The 16th-Century Knight Who Fought With A Mechanical Iron Hand

Gotz von Berlichingen was a German knight. He survived entirely by war. In his case, that meant plundering, mercenary work, and generally being a nuisance to everyone he met. By the time he was in his twenties, he already had a long list of enemies. Which, honestly, given his history, isn’t surprising.

Gotz was 24 when a cannonball took his right hand off at the Siege of Landshut in 1504. Most people would’ve hung up their armor then, if not earlier. And for a professional soldier, losing the hand with which he swung his sword was like being fired.

Not long after, Gotz had a prosthetic iron hand forged. Years later, a far more advanced version of the iron hand with moving parts followed. Most people would lose a hand and adapt. Gotz lost a hand and basically said “no thank you, I’ll just have a replacement made and keep on stabbing!”

Not some pathetic iron arm, not some piece of iron cast in the shape of a fist. It was a functioning machine. It had fingers that actually opened and closed, moved and gripped, by means of a whole series of small levers and switches. This was in the early 16th century, I say again, the early 16th century!

Gotz was able to close his robotic hand and position it with the use of springs and levers, which gave him the ability to grasp objects and keep them in place. He could have grasped a sword or a spear or the reins to his horse.

All of this took place at a time when there was no steam power, no electricity, no modern machine tools, as the scientific revolution had only just begun. And yet, someone hand-built a spring-loaded mechanical prosthesis with moving parts. It’s like Tony Stark managing to make his first Iron Man suit in a mere cave! Gotz certainly didn’t have Stark Industries’ resources, though I think you know what I mean

The machine itself is uncredited, however, for obvious reasons. We don’t know who designed or constructed this ingenious mechanism. It is quite likely that whoever did was a genius, centuries before his time. But the guy who just wore it? Gotz became a legend. You can’t have it all, I suppose.

Once equipped with his new iron hand, Gotz went right back onto the battlefields, resuming his prior violent life of pillaging and plundering and seemingly not missing a step.

Legend has it that Gotz boasted his artificial hand fought better than his natural one, though no record actually confirms he said it. Whether this is true or just bravado, I can’t help but be impressed by how innovative this was for its day.

Gotz didn’t become a respectable citizen, however. The Holy Roman Emperor declared Gotz an outlaw twice. Being outlawed by the most powerful person in your area once is bad enough. To be outlawed twice means you’re either principled or stubborn. In Gotz’s case, maybe both.

One of the bandit declarations at least stemmed from a delightful, uncomplicated crime: Gotz stole from a gang of extremely rich merchants. That’s it. He saw a well-stocked caravan and helped himself!

Gotz also had years of experience burning down villages and turning chaos into a reliable pastime. As far as neighbors went, he was definitely a problem person. The accounts that call him “an all-around bad guy” are, in fact, not exaggerating.

As for whom Gotz fought, he had no scruples there either. He took on Turks and French, and, yes, some of his fellow countrymen. He’d fight anybody if circumstances demanded it, which for a mercenary generally meant if someone was paying, or if he felt like it. He was an equal-opportunity menace. No one was too large or too distant to make it onto his list of enemies.

In a move that’s quite shocking for a guy like Gotz, he actually joined up with a peasant rebellion and led it for a time, before stepping away once his agreed stint was up. So he was hardly a lifelong ally of the people. More like a wild card who only went along with things when it suited him.

There was even a time an Imperial captain demanded Gotz surrender, or so the German playwright Goethe has it. In Gotz’s own memoirs, it was actually a bailiff in Krautheim. Either way, Gotz’s response was a now-legendary retort in German which translates, roughly, to ‘Kiss my butt!’ Not ‘I respectfully decline.’ Not ‘over my dead body.’ Just a flat-out ‘kiss my butt.’

As you can imagine, the phrase didn’t just fade away. In fact, an almost identical retort caught on in English, though that version has its own separate history. In German, the line is still known as the Götz quote, and Goethe’s play is why it’s attached to him at all. If you think about it, though, maybe his enduring legacy isn’t the iron hand.

You’d think Gotz, who robs, plunders, and fights whole countries, would die violently, killed by an enemy or simply reaping the fruits of his own evil deeds, as the natural order of things would have it. But he retired and died in his bed.

Gotz’s mechanical hand was not lost to the sands of time. It can be seen today in a museum located in his former castle, Jagsthausen. You can even visit the site and admire the very robotic hand from 500 years ago that this knight wielded.

Gotz was such a larger than life character that German writer Goethe wrote a five-act play based on him. He even named the play after Gotz and his iron hand. He changed the ending to make it more dramatic, but what can you do, “and then he retired” doesn’t bring in as many ticket sales.

As scientific knowledge grew, surgeons and researchers examined Gotz’s iron hand and used its principles as a model for their own work. And so a brutal sixteenth-century soldier, who spent nearly all of his life as a scourge, inadvertently helped found modern prosthetics. A pretty decent thing for a man who spent most of his years doing the worst possible things.

This content was created with the help of AI.