Rothenburg pictures.

I forget that I was going to post some more pics from my holiday (which is already feeling like a distant memory!). These are all taken in Rothenburg - a truly beautiful medieval town, with walls surrounding the late medieval style buildings. It's heavily rebuilt as it was before the war, when Allied bombing destroyed much of the original buildings and it's now a tourist venue and whilst it does sometimes feel like a pseudo-Disneyland setting, it does retain a real charm and we spent a couple of lovely days looking around.

The jewel from a military perspective, apart from the defensive walls and towers, is the Reichstadtmuseum. This is cited in the old monastry buildings and has a good collection of arms and armour items, stretching from iron age to the Thirty Years War. I purchased a photography pass (only 3 euro) to allow me to take what I wanted, which I'd recommend if you ever visit. Some items were tricky to get due to the glass cabinets, but they do publish an arms catalogue.

These are the medieval highlights for me. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves, but there are some remarkably well preserved swords and daggers, in quantities that I'd not seen before outside of a state armoury collection.

Holiday pot pouri

To keep this blog ticking over, before it hopefully gets busier later this year - when I can start work on the planned Salute game for 2013 with the Lance and Longbow Society, I will post up some pictures from my summer vacation. These are military related, roughly covering the late medieval and early Renaissance periods. ‘Mrs P’ and I travelled down the Romantische Straße in Germany from Wurzburg to the German Alps, which I can thoroughly recommend and along the way found some castles, museums and churches from which these pictures have been selected.

Above - The carved stone funerary images of German ‘ritters’( the first dated at 1379 the second 1408 and the last 1549), early sixteenth century crossbow and bolts and fine quality swords, all in the Marienburg Castle Museum at Wurzburg.

  

The horse chamfrons, half armour and visored bascinet are sixteenth century, also from the Marienburg. The heater shields appear to be surviving originals from the late fourteenth century of Konrad Hohenlohe and are kept in the church he founded in 1384 in Creglingen (where we went to view the magnificent wooden alter carved by Tilman Riemenschneider).

The other funerary images are in Wurzburg Cathedral and date from the later fourteenth and late fifteenth centuries. The latter is another Reimenschneider carving of Konrad von Schaumberg dating from 1499. The resurrection painting, with a clear rendering of a crossbow and cranequin spanning device, as well as soldier in german style harness with an interesting hammer, is from Creglingen church.

A few more to come soon….