The Knight Whose Insult Became a Mozart Composition
He lost his right hand to a cannonball and had a blacksmith build him an iron replacement — spring-loaded fingers, ratcheting knuckles, two of them total. One for war. One for Sundays. When ordered to surrender, Götz von Berlichingen told the bishop's men to lick his arse, liked the line enough to publish it, and set off a chain of events that ended with Mozart setting it for six voices. The man who fought forty years of feuds with a mechanical fist.