Silver is a monetary asset. For this reason, Burgundian silver treasures were frequently melted down and sold.
In the booty registers (Beuterödeln) compiled after the battle that listed all of the objects seized, silver and gold objects were appraised according to their weight. The symbolic and artistic-craft value of the elaborately worked pieces from the Burgundian court was initially of little importance — partly because the duke owned so many similar vessels. The monetary value of the metals was what mattered most.
Many silver bowls from the Burgundian booty were sold and melted down. From the silver thus obtained, new works of art could be created, or coins minted. Individual trophies, however, became symbolically valuable as tellers of the story of victory, and thus escaped the metalsmith’s furnace.
The Confederates hung the flags that they captured on the battlefield in their churches where they became quasi-holy objects.
When the Confederates captured flags on the battlefield, they hung them in their churches. God had granted them the victory and captured flags marked divine blessing. From military field-signs, the Confederates thus transformed captured flags into sacred trophies. Annual commemorations of particular battles (“Schlachtjahrzeiten”) were occasions on which the community could connect itself with the heroic deeds of its ancestors — ancestors who had defeated a common enemy and brought his flags home.
The Basel chaplain Johannes Knebel reported that after the Battle of Murten in 1476, ‘the people of Basel returned full of joy […] by the grace of God, and they brought with them their swallow-tailed banner, as well as another, golden one […] and they all entered the Basel church and knelt down — especially the standard-bearers and knights — on the steps in the middle of the choir before the altar, and gave thanks to God, the Holy Virgin Mary, and the 10,000 Martyrs for this wondrous and great triumph and victory, which had been granted to them from heaven.’ Such rituals strengthened the cohesion of the community and conveyed a sense of shared historical consciousness. In Zurich, a large portion of captured battle flags hung in the Wasserkirche. It is unclear, however, whether the Burgundian banners were among them.
A piece of armor captured in the 15th century was long said to have belonged to Berchtold V? Today, this seems questionable…
Dem erbeuteten Harnisch eine völlig neue Geschichte anzuhängen, war für die Berner im 16. Jahrhundert eine sinnvolle Verwertung einer alten Rüstung. Militärisch konnte man sie nicht mehr verwenden. Einst ein luxuriöser Harnisch eines wahrscheinlich burgundischen oder savoyischen Adeligen, war sie unter den Trophäen und eigenen Rüstungen und Waffen im Zeughaus ein seltenes Stück, aber eines ohne Geschichte. Damit bot er sich an für die Ausstattung der Berchtold-Figurine. Diese historische Überschreibung gehört also zur Geschichte des Harnisches und ist mehr als nur eine “falsche” Zuschreibung.
In reformed Bern, ritual implements confiscated from the monasteries were melted down, primarily to mint coins.
On the authorities’ orders, goldsmiths reworked the ecclesiastical implements.
They separated the gold and silver and melted them into silver and gold bars for coin minting. This served a dual purpose: the implements of the old (Catholic) faith were destroyed and rendered unusable, while the silver thus obtained could be put to social use, in the form of money, for purposes such as feeding the poor and the sick. At least 32 kilograms of silver were recovered from the melted-down objects from Königsfelden.
The authorities classified the looted objects according to their own criteria. They sorted out and disposed of things that seemed useless to them.
In the eighteenth century, the Bernese council ordered that the stored Burgundian spoils be arranged according to the principle of “like with like.”
Flags went to the arsenal. Medieval white linen cloths were placed at the hospital’s disposal. The ecclesiastical textiles were to be examined to determine whether it would be financially viable to unravel them and recycle their metal threads. The council records contain no indication of this having been carried out. The magnificent medieval tapestries were once again carefully packed and put into storage. We cannot reconstitute what the city council did, in effect, sort out. This will forever remain a gap in the historical record.
Precious stones often changed hands. Particularly notable pieces were frequently pawned by rulers to raise money. Sometimes they were acquired by rivals.
As is still true today, jewels in the early modern period were not merely symbolic in value, but were also commodities traded on the market. In times of hardship, monarchs could sell or pawn their jewelry — a common practice for quickly raising money. This, too, happened with the ‘Three Brothers’ jewel, which was pawned on several occasions.
“The merchant Thomas Cletcher of Rotterdam took possession of numerous jewels belonging to the English crown in the period before the Revolution — among them the ‘Three Brothers’ (which he possibly had recut and renamed the ‘Three Sisters’) as well as the famous Sancy diamond. Both had originated from the Burgundian booty, and thus from the glittering possessions of Charles the Bold. Cletcher was the last known owner of the ‘Three Brothers’; the English crown never recovered it. Cletcher died in 1666. The jewel vanished.
Out with the old, in with the new! Sometimes even captured trophies were melted down so that more modern weapons could be cast from the metal.
The cannons of the Burgundian duke were large and important trophies of war, symbolizing the improbable triumph of the Confederates over a technologically advanced army. At the same time, a city needed artillery that was militarily operational and technologically up to date - and artillery technology was changing in this era.
Not terribly long after the Burgundian booty arrived in Basel, seized the opportunity to melt down and reuse material from outdated weapons. In 1513, it commissioned the casting of a new cannon called ‘Der Drache’ (‘The Dragon’). The weaponsmith Jörg von Guntentheim from Strasbourg was likely inspired by other Burgundian cannons. He created not merely a new weapon, but a second ‘dragon’ — one that referenced the “Burgundian lady” on display in the city’s arsenal.
On von Guntenheim’s new cannon, the hexagonal elements of the barrel also protrude. Fragments of Burgundian cannons have survived that also feature hexagonally shaped sections, bearing Burgundian coats of arms. These are now in other Swiss collections — in St. Gallen and Bern.
Did a Burgundian cannon explode outside Bern? Bern was never besieged in the period following the Burgundian Wars. However, the ceremonies and theatrical presentations, or parades often took place in which old trophy cannons were fired. Perhaps the touch-hole chamber of the seventeen-sided barrel here burst during just such an event in the fields before the city? This would explain why it was later found in Bern’s Hallerstrasse, outside the ramparts and walls of the old town.
It was not, however, the people of St. Gallen who had captured this weaponl. The find site suggests, rather, that Confederates aimed the cannon — captured during the Burgundian Wars — against St. Gallen itself in a conflict in 1490, underscoring the tensions that belied the myths of confederate unity that were later spun around their defeat of the Burgundians.
The deployment of the Burgundian cannon, like the siege, was brief. The Confederates forced St. Gallen — an associate member of the Confederacy in its own right — to accept the sovereign rights of the Abbey of St. Gallen, the city’s rival.