Available now · Historical true crime
The False Baron
Marriage, Murder and the Con Man Who Hunted Wealthy Women
Read the opening →A stranger arrives in respectable society claiming rank, estates and connections. Women believe him. Lawyers believe him. Families believe him. Behind the performance lies a trail of false identities, marriages, money, disappearance and finally a murder prosecution.
Der falsche Baron von Münchhausen, ein Frauenspeculant appeared in the German true-crime collection Der neue Pitaval in 1861. The Worlds Unread edition presents the complete narrative in English, based on the original printed text and checked against the surviving source.
This edition
The book includes a new English translation, an introduction placing the case and its nineteenth-century editors in context, a chronology, source notes, and explanations of genuine contradictions in the historical text rather than silently correcting them.
Translated and introduced by Paul Barnes.
From the book
Meet the man who called himself a baron.
In the spring of 1702, a stranger arrived in Halberstadt calling himself Baron von Münchhausen. He announced that he meant to remain in the city for some time while pursuing a lawsuit against a certain Herr von Eberstein and asserting claims to several nearby estates. He said that he came from Courland, spoke freely of properties he owned near Golding, and lived in the grand style of a wealthy nobleman.
Through his legal representative, the advocate Christian Bemsdorff, the Baron was introduced into respectable society. Before long he became acquainted with Anna Margarethe Heintz, daughter of the Saxe-Lauenburg court councillor Christoph Heintz. Miss Heintz had neither brothers nor sisters nor any other close relatives and, since the death of her parents, had lived a rather solitary life. She was no longer very young and could hardly have been called beautiful. She did, however, possess another quality which our Baron — and many another man besides him — valued more highly than youth or beauty: she was wealthy and entirely free to dispose of her fortune as she pleased.
None of this was a secret in Halberstadt. Several men had already sought Miss Heintz's hand, and at that very time a senior member of the cathedral chapter who lived in her household was courting her assiduously. All in vain. The suitors of Halberstadt were rejected, and it fell to Baron von Münchhausen to warm and conquer the lady's maiden heart.
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