Bartholomäus Sastrow

[1] He, his eldest sister Anna (1516–1594), the wife of Peter Frubose, Mayor of Greifswald, and their brother Karsten or Christian (1530–1580) were the only members of the family to have long lives.

However, on the recommendation of Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon, Bartholomäus obtained a position as a clerk, and in 1544, despite never having completed his studies, he was awarded a diploma as a notary of the Holy Roman Empire.

He and a companion from Lübeck travelled as far as Innsbruck disguised as Italians and avoiding speaking German, for fear of attack by soldiers being sent by the Pope to aid the Holy Roman Emperor against the Schmalkaldic League; they then changed back to their normal clothes for fear of attack by German Protestants who did not recognise their strange accents.

[1] On his return Sastrow worked in Wolgast for the Dukes of Pomerania, Philip I and Barnim XI, accompanied the Pomeranian representatives seeking reconciliation with Emperor Charles V, and took part in diplomatic missions to Bohemia, Saxony and the 1547/48 Diet of Augsburg (the geharnischter Reichstag).

[1] He supported the mayor, Nikolaus Gentzkow, in developing new regulations for schools and churches as well as the town law code.

[4] His term was marked by a number of political and religious conflicts; Sastrow's unyielding style made him several enemies.

It is unknown whether it was not completed or whether it was destroyed because of Sastrow's account of des Teuffels Battstube ("the Devil's bathhouse"), as he characterised his time there in the superscript.

[9] Speaking for the latter alternative is the fact that the account was not meant to be purely private, as can be seen from the almost complete absence of material about his family: thus, Sastrow says little more about his wife than that he married her, and does not even give the birth dates of his children, and he addresses it in the first instance to his sons-in-law Hinrich Godtschalk and Jakob Klerike, both city councillors.

[10] Although it includes text from numerous Latin documents, the work is not written in Latin as is normal for contemporary humanistic writings, nor yet in Pomeranian Low German, which Johannes Bugenhagen had used in making his own translation of the Bible 50 years before, but in Early New High German Kanzleisprache, the language of depositions and records in the imperial and municipal courts.

However, there are major gaps in its coverage of contemporary history, since Sastrow, unlike Sleidanus, only recounts what he personally experienced.