Salt (25 page)

The Hapsburg Pickle

I
N GERMANY, THE
Romans had found a land of ancient salt mines. Tacitus wrote in the first century
A.D.
that the Germanic tribes believed the gods listened more attentively to prayers if they were uttered in a salt mine. But many of those mines had been destroyed or closed down in the warfare that followed the disintegration of Rome. As in France, the medieval Church reopened them. Monasteries were often located on the sites of ancient mines so that the salt could provide revenue.

Under the direction of the Church, salt mining boomed in the Middle Ages in the Alpine area from Bavaria into Austria. In Bavaria, Berchtesgaden and adjacent Reichenhall; across the Austrian border, Hallein, Hallstatt, Ischl, and Aussee were all mining the same underground bed of salt. The Austrian part became known as the Salzkammergut, the salt mother lode, a region of salt mines below green, pine-covered mountains and deep blue lakes. In the winter, the steep pine forests were completely white with snow, but underground the temperature in the mines remained moderate.

Underground springs provided brine that could be boiled into salt crystals. Plentiful forests offered cheap energy. Reichenhall, which was still in operation in Roman times, was destroyed in the fifth century either by Attila the Hun or possibly by the local supporters of Odoacer, Rome’s final conqueror, the Germanic-Italian who in 476 officially ended the Western Roman Empire. A century later, according to some accounts, the saltworks was reconstructed. According to others, it was rebuilt 300 years later by the archbishop of Salzburg.

Next to Reichenhall was a mountain of salt. On the Bavarian side was Berchtesgaden, and across the border, on the opposite side of the same steep wooded mountain known as Dürnberg, was the ancient Celtic salt mining site of Hallein.

A medieval conflict between the archbishops of Salzburg and the Bavarians over control of the salt mines continued for centuries because Dürnberg mountain contained a Salzburger mine entered on the Hallein side and a Bavarian mine entered from Berchtesgaden. Underground, the two mines were supposedly separated by less than a half mile, but the shafts from Hallein wandered under the border and so Salzburger miners theoretically took Bavarian salt.

The first archbishop of Salzburg had resurrected the ancient Celtic mine in the late eighth century and with this salt revenue had built the city of Salzburg, which did not merge with Austria until 1816. Though Salzburg’s territory had gold, copper, and silver, it was salt for which Salzburg repeatedly fought. The wealth from salt gave Salzburg its independence.

In the seventeenth century, an archbishop named Wolf Dietrich tried to dominate the salt market by dramatically lowering the selling price for salt from his mines, especially Dürnberg. For a time Dietrich made tremendous profits, some of which were used to build grand baroque buildings in Salzburg. Bavaria retaliated by banning trade with Salzburg, and this eventually led to a “salt war,” a conflict which Dietrich lost. This defeat was disastrous for Dürnberg and its village of Hallein because, for a time, they were excluded from much of the regional salt trade. It was even more disastrous for Archbishop Wolf Dietrich, who was removed from his Church post and, after five years in prison, died in 1617.

The relationship between the two sides of Dürnberg mountain was not resolved until after Salzburg became a part of Austria, when, in 1829, a treaty between Bavaria and Austria allowed Austrians to mine salt up to one kilometer beyond their border. In exchange, 40 percent of mine workers had to be Bavarian, and Bavaria could fuel its pans with trees chopped on the Austrian side. Though fuel had been plentiful in the Middle Ages, after centuries of mining, procuring wood had become an important issue.

I
N 1268 AND
possibly earlier, a new technique was used to mine rock salt. Instead of miners carrying chunks of rock out steep shafts in baskets slung on their backs, and then crushing the rock into salt, water was piped into a dug-out vein of rock salt. The water quickly became a dense brine, which was then piped out of the mountain to the village of Hallein, where it was boiled down into crystals over wood-burning fires.

Eventually, the idea became a more sophisticated system known in the Salzkammergut as
sinkwerken
. A sinkwerk was an underground work area in which the surrounding salt and clay were mixed with water in large wooden tanks. The solution then moved down wooden pipes to iron boiling pans.

Hallein is a village pressed between its two sources of wealth, the rough, rock-faceted Dürnberg Mountain and the Salzach River. The Salzach is a tributary of the Danube, and the brown Danube runs, with its tentacles of tributaries, from west of Bavaria through central Europe to the Black Sea. The salt could be boiled in cylindrical molds, much as it still is in Saharan Africa, and the cylinders could be loaded in barges that traveled the Salzach to Passau, where it entered the Danube, to be traded in Germany or central Europe.

But much of Hallein’s salt was for local use, traveling by river only to Passau, where it was packed on wagons to be sold in the region. Transporting on land was expensive because tolls were established along the roadways for wagons carrying salt. The inevitable response was a network of paths over rugged mountain passes for smugglers carrying illegal salt, which they could sell for less because they paid no tolls.

Diagram of sinkwerken in Dürnberg Mountain shown from the Bavarian side in Berchtesgaden.
Deutsches Museum, Munich

R
IVERS WERE ESSENTIAL
to central European saltworks. Halle in central Germany and Lüneburg in the north, with its famous founding ham, had the advantage of the Elbe with its mouth at the North Sea port of Hamburg. In the late fourteenth century, the Lüneburgers built a canal, the Steckenitz Canal, to connect their salt to the Elbe. They did this not to move salt to nearby Hamburg but to ship it to Lübeck, on a tributary to the Baltic, because Lübeck was the trading center of the Hanseatic League.

In the Middle Ages, no German salt enjoyed as great an international reputation as that of Lüneburg, and the Hanseatics shipped it to the herring fisheries of southern Sweden, to Riga, to Danzig, and throughout the Baltic. At a time when the Hanseatic League was considered the guarantor of quality, Lüneburg salt was considered the Hanseatic salt. Lesser German saltworks would fraudulently mark their barrels with the word
Lüneburg
to obtain entry to foreign markets.

The salt in Lüneburg, Halle, and other German saltworks was made by drawing the brine in buckets and carrying it to boiling sheds, where it was dumped in a huge rectangular iron pan. The pan sat on a wood-burning furnace. Blood was added, which caused a scum to rise with boiling. The scum drew impurities and was skimmed off with care. The salt maker needed to continually stir the liquid. Shortly before crystallization, beer was added to further draw impurities from the crystals, which were then placed to dry in conical baskets.

With the pans in use twenty-four hours a day, except for a once-a-week cleaning, the entire operation required only three people: a master salter, an assistant, and a boy to stoke the furnace. This staff was often simply a man, his wife, and a son. It was easy for a family to go into the salt business. But in Lüneburg the business did not remain in the family because, one by one, Hanseatic merchants bought them out and gained control of a single large saltworks.

T
HE
S
ALZKAMMERGUT DEVELOPED
its own salt-mining culture. Saint Barbara was its patron saint, and miners observed her day, December 4, by performing traditional dances in their own dress uniforms, which, by the nineteenth century, included a black wool jacket with brass buttons and epaulets and a black velvet hat with silk buttons and a gold emblem of two crossed pickaxes.

The Dürnberg mine has nineteen miles of tunneling. The main tunnel was built in 1450, but the current timber shoring is only 100 years old. The tunnels were built with seven-foot ceilings and wide enough for a man to walk through comfortably. But the pressure of the mountain’s weight slowly compresses them. It was in such compressed ancient shafts that medieval miners discovered the remains of their Celtic predecessors. Today, one of the 400-year-old tunnels is only about eighteen inches wide in parts. Another seventeenth-century tunnel is about three feet wide.

The tunnels, shored up with timber, have walls of dark rock with white streaks of salt crystals. In some spots the rock is spotted with fossils of shellfish and other marine life. Miners would ride on steep, smooth wooden slides, which propelled them at considerable speed down to tunnels sometimes as far as 100 feet lower. Some of the slides are more than 350 feet long. A cable on the right side provided a brake for the practiced gloved hands of the miners.