Oe 1 Bü 14525

A volume of deeds and official papers concerning the estates in South Prussia that the Prussian crown granted to Prince Friedrich Ludwig of Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen (1746-1818), a Prussian general, in 1796 and 1797. It contains 44 documents on 165 pages, dated 1794 to 1804, and is kept in the Hohenlohe-Zentralarchiv Neuenstein. Most of the documents are certified copies.

Historical background

South Prussia was the province formed from Prussia’s share of the second and third partitions of Poland. After the uprising of 1794 the crown confiscated the estates of landowners who had taken part in it, and in 1796 it took the estates of the church into state ownership. Estates of both kinds were granted to officers and officials. Ownership of noble land was recorded in mortgage books kept by the provincial governments, which sat as courts at Poznań and Kalisz. A new owner had to prove his title before it was entered; where an estate came from the crown, the Treasury first resigned its own title in a formal hearing.

Contents

The grant of 1796

The charter of 9 August 1796 grants Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen 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, Osiny and the Trąbczyn Hauland in the district of Konin, and Brzyce in Kuyavia [1, 2, 3, 4]. It survives here in three copies [1, 3, 4]. The estates had been confiscated from Anton von Prusimski for his part in the uprising of 1794 [12]. A letter of Count Hoym, the minister for the province, reports the King’s decision, puts the yearly income of the estates at 4,000 Thaler, and recommends a manager [39].

The grants of 1797

A second charter, of 19 June 1797, grants sixteen villages formerly owned by the church, among them Pszczew, Zagórów, Kopojno, Drzewce and Wrąbczyn. It states as its reason that the estates of Prusimski had proved heavily indebted [5, 8, 9, 10, 16, 17, 22]. A declaration of 1 December 1797 adds the outlying parts of the estates of Pszczew, Zagórów and Wieniec [6, 7, 11, 16, 18]. Both grants are subject to a fixed annual payment to the crown and to the maintenance of the former ecclesiastical owners [5, 6].

Handover of the estates

A royal order to the chambers at Poznań and Petrikau states that the handover had been a formality and that holders of pledge and lease contracts had been left in possession; the chambers are to examine their claims and put the agents of Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen in possession [40]. A letter of Hoym explains the delay and the position of the clergy, who administered the estates for the Treasury [41].

Registration of title

Mortgage certificates and register extracts record the title of Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen and the charges on Szetlewek, Kolno, Pszczew, Zagórów and Bątkowo [2, 12, 15, 21, 25, 28]. The extract for Zagórów lists a loan of 250,000 Rthl to von Triebenfeld, parts of it ceded to other creditors [21]. The certificate for Pszczew lists debts to Johann Wilhelm Glenck and others [25, 26].

The correspondence on registration is addressed mainly to Glenck, building and economy councillor to Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen at Wrocław. The governments at Kalisz and Poznań set and extend deadlines for proving title, and Glenck presses for the Treasury’s resignation of the estates of Pszczew and Kuyavia [19, 20, 29, 30, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38]. The government at Kalisz requires a certified copy of the judgment confiscating Prusimski’s property; a request for it is refused at Poznań, because the judgment had been given at Toruń [31, 42, 43, 44]. One note asks that Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen take the oath of homage for the granted estates [32].

Valuations

The volume contains a valuation of Kamionna and Kolno, a valuation of their forest, and a judicial valuation of Szetlewek, which gives a gross value of 34,803 Rthl [13, 14, 23]. One further document is a damaged note of which little can be read [24].

Form and language

The documents are in German; the register extract for Zagórów is partly in Polish. Because most documents are certified copies, the date and place given for a document are often those of its certification and not of the instrument copied. Several charters appear more than once, as separate copies with their own certifications. The two valuations of Kamionna and Kolno are tables and are shown one entry to a line. The documents keep the archive’s numbering, which does not follow their dates.

Related holdings

The ministry’s file on the charters of August 1796: I. HA GR, Rep. 7 C, Nr. 3570. Contracts by which the estates were sold and leased: Oe 1 Bü 14526. The entail of 1805, which includes the South Prussian estates: Oe 1 U 199. Letters of the agent Peter Friedrich von Triebenfeld to Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen: Oe 1 Bü 9454. Copies of the bond by which Triebenfeld pledged part of the loan on Zagórów to the Invalids’ Fund in 1805, and of the mortgage certificate issued for it: I. HA Rep. 162, Nr. 295.

Scans

The archive supplied 128 images. They were cropped into 209 single pages. Of these, 165 carry text that was transcribed. The rest are covers, blank pages and pages the editor chose not to transcribe.

Transcription

The German text was transcribed by an AI system and supplied by the editor, one file for each page.

Division into documents

The editor set the 44 document boundaries. The documents keep the numbers the archive gave them.

Corrections

An AI model (Claude) went through the transcription in three passes, and each change is logged with the line as it stood before. The first pass corrected misreadings, restored the order of lines at eleven places, and removed two lines that are not on the page. The later passes brought personal names and the King’s titles to one spelling. On the editor’s instruction this holding standardises personal names in the transcription itself. Place names stand in the German form the documents use; the lists and the English translation give the Polish name.

Many charters are present in more than one copy, and one copy was used to settle a doubtful word in another. Two documents contain a date that cannot be right. The editor checked both against the scans, found that the documents themselves are in error, and left them as written.

Catchwords and paragraphs

A scribe often wrote the first word of the next page at the foot of a page. These catchwords repeat text and were removed from the transcription on the editor’s instruction, 49 in all. Where the reading text breaks into paragraphs was decided by rule and, for 227 cases the rule could not settle, by hand.

Summaries and translation

The model translated each document into English. The summaries were first written from those translations. In October 2026 they were written again, in German, from a reading of each document in its German text, and each of their 212 statements was then checked against the document. All held as finally worded; where a statement rested on a word not read with certainty, it was cut or left general. The English summaries are translations of the German.