Treasure find from Bokel

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

As a fund of Bokel is near the former farmstead Bockel (or Bokel) on the outskirts of Bevern (Bremervorde) in 1929 discovered, large hoard of about 14 thousand to 15 thousand coins from around 1190 to 1220, as well as some jewelery and amulets made of precious metals in the Literature received.

The find and its scope

On September 3, 1929, two clay pots filled to the brim with coins and around 50 pieces of jewelry were found on a field owned by the farmer A. Borchers in Bockel on the side of today's B 71 while digging a rent half a meter deep.

Mostly it is about Lüneburg bracteates of Emperor Otto IV. (9379 pieces), as well as smaller amounts of other Guelph coins as well as those from Hamburg for the Count of Holstein, from Lübeck and the Archdiocese of Bremen. As the "largest coin treasure ever discovered in Lower Saxony", it is fundamental for knowledge of northern German coinage at the beginning of the 13th century. The treasure must have been hidden after 1213, which can be proven numismatically: A labeled coin minted in Deventer is clearly attributed to Otto I von Geldern, the reigning bishop of Utrecht from 1213-1215.

In addition to the hollow pennies stamped from sheet silver, so characteristic of high medieval coinage, the hoard contained three similarly fragile, large decorative discs pressed from sheet gold (perhaps parts of clasps similar to disc brooches), plus 15 finger rings, gold cross pendants, brooches and other pieces of jewelry. Some have expressed Amulet Character: The mysterious inscription Tebal GVT GVTTANI on an antique cameo decorated Thebalring is interpreted in terms of a defensive spell. With another gem set in gold, an eye made of sheet silver was connected with wire, which probably served as a votive offering to heal an eye disease.

Whereabouts

Of the two earthen vessels, a spout jug and a spherical pot in which the hoard was kept, only images remain. The lion's share of coins went to the Kestner Museum in Hanover in 1930, apart from a few duplicates for the Münzkabinett Berlin , the Focke Museum in Bremen and the Heimatmuseum Bremervörde . The remaining objects, including the gold discs and the thebal ring, were acquired by the Focke Museum in Bremen in 1932 and 1951 and are on display in the museum's foam magazine. only three pieces (an alsengemme in gold mount, which is loosely wired with the aforementioned votive offering, a gold cross and another gold ring) remained in the Kestner Museum.

Date and occasion of the burial

By whom, why and when the hoard was buried does not seem to have been scientifically discussed. There are two opposing positions:

The faith healer Otbert. Woodcut from the Saxon Chronicle of 1492.

The Otbert Theory

Various chronicles from the 13th to 15th centuries ( Albert von Stade , Sachsenchronik , Lübecker Chronik ) report on a simple farmer ("simplicissimus rusticus") Otbert , who at the beginning of the 13th century turned out to be a miracle worker on his farm in Bokel on the Bever river emerged and healed countless sick people with the water of a nearby spring, the "Sültenborn" (brine well) and / or the "Hilgenborn", and made an "enormous profit from the offering". According to the report in the Saxon Chronicle, he used to sit on a throne sprinkled with roses and blow a horn wearing nothing but a simple skirt. Otbert was under the protection of the Guelph Burgvogts von Bremervörde , which was certainly not unselfish , and which had passed into the hands of Heinrich the Lion from the possession of the Archbishop of Bremen since 1167 . The Vogt Hinrich von Oftingenhusen is likely to have skimmed off considerable shares of the miracle healer's income on behalf of his master. In 1218, Archbishop Gerhard I of Bremen managed to regain the castle by means of a ruse: his warriors pretended to be pilgrims in search of Otbert's medicinal bath, so they came to the castle, overpowered the occupation and recaptured the base. The faith healer, who, although regarded by many as a saint, could hardly count on church support for his work, had lost his support with this change of power and fled first to Stade, at the latest to Lübeck in 1227 and is said to have died in Riga later.

The harmony between the place of discovery and the place steeped in history, the dating of coins and Otbert's time of escape, the magical decorative symbols and the traditional healing of the sick left no doubt for Albert Bachmann, the first reporter of this treasure find, that this was part of the hoard left behind on the run of the once famous miracle worker Otbert. However, this assignment remained little recognized until Bernd Ulrich Hucker once again assumed a connection between Find Bokel and the miracle worker Otbert in various publications.

The war chest theory

Numismatists, on the other hand, still hold the assumption that because of the high proportion of Guelph coins, "it could only have been a state treasure or a war treasure belonging to the sons of Henry the Lion ". Meier put the creation of the coins as “around 1195 to 1225”, but from the dating of several final coins “around 1220” did not explicitly conclude that the treasure was buried, which Ernst Grohne only gave as “around 1225, at the latest 1230” .

If the question of whether the hoard came into the earth as early as 1218 or not has ever been answered with greater certainty, the meaning and role of Otbert is more likely to have been clarified.

swell

literature

  • August Bachmann: Who did the Bevern treasure belong to? In: Niedersachsenhaus Nr. 50, December 1928 (supplement of the Bremervörder Zeitung). Reprinted in: Elfriede Bachmann: Works by August Bachmann (1893-1983) , Rotenburg (Wümme) 1993, pp. 136-137.
  • August Bachmann: Otfried von Bockel and the treasure trove of Bockel near Bevern , in: August and Elfriede Bachmann: Bevern near Bremervörde. Historical overview and source publication , Rotenburg 1980, pp. 19–24 and 41.
  • Ortwin Meier: The bracteate find by Bokel Hannover 1932.
  • Ernst Grohne : The medieval jewelry find from Bokel near Bremervörde . In: Niederdeutsche Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 12, 1934, pp. 215–240 (only for the jewelry, in the numismatic classifications it follows Meier).
  • Ernst Grohne: Review of the medieval jewelery find by Bokel , in: Ernst Grohne: Old treasures from the Bremen cultural sector , Bremen 1956, pp. 40–45.
  • Ernst Grohne: A finger ring with magical inscription from the time and surroundings of Heinrich the Lion, The problem of thebal rings . in: Old treasures from the Bremen cultural sector . Bremen 1956, pp. 46-106.
  • Frank Berger: The medieval bracteates in the Kestner Museum Hanover . Hanover 1993.
  • Bernd Ulrich Hucker: The economic foundations of imperial politics in the high Middle Ages , in: Eckhard Schremmer: Economy and social history. Subject and method. Stuttgart 1998, pp. 43-44.
  • S. Krabath: The silver treasure in the cooking pot , Archeology in Lower Saxony 7, 2004, 48-52.
  • Rüdiger Articus: Early Gold from Northern Germany (exhibition catalog), Hamburg: Helms-Museum, 2006.
  • Bernd Ulrich Hucker:  Otbert. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 19, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-428-00200-8 , p. 641 f. ( Digitized version ).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Meier, p. 149
  2. ↑ Berger, 1993, p. 12
  3. ↑ Berger, 1993, p. 12.
  4. ↑ Berger, 1993, p. 12
  5. ↑ Meier, p. 129, no. 367; Berger, p. 330, no.2705
  6. ↑ For the location of Hilgenborn, see the list of natural monuments in the Rotenburg district (Wümme) and Bachmann 1993, p. 147.
  7. ↑ August Bachmann: Who did the Bevern treasure belong to? In: Niedersachsenhaus No. 50, December 1928.
  8. ↑ Hucker, 1998, p. 43f .; Hucker, 1999, p. 641 f .; However, without developing the arguments in detail, as happened in an unpublished lecture in Bremen in 1978.
  9. ↑ Meier, 1932, p. 5. - Grohne, 1934, p. 216, tellingly, although it did not follow the less stable cultural-historical arguments against the Otbert thesis, he did trust the dating of the numismatist Meier.
  10. ↑ Grohne, 1934, pp. 216 and 240. How unsustainable the only approximate, partly stylistically based chronology of the individual, but unmarked coins, is, is shown by the consistently different dates in Berger, 1993.

Web links

Coordinates: 53 ° 25 ′ 38 "  N , 9 ° 10 ′ 53"  E