Gebhard Truchsess Von Waldburg - Historical Assessments

Historical Assessments

Historians have not been kind to Gebhard. E.A. Benians, in the Cambridge Modern History, was perhaps the most generous: "Few men personally insignificant have made more stir in the world." Walter Goetz described him in less complimentary terms: he "was impelled by no great idea, nor could he claim through virile activity the title to any high striving ambition" and was wanting in both depth and tenacity. Goetz was not particularly kind to Ernst either: Ernst was not Gebhard's superior; the victory that placed him in the Electorate belonged to his brothers' influence and the Curia (papacy), not to his own striving ambition; Ernst was, fundamentally, on a tide of Counter Reformation that lifted all boats, which Gebhard was not. Philip Motley describes him thus: despite his swearing an oath to renounce his see if he should marry, "the love of Truchsess for Agnes Mansfeld had created disaster, not only for himself but for all of Germany." Like Goetz, he describes both Gebhard and Ernst as cut from the same cloth: "two pauper Archbishops without men or means of their own were pushed back and forth, like puppets, by the highwaymen" on either side, while murder and robbery, in the name of Catholicism and Protestantism, were the "for a time the only motive or result of the contest."