The bishop’s ecclesiastical silver, liturgical vestments, and secular textiles were transported to Bern.
The city of Lausanne, the cathedral clergy, the bishop, and the Bernese council contested ownership of the cathedral treasury. Various inventories were meant to prevent theft and provide an overview of the assets involved—though this was not entirely successful.
Bern transported eighteen wagonloads of church property back to Bern, including the four tapestries depicting the story of the Roman general Julius Caesar. This is documented by an entry in a contemporary inventory.
The authorities confiscated religious objects for ideological reasons.
In March 1528, the Bernese authorities decreed the dissolution of the convent in Königsfelden and prohibited the celebration of Mass there.
The Bernese convent bailiff ordered the church treasury to be secretly transported to Lenzburg Castle, which was under Bernese authority at the time. There, the treasury was recorded on a list that is now lost.
In March 1528, the entire convent treasury was transported to Bern.
State treasures were kept in the town hall’s archival vault: money, charters, promissory notes, and, remarkably, looted textiles.
Thick walls and a stone vault protected the Bernese government’s treasury. The “upper” vault housed a large cabinet in which the “state antiquities” were kept — predominantly textiles captured in wars and confessional conflicts.
These secular and (formerly) sacred objects no longer had any practical function within the early modern Bernese state. They now functioned as cultural capital — as a repository of value, as a symbol of triumph recalling past military greatness, and as “art.”
Books, minerals, taxidermied animals, ethnological artifacts, archaeological finds, as well as spoils of war were catalogued and put on display.
A new building was built to house the library in 1775.
Paintings and books were arranged on the elegant upper floor, while the remaining collections were densely packed on the ground floor: natural history specimens (minerals, fossils, and preserved animals and plants), archaeological finds, and “ethnographica.”
The field altar of Charles the Bold remained a centerpiece of the collection; in 1827 it was said “to be of Byzantine origin.” It was displayed alongside Arctic clothing from Canada, Persian slippers, and archaeological weapons.
Flags fall apart quickly. To preserve the memory of these trophies, the Confederates began to make copies of the banners they had captured.
Damaged on the battlefield, hung in churches exposed to air and light: the life of a flag was short. And yet these fragile objects were immediate testimonies of battles won, and material bearers of historical memory. The Confederates therefore began making copies. Some copies were replicas in fabric (often less expensive materials than the silks and metallic embellishments of the originals), but flags were often also drawn and recorded in flag books, known as “Fahnenbüchern.” In this two-dimensional form, they were sometimes shown in motion, sometimes laid out flat as flat emblems. This translation into the medium of drawing thus made it possible to preserve fleeting memories made of fragile fabric.
In Zürich wurden die Fahnen im Zeughausinventar abgemalt. Diese Kopien vermitteln dauerhafter als die Originale, wie die nun zerfallenen Fahnen mal ausgesehen haben können. Hier finden wir unter anderen Zeichnungen von dem “Panner” Karls des Kühnen.
In Luzern hingen die erbeuteten Fahnen in der Franziskanerkirche. Im 17. Jahrhundert wurden sie in einem Fahnenbuch abgemalt. Das Fahnenbuch diente als Vorlage für weitere Kopien. Zuerst wurden die Fahnen an den Kirchenwänden gemalt. Später ersetzte man sie durch bemalte gewölbte Holztafeln, die den Eindruck erwecken sollten, dass die Fahnen in der Luft hingen und wehten. Man suchte stets nach Lösungen, um die Erinnerungskultur lebendig zu halten.
The city’s concern about the preservation of its captured textile treasures attests to their growing significance as cultural heritage.
The authorities were concerned about dampness and vermin in the archive rooms of the town hall and began looking for a better place to store the textiles. Initially, they considered moving the pile of “carpets, altar decorations, and vestments” to the arsenal.
They were said to be monuments to the victory over the Duke of Burgundy, remains of the pre-Reformation Minster treasury, and other ‘accoutrements of ’ päpstlichen Mummereien”—a pejorative reference to Catholic “theatrics”.
In the end, however, they chose the dry and clean sacristy in the Minster. A new inventory list documents the 86 objects transferred there.
In the late medieval arsenal of Basel, the cannons themselves seem to speak of their own destructive power.
The people of Basel brought two large bombards bearing the Burgundian coat of arms straight from the battlefield home to Basel. They were kept in the arsenal on Petersplatz. The armory had been built in 1438 as a grain store and served, until the 18th century, for the storage of both weapons and grain. Almost nothing remains of the arsenal building today
Some fragments of the late medieval wall paintings from the Basel arsenal have survived. They reveal the old arrangement of the cannons displayed there around 1474, before the Burgundian spoils were added. To the right of the ‘Widder’ (‘Ram’) and the ‘Rennerin’ (‘the Runner’), one named ‘Burgunderin’ was later installed — the cannon still kept today in the Historisches Museum Basel.
Rhymed verses were painted on the walls above each cannon. The texts that extolled the merits of each weapon, formulated in the first person, as if the cannons were speaking themselves. Accompanying the texts were emblematic images. The so-called Rennerin (‘the Runner’), for instance, is shown as a horse rider at full gallop, whip raised, chasing after her own banner scroll. After the Burgundian Wars, a new rhyme was added to the wall: ‘Burgund bin ich genandt – brich Maur und Want’ (‘Burgundy I am called – I break wall and partition’). The “Burgunderrin” (Burgundian woman) was just one of several trophies included in the Basel armory display. There was also the ‘Strauss’ (‘Ostrich’) from Grandson and the ‘Rauch’ (‘Smoke’) from Murten.
The ‘Burgunderin’ by Jean de Malines left the arsenal in 1874 and was included in the city’s medieval collection. This collection formed the core holdings of the Historical Museum when it was founded in 1894.