The Coat of Arms

The Witnesses, in Order of Time

A coat of arms wanders when it is handed down over centuries: every generation draws it afresh and misunderstands something in the process. These arms have not wandered, and the sequence of their witnesses shows why.

1433. The letter of Emperor Sigismund describes the arms in words and says they are painted “in der mitte diß gegenwartigen brieffs” – in the middle of this present letter. The parchment is lost; its wording lives on in two copies that never met.

1656. The Görlitz master builder Gottfried Schmid copied the letter into his “Adelicher Tugendspiegel”, the cartulary of his own family, and left room under the heading for a picture that was never painted. Christian Knauth printed this text at Görlitz in 1737.

1663. On 10 March the chancery of the abbey of Quedlinburg authenticated a copy that the council of the city of Breslau had taken on 9 November 1582 from the parchment with the imperial seal attached, and in the middle of the text block the arms are painted: the black shield with the silver horse out of gold-red flames, a barred helm laid in blue with a gold crown, mantling black and silver, the whole set in a tall oval red field with scrollwork, framed by a green band and blue spandrels. It is the oldest picture of the arms. A reproduction of the sheet hangs in the family; Georg Kupke published it as a photograph in 1929.

1735. Lebrecht Gerlach, court councillor at Köslin, presented this copy in Berlin. The act of 2 September 1735 by which Frederick William I recognised his nobility is recorded in the Secret State Archives among the nobility files; the day appears in print first in Hellbach’s lexicon of 1825, misattached to the imperial grant and taken for a misprint by Zedlitz in 1839; as the date of the Prussian act it was supplied by Maximilian Gritzner in 1874 from notes of the archives and of the Herald’s Office.

1741 and 1748. In Görlitz, where a burgher family Gerlach lived until 1737, the memorial to the town judge Gottfried Gerlach in St Peter’s church bears the rising horse over flames, and a Görlitz collection of arms of 1748 records it as a small pen drawing, shield and crowned helm, without a word beside it. An alliance stone Gerlach–Emerich at St Nicholas’ church showed the same image according to the description of 1891.

1776 and 1779. Johann Wilhelm Franz von Krohne printed the blazon after the diploma in the family’s possession, and three years later Ludwig Wilhelm Brüggemann set a second description beside it, taken from a coloured drawing in the diploma, which calls the helm an open helm. Neither knows a border round the shield.

1783. The sixth supplement to Siebmacher’s armorial brings, under “v. Gerlach in Pomern”, the first engraving: a plain heater shield, horse out of flames, barred helm with a leafy crown, flames out of the crown, mantling black and white. Feature for feature, it is today’s image.

1836 to 1861. The armorial of the Prussian monarchy gave the arms an oval shield in a red frame. Julius Theodor Bagmihl did not adopt the frame in 1843 and named it as a peculiarity of that book; Leopold von Ledebur took it into the blazon in 1855, and Ernst Heinrich Kneschke followed in 1861. Where the border comes from and what became of it is told in the next section.

Around 1850. The privy councillor of legation von Bülow, a friend of the Gerlach brothers, dedicated a sonnet to the arms: the steed rising from the embers carries its bright head high above the heat of battle and will never let itself be made a serf – an image that alludes to the shield of faith in the Epistle to the Ephesians.

1874 and 1878. Gritzner’s register of Prussian elevations named the date of 1735 and referred, for the arms, to the plate of 1836. In 1878 the Brünn pocketbook of noble houses printed an article that the family itself had sent in. It distinguishes an “old coat of arms” without border from a “present one since 1735” with red border and blue-and-gold mantling, and it is the source of almost every later statement: the knighting on the bridge over the Tiber, the cavalry regiment, the origin in the Netherlands, the stations Breslau 1582 and Anhalt 1663.

1891 to 1903. Otto Fritsch depicted the arms of the Görlitz family from purely Görlitz tradition, without border. Around 1895 the church at Wittenmoor received its window with the horse rising from flames, without border. The family history of 1903 describes the arms after the patent of nobility, without border. In the same years the five windows of the council chamber at Schmargendorf carried the arms of the village’s former lords, among them that of the Gerlach, because Charlotte von Gerlach née von Beyme had owned the village from 1838 to 1841; a bomb shattered them in the war.

1916 to the present. Grotefend’s index, Kupke’s photograph – and the objects that passed down the generations: the flag, the signet rings, the silver, the armorial cartouche above the main entrance of Schloss Parsow. All of them show the silver horse out of flames on the black field and the black-and-silver mantling.

The sequence is short, and that is why it is firm. Every surviving depiction goes back to a narrow base of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and between that base and the armorials of the nineteenth century the image did not change – only its description did.

The Red Border

In the armorials of the nineteenth century the shield carries a red border, and since 1878 it has been said that the family bore it “since 1735”. Both can be traced back to their origin.

Before 1836 no witness knows the border: not the wording of the letter, not the painting of 1663, not Krohne in 1776, not Brüggemann in 1779 after the coloured version, not the engraving of 1783. It first appears on the twenty-sixth plate of the third volume of the armorial of the Prussian monarchy, Nuremberg 1836, and there it is the red-hatched rim of an oval shield – an engraver’s ornament, without date. Bagmihl described it in exactly those terms in 1843, as a rim that that book gave to the oval shield, and left it out of his own armorial. Ledebur took it into the blazon in 1855 and cited that same plate for it; Kneschke followed in 1861; Gritzner in 1874 again referred to it for the arms. The article of 1878 turned it into a “present coat of arms since 1735”, Rietstap adopted it in his Armorial in 1884, the Handbuch des Preußischen Adels in 1893 as “Wappen (1735)”. Every link in this chain rests on the same single plate.

The family never bore the border. The family history of 1903 describes the arms without it, the Wittenmoor window shows none, and what survives in objects – the flag, the signet rings, the silver, the cartouche at Parsow – carries the horse out of flames on the black field and black-and-silver mantling. The red border existed on the paper of the armorials.

The Letter of 1433

The letter is the root of the arms and at the same time the point at which the family’s tradition is thinnest. What is established about it, what scholarship has objected, and what withstands the objections – in ten sections.

What the letter grants

Sigismund, emperor since 31 May 1433, gave at Rome on St Lawrence’s day, 10 August 1433, to Jacob Gerlach, for services “in Deutschen und Welschen landen, in unsern Königreichen zu Hungarn und Böhmen” – in German and Italian lands, in our kingdoms of Hungary and Bohemia – arms and crest. The legal effect lies in the formula of those entitled to arms: “dass er und seine Eheliche Leibes Erben fürbass mehr Wapensgenoss sein” – that he and his lawful bodily heirs shall henceforth be armigerous –, sit in judgement, hold office and fief, “wie andere geborne Wappengenossen und rittermässige Leute von Recht und Gewohnheit haben” – as other born armigers and men of knightly standing have by right and custom. That is a letter of arms with knightly standing, not a patent of nobility and not a knighting. So the scholars of heraldic law read it who know the text independently of the family: Johann Wilhelm Albert in 1884 counted it among Sigismund’s plain letters of arms to commoners, beside those for Hans Schmied of Görlitz in 1431 and Hans Weyder in 1434; Gustav Seyler and Felix Hauptmann printed the formula as a model case in the two standard works of German heraldic law. By their reading the nobility of the Pomeranian family does not hang on 1433 but on what was recognised in Berlin in 1735; the letter was the title the family presented for it.

How it is transmitted

The parchment is lost. That nothing of it survives is, for this kind of document, the normal case: of the 221 charters Sigismund issued in the Roman summer of 1433, Altmann knows a surviving engrossment for seventy-three – of the thirty-nine armorial acts, for two. Nineteen out of twenty are lost. Its wording lives on in two lines that never touched. The Görlitz line: Gottfried Schmid’s Tugendspiegel of 1656, from which Christian Knauth printed in 1737; the printed register of Upper Lusatian charters of 1805 took the letter from Knauth’s print, with the dagger that there marks pieces taken from books and ordinary copies, and from it Wilhelm Altmann entered the letter in the Regesta Imperii in 1900 as no. 9622, with the registration note and without the “nicht in RR” – not in the imperial registers – that he added to the two neighbouring Görlitz letters of 1431 and 1434. That silence is no testimony in the letter’s favour: Altmann set the note where he had a piece in hand and searched the register for it in vain; for no. 9622 he had only copies before him. What the register itself says is set out below. And the three Görlitz personal letters of arms belong together in any case: the one for Hans Schmid of 7 September 1431 and the one for Hans Weider of 6 December 1434 are missing from the imperial register just as ours is, and Altmann knows all three only from the same two volumes of copies, Görlitz and Zittau. They are not three independent witnesses to a Görlitz channel into the chancery, but three entries in one Upper Lusatian tradition of copies. That the register was running in those weeks the control shows: one day after Schmid, at the same place, the arms of Ulrich Kol were duly entered. Altmann names his source as “Kop. Görliz u. Zittau” – copies at Görlitz and Zittau. A finger can be laid on both manuscripts, and both are younger than the print: the Görlitz one is the Upper Lusatian collection of charters, today Biblioteka Uniwersytecka we Wrocławiu, Mil. II 382 wol. 5, fol. 235r–235v, piece no. 837; the Zittau one is A 110, pp. 475–477. The collection was begun on 28 October 1793 by a committee of the Upper Lusatian Society of Sciences, and its preface says that where the source was a printed book, “das Buch benant worden ist, aus welchem wir die Abschrift besorgten” – the book has been named from which we procured the copy; under our entry stands “Knauth vom alten Gerlach. geschl.”. The wording of the manuscript follows Knauth’s print word for word, down to the false Roman regnal year forty-two. Before 1737 the Görlitz line therefore has exactly one stage: the Tugendspiegel of 1656. The Quedlinburg line: the authentication by the council of Breslau of 9 November 1582, which held the parchment “mit anhangendem Kaiserlichen Insiegel” – with the imperial seal attached – in its hands and heard it read out, and over it the vidimus of the Quedlinburg abbey chancery of 10 March 1663, which collated it word for word. Who issued it there can be named. Gottfried Christian Voigt describes in 1791 the abbey’s high court, which sent out the ordinances in the abbess’s name “und welches sich unterzeichnete: Fürstliche Stiftskanzler und Räthe” – and which signed itself: princely abbey chancellor and councillors; the same sequence of words that the vidimus bears, and Voigt attests it already for 15 December 1608. The issuing body is thus a named authority and not a supposed one: the high court of the abbess Anna Sophia I. Voigt names her chancellor under the year 1659 as “von Mithöfen”, and records no change before 1663. This is the sheet Lebrecht Gerlach presented in Berlin in 1735; after it Krohne described the arms in 1776, Kupke photographed it in 1929, and a reproduction hangs in the family. A third copy without a picture of the arms lies in Vienna, in the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv among the nobility files of the State Chancellery.

Both lines give the same text, and they differ where copyists differ: Görlitz writes “Jacobus Görlach”, Quedlinburg “Jacob Gerlach”; Görlitz sets the horse “auß” – out of – the flame, Quedlinburg “uff” – upon – it; in the dating clause Görlitz counts the regnal year of the Roman kingship as the forty-second, Quedlinburg, written out, as “Zwei unnd Zwentzigistenn”, the twenty-second. The norm is no longer inferred but attested. From the same 10 August 1433 the Esslingen mining privilege is printed twice in full, and its dating clause reads: “an St. Lorentzen-Tag … des Hungarischen im sieben und vierzigsten, des Römischen im drey und zweinzigsten, deß Behemischen im vierzehenden, und deß Kaiserthums in dem ersten Jaren. Ad Mandatum Domini Imperatoris. Caspar Sligk, Cancellarius.” – forty-seven, twenty-three, fourteen, one. That is how the chancery wrote on that day.

The two Quedlinburg numbers therefore stand differently. The fourteenth Bohemian year was thirteen days old on St Lawrence’s day; until 28 July the same chancery had written thirteen, and on the coronation day still “des Behemischen im Dreyzehenden”. The thirteen is a number only just superseded. For the Roman year that explanation does not hold: it begins not in July 1411 but on 20 September 1410, and the twenty-third year was already eleven months old on 10 August. The twenty-two is eleven months wrong, not three weeks – and that is a correction to our own holdings. What tells against it belongs beside it: the same undisputed charter of Sigismund is read in two printings of the same work once as “im xxij” and once as “im xxiij”; the loss of a single minim is demonstrable at exactly this point. The forty-two of the Görlitz line remains an error.

What can be tested by the form

The chancery line names Kaspar Schlick as “miles, Cancellarius”: That line now passes a strict test. In the six hundred and fifty-six regesta of the year 1433 the command formula “Ad mandatum domini imperatoris” appears for the first time on 31 May, the coronation day – before it stands twenty-three times “domini regis”, after it, through 1433, well over a hundred times “domini imperatoris”; only a single Basel piece of 29 October carries the royal form once more – and the “miles” beside Schlick’s name likewise appears first on that day. For 10 August the line of our text is therefore formally impeccable, and seven further confirmations of the same day style Schlick just as briefly as knight and chancellor, without the majesty titles. The bare “Rta” without the registrar’s initials is unremarkable too: of a hundred and twenty-three registration notes of that year, twenty-two stand thus. **As an objection the chancery line will not serve.** Sigismund had knighted him on the day of the coronation and made him chancellor. The mandate clause is short, without the long series of princes, counts, knights and heralds; the same short version stands word for word in a letter of arms of Sigismund for Contz Geuder, Constance 1417, preserved in the original, down to the rare “vielleicht” of the closing clause. For the Roman summer of 1433 itself, however, the short form rests on a single piece, and it is precisely the augmentation of arms for the Schlick of 13 July which Elbel and Zajic hold to be falsified; on the coronation day the register writes the long form. The chief witness for the brevity is thus itself disputed – the Constance letter of 1417 is untouched by this. The picture clause – that the arms are painted in the middle of the letter and set out in colours – is the habit of the imperial chancery since the oldest surviving imperial letter of arms of 1338, and it stands in the same words in the charter that Sigismund gave the city of Görlitz nineteen days later. The type is attested in an original: an imperial letter of arms for two burghers, Basel, 20 April 1434, has the same picture clause, the same chancery line and the note “Rta”. On 10 August 1433 the chancery at Rome entered one matter of arms in its register; between coronation and departure there were thirty-nine acts concerning arms.

One thing the chancery distinguished precisely, and it bears directly on our letter. The grant of arms for the Brisacher brothers says that they had “vormals … zu Rittermessigen und wapensgenoss leute gemacht” – previously been made men of knightly standing and companions of arms – and that, beyond this, Marquart was knighted on the bridge. Two stages, held apart in a single sentence. Our letter carries the formula of the lower one: arms and the fellowship of arms, knightly standing, no accolade. **It does not claim the knighting.** That was added only by the family tradition of 1878.

What the imperial register says

The book in which the letter ought to stand survives. Its shelfmark is “AT-OeStA/HHStA RK Reichsregister K”, it runs from 1433 to 1435, it has been digitised in five hundred and four images, and it can be examined leaf by leaf. It also has an index of its own: six pages in three columns, written by the chancery itself, ordered by folio, one line to each piece of business. Grants of arms stand there by name – “Arma ulrico truchsess”, “Arma ulrico Blukyn”, “Confirmacio armorum Jeronimi d'Ligniz”, “Nobilitacio et armorum data est petri de Quercu”, “Arma Bartholomei Pregmar”, “Arma Baptiste de Scacolis”, “Confirmacio armorum Henrichs und Hansen von Altenberg”, “der Stat von Gorlitz wapen besserung” – a betterment of arms for the town of Görlitz. On the leaves covering the Roman summer of 1433 there is no Gerlach, in any spelling. And the index is exact: every name it gives stands on the leaf to which it points.

On the leaf that the old ink foliation calls “xxxiij”, a Roman charter for the counts of Württemberg ends with the line “an sand Laurencien tag Anno etc. xxxiij” – St Lawrence's day is 10 August – and directly beneath it the chancery enters a matter of arms, the confirmation for “hinrich und hanns von altemberg”. At this point the sequence is closed.

The obvious objection does not hold. One might suppose that Görlitz belonged to the Crown of Bohemia and that its business therefore went into the Bohemian register book. The betterment of arms for the town of Görlitz of 29 August 1433 stands in this same imperial register, with the marginal note “Rattmann zu Görlitz” – the councillors at Görlitz.

What an absence weighs depends on the kind of document. For ordinary charters it weighs nothing: thirty-four pieces from 1433 are missing from the register although their engrossments survive, among them the charters of liberty for Lucerne, Schwyz, Uri, St Gallen and Nuremberg. For letters of arms the reverse holds, and the figure for the Roman stay itself is the sharpest: from 21 May to 12 August 1433 the chancery at Rome issued forty grants of arms, ennoblements, palatinates and knightings. **Thirty-six of them stand in the imperial register.** Of the four remaining, two are Kaspar Schlick’s own elevations – beside one of them Altmann writes “nicht in RR! Fälschung?” (not in the imperial registers! forgery?) – the third is the letter entered and struck out again with the note “non transivit”, entered but not issued. The fourth is this one.

It can be put more sharply still, and it shall stand here: **three of the four have either a surviving engrossment or a register entry. The letter for Jakob Gerlach has neither.**

One explanation often given does not hold: that the fee hung on the entry. For Sigismund no fee schedule and no account book of the chancery survives; the first fee schedule is of 1545, the oldest tax register of the imperial chancery of 1471. Whoever names a price for 1433 is guessing. And the book is no precise instrument, which belongs here just as much. Altmann notes two things for these same weeks: a charter of 27 August 1433, dated at Perugia, stands on folio 225 and was “erst 1435 Juli/Aug. registriert” (registered only in July or August 1435); and an entry under 29 August 1433 at Perugia – the permission for Görlitz to admit twelve Jews – was, according to the original, “Basel 1433 Nov. 27 ausgestellt” (issued at Basel on 27 November 1433). Three months apart and half the way across the Alps, and both stand there as though they had happened on the same day in the same place. Whoever reckons from this book must know how it was kept.

Why the book was kept this way, a Görlitz account tells us, and it tells it in money. The town clerk Laurentius Erenberg did not collect his town’s charters where they are dated. Beyond the costs of the journey he had to pay “cccxxviij sco. xiij gr. iiij ph.” when at Basel he “die briffe aus der canczeley ubir die wopin loste” (redeemed the letters about the arms from the chancery) – three hundred and twenty-eight Schock, thirteen groschen and four pfennigs. The grant of arms itself is dated Perugia, 29 August 1433. Between the day the charter names and the day it came out of the chancery against payment lie the autumn and the Alps. Altmann’s two anomalies are therefore not the registrar’s carelessness but the course of business itself: the date line names when and where the emperor granted the favour; the engrossing and the paying happened where the chancery stood when the recipient came. No price for a single personal grant of arms is won by this – the sum covers a town’s letters, two golden bulls among them. Something else is won: that the fee fell at the place of delivery and not at the place of dating. For our letter that is a possibility and not a proof – a piece dated Rome, 10 August 1433 could leave the chancery’s hands months later and hundreds of miles further on.

A second observation turns the finding around. For a town a matter of arms leaves traces in the money, and the Görlitz account books carry them all: travel money and bills of exchange, the chancery fee, in February 1434 the vidimus made at the duke of Sagan’s, in the spring the chest for the new bulls, in July four lot of silver for the new seal, in April 1435 the goldsmith who cuts the small seal, and as late as October 1436 a messenger carrying the vidimus of the golden bull to Prague. For a single recipient nobody keeps books. That no administrative trace is found for Jakob Gerlach therefore does not speak against him; it is a property of his class of document.

A register says what the chancery entered, not what it issued. The letter asserts its own entry – it closes with “Registrata” – and the book does not know it. How often that happens, the editor said himself, in the preface to his first volume: charters without the note sometimes do stand in the register book, “häufiger aber ist der Fall, dass Urkunden, die den Vermerk haben, in den Registraturbüchern fehlen” (more frequent, however, is the case that charters which have the note are missing from the register books). The conclusion one would expect he expressly declines: “dies auf Nachlässigkeit der Kanzlei allein zurückzuführen, wäre verfehlt” (to trace this back to carelessness of the chancery alone would be mistaken); one will “meist zu dem Schlusse kommen, dass es noch andere Registraturbücher ausser den uns erhaltenen gegeben hat” (mostly come to the conclusion that there were still other register books besides those preserved to us) – such for Hungary, and Bohemian ones “müssen gleich, als Sigmund 1420 nach Breslau kam, eingerichtet sein” (must have been set up as soon as Sigismund came to Breslau in 1420).

This can be counted. In Altmann’s second volume eight hundred and twenty-six pieces carry the note “Rta”; for five hundred and eighty he locates the entry, for one hundred and thirty-four he writes expressly that it is missing, for one hundred and twelve he says nothing. Where the question could be decided, roughly one piece in five therefore carries the note and yet does not stand in the book; for 1433 alone there are one hundred and twenty-three notes, ninety-one located and eighteen expressly not. And how far his silence reaches, the book itself shows: on the leaf that the ink foliation calls 106 stands an entry for Kaspar Schlick of 5 March 1434, struck out with two strokes and breaking off in mid-sentence, and beside it in the margin the instruction “Quere in Registro Bohemie etc.”. Altmann’s apparatus names no register entry for it – he knew the piece only from a Czech printed edition. What he says about the register, and what he passes over, is therefore a statement about his reading, not about the chancery. The reference cannot be followed up: of Sigismund’s Bohemian register books only the volume for 1436 and 1437 survives.

The test is made by pieces where both things are fixed at once: that the parchment is there and that the register is silent. In Altmann’s second volume there are one hundred and ninety-two; at six he notes a suspicion of forgery, one hundred and eighty-six carry none. Among them grants of arms that serve ours as a model: Rudolf Lupfensack, 12 June 1434, the original in the Museum Ferdinandeum at Innsbruck – Altmann notes expressly that it bears the arms painted in colour; Ulrich Pfanzagel, “Bürger zu Wien” (a townsman of Vienna), 25 January 1435, the original in the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv; Hans Grändl with his brothers, 1 March 1436, the Vienna city archive. All three carry “Rta”, the first two also the chancery line of our letter – and at all three Altmann writes “nicht in RR” (not in the imperial registers). No one has ever attached a suspicion to them. That says what the heaviest objection is and what it is not: it is no mark of falsity. What gives those letters their freedom from doubt is not the register entry – they have none – but the parchment. Ours is lost, and that is the whole difference.

What heraldry says

A half animal rising from flames occurs in Sigismund’s chancery: in 1409 he granted the Garázda and Szilágyi a black goat “in flama ardenti”, with the same image as crest and mantling of white mixed with black – the colours reversed, the helm without a crown. The repetition of the charge in the crest is the most common form of the period, the rule of tincture is observed, two-coloured mantling arises in the fifteenth century. The one feature that stands out is the helm crown, in the fifteenth century a favour granted by name; in Sigismund’s circle it is attested from 1415. Ludwig Clericus, the only professional heraldist to judge the image, assigned it in 1896 to the epoch in which the chanceries invented and painted arms: the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

The man and the city

The letter names no place. “Zu Görlitz” – at Görlitz – first stands in the register of 1805, and Altmann took it from there. In Görlitz itself a Jakob Gerlach appears in no list of the year 1433: not in the citizenship rolls of 1432 to 1434, not in the council book, which for 1433 names the mayor, the aldermen, the councillors and the minor offices, not in the summons book. The tax lists of that year, which go house by house through the town and its suburbs, lie in the Görlitz council archive. And in no register of the nobility. The Görlitz rector Johann Christian Karl Crudelius compiled in the eighteenth century, in the council archive itself, a “Verzeichnis derjenigen vom Adel, deren in den älteren Görlitzischen Stadtbüchern gedacht wird” – a list of those of the nobility recorded in the older Görlitz town books –, arranged by year. The year 1433 carries twenty-two names: eight lines of Gersdorff, and with them Salcz, Hugewitz, Bischoffswerde, Penczig, Raewil, Saltza, Czorrsfelden, Metzenrade, Dohme, Redern, Leipe. No Gerlach stands among them, nor in the years 1430 to 1437. What this finding says must be taken precisely: the list records the nobility. If Jakob Gerlach was a burgher of Görlitz on whom the emperor conferred arms and crest without ennobling him, he did not belong in it. What it says is this: in the years around 1433 no Görlitz town book entered a Gerlach among the nobility. Görlitz did have dealings with Rome that summer, only otherwise. In the week after 5 July 1433 the town clerk Laurentius Erenberg set out for the emperor with a hundred Hungarian gulden for expenses; the burghers lent the town the money for it. He found Sigismund not at Rome but at Perugia – “do her syne gnaden zu Perus fant und noch sinem gebot kein Rome reyt” (where he found his grace at Perugia and rode on to Rome at his command) – and only then rode on. The journey took thirty weeks; the closing sum of the travel account cannot be read with certainty in the printed edition. At Rome he took up a hundred ducats by bill of exchange. He brought home the indulgence for five Görlitz churches and the two charters of 29 August by which the emperor at Perugia confirmed the town its liberties and bettered its arms, both with a golden bull – “des her zw guldene bollin brachte” (which he brought with golden bulls), says the account. The originals of both lie in the Görlitz council archive.

Two things follow for the letter. The town’s embassy reached the court only at the end of August, a good two weeks after 10 August; it cannot have procured it. And yet men of Görlitz were at Rome that summer: the town attests a fellow citizen who was present at the imperial coronation on 31 May – “quodam concivi civitatis Gorlicz, qui in coronatione presens erat, nomine N. Ron”, a fellow citizen of the town of Görlitz who was present at the coronation, by name N. Ron. The name recurs, and then with a forename and with a commission. The Görlitz council account records in 1435: “Item Heinrico Ror, das her vor das indult, daz her zu Rome noch entphelunge unsers statschreibers irwurben hatte, usgegeben 10 Unger. gulden.” (Item to Heinrich Ror, for the indult which he had obtained at Rome on the instruction of our town clerk, paid out 10 Hungarian gulden.) Heinrich Ror had obtained an indult at Rome on the Görlitz town clerk’s instruction, and the town advanced him ten Hungarian gulden for it. Already in March 1434 a messenger brought “botschafft von Rome von hern Ror, als von des applas wegin” (a message from Rome from Herr Ror, concerning the indulgence), and on 14 August 1435 a letter of the town went “zu Heinrich Ror von des aplas wegen … in den hoff zu Rome” (to Heinrich Ror concerning the indulgence, into the court at Rome). for years Görlitz had a man at the Roman curia who worked for the town and carried out its town clerk’s commissions. That the town had standing business at Rome at all has a reason in the constitution of the church. Görlitz lay in the sedes Görlitz, one of twelve archpriests’ seats of the archdeaconry of Upper Lusatia; that archdeaconry was permanently joined to the provostry of St Peter at Bautzen, and its provost had by constitution to be a canon of Meissen cathedral – in 1433 that was Dietrich von Kreuzburg, who on 7 January of that year stood at the curia himself and had his benefices listed there. Above him stood the bishop of Meissen, and above the bishop stood no one but Rome: the diocese had been exempt since 1399, with no metropolitan in between. The way from a Görlitz parish church to the curia was therefore short and well worn, and the town went it – in October 1433 for the indulgence of its five churches, which the same town clerk obtained at Rome. For the armorial letter nothing follows from this directly, for matters of arms went through the imperial chancery and not through the curia. But it explains why men of Görlitz were at Rome at all in the summer of 1433.

Whether Jakob Gerlach was at Rome at all matters less than it seems – for he did not have to be. Görlitz fetched its imperial charters wherever the court happened to stand: in 1429 three of them on a single day at Luck in Volhynia, a thousand kilometres east, and between 1425 and 1437 also from Buda, from the field camp in Wallachia, from Belgrade, Pressburg, Nuremberg, Feldkirch, Siena, Rome, Perugia, Basel, Ulm, Regensburg, Prague and Znojmo. The business travelled, not the person. And one feature of the procedure belongs with it: the chancery sealed, registered and handed over letters of arms without the arms themselves having been painted – no arms-painter travelled with the court. Whoever finds no man of Görlitz in the Roman sources of the summer of 1433 has therefore found nothing that tells against the letter. The man to whom the second Görlitz letter of arms went, Hans Weider, sits on the council in the year of his letter.

A Görlitz family Gerlach did exist, only later. The first bearer of the name in the citizenship lists is “Meister Heintz Gerlach”, a barber, in the administrative year 1476/77 – forty-three years after the letter. Jocoff Girlach acquired citizenship in the administrative year 1484/85 for thirty-six groschen; whoever acquires it has not inherited it, so he was not the son of a Görlitz burgher. What these lists cannot do their editor states himself: sons of burghers were exempt from the fee until the council decree of 24 February 1624 and do not appear in them; the lists therefore exclude no burgher’s son born at Görlitz, only an incomer. How far the finding reaches can now be said exactly, for the volume has a name index covering its whole run. Under “Gerlach, Girloch” it lists ten persons – Anna, Augustin, Barbara, Hans, Heinz, Jocoff, Katharina, Martin, Servatius and Wolfgang – and the earliest page number is Heinz’s: page 63, the administrative year 1476/77. In the ninety-seven years before that, from 1379 on, there is none. One trap the editor defused himself: on page 55 a “Gerlach Regenbald” acquires citizenship, and the index carries him under Regenbald – there Gerlach is the forename, not the surname.

The same editor also says where the Görlitz family came from, and he says it in a note to a baker. Wolfgang Girlach acquired citizenship in the administrative year 1505/06; he “ehelichte um 1505 Anna geb. Hermann, Witwe des Bäckers Hans Clement, und übernahm dessen Backhaus in der Jüdengasse. Seine Söhne Hans und Martin, die er 1509 hinterliess, stifteten das namhafte Görlitzer Geschlecht Gerlach.” (He married about 1505 Anna née Hermann, widow of the baker Hans Clement, and took over his bakehouse in the Jüdengasse. His sons Hans and Martin, whom he left in 1509, founded the notable Görlitz family Gerlach.) The name therefore occurs at Görlitz around 1500 several times and side by side – the barber of 1476, the tanner of 1484, the baker of 1505 – and the family the town knows Wentscher dates only from the baker’s sons: seventy-six years after the letter. The same Jocoff is house owner in the suburb in 1500, elder of the tanners in 1508, councillor from 1510 to 1514; Master Servatius Gerlach, syndic from 1546 to 1549, who acquired citizenship in 1549 “der geburt von Breslaw” – born at Breslau; Gottfried Gerlach, town judge, with whom the name died out at Görlitz in 1737. Knauth, who printed the memorial to him in 1737, has the ancestor settle at Görlitz “endlich” – at last –, after the wars and at the end of his life, and calls the son a tanner. Five testimonies of the years 1737 and 1741 – Knauth’s title page, his tract, Baumeister’s funeral oration, the curriculum vitae in it and the inscription of the memorial – name no “von”. The arms of this family were the same: on the memorial in St Peter’s, on the alliance stone at St Nicholas’, in the Görlitz collection of arms of 1748 and on Fritsch’s plate of 1891. Between it and the Pomeranian family lies no document. Of two of these men more is known. Servatius Gerlach represented the town in the year of the Pönfall: on 10 July 1547 he wrote to the Görlitz council from Prague together with Petrus Schwoffheim, signing »Servatius Gerlach, Mgr. Syndicus« (Servatius Gerlach, Master of Arts, town syndic); the list of the townsmen summoned to Prague by King Ferdinand enters him as »M. Servat. Gerlach, Syndikus«, and the Bohemian diet records name him under Upper Lusatia as »magister Servatius Gerlach«. Theodor Neumann, who published the papers in 1848, wrote of him that he appeared to be one of those who had the welfare of the town most at heart. Gottfried Gerlach, the last of them, turned what was left into an endowment on 1 July 1737: 1040 thalers for a three-year scholarship, relatives to have precedence, but the holder to be Protestant and to have attended the Görlitz grammar school for at least two years. Under the same date the printed Verzeichniss Oberlausizischer Urkunden records »Gottfried gerlachs stipendien- vnd andere stifftungen in Görliz« (Gottfried Gerlach’s scholarship and other endowments in Görlitz) – marked with the cross that the same register uses for the letter of arms of 1433. After his death on 19 October 1737 a further 150 thalers went to the hospital. The endowment outlived the family by a century and a half: in 1885 the »Gottfried Gerlachsche Stiftung« still stood in the list of Görlitz endowments for universities.

What the family said about itself

Before 1735 it names its origin seven times itself, across four decades and three towns, and each time it is Anhalt. The oldest witness even names the town: in 1638 a “Caspar=Otto Gerlach Neoburgo-Anhalt[inus]” matriculated at Jena – Nienburg on the Saale, as the place index of the Jena matriculation edition itself resolves it; from that town exactly two students appear in the whole matriculation between 1548 and 1652. In 1640 the same man signed there as “Casparus Otto Gerlach aus Anhalt”; in 1689 “Lebrecht Gerlach Bernburgensis Anhaltinus” matriculated at Frankfurt on the Oder – beside the entry stands the figure nine, in this edition the matriculation fee in groschen; in 1691 a Zerbst print carries “MARTINUS Gerlach / B. A.”, and in November of the same year the Jena matriculation has the same man written out as “Martinus Gerlach Bernb. Anh.”; in 1692 Lebrecht returned to Jena as “Anhaltinus” and disputed there in 1694 under the same word. Krohne’s article of 1776 rests on what the family sent him; he turned the armigerous standing into the “knightly estate” and Jakob into a “colonel over a regiment of cavalry”, an institution that did not exist in 1433. The article of 1878 in the Brünn pocketbook, written and proofread by the family, added what nobody had known before: the knighting on the bridge over the Tiber, a phrase the Gotha pocketbooks had used since 1853 for the Himmelberg, Dalberg, Herberstein and Keppler; the phrase itself, however, does not carry the charge, for “auf der Tiberbrücke” is the ordinary rendering of the chancery formula “uff der Tiberbrugken” and was already in print in 1862 – what is new in 1878 is not the word but the claim; the origin in the Netherlands; the stations Breslau 1582 and Anhalt 1663; a son Jakob who dies on the Görlitz council in 1515, and a grandson Servatius. The family history of 1903 names the model for the bridge, Gregorovius’ history of the city of Rome, and says that from it “we can form a picture of how it may also have gone for our brave Jakob I”. Who was knighted on the bridge over the Tiber in 1433 is known only in part. The row that long stood here – Keppler, Brisacher, Sannawer, Beheim – is Altmann’s footnote to a single regest, and it is demonstrably incomplete: three of the four stand in the imperial register, the fourth does not. The Keppler letter comes from the heraldic literature of the nineteenth century; it is not among the regesta of 1433.

A better handle is the crown. Whoever was knighted on the bridge received “ein gele oder goltfarb Cron uff dem Helme” – a yellow or gold-coloured crown upon the helmet – and by that mark ten names can be attested in the register of that year instead of four: beside Brisacher, Sannawer and Beheim also Haller, Heiden and Rummel – and Kaspar Schlick himself, who from the coronation day is called “miles” in eight chancery lines and in none before. The Nuremberg chronicle adds that there were also “mer ander ritter von Venedig und von Zurich”, other knights from Venice and from Zurich.

And the Roman side says it more plainly than any German source. Paolo dello Mastro, who wrote in the district at the foot of the Ponte Sant’Angelo, notes that the emperor knighted “più altri cavalieri” there; Infessura writes “de molti cavalieri”; and Niccolò della Tuccia at Viterbo names, beside five Italians, expressly “certi altri italiani e tramontani del suo paese” – and Germans from the emperor’s own country. None of the three names a German, because Italian chroniclers name Italians. **That no Gerlach stands among the known names therefore does not mean that none was among them** – and it proves just as little that one was.

The voices of scholarship

The doubt was voiced in 1904 by the Görlitz city archivist Richard Jecht. He counted the Gerlach among the families “said to have been ennobled by Emperor Sigmund” and asked why precisely three Görlitz families should possess such ancient patents and why the originals were already missing in the sixteenth century. Erich Wentscher, who edited the Görlitz citizenship rolls, wrote in 1932: “I doubt the existence of the knight’s letter altogether”, and let the family’s history reach back “to the Nienburg marriage of 1588”. Recent scholarship – Alexandra Kaar in 2010, Andreas Zajic and Petr Elbel in 2012 – calls the letter a forgery of the sixteenth century which led in 1663 to an illuminated copy; both rely for this solely on the article by Jürgen von Gerlach of 2008, and his book of 2015 lists in its index a “Jakob, allegedly 1433”. The doubt comes from the family itself. And the most recent scholarship carries the letter forward without testing it: in 2022 Péter E. Kovács takes Jakob Gerlach into his table of Sigismund’s Roman entourage, but notes there “Mir ist nur sein Herkunftsort (Görlitz) bekannt” – only his place of origin is known to me. Every other name in that table carries an independent source – from the Vatican registers of supplications, from the Repertorium Germanicum, from the Sienese records. Ours carries none; it stands there on the strength of the letter’s own service formula. Beside it stand the findings of the form that speak for the letter, and between the two the parchment is missing.

Jakob and the line of descent

In the family’s line of descent Jakob has no place. According to the Genealogisches Handbuch des Adels it begins in 1447 with a Gerlach at Obermelsungen in northern Hesse and leads by way of Melsungen to Nienburg on the Saale, where Martin Gerlach married in 1588, and to Anhalt, where Lebrecht was born in 1669. Which of the Melsungen bearers of the name were fathers and sons no document says; the town’s parish registers begin in 1619. Melsungen’s town history of 1905 knows no family Gerlach before 1608, and the Nienburg marriage entry that has Martin come “aus Milsungen” is a later transcript of 1597, which Georg Kupke took for a misreading of Helsungen. What Quedlinburg holds can now be named. A family Gerlach sat there in the sixteenth century, and it sat in good offices. Friedrich Ernst Kettner printed in 1710 the year-by-year list of mayors of both towns; under 1547 stands “Johann Gerlach – Hans Setler”, and Johann Heinrich Fritsch enters the same man in 1828 in the third council body of the old town: “Claus Rübenstreit. Johann Gerlach, 1547. Jacob Seifarth, 1550.” In some four hundred and sixty years of office in both towns that is the only Gerlach. A Martin Gerlach appears in 1568 as town clerk and on 3 September 1575 as syndic; his widow stands in a Saxon electoral file whose cover names the dispute “zwischen dem Capitul S. Bonifacij zu Halberstadt, vnnd Martin Gerlachs zu Quedlinburg Wittbe” – between the chapter of St Boniface at Halberstadt and the widow of Martin Gerlach at Quedlinburg – for the years 1585 to 1590. He was therefore dead by 1585 at the latest.

What stands against this belongs beside it. In the Quedlinburg tax register of 1525 no Gerlach occurs, and in 1556 “Christoff Gerlach von Ermsleben” pays the citizen’s fee – Ermsleben lies fourteen kilometres to the south-east. The Quedlinburg Gerlach are themselves incomers from the Harz, and between them and the Martin who married at Nienburg on the Saale in 1588 lies no document. Three origins the family has upheld side by side in the twentieth century – Görlitz, Breslau–Quedlinburg and Melsungen –, and none of them reaches the man to whom the letter went.

The Prussian act of 1735

Lebrecht Gerlach, born at Amesdorf in 1669, matriculated at Frankfurt an der Oder in 1689 as “Lebrecht Gerlach Bernburgensis Anhaltinus”, mayor of Stolp in 1719, later court councillor at Köslin, died 1742, presented the authenticated copy in Berlin. He never owned a knightly estate: Ganzkow came to his son Martin only in 1755, the remaining estates between 1762 and 1781. Gritzner’s register records under 2 September 1735 the act “für den Hofgerichts-Rath Lebrecht G. zu Coeslin, unter Anerkennung des, seinem Vorfahren Jacob G. … verliehenen Reichsadels” – for the court councillor Lebrecht G. at Köslin, in recognition of the imperial nobility granted to his ancestor Jacob G. –, and under 6 February 1787 the recognition for his descendants “mit dems. Wappen” – with the same arms. The files lie in the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz among the nobility files of the Privy Council (Geheimer Rat) – a bundle “von Gerlach, 1734–1767, hier Adel für d. Rat Lebrecht Gerlach 1734”, a case “Lebrecht Gerlach 1729”, a piece of the Königsberg ministry of state of 1735 and a bundle of the years 1783 to 1799 –; in addition the State Archive at Stettin holds, from the registry of the Köslin court, the volume “Standeserhöhungen” – elevations of rank – for the years 1731 to 1746. Krohne knew no Prussian act in 1776; Hellbach printed “Adelspatent u. Renovation des Adels” (patent of nobility and renewal of nobility) with the date 2 September 1735 in 1825, but attached the day to the imperial grant; Zedlitz took that for a misprint in 1839 and named a diploma of renewal without a year; the date of the Prussian act was supplied by Gritzner in 1874, and the Brünn pocketbook called the act a recognition in 1878.

Two Coats of Arms, Two Families

There is more than one family von Gerlach, and the arms keep them apart. The Brünn Genealogisches Taschenbuch der adeligen Häuser runs two lines side by side, “von Gerlach I.” and “von Gerlach II.”. The first is this one: Reformed, imperial nobility of 10 August 1433, Prussian recognition of 2 September 1735, on the black field the silver horse rising from flames. The second is Lutheran and was raised to the Prussian nobility on 15 October 1840, the diploma issued at Potsdam on 6 August 1856. Its line begins with Siegfried Sigismund Gerlach, excise director at Landsberg on the Warthe, who died in 1722; a mayor of Arnswalde and a councillor of justice follow, and the man ennobled was Karl Johann Heinrich Eduard von Gerlach (1792–1863), police president of Berlin and afterwards regional president at Cologne and Erfurt. His son Max sat at Mönchmotschelnitz in the district of Wohlau in Silesia, his grandson was the publicist and pacifist Hellmut von Gerlach (1866–1935). This house too bears a horse, but a different one: “In Silber ein schwarzes, aus blauem Wasser halb hervorsteigendes Pferd” – on silver a black horse rising half out of blue water. Fire against water, silver on black against black on silver – the two shields can be told apart at a glance. Max Jähns already set them side by side in 1872 in his book on horse and rider: “v. Gerlach (Preußen) aus Flammen hervorspringend, v. Gerlach (1840) aus Wasser springend” – the Prussian von Gerlach leaping out of flames, the von Gerlach of 1840 leaping out of water. The pocketbook remarks of the second family that it is of the same descent as the first; it has no line of estates at the head of its article, though individual members held estates of their own, Mönchmotschelnitz in the district of Wohlau and Miloschewo in the district of Neustadt in West Prussia. None of these ever belonged to a von Gerlach I, and the estates on this website all belong to the first family. Portraits of this man are held by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, among them a lithograph by Friedrich Jentzen; and when he died on his estate on 17 August 1863 a Hague paper reported it as news from Berlin: he had long headed the police there and afterwards led the government at Cologne.

That the two houses wanted nothing to do with each other is attested, of all places, from the other side. Hellmut von Gerlach twice held up Karl August von Gerlach-Parsow in the left-wing press as an example of untaxed large landownership, on 9 May 1927 in the “Welt am Montag” and on 27 July 1932 in the “Vorwärts”. In the second article, headed “The Barons as Taxpayers”, he writes of him: “He is the head of the so-called elder line, which once solemnly declared in the Kreuz-Zeitung that it was of considerably older nobility than my family and had nothing to do with me.” The demarcation thus comes from the family itself, it stood in print in the newspaper Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach had founded, and the man it was aimed at later repeated it word for word. The 1892 volume of the Brünn pocketbook, the first to place the two families side by side, asserts on page 98 that they are of the same descent; the elder line contradicted that. Both statements belong to the history of this demarcation.

Two further names belong to neither family. Rietstap lists a family “Gerlach – Heusden” from North Brabant, gules a horse argent issuing from a bridge or. And the extinct Silesian family “von Gerlachsheim”, which Hefner’s Stammbuch of 1863 lists two columns from the Gerlach article, is the reason why Leopold’s memoirs of 1891 take a place called Gerlachsheim near Görlitz for a family possession: a confusion, not an estate.

A Window in the Altmark

One object that brings everything together stands in a village church in the district of Stendal. Around 1895 the patronage church at Wittenmoor received eleven donated windows from the workshop of the Royal Institute of Glass Painting in Berlin-Charlottenburg. Wittenmoor belonged to the von Alvensleben; the lady of the manor was Ehrengard née von Kröcher of Vinzelberg, and her daughter Elisabeth Louise had married Leopold Friedrich von Gerlach in 1867, a son of the Berlin court preacher Otto von Gerlach. For the three daughters of the house the family donated the three north windows. One of them shows at the top two tilted shields side by side: to the dexter, on the viewer’s left and thus in the more honourable place, for the husband, the rising horse coming out of golden flames at the lower edge of the shield; facing it the Alvensleben shield. Below runs a scroll in Gothic letters: “† Elisabeth Louise von Gerlach geb. von Alvensleben & Leopold von Gerlach. Off. Joh. 19,9: Selig sind, die zum Abendmahl des Lammes berufen sind” – Blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb. Both had by then been dead for more than twenty years, she since 1872, he since 1874.

For the question of how the arms were borne, this window is the most securely datable witness of the nineteenth century: fixed to a decade, preserved, restored by 2007, and donated not by the family itself but by that of the parents-in-law. It shows the horse rising from flames and no red border.