Alchemists Who Failed: The Gilded Gallows of 1597

Six years earlier, Munich had beheaded its own gold maker. Nine years later, Stuttgart hanged another man on the same iron frame. What happened to the men who promised princes gold and could not deliver is written down in broadsheets, city chronicles and interrogation records — and what it describes is not a war on magic. It is the enforcement of a contract.

Gold maker, alchemist, fraud: three different words

English usually collapses all of this into "alchemist," which is why the story reads as persecution when it was something else. Sixteenth-century German had a narrower word, Goldmacher — gold maker — and the distinction mattered enough to decide whether a man kept his neck.

An alchemist distilled, separated, assayed, colored metals and made medicines. He worked inside a body of knowledge that the learned men of his century took seriously, and he owed nobody a delivery date. A gold maker promised a result: a stated quantity of precious metal, from a stated quantity of raw material, by a stated deadline. That promise is what made him answerable in a way a scholar never was.

The historian Tara Nummedal, whose 2007 study of alchemy and authority in the Holy Roman Empire works through exactly these contracts, laboratory inventories and trial records, puts the question the period itself was asking: what separates a true alchemist from a fraud? Her answer is that in practice the courts decided it, and they decided it on the basis of delivery.

A duke who needed gold

Friedrich I of Württemberg came to power in 1593 with expensive plans. He wanted his duchy converted from an Austrian sub-fief into a direct imperial fief, which he achieved in 1599 by paying the emperor a very large sum. The same year he ordered a new town founded on the eastern edge of the Black Forest. There was a court to keep, there were buildings, and there was an interest in metals that went past simple cash trouble: he had ores assayed, sent men looking for mines, had mineral springs examined. He set up a laboratory in the old pleasure house of his deer park in Stuttgart, and two more elsewhere. In 1599 the territorial estates complained that he had spent thousands of gulden on it.

Into that world came the gold makers. The Stuttgart chronicle compiled by Carl Pfaff in 1845 from the city's archival records counts four men who ended as gold makers under Friedrich — in 1597, 1600, 1601 and 1606 — all on the duke's order, and all on the same gallows.

The contract: 800 ducats out of 100 pounds of iron

Georg Honauer was born in 1572 in Olmütz, a goldsmith by trade. When he appeared in Stuttgart in 1596 he styled himself lord of two estates. Both existed only on paper; the duke later had a messenger check in Prague. What interested Friedrich first was a different claim: that Honauer could draw eight hundred ducats' worth of gold out of a hundred pounds of iron.

The duke asked for a small-scale proof. Honauer supplied one, and the metal passed the examination of the ducal mining council — at least as good as ducat gold. That is the hinge of the whole story, and it is better documented than most of what people think they know about alchemists. The main state archive in Stuttgart holds the case file: a letter from the duke of October 9, 1596, saying he wanted the gold and silver samples tested further; a letter from Honauer three days later asking for a delivery of iron; and a set of standing orders for the gold makers and laboratory workers, drafted in the duke's own hand.

Then the order was placed. Friedrich initially wanted gold to the value of 200,000 ducats. Honauer explained that he lacked the reagents for a batch that size, and they settled on 36,000 ducats a month, for an indefinite term. The raw material came from the ducal armory at Montbéliard, more than a hundred and fifty miles away: thirty-six hundredweight and eighteen pounds of iron. With it came a chemicals list the records preserve — over a thousand pounds of saltpeter, more than eighteen hundred pounds of lead, and comparable quantities of other reagents.

It is worth sitting with those numbers. A prince who believed he had bought sorcery would not have written standing orders for the laboratory. Friedrich bought a process, with inputs, quantities and deadlines, exactly as he would have bought a mine or a saltworks.

The flight, and the seven portraits

Honauer ran before the iron was ever worked. The records do not say what pushed him; the sheer tonnage sitting in the laboratory, against which no small-scale trick would help, is the obvious explanation.

What the records do say is how the duke reacted. On November 17, 1596, Friedrich issued a warrant for the arrest of the runaway gold maker. Over the following two days letters were drafted to the king of Denmark, the elector of Brandenburg, the duke of Mecklenburg and the queen of England, each with a copy of the warrant. They were never sent, and they are still in the file. The court painter produced seven portraits of the fugitive to serve as wanted notices. A butcher reported at the end of November that he had seen a man matching the description.

Honauer was finally taken far to the north, and here the story stops fitting the picture of a vengeful prince. The count who held him refused at first to hand him over. Friedrich sent a councillor to negotiate; the talks dragged on for weeks, a landgrave mediated, the emperor was brought in, and a side instruction covered when the envoy should make the count and his household agreeable with money. Dated the same day as that instruction is the draft of a letter from the duke to Honauer himself: he had never doubted the man's art, and desired his return.

That sentence is worth reading twice. Friedrich did not want the gold maker back in order to hang him. He wanted him back because he had watched the proof with his own eyes and still believed it could be repeated. Honauer was brought to Stuttgart and told to perform the transmutation again. Only when that failed came the interrogation, the trial and the sentence. He was charged not only with fraud but with usurping a noble title. An appeal for mercy to the emperor came to nothing.

Gilded, or painted red?

Two old traditions describe what stood on the rise outside the city, and they do not agree.

Pfaff's chronicle, working from the archival records, describes an iron gallows on a stone footing, thirty-five feet high, painted red, with a smaller drop-gallows above it; the iron for it came from Montbéliard and had originally been intended for the alchemist who was to make gold from it. Honauer, it says, was hanged from it in a suit of tinsel gold — thin-beaten brass leaf that glitters like gold foil.

The 1597 broadsheet says otherwise. Its verses describe both the suit and the gallows itself as gilded all over. Christoph Gottlieb von Murr, who assembled the history of gold making from the sources in 1805, took that version: a gallows weighing more than twenty-five hundredweight, gilded, with the condemned man dressed in tinsel gold to match.

The gilded version is the one that won; it is in every encyclopedia entry. The red one comes from a chronicle that explicitly worked from archival documents. Both could be true — a red-primed frame covered in tinsel leaf is ordinary craft, not invention. Without the accounts it cannot be settled. What is not in dispute: the iron was Honauer's iron, the suit was gold-colored, and the duke wanted the whole empire to hear about it. The broadsheets were not a by-product. They were the point.

Munich, six years earlier: the gallows nobody hung from

Stuttgart was not the first court to settle accounts with a gold maker in public. On April 26, 1591, a man in the white and blue of the house of Wittelsbach stood before a scaffold on the Munich wine market — Marco Bragadino, born around 1545 on Cyprus, a runaway Capuchin, lately the guest of the Republic of Venice and then alchemist to Duke Wilhelm V of Bavaria.

His rise can be followed in the Fugger newsletters, the handwritten news reports the Augsburg trading house received from across Europe. A dispatch from Venice in November 1589 reports that he kept a daily table for five hundred people, that he took ten ounces of mercury, set it on the fire, added a drop of liquid from a phial he carried, and produced good gold; that he had handed the Council of Ten two such phials, tested in his absence, and that the first test had worked. The writer admits it sounds like a fairy tale, then says everything was so open that one could not doubt it. By December the leading men of the city were addressing him as illustrissimo and armed boats guarded him at night. From Rome, the pope's reaction: he was not a little surprised that Venice put such faith in the man, and even if the art worked, it could only work with Satan's help.

Then, in January 1590, the same source turns. His art was enough for small quantities and not for larger ones. He had made two one-pound bars in front of patricians and no more, however hard he was pressed — and the opinion now was that his claims of producing millions had been a great fraud. The reasoning is worth noting, because it is the assaying logic of the age: a man who can make a little must be able to make a lot. Bragadino cut back his banquets, left Venice in the spring, and in August reached the castle where Wilhelm V was waiting for him, with debts that had brought the duchy close to ruin.

In March 1591 the Bavarian estates and ducal councillors had him arrested — without the duke's knowledge, who learned of it the next day. Under threat of torture he confessed that his gold making had been destrezza di mano: sleight of hand. He was condemned for fraud, and because he had never formally been released from clerical status the court commuted hanging to the sword. The gallows was put up anyway, the night before, painted red, with a noose covered in gold leaf hanging from it — as a sign, not for use. The beheading beside it went badly; the executioner needed three strokes.

The footnote that fused two executions

A twentieth-century edition of the Fugger newsletters carries an editor's note on Bragadino: that his fraud was discovered and that in 1590 he was hanged on a gilded gallows, in a garment with gold tinsel glued to it.

The year is wrong. The manner of death is wrong. And the gilded gallows with the tinsel suit is Georg Honauer, three hundred years and one city away. The editor had slid the Munich and the Stuttgart executions into each other.

The error is more interesting than a simple mix-up, because contemporaries were already thinking of these cases together. Ten weeks after the wine market, a Fugger dispatch from Prague reported that the English alchemist Edward Kelley had been walled up in a castle with air coming through a hole, and that it was feared he would be dealt with as the alchemist in Munich had been. Kelley got out of it. Bragadino did not; Honauer, six years later, did not either. The news writers who supplied the courts of Europe had already made a pattern out of three separate cases, and the gallows — red or golden — was the image that stuck.

Why the judges said fraud and not sorcery

Look at what these men were actually convicted of. Not alchemy — that was lawful, and the duke practiced it himself. Not a pact with the devil, although the pope had read Bragadino's art exactly that way. Bragadino died for fraud. Honauer was charged with fraud and with usurping noble rank. The last of the Stuttgart gold makers was tried, according to his biographical entry, not officially for unsuccessful gold making but for fraud, treason and perjury.

Behind that sits a legal understanding that had moved alchemy out of the sacred and into commerce. The gold maker signed a contract, took advances, raw materials, a laboratory and a title, and owed a performance in return. When the performance failed, that was not sacrilege but non-delivery — and a man who had rigged the proof the contract rested on was a criminal fraudster. In this period the word Betrüger, deceiver, functioned almost as a technical term for alchemists who had not delivered, whether they had tried in bad faith or in good. The gallows was the penalty clause.

How a rigged proof actually worked is rarely described as precisely as in the case of the last man to hang on Honauer's gallows.

The cabinet with many drawers

Hans Heinrich Müller, born around 1579 in Alsace, had learned the barber-surgeon's trade from a cousin, wandered through Hungary, Silesia and Italy, and picked up distilling in Florence. In 1603 he surfaced in Prague, showed Emperor Rudolf II a gold tincture and an art of making men bulletproof, and was raised to the imperial nobility for it as Müller von Mühlenfels. In January 1604 he entered Friedrich's service as court alchemist, was given a laboratory, then a castle and estate, and lent a nearby city three thousand gulden — money that turned out to belong to a margrave.

On June 26, 1606, he testified before the Stuttgart city court. The record notes that the statement began under torture and was afterwards confirmed point by point without it. One reads it for what it is, a coerced confession — but its details were checkable, because the court inspected the objects. And the details are remarkable.

The bulletproofing, he admitted, had consisted of his servant loading the guns with paper instead of shot. The gold proof before a Prague captain: he had locked the laboratory and given the captain the key, kept a second key, and sent his servant in at night with a good quantity of gold to throw into the crucible. From the margrave he had asked thirty thousand crowns for a tincture and received eight thousand ducats, ten thousand reichstaler, velvet for two suits, two horses, a cloak and a hatband of pearls.

Then the Stuttgart proof. Because the duke watched too closely and a night key was no longer enough, he had a cabinet built with many drawers — lined inside with cloth and felted underneath, so that a man inside it would not be heard, with holes to see out of — and had it carried into the laboratory and set against a wall. Through the wall he cut a hole with a sliding panel opening into a passage, the panel painted the same color as the wall. When the proof was due, once the mercury and the rest of the material had been set up openly and without deception, everyone had left, and the door had been sealed with the ducal seal, a man was to climb out of the cabinet and throw silver or gold into the crucible. The silver came from coins a messenger had changed in Ulm and which Mühlenfels had melted down. As for the tincture, he had passed off a mercury precipitate, because he had never had a tincture at all.

The cabinet tells you what a proof was in the sixteenth century: not a ritual, but an experimental setup with a seal, witnesses and the interested parties locked out — a procedure designed to defeat sleight of hand, which did not defeat a man in a closet. It also tells you why princes went on believing. The precautions were serious. They were only outflanked.

The Pole who was not to reach the country

What finally broke Mühlenfels was not the cabinet. It was a guest.

In 1605 Friedrich invited the Polish alchemist Michael Sendivogius to Stuttgart. Sendivogius had published the most widely read alchemical book of his generation the year before and stood high in favor at the Prague court. For Mühlenfels that was a threat: a second alchemist with a better reputation could cost him everything he had been given.

What he did about it is in his own testimony. He intercepted the letters. He admitted taking dispatches from a courier carrying mail from Poland for the duke and the privy council, and holding the man for about a month until he swore to tell nobody who had taken his post. Further letters passing between the duke and the Polish baron, together with an instruction, he suppressed against his oath, so that Sendivogius would not reach the country. When the Pole arrived in Stuttgart anyway and the duke received him with full honors, Mühlenfels took him aside, swore him to secrecy, and told him the duke meant to imprison and torture him until he gave up the art, and that he should flee. Sendivogius fled — and Mühlenfels then held him prisoner at his own castle.

The rest went quickly and far beyond Württemberg. Sendivogius was in Polish service and in Rudolf II's favor; the Polish king, the Prague court and Brandenburg all intervened, and the correspondence about restitution ran on into the next reign. The arrest warrant came on June 15, 1606, the testimony on June 26, and a few days later three fingers of his right hand were struck off before he was hanged on June 30, twenty-eight years old, on the gallows built nine years earlier for Honauer. Everything he owned was confiscated.

And here the records go quiet. His biographical entry states plainly that how far Friedrich himself may have driven the seizure of Sendivogius, as has been supposed, cannot be established from the surviving files. The suspicion is easy — a prince who had employed gold makers for a decade and hanged four of them would hardly have balked at squeezing a famous alchemist. But the statement that incriminates the duke comes from the mouth of the man who called him a tyrant in order to save his own game, and who died for treason days later. The files allow both readings. They settle nothing.

What became of the gallows

The iron gallows stayed up. Pfaff's chronicle names the three men who died on it after Honauer — in 1600, in 1601, and Mühlenfels in 1606 — all of them called alleged gold makers, all of them for their frauds. The iron was not melted down. The duke apparently had no plan to need it again, and then needed it three times.

What lasted was the figure. Nummedal describes how the publicized fraud cases served the next generation of alchemists as a foil: anyone offering himself as a serious adviser who could tell real gold from a trick did so with the image of the gilded gallows behind him. The executions did not end gold making. They gave it a counter-figure — and gave the courts a reason to try once more, this time with someone who was certainly not a fraud.

A short timeline

Date	What happened
Nov 1589	A Fugger dispatch from Venice reports Bragadino making gold from mercury; the Council of Ten has it tested
Jan 1590	The same source: the art works for small quantities only; talk of a great fraud
Apr 26, 1591	Bragadino beheaded in Munich; a red gallows with a gilded noose stands beside the scaffold as a sign
Oct 1596	Letters between Duke Friedrich and Honauer about proofs and iron; the delivery begins
Nov 17, 1596	Honauer has fled; a warrant is issued, seven portraits are painted, a reward is posted
Apr 2, 1597	Honauer is hanged on the iron gallows in a suit of tinsel gold
1600 and 1601	Two more gold makers die on the same gallows
Jan 4, 1604	Müller von Mühlenfels, ennobled in Prague, becomes court alchemist in Stuttgart
1605	Sendivogius travels to Stuttgart, is talked into flight and held at Mühlenfels's castle
Jun 30, 1606	Mühlenfels is hanged — the last gold maker on Honauer's gallows

What an American reader tends to get wrong about this

Popular accounts in English usually file these executions under the witch trials, as one more instance of a superstitious age punishing forbidden knowledge. Almost every part of that is backwards.

The courts did not treat transmutation as impossible. Most educated people, including the men on the bench, thought it was possible in principle, which is precisely why a contract for it was enforceable. The charge was never the art. It was the rigged demonstration, the advance taken, the delivery not made — the sixteenth-century equivalent of a securities-fraud indictment, with an assay in place of an audit.

Nor were these men hunted as heretics. Honauer was pursued by diplomatic correspondence and bought back through negotiation; his employer wrote to him while he was a fugitive to say he still believed in his art. What killed him was that he could not do it twice in front of witnesses.

And the spectacle was not religious. A gilded suit, an iron frame made from the man's own raw material, a printed sheet with a portrait and thirty-two verses sent out across the empire: that is a creditor publishing a default, in the most legible visual language available.

Frequently asked questions

Can iron or mercury be turned into gold?
Not by any chemical process. Gold is a different element, and changing one element into another means changing the nucleus, which chemistry does not touch. Physicists have made trace amounts of gold in accelerators and reactors at costs that make the exercise meaningless. Whatever passed those sixteenth-century assays was smuggled gold or an alloy.

Was the Stuttgart gallows really gilded?
The sources disagree, and both are old. The 1597 broadsheet and Murr in 1805 say gilded; Pfaff's 1845 chronicle, working from the archives, says painted red. A red-primed frame covered with tinsel leaf would satisfy both descriptions, but without the accounts it cannot be decided.

Were alchemists generally executed?
No. Alchemy was legal and widely patronized, and the overwhelming majority of practitioners were never prosecuted. What drew prosecution was a contract with a quantity and a deadline attached, plus a demonstration that turned out to have been rigged.

Did the dukes stop believing afterwards?
Not straight away. Friedrich hanged four gold makers in nine years and kept hiring. The publicized frauds became a reference point that later alchemists used to distinguish themselves from — which is a different thing from disbelief.

Sources and further reading

• Broadsheet with copper engraving and thirty-two verses on Honauer's execution, 1597 (Kunstmuseum Moritzburg Halle; a second copy in the German Pharmacy Museum, Heidelberg)
• Christoph Gottlieb von Murr, Über den wahren Ursprung der Rosenkreuzer und des Freymaurerordens and his collected material on gold making, 1805 — including the 1606 interrogation record printed from the original
• Carl Pfaff, Geschichte der Stadt Stuttgart, 1845, compiled from the city's archival documents
• Main State Archive Stuttgart, holding A 47 — the Württemberg gold-maker case files
• Tara Nummedal, Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire, University of Chicago Press, 2007
• Ivo Striedinger, Der Goldmacher Marco Bragadino, 1928, an archival study
• The Fugger newsletters, Venice and Prague dispatches, 1589–1591
• Neue Deutsche Biographie, vol. 18 (1997), entry on Müller von Mühlenfels

Questions about this piece? Write to 28@templeofdesire.com.