The Adventurous Simplicissimus: being the description of the Life of a Strange vagabond named Melchior Sternfels von FuchshaimGrimmelshausen, Hans Jakob Christoph von
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The Adventurous Simplicissimus: being the description of the Life of a Strange vagabond named Melchior Sternfels von Fuchshaim
Grimmelshausen, Hans Jakob Christoph von
German fiction -- Translations into English; Thirty Years' War, 1618-1648 -- Fiction
"But," said I, "great Jupiter, what will princes and lords say to this,
if this future hero so violently take from them their rights and hand
them over to the towns? Will they not resist with force, or at least
protest against it before gods and men?"
"The hero," answered Jupiter, "will trouble himself little on that
score: he will divide all the great into three classes: them which have
lived wickedly and set an evil example he will punish together with the
commons, for no earthly power can withstand his sword: to the rest he
will give the choice whether to stay in the land or not. They that love
their fatherland and abide must live like the commons, but the German
people's way of living shall then be more plentiful and comfortable
than is now the life and household of a king; yea, they shall be one
and all like Fabricius, that would not share King Pyrrhus his kingdom
because he loved his country and honour and virtue too much: and so
much for the second class. But as to the third, which will still be
lords and rulers, them will he lead through Hungary and Italy into
Moldavia, Wallachia, into Macedonia, Thrace and Greece, yea, over the
Hellespont into Asia, and conquer these lands for them, give them as
helpers all them that live by war in all Germany, and make them all
kings. Then will he take Constantinople in one day, and lay the heads
of all Turks that will not be converted and become obedient before
their feet: then will he again set up the Roman Empire, and so betake
himself again to Germany, and with his lords of Parliament (whom, as I
have said, he shall choose in pairs from every city in Germany, and
name them the chiefs and fathers of his German Fatherland) build a city
in the midst of Germany that shall be far greater than Manoah[21] in
America, and richer than was Jerusalem in Solomon's time, whose walls
shall be as high as the mountains of Tirol and its ditches as broad as
the sea between Spain and Africa. And there will he build a temple
entirely of diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and sapphires, and in the
treasury that he shall there build will he gather together rarities
from the whole world out of the gifts that the kings in China and in
Persia, the great Mogul in the East Indies, the great Khan of Tartary,
Prester John in Africa, and the great Czar in Muscovy will send to him.
Yea, the Turkish emperor would be yet more ready to serve him if it
were not that my hero will have taken his empire from him and given it
as a fief to the Roman emperor."
Then I asked my friend Jupiter what in such case would become of the
Christian kings. So he answered, "Those of England, Sweden, and Denmark
(because they are of German race and descent), and those of Spain,
France, and Portugal (because the Germans of old conquered and ruled in
those lands), shall receive their crowns, kingdoms, and incorporated
lands in fee as fiefs of the German nation, and then will there be, as
in Augustus's time, a perpetual peace between all nations."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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