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. 

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.