Badges Across Europe: Rostock, Part Four

GEOGRAPHY LESSON 4: Mobile, mutable images

The badges from Rostock and their corroborating evidence testify to the wide-ranging mobility of Rostock pilgrims. This fact should not surprise us; after all, the burghers of Rostock were sea-faring merchants and traders. The sum total of these artifacts suggests that piety wove together many strands of the lives of the inhabitants of medieval Rostock.

The bells in their churches sounded, as it were, with the voices of the saints and divine figures represented on their in-cast badges. Returned travelers must have told stories of miraculous rescues and journeys of thanksgiving, of long treks undertaken for the soul of a deceased or for the chance of inheritance, or of taking up arms to earn salvation by converting to Christianity the Prussian polytheists who lived only a few hundred kilometres to the east. The surviving evidence usually concerns men but here and there women and even children appear in it as well. Sometime around 1254-56, the archival evidence tells us, one Henricus de Horneshusen traveled to Livonia with his wife and son. The image below is a detail from the Saint Hedwig Altarpiece at Church of Saint Catherine in Brandenburg, which is located about 280 kilometres south of the city of Rostock. The Saint Hedwig Altarpiece, made around the year 1500, shows a man, a woman, and a child wearing hats adorned with pilgrim badges.

Selection from Saint Hedwig Altarpiece, Church of Saint Catherine, Brandenburg, Germany, ca. 1500. Photograph courtesy of photographer: Dirk Jacob.

The fact remains, however, that the archaeological evidence could suggest that medieval pilgrims threw their badges away at journey’s end. What might this tell us about the way medieval pilgrims viewed their religious badges? 

Seeking to explain why so many pilgrim badges turn up in wet soil deposits in and along rivers (the Thames, the Seine, the Meuse, and so on), the idea circulated in and beyond medieval circles for decades that medieval pilgrims tossed their badges into rivers at journey’s end as a sign of thanksgiving. This “ritual deposition theory,” as art historian Jennifer Lee calls it, popular though it is, is not borne out by other evidence. There is good evidence that medieval badges were discarded as scrap metal, for example. Disposing of religious badges in latrines, whose contents in turn were flushed into rivers or used as backfill or infill on construction sites, further undermines the ritual deposition theory. It seems more likely that pilgrims at times treated religious badges as unimportant objects; when a badge’s purpose had been fulfilled, it was discarded.

A more promising theory that conforms better to the archaeological evidence is that religious badges were de-venerated, meaning that the badges lost their ritual-like, religious status as a hallowed or revered object and could therefore be discarded as waste. Perhaps, as Lee hypothesizes, religious badges “were more important as signs of a temporary social role (that of pilgrim) than as representatives of the object of the pilgrim’s devotion” (11). The discarded badges suggest that “many pilgrims did make a clear distinction between the venerable images at the pilgrim centres and the cheap, mass-produced copies that they bought to wear, and then to throw away” (Lee, 11). This theory is exciting because, as Lee points out, de-veneration is “a characteristically modern way to regard images” (10), which makes these medieval religious badges, thrown into latrines, the first tangible evidence of image de-veneration.

Does tossing a religious badge into a latrine make a medieval pilgrim less pious? Probably not. Rather, it shows us someone using images in ways that are, in fact, modern, “distinguish[ing] between different types of images with mutable and context-dependent significance” (Lee, 11). Meticulous attention to the medieval religious badges found in Rostock, Germany reveals that some of the practices of the Rostock city dwellers are arrestingly familiar, even when they are embedded in a historical era distant from our own.

Written by Dr. Ann Marie Rasmussen. This post was originally published on the Medieval Badges blog on March 22, 2021.

Works Cited

Ansorge, Jörg. “‘pelgrimmatze in de ere des almechteghen godes’: Pilgerzeichen und Schriftquellen zum mittelalterlichen Wallfahrtswesen in Rostock,” in Verknüpfungen des neuen Glaubens. Die Rostocker Reformationsgeschichte in ihren translokalen Bezügen, edited by Heinrich Holze and Kristen Skottki. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck-Ruprecht, 2019, pp. 29–83.

Lee, Jennifer. “Medieval pilgrims’ badges in rivers: the curious history of a non-theory.” Journal of Art Historiography. no. 11 (2014): pp. 1–11.

Badges Across Europe: Rostock, Part Three

GEOGRAPHY LESSON 3: CORROBORATIVE EVIDENCE

Dr. Ansorge’s article shows us the detective archaeologist at work, seeking out disparate kinds of evidence for clues to better understand the landscapes of religious belief in medieval northern Germany. To contextualize the Rostock badges, Ansorge unearths evidence from archives, manuscripts, early printed broadsheets, and books, and from other unusual sources as well. Each source requires different contextual knowledge and a different interpretative stance. Ansorge views these sources as a kind of assemblage in which different kinds of evidence provide a deeper understanding of late medieval piety while supplementing the picture of where Rostock pilgrims travelled with new information.

Many medieval wills from Baltic Hansa cities have survived into our times: about six thousand from Lübeck and one thousand from Stralsund. In comparison, only sixteen Rostock wills from the fourteenth centuries have survived. These wills are of interest because of the common practice in the cities of northern Germany of testators stipulating in their wills that inheritors or others undertake pilgrimages to specific, named holy sites. 

All the sites from which the Rostock badges come are mentioned in Rostock wills. However, the wills also name pilgrimage sites from which no badges have been found (to date) in Rostock. The most frequently named holy sites in the wills are Rome and the Holy Land (i.e. Jerusalem). Badges made in Rome have not been frequently found in northern Germany, so it is probably not a coincidence that only one has been found in Rostock. Jerusalem badges are so rare that it seems badges were almost never produced there. In any case, the Rostock wills confirm that Rome and the Holy Land should be included among the long-distance destinations for pilgrimage journeys made by inhabitants of Rostock.

On the other hand, none of the surviving wills mention the holy sites at Steinfeld and Stromberg, so without the badges we would not have known that pilgrims from Rostock travelled there.

Pewter badge, crucified Christ, Stromberg, Germany, before 1269, found in Rostock, Germany. Left: front of badge; Center top: folded badge as originally found folded into ball, head of Christ on top; Center bottom: back of folded badge; Right: back of badge with arrows highlighting fold marks. This badge was found in the Mühlendamm excavation site shown in the blog post Geography Lesson 1. Photograph courtesy of photographer: Dr. Jörg Ansorge, Horst (Germany).

Ansorge also discusses written evidence from Rostock covering the two decades between 1250 and 1270. It shows Rostock burghers travelling on pilgrimage to Livonia (German Livland) in the eastern Baltic, where the modern states of Estonia and Latvia are located (in a few cases their wives went along, too). The time period coincides with the conquest of Livonia by the military order of the Teutonic knights. These pilgrim journeys might have been traditional religious visits to holy sites, but they might also have been “military” pilgrimages in which the travellers sought salvation by taking part in an armed conquest that comprised violent conversion and colonization.

The medieval custodians of holy sites often kept so-called miracle books in which they recorded the miracles performed by the shrine’s saint. Burghers from Rostock appear in these books. One Heinrich Loesthin “from the city of Rostock,” for example, travelled to Thann (Alsace) in 1450 to thank Saint Theobaldus for saving him from shipwreck. Early sixteenth-century Rostock printers published flyers advertising, as it were, local pilgrimage sites: Güstrow, Sternberg, Heiligengrabe, and Wilsnack. In 1593, a Lutheran pastor writing about now abandoned Catholic pilgrimage practices, mentions a number of sites, including one in Rostock itself.

More evidence about medieval badges comes from an unexpected source. Especially in northern Europe, late medieval bell makers (or founders) often pushed religious badges into the clay moulds a bell would be cast in, which created impressions of these badges on the final metal bell. In other words, the badge impression left in the metal bell is a trace of a once existing badge. Ansorge uses this ghostly evidence to corroborate his identification of the holy sites from which the Rostock badges came (he occasionally uses other surviving material evidence such as medieval stained glass or statues, too). 

Medieval bell, detail showing cast of badge from Wilsnack, Germany, Saint Catherine's Church, Lübeck, Germany. Photograph courtesy of photographer: Dr. Jörg Ansorge, Horst (Germany).

The unearthed pilgrim badges from Rostock do not tell a complete story on their own. The judicious use of corroborating evidence from a wide variety of sources allows a knowledgeable researcher such as Dr. Ansorge to share a more detailed and nuanced picture of where Rostock pilgrims went.

Written by Dr. Ann Marie Rasmussen. This post was originally published on the Medieval Badges blog on March 8, 2021.

Works Cited

Ansorge, Jörg. “‘pelgrimmatze in de ere des almechteghen godes’: Pilgerzeichen und Schriftquellen zum mittelalterlichen Wallfahrtswesen in Rostock,” in Verknüpfungen des neuen Glaubens. Die Rostocker Reformationsgeschichte in ihren translokalen Bezügen, edited by Heinrich Holze and Kristen Skottki. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck-Ruprecht, 2019, pp. 29–83.

Badges Across Europe: Rostock, Part Two

GEOGRAPHY LESSON 2: WHERE THE ROSTOCK PILGRIMS WENT

The twenty-nine pilgrim badges found in Rostock testify to journeys to different holy sites. Medieval pilgrims purchased religious badges at the sites they visited and then brought the objects home with them. Dr. Ansorge uses the badges found in Rostock as evidence to see where and how far the Rostock pilgrims travelled. 

Some Rostock pilgrims ventured far to visit holy sites of outstanding importance in medieval Christendom. Santiago de Compostela in Spain, whose badges were mentioned in the previous blog (Part One), is about 2500 kilometers from Rostock. Also found were single badges from Rome (about 1700 kilometers distant), and from Canterbury where Saint Thomas Becket was revered (about 1000 kilometers distant). A single badge was found from Saint-Josse-sur-Mer in northern France (Picardy) (about 1000 kilometers southwest), which may have been a waystation on the pilgrim road to either Santiago or Canterbury and another was found from Einsiedeln (Switzerland) (about 1000 kilometers south), which may have been a waystation on the way to Rome.

The Becket badge from Canterbury is one of only two such badges found in northern Germany. The other was found in the Hansa city of Wismar and can be dated to the 1260s. The Becket shrine at Canterbury was the most important pilgrimage site in England and it was not old; Becket was murdered in 1170 and made a saint in 1173. The quintessential Englishness of Becket’s popularity and its being wrapped up in the specifics of English politics make one wonder whether the Becket badges found in Rostock and Wismar might in fact have been discarded there by English traders and merchants, who frequented Hanseatic League cities.

Pewter badge, Becket head front and back, Canterbury, United Kingdom, 1260-1270, found in Rostock, Germany. Photograph courtesy of photographer: Dr. Jörg Ansorge, Horst (Germany).

Roughly half of the Rostock badges are from the large, old pilgrim sites on or near the Rhine or Meuse rivers. Aachen, Cologne, and Maastricht, for example, were linked together as an established pilgrim route. Besides being relatively close to one another, the great shrines of these cities were ancient, traditional holy sites. Clearly Rostock pilgrims wished to partake in this venerable divinity. To the frequent finds can be added two more sites southwest of Rostock: Stromberg and Steinfeld. These sites are in middle distance range, between 600 and 700 kilometers west or southwest of Rostock and it is likely that Rostock pilgrims visited two or more of them on one trip. 

Some Rostock badge finds testify to journeys to local shrines which could have been completed round trip in about a week. These are represented by badges from now obscure or vanished holy sites at Kenz (about 60 kilometers east northeast of Rostock), Güstrow (about 40 kilometers south), and Sternberg (another 30 kilometers southwest of Güstrow). Also present are badges from the great holy site of Wilsnack, which is less than 200 kilometers southwest of Rostock, and from Königslutter, another 150 kilometers southwest of Wilsnack, both established way-stations on middle and long distance pilgrim journeys. 

Pewter badge, Virgin Mary and Child, Kenz (Mecklenburg-Vorpommern), Germany, found in Rostock, Germany. Photograph courtesy of photographer: Dr. Jörg Ansorge, Horst (Germany).

Pewter badge, Virgin Mary and Child, Aachen (Nordrhein-Westfalen), Germany, found in Rostock, Germany. This badge was found in the Mühlendamm excavation site shown in the previous blog post, Geography Lesson 1. Photograph courtesy of photographer: Dr. Jörg Ansorge, Horst (Germany).

There is a badge from a holy site dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary that is about 300 kilometers east of Rostock in what is now Poland on the mountain, Góra Chełmska (German, Gollenberg, Mount Gollen), east of the town of Koszalin. Easily accessible from the Baltic, it seems likely that Rostock pilgrims would have travelled there by sea. 

And finally, there are two badges that have not yet been identified, probably because they came from small, local holy sites that vanished when the territories around Rostock adopted Lutheranism in the Reformation. Using his skills as an archaeologist-dectective, Dr. Ansorge continues to seek the home and saintly identity of these badges.  

Identifiable by their imagery as coming from specific holy sites, the surviving pilgrim badges found in Rostock can be ordered according to the distance between holy site and find site. They show people from Rostock travelling near and far on what were once well-established roads and pilgrim routes, not all of which are still known today.

Written by Dr. Ann Marie Rasmussen. This post was originally published on the Medieval Badges blog on March 1, 2021.

Works Cited

Ansorge, Jörg. “‘pelgrimmatze in de ere des almechteghen godes’: Pilgerzeichen und Schriftquellen zum mittelalterlichen Wallfahrtswesen in Rostock,” in Verknüpfungen des neuen Glaubens. Die Rostocker Reformationsgeschichte in ihren translokalen Bezügen, edited by Heinrich Holze and Kristen Skottki. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck-Ruprecht, 2019, pp. 29–83.

Badges Across Europe: Rostock

MEDIEVAL BADGES FROM ROSTOCK: FOUR GEOGRAPHY LESSONS

This blog post in four parts focusses on twenty-nine medieval badges found in the Baltic coastal town of Rostock, Germany. It summarizes a recent article by Dr. Jörg Ansorge, one of the premier archaeologists working with pilgrim badges in Germany today. The article discusses all badges that were found in Rostock by 2018 (more have been found since then). Dr. Ansorge pays meticulous attention to different kinds of evidence in order to create rich contexts for the found badges. He draws conclusions that allow us to glimpse people’s religious practices in medieval Rostock and to better understand how medieval people used their religious badges. 

I am excited to be publicizing the work of outstanding archaeologists undertaking urban excavations that add to our knowledge of medieval places less widely known in English-speaking countries. Archaeologists work with all kinds of clues that they unearth themselves, whether from the ground, from archives and books, or drawn, in agreement or disagreement, from the work of other scholars. These blog posts highlight the intellectual complexity of the research archaeologists do. 

ROSTOCK, GERMANY

Rostock is a port city that in the second half of the twentieth century was part of the German Democratic Republic (or East Germany). Straddling the Warnow River, Rostock stretches from the river’s mouth on the Baltic Sea in the north to the city center about ten kilometers upstream, or south. It is the most populous city (ca. 210,000 inhabitants) in the province of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and home to one of the oldest universities in central Europe, the University of Rostock, which was founded in 1419. In the Middle Ages, Rostock was a thriving member of the Hanseatic League, a commercial confederation of merchant guilds and cities located on and near the Baltic and North Seas. Rostock was a self-governing city, with city council (Rat) made of aldermen (Ratsherren) elected from among the elite families. The language spoken in Rostock was Low German and the population was, of course, Catholic until the Reformation.

GEOGRAPHY LESSON 1: BADGES AND SOIL COMPOSITION 

Twenty-nine medieval badges have been found in Rostock. Two of these are scallop shell badges originating in Santiago de Compostela that were found in graves. The majority of the badges (twenty) were found in layers of organically rich, wet soils that were on the surface during medieval times but were buried by subsequent soil deposits or by usage (the German word for this phenomenon is a wonderful composite noun, Feuchtbodensedimente).

Organically rich means that the layer is full of decomposing organic materials such as plant matter and waste, including sewage. Wet means exactly what it says: the soil has been in water for a long time. In medieval cities, all kinds of refuse were dumped into latrines, whose contents were emptied into adjacent rivers and creeks and onto nearby agricultural fields. Archaeologists excavating the remains of medieval cities in northern Germany frequently encounter this waste for another reason. During medieval times the expanding cities of northern Germany required new buildings. The available ground, however, being low-lying and only marginally suitable for buildings, demanded special foundation construction techniques, and these included creating infill by depositing huge quantities of soil and waste. This urban land reclamation and ground elevation, which took place in areas near the waterfront or the sea, was largely completed around the year 1300.

Rostock, two views of the excavation site at Mühlendamm. Mühlendamm (a street name in Rostock), was a mill dam on the Warnow River whose construction began in the mid-thirteenth century. In the photo on the left are the thirteenth-century elevation layers where a Stromberg badge was found (this badge will be shown in part III), which can be dated to 1269. In the photo on the right are the remains of a fourteenth-century mill building. An Aachen badge (this badge will be shown in part II), which dates to c. 1330-1350, was found at this site. In the background of the righthand photo can be seen the Nicolai Church Rostock (founded 1230). The original church, often altered over the centuries and largely destroyed in World War Two, was rebuilt in 1976 and repurposed at that time to include apartments on the higher floors. The square tower visible on this photo dates from 1976. Photographs courtesy of photographer: Dr. Jörg Ansorge, Horst (Germany).

Rostock, main excavation site at Gerberbruch. This was the site of tanning industries outside the town wall near the Warnow River from the thirteenth to twentieth centuries. The red-brown soil near the bottom of the pit is late thirteenth-century waste tan bark. All the sites shown in these photographs are now below sea level because the peat upon which they were built has been compacted by centuries of overburden. Photograph courtesy of photographer: Dr. Jörg Ansorge, Horst (Germany).

Badges are found in these urban foundation deposits for two main reasons. First, medieval pewter tends to disintegrate over time and when temperatures fall below freezing. The anaerobic conditions of wet soil deposits, however, provide ideal conditions for its survival. Second, medieval badges are found in these wet soil deposits because they were discarded into latrines, whose contents were flushed into streams or otherwise put to use in fields or on construction sites. In other words, sometimes medieval people threw their religious badges away (I will return to this point in part IV).

Layers of medieval wet soil deposit are characteristic of medieval urban centres in northern Germany (and indeed, of most cities in Northern Europe, including London). These deposits have another unexpected archaeological bonus: they preserve datable organic material such as timber, datable by dendrochronology, which was used for making foundations for buildings where infill rubbish and waste had been dumped. The contexts of timber, new building construction, and waste thus provide precise dates for the badges, because the badges cannot post-date these materials.

The surprise here is that many religious badges found in Rostock are from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a finding that conforms well to the dating of badges found in other northern German cities such as Stralsund and Wismar. Europe-wide, the use of medieval badges swells and peaks in the fifteenth century, and we might be tempted to hypothesize that these northern city dwellers were, to use a modern phrase, late adopters of badge use, situated as they were far from the centre of European politics and culture. But the archaeological evidence contradicts the hypothesis of late adoption. The dating of the badges shows that early on, by the middle of the thirteenth century, the inhabitants of northern German cities were undertaking pilgrim trips near and far, and they were bringing badges home with them. They were early and apparently enthusiastic adopters of the idea that a person could identify themself as a pilgrim by wearing a small, cheap, mass-produced, ephemeral, image-bearing badge of their very own.

Written by Dr. Ann Marie Rasmussen. This post was originally published on the Medieval Badges blog on February 22, 2021.

Works Cited

Ansorge, Jörg. “‘pelgrimmatze in de ere des almechteghen godes’: Pilgerzeichen und Schriftquellen zum mittelalterlichen Wallfahrtswesen in Rostock,” in Verknüpfungen des neuen Glaubens. Die Rostocker Reformationsgeschichte in ihren translokalen Bezügen, edited by Heinrich Holze and Kristen Skottki. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck-Ruprecht, 2019, pp. 29–83.