destroyed by the indignant avengers of the emperor, and her father’s
heart was broken at the news of his son’s crime; so that of the old
cradle-land of the family nothing but smoking ruins and sad memories
remained, while a few years later she saw her two sons, Henry and
Conrad, meet in deadly conflict as the heads of two rival parties in the
duchy, the latter defeated and pursued by his brother, and only saved by
his father to die a few days later from a fall when out hunting. Her
husband and her remaining son died within three years of each other, the
latter in battle against the invading Tartars; and, what no doubt
pierced her heart still more, her husband was excommunicated for
retaining church property in provinces which he claimed as his by right
of the testament of the Duke of Gnesen and Posen. The early death of
three other children must have been but a slight sorrow compared with
these trials, and the peaceful life of her sister Matilda, Abbess of
Kitzingen, and of her daughter Gertrude, second abbess of Trebnitz—the
same who escaped becoming the bride of “Wild Otho,” as he was
called—could not but have made her envy it at times. She had had in her
youth an inclination towards the monastic life, but gave it up at her
parents’ desire, and married, according to the customs of her time and
class, at the childish age of twelve. But she had seemed from her
infancy marked out for no common lot; she was grave, sedate, and
womanly; she felt her marriage to be a mission and the beginning of
duties; she saw at a glance the state of neglect and uncivilization and
the need of betterment in which her adopted country stood, and set about
imbuing her husband with her ideas concerning improvement. He was only
eighteen, and loved her truly, so he proved to be her first disciple.
She began by learning Polish, which her husband’s sister Adelaide taught
her, and then gathered all the inmates of the palace, to teach them
prayers and the chief doctrines of the faith, in which they were very
imperfectly instructed, although full of readiness, even eagerness, to
believe. Her father-in-law, the reigning duke, fully appreciated her
worth and respected her enthusiasm. Her husband joined her in plans for
founding monasteries and building churches when it should come to his
turn to reign over Silesia; and in the meanwhile she strove to teach the
nobles and the people a greater respect for the priesthood by herself
setting the example of outward deference towards priests, whether native
or foreign, ignorant or learned. The strangers she always asked to the
palace, gave them clothes and money for their journey, attended their
Masses, and sometimes served them at table.
In order to introduce clerical learning and morals into Silesia and
Poland, it was necessary to rely upon Germans, as has often been the
case in other countries, where a foreign element has been, for some
time at least, synonymous with civilization. In England Italians
chiefly, in a less degree Normans, and in one signal instance a
Greek,[12] brought with them the knowledge of church architecture and
chant, besides secular learning; Irish missionaries had before that
helped on the Britons, and Saxons, later on, carried the same
influence across the sea to heathen Germany, who in her turn became
the evangelizer of the Slav nations. Still later, when Poland was as
fervent a Catholic country as Germany, another Hedwige (the name had
then grown to be a national one) converted the Lithuanians and became
the mother of the Jagellon dynasty. Here, on the confines of Russia,
the Latin Church stood face to face with the Greek, and the tide of
progress and conversion was stayed. Then came the perpetual turmoils
with the warlike Turks, till religion became rather an affair of the
knight than of the missionary, until that wave of circumstances having
passed away, and the Turks having sunk from the height of their
military renown to the insignificance of a mongrel and undisciplined
crowd, the battle between faith and scepticism—the modern form of
heathenism—has shifted to a great degree to the arena of the mind. The
Lepanto of our day is being fought out as obstinately on paper as that
of three hundred years ago was on sea; of its nature it cannot be as
short or as decisive, but it is nevertheless the counterpart—and the
only worthy one—of that romantic and daring feat of arms. The struggle
in the days of Hedwige was in some sense much narrower; but though her
husband and son engaged in it rather as blind instruments than
far-seeing directors, she, with the instincts of her sex and her
habitual union with God, helped in it as a teacher and missionary. She
proved her gift for it first upon her household, then, in the years of
her retirement, upon her special charge—some young heathen girls,
natives of Prussia, whom she taught herself and provided for in life.
One of these, Catherine, to whom she was godmother, she married to her
trusty chamberlain, Schavoine, and left them the estate of that name
after her death. But notwithstanding her thirst for doing good and her
high idea of her duty to her subjects, she thoroughly enjoyed the
quiet of home-life, away from the court, and, whenever it was
practicable, would spend some weeks at a time with her young husband
and her children at Lähnhaus. It is here that her memory lives
freshest at present; here that she tended her dovecot, which is
brought to mind by the yearly market of doves, unique of its kind,
still held at Lähn on Ash-Wednesday; here that she and her favorite
doe crossed the Hedwigsteig, a rough, rocky pathway, to the Chapel of
the Hermit and the image of the Blessed Virgin, which afterwards
became a pilgrimage-shrine, where the neighboring peasants came to see
her and unite in her prayers, so that the present village dates back
to the huts of branches hastily put up around the spreading tree that
formerly protected the image; here that she rested on the Hedwigstein,
or moss-grown boulder, yet remaining, with her name attached to it;
here that she built a chapel dedicated to St. Nicholas, and
established some Benedictine monks; and here that in her later years
she received the confidence of her friend, Baroness Jutta of
Liebenthal, a pious widow, who founded the monastery of that name for
Benedictine nuns and the education of young girls, and herself became
its first abbess.
Duke Henry, when he came to be sovereign, did not forget his plans and
promises, but helped her generously in the endowment of her hospitals,
churches, and monasteries. Himself the son of a German princess, he had
great faith in the influence for good, in morals, in agriculture, in
learning, of his mother’s and his wife’s countrymen; and, according to
the custom of the time, Hedwige was accompanied on her journey to
Silesia, as a bride, by an escort of German knights, who were not to
compose a separate court or household for her, but to settle in the
country and make it their home. Such immigration, of course, had its sad
as well as its good side; it led to jealousies that were neither
unnatural nor inexcusable, although it also leavened the country with
some useful and healthy habits. It was on this delicate question that
her two sons quarrelled so violently as to make it the pretext of a
civil war; Conrad, the youngest, being passionately attached to the old
Polish customs and not discriminating between these and crying abuses,
while Henry, the eldest, inherited his father’s love for the Germans.
The old nobility formed a powerful party and rallied round Conrad,
hailing him as their future national sovereign, although his father was
still alive and his elder brother the acknowledged heir. Henry the
Bearded had by that time retired from public life, and divided his
possessions between his two sons, giving the eldest the city of Breslau
and all Middle and Lower Silesia, while the youngest received the
provinces of Leubus and Lausitz. The latter were less cultivated than
the former, but this was chiefly due to that want of, or remoteness
from, German influence and immigration; so that the father, knowing his
sons’ opposite views on this subject, hoped to satisfy each by his
partition. Conrad, however, resented the gift of a less civilized and
extended territory, and took this pretext to make war on his brother,
with the result already noted.
The retirement of Henry, the husband of Hedwige, which lasted for twenty
years or more, was the result of a strange form of piety and
self-renunciation not uncommon in the middle ages. The Duke and Duchess
of Silesia had been married twenty-three years, and had had six
children, three of whom died in infancy. A little after the birth of the
youngest, in 1209, Hedwige, still in the bloom of her years (she was
only thirty-five and her husband forty-one), and after many prayers and
struggles, felt herself impelled to dedicate the rest of her life to God
only, and, with her husband’s consent, to live separate from him. They
had always loved each other tenderly, and Henry’s conduct, unlike that
of many sovereigns of his and of later times, had been irreproachable;
he looked upon his wife as a saint, and upon her wishes as commands; he
had allowed her to guide his charities and public improvements, had
followed her advice, had trusted to her to bring up his children exactly
as she thought fit, which was more rigorously and less luxuriously than
is often the case with royal children—in a word, had leant wholly upon
her. To signify his full acquiescence in this half-monastic vow, he
received the tonsure, and, contrary to the custom of his class at that
time, let his beard grow, whence came his surname, the Bearded.
Hedwige retired to Trebnitz, where she lived in a separate house with
her own women and the chamberlain Schavoine, who took his name from the
estate which Henry gave her on their separation. Other grants of money
were also made her, and her husband promised his countenance and help in
any good work she should wish to do there or elsewhere throughout his
possessions. They often met in after years, generally at festive
ceremonies for the building or opening of churches, and once at the
grave of their unhappy son Conrad; and Henry himself, though keeping up
a court and moving from place to place, betook himself to prayers,
study, and good works, having given over the government to his sons. In
his old age he came forth again in the character of a sovereign and a
leader, and, indeed, led a stormy, stirring life for a few years before
his death.
Hedwige, in this proceeding of her retirement, had another object in
view—that is, the example which she hoped her voluntary giving up of
married life would be to the married priesthood of Poland and Silesia.
Such was, to a great extent, the case, and the celibacy of the clergy,
so long preached in vain, became in a few years the rule instead of the
exception.
The Cistercian abbey of Trebnitz, now Hedwige’s home, was the first
institution of its kind for women. It was begun in 1200 and finished
eighteen years later, but was ready to be inhabited in 1202. It stood in
a wooded region, three miles from Breslau. The legend of its foundation,
as commemorated in an old rhyme or _Volkslied_ (people’s song), refers
it to a vow made by Henry, who, while out hunting, got entangled in a
morass and could see no human means of rescue; but what is certain is
that the royal couple had long planned and looked forward to a monastery
for women, and the date of the laying of the first stone of Trebnitz
corresponds with that of Henry’s accession to the throne. The building
was intended to accommodate a thousand persons, and was built by the
hands of convicts and prisoners, even those who were condemned to death,
whose work on it was to be equivalent to the rest of their sentence.
Hedwige’s pity for, and kindness to, captives, whether innocent or
guilty, was a conspicuous trait of her character; and the undeserved
physical hardships of prisoners in those times were enough to turn the
sympathies of every kind-hearted person from justice towards the
criminal. In the same way did the neglected sick, and especially the
lepers, touch her heart; indeed, all the oldest hospitals in Silesia are
due to her.
The neighboring Cistercian monks of Leubus cast the leaden plates for
the roof and the smaller bells of the new monastery, in return for which
Henry gave them two estates; and the duke himself with his foremost
nobles inspected the progress of the work, and solemnly made the round
of the land deeded to the institution, marking his own name on the
boundary stones. Bishop Egbert of Bamberg, Hedwige’s brother (this was
before his disgrace), procured a body of Cistercian nuns of his diocese
as a beginning, and accompanied them himself on their journey to their
new home. Hedwige’s great-uncle, Provost Popo of Bamberg, came too, and
the meeting of these strangers with the high clergy of Silesia and
Poland was, as the old chroniclers would have said, “a brave and
pleasant sight.” The buildings were decorated with evergreens, and the
pomp of jewelled garments, clerical and national costumes, armor, horses
richly caparisoned, embroidered robes and canopies, was dazzling. It was
the Sunday within the octave of the feast of the Epiphany—a sharp,
bright winter’s day; the cavalcade from the court of Breslau, consisting
of the duke and duchess and their retinue, escorted the nuns and the
foreign ecclesiastics, while the bishops of Breslau and Posen, each with
his chapter, and the Cistercian abbot under whose jurisdiction Trebnitz
was placed, received the latter at the gate of the finished portion of
the new church. Here the duke handed the Abbess Petrussa, Hedwige’s old
friend and teacher, a deed of the property henceforth belonging to the
order—a document which, like all following ones of the same kind, ended
with a forcible denunciation of any future injury to the rights of the
abbey. “Whoever injures this foundation, without giving full
satisfaction therefor, shall be cut off from the church; and let his
everlasting portion be with Judas, the Lord’s betrayer, who hanged
himself, and with Dathan and Abiron whom the earth swallowed up alive.”
When the deed had been read, and the dedication of the building “to the
honor of God and of the holy apostle Bartholomew” declared, the clergy,
who held torches in their hands, threw them on the ground, as a sign of
all secular claims on the possessions of the abbey being extinguished;
and during this ceremony the solemn excommunication against all who
should injure the monastery was read aloud once more. The men who had
worked at the building, or in any way contributed to it, were freed from
all feudal claims, from the obligation to fight, to furnish huntsmen,
falcons, or horses for the ducal household, to work at the fields or at
the public works, and received the immunities and protection usual to
the vassals of a monastery.
Although Trebnitz was undoubtedly named after the neighboring village so
called, a story grew up of the humorous mispronunciation of a Polish
word, _trzebanic_, by the German abbess, when asked by Henry if “there
was anything else she needed?” The word signifies “We need nothing
more,” and has some likeness to the name of Trebnitz; but popular tales
such as this abound everywhere. Among the later gifts to the monastery
were three villages, bound to supply the nuns with honey, wax, and
mead—the first for their “vesper-meal,” the second for their candles and
torches, and the third for their “drink on holidays.” The object of the
institution, which the original deed set forth as being the securing of
“a place of refuge wherein the weaker sex may atone for its sins through
the mercy of God,” was at once obtained, and other advantages also grew
up around the women’s republic of Trebnitz. It was soon filled with
young girls sent there to be educated; widows came either to enter the
order or to live under its rule and protection as out-door members;
women fled there to repent, and others to avoid temptation; and lastly
came Gertrude, the duke’s daughter, to become a nun within its walls.
Seven years after its festive opening Hedwige herself retired there and
began the second half of her long life by caring for and educating the
heathen maidens from Prussia. Trebnitz was her favorite home until her
death, and the institution which was most identified with the holy
Duchess of Silesia; but the list of great works she and her husband set
on foot, each of them a starting-point of much hidden good, is a long
one. The parish church of Bunzlau having, with most of the town itself,
been burnt, she built a new one, dedicated to Our Lady. At Goldberg, a
village near one of the royal summer palaces, she founded a Franciscan
convent, intended to serve the purpose of a school for the neighborhood.
Nimptsch, her place of refuge during the civil war between her two sons,
was not forgotten; for while there she laid the first stone of a church,
and almost at the same time began one dedicated to St. Andrew for the
town of Herrnstadt. Her friends often remarked on her lavishness in
building, and asked her whence she could expect to draw the means. She
used to answer confidently: “I trust that the heavenly Architect who
made the world, and my dear and faithful husband Henry, will not let me
be shamed, so that I should be unable to finish what I have begun with
good motives and to their honor. Do not be too anxious about my doings;
all will end well with God’s help.” In Breslau, the capital, she built
three hospitals—that of the Holy Ghost, that of St. Lazarus (this was
for lepers), and that of St. Barbara. For many years Hedwige’s charity
towards the sick had produced a rivalry among all good men, both nobles
and burghers, to tend and care for some sick persons in their own houses
or in rooms hired or built for the purpose; but her wish always was to
found a public hospital. The duke gave her a suitable piece of land for
the building and garden; the abbot of the Augustinians, Witoslaus, gave
his lay brothers as sick-nurses and his choir-monks as overseers and
confessors. Contributions flowed in from the rich members of the
population, and the first hospital was finished in a very short time.
The third contained what was an immense luxury in those days—a number of
bath-rooms, open gratis to the poor on certain days, and rooms where
they could be bled, as was the custom on the slightest illness. All
those who came in contact with Hedwige caught her spirit of generosity,
and rich men, lay and ecclesiastic, vied with her in founding churches
and monasteries. Canon Nicholas of Breslau, the duke’s chancellor,
obtained Henry’s leave to endow a Cistercian monastery with the estates
which the duke had given him for his lifetime, and others followed his
example.
These ceremonies were always solemn and the deed of gift publicly read,
signed, witnessed, and sworn to. As much pomp hedged them in as was
usual in a treaty of peace or the betrothal of sovereign princes; and,
indeed, the foundation of churches, though a common occurrence, was
looked upon as quite as important as any civil contract. In 1234 a
terrible famine, fever, and pestilence decimated the land, and, among
many other Silesian towns that possessed as yet no hospital, Neumarkt
was in special distress. Hedwige hurried there and set on foot a
temporary system of relief and nursing, but also entreated her husband
to build a permanent hospital for incurables, where they might be cared
for till their death. This he did, and attached to it a provostship, the
church dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, and Pope Innocent IV. sent
special blessings to the Bohemian Benedictine monks who were entrusted
with the care of the sick. Four years later Henry built a church in
Löwenberg and gave it to the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem; this was
a month or two before his death. But these are only a few of the works
of this generous couple. Many villages and remote places obtained
benefits from them, travelling priests were cared for, young girls
helped in their need and protected or dowered, many poor families housed
and fed; and the famine of 1234 especially gave Hedwige an opportunity
of justifying her title of “Mother of the poor.” She distributed
unheard-of quantities of grain, bread, meat, and dried fruits to the
people, who came for relief from long distances. She gave lavishly, with
that apparent recklessness that marks the charities of saints, smilingly
saying, “We must help the poor, that the Lord may have pity on our own
needs and appease our own hunger.” She forgave all feudal dues for years
on her own possessions, and looked after her employés so diligently that
they complained that the “duchess left them nothing but the leavings of
the peasants.” When she did not distribute her alms in person, the poor
groaned and wept, and cared less for the charity than if it had been
seasoned by her gracious presence. When Breslau was wholly burnt down in
1218, and three years’ distress fell upon the land, she did the same and
relieved thousands. That year was marked by the death of the Abbess of
Trebnitz, Petrussa, and the choice of Princess Gertrude as her
successor, which coincided with the festival held to celebrate the
entire finishing of the monastery and the dedication of the church. The
religious ceremonies were followed by a banquet in the refectory and by
games for the people in the courtyard. Henry was present and rejoiced
with her; her son’s wife, Anna, daughter of King Ottokar of Bohemia, was
there with her children, one of whom was to fill, but unworthily, the
throne of Silesia. It was a family gathering as well as a religious
feast; but if, as tradition says, Hedwige was then gifted with a more
than ordinary insight into the future, she must have felt sad to think
of the turmoil that was coming and that would part her more and more in
spirit from her husband.
After the death of his second son, Conrad, Henry turned his arms against
a relation of his own, Duke Ladislaus of Gnesen and Posen, and came off
victorious. His old warrior-blood once again stirred in him, it was
impossible to keep him from the excitement of war, and Hedwige’s
entreaties and messages were of no avail. She feared the excommunication
which Pope Innocent had more than once threatened to launch against the
restless Polish sovereigns, and was relieved when he undertook a war
against the Prussians, who at least were heathens, and whose cruelties
really needed strong repression. Still, it was rather the thirst for
fighting that led the Duke of Silesia against them than any exalted
motive of justice or desire to open the way for their conversion.