Die Pässe Splügen, San Bernardino, Septimer und Julier gehörten um 1700 zu den wichtigsten Alpenüberquerungen und waren damit von strategischer Bedeutung für die kriegsführenden Mächte. Hier abgebildet ist der Splügenpass um 1810. — Around 1700, the Splügen, San Bernardino, Septimer and Julier passes were some of the main Alpine crossings, making them strategically important to the warring powers of the time. This image shows the Splügen Pass circa 1810. Wikimedia

The smuggling king of Chur

Unlike today, wars were almost constantly raging on the borders of the Old Swiss Confederacy in the 17th and 18th centuries. As well as representing the culmination of ongoing conflicts, this warfare opened up lucrative new lines of business for people like Thomas Massner.

Noah Businger

Noah Businger is a historian and a PhD student in Early Modern Swiss History at the University of Bern.

The life of Thomas Massner (1663-1712) was that of a war profiteer. He amassed considerable wealth during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714) and rose to the highest ranks of political office. But although Massner’s career was meteoric, his star waned as swiftly as it had risen.

In the eye of the storm

Thomas Massner was born into a family of merchants from Chur. He began his working life arranging the transportation of goods from Northern Italy across the mountain passes of Graubünden to Southern Germany and the Tyrol region, and vice versa. When war broke out between France and the House of Habsburg in 1701 over who would succeed Charles II of Spain of the Habsburg dynasty, who had died childless, the mountain passes of Graubünden became of strategic importance to the warring parties.

The Holy Roman Emperor’s forces clashed with the French king’s army in the Duchy of Milan, which at that point was under the control of the Spanish Habsburgs. Both sides needed the Graubünden passes to transport supplies and potentially move troops. Owing to its crucial geographical position, the Free State of the Three Leagues, as Graubünden was known at the time, thus became fiercely fought over.

The Free State of the Three Leagues as it existed until 1797. It consisted of the Grey League (brown), the League of the Ten Jurisdictions (orange), the League of God’s House (green) and their subject territories (grey). The Three Leagues was an associated state of the Old Swiss Confederacy until 1797 and bordered directly onto the Duchy of Milan, the Republic of Venice and the County of Tyrol. Wikimedia

To enforce their interests, King Louis XIV and Emperor Leopold I each sent an envoy to the territory, to Chur and Rhäzüns respectively. The Three Leagues found itself in the eye of the storm – with war raging all around, it became a diplomatic hotspot.

From shipping agent to spy

The envoys had two main tasks: to win over Graubünden’s elite and to gather intelligence. Information about the enemy and the events of war had become a highly prized resource.

This was Thomas Massner’s cue to step forward. In 1701, the merchant from Chur offered to act as a secret agent for the French envoy Count Forval. Drawing on the cross-border connections he had forged as a merchant in the surrounding regions, Massner was quickly able to set up a dense network of agents and informants in the Swiss Confederacy and Upper Italy, Vorarlberg and Tyrol.

Map of Europe circa 1700. The Holy Roman Empire is outlined in red. It was made up of numerous small to medium-sized, mainly German, lordships. At its head was an emperor chosen by the prince-electors, but who almost always came from the House of Habsburg. Wikimedia

Massner travelled in person to Habsburg territory and to Italy, ostensibly to attend to business affairs. However, once there he engaged in reconnaissance on behalf of the French, making full use of his connections to the political elite in his homeland. Armed with a recommendation from his son-in-law, a high-ranking official in Chur, Massner was even able to visit the Commissary General of Military Stores at the imperial military camp in Italy, where he gained sensitive information.

Massner is highly resourceful and cunning; he is capable of taking on the most difficult of tasks.

Quote by the French envoy Forval

Massner proved to be of valuable service to the French and became Forval’s leading agent. But the merchant was not content with mobilising his resources for the benefit of France alone. Massner also offered to spy on behalf of the Holy Roman Empire, with which he continued to do great business.

Serving both emperor and king

In October 1702, Massner sought to establish contact with the imperial envoy Baron von Rost with the aim of offering to work undercover for the Habsburg side. Massner, the French spy, succeeded in gaining von Rost’s trust and thus became a double agent.

Massner made no secret of his multiple alliances, attempting to persuade each side that this was to their advantage. He assured the new French envoy Graville that his counterintelligence activities for the enemy were the very thing that would enable him to safely pass on information to France, while also impressing upon von Rost the supposed ways in which the imperial side stood to benefit from his dual ties. Massner proposed that he “be permitted the odd piece of deception that appeared to favour our enemies” as a clever means of building up credit with them that would make it all the easier to subsequently pull off a master stroke.

At this point, Massner was fully in command when it came to playing one side off against the other. In addition to the Three Leagues’ strategically important position, he was able to draw on his trade networks and, above all, his unfailing business acumen. Whenever Massner saw an opportunity to turn a profit, he moved heaven and earth to do so.

A smuggler in charge of policing contraband

Massner then became responsible for anti-smuggling operations. His appointment to the position by von Rost gave him the right to keep one-third of all goods seized for himself. This proved financially rewarding, given that the smuggling of contraband from the Three Leagues and the Swiss Confederacy to Vorarlberg and Swabia was booming during this era.

Both Leopold I and Louis XIV had imposed blanket bans on trade when war broke out, with the aim of weakening the adversary’s economy. Consequently, many goods could no longer be legally taken into or out of the Holy Roman Empire, leading to widespread smuggling.

The Alpine Rhine Valley by Vaduz. Gouache by Johann Jakob Schmidt, 1824. Liechtenstein. — The Alpine Rhine Valley by Vaduz. Gouache by Johann Jakob Schmidt, 1824.
Liechtenstein. The Princely Collections

The Rhine Valley between Graubünden and Lake Constance became a smuggling hotspot, as the border to the Holy Roman Empire ran right through its middle. The Rhine marked the boundary of sovereignty: this is where import bans took effect, where horses could be classed as contraband. But the Rhine was also passable. It could be crossed by bridges and fords, the darkness at night was all-enveloping and there were enough locals willing to take the risk of transporting goods now deemed prohibitive and thus considered lucrative over the border for the right price. In other words, ideal conditions for a smuggling landscape to evolve. And Thomas Massner was right at the heart of it all.

As the official in charge of anti-smuggling operations, he was responsible for keeping watch over the border with Vorarlberg, which essentially meant he was subject to his own surveillance. Massner the official used his new-found authority as a front for smuggling goods on a large scale as Massner the merchant. He sneaked horses and money that he himself had counterfeited over the Rhine and made sure that his business partners from northern Italy were able to circumvent the ban and import their goods to the Holy Roman Empire. Massner became a smuggling kingpin. But success in running contraband was still not enough for Massner.

The ambush at Leutkirch

Driven by insatiable greed, Thomas Massner began launching a series of attacks on valuable shipments of goods passing through the territory in transit. And he did not shy away from violent methods. In June 1703, a large consignment of money from the Milanese banking house Guidi was on its way to a client named Caimo in Augsburg. The five chests were laden with more than 50,000 Louis blanc coins and Massner was supposed to transport them from Chur to Leutkirch in the Allgäu region of Germany.

In Chur, Massner instructed his people to open the chests, remove the money and hide it to be smelted down later. They replaced the precious cargo with bales full of earth, stones and sand, and – unaware of the fraud – one of Massner’s men, Ulrich Zellweger, accompanied the shipment over the Rhein as planned and on to an inn run by the Lutz family in Leutkirch. This was where the attack took place. A group of soldiers asked the landlord for lodgings for the night, then overpowered him and made away with the cargo being temporarily stored at the inn.

The ambush was staged by Massner’s own people. He instructed five confidants to follow Zellweger’s wagon, disguised as soldiers, and to steal the supposedly valuable consignment, making sure to cover their tracks. Once outside the town, the pretend soldiers cut the bales open and left the cloths in which they had been packed lying around to create a false trail.

This second ruse was more than an attempt by Massner to cover up the initial deception; he actually hoped to make even more money from it. He unabashedly sent word of the unfortunate attack to the client in Augsburg, demanding payment of the agreed costs of transportation on the grounds that he had fulfilled his part of the bargain by successfully forwarding the goods as far as Leutkirch.

Escalation and isolation

The smuggler king and double agent was turning into a pushy, violent troublemaker. Massner’s men attacked further consignments of money. Tasked with accompanying Lieutenant-General Barbesières from Chur to Bavaria to ensure him safe passage, Massner led the Frenchman into an ambush outside Lindau where he handed him over to the imperial forces. Massner personally carried out an attack on the French courier Sonnery near Chiavenna after recommending this as the supposedly best and safest route to the Papal States. And he thought about having his clerk Carlo Grisore walled in alive because the latter knew too much about Massner’s brutal business practices.

**The Three Leagues forming an alliance with the Republic of Venice in Chur, 1706. Thomas Massner played a significant role in the process.** Rätisches Museum

His comportment and actions had long since made Massner an enemy in the eyes of the French king. He was also gradually falling out of favour with the imperial side on account of his forays. Massner sought to stay in the business of espionage by forging new alliances and enjoyed brief success from 1706 to 1707 as an agent for the British ambassador Abraham Stanyan and the Republic of Venice. But these appointments soon came to an end and Massner found himself increasingly isolated.

Revenge of the Sun King

Louis XIV saw his opportunity to take vengeance on this troublesome fellow from Graubünden. In 1710, while out walking with a supposed friend in Geneva, Massner’s son was deliberately led into French territory. He was then arrested, taken to Lyon and locked up in the citadel there for the next seven years as a prisoner of state.

Seeking to retaliate, Massner tried but failed to detain two French officials, the embassy secretary Merveilleux and later Duke Philippe of Vendôme, Louis XIV’s cousin, as they passed through the Three Leagues.

The French ambassador Du Luc then called on the heads of the Three Leagues to punish Massner. A criminal court finally sat in judgment over Massner in Ilanz on 4 July 1711. Largely composed of members partisan towards the French, the court proceedings were essentially a show trial: Thomas Massner was sentenced to death by dismemberment.

Charges against Thomas Massner, 1711. Among other things, Massner was accused of having “not only shamefully and wantonly violated and usurped the peace and prosperity of the Republic – contrary to our fundamental statutes, neutrality, Federal Charter and the laws of all nations – but also, in doing so, having involved the beloved shared fatherland in dangerous and harmful entanglements with foreign powers”. Staatsarchiv Graubünden

The verdict was worth 12,100 livres to Louis XIV – but the sentence was never carried out. Massner had fled to Liechtenstein before the trial, hoping to appeal the death sentence by submitting an opposing expert report he had purchased in Tübingen. But his plea failed, and Massner remained in exile until his demise in 1712 when the coach in which he was travelling broke a wheel in Balzers, throwing him to his death.

Thomas Massner’s story is that of a remarkable pursuit of wealth and power. Shrewd and full of gumption, Massner became a master of opportunity, seized the chances presented by war and rose spectacularly to become a top spy and smuggling kingpin. But he enjoyed broad support along the way: the list of people who gained from his activities is long. The tide only began to turn when Massner overstepped the mark with his grandiose strategies, causing him to lose the backing of his powerful patrons. The one-time luminary paid the price for his boundless greed and ended up becoming easy prey for his enemies.

More of: Modern Age Economy Transportation Politics War/battle

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