The Fleuron Crown from Neumarkt in Silesia (Środa Śląska): Christian Material Culture in a Jewish Context

In 1988, a treasure was discovered during the demolition of a building at 14 Daszyńskiego St. in the heart of what had been the medieval Jewish quarter of Środa Śląska in Poland (medieval Neumarkt in Silesia). The trove included gold and silver coins and some unique gold jewelry: two rings, two pairs of earrings, a brooch, a bracelet, and various other objects (fig. 1).¹

Fig. 1.

The treasure of Neumarkt, found in the Jewish quarter, mid-14th century. The National Museum in Wrocław

The most elaborate piece in the collection is a massive gold crown intended for a woman, which dates to the first quarter of the fourteenth century. It is decorated with more than a hundred precious stones, including tourmalines, pearls, rubies, sapphires, and emeralds of different sizes and shapes (fig. 2).² The round circlet of the crown consists of ten plates, connected by high hinges. Atop every hinge is a vinelike ornament called a fleuron,³ consisting of clusters of grapes and vine leaves. Every panel is topped by a small heraldic eagle holding a gold ring set with turquoise in its beak. This find recalls a cache of silver coins uncovered three years earlier in a neighboring building, which was also determined to have been hidden in the mid-fourteenth century. This dating suggests a connection with the anti-Jewish violence in Neumarkt in 1362 and that the hiding and abandonment of these objects can be attributed to their owners meeting with catastrophe.⁴

Regarding the original owner of the gold jewelry found in the trove, researchers have suggested that some of these jewels were given to a Jew named Muscho son of Merklin as security for a loan made in 1348 to the Bohemian Charles IV, the son of John of Luxemburg. As part of the agreement, the king granted Muscho and his family special permission to live in the city for several years.⁵ If this was indeed the case, this crown might have originally been owned by a member of the royal family, perhaps Blanche de Valois of Sicily, Charles IV’s first wife, who died in 1348,⁶ but no record has survived to prove or disprove this notion.

The Neumarkt treasure is not unique. Over the past two centuries, several other treasure troves have been found in areas associated with medieval Jewish habitation. They often contain a mix of identifiable Jewish and Christian artifacts, suggesting that they belonged to Jewish pawnbrokers. Moreover, their composition implies that these pawnbrokers preserved little distinction between items taken as security for loans and their own private property.⁷ The discovery of these treasures raises questions regarding Jewish use of pawned objects, especially secular objects that have little connection to Jewish or Christian liturgical practice and that do not bear explicit Jewish or Christian religious iconography or inscriptions. Were the Jews of the time aware of the true meaning of these objects? Were they able to understand the original context in which they were used by Christians? Finally, did the Jews consider them as belonging to their own cultural milieu?

Study of the material culture of the time demonstrates that Jews were exposed to crowns such as the one described above and were well aware of their symbolic meaning, especially with regard to the insignias of nobility and royalty. Furthermore, some Jews utilized such crowns to define their social status. In the first part of this article I discuss the socio-economic role of fleuron crowns in Christian society as symbols of royalty and nobility. I then focus on the various ways in which fleuron crowns could have been adopted in Jewish iconography and how they were interpreted in view of the contemporary European context, as well as in light of Jewish tradition. I conclude by dealing with the appearance of fleuron crowns in a Jewish context against the background of the socio-economic changes in Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

The Mobility of Fleuron Crowns and...