the Counts of Ortenburg seem, indeed, to have been some of the most notorious of the powerful nobles who from their strongholds on the Danube enforced the predatory laws which they themselves enacted. Among their ingenuities, they devised or interpreted in their own fashion the “right” of “grundwehr,” by which any vessel that grounded anywhere within their domain became confiscated, with all its cargo and crew. It had but to grate the sand or brush the shore, to touch in passing any island bank or shoal, to be captured by the Count’s henchmen, who were ever on the watch. It is even said that these same henchmen did not scruple to chase any passing boat until they forced it to ground, and so could establish a “rightful” claim to it and all it contained! Well might Froissart say of the German barons of old “they are people worse than Saracens or Paynims; for their excessive covetousness quencheth the knowledge of honour.”
On the right bank, a little inland on the rising ground, where the little Angerbach nears the Danube, is Kinzing or Künzing, another link with the Rome of old; for in place of its present short name is said to have been the earlier one of Castra Quintana or Augusta Quintanorum Colonia. Here is said to have lived in the fifth century a hermit saint, Severinus, though Gibbon makes that saint’s dwelling place somewhere in Noricum, which was bounded on the west by the Inn and on the east by the Save. He is one of the two saints of this name, and is associated with the story of Odoacer, the first barbarian who was ruler of Italy on the downfall of the Western empire. “After the death of Odoacer’s father, a leader of the Scyrri and officer of Attila’s, the youth,” says Gibbon, “led a wandering life among the barbarians of Noricum, with a mind and a fortune suited to the most desperate adventures; and when he had fixed his choice, he piously visited the cell of Severinus, the popular saint of the country, to solicit his approbation and blessing. The lowness of the door would not admit the lofty stature of Odoacer: he was obliged to stoop; but in that humble attitude the saint could discern the symptoms of his future greatness; and addressing him in a prophetic tone, ‘Pursue,’ said he ‘your design; proceed to Italy; you will soon cast away this coarse garment of skins; and your wealth will be adequate to the liberality of your mind.’” Among the miracles associated with the name of this St. Severinus is one that tells how in a time of flood he saved Kinzing from inundation by planting a cross on the Danube bank—succeeding by holiness and faith where mere pride, as in the case of Cnut, failed.
Another of the saint’s doings suggests that workers of miracles have sometimes performed but thankless tasks. Severinus had a great friend named Sylvin, and when Sylvin died, the body was laid in a little wooden church outside the walls of the town. Severinus, going to the church to mourn his friend, bethought to restore him to life, and the miracle was duly performed—to the great annoyance of Sylvin, who reproached the saint saying, “I beg of thee, I conjure thee, not to rouse me from the rest which God has appointed for me! Why hast thou awakened me? Why hast thou brought me back into a world into which I never more wish to return?” Whether the saint had his way and Sylvin lived on, or whether the revenant was allowed to die again forthwith, we are not told.
The right bank of the Danube now begins to take on the more variedly picturesque beauty of the left as the ground becomes hillier. Pleinting, a small town, is passed on the right bank—from which point the railway from Ratisbon keeps closely along the river to Passau—and a little beyond on the left are the picturesque ruins of Hildegartsburg, “the hold of some robber knight, noble, or priest, of the Middle Ages” destroyed by the Duke of Austria as long ago as the middle of the fourteenth century. The next town, Vilshofen, which is on the right bank disputes with Osterhofen the claim to be considered as the Castra Quintana of the Romans. Here two streams the Vils and the Wolfbach empty themselves into the Danube. Though there is low-lying marshy land in the neighbourhood, the low hills from the south are sensibly drawn in to meet those on the further bank and so to form a beautiful stretch of the river. Vilshofen like so many other of the places along the Danube, in the days when the making of history largely followed the course of the great rivers, was the scene of much fighting. It seems to have belonged to the Counts of Ortenburg, and thus to have been assured of such a fate. Here, in the fourteenth century, one Heinrich Tuschl founded a religious house for men. Having discovered his wife to be unfaithful to him, he revenged himself, not by any mere method of divorce, but by having her walled up alive; and thereafter (it is not surprising to learn) he abjured the company and shunned the sight of women. When he died he left his property to build this place in Vilshofen and on the charter of it he wrote—
or,
The canons of the place he thus founded bore the word “allain” on their arms, their clothes and their houses, and this, says Schultes, was latinized as “Solus cum sola.” Beyond Vilshofen and on to Passau is a lovely stretch of the river, with wooded hills on either side and occasional villages. The swift stream, here broken up by submerged rocks, “boils” and foams along in a manner that is seen again and again on the journey. At points where the disturbance is more particularly marked the hurrying waters receive some special name, until they reach the most remarkable manifestation of their brokenness at the world-famous Iron Gate. Below Vilshofen, near the village of Sandbach the troubled waters are known as “the terrible Sandbach”; but as we see boats passing these places—among them being ferry boats taken by girls across the swirling waters—the terror is more in seeming than in reality, when experience and care are employed in navigation. Indeed the temerarious Englishmen who took out the “Water Lily” said that they found nothing dreadful, nothing their shallow craft could not negotiate with ordinary care. As their chronicler wrote of this stretch of the river, which had been described to them as one of the bugbears of the Danube: “On we went alone, and found that it was just what we had expected, a most exceedingly dangerous place for a heavily laden boat, but by no means so for our little cockle-shell, that only drew a few inches of water; rocks were scattered about the bed of the river in every direction, some above water, and some below; the white breakers surrounded us on every side; we came rather unpleasantly near one, but with steady pulling, careful steering, and quick obedience to the word of command, we came safely through.”
Some way beyond “the terrible Sandbach” the road was cut more or less through the very rock right along the river-side, and here is to be seen another of the Danube memorials in the form of a couchant lion on a pedestal placed upon a jutting rock above an inscription which records that the road was made by order of Maximilian Joseph, the first king of Bavaria. From near Heining—where a branch of the railway is carried across the Danube, to the valley of the Ilz and the villages of the Wald—the towers of Mariahilf by Passau may be seen, and soon after the towers of Passau itself and the buildings on the high hills on the left bank to the north of the town.
FOOTNOTES:
[5] A similar story belongs to Kent, for it is said that the devil, wishing to destroy the city of Canterbury, took a great part of it up intending to drop it in the sea, but just as he reached the shore, he heard the ringing of the cathedral bell, and had to drop his load, and so instead of destroying the city of Canterbury, he started the town of Whitstable.