Reinoldus

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Reinold von Montalban, head of the statue in the Reinoldikirche in Dortmund (1300-1350)

Saint Reinoldus (also Reinhold von Köln) has been the city ​​patron of Dortmund since the 11th century . With the transfer of the Reinoldus relics from Cologne to Dortmund, allegedly under Anno II , a change of patronage of the main church in Dortmund was connected. As recent research since 1997 suggests, but cannot conclusively prove, there was an exchange of relics between the two cities ( Pantaleon's relics for Reinoldus relics ). According to another thesis, the former Marienkirche became St. Reinoldi . Soon a new St. Mary's Church was built in the immediate vicinity.

The legend

The Heymons children on Bayard, keystone in the crossing of the Reinoldikirche in Dortmund
Dortmund, Reinoldikirche

"It should be relatively rare that one has to look for traces of the patron saint of a church and a city outside of historical tradition alone in legend and poetry", regretted the former superintendent of the Reinoldikirche, Hans Lindemann, in his outline of the Reinold saga in the 1950s. And so for Dortmund the strange amalgamation of two traditions - that of a hero as well as that of an epic saint - can be ascertained into an impressive fusion in the veneration of the patron.

The hagiography Reinolds is complemented by a chanson de geste . Thereafter Reinoldus was born as one of four sons of Count Haimon and his wife Aya and as the nephew of Charlemagne . Reinold and his brothers, all together called the four Haimons children , escaped a war with Charlemagne on his miracle horse Bayard, as the heroic epic depicts. Reinold built the impregnable fortress of Montalban, which was besieged by Charlemagne for many years, but without to be able to conquer him. The ruler finally complied with Ayas, who was a sister of Karl's sister, to spare her sons, but demanded a high price: after Reinold and his brothers had defied seven years of persecution and siege, they finally surrendered. The horse Bayard, however, was drowned and Reinoldus went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in mourning over the loss of his beloved animal. There he did a great job in conquering Jerusalem.

The Legend of returned Reinold then back to Europe and was first a monk at the monastery of St. Pantaleon in Cologne. He hired himself as a stone carrier for the construction of the Hildebold Cathedral . Since he worked for too little wages, he incurred the anger and envy of the other workers, who killed him with a hammer and threw him in a sack into a water near the Rhine. A paralyzed woman was called to the scene of the bloody act by a dream. She found the body, which was miraculously recovered from her. Then she was healed of her ailments. At the same time, all the bells of the episcopal city of Cologne began to ring in a miraculous way.

Now, legend and epic epic and the German prose version based on these types of text, “The Four Haimons Children”, communicate that the clergy in Cologne did not succeed in burying the dead in a church. The cart drove off by itself and rolled another path with the dead man and only stopped in Dortmund. At this point, the citizens of Dortmund built the Reinoldi Church in honor of the saint . From now on he was the city's patron saint.

Whether the legendary Reinold von Montalban and the holy martyr from Cologne, who was never canonized and yet became a stone witness in the north portal of Cologne Cathedral, are one and the same person is historically not verifiable and is valid many historians as excluded. Throughout the centuries, however, the people of Dortmund revered “their” patron saint as a strong hero, who also stood by them in war and need.

They attributed their victory in the Great Feud in the late 14th century to their patron saint. According to legend, Reinoldus himself was seen on the city walls, catching the stone balls of the enemy catapults and throwing them back at the enemy. The depiction of their patron in the main church of St. Reinoldi, which depicts him as a young knight armed with a shield and sword and dating from the period between 1300 and 1350, should have supported the firm belief in rescue by the venerated saint. There was also a statue of Reinoldus at the entrance to the city. Emperor Charles IV rode through the Ostentor in 1377 when he visited Dortmund.

Worship and iconography

Two important aspects can be found in the veneration of Reinoldus since the Middle Ages. As already mentioned, the knightly past of the legendary figure is emphasized in Dortmund. The portrayals of the city patron show him well armed with a shield and sword. The shield shows the coat of arms of Brabant in colored illustrations and a golden lion in black. This is the way Conrad von Soest Reinold painted in 1404 on a portable altar made for a Dortmund bourgeois family. According to B. Weifenbach's research, the Reinoldus figure, which has been erected in the Reinoldikirche since the early 14th century, has an equivalent in the Roland statues widespread in northern German cities . The idea of ​​the ideal combination of Reinold and Roland statues was suggested by A. Stange in 1933 and by H. Appuhn in the 1970s. However, a merger or even equality of both figures, as suggested by the chronicler Beurhaus, is more than absurd and lacks any historical basis.

In Dortmund, the most powerful of all guilds in the imperial city, that of the cloth merchants, named itself after the city's saint. At that time, the people of Dortmund carried the shrine with the bones of their patron saint every year in a solemn procession through and around the city. Part of a street that used to go around the walls is still called the “Holy Way” today. The appreciation for the legendary knight has remained. In the present, a new Reinoldigilde of influential personalities has formed, which has set itself the goal of promoting Dortmund.

In other cities, the saint is often viewed from a completely different perspective. The monasticism of the knight is emphasized here. The facet of Reinold's manual work in building the cathedral comes to the fore. Reinold is the patron saint of the construction industry there, with a hammer and a measuring stick as an attribute. These attributes are given to Reinold in Lindlar and Cologne. At the end of the 19th century, commemorative stamps of the Dutch “R. K. Hanzebond Sint Reinoldus te Zwolle “the saint with a hammer in his hand. The Steinhauergilde zu Lindlar , founded in 1706, still bears the name St. Reinoldus today .

Reinold's day of remembrance in the Catholic Church is January 7th. He is considered the patron saint of Dortmund, the stonemason, bricklayer and sculptor. Every year around January 7th, an international congress takes place which brings together researchers from all over the world on the city's patron saint.

Relics

After the mortal body of Reinoldus had found its way to Dortmund, there was considerable admiration for it. The Reinoldikirche still shows today how much effort the Dortmunders took to ensure that the bones were properly stored. These survived the great city fire in the crypt of the old church in 1232 and were finally kept and venerated in an impressive reliquary house, which is still there today, since the middle of the 15th century. The bones themselves were kept in a wooden ark, the head in a silver reliquary, probably in the form of a bust. If during the visit of Emperor Charles IV in Dortmund in 1377 there was no more suitable gift for the distinguished guest than opening the shrine to him as a great relic collector and giving him a few bones as a gift, the more carefree one became in the course of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation turmoil. While Charles IV added the relics he had been given to the cathedral treasury of Prague during his lifetime, the wooden ark with the bones of the saint was given to the patrician Albert Klepping, who had remained Catholic, in a kind of night-and-fog operation Provost of Cologne Cathedral gave away. Through various stations, they finally came to Toledo in Spain in 1616, where they are still venerated today. The Dortmunders initially noticed nothing of the disappearance of the once so carefully guarded treasure. When money was needed for maintenance work on the Reinoldi Church in 1792, Reinold's silver head reliquary was also sold. His trace was then lost.

However, when Dortmund celebrated its 1100th anniversary in 1982, a delegation from Toledo brought a large relic of Saint Reinoldus to Dortmund on loan. After the celebrations were over, something was left behind in the city: the bone was cut lengthways and half of it was given to the Dortmunders. Since the Protestant Reinoldi community showed no interest in keeping this relic again at its actual destination or even venerating it , a solution was found in the Catholic provost church of St. Johannes Baptist , the former church of the Dominican monastery : the Dortmund jeweler Rüschenbeck donated a new one precious shrine made of silver and gold, which is now kept and shown in the altar of the church. The patron saint had returned to “his” city.

literature

  • Horst Appuhn: Reinold, the Roland of Dortmund, an art-historical attempt on the creation of the Rolande. In: Rüdiger Becksmann (Hrsg.): Contributions to the art of the Middle Ages. Festschrift for Hans Wentzel. Berlin 1975, ISBN 3-7861-7014-2 , pp. 1-10.
  • Jochen Behrens: Reinoldus and the Dortmund community. Reflections on the relationship between the city patron and the city. In: Thomas Schilp (Ed.): Heaven, Hell, Purgatory - Concepts of the afterlife and social history in late medieval Dortmund. Essen 1996, ISBN 3-88474-516-6 , pp. 39-43.
  • Hans Jürgen Brandt: St. Reinoldus in Dortmund. On the importance of the “saint patron” in communal history. In: Gustav Luntowski, Norbert Reimann (Hrsg.): Dortmund, 1100 years of city history. Festschrift. Dortmund 1982, ISBN 3-7932-4081-9 , pp. 79-105.
  • Dye legend van sent Reynolt merteler ind monich zu Coellen - legend of Saint Reinoldus from Dat duytsche passionail, Cologne 1485 (which owns the Cologne city library). In: Mitteilungen der Dortmunder Stadtbibliothek, No. 3–4, Dortmund 1922, pp. 6–7.
  • Paul Fiebig: St. Reinoldus in cult, liturgy and art. In: Contributions to the history of Dortmund and the county of Mark, 53. Dortmund 1956, pp. 1–200.
  • Joseph Hansen: The Reinolds legend and its relationship to Dortmund. In: Research on German History, 26. Göttingen 1886, pp. 105–121.
  • Gerhard Knörich: Saint Reinold. In: Contributions to the history of Dortmund and the county of Mark, 31. Dortmund 1924, pp. 121–127.
  • Hans Lindemann: About the Reinold legend. In: St. Reinoldi in Dortmund. For the rededication of St. Reinoldi Church on behalf of the presbytery, published by Hans Lindemann, Dortmund 1956.
  • Heinrich Schauerte : Reinold, the patron saint of Dortmund. Dortmund 1914.
  • Thomas Schilp (ed.): Reinoldus and the Dortmund community, the medieval city and its holy patron. Publications of the Dortmund City Archives, 15. Klartext-Verlag, Essen 2000, ISBN 3-88474-918-8 .
  • Alfred Stange: A panel by Konrad von Soest. In: Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch, 7/8, NF 2/3. Frankfurt am Main, 1933–1934.
  • Luise von Winterfeld : From the history of the Reinoldikirche - The latest research on the Reinoldus relics. In: St. Reinoldi in Dortmund. For the rededication of St. Reinoldi Church on behalf of the presbytery, published by Hans Lindemann, Dortmund 1956.
  • Oliver Neumann: The Dortmund Propsteikirche - A historical picture arc. Dortmund 1992, ISBN 3-7932-5081-4 .
  • Beate Weifenbach : The Haimons children in the version of the Aarau manuscript from 1531 and the Simmern print from 1535. A contribution to the transmission of French narrative material in medieval and early modern literature (Dissertation FU Berlin 1997, 2 vols.). Peter Lang, Frankfurt a. M. 1999, ISBN 3-631358-73-3 , especially vol. 1: Introduction to the European Haimons child tradition .
  • Beate Weifenbach: Sankt Reinoldus in Dortmund. A knight saint from a philological point of view. In: Contributions to the history of Dortmund and the county of Mark, 89. 1998, ISBN 3-88474-736-3 , pp. 9–66.
  • Beate Weifenbach: Freedom through privileges and protection through relics. Considerations for the late medieval staging of imperial city freedom on the occasion of Charles IV's visit to Dortmund. In: Blätter für deutsche Landesgeschichte, 137. 2001, pp. 223–256.
  • Beate Weifenbach: Le culte de Saint Renaud en Allemagne et les adaptations allemandes et néerlandaises des Quatre Fils Aymon. In: Études Médiévales, 4. 2002, ISBN 2-901121-50-0 , pp. 352–364 (+ 9 plates).
  • Beate Weifenbach (Ed.): Reinold. A knight for Europe. Protector of the city of Dortmund. Logos Verlag, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-832504-21-4 .
  • Ibid .: The Reinoldiconography and its interpretation, pp. 151–174.
  • Ibid .: Die Historie van Sent Reynolt and the Historia beati martiris Reinoldi [text in German / Latin], pp. 191–260.
  • Ibid .: The reliquary list of the Reinoldikloster in Cologne [facsimile with commentary], pp. 261–277.
  • Beatrice Weifenbach: Généalogie et topographie littéraires in Renaut de Montauban. Sur le succès d'une «chanson d'identification». In: Pré-publications of the Société Rencesvals.
  • Andrea Zupancic: Saint Reinoldus - knight and city patron. In: Heimat Dortmund, 1. 2000, pp. 11–15.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Weifenbach 1998.
  2. ↑ Weifenbach 2004.

Web links

Commons : Renaud de Montauban  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Commons : Saint Reinhold  - collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Reinoldus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION City patron of the city of Dortmund
DATE OF BIRTH 8th century or 9th century
DATE OF DEATH 9th century