The Bochum Town Fire of 1517

What we know about the fire of 1517

While researching the early history of the Springorum name, I repeatedly ran into a hard limit in the sources. Again and again, the trail seemed to stop just before 1517. My initial assumption was that I had simply not searched widely enough—that somewhere, older documents from medieval Bochum must still exist.

Only later did I learn why those earlier records are so scarce. In 1517, a devastating fire swept through Bochum, destroying large parts of the town. Houses, public buildings, and—most crucially for historical research—the written records of earlier centuries were lost. From that moment on, Bochum was forced to rebuild not only its streets, but also its administrative memory. Much of what we know today about the fire comes from later references: tax records, rebuilding measures, and retrospective accounts that point back to the disaster as a decisive rupture.

What came as a surprise was discovering that this event was not just a general historical backdrop, but directly connected to my own family history. According to later sources, the fire is said to have started in the house of one of my ancestors, Johann Schriver genannt Springorum. He was held responsible for the catastrophe, banished from the town, and appears in the records only in the context of blame and reconciliation seven years later. I learned this through a remarkable document known as Reconciliation after the Bochum fire, a charter that sheds light not only on the consequences of the disaster, but also on how guilt, punishment, and social repair were negotiated in its aftermath.

For this research, the fire of 1517 therefore marks more than an archival boundary. It is a moment where family history and urban history intersect—explaining both the sudden loss of earlier sources and the conditions under which the Springorum name re-emerges in the records in the decades that followed.