Kostbare Koggen: seltene Bilder aus illuminierten Manuskripten und gotischen Kirchen

Abstract

The modern history of the Bremen cog of 1380 begins in October 1962 with pictures of cogs on the seals of medieval Hanseatic cities. Cogs are also known to us today from miniatures in illuminated manuscripts and frescoes in churches. For the German Maritime Museum book "Die Kogge: Sternstunde der deutschen Schiffsarchäologie" (The cog - a defining moment in German maritime archaeology) I succeeded in assembling a large number of images, several of them unknown until now. The aim of my search was to make the book visually attractive. After its publication in 2003, I continued with my search - this time for a twenty-seven-metre-long illuminated wall in the museum's cog exhibition, which was opened in the summer of 2005, and can now present nineteen new finds. As a result, sixty cog pictures - on miniatures, frescoes and etchings - are currently known, and the number prompts me to seek initial answers to two questions: Do the pictures' times and places of origin match the construction times and origins of the archaeological cog finds? And: What role did the vessel type known as the Hansa cog play in the awareness of contemporaries, and in what context were cogs portrayed? Images of cogs in manuscripts and churches existed from the early thirteenth to early fifteenth centuries - roughly the time from which the discovered wreckage dates. I have been able to trace cog pictures to all countries in the Hanseatic region apart from Poland and the Baltic countries. The miniatures show that cogs were probably familiar in the countries where archaeologists found no wrecks: Indeed, most of the manuscripts in this collection come from England and France. Analysis of the pictures of cogs clearly shows that this type of ship was certainly familiar to contemporaries, and that it is certainly no mere scientist's invention. People at that time knew this vessel well. Whether they always called it a cog, however, or associated this type of ship with the word ‘cog’ is something we cannot ascertain from the pictures that survive. Today, cogs are considered to be the ships used by Hanseatic merchants: No other type of ship is mentioned as frequently in the records of the Hanseatic towns, and we also see cogs on the cities' official seals. Yet miniatures in manuscripts dealing with cogs generally show people of entirely different social origins: kings, priests and the aristocracy. Those among the nobility who commissioned pictures had themselves portrayed in the process of carrying out grand military deeds of the past and in the most recent ship of the time - the cog. The leaders of the church and the landed nobility also commissioned images of saints that included cogs. Those who were important and had money in the fourteenth century used cogs and derived prestige from them - or at least from a portrayal of them.