The year is 1581 and a barrel maker is sitting in a public bath house in a small Bavarian market town maybe 40 km from Nuremberg and he’s looking at an old man across the room and he’s counting scars, two crooked fingers, a long scar running down the chin.
And the barrel maker has seen pamphlets. He’s heard ballads sung at market fairs.
He knows what those markings mean. That old man scrubbing himself down in the steam is Peter.
And Peter is, according to the wanted notices circulating across the Holy Roman Empire, responsible for the deaths of more people than most plagues manage in a midsized village.
But before we get too deep into all of that, thanks for being here.
Now, a bath house in 1581 in a town like Nyar, just to set the scene, is not a private affair. It’s communal. It’s basically a public pool mixed with a sauna mixed with a barber shop.
Everyone’s in there. Locals, travelers, tradesmen. You go in, you get in the water. You might get a shave or a haircut or even some minor surgery. Barber surgeons operated out of bathhouses, teeth pulled, wounds dressed, that sort of thing. The point is, everyone can see everyone, including their scars, including their crooked fingers.
And in a world where there were no photographs, no fingerprint databases, no forensics of any kind, a wanted notice was just a physical description on a piece of paper. Crooked fingers, chin scar, old. And the barrel maker looked at this old man and matched the description. That’s it. That’s how the most prolific alleged serial killer in the history of the Holy Roman Empire was caught.
A cooper in a bath house who read pamphlets. Peter Nars, also spelled N or N or Nars, depending on which pamphlet you’re reading and how the printer felt that morning. Born around 1540 in the Palatinate region of what is now Germany. Executed on or about September 16th, 1581 in Noar in de Obaltz after confessing under torture to 544 murders, including 24 pregnant women whose unborn children he allegedly cut from their bodies and used in magical rituals and also cannibalism.
The confessions include cannibalism. Now 544. That number. We need to talk about that number because it is the thing that everyone leads with when they talk about Peter. And it is also almost certainly wildly inflated by the machinery of 16th century judicial torture. But we’ll get to that. We have to get to that because the interesting thing about NAS is not really whether the number is accurate.
It’s the world that produced him, the world that caught him, and the world that needed him to be exactly what those pamphlets said he was. Let’s talk about Germany in the 1570s and 1580s because it matters. You cannot understand Peter’s without understanding the place he moved through. The Holy Roman Empire at this time was not a country.
It was barely even a political entity in any functional sense. It was a patchwork of somewhere between 300 and 350 largely independent territories, duchies, principalities, prince bishops, free imperial cities like Nuremberg, and tiny little nightly holdings barely bigger than a couple of farms. The emperor existed, but his power was mostly ceremonial.
Real authority belonged to territorial princes. And what that meant in practice was a jurisdictional nightmare. There was no unified police force. There was no coordinated law enforcement. If you were a bandit and you murdered someone on one side of a river, you could cross that river and be in a completely different jurisdiction where nobody had the authority to arrest you.
The entire landscape was designed almost by accident to be a paradise for organized crime. On top of that, you had religion tearing everything apart. The peace of Agsburg in 1555 had tried to settle the reformation by saying each prince could decide whether his territory was Catholic or Lutheran. Fine, but it didn’t account for Calvinism which spread rapidly through the 1560s and 1570s, especially in the Palatinate under elector Frederick III.
By the 1580s, three rival confessions were competing for dominance. Each trying to impose discipline on their populations, each suspicious of the others, each generating paranoia and social control, and a deep abiding conviction that moral disorder was everywhere. The 30 Years War wouldn’t start until 1618, but the fuses were already lit.
And then the weather. This is the part people don’t always think about, but it’s enormous. The period from about 1560 to 1630 is what climatologists call the Grindlevald fluctuation, which is part of the broader little ice age. Temperatures dropped. Summers turned wet and cold. Crops rotted in the fields. Famines tripled in frequency.
Real wages collapsed. Peasants who lost their land drifted into vagrancy. Discharge soldiers with no income turned to robbery. The forests and mountain passes of central Germany were infested with bandit gangs. And for many of the people in those gangs, crime wasn’t a lifestyle choice so much as it was the only option left after the harvest failed for the third year in a row.
Historian Wolf Gang Bearinger has drawn a direct line between these agricultural disasters and the explosion of witch hunting that happened in exactly the same decades. When crops fail and children starve, people look for someone to blame. And they don’t always look in rational directions. That’s the world Peter was born into and operated in.
Fractured authority, religious paranoia, economic collapse, forests full of desperate people, and a printing press that had gotten cheap enough to turn crime reports into mass entertainment. Murder accounted for roughly 11 to 15% of all recorded crime in the 1570s and 1580s. Execution rates doubled in cities like Augsburg and Nuremberg.
The roads were genuinely dangerous. You didn’t travel alone if you could help it. Merchants formed convoys. Pilgrims traveled in groups. And still people died because a group of four armed men hiding in a treeine along a forest road can take most small parties without much difficulty, especially when they’ve been doing it for years and they know the terrain better than anyone passing through.
The other thing to understand about banditry in this period is that it wasn’t just random, desperate people grabbing what they could. These were organized networks. They had safe houses. They had fences. People who would buy stolen goods, no questions asked. They had inkeepers who provided shelter and forwarded intelligence about wealthy travelers.
They had a whole infrastructure. And because each territory had its own laws and its own courts and its own limited jurisdiction, there was essentially no way to pursue a coordinated investigation across borders. It would be like trying to run a federal criminal investigation today. If there were no FBI and every county in America had its own completely independent legal system and refused to cooperate with the county next door.
That’s what law enforcement looked like in the Holy Roman Empire and that’s why someone like Peter Ne could operate for 15 years. N grew up in the Palatinate which was Vittlesback territory. The same dynasty that held the powerful electoral Palatinate, one of the seven electorates that chose the emperor.
The Palatinate had an almost comically unstable religious history in the 16th century. The population reportedly changed its official faith five times as successive rulers imposed Lutheranism, then Calvinism, then switched back. Imagine having your church tell you one thing, then the ruler dies, a new one comes in, and suddenly you’re worshiping a different way, and then another ruler comes in, and you switch again five times in one century.
It’s the kind of thing that either makes you very pious or very cynical and probably both at the same time. Under Frederick III, it became one of Europe’s major Calvinist centers, which mattered politically because Calvinism was technically excluded from the peace of Agsburg’s protections, making the entire Palatinate a kind of legal gray zone in the eyes of Catholic powers.
The upper palatinate where Nars would eventually die was a rolling landscape of the Nab River Valley, scattered towns and dense forest. Neiarfalts itself was a market town, probably 1 to 3,000 people sitting on the main trade route from Nuremberg to Regansburg. Salt, metals, textiles, all the goods that traveled between major cities passed through there, and so did the bandits who prayed on the merchants carrying them.
It’s the kind of town that knew violence. Trade routes attracted wealth and wealth attracted predators. And a town that served as a way station on a major commercial road would have been all too familiar with reports of robberies and murders along the stretches of forest between cities. We know almost nothing about Nia’s early life.
He was born around 1540, probably into a peasant family. Some accounts suggest he started as a soldier before drifting into brigandage around 1560. The first concrete documentation we have of him comes from 1577 when he was arrested for the first time before that. His biography is blank or rather it’s filled in by the pamphlets and ballads that came later and those are not exactly sworn testimony.
What we do know is that his criminal mentor was a man named Martin Styer, a shepherd who organized 49 of his fellow shepherds into a bandit gang. Shepherds, by the way, were one of the so-called dishonorable trades in German society, marginalized, distrusted, living on the edges of settled communities.
They made natural suspects when things went wrong. The gang operated from the 1550s until his execution in Verenberg in 1572, pillaging and killing across a huge geographic range from the Netherlands to southern Germany. And here’s the thing that matters. Styer was accused of exactly the same practices that would later be attributed to NAS.
Ripping male fetuses from murdered pregnant women, cutting off their hands, eating their hearts, black magic, the whole catalog. According to the pamphlets that came later, Steer taught Nia’s the art of black magic and the secret of invisibility before he was executed. When Steer died, Nars supposedly took over the criminal network and expanded it.
The Johan Yakob Wick collection in Zurich. Wick was a Protestant minister who compiled what is basically a 16th century true crime scrapbook contains pamphlets on both Sty and N. And Wick cross-referenced them in the margins. He recognized these as connected stories. Two generations of the same criminal tradition separated by about a decade.
Now, Wick is an interesting figure on his own. He collected everything, not just crime reports, but accounts of natural disasters, monstrous births, celestial phenomena, fires, floods, political events, 24 folio volumes of news clippings. Essentially, if you want to know what frightened and fascinated ordinary people in the second half of the 16th century, the Wikana is the single best source.
And the fact that he collected near alongside accounts of comets and floods and monstrous calves tells you something about the category that crime stories occupied in the popular imagination. They were wonders, signs from God. Not just news, but omens. After Steer’s death, Nars ran a gang of roughly 24 men, though the membership fluctuated as people joined for specific operations and then split off.
The gang wasn’t a permanent body the way we think of organized crime today. It was more like a network that expanded and contracted depending on the job. A big raid on a trade route might pull in a dozen men from scattered locations. A smaller robbery might involve just two or three. They used pre-arranged meeting points, and the inkeepers in the network served as both safe houses and communication nodes.
When someone heard about a rich merchant heading from Nuremberg to Reagansburg with a load of silver, the word would travel through the inkeeper network and the right people would gather at the right place at the right time. They reportedly gathered near Falsberg in Alsace. That’s modern-day Falsburg in Lorraine, France before separating into smaller groups to rob and murder across multiple territories.
The folk ballad about Nars, “Anazang of Peter Nosh,” provides what amounts to an itinerary of violence. “Both sides of the rine over 200 people including nine pregnant women. Then through Verenburgg, 123 people. Then along the route through Ulm and Agsburg, following the Danube toward Lintz into Austria, five more pregnant women.
Near Prague and into Bohemia, around 140 people, eight more pregnant women. Then back toward Reaganburg and Nuremberg.” These are staggering numbers and they come from a ballad, not from court records. So the level of reliability here is roughly equivalent to a modern true crime podcast that cites Reddit threads as primary sources.
But even setting aside the specific numbers, what the ballad and the pamphlets describe in terms of method is consistent with what we know about how bandit gangs actually operated in this period. Small groups of two to four men setting ambushes on forested stretches of road, targeting isolated travelers or small parties, strangulation, bludgeoning, stabbing, bodies dismembered to hide evidence.
The gang working the spaces between cities, in the forests and mountain passes, and along roads that nobody was really policing. Gang members were eventually caught in widely separated locations. One in the imperial city of Landau, one at Kershwa Amrine, four at Strabber, nine at Falsber, six at Cooblins, which tells you both how wide the network reached and how completely impossible it was to coordinate a crackdown across the empire’s 300 jurisdictions.
Each of those arrests happened independently in a different territory under different legal authority and each one produced its own round of interrogations and confessions that named other members and described other crimes. The picture of the gang assembled itself peacemeal like a jigsaw puzzle being worked on in six different rooms by six different people who never compared notes.
Some of the confessions contradicted each other, some corroborated each other. All of them were extracted under torture, which makes the contradictions less surprising and the corroborations less reassuring. The inkeepers who supported the gang deserve their own mention because they complicate the picture. Six of them, Hans Lobber, Jacob Tritch, Michael Hanawa, Hans Mueller, Kristoff Lutzenova, and Meltchure Zilman were eventually tried and executed at Ensisim in Alsace.
They were described as having committed over 300 murders collectively, but inkeepers in this period occupied a gray zone between legitimate commerce and criminal facilitation. They housed travelers, overheard conversations about wealth and roots, and were perfectly positioned to pass information to bandits who would rob those travelers on the road.
Some of them were active participants. Others may have been coerced or complicit through silence rather than action or simply unlucky enough to be named under torture by someone who needed to give the interrogator more names to make the pain stop. The distinction mattered to them. It didn’t matter much to the executioner at Ensisim.
One specific incident from the sources gives you a sense of what was alleged. When N came to Franconia around 1580, he reportedly murdered a pregnant woman from Kitsingan near Oxenfoot. When his bag was finally opened at Nymar, it allegedly contained what the German sources call “Shendline unser.” The phrase is best left untransated here.
It is exactly as disturbing as you might imagine. In 1577, Nars was captured for the first time in Gersbach in the Black Forest region. Under torture, he confessed to 75 murders, but then he escaped. And this escape absolutely supercharged his legend because now the pamphlets could point to it as proof of his supernatural powers. He could make himself invisible.
Obviously, that’s why he got away. The practical reality of escaping a 16th century provincial jail is considerably less dramatic. These were not maximum security facilities. They were often just rooms in a building with a guard who might fall asleep or accept a bribe. But practical explanations don’t generate the same level of public terror.
And they certainly don’t sell pamphlets at market fairs. The escape turned near from a wanted criminal into something closer to a folk demon. For 4 years from 1577 to 1581, he was out there somewhere. The pamphlets about his first arrest and confession were circulating. People knew his name, his description, his alleged crimes, and he was loose.
Every unsolved robbery, every discovered body along a forest road, every disappearance, any of those could be Peter’s. He became a bogey man, the kind of figure mothers invoked to keep children indoors after dark. And the fear was not entirely irrational because bandit gangs were genuinely active and genuinely dangerous in this period.
The fear just happened to be attached to one specific name, one specific set of crooked fingers. The wanted poster from 1579 based on confessions from his captured accomplices described him as rather old with those two crooked fingers, the scar on his chin, and the habit of carrying a lot of money, two loaded pistols hidden in his trousers, and a massive two-handed sword.
It also noted that he was a master of disguise who changed his appearance constantly, sometimes dressing as a common soldier, sometimes as a leper. Dressing as a leper was particularly clever, by the way, because lepers were avoided. Nobody wanted to get close enough to inspect your face. You could move through populated areas essentially untouched if people thought you were contagious.
It’s probably the closest thing the 16th century had to a disguise that actually granted a kind of invisibility. That’s the practical explanation for his ability to evade capture. He was just good at it. He knew how to change his look and he knew how to cross borders. But the practical explanation doesn’t sell pamphlets.
Four years later, August 1581, N arrived in Nymar. He lodged at an inn called the Bells, “Zur Glocken,” and after a day or two, he went to the public bath house to clean up. He left his leather bag with the inkeeper for safekeeping. This decision proved fatal. It’s the kind of small, mundane choice that changes everything.
If he’d taken it into the bath house, he might have been able to grab whatever he needed and make a run for it. Or he might have been caught anyway. But the bag being separate from him meant that when the citizens opened it and found what was inside, they had evidence before they had a suspect in custody. They knew what they were dealing with before they went to arrest him.
And this is where the barrel maker enters the story again. The Cooper recognized him. He’d seen the descriptions in the circulated warrants, the crooked fingers, the scars. Word spread through the bath house in whispers. N himself was reportedly oblivious, which is an interesting detail if it’s true because it suggests either that he had grown complacent.
15 years is a long time to be a fugitive and complacency is inevitable or that his disguise game had slipped or simply that being naked in a bath house eliminates all the tools of disguise. You can’t dress as a leper when you’re not dressed at all. Two citizens slipped out, went to the inn, asked the inkeeper for the bag, opened it, and found the fetal remains inside.
They took the evidence to the flagger, the town magistrate, who assembled a force of eight men, marched to the bath house, and arrested Ne. He was bound to a dung cart and hauled before the court. And when he understood they had opened his bag, he apparently confessed immediately. Said he was guilty, acknowledged the murders, which is either the response of a man who knows the game is over or the response of a man who was tired, or the response of a man being described by pamphlet writers who thought immediate confession made for a better story. Possibly all three.
The pamphlet tradition framed his capture as divine intervention. He was caught only because he was separated from his bag of magical materials. Without his black magic, the invincible killer was just a scarred old man in a steam room recognized by a guy who makes barrels.
Now the interrogation, the legal framework governing what happened next was the “Constitio Criminalis Karolina” of 1532, the first empirewide criminal code ratified under Emperor Charles V. It’s a fascinating document because it actually tried to impose limits on judicial torture. And the fact that it tried tells you exactly how bad things were before it existed.
Confession was considered the highest form of evidence, the queen of proofs, as legal historians sometimes call it. And when confessions weren’t forthcoming, the code authorized torture to extract them. But with rules. You needed at least half proof, eyewitness testimony, or strong circumstantial evidence before you could start.
Leading questions were technically banned. You could ask what weapon was used, but not “did you use a knife?” Confessions had to be corroborated. If someone said they buried a body in a specific spot, you had to go check. Defendants could recant within 24 hours and the confession would be invalidated. Torture was prohibited against the young, elderly or infirm.
These are actually not terrible rules on paper. If they had been followed, they would have prevented many of the worst abuses. But in practice, every single one of those safeguards was routinely ignored. Judges who needed a conviction to justify their investigation weren’t going to stop because the suspect recanted the next morning.
Interrogators who already believed the suspect was a diabolical murderer weren’t going to avoid leading questions, and the prohibition against torturing the elderly was clearly not applied to a man described as “rather old” in his own wanted poster. In practice, every single one of those safeguards was routinely ignored.
The standard tools used on NYS included the strike bank, that’s the rack, thumb screws, leg screws, and the strapado where you’re suspended by your bound arms until your shoulders dislocate. Under these conditions, Nia gave his name as Peter Nurse and confessed to the murders. All 544 of them, including the 24 pregnant women.
He confessed to cannibalism, eating fetal hearts during spellcasting. He confessed to making magic candles from infant fat for use in robberies. He confessed to learning invisibility from Martin Steer. He confessed to shapeshifting into animals and objects. And in the fullest version of the narrative, which comes from a pamphlet published in Strasborg in 1583, he confessed to a pact with the devil.
And here’s the escalation pattern that tells you everything you need to know about how reliable these confessions are. In 1577 first arrest, Nia confesses to 75 murders. The 1577 pamphlet attributes 540 murders to the entire gang collectively. By 1581, the number attributed specifically and solely to Nas himself has risen to 544.
Each round of torture pushed the numbers higher. Each new pamphlet edition needed to be more sensational than the last. This is textbook torture inflation married to printier sensationalism. The execution itself was spread over three days. Three days in the market square of Noi marked day one. They began with what’s called “Reman Schniden,” literally strap cutting, where strips of flesh were torn from his body using red-hot pincers.
Heated oil was poured into the open wounds. Some sources describe a brass device called a “rustlinin,” a heated metal pony that the condemned was forced to sit on, burning the inner thighs and groin. Day two. His feet were coated in grease or oil and held above glowing coals, slowly roasting them. Some accounts mention molten lead poured onto the soles of his feet.
The purpose of spreading the execution across multiple days was explicitly to prolong the suffering without killing him prematurely. They wanted him alive for day three. Day three, he was dragged to the place of execution and broken on the wheel. The breaking wheel was the signature punishment for aggravated murder in the Holy Roman Empire.
You were placed face down on a wooden platform, arms and legs outstretched, and the executioner used a heavy iron wheel or cudgel to systematically shatter your bones. A standard severe breaking involved eight or nine blows. Two on each limb above and below the joint and a final blow to the spine or chest. There was actually a protocol to this.
The executioner was a trained professional, often from a family that had practiced the trade for generations. The profession was hereditary, considered dishonorable, and executioners were social outcasts who lived on the margins of the communities they served. But they were skilled. They knew anatomy. They knew how hard to strike and where to strike to break a bone cleanly without killing the person because the point was to keep the condemned alive as long as possible.
If the executioner killed someone too quickly, he could be fined or even punished. It was a job with professional standards, as grim as that sounds. Peter received 42 blows, five times the normal number. That is an extraordinary amount, even by the standards of a period that did not shy away from spectacular violence.
And he was reportedly still alive after 42 blows, at which point he was quartered, his body cut into four pieces. The quarters were displayed on poles at the four roads leading out of Noar as a warning. People came from far and wide to watch. Public executions in this period functioned as organized spectacles, what historian Richard Van Dulman called the “theater of horror.”
The judge sat on a raised cushion holding a white rod. 12 jurors flanked him in red and black robes. The sentence was read. The judge broke a wooden staff in two and commanded the executioner to carry out the punishment. It was theater, deliberate, choreographed, performed for an audience, and it was a holiday of sorts.
Work stopped, schools closed, people traveled from neighboring towns, vendors sold food and drink. The execution was a community event and attendance was not optional in the social sense. You were expected to be there to witness justice being done to participate in the collective ritual of punishment and restoration. And the contemporary understanding was not purely retributive.
Christian authorities believed the gruesome physical suffering served a spiritual purpose that it softened the body so the soul could be liberated and prepared to face God. There was a sincere theological conviction that pain was purifying. The execution was framed as both punishment and a kind of violent mercy.
A priest would typically attend the condemned in the final hours, hearing confession, offering communion, praying with them. The condemned was expected to repent publicly, to acknowledge the justice of the sentence, to die well. Whether Nia did any of this is unclear from the sources. The pamphlets focus on the physical spectacle rather than the spiritual one.
For context, the executioner of nearby Nuremberg at this exact time was Meister France Schmidt, who served from 1578 to 1617, and kept a detailed journal of every single person he executed, 392 in total. Schmidt’s journal is one of the most extraordinary documents of the era and it records hangings, beheadings, burnings, and breakings on the wheel in the exact region where Nars was operating.
It’s the closest thing we have to a primary source for what the mechanics of justice actually looked like in that time and place. Schmidt himself was a complicated figure, an executioner who took pride in his craft, who campaigned for social respectability, who seemed to genuinely believe in the moral framework of the system he served, and who recorded his work with a kind of meticulous professionalism that is both impressive and deeply unsettling.
In his journal, he notes a man named Niclaus Stuller who was convicted of killing three pregnant women and their unborn children in the same region in the same era as Nia, which tells you that even without the supernatural embellishments, violence against pregnant women was a genuine feature of the period’s criminal landscape, not something invented by pamphlet writers from whole cloth.
The pamphlets because Peter N’s story didn’t just circulate by word of mouth. It was a media event. Five major publications about him survive and they are the 16th century equivalent of tabloid crime coverage. The first was by Alexander Hawk, published in Tubingan in 1577 after Nas’s first arrest.
It credits the gang with 540 murders collectively and describes how Nia’s learned invisibility from Martin. It’s a song pamphlet, a lead flug blat meant to be sung aloud at markets, probably by a traveling ballad singer using an illustrated board to point at scenes as he performed. Then two pamphlets by Jacob Mueller printed in H Highleberg in 1582.
One packages Nears’s story alongside other sensational news fires in various cities following the genre convention of bundling multiple horrors together. The other focuses specifically on his capture and execution. A ballad published in Basel in 1582 by Samuel Apiarius names six accompllices who were tried at Ensisim in Alsace and identifies Nars as Steer’s companion.
And then the big one, the Strasborg pamphlet of 1583. This is where the devil shows up. Only in this final publication does the narrative include an explicit satanic pact. The devil appears to Nars and his partner Sumer at Fowlsburg, blesses their enterprise, provides them with monthly pay, and grants supernatural powers fueled by fetal black magic.
Scholar Joy Wiltonberg has identified this progressive escalation from mundane banditry in 1577 to fullblown demonic horror by 1583 as a deliberate narrative strategy that merged criminal reportage with the witch trial hysteria that was reaching its peak in exactly those years. These pamphlets were marketed with formulaic titles emphasizing that they were truthful.
“Warhage” appears in almost everyone and frightening. A “shr” meaning dreadful or terrifying. They cost very little. They were sold at fairs and markets. They were the true crime podcasts of their day and they served the same overlapping functions. Entertainment, moral instruction, political propaganda, and profit. The economics of pamphlet publishing are worth pausing on for a moment because they explain a lot about why the Nia’s narrative escalated the way it did.
A printer in H Highidleberg or Strasburg invested a small amount in paper and ink, maybe hired a woodcutter artist for an illustration, and produced a run of pamphlets that could be sold for a few fenig each. If the subject was sensational enough, the pamphlets sold quickly, and the profit margin was healthy.
If the subject had already been covered by a previous pamphlet, you needed an angle, something new, something more extreme, something the competition hadn’t included. This is why the supernatural content escalated from publication to publication. The 1577 pamphlet by Hawk mentioned magic. The 1582 pamphlets described the execution.
The 1583 Strasborg pamphlet added the full satanic pact because by 1583 the market for Peter N’s content needed a fresh hook and the devil was the freshest hook available. It’s the same commercial logic that drives every sensationalist media format in every era. You need to top the last thing. And when the last thing was already 500 murders and cannibalism, topping it requires the actual devil.
There’s also the question of audience. These pamphlets were purchased and consumed by a literate.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
