Early music in fascist fires ~ or ~ The extraordinary survival of a Polish early music gem: Breve regnum erigitur

Breve regnum erigitur is a song from the mid-15^th century, sung by the students of Kraków Academy. As the Latin verses describe, during their annual week of student rule there was a reversal of college hierarchy: students elected their own ‘king’, took over the university and abolished lectures.

This curious song with a magnificent tune is testament to a brutal history and an unlikely recovery. The manuscript which includes it, one of Poland’s cultural gems of early renaissance Europe, was thought lost in the Nazis’ attempt to obliterate all vestiges of Polish culture. This article traces the history of Breve regnum erigitur via 15^th century student life, the making of a manuscript collection, fascist destruction and theft, a Hollywood film, and the modern revival of student rule depicted in the song.

We begin with a performance of the song by early music ensemble La Morra, performed with three voices, lute, fiddle and recorder.

Breve regnum erigitur: student rule

Kraków Academy is one of the world’s oldest universities and the oldest university in Poland, founded in 1364 by King Casimir III. Kraków Academy flourished in the 15^th century, teaching law, mathematics and astronomy, attracting 200 new students annually, not only from Poland but internationally from Lithuania, Belarus, Russia, Hungary, Bohemia, Slovakia, England, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. Among its distinguished alumni, the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus enrolled in 1491.

This is the institutional context for the anonymous 15^th century students’ song, Breve regnum erigitur, about an annual event for students of Kraków Academy. Every year, for the eight days beginning on the 15^th of October, the students took over the university. They elected a student ‘king’ with the other students as his regal courtiers, made their own rules, missed lectures, and left the university staff without authority. Whether the composition played any part in the events of the week is unknown.

Breve regnum erigitur appears with monophonic music on folio 181 verso of the manuscript formally known as PL-Wn MS III.8054, previously called Krasiński 52, often abbreviated to Kras 52, also known as Codex Krasiński. Kras 52 is a collection comprising five different manuscripts written between 1430 and 1455, collected into one volume in the second half of the 19^th century, formerly in the Krasiński Library, now in the Polish National Library, both in Warsaw. The five manuscripts of Kras 52 are:

(i) Sermons quadregesimalis, sermons by Jacob (Jacobus) de Voragine (Varagine), 13^th century Archbishop of Genoa. Jacob was the compiler of one of the most popular books of the middle ages, Legenda Aurea (Golden Legend), a hagiography (compilation of saints’ biographies);
(ii) Gesta Romanorum, Roman history;
(iii) Expulsiones demonum, a treatise on demon exorcism;
(iv) miscellaneous;
(v) 37 songs on 33 folios in black mensural notation.

The first four manuscripts of Kras 52 were written out by Piotr of Kazimierz, Kraków, in the years 1430–55. The copyist of the fifth manuscript with music, including Breve regnum erigitur, is unknown. The songs are mostly devotional and ecclesiastical, and may have been written out by early 15^th century Polish composer Mikołaj Radomski (Mikołaj z Radomia or Nicholas of Radom). Mikołaj wrote polyphonic religious music and was connected with the court of Władysław II Jagiełło, Grand Duke of Lithuania (1377–1434) and King of Poland (1386–1434). Kras 52 includes more of Mikołaj’s works than any other source.

Breve regnum erigitur and the Nazis

Breve regnum erigitur, and the manuscript which includes it, survived the attempted wholesale destruction of Polish culture by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. That the manuscript and the song did survive and is avalable to us now is due to an act of theft, followed nine years later by lucky happenstance.

Poland was devastated in World War II. Upwards of 1.5 million Polish citizens were deported to German territory for forced labour, and 4.9 million more were murdered, including 3 million Polish Jews.

Warsaw was hit particularly hard. 10% of its buildings were destroyed in September 1939 during the invasion of Poland that precipitated World War II. In 1941, the city was bombed by Soviet Russia. In April and May 1943, more destruction followed the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of Jews in armed resistance against deportation to the Majdanek and Treblinka death camps. The ghetto was utterly demolished and the Warsaw concentration camp established.

By 1944, around 800,000 people, 60% of Warsaw’s population, had been murdered. In August–October 1944, the Polish resistance Home Army attempted to liberate Warsaw in the Warsaw Uprising. As a result, the Nazis planned to systematically raze the city to the ground and eliminate all signs of Polish life. By the end of the war, 85% of Warsaw’s buildings had been destroyed.

In addition to the destruction of people, their homes and places of work, the Nazis aimed to completely eradicate Polish culture by attacking universities, libraries, museums and monuments with the Verbrennungs und Vernichtungskommando, burning and destruction detachments. In Warsaw, they demolished 923 or 94% of Warsaw’s historical buildings, burned 16 libraries to the ground and destroyed 16 million volumes of learning, art and culture. Among these buildings were the Załuski Library, the Polish Museum and the Krasiński Library.

The Załuski Library was the oldest public library in Poland and one of the oldest libraries in Europe. Founded in 1747, the Nazis burned it down in October 1944. It housed 400,000 printed items, maps and manuscripts, from which only 30,000 printed items and 1,800 manuscripts survived. That’s just over 92% destruction, or not quite 8% survival of irreplaceable cultural artefacts.

When the Polish Museum was founded in 1870, Poland was ruled by Prussia, so the museum was located in the safe town of Rapperswil, Switzerland. It moved to Warsaw in 1927. During 1944, the majority of its 27,000 manuscripts, 92,000 books and 20,000 engravings were incinerated by the Nazis.

The Krasiński Library was home to one of the world’s most comprehensive national collections of books, manuscripts, art, music and maps, a key part of Poland’s cultural heritage. This included Kras 52 and Breve regnum erigitur. In September 1939, during the siege of Warsaw, the Krasiński Library at 9 Okólnik Street was bombed over 2 days, but miraculously portions of its collections survived: the central part of the building – museum, reading room, and reference collection – was destroyed, but the collections in storage endured. The library’s owner, Count Edward Krasiński, was sent to a concentration camp. The Nazis then appropriated many of the library’s rare manuscripts, including Kras 52, for the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) Advanced School, a recently-founded Nazi university.  

In May 1941, the remaining collection of the Krasiński Library was moved to the Staatsbibliothek Warschau, a library founded by Nazi occupiers in July 1940 by merging Poland’s two largest book collections, the National Library and the University Library. In 1942, both collections were sent to 9 Okólnik Street, the former home of the Krasiński Library. By May 1942, 9 Okólnik Street held between 388,000 and 400,000 items.

The Nazis turned 9 Okólnik Street into their Department of Internal Affairs, which was bombed on 5^th September 1944 during the Warsaw Uprising. The collections in the basement survived, as did the manuscripts of the Krasiński collection on the ground floor. On the 2^nd floor, 19^th and 20^th century manuscripts were aflame. On the 3^rd floor, more old prints and music scores were destroyed. On the 4^th floor, irreplaceable 16^th and 17^th century prints were annihilated. Staff fought for a full 24 hours against the destruction all around them, throwing books out of windows onto the courtyard below in an attempt to save them.

Following the defeat of the Warsaw Uprising in October, Nazi soldiers looted the city, stripping residential, public and industrial buildings of anything they considered valuable. Then Das Brandkommando – the fire-lighters unit – moved in to commit arson on the city. They set fire to all that remained in the former Krasiński Library at 9 Okólnik Street. Das Brandkommando was followed by Das Sprengkommando, German demolition engineers, to blow up what remained in Warsaw.

The following numbers of unique and irreplaceable cultural treasures in 9 Okólnik Street were destroyed by the National Socialist militia: 26,000 manuscripts; 80,000 early prints, mostly Polish documents from the 16^th to 18^th centuries; 2,500 incunabula (books, pamphlets and broadsides printed before 1500); 100,000 drawings and etchings; 50,000 music and theatre scores; and an unknown number of maps, catalogues and inventories.

The recovery of cultural treasures stolen by the Nazis

The institution called Kraków Academy in the 15^th century is now called Jagiellonian University. Stanislaw Estreicher was Professor of Law there when, on the 6^th of November 1939, the Nazis tricked the 180 scholars and staff of the university into meeting within the grounds of Collegium Novum, where they were arrested and deported to concentration camps. Stanislaw Estreicher was deported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he soon died.

Stanislaw Estreicher’s son, Karol Estreicher Jr. (1906–1984), was an art historian and author. Among his many achievements and responsibilities, Karol was a member of the Commission of the History of Art of the Academy of Science and Letters in Kraków, Director of the Diocesan Museum in Sandomierz, and Keeper of the Cabinet of Prints and Engravings in Kraków. He was also one of the 345 men and women from 13 nations who comprised the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Subcommission during World War II, whose role was to protect European cultural treasures during the war and return them to their rightful owners when the war was over. Karol Estreicher Jr. was the Polish Liaison Officer of this task force, called The Monuments Men in the 2014 Columbia Pictures film of that name.

In 1948, Karol Estreicher Jr. was in the Bavarian State Library in Munich when, by chance, he noticed a volume that looked familiar. He asked to see the manuscript. It was Krasiński 52, stolen by the Nazis nine years before, an act which saved it from being being burned into oblivion along with the rest of the collections in the Krasiński Library. The means by which it had arrived in the Bavarian State Library are unknown. Karol Estreicher brought it home, and it is now housed in the Polish National Library in Warsaw.

In bringing back Kras 52, he brought home a manuscript connected not only to his national history, but also to the history of the academic institution he would soon serve. From 1950, Karol Estreicher Jr. was Professor of Art at Jagiellonian University, formerly Kraków Academy, for which Breve regnum erigitur was written and where his murdered father Stanislaw had been Professor of Law. From 1951 he was Director of the Jagiellonian University Museum.

Breve regnum erigitur today

In 1964, for the 600^th anniversary of Jagiellonian University’s foundation, Professor Florian Jan Nieuwazny revived the 15^th century tradition of one week of student rule depicted in Breve regnum erigitur. The week is now called Juwenalia, after the classical Juvenalia, instituted by the Emperor Nero in AD 59 when he was 21 years old, to celebrate the first shaving of his beard, indicating his transition from youth to manhood. Nero invited theatrical performances and games in his palace and private gardens. All and sundry took turn in giving a performance, to the displeasure of some who were there and later wrote accounts.

Juwenalia is now an annual event in May. Other Polish universities have followed suit with their own titles, according to the name of the institution: Medical University have Medykalia; the University of Economics have Ekonomalia; the University of Zielona Góra, in a wine-making area, has Bacchanalia (after Bacchus, god of wine); the Maritime University of Szczecin have Marinalia; and so on.

There is one key difference between this revived Polish tradition and its 15^th century predecessor: whereas the Kraków Academy students chose their own ‘king’, leading potentially to mischief, Juwenalia can only take place once the students of Jagiellonian University have elected a responsible and well-liked student to lead the week, approved by the university. The students are then given the symbolic keys to the city gate by the mayor, bestowing authority. There follows a week of fun organised by and for the city’s 100,000 students, encompassing the whole city, with costumes, concerts, sports, and other cultural activities, culminating in a carnivalesque procession.

Personal end-note

It’s quite a journey for a song, to be preserved for posterity in a mid–15^th century manuscript, and then, by an act of theft, to survive the National Socialists’ attempted cultural genocide as the treasures around it perished in fascist fires. I look at those numbers for the destruction of people and heritage – 4.9 million citizens murdered in Poland, 16 million volumes of culture destroyed in Warsaw alone – with sorrow and blank incomprehension.

Those cultural vandals and destroyers, those psychopaths and people-haters, were with us well before the Nazis, are still with us now, and form a sickening family tree. The first emperor of the Qin Dynasty, Qin Shi Huang, not only ordered the burning of books he disapproved of in 213 BC, in 210 BC he ordered the live burial of 460 Confucian scholars. The Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in AD 312. He called the First Council of Nicaea in 325 to define the universal boundaries of the Christian faith, declaring that the writings of those now considered heretics – non-Trinitarian followers of Arius, the Arians – be systematically burned, and that anyone found in possession of his works should be put to death. Through the middle ages and the renaissance, Talmuds, Bibles, Cathar texts, Lollard writings, poetry, were all put to the flames by ‘guardians of the public good’. Similar acts of destruction and reigns of terror continue around the world. The Taliban in Afghanistan have banned all non-Islamic books, music, all non-Islamic cultural artefacts; banned women from working or studying, from showing any part of their body in public, including their faces, which must be veiled, from looking at men who are not their relatives, from singing, reciting poetry, or speaking in public; and they have banned all artistic representations of living things, which includes paintings, films, and sculpture. One of their most egregious acts of destruction of material culture was against two giant Buddhas, 55 and 38 metres tall, hewn into the mountain rock in Bamiyan in the 6^th century. Since they branded these impressive sculptures as un-Islamic idols, in 2001 the Taliban completely destroyed them with explosives.

Such events, past and present, illustrate why the works of the Monuments Men of World War II was so important: people need art, self-expression, to give meaning to life, to carry their culture, to give a sense of beauty, to engage with life’s struggles. One way of viewing the history of music is as the history of self-expression: we sing and perform who we are. To deliberately wipe out a culture by destroying song manuscripts – and paintings, drawings, etchings, theatre scores, maps, catalogues, inventories, statues – is a deliberate attempt to crush the human spirit.

This article is my own small way of honouring the loss of life this song inevitably evokes, and of praising the work of cultural preservation that, against all odds, brought this manuscript back into the light and saved it from oblivion. Karol Estreicher Jr., and all the men and women like you: thank you for your work.

 

© Ian Pittaway. Not to be reproduced in any form without permission. All rights reserved.

 

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© Ian Pittaway. Not to be reproduced in any form without permission. All rights reserved.