The Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen years

How the Prussian crown took the Trąbczyn estates from their Polish owner and gave them to a Prussian general; how he divided them, let them out and lost them; and how his claim to them was argued until 1820.

This is one of three eras. See the story for the other two, which are not yet published.

This era holds 474 documents, dated between 1794 and 1832, from 17 archival holdings. Most are letters written to the estates’ owner by his agent. With them are the charters by which the King of Prussia granted the estates, the deeds by which they were sold and let out, a court record of one settler’s lease, the confirmation of a family entail, and the files of the Prussian ministries on the owner’s affairs. The Sources page describes each holding.

The letters and the deeds answer different questions. The deeds record what was agreed: who took which land, at what price and on what terms. The letters record what happened next. The ministry files show how the case looked from Berlin.

Who is who

Prince Friedrich Ludwig of Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen (1746 to 1818) was a Prussian general and governor of Wrocław, with estates and ironworks in Silesia. In 1796 and 1797 the Prussian crown granted him estates in South Prussia, the province formed from Prussia’s share of the partitions of Poland. They lay around Konin, east of Poznań, with outlying parts further west. He never lived on them, and he was in debt throughout.

Johann Wilhelm Glenck, his building and economy councillor at Wrocław, saw to the estates first: he handled the registration of title and made some of the earliest sales.

Peter Friedrich von Triebenfeld, a Prussian Councillor of War and Forests (Kriegs- und Forstrath) with estates of his own in Silesia, acted for Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen from 1798 and held his general power of attorney from 1805. He wrote most of the letters here, and he signed for several of his employer’s debts himself, which is why the correspondence continues long after the estates were gone. Almost everything below is Triebenfeld writing to Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen. Where someone else writes, the page says so.

Antoni Prusimski, Starost of Niszczewice, owned Trąbczyn and Kamionna before the grant. His daughter Michalina Prusimska, later Dąbska and then Miączyńska by her two marriages, recovered the estates in 1807.

I. Confiscation and grant, 1794 to 1797

In 1794 the Poles rose against the partitioning powers. After the rising was put down, the Prussian crown confiscated the estates of landowners who had taken part in it. Antoni Prusimski was named by the Prussian authorities as one of its leaders, and he fled. His estates were declared forfeit to the Treasury by a judgment given at Toruń. In December 1796 he was at Venice: the Prussian resident there reported that he had come to him ill and broken by the death of his wife, and had asked for a certificate that he could not travel (extract). His daughter’s claim of 1818 says what it was for: the Prussian authorities had summoned him to justify his leaving the country, the summonses reached him late, and he sent the certificate to ask for more time; he died before he had an answer (statement of the claim). The department of foreign affairs passed the resident’s report to the ministers for the new provinces in January 1797 (draft).

In the summer of 1796 Count Hoym, the minister responsible for Silesia and South Prussia, proposed that some of these estates, with others that had fallen vacant, be granted to officers. The file of the central administration in Berlin holds the sequence: Hoym’s report to the King of 14 July, the cabinet order of 23 July approving it, and the charter for Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen dated 9 August 1796 (Nr. 3570). Six other officers were granted estates at the same time, among them Blücher.

The charter gave Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen what had been Prusimski’s: the town of Kamionna and the market town of Kolno in the district of Poznań, the villages of Trąbczyn, Szetlewek, Nowawies, Łazy, Old and New Laski and Osiny with the Trąbczyn Hauland near Konin, and Brzyce in Kuyavia. Hoym, reporting the King’s decision, put their yearly income at 4,000 Thaler (letter of 30 July 1796). The charter itself survives in this edition in three certified copies (one of them).

A second charter, of 19 June 1797, added sixteen villages that had belonged to the church, among them Zagórów, Pszczew (in German, Betsche), Kopojno and Drzewce. Its stated reason was that Prusimski’s estates had turned out to be heavily in debt (a copy). Both grants carried a fixed annual payment to the crown and the maintenance of the former church owners.

The handover was slow. A royal order of October 1797 to the chambers at Poznań and Petrikau states that it had been a formality, and that those who held parts of the estates on pledge or lease had been left in possession (royal order). Registering Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen’s title took years. The government at Kalisz required a certified copy of the confiscation judgment, and the request for it was refused at Poznań because the judgment had been given at Toruń (December 1798).

II. The exchange scheme, 1798 to 1800, and the first challenge

The correspondence opens with a plan to be rid of the estates. They were scattered, encumbered and hard to manage from Silesia, and Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen wanted to exchange them with the crown for two consolidated Prussian domains, Krotoszyn and Polajewo, and so clear his debts.

Triebenfeld spent the autumn of 1798 in Berlin approaching everyone who could help: Cabinet Councillor Beyme, Minister Struensee, Count Hoym, and Colonel von Köckritz, the King’s adjutant-general, who became Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen’s most useful friend at court. The minister whose department had to report on the exchange was Etats-Minister von Voss, and his report was slow in coming.

For a few weeks the exchange looked settled. Köckritz sent word that the business could be counted as good as concluded. It was not. Voss reported that the state would lose 17,400 Reichsthaler a year, on a valuation by a Kriegsrath named Nöldichen who had, Triebenfeld protested, never inspected the properties. The King refused, and the refusal survives as a copy of the royal rescript. Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen was still petitioning against it two years later.

The honest Cabinet Councillor Beyme let me read the papers in the Cabinet myself. Letter 96

From this point Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen kept estates he could not afford, and the correspondence turns from acquiring land to raising money from it.

The grant was also challenged from the other side. Michalina Prusimska, still a minor, sued Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen through her guardian before the Government at Poznań for the Brzyce estates, which she claimed as her mother’s property (Nr. 3709, document 5). On her complaint the King called in the files in June 1800 and then ordered the case hurried and a settlement tried (2, 4). In November Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen asked the Grand Chancellor for other judges, since the councillors at Poznań also sat on the guardianship board that conducted her suit. The order giving the case to the Government at Warsaw came too late: Poznań had given judgment on 9 December 1800 (12). The file does not say how it decided. In January 1802 Prusimska petitioned the King from Dresden to hasten the appeal (15). what she claimed is not yet known.

III. Dividing the estates, 1798 to 1806

Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen’s answer to the debts was to sell what would sell and to let the rest out in hereditary lease. Under such a lease the settler paid a sum to enter, then a fixed rent every year, and held the land as heritable property.

The outlying estates went first. Glenck sold the farm of Szetlewek to the miller Samuel Lucke for 12,333 Rthl, of which 8,333 went to Ignatz von Radzinski, who had lent money on the farm and held it as security until he was repaid (contract). Kamionna and Kolno were sold in 1804 to George Conrad Leixner, an official of the bank at Frankfurt an der Oder, for 142,000 Rthl (contract; letter 136). In July 1804 the whole lordship of Pszczew was made over to its townspeople and six villages for 180,000 Rthl and a yearly ground rent of 1,000 Rthl, most of the price being met by taking over its mortgage debts (contract). The authorities at Poznań refused permission for it in May 1805 (refusal), and a royal approval followed only in 1806.

Trąbczyn and Zagórów were divided among settlers. Triebenfeld recruited widely. Moravian Brethren from Bohemia, whom the letters call Hussites, came to look at the land at 300 Reichsthaler a Hufe, then went home to fetch their co-religionists. Mennonites from West Prussia offered to buy Zagórów and Trąbczyn entire and divide them among themselves. Alongside them were the Hauländer, settlers on a tenure of Dutch origin that was much older than the Prussian takeover: the letters gloss the word as “die Hauländer oder Collonisten”.

In April 1805 Triebenfeld signed a punctation letting 270 Hufen at Trąbczyn, Łazy, Osiny, Neudorff and Przybysław at 300 Reichsthaler the Hufe, with fifteen more every year in a rent that could never be bought out. New villages were to be laid out in two straight lines, with thirteen free Morgen in each for the schoolmaster, the village head and the churchyard. The crown’s licence came only afterwards. On 28 January 1806 the chamber at Kalisz, acting on the King’s orders of October and December 1805, allowed both lordships to be divided, provided that no peasant holding lapsed and that the subjects were compensated for their rights of pasture and wood. One copy of the licence is filed with another of the contracts; a second was made about 1930. Seventeen men signed the punctation, ten of them with a cross. German and Polish names stand side by side in the list, and one holding, three Hufen, is taken by a woman, Elisabetta di Simony, in her own name.

The terms repeat almost word for word across the hereditary leases. The settler paid entry money and owed a fixed rent for ever, and the lord took a tenth of the price whenever the holding was sold. He paid the taxes, bought his drink from the lord’s tavern and ground his corn at the lord’s mill. Two years in arrears and he forfeited the holding. He also gave up, in advance and in writing, any claim to relief for fire, flood, war or bad harvests.

Where the land was still forest the terms were lighter. A hundred Hufen of the forest of Drzewce, in the lordship of Zagórów, went to eighteen settlers with no entry money and four years free of rent while they cleared it, then at 30 Reichsthaler the Hufe, half of which they could buy out (contract). Eleven of the eighteen signed with three crosses.

One such lease can be followed from contract to court record. On 31 March 1806 the patrimonial court of the Trąbczyn estates, sitting at Mariantów, recorded that Triebenfeld had let one Hufe of the Trąbczyn forest to Christoph Erbet of the Trąbczyn Hauland for 100 Reichsthaler entry money and 30 a year, the first three years free (court record). The record is in the State Archive in Poznań because in 1811 the estate official Hawich handed it to the peace court of the Konin district to recover the costs from Erbet.

Not every lease paid. The estate of Oleśnica had been let to three townsmen, Giese, Bagans and Gietzinger, for 20,000 Reichsthaler entry money. In September 1805 Triebenfeld petitioned the King: the lessees had paid 10,000, raised from their own sub-lessees, and since then neither rent nor taxes, and had sold off parts of the estate. The government at Kalisz had twice refused to put it under court administration, and he asked the King to order it (petition). The file holds no reply.

By 1806 a revenue survey certified by the chamber at Kalisz put the two lordships of Trąbczyn and Zagórów at 40,260 Reichsthaler a year, and the hereditary rents from the newly divided land at nearly three times the dues from the old manorial tenants. The same document promises the King sixteen new villages and five hundred families.

The debts grew faster than the rents. Countess Schlabrendorff would not wait past Christmas for 50,000 Reichsthaler. In January 1805, through Köckritz, the Invalids’ Fund, the Prussian military pension fund, agreed to advance 150,000 Reichsthaler, 50,000 of it at once against a mortgage and Triebenfeld’s own signature. The mortgage register for Zagórów records a loan of 250,000 Reichsthaler to Triebenfeld, parts of it already ceded to other creditors (register extract). Triebenfeld’s own bond for the Invalids’ Fund, signed at Berlin on 28 January 1805, pledged a fifth of that loan, with priority over the rest, and the mortgage certificate issued at Kalisz that March lists what else stood on Zagórów. Both survive as copies in a file of the state treasury.

Any breach of word is foreign to my heart, and shall remain so to my last breath. Letter 158

In April 1804 Triebenfeld sent a draft reply for approval and asked that someone else make the fair copies:

I am as though crushed, and, since my good wife is being laid to rest today, I have withdrawn with the children to my brother-in-law’s. (Letter 124)

He then finished the business of the letter.

IV. The entail of 1805

In his will of 7 October 1805 Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen placed his principal properties under entail: they were to pass undivided to one heir and could not be sold or divided. The King confirmed the foundation by a charter of 19 December 1805 (charter). The entail covered his houses at Wrocław and the park at Szczytniki, the estate of Bytków, the lordship of Koszęcin, and the South Prussian lordships of Zagórów, Trąbczyn, Pszczew, Wieniec and Bątkowo. If the male line ended, the South Prussian estates were to go to his third daughter, Auguste. The charter was made in the same year in which those estates were being let out in parcels.

V. War, and the loss of the estates, 1806 to 1807

In October 1806 Prussia was defeated at Jena and Auerstedt. Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen commanded at Jena and surrendered at Prenzlau at the end of the month, and held no further command.

The letters do not mention either event. What survives is a letter of relief written from Wrocław at the end of October 1806, in which Triebenfeld has learned through a secretary that his employer is alive, after rumours had made things sound worse. That the rumours concerned Jena and Prenzlau is an inference from the date; the letter does not name the battle.

My joy was now greater than my distress had been before, and I only thank God that you are alive. Letter 26

By the Peace of Tilsit in July 1807 Prussia gave up South Prussia, and the Duchy of Warsaw was formed from it. The province was governed in the meantime by the Governing Commission, a provisional Polish government that Napoleon had set up in January. Prusimski’s daughter, Michalina Dąbska, followed it to Dresden. On 20 and 21 July she petitioned the commission and the Emperor for her father’s estates, pointing to a decree of Napoleon that had given Józef Wybicki, a member of the commission, his confiscated estates back. On 21 July 1807 the commission extended that decree to her: the estates were to return to their true owners. On 5 October 1807 the estate official Hawich reported from Pyzdry that the Trąbczyn estates had been taken over by an appellate judge from Kalisz and handed to the heirs of the former owner, and two weeks later Triebenfeld wrote that Kamionna had been taken in the same way. Triebenfeld’s petition of March 1815 states the sequence: fourteen weeks after the peace, a Polish administrative commission took possession of all the estates without a judgment of any court and gave them to Prusimski’s daughter (petition; letter 265b).

The claimant was Michalina Prusimska, who appears in the letters under several surnames: Prusimska, then Dąbska, and after a second marriage around 1814 Miączyńska, which the letters also write Moscinska and Moszynska. In 1810 the King of Saxony, as Duke of Warsaw, refused a petition of hers concerning Trąbczyn. In August 1811 von Sanitz, another of the officers granted estates in 1796, wrote that he had heard from the Saxon court that Polish commissioners, on her petition, had ordered the estates returned to her. Triebenfeld’s objection was always that she had taken possession “without any decrees or judgments whatever”. Her own tenure of the estates is the subject of the third era of this archive, which is not yet published.

The deeds add one detail. On 28 January 1808, three months after the seizure, the estates’ own court was still issuing settlers their papers. Two hereditary-lease contracts carry fair copies made out that day: one at Alexandrien under the seal of the “Hohenlohesches Patrimonial Gericht amt Zagorow”, the other at Pyzdry in Polish, as Sąd Patrimonialny Maiętnosći Zagurowskiey. The same official, Hawich, signs both, confirming a man named Gottlieb Sarre in a Hufe and a half of cleared forest.

VI. Lawsuits and arrears, 1808 to 1812

By 1808 the creditors had reached Triebenfeld himself. As Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen’s general agent he was arrested in Berlin by two French gendarmes for two years’ arrears of interest on the Invalids’ Fund loan, which he had signed for. His own account of it survives. In 1809 he left Berlin to avoid arrest under another judgment, was robbed on the road of a trunk worth 800 Reichsthaler, and had bailiffs in his house.

Now I am a true beggar-dog, and must still thank God that I was not myself murdered. Letter 57

On 7 March 1809, at Konotop, he gave the estate official Hawich thirteen powers of attorney to act in the Duchy of Warsaw: to sue to have Michalina Dąbska removed from Trąbczyn; to have the court administration put on the remaining estates for unpaid interest lifted, the King of Saxony having granted debtors three years’ grace; to remove Honrichs, who had had himself appointed its administrator and had sold land without authority; to sue the creditors Oppenheimer and Wolff over 72,000 Reichsthaler; to collect the arrears; and to appear for Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen at the Diet in Warsaw, where every landowner now had to appear in person or lose his estates. The letter is in the file twice, as letter 48 and letter 302. Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen also sued for the estates themselves; the tribunal at Kalisz, the court of the Duchy of Warsaw for the department, declared that it had no authority to set aside the commission’s order (petition of 1815).

By January 1811 Triebenfeld was, on his own count, conducting thirty-one lawsuits at once and recovering almost nothing of what was owed to Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen: the colonists paid none of their yearly rent, and the tenants of Oleśnica, Kopojno and Drzewce none of their lease money, while taxes and interest on the estates’ debts still fell due. He wrote that letter from a peasant’s house at Świątniki, while recovering from a serious illness.

The colonists on the Zagórów estates, who held their farms in hereditary lease, could not pay their yearly rent (the “interest” of their contracts). Grain prices had fallen, and Triebenfeld’s officials advised remitting part of the arrears. In 1811 Triebenfeld proposed that a third of the year’s rent be remitted as an act of princely grace, because otherwise, he wrote, “the people out of obstinacy give nothing at all”. In the same year, weighing whether Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen should keep the estates at all, he proposed the opposite: to have most of the colonists removed by court judgments and the land turned back into demesne farms.

The settlers in arrears had signed away any claim to relief in their contracts. They are named in the deeds. The Althütte contract lists six with the villages they came from: Martin Giering from Racotten, Wilhelm Daniel Schulz from Krolikower Holländ, Gottfried and Michael Dumel from Razoten, Gottfried Damt, and Christoph Schoenfisch from Trąbczyner Holländ. It is signed with marks.

VII. The claim, 1814 to 1816

After Napoleon’s defeat the future of the Duchy of Warsaw was open, and Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen pressed for the return of the estates or compensation for them. Triebenfeld petitioned the State Chancellor, Hardenberg, in Paris in May 1814 (petition), and then went to the Congress of Vienna.

He arrived in October 1814, after three days on the road, and found prices far beyond his means. One letter lists his expenses line by line, the room, the coffee, the one glass of wine he took for the sake of appearances, the servant and the carriage, to support a request for another 300 Reichsthaler in gold. He gives his address as the Golden Duck in the Schulerstraße.

I have nothing on my back, and often nothing in my belly. Letter 266

He petitioned Hardenberg again in October 1814 and in March 1815. The petition of March 1815 sets out the case in full and asks for the return of the Trąbczyn estates with nine years’ revenue, 36,500 Reichsthaler (petition). Wilhelm von Humboldt took up the case and asked for copies of everything, and Hardenberg was reported as calling Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen the worst-treated of men. Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen wrote himself, in April 1815 to Baron vom Stein and in May to Hardenberg. He gave his loss as 325,400 Reichsthaler in the first letter and as more than 261,000 in the second, and in the second asked for the crown estate of Sokolnik in compensation (to Stein; to Hardenberg). The replies put the matter off until Polish affairs were settled.

Where the new frontier ran decided whose the estates would be. The Prosna was to be the border; if it was drawn as Russia wanted, Trąbczyn and Triebenfeld’s own Blizanów would fall under Russian sovereignty, beyond the reach of any Prussian court. In February 1815 he reported the line settled against him. The district of Konin became part of the Kingdom of Poland under the Russian Emperor. In March 1815 Napoleon returned from Elba, and Triebenfeld’s letters turn to Grenoble and Lyon and to reports that he stood almost at the Rhine with 200,000 men.

In Berlin, Hardenberg asked Zerboni di Sposetti, the senior Prussian official at Poznań, for a report. It came on 2 November 1815 and went against the claim: it rejected the figures submitted for Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen, said that he had let Trąbczyn decline and loaded it with debt, and concluded that Prussia could do no more than ask the Russian government to decide (report). In April 1816 the ministry instructed the Prussian envoy at St Petersburg, Major General von Schöler, to raise the matter with the Emperor in general terms and without pressing it, compensation being a matter of grace (instruction). On 23 November 1816 Schöler reported that the Russian ministry had refused (report).

The creditors were waiting too. In April 1816 the widow of Colonel von Brehmer petitioned for the 5,000 Reichsthaler her brother had lent Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen in 1803 on Szetlewek, of which neither capital nor interest had been paid (petition). A note on her petition holds that any compensation from Russia should go to the creditors registered on the estates.

Triebenfeld’s last letters are of 1815 and early 1816. Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen’s letters to him had turned cold, and he answered three of them point by point, defending his conduct and asking for money for his children in Silesia.

Your word was sacred to me, and upon that ground I raised the edifice. Letter 273

In March 1815 his daughter Charlotte wrote to Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen from Wrocław. It was her third letter and none had been answered. She wrote because she did not know where her father was and could reach him only through his employer:

My misery has now overstepped all bounds, the more so since I must now also give up the hope of making my situation known to my father. (Letter 7)

In December 1815, back at Blizanów and recovering from an illness, Triebenfeld wrote that a daughter had died four days after giving birth, and that Barbe, the friend in Vienna who had lent him money there, had also died. He wrote, he said, so that Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen might know that he was still alive and where he was. His last letter is dated 31 January 1816. A note on Zerboni’s report, written in April 1816, records that he had died.

The last document in his file is not a letter. It is an extract from the liquidation records of Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen’s debts, undated, listing 142 creditors, from the saddler Gleisberger at Potsdam and the gardener Nickel to bankers and noble heirs, and totalling 1,414,377 Reichsthaler in silver and 17,874 in gold. The largest private creditor on it is a Frau Charlotte von Triebenfeld, owed 112,000 Reichsthaler, the same figure as an advance that runs through the correspondence. Whether it is the same 112,000, and whether this Charlotte is the daughter who wrote letter 7, the documents do not say.

VIII. After Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen’s death, 1818 to 1832

Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen died in 1818 at Sławięcice in Upper Silesia. His heirs renewed the claim, and Duke Eugen of Württemberg recommended it to the Russian government, citing two Prussian generals who had been compensated. On 31 January 1820 the Russian envoy at Berlin, Alopeus, answered that the claim had been refused in 1816 and that the Emperor could not act on the recommendation (note). The Prussian ministry took no further step and passed the matter to the Minister of the Interior (May 1820).

The debts that Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen had secured on Trąbczyn outlasted him. In January 1819 Prusimski’s daughter, by then Countess Miączyńska, asked Prussia through the Russian envoy to pay them off: 156,000 Reichsthaler on Trąbczyn and Szetlewek by her count (report). The Prussian ministry refused in May (draft reply). The Polish courts then held that the return of the estates in 1807 had cancelled the debts raised on them in the years between. The civil tribunal at Kalisz ordered the mortgage of Weigel, a merchant at Wrocław, struck out in 1819, and the high tribunal at Warsaw confirmed the judgment in 1826. In February 1827 the Prussian envoy at St Petersburg, Schöler, asked the Russian foreign minister to have it annulled (note). The file holds no answer. In July 1827 the tribunal at Kalisz also struck out the mortgages of the Lichnowski brothers and of the widow of Grotowski (judgment).

Prussia went on pressing Weigel’s case at Warsaw through its consul general, Schmidt. Baron Mohrenheim, who directed Grand Duke Constantine’s diplomatic chancellery, told him that the council had agreed that payment must be made (note), and in February 1830 that the Administrative Council held the competence of the courts open to question (letter). Weigel asked for 63,100 thalers. In September 1830 the minister of finance, Prince Lubecki, called the sum excessive and had the estates valued (letter); Weigel answered that by the valuation of 1803 his loan was covered (reply). The rising of November 1830 interrupted the matter. In March 1832 the valuation of Trąbczyn was ordered again (letter). The documents published so far do not show whether Weigel was paid.

The judgment of 1826 was still being used a generation later, and against the settlers. In 1859 the colonists of Trąbczyn sued its owner, Count Włodzimierz Miączyński. He answered in October 1860 with a counterclaim against 97 of them, from two colonies of the estate. A contract of 18 May 1805 between Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen and fourteen colonists had sold them forest and marsh and given them free pasture and the gathering of wood in a part of his forest. Miączyński asked the Civil Tribunal at Kalisz to hold that this contract did not bind him, on the principle of 1826: what Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen had undertaken fell with his title when the estate was returned in 1807 (summons). What the court decided is not in the edition.

The people you will keep meeting

On Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen’s side, Glenck manages the estates at first and later appears, in Triebenfeld’s account, as an obstacle. Hahn is the court councillor who writes when Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen does not. Amelang is the agent in Berlin. Honrichs and Hawich are two different men, easily confused, both estate officials, and each accuses the other of fraud.

In Berlin, Hoym proposed the grant and Voss reported against the exchange. Köckritz, the King’s adjutant-general, arranged the Invalids’ Fund loan. Beyme was cabinet councillor. In the years of the claim come Hardenberg, Humboldt, Stägemann, Zerboni di Sposetti at Poznań and Schöler at St Petersburg.

Among the buyers and creditors, Leixner bought Kamionna and Kolno. Cosmar is the lawyer whose settlement of 1811 with the creditors Triebenfeld regarded as fraudulent, and whose removal he pursued through the Vienna years. Weigel and Stössel are creditors large enough to be negotiated with. Oppenheimer, van der Lahr and Schlabrendorff are creditors who went to law. On the other side of the dispute stand Antoni Prusimski and his daughter.

The People page lists everyone the documents name, with the evidence for each identification.

What to read first

Fifteen documents, in the order of the story.

1. The charter of 9 August 1796, with Hoym’s report and the King’s approval
2. Hoym’s letter of 30 July 1796, what the estates were thought to be worth
3. Letter 77, the exchange scheme in Berlin
4. Letter 85, the King’s refusal
5. Contract 15, 270 Hufen let out, signed by seventeen men, ten of them with a cross
6. Contract 24, the authorities refuse the lease of Pszczew to its own people
7. The Erbet court record, one settler’s lease from contract to collection
8. The Oleśnica petition, a lease that did not pay
9. The entail charter of 1805
10. Letter 179a, what the estates yielded in 1806
11. Letter 28, the estates taken over in 1807
12. Letter 212, thirty-one lawsuits
13. The petition of March 1815, the whole case as Triebenfeld put it
14. Zerboni di Sposetti’s report, the case as Prussia’s officials saw it
15. Alopeus’s note of 1820, the final refusal