Cont.:
Wismar awaited the onslaught of Lübeck`s forces with a mixture of defiance, fear, and frustration. Frustrated were all those (mainly, but not exclusively) of patrician background with or without affiliation to the Old Council, who had tried to talk some sense into Claus Jesup, or to plot his assassination, or at least to carry their valuable assets to safety.
Jesup had indeed attempted to negotiate with Rapesulver and Lübeck`s town council; they had even promised to step up their contributions to the war against Erik, but to no avail. When Jesup realized that Rapesulver was bent on conquest, and that he had been encouraged by the King of the Romans in this pursuit, he oversaw defiant preparations for a military defense of the town. All his supporters, from the guild leaders to their simplest members, were mobilized for an improvised improvement of the fortifications on the town`s outer maritime perimeter, and all eighteen towers along the town`s walls were manned with anyone who could wield a handgonne, a crossbow, a dagger or even just a fishing knife.
Fear had befallen both groups, and it claimed its first victims even before the first Lübecker ship had come into sight. On March 21st, 1428, another group of thugs attacked Claus Jesup, presumably hired by patricians, who wished to deliver the rebel leader to Rapesulver in a last attempt to save their town from a predictable carnage. Jesup`s guard fended the attack off easily, but their disquieted leader, who feared that such acts of sabotage would continue even when the Lübeckers were at the gates, which would render them incomparably more dangerous, began a manhunt among the town`s most respected families, bringing over two dozen suspects before an improvised tribunal, which condemned them to death as traitors. Jesup denied them even the honor of a beheading, famously arguing that he could not spare a single sword to blunt, and had them hanged over the course of the 23rd, 24th and 25th of March.
Just before noon on March 27th, 1428, the crew on the watchtowers on Poel and Lieps islands [see a 21st century map
here; in 1428, Lieps was presumably still an ordinary island instead of just a sand bank] sighted Lübeck`s armada. It was more than twenty war-fitted cogs strong – they could be manned with over a thousand mercenaries, it stood to be feared. Both on Poel and on Lieps, the two islands which oversaw the entrance to Wismar Bay, the men hurried to ready their cannons, then waited for the cogs to come into range.
But the Lübeckers opened fire before Wismarer cannons could even reach them; their artillery was fashioned after those models which had been used by the Hussites against Moravia`s towns [1]. They fired at greater distance, with a more massive impact, and they even cooled down in reasonable time. The improvised combined wood-and-stone fortifications on Poel took a few serious blows before it collapsed over the heads of its defenders, rendering one of the two entrance gates to Wismar Bay wide open.
Firepower and numbers proved decisive in the ensuing sea battle between Lübeck`s 16 and Wismar`s seven war-cogs, and later, too, when Lübeck`s mercenaries laid siege to the town. The old walls and gates were subjected to a week-long merciless attack, shortly interrupted only on April 2nd, when the Lübeckers were faced with Mecklenburger relief forces sent by Katharina, which they defeated easily from out of their own adapted version of war wagons.
When the walls were finally breeched on April 5th, 900 well-trained Lübeckers crossed the moats on pontoons and fell into a town whose defenders outnumbered them, but whose discipline and equipment were found lacking. Nevertheless, Wismar did not give in easily. Even when its houses and workshops had been devoured by the flames, guild militiamen still fought back until each and every one of their hideouts had been smoked out. Claus Jesup was purportedly seen in many of these combats; when the end was near, he had retreated with the closest circle of his followers in the Dominican Black Monastery, until the doors of this monumental sacral building had been blown open by a Lübeck cannon, too. When a group of Lübeckers hung the horribly mutilated corpse of Claus Jesup on ropes from the bell-tower of the monastery, Wismar`s last defenders realized that they had lost.
Heinrich Rapesulver personally received the capitulation of a number of former patricians and the last surviving leaders of the craft militia among Wismar`s smouldering ruins. The town, along with the nineteen villages it owned and all its land, became a possession of the free city of Lübeck. Local administration and justice would be delivered through a bailwick, staffed with Lübeckers and a few of Wismar`s former patricians which were hand-picked by Lübeck`s town council. Specifically, the store-houses and the remaining ships of Wismar`s commercial fleet would become Lübeck`s, too. All guilds were dissolved, the formation of new ones prohibited and penalized with death. Lübeck left a garrison with the bailwick, which also took control over Poel, Langenwerder, and Lieps.
When Rostock`s Council of the Hundred heard of Wismar`s fate, they sought help from Erik, and, in a reversal of the town`s policies throughout the past decades, even promised allegiance to the King of Denmark. With Danish forces being busy elsewhere, though, Rostock underwent a similar tragedy between May 1st and 7th.
During this time, Danish forces attacked Stralsund [2] – the Hanseatic town whose engagement against the Kalmar kingdoms was considered outright treacherous by Erik because it was legally a vassal of the Danish crown. Stralsund, which hoped in vain for relief from its allies Lübeck, Wismar and Rostock [3], was thoroughly sacked in such a manner that it would no longer play any role in this war.
Within less than two months, the Wendish Quarter of the Hansa had practically fallen apart. Lübeck was towering alone, singularly powerful to an extent which made the remaining members of the Hanseatic war alliance, Hamburg and Lüneburg, rather uncomfortable. Also, the fleets of the Kalmar kingdoms were, for the first time in this war, nearing a hegemonial control over the Southern Baltic. Hamburg`s town council was split between a peace faction, which proposed a more Westerly orientation on North Sea trade and sought an agreement with Erik even if it was on much less favourable terms than they had bargained for, and a war faction, which hung on to Baltic involvement and called for massively stepping up the city`s war effort in order to turn the tide.
When the latter obtained a narrow victory, aided by a decided stance of King Friedrich III. in favour of the war party, the Hansa, dominated by Lübeck and Hamburg, with a tiny contingent from Lüneburg, sent another fleet which successfully dodged Danish enemies and almost attacked Copenhagen, before it was confronted by combined Danish and Swedish forces. This time, the odds were in favour of the Hanseatic allies, and their heavy ships managed to sink a much greater proportion of their Scandinavian adversaries before they abandoned the attack and returned home. Both sides had reached a situation in which they could not force a decisive defeat on the other; neither could occupy the other`s lands for long, and each side appeared able to muster enough resources to send yet another and another wave of maritime attacks against the enemy. But it would still take both sides years and yet more dramatic events to realize and accept the stalemate they had reached.
Further East, the Teutonic Order had marched into the duchy of Stolp in June 1428. Under Boguslaw`s leadership, Pomerania`s defenders confronted them near Nessin. As they had been taught by their Bohemian advisors, the hastily trained infantry was assembled behind a number of war wagons, with the horses of the duke`s banners securing their flanks. It was not the first time Teutonic forces encountered the war wagon strategy, for a few Teutonic knights had participated in the first crusade against the Bohemian Hussites, but they still had not stumbled upon promising counter-measures, so the army of the Grand Master Paul von Rustorf attempted to simply circumvent Boguslaw`s forces far to their left. Harassed by Pomeranian cavalry, they spread more and more to the North, until von Rustorf realized that they were about to march into a trap laid out by Boguslaw: a position where they would have a lake at their back and swamps to their right and left. Exasperatedly, von Rustorf ordered his army to turn around and advance.
Nessin was a massacre, in which the Order lost over two thousand men, but ultimately they prevailed over the smaller Pomeranian forces, who were not yet as experienced with the tactics they had learned from their Bohemian allies and who lacked a leader like Žižka had been to the early Hussites. At the end of a day which had soaked the Pomeranian fields with blood, Boguslaw was forced to hastily flee towards Stolp with just a handful of men.
Although Stolp / Slupsk did not exactly possess modern fortifications – they contained at least as much wood as they contained stones, and Boguslaw had not been able to come by sufficient gunpowder for the organization of a massive artillery defense –, it nevertheless caused a lot of trouble to the Order. A first frontal assault in July had been fought back. Now, von Rustorf took to subduing all the surrounding villages and reducing the smaller castles one by one, when a series of heavy rains throughout September and a very early arrival of a snowy winter in the first weeks of November bogged down his offensive and prevented him from finishing his business.
Determined not to let Friedrich`s offer pass, though, von Rustorf decided to hold the positions, withdraw only a portion of the troops, and return with fresh forces in spring. To this end, he levied another round of hefty taxes from the Order`s Prussian lands. (The Livonian master Rutenberg simply ignored von Rustorf`s requests and spared his Northern lands from this new heavy burden.)
In April 1429, Friedrich III. of Hohenzollern, King of the Romans, Prince-Elector of Brandenburg, Burgrave of Nürnberg and Margrave of Kulmbach and Ansbach, personally accompanied von Rustorf`s new offensive against Stolp and witnessed its painstakingly slow and ultimately anticlimactic victory on May 11th, which saw Stolp razed to the ground, Boguslaw put to trial and burned at the stake, and the duchy partitioned between Casimir and the Teutonic Order.
While the Teutonic Order`s professional army ravaged Stolp and Paul von Rustorf enjoyed his triumph, trouble brewed back in the East. Enraged at the taxations and confiscations to which they were subjected without having any participation in the Order`s policies, an alliance of seventeen Prussian towns, led by the city of Danzig, together with 53 nobles, had risen against the yoke of the Order and declared their allegiance to Wladislaw Jagiełło II., King of Poland.
Although this new situation disquieted Friedrich, too, he had no plans to help von Rustorf out of this mess. Encouraged by the successes which the Lübeckers had obtained and by the demonstration that Hussites were not invincible, the King of the Romans decided that now, the time had finally come to take the bull by the horns and launch his long-prepared campaign against the Bohemian and Silesian Hussites.
[1] More on that in a later update.
[2] They did so IOTL, too.
[3] IOTL, it received this relief, and the Danes were defeated in a sea battle.
Soooo, you decided with 5-0 votes that Lübeck defeats Wismar and Rostock, and with 5-2 votes that the Teutonic Order smashes Pomerania-Stolp. Now this is how the story unfolded so far.
Before we see if Friedrich fares any better than Sigismund against the Hussites (you`ll decide that, as per usual), we`ll have to bring other places where there`s also wars up to 1429, i.e. Švitrigaila`s Lithuania and its Eastern neighbours in particular. And, of course, there`s more to describe about how the Hussite Confederacy develops in the years 1425-29. I´ll try to tackle the former next week, and the latter in two weeks` time.
I´ll see if I can straighten that out some time.
