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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Orielensis, post: 3936853, member: 96898&quot;]That&#039;s a beautiful Cologne pfennig – I very much like it.</p><p><br /></p><p>Hävernick&#039;s catalogue and monograph on the Cologne pennies don&#039;t dive into the architectural fineries of their reverses. This is a topic very close to my interests, and since you ask, I have a preliminary theory on this matter, which I will outline below. Please take it with a grain of salt, though – this still is very much work in progress.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>1.)</b> The majority of high medieval Cologne pennies (see examples <a href="https://www.muenzfreunde-hilden.de/?q=node/26" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://www.muenzfreunde-hilden.de/?q=node/26" rel="nofollow">here</a>) shows a church building with three towers and a wall or arcade surrounding it. The latter structure might, depending on the exact reverse in question, be understood either as the city wall or as the arcade front courtyard of Cologne&#039;s &quot;Old Cathedral&quot; (<i>Alter Dom</i>, more on this below). In any case, what we see on the lower part of the reverse of your coin, highlighted in the image below, is this wall/arcade structure and not the facade of the church.</p><p>[ATTACH=full]1037770[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p><b>2.)</b> Of the church itself, we usually only see three towers. Your coin is the most common type with two flanking towers and a central tower which I&#039;d understand as a domed lantern tower with an additional decorative turret on top (higlighted in the image below). Such stylized church buildings are, as you mentioned, somewhat of an iconographic trope on German medieval coins.</p><p>[ATTACH=full]1037771[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p><b>3.)</b> However, it&#039;s quite striking to compare the church building on the Cologne pennies with what we know about the architecture of the Old Cathedral of Cologne.</p><p><br /></p><p>Construction work on this building began in the first half of the 9th century. In 1248, the pre-Romanesque Old Cathedral was completely demolished to make room for a new building in the Gothic style. Above, [USER=101607]@shanxi[/USER] has already shown a late-19th century mosaic of the Old Cathedral giving a good impression of how this building must have looked like. I&#039;m nonetheless adding some more depictions of this church to make the point even clearer.</p><p><br /></p><p>A detail from an illuminated folio of the 10th century Hillinus-Codex (Dombibl. Köln, Hs. 12, fol. 16v). Note the two bell towers flanking the apse as well as the two lantern towers with additional turrets on the nave:</p><p>[ATTACH=full]1037769[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>A reconstruction of the Old Cathedral around 850 (source: <a href="http://www.koelnisches-stadtmuseum.de/bauzaun/" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.koelnisches-stadtmuseum.de/bauzaun/" rel="nofollow">here</a>). The architectural ensemble didn&#039;t change that much until 1248. Pay attention to the arrangement of the western towers as well as the arcade courtyard:</p><p>[ATTACH=full]1037767[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p><b>4.)</b> To conclude, comparing these images to the reverses of the pre-1248 Cologne pennies makes me suspect that at least some of them don&#039;t just show a generic stylized church building but a view of the Old Cathedral from the west with the arcade courtyard, the two bell towers and the western lantern tower. The resemblances seem a bit too clear to be just coincidence.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>5.) </b>As [USER=74712]@FitzNigel[/USER] mentioned, I am flirting with the idea that there might be a bit more reverse variation on these pennies than usually assumed. The type below, for example, differs quite strongly from the usual type. Instead of the wall or arcade structure it shows three raised squares that have been described as doors or archways. I suspect that these three squares aren&#039;t &quot;inverted quadratic archways&quot; but might represent the sarcophagi of the three Magi, whose relics the issuer of this coin, Bishop Rainald von Dassel, brought to the Old Cathedral in 1164.</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1037766[/ATTACH]</p><p><font size="3">Archbishopric of Cologne, under Rainald von Dassel, AR obol, ca. 1159–1167. Obv: Bishop facing, holding crosier and book. Rev: church building with three towers, inside, three sarcophagi (?). 14 mm, 0.53g. Ref: Hävernick 498.</font>[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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