III. HA MdA, III. Nr. 12366

A file of the Prussian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, kept in the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin. It concerns the debts that Prince Friedrich Ludwig of Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen (1746-1818), a Prussian general, had secured on the Trąbczyn estates in central Poland, after the estates were returned in 1807 to Michalina Miączyńska, born Prusimska, the daughter of their former owner. Its cover calls it the first volume and gives its span as December 1818 to November 1827. It holds six documents on 37 pages: five in French and one in Polish.

Historical background

The Starost Antoni Prusimski owned Trąbczyn and Szetlewek in the district of Konin, Kamionna and Kolno near Międzyrzecz, and Pawłowo with two further villages near Wągrowiec [2]. Prussia confiscated the estates in 1796 on the charge that he had taken part in the uprising of 1794, and gave them to Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen and to General von Sanitz [2, 5]. Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen borrowed on Trąbczyn and sold Kamionna and Kolno to Leixner, a cashier of the royal bank [2]. In 1807 Prussia lost the province, and on 21 July 1807 the governing commission of the new Duchy of Warsaw put Prusimski’s daughter back in possession of all the estates [2, 6]. The mortgages that Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen had raised stayed in the mortgage register [5].

From 1815 the district of Konin belonged to the Kingdom of Poland, which the Russian Emperor ruled, while the estates near Międzyrzecz and Wągrowiec lay in the Prussian Grand Duchy of Posen. Miączyńska was therefore a subject of both states, and her claim reached Berlin through the Russian envoy.

Contents

Miączyńska’s claim against Prussia. A report drawn up at Warsaw on 29 April 1818 sets out what Miączyńska had asked of the commissioners who were settling the accounts of the former Duchy of Warsaw: that Prussia should pay off the debts the donees had placed on her estates. It gives 156,000 Reichsthaler on Trąbczyn and Szetlewek and 160,000 on Kolno and Kamionna, which Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen had sold for 142,000. It argues that she was an orphan under age when the estates were taken, that other owners recovered their estates free of debt, and that Prussia compensated the generals von Sanitz and von Zastrow with other estates and could do the same for Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen by taking over his debts [2]. The Russian envoy at Berlin, Alopeus, sent the report to the Prussian foreign minister, Count Bernstorff, on 20 January 1819 and supported it [1]. The ministry’s draft reply of 11 May 1819 refuses: Prusimski’s estates were confiscated by a court’s judgment, the request has been refused before, and the decision of the Prussian courts stands [3].

A reader’s objections in the margin. A reader in the Prussian ministry went through the Warsaw report with a pencil, underlined passages and wrote short objections beside them in German. They are transcribed at the foot of each page. He denies that Prussia is answerable to anyone for acts of government in the former South Prussia, calls untrue the statements that Miączyńska was left without a guardian and that the confiscation was against all justice, and asks why she kept silent after 1807, when she was put back in possession. He holds that not even Napoleon granted a claim for what was done in the years between, and that the donee, for as long as he possessed the estate, possessed it lawfully and with full right of ownership. Beside the complaint that the owners got back only a burdened title he writes that they got back what was there [2]. The refusal of 11 May 1819 takes the same line [3].

A creditor’s suit, 1819. A copy of a letter of 16 November 1819 from Tarczewski, an advocate at Warsaw, reports to a client on a suit against Miączyńska that was about to go before the court of appeal, and asks for the mortgage certificates on which the claim rests [4]. The letter does not name the client.

Prussia’s protest for the merchant Weigel, 1827. On 10 February 1827 the Prussian envoy at St Petersburg, General von Schöler, wrote to the Russian foreign minister, Count Nesselrode. Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen had borrowed 30,000 Reichsthaler from Grotowski on Trąbczyn, and the mortgage had passed to Weigel, a merchant at Wrocław. When Weigel sued Miączyńska for unpaid interest, the civil tribunal at Kalisz dismissed his suit on 6 March 1819 and ordered the mortgage struck out; the court of appeal set that judgment aside, and the high tribunal at Warsaw restored it on 17 July 1826. The courts held that the return of the estates in 1807 had cancelled the debts raised on them in the meantime. Schöler answers that the Peace of Tilsit and the conventions of 1815 and 1819 between Prussia and Russia uphold mortgage claims, and asks that the judgment be annulled and its execution suspended. He states that Prussian notes of 1819 and 1820 on the matter were never answered [5].

The judgment against the other creditors, 1827. A certified extract, in Polish, gives the judgment of the civil tribunal at Kalisz of 30 July 1827 in Miączyńska’s suit against two further creditors of Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen: the Lichnowski brothers and the widow of Franciszek Grotowski. The court holds that Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen possessed the estates only for as long as the confiscation stood, that his debts fell with his title, and that it must decide as the courts decided against Weigel. It orders both mortgages struck out of the register of Trąbczyn and Szetlewek [6].

The file does not contain a Russian answer to Schöler’s note, nor the memorandum that the reply of 1819 says was enclosed with it [3].

Form and language

Three of the six documents are copies: the Warsaw report, Tarczewski’s letter and Schöler’s note. The note of Alopeus is the original, and the reply to it is the ministry’s own draft, written by a German official in French. The Polish judgment is an extract issued by the court under its seal.

Related holdings

The claim of Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen and his heirs to be compensated for the same estates, 1814 to 1820, kept by the same ministry: III. HA MdA, III Nr. 12765. The grant of 1796: Oe 1 Bü 14525 and I. HA GR, Rep. 7 C, Nr. 3570. The lawsuit of Prusimski’s daughter against Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen for her mother’s estate, 1800 to 1802: I. HA GR, Rep. 7 C, Nr. 3709. The letters of the Prince’s agent Triebenfeld, which follow the loans from Grotowski, Weigel and the Lichnowski brothers: Oe 1 Bü 9454. The Prussian resident’s report from Venice of December 1796 on the certificate he gave Prusimski, which the statement of the claim mentions: I. HA GR, Rep. 7 C, Nr. 1414.

Scans

The archive photographed the file as 25 images: the cover, nine single leaves and fifteen openings of two facing pages. Every opening has writing on both sides and was cut at its fold into two pages, at a line the editor placed or approved. One opening was photographed twice, because a slip of paper bound into the fold hides part of the left page in one image and part of the right page in the other; the left page is taken from the first image and the right page from the second. The edition has 37 pages and the cover.

Transcription

The editor supplied the transcription as one text, written paragraph by paragraph and not line by line. It was divided to match the pages: where a paragraph runs over a page turn it is cut there. A date or an address that the transcription set at the head of a document, but the writer put at its end, stands on the page where it is written. The line on the cover that gives the volume and its dates was added by the editor.

Division into documents

Each letter, report, draft or judgment is one document, six in all. Dates are taken from each document’s own dateline. The note from St Petersburg is dated in both calendars, and the western date is used.

Corrections

An AI model (Claude) compared the whole transcription with the scans and corrected it where the page is plain and the corrected form is a word that fits its sentence. In the four French documents written in clear copyists’ hands, 72 single words were corrected, nearly all of them typing slips. In the ministry’s draft of 11 May 1819, written in a hurried hand, 21 passages were corrected, and in the Polish judgment 64. One word that the transcription had dropped, a “ne” in the Warsaw report, was added from the scan at the editor’s wish. Each change is logged with its reason. The writers’ own spelling was kept, and the Polish keeps the spelling of its time. The editor then ruled on thirteen doubtful words against the scans; three that could not be read stand as transcribed.

Notes in the margin

The pencil notes in the margins of the Warsaw report were first read by the editor, who also named the passage each stands beside. The model read them again on enlarged images of the scan and changed several words. Each note stands at the foot of its page under the label “Written by the receiving office”; the French words in square brackets before it are the passage it refers to and were added by the edition. The editor then settled the doubtful words on the scan.

Summaries

The summaries were written in German from a reading of each document against its scan, and translated into English. Each statement in them was then checked against its document, under the same rules as the separate check that the summaries of other holdings received: a summary may say only what the document says. One clause was weakened: a pencil note that the summary attributed to the Prince speaks only of “he”, the holder of an estate the King had given.

Translation

The documents were translated into English in a working session under the same rules as the other holdings: every figure, name and mark of doubt carried across, names in the edition’s settled forms where it has settled them and otherwise as the page spells them, and passages that do not read left visibly doubtful rather than smoothed. The five French documents were translated from the French and the judgment from the Polish; one French letter and the Polish judgment were done first as a trial, since documents in these languages are new to the edition. The pencil notes in German were translated where they stand, under the same label as in the transcription. The same automatic check as elsewhere then confirmed that every figure and every mark of doubt survives into the English. Where the text repeats words, as the Polish judgment does twice, the English repeats them too.