The Maiden of Magdeburg and the Rider on the Old Market

The arms of Magdeburg are easy to read and precisely for that reason puzzling. On a silver field stands a red castle with black jointing, two towers, an open golden gate and a raised black portcullis. Between the towers appears a maiden dressed in green, holding up a green wreath in her right hand — the wreath as a sign of purity. The city seal showing a woman above a many-towered castle gate is first mentioned in 1244, in the years when the burghers were forming their own council.

Heralds call such a thing canting arms: the image spells out the name. Maid plus castle makes Magdeburg, and that is how the people explained for centuries where the town got its name. On the heights above the Elbe, they said, there had once stood a castle in which maidens lived — noble daughters, or the serving maids of a prince — and the place had been named after them. Whoever saw the arms knew the city at once.

Scholars see it differently. The name first appears in 805, in Charlemagne’s Capitulary of Thionville, as Magadoburg. The onomastician Jürgen Udolph suggested in 1999 that behind the first element lies an unattested Germanic adjective magath, «great, mighty»: Magdeburg would then simply be the mighty castle. Harald Bichlmeier cast doubt on that reading again in 2010. Only one thing is certain: the maiden in the arms is the citizens’ explanation, not that of linguistics.

Tradition gave the maiden a face as well. She was said to be Editha, in Anglo-Saxon Eadgyth, daughter of King Edward the Elder of Wessex and granddaughter of Alfred the Great. In 929 she came to Saxony; shortly afterwards she married Otto, the future Emperor Otto the Great. Magdeburg she received as her morning gift, the bridegroom’s present to the bride after the wedding night. The city was therefore literally hers.

Editha loved that city more than any other place in the empire, and the city loved her back. She stayed there gladly, gave to monasteries and brought the veneration of Saint Oswald to Germany. When she died unexpectedly in 946, barely thirty-six years old, the people of Magdeburg mourned her as they would a daughter of their own. And so, says the legend, the female figure came to stand between the towers: the burghers wished to honour their empress in their arms for ever.

Here too legend and history part company. The seal is almost three hundred years younger than Editha, and no medieval source names her in connection with the arms. Her grave, however, is entirely real. In 2008 archaeologists in Magdeburg Cathedral found a lead coffin inside a stone sarcophagus; examination confirmed in 2010 that the bones came from southern England. Otto the Great, who founded the archbishopric in 968 and died in 973, lies beside her in the same church.

The third maiden — there are in fact two — stands on the Alter Markt. About 1240 a Magdeburg workshop carved from fine-grained sandstone a rider on horseback, flanked by two maidens: the one on the right with a shield on which an imperial eagle was probably once painted, the one on the left with a banner lance. It is the oldest free-standing equestrian statue north of the Alps. There is no inscription, so who the rider is must be guessed. The people called him Otto the Great early on, and art historians hold that reading to be the most likely. Others see in the figure not a particular man but an office: the emperor of the realm dispensing justice, with the bearers of banner and shield at his side — civic liberty under imperial protection. The people of Magdeburg naturally recognised their own maidens in those two women. The original has stood since 1966 in the Kaiser-Otto-Saal of the Kulturhistorisches Museum; on the market square a copy by the sculptor Heinrich Apel keeps watch.

Law is the third word that belongs to this maiden. A privilege of Archbishop Wichmann of 1188 set down the liberties of the burghers, and the Magdeburg bench of lay judges grew into a court to which other towns submitted their legal questions. Magdeburg law travelled east with the settlers: Cracow adopted it in 1257, Vilnius in 1387, Kyiv and Minsk towards the end of the fifteenth century; in Ukraine it remained in force until 1840. For hundreds of towns the maiden of Magdeburg was the emblem of a community that spoke its own law and would not be taken.

And yet she was taken. On 20 May 1631 the imperial troops of Tilly and Pappenheim stormed the city; in the fire that followed almost everything was lost and an estimated twenty thousand people died. Europe called it the Magdeburg Wedding, and the verb magdeburgisieren meant from then on: to wipe out a city completely. The bench of judges ceased to exist. What was left the burghers rebuilt stone by stone — and above the new gates hung once more the same maiden with her wreath, as though no one had ever been able to touch her.