Gertrudis Night
The Gertrudisboulevard night is the night of 16 on March 17, named after the day Saint Gertrude of Nivelles , whose feast day is March 17th.
The Gertrudis Night of 1278, in which Count Wilhelm von Jülich and his horsemen attacked the imperial city of Aachen and were killed by the city's citizens , is particularly well known .
The events
That night, Count Wilhelm von Jülich, with 469 armed riders in the wake, entered the city to collect taxes due for King Rudolf I of Habsburg, who was in conflict with the Bohemian King Ottokar II. Přemysl . Wilhelm was accompanied by his sons Roland and Wilhelm and Wirich I. von Frentz (other sources: with three sons). The legend of the defensive blacksmith speaks of another 500 followers.
Wilhelm entered the city through the Cologne Middle Gate , which had been opened by traitors . When the intruders reached the market, resistance formed, which moved them to flee via Jakobstrasse to the Jakobstor . On the way there, roughly at the level of the former White Women's Monastery, they were killed. The legend reports that the blacksmith had already expected Wilhelm and "wordlessly killed him with his heavy iron hammer". Other sources speak of one or more butchers instead of the blacksmith.
The consequences
In the so-called atonement contract of September 20, 1280 at Schönau Castle , the city of Aachen was obliged to pay a large amount of damages to the count widow Richarda. It remains to be speculated whether the unexpected death of Wilhelm IV in Aachen prevented the impending war between the county and the Archbishops of Cologne.
At the site of the event, an atonement memorial was first erected, parts of which still existed until around 1800. In 1909 the well memorial for the fortified blacksmith was erected there. Wilhelm's body was buried in the church in Nideggen below his strong castle, the tumba provided with a Latin inscription with reference to the event (German translation after Pippke / Pallhuber, quotation in extract: “What anger, citizens, urged you to destroy the princes ! Wilhelm IV. Was like a shining star of his ancestors, the deeds of his ancestors point to him. Gifted with energy, he wore the white knight's cloak over his shoulders. He was killed ... ".)
The Gertrudis Night in poetry
Otto Friedrich Gruppe's poem Der Schmied von Aachen was written in 1854 . The group wrongly moved the event to 1277. A historical novel by Johann Walter Neumann also bears the title The Blacksmith of Aachen . The book was published in 1909. The novel Getrudisnacht by Günter Krieger is from 2001 .
literature
- Thomas R. Kraus : Jülich, Aachen and the Reich. Studies on the origin of the sovereignty of the Counts of Jülich up to 1328 (= publications of the Aachen City Archives. 5). Mayer, Aachen 1987, ISBN 3-87519-109-9 , p. 137 ff.
Web link
- The blacksmith was a butcher (PDF file; 41 kB)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Walter Pippke, Ida Pallhuber: The Eifel. Voyages of discovery through landscape, history, culture and art - from Aachen to the Moselle. DuMont, Cologne 1984, ISBN 3-7701-1413-2 , p. 36.
- ^ Legends and poems of the German people from the mouths of poets, Berlin 1854