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.

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). 

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.

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.