Mos teutonicus
Mos teutonicus ( Latin "German custom", "German style") is in medieval documents the reference to a procedure according to German law or German custom, especially the separate burial more teutonico ("in German way"), which in the High Middle Ages temporarily Practiced method of cutting corpses into pieces of meat and bones by boiling them.
application
The method of mos teutonicus was used for some high-ranking people who had died far from the place intended for their burial site, and was intended to make it possible to transfer the bones to their destination without the possibility of decomposition during the journey.
Especially during the crusades, attempts were made to bury the corpses of fallen knights with the greatest possible honor. When the crusaders returned to their homeland, the particularly high-ranking dead were often exhumed to bring their remains back home. When King corpses procedure was used for preservation prior to the transfer, which was to "to the body cure and vigorous boil five hours to separate the meat from the bones." Then the bones were brought back home under guard and buried there again with prayers.
This type of burial was forced for practical reasons, as it was impossible to bring a corpse intact from the Mediterranean to Europe. The internal organs were buried in special places, for example in the courtyard of a chapel. The preservation and intactness of the bones was given great importance until the late Middle Ages, since according to Christian belief the bones of the deceased would be resurrected at the Last Judgment . In the Middle Ages, the idea was widespread that the bones would have to be completely preserved.
Evidence in sources
Boncompagno da Signa († around 1240) offers a brief description in his Boncompagnus :
"Teutonici autem eviscerant corpora excellentium virorum, qui moriuntur in provinciis alienis, et reliqua membra tamdiu faciunt in caldariis decoqui, donec tota caro, nervi et cartilagines from ossibus separantur, et postmodum eadem lotamis, admirifero pigment su odorifero deportant. "
“The Germans take the entrails from the corpses of high-ranking men when they die in foreign countries, and let the rest of them boil in kettles until all the meat, tendons and cartilage are separated from the bones; these bones, washed in fragrant wine and sprinkled with spices , then take them back home. "
An earlier case that has only recently been discovered through archaeological research is Emperor Lothar III. When he died in the winter of 1137 during his Italian campaign in Breitenwang , Tyrol , according to the findings of an amino acid analysis published in 1989, his body was boiled for about six hours before the bones were then transferred to Königslutter in Lower Saxony , where they were also used for public homage To be able to show.
The earliest reference to sources is for the year 1167. After the conquest of Rome by Frederick I , a devastating epidemic struck, which succumbed a large part of the army and its leadership. The Historia Welforum Weingartensis mentions among the dead the Archbishop of Cologne ( Rainald von Dassel ), the Bishops of Speyer ( Gottfried II. ), Regensburg ( Eberhard der Schwabe ), Prague ( Daniel I ), Verden ( Hermann von Verden ) and Liège ( Alexander II of Orle ), also the princes Friedrich IV of Swabia , Welf VII , Berengar III. von Sulzbach and Heinrich von Tübingen , and adds:
"Quorum omnia pene ossa carnibus per excoctionem consumptis, ad propria reducta sunt. Translata sunt autem et ossa Guelfonis nostri et in monasterio Staingadem a patre suo fundato reposita sunt. "
“In almost all of these, the bones were brought back to their respective homeland after they had been detached from the meat by cooking. The bones of our Guelph were also transferred and were buried in the Steingaden monastery founded by his father . "
Examples
The most prominent example of the application of mos teutonicus is Frederick I himself. When he drowned during the Third Crusade in June 1190 in Cilicia, his heart and entrails were buried in Tarsus , his flesh in early July in St. Peter's Church in Antioch , while the bones of his son Friedrich VI. were carried by Swabians at least as far as Tire , presumably to bury them in Jerusalem. The Babenberg dukes Friedrich I (1198) and Leopold VI. of Austria (1230) were buried in this way.
End of practice
With the Bull Detestande feritatis first published on September 27, 1299 and again on February 18, 1300 , Pope Boniface VIII decreed an ecclesiastical ban on dividing or boiling corpses for burial purposes, as he viewed this as "abuse". However, the procedure remained in use for a longer period of time during military campaigns and campaigns, because it was important to have the remains of the noble people where they could be looked after appropriately. Finally, the papal ban on mos teutonicus encouraged the search for suitable methods for the at least temporary conservation of corpses . The separate heart burial took on institutional forms that lived on, especially in the Catholic ruling houses, into modern times.
Trivia
A late echo find this custom in the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm by Brother Lustig (KHM 81).
St. Peter resurrects a king's daughter: there he was brought to her, and then he said, “Bring me a kettle with water,” and when it was brought he told everyone to go out, and only Brother Lustig was allowed to stay with him. Then he cut off all the limbs of the dead and threw them into the water, made a fire under the kettle, and let them boil. And when all the flesh had fallen from the bones, he took out the beautiful white bone and laid it on a table and lined up and arranged it according to its natural order. When that was done, he stepped in front of it and said three times: "In the name of the Most Holy Trinity, dead, stand up." And the third time the king's daughter rose alive, healthy and beautiful.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Johannes Laudage after Barbara Hartl: Schön für die Ewigkeit ( Memento from March 13, 2013 in the Internet Archive ), PM Magazin (accessed on November 4, 2012).
- ↑ Boncompagno da Signa, Boncompagnus 1, 27, 2; electronic edition by Steven Wright ( September 20, 2016 memento on the Internet Archive ).
- ↑ Jeff L. Bada, Bernd Herrmann, IL Payan, EH Man: Amino acid racemization in bone and the boiling of the German Emperor Lothar I , in: Applied Geochemistry 4 (1989), pp. 325-327.
- ↑ a b Reinhold Röhricht : On the history of the funeral more teutonico. In: Journal for German Philology 24 (1892), p. 505.
- ↑ Historia Welforum Weingartensis , MGH , Scriptores XXI, p. 471 ( digital version ).
- ↑ Knut Görich , Die Staufer: Herrscher und Reich , 2. durchges. and actual Edition, CH Beck, Munich 2006 (= C.-H.-Beck-Wissen, 2393; ISBN 3-406-53593-3 ), p. 67
- ↑ stift-heiligenkreuz.org
- ↑ Elizabeth A. Brown, Death and the human body in the later Middle Ages: The legislation of Boniface VIII on the division of the corpse , in: Viator 12 (1981), pp. 221-270, again in dies., The Monarchy of Capetian France and Royal Ceremonial , Variorum, Aldershot 1991 (= Collected studies series, 345; ISBN 0-86078-279-4 ), chap. VI.