ABSTRACT
Writing his chronicle of the history of Augsburg during the 1530s, as the Reformation was being formally adopted in his town, the Catholic monk Clemens Sender set down a famous story from the year 1435. It concerned the daughter of an Augsburg bath-keeper, Agnes, who won the heart of Albrecht, future Duke of Bavaria. Despite the huge disparity in rank, Albrecht promised her marriage, and provided a ladyin-waiting for her ‘as if for a princess’.1 But Albrecht’s father Duke Ernst could not accept such an unsuitable match, and when Albrecht was away from home, he seized his chance, ordering the woman to be drowned in the Danube at Staubing. The hangman tied her up and was about to throw her into the river, when he gave her one last chance: if she would confess that Albrecht was not her husband, he would let her go. She refused, insisting that she was Albrecht’s lawful wife. So the hangman threw her into the river, and pulled her under the water, but she did not drown. Three times he dragged her down, until finally he ‘took a long pole and wound it around Agnes’s hair, for she had very beautiful, long hair’, and pulled her again in the water down to the bottom.2 Only then did she drown. Albrecht, grief-stricken, built a chapel to her memory and founded three eternal masses for her soul.
