A paradise below.”
About this bit of the Danube there are a number of islands caused by the small branches of the Isar where it reaches the greater river. Still with the beautiful hills on the left and the plain on the right, the river goes on past small villages and hamlets. The next place with an arresting story is Nieder-Altaich, the site of another Benedictine monastery, and that at one time the most important of all which this powerful Order held in Bavaria. Here St. Parminius went through the same performance as at Ober-Altaich—destroying a Druid altar and cutting down its sheltering oak with his own hands—and here, also as at the other place, came the destroying Hungarians in the tenth century. The Benedictines showed again their great recuperative power, for the monastery was rebuilt and re-endowed before the close of the same century. Hither came St. Gotthard (born at Reichersdorf in 965) as a barefoot candidate for a monk’s cell; here he rose to be abbot, until he was transferred as bishop to Hildesheim, where he died in 1035. Two and a half centuries later the monastery seems to have had a less worthy head, for it is said that in the year 1232, the monks of Nieder-Altaich lay in ambush and shot their abbot with arrows as he was crossing to Thundorf on the other side of the river.
The chronicles of the place have to tell of another unpopular abbot—one, however, who was removed from the post in a less drastic fashion, for in an old Bavarian history there is record of an abbot of Nieder-Altaich who seems to have interpreted the rules of the Benedictine Order in a very liberal fashion, so far as he himself was concerned: “Besides his valet he had two pages. On his name-day all the principal persons of the government of Straubing assembled in the grand refectory of Nieder-Altaich. A band of trumpets and kettle-drums was in attendance from daybreak, facing his chamber window, and the moment his Excellency (for he had purchased the title of a privy councillor) opened his eyes, the pages undrew the curtains of cloth of gold, amidst a flourish from the trumpets and kettle-drums without, while a battery of small mortars proclaimed in thunder to the surrounding country, the dawning of the name-day of this important personage.” It is said that not only did this worthy spend upwards of ninety thousand florins a year, but when he was made to retire he had run his monastery into a debt of over a hundred thousand florins. In his retirement he was reduced to an annuity of two hundred ducats. This abbot may well have thought that he was only ordering his life in a manner befitting the head of so magnificent an establishment, for it is recorded that ten times was the “Kloster” burnt down, and each successive destruction was only made the occasion for rebuilding it more splendidly than before, until “the very oxen of the community eat out of marble mangers.” It is, perhaps, not surprising to find that this worthy was one of the last of the abbots of Nieder-Altaich.
The winding river goes by village after village, with here and there fresh ruins testifying to the past importance of the natural frontier afforded by the Danube. Inland, on the left, is the old castle of Hengersberg, said to have belonged to a mediæval St. Maurice, who is not to be confused with the Theban Christian martyred with his legion by the orders of that Cæsar whom he sought to serve. Where the stream takes a short semi-circular bend to the south, a little way inland, on a low hillside, is Osterhofen, which is described as one of the oldest towns in Bavaria and the Castra Petrensia of the Romans, where a notable victory was won over the long-victorious Avars, who, introduced by Rome to Europe as allies, remained to be a standing menace to the Roman power. These Avars, who seem finally to have merged in the Huns, are described as at first appearing at Constantinople with their long hair hanging in tresses down their backs, and the description suggests that the gipsies to be met lower down the Danube may be their descendants. The defeat of the Avars at Osterhofen is said to have happened upon an Easter Sunday—in consequence of which the town gained its present name and right to bear a paschal lamb as its insignia. In the Oster-Wiese—or Easter Meadow—on which the battle was won, that Duke Uttilo, who had founded the monasteries of Ober- and Nieder-Altaich, is said to have erected yet another Benedictine monastery—only to have it destroyed by the vengeance-seeking Avars in 765.
Bending north again from Osterhofen the river soon reaches Winzer, with the ruins of a castle reduced to their present state by “the whiskered Pandoors and the fierce hussars” of Maria Theresa in 1741. At Hofkirchen, also on the left, we reach the ruined castle of another of those families of robber barons who were a law unto themselves, for Hofkirchen was the seat of the Counts of Ortenburg renowned as the persistent enemies of the Counts of Bogen, whose ruined place the Danube passed some distance to the west, and who were, as well, a standing danger to those who went down the Danube in boats. The quarrels between Bogen and Ortenburg were not of the kind of falling out among thieves by which honest men come to their own, for the Counts of Ortenburg seem, indeed, to have been some of the most notorious of the powerful nobles who from their strongholds on the Danube enforced the predatory laws which they themselves enacted. Among their ingenuities, they devised or interpreted in their own fashion the “right” of “grundwehr,” by which any vessel that grounded anywhere within their domain became confiscated, with all its cargo and crew. It had but to grate the sand or brush the shore, to touch in passing any island bank or shoal, to be captured by the Count’s henchmen, who were ever on the watch. It is even said that these same henchmen did not scruple to chase any passing boat until they forced it to ground, and so could establish a “rightful” claim to it and all it contained! Well might Froissart say of the German barons of old “they are people worse than Saracens or Paynims; for their excessive covetousness quencheth the knowledge of honour.”
On the right bank, a little inland on the rising ground, where the little Angerbach nears the Danube, is Kinzing or Künzing, another link with the Rome of old; for in place of its present short name is said to have been the earlier one of Castra Quintana or Augusta Quintanorum Colonia. Here is said to have lived in the fifth century a hermit saint, Severinus, though Gibbon makes that saint’s dwelling place somewhere in Noricum, which was bounded on the west by the Inn and on the east by the Save. He is one of the two saints of this name, and is associated with the story of Odoacer, the first barbarian who was ruler of Italy on the downfall of the Western empire. “After the death of Odoacer’s father, a leader of the Scyrri and officer of Attila’s, the youth,” says Gibbon, “led a wandering life among the barbarians of Noricum, with a mind and a fortune suited to the most desperate adventures; and when he had fixed his choice, he piously visited the cell of Severinus, the popular saint of the country, to solicit his approbation and blessing. The lowness of the door would not admit the lofty stature of Odoacer: he was obliged to stoop; but in that humble attitude the saint could discern the symptoms of his future greatness; and addressing him in a prophetic tone, ‘Pursue,’ said he ‘your design; proceed to Italy; you will soon cast away this coarse garment of skins; and your wealth will be adequate to the liberality of your mind.’” Among the miracles associated with the name of this St. Severinus is one that tells how in a time of flood he saved Kinzing from inundation by planting a cross on the Danube bank—succeeding by holiness and faith where mere pride, as in the case of Cnut, failed.
Another of the saint’s doings suggests that workers of miracles have sometimes performed but thankless tasks. Severinus had a great friend named Sylvin, and when Sylvin died, the body was laid in a little wooden church outside the walls of the town. Severinus, going to the church to mourn his friend, bethought to restore him to life, and the miracle was duly performed—to the great annoyance of Sylvin, who reproached the saint saying, “I beg of thee, I conjure thee, not to rouse me from the rest which God has appointed for me! Why hast thou awakened me? Why hast thou brought me back into a world into which I never more wish to return?” Whether the saint had his way and Sylvin lived on, or whether the revenant was allowed to die again forthwith, we are not told.
The right bank of the Danube now begins to take on the more variedly picturesque beauty of the left as the ground becomes hillier. Pleinting, a small town, is passed on the right bank—from which point the railway from Ratisbon keeps closely along the river to Passau—and a little beyond on the left are the picturesque ruins of Hildegartsburg, “the hold of some robber knight, noble, or priest, of the Middle Ages” destroyed by the Duke of Austria as long ago as the middle of the fourteenth century. The next town, Vilshofen, which is on the right bank disputes with Osterhofen the claim to be considered as the Castra Quintana of the Romans. Here two streams the Vils and the Wolfbach empty themselves into the Danube. Though there is low-lying marshy land in the neighbourhood, the low hills from the south are sensibly drawn in to meet those on the further bank and so to form a beautiful stretch of the river. Vilshofen like so many other of the places along the Danube, in the days when the making of history largely followed the course of the great rivers, was the scene of much fighting. It seems to have belonged to the Counts of Ortenburg, and thus to have been assured of such a fate. Here, in the fourteenth century, one Heinrich Tuschl founded a religious house for men. Having discovered his wife to be unfaithful to him, he revenged himself, not by any mere method of divorce, but by having her walled up alive; and thereafter (it is not surprising to learn) he abjured the company and shunned the sight of women. When he died he left his property to build this place in Vilshofen and on the charter of it he wrote—
“Zwei Hund an ain Bain
Ich Tuschl bleib allain;”