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Money bags found in leg of statue in German church
Restorers working at St. Andrew’s Church in Eisleben in the east-central German state of Saxony-Anhalt, discovered four bags of coins from around 1640 in the cavity of the leg of a statue of a kneeling count. They were hidden in the count’s leg during the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) when Swedish occupying troops wreaked havoc in the area, forcing the local population to house them, feed them and pay them large amounts of cash.
Conservators found the treasure in 2022. The leather bags contained 816 coins, including an extremely valuable “golden angel,” several gold ducats, gold double ducats and silver thalers, half-thalers and quarter-thalers, plus 800 pennies. This was an enormous amount of money in an era when a miner made 24 pennies (one thaler) a week.
The most valuable gold coins were wrapped in paper and labeled in a way that indicates the money belonged to the church treasury. “However, it is not the bell pouch for the Sunday collection,” [head of the State Coin Cabinet of Saxony-Anhalt Ulf] Dräger said. “Instead, it is the collected income from special services provided by the pastors,” such as weddings, baptisms and funerals. Pastors also collected money from “chair fees,” in which congregants would pay to sit in prominent seats in the church, he added.
Historians know that from 1561, Eisleben had an “Aerarium Pastorale” — a common parish fund that was used as a pension and health fund, as social insurance for pastors, and to promote the training of theologians. “Perhaps we now have this fund before us,” Dräger said. “Historical research will show this.”
Martin Luther was born in Eisleben in 1483 and died there in 1546. He gave his last four sermons from the pulpit in the Church of St. Andrew and his funeral was held there, although his body was taken to Wittenberg for burial by order of the Elector of Saxony. In Luther’s time, Eisleben was the capital of the county of Mansfeld, ruled by the counts of the House of Mansfeld, several of whom converted to Protestantism, splitting from the Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Emperor to follow Martin Luther. Luther acted as intermediary between the Catholic and Protestant Mansfeld Counts, negotiating a unique ceasefire in the roiling conflict of the Reformation: St. Andrew’s held Catholic masses in the mornings and Protestant services in the afternoon. As a matter of fact, Luther was only in town because he was settling another dispute between the Mansfelds. He arrived in January, rapidly took ill and died on February 18th. His body lay in state at St. Andrew’s for four days before it was removed to Wittenberg.
The statue where the money was found was depicts one of the Mansfeld counts, namely Count Johann Albrecht von Mansfeld-Arnstein (1522-1586). It’s a high-relief scene of the count and his wife Countess Magdalena von Mansfeld (1530-1565) kneeling at the foot of the cross. The sculpture marks the tomb of the countess which was installed there in 1574, a decade after her death. Sixty-five years or so later, someone, perhaps a church functionary, cached the pension fund in his leg.
Originally built in the 12th century, the church was undergoing a major reconstruction when Martin Luther was born. Most of the church that stands today — the three-aisled nave, choir and ground floor of the tower — were completed by 1486. The rest of the tower and dome were added to the Late Gothic hall in 1714-23. The wooden pulpit where Luther preached his last sermons is still present and has been a site of pilgrimage since his death.
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