In 1256 Berlin and Cölln were linked by a mill dam which could control the flow of water, making it a more convenient river crossing and providing power for a public mill; in 1307 the two towns merged in a formal union and a new Rathaus was built on the Lange Brücke – or long bridge – so that the representatives were actually suspended between the two settlements as they sat in council. The margrave of Brandenburg did not move to Berlin, preferring to stay in the much more luxurious Spandau Castle, but he was represented there by a governor known as the Schultheiss, first appointed in 1247.72 (The name Schultheiss was given to one of Berlin’s famous brands of beer.) The towns were given their own seals; the earliest dates from 14 July 1253 and was produced under the joint authority of the Brandenburg margraves Johann I and Otto III. It depicts the Cölln eagle framed by a great city gate complete with three towers. The Sekretsiegel, the second Berlin seal to depict a bear, dates from 1338 and shows a rather ferocious beast, all claws out, striding across the landscape and dragging behind him a small Cölln eagle attached to his neck by a leash. In 1369 Berlin Margrave Otto granted Berlin the right to mint coins which were to be honoured by the people of ‘Berlin, Cölln, Frankfurt, Spandau, Bernau, Eberswalde’ and others, in effect making Berlin the financial centre of the Mark Brandenburg.73
Despite such successes Berlin was far from becoming a great city; indeed in comparison to the rest of Europe all the towns of the Mark were backward and primitive.74 The few churches in Berlin were small and unimaginative. There was no great representative architecture of the age and certainly nothing remotely like the magnificent Notre Dame, Westminster Abbey, St Stephen’s in Vienna, the Charles Bridge in Prague, or Magdeburg Cathedral; nor were there beautifully constructed city walls or ornate public buildings. Fourteenth-century Berlin-Cölln covered a modest seventy hectares and contained around 1,000 houses at a time when Paris, Venice, Florence and Genoa contained around 80,000 people and London already had 35,000, making it the largest city in England.75 Berlin could not compete with the great textile cities of Arras and Ghent or with ports like Bruges or Genoa and it lagged far behind in everything from financial acumen to the development of art and culture. Then, on 14 August 1319 the Margrave Woldemar died, bringing the end of the Ascanian dynasty which had governed the Mark Brandenburg from the time of Albert the Bear. Berlin had lost its powerful patrons.
There was no natural heir or successor to the titles held by the family of Albert the Bear, and the vast property passed into the hands of margraves from the houses of Wittelsbach and Luxembourg. Unlike the Ascanians these families had no interest in supporting the strange territory; on the contrary, they were eager to extract wealth to finance their estates elsewhere and increased taxes and fines accordingly. With no protection the Mark was soon targeted by marauding armies and bandits. Polish and Lithuanian troops raided in the 1330s, and in 1349 the Danish king Woldemar – the ‘False Woldemar’ – returned from the Crusades claiming to be Albert the Bear’s long-lost ancestor. When he was denied his ‘inheritance’ he attacked the Mark, burning dozens of villages in the ensuing struggle.
This was not the only disaster to befall the fledgling city. In 1348 the Black Death made its fearsome way through Europe and reached the Mark the following year. Suddenly people began to develop black sores on the palms of their hands or under their armpits, only to die in agony a few days later. One tenth of the population of Berlin succumbed to the bubonic plague and more fell to influenza, smallpox and typhus. Tragically, the Black Death brought the first pogroms to Berlin. The Jews had long played an important part in the region; not only had they traded there throughout the Slavic period but the first Jewish grave dates from 1244 and the Berlin Jewish community was officially founded in 1295, after which Jews and Italians largely controlled the functions of banking and money-lending. This long history did not prevent persecution and after the outbreak of plague Berliners began to blame the Jews for poisoning the wells. There were wild outpourings of hatred, Jews were viciously attacked on the streets and in their homes, and many moved for a time to a protected alley near the present Klosterstrasse which was closed off at night by a huge iron gate. Jews were put on trial and publicly executed for their ‘crimes’. Such violence was by no means unique to Berlin; over 300 Jewish communities were destroyed in western Europe and many fled east, particularly to more tolerant Poland, where they formed the largest community in Europe until the Second World War.76 This first wave of Berlin anti-Semitism ended only on 6 July 1354, when the margrave re-established the right of Jews to reside in the city and founded a Jewish school and a synagogue.
The misery of the century was not yet over. In 1376 Berlin was ravaged by another of those demons of medieval Europe – fire. It struck again in 1380 in the ‘Great Fire’, which destroyed most of the city. All the churches were levelled and the Rathaus was reduced to ashes along with all early documents and records of the city’s history, one of the reasons we know so little about Berlin’s earliest years. A contemporary chronicler reported that only six buildings were left standing, and when it was all over an unfortunate and probably blameless knight, Erich von Falke, was accused of arson and tortured to death; his head was stuck high on the Oderberg Gate.
The era was for many Berliners a miserable time of superstition and punishment. The city enforced strict penalties for the most petty crimes and, according to the Berliner Stadtbuch, women caught stealing from the Church were buried alive while those caught committing adultery were killed by the sword. Crimes like alleged poisoning, witchcraft and the use of black magic were considered serious offences and between the years 1391 and 1448, in a population of no more than 8,000 people, 121 ‘criminals’ were imprisoned, forty-six were hanged, twenty were burned at the stake, twenty-two were beheaded, eleven were broken on the wheel, seventeen were buried alive (of which nine were women), and thirteen died through other forms of torture.77 Being broken on the wheel meant just that: the victim was tied on the ground and large wooden blocks placed under him. He was then battered until his arms, legs and spine were cracked so that his broken body could be threaded on to the spokes of a specially made wheel, which was then raised on a high post and the man left to die (the wheel was not used to punish women, who were typically drowned or boiled, burned or buried alive). The corpses of the executed were hoisted up and displayed on the Lange Brücke, their bodies left to decay and their bones put out to rattle in the wind as a warning to others.78 Many other punishments are recorded on the bloody pages of the Berliner Stadtbuch – Christians who ‘mixed poison’ were burned, liars were boiled alive in a gigantic iron cauldron, and lesser charges could result in anything from having the eyes pushed out, the ears sliced through, the right hand chopped off, the tongue removed with pliers, or molten iron pushed between the teeth.79 These ‘minor’ sentences were carried out twice a week, on Mondays and Saturdays, although the public executions took place only once every two weeks – on every second Wednesday – in front of the Oderberg Gate. Such tortures were common throughout Europe but Berlin was already proving itself to be rather a violent place.
Things were to get worse. The fire which had resulted in the execution of Erich von Falke had been so destructive that Margrave Sigismund had allowed Berlin to forgo paying taxes for a year, but even so it was dangerously weak, and from the 1390s the infamous Raub Ritter – the Robber Barons from Mecklenburg and Pomerania – began to ravage the area. The very mention of their names – Quitzow, Putlitz, Bredow, Kracht – was enough to send fear through the population. These destructive, barbaric men brought catastrophe in their wake and made the decade from 1401–10 the most turbulent in the history of medieval Berlin.
The robber barons were adventurers who terrorized the area, burning and looting and raping at will. An extraordinary letter sent to the people of Lichtenberg still survives in which Dietrich von Quitzow explains that ‘if they do not send their wagons to Bötzow and bring me wood and ten Schock [a group of sixty] of good Bohemian Groschen for delivery which your Councillors of Berlin-Köpenick have captured from me, I will take everything