To avoid this contingency, the commissioners recommended the duke to redeem all the existing mortgages great and small. It would cost 140,000 florins, but the revenue would at once increase with the new security which would immediately follow under firm Burgundian rule. Sole master, Charles could then enforce obedience from nobles and cities and better conditions would be inaugurated.
Evidently this rational advice was not taken, for it is repeated by Coutault in 1473. Redemption of the mortgages, "if your affairs can afford it," is the counsel given by the chamber of accounts at Dijon, though this sage board adds that they were well aware that in the previous month Monseigneur could not put his hands on a hundred florins to redeem one wretched little gagerie. The native coffers of the region did not suffice to settle the salaries of the officers in charge.
Such then was the new acquisition of Charles after four years of his administration. Peter von Hagenbach, his deputy in charge of this unremunerative territory, is a character painted in the darkest colours by all historians. It is more than probable that his unpopular efforts to make bricks without straw were largely responsible for his unenviable reputation. Ground between the upper and lower millstones of Charles's clamours for revenues and popular clamours that the people had nothing wherewith to pay, Hagenbach developed into a taskmaster of the hardest and most unpitying type, who made himself thoroughly hated by the people he was set to rule.
It must be remembered that there was no cleft in nationality or in language between governor and governed. He was not a foreigner set over them. He was one of them raised to a high position. There was then no French element in Lower Alsace. It was then German pure and simple.
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[Footnote 1:] [Gachard], Doc. inéd., i., 204-209. "Relation de l'assemblée solennelle tenue à Bruxelles le 15 Jan., 1469.">[
[Footnote 2:] [See]Toutey, Charles le Téméraire et la ligue de Constance, p. 7.]