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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;chrisild, post: 781177, member: 39&quot;]Actually I bought the &quot;market woman&quot; and &quot;beast&quot; pieces too, some time last year. (And one from Koblenz; the guy who sticks his tongue out.) Fortunately they are not terribly expensive, so I could justify the expense even though I don&#039;t really collect notgeld. <img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie1" alt=":)" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" /></p><p><br /></p><p>Admittedly I don&#039;t know what that animal is supposed to be. However, if we assume that the three Aachen pieces are all related to the cathedral, and the legends around its construction, the &quot;bear-wolf&quot; and the woman make sense.</p><p><br /></p><p>There is a scupture in the cathedral which shows a female wolf - a reference to the one that fed Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome. (One of many references to the ancient Roman Empire that Charlemagne used - after all, he regarded &quot;his&quot; empire to be a sort of successor to the ancient empire.) So much for the facts.</p><p><br /></p><p>The legend however says that the Aacheners ran out of funds when the cathedral was built in the 8th century. Charlemagne could have supplied the money, but was in some remote part of his empire. So they made a deal with the devil: He would help them build/complete the church, and they would leave him the soul of the first person to enter the completed cathedral.</p><p><br /></p><p>What to do? Well, the night before Charlemagne and Pope Leo would officially open the cathedral, the Aacheners caught a bear which would then be &quot;pushed&quot; into the cathedral where the devil was already waiting for his prey. The impatient devil just noticed a two-legged something (guess that is why for the legend a wolf would not work) and took it with him. Full of anger about his error, he ran out of the church - so quickly that one of his thumbs was torn off and got stuck in the cathedral entrance door.</p><p><br /></p><p>Again assuming a &quot;cathedral background&quot;, the woman from Aachen - on your first coin - was about as clever as the Aacheners were with that bear. Of course the devil was looking for revenge, and decided to &quot;bury&quot; the cathedral underneath lots of sand that he would shlep from the North Sea to Aachen. Well, even the devil gets tired once in a while, especially with those huge sacks of sand. So he wanted to make a pause not too far from Aachen.</p><p><br /></p><p>He asked a market (or peasant) woman who was coming from the city how far it was. The woman however noticed his horse foot or his tail. Oh dear, the devil on his way to Aachen? She quickly said that the city and the market were still awfully far away, pointed at her bad shoes and a hard loaf of bread, and said she had bought both, new, at the market (in the sense of, can you tell how far Aaachen is?). The devil got terribly angry again, left all his sand where he was, ran away and never came back to Aachen.</p><p><br /></p><p>This way a farmer/market woman saved the city, and this way the Lousberg (a &quot;mountain&quot; north of Aachen) was created: A heap of sand, left there by the devil. Believe it or not. <img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie2" alt=";)" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" /></p><p><br /></p><p>Edit: As for the second tale, here <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aachen_devil_and_woman.jpg" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aachen_devil_and_woman.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aachen_devil_and_woman.jpg</a> is a picture and an English description of a monument in Aachen which shows what, umm, happened back then.</p><p><br /></p><p>Christian[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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