30 Days of Biographies:
Gregor von Plündern
Either famous or infamous as one of the exceedingly few pirates in the history of Realmgard to have never laid eyes upon the ocean, the outlaw Gregor von Plündern spent several decades as a major thorn in the side of the Dukes of Middlesbrooke before going on to become one of Middlebrooke’s most famous chefs after several improbable twists of fate.
Originally the captain of a mercenary company in the service of Middlesbrooke, von Plündern was outlawed by the Duchy after pillaging several villages to fill the coffers of his company between campaigns while the mercenaries became increasingly shiftless with increasingly light pockets. This led von Plündern and the bulk of his mercenary company commandeering a fleet of river fishing boats from the villages along the rivers in the Duchy and declaring themselves to a band of river pirates known as the Hauptgericht Brethren.
Despite leading frequent attacks on largely undefended peasants, von Plündern actually harmed very few people, instead preferring to intimidate the peasantry into giving into his demands, or else restraining them long enough to plunder the villages, usually focusing on taking the village foodstuffs.
The Duchy was ill-equipped to deal with the threat posed by the Brethren, having little history with fending off large-scale river piracy. For the most part, the Brethren ran roughshod over most of the riverside settlements in the Duchy, though several of the Duchy’s land-holding vassals were able to mount effective defenses and repulse the Brethren’s raids.
Once the Duchy was able to develop effect strategies against the Brethren, von Plündern was driven out of his base of operations, whereupon he has inspired to mount his remaining fleet of boats on wheels and take to land piracy. With mixed results. While these hastily-constructed land-boats did offer certain strategic advantages, they also had an unfortunate tendency to get stuck in muddy ground, with wheels that were prone to breaking down. In general, the go-to strategy of the Duchy’s forces was to set fire to them.
Von Plündern’s piratical career came to an abrupt and anticlimactic end one rainy day when his personal land-boat became bogged down in the mud, allowing him to be easily surrounded by the forces of Middlesbrooke.
Due to his spree of piracy causing very little bodily harm to the people of Middlesbrooke and only one entirely accidental death, upon being defeated, von Plündern and the rest of the Hauptgericht Brethren were granted clemency by Duchess Anselma. Fond of irony, the Duchess thus sentenced them to 15 years of community service, putting them to work feeding the hungry of the Duchy as recompense for plundering the Duchy’s larders.
In an ironic twist that even Duchess Anselma did not foresee, von Plündern proved a culinary prodigy, proved remarkably skilled at stuffing food with other kinds of food, and invented several dishes that have since become synonymous with the cuisine of Middlesbrooke.
From then on, the Hauptgericht Brethren was reformed into a culinary guild, which continues to exist in Middlesbrooke even in the present day as one of the most prestigious associations of cookery in Realmgard.
My major inspiration here was the Victual Brothers, a group of pirates active in the Baltic circa the turn of the 15th century, who I became aware of largely thanks to Crusader Kings and whom I manage to keep in the forefront of my mind because “Victual Brothers” is a fantastic name.
“Victual” basically means “food”, so I ran with the concept. “Hauptgericht” means “main course”…
Of course, since Middlesbrooke is basically the Germanic part of Realmgard and it’s also landlocked (though, of course, so is Austria…), I had to get a little creative about pirates would work in that context. River pirates, however? Real thing.
I’ve mentioned in various posts before that the landsknechts were Early Modern German mercenaries with bombastic outfits, which is what I wanted to use for the picture, but I couldn’t find one in the style I liked. However, the real person in that picture, Konrad von Bemmelberg was a landsknecht, even though that painting has him in what is, all in all, pretty understated armour…
The fact that he ended up looking uncannily like Santa was not on purpose. I though red would look good and I only clued in on the Santa thing after the fact. Also, he stole all the food.
He’s, uh, he’s basically the Grinch, isn’t he?
Man, what I weird direction to go in October. Maybe I slept even worse last night than I thought I did.
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