Mercenaries of Theodul

When mercenaries of Theodule , also called "Theo" is the remains of a twenty to thirty year old man in elegant clothes, the late 16th century on the upper Theodulpass in about 3000 meters above sea level at the foot of the Matterhorn , the glaciers crashed.

1985 aperte the corpse with all its equipment and clothes. These included a wheel lock pistol , a sword and numerous knives, which led to the assumption that the man was a mercenary . In the end, however, he was interpreted as an unfortunate member of the upper class due to his high-quality weapons inventory in combination with the expensive clothing and the lavishly filled coin pouch.

The discoverer gave skull fragments, weapons, coins and a number of smaller objects to the Matterhorn Museum Zermatlantis , to which the remains and the finds are to be returned (as of January 2016). In 2015, Nicole Reynaud Savioz analyzed the remains of animal bones at the site, 252 of which were recovered between 1985 and 2013. Reynaud Savioz succeeded in identifying the not easily distinguishable bones that had previously been assigned to a horse as mule bones. The animal can only be used in the 15th / 16th Date of the century, so cannot be directly associated with the mercenary.

The Valais History Museum is the owner of the finds . It keeps the majority of them in its collection center. From February 2014 to February 2015 «Theo» was brought to an exhibition in Bolzano .

The minting dates of the twelve coins that the man carried with him are between 1578 and 1588.

literature

• Sophie Providoli, Patrick Elsig, Philippe Curdy (eds.): 400 years in glacier ice. The Theodulpass near Zermatt and its «mercenaries». Publisher here + now, Baden 2016.
• Werner Meyer : The mercenary from the Theodul Pass and other glacier finds from Switzerland. In: Frank Höpfel , Werner Platzer, Konrad Spindler (eds.): The man in the ice. Report on the international symposium in Innsbruck 1992. (= publications of the University of Innsbruck. Vol. 187). Self-published by the University, Innsbruck 1992, pp. 321–333.

Remarks

1. ↑ Glacier archeology . Story from the freezer , in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, November 6, 2015.
2. ↑ The nobleman in the glacier who is the «Valais Ötzi». Retrieved July 19, 2017 . 
3. ↑ The nobleman in the glacier who is the «Valais Ötzi». Retrieved July 19, 2017 . 
4. ↑ Nicole Reynaud Savioz: Mules and rock horses: the animal bone remains from the Theodulpass , Sophie Providoli, Patrick Elsig, Philippe Curdy (eds.): 400 years in glacier ice. The Theodulpass near Zermatt and its «mercenaries». Verlag hier + Jetzt, Baden 2016, pp. 71–82, here: p. 71.
5. ^ Albert Hafner: History from the ice - Archaeological finds from alpine glaciers and ice hollows. In: Communications from the Natural Research Society in Bern. Vol. 66 (2009), pp. 159–171, here p. 161 ( digitized version ).