We can hardly empathize with people who were so afraid of Hellfire that they gave up power, wealth, and posterity to avoid it.

Nine hundred years ago that fear was real and steeped in history.

In the spring of 1122, Count Gottfried von Cappenberg, ruler of a considerable territory in northern Westphalia and candidate for the County of Arnsberg by marriage, converted his ancestral castle into a Premonstratensian monastery, to which he transferred his entire property.

The year before, on a pilgrimage, Gottfried had met Norbert von Xanten, the founder of the Abbey of Prémontré, and told him an event that weighed heavily on his soul.

On February 2, 1121, Cappenberg troops stormed the city of Münster and set the cathedral there on fire.

Andrew Kilb

Feature correspondent in Berlin.

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The matter also had a secular side.

The storming of Münster was an episode of the power struggle between the Saxon dukes and the Salian Emperor Henry V as part of the Investiture Controversy between the Empire and the Pope.

Heinrich had been in retreat for years.

In the spring of 1122, however, the tide had turned and the Worms Concordat was about to be signed.

As a rebel, the Count of Cappenberg was threatened with the loss of all his goods.

By founding the monastery, he forestalled a judge's verdict.

In order to further advance the reconciliation with the Salians, Gottfried and his brother Otto sought to be close to their Swabian relatives, the Staufers.

In the autumn of 1122, they sold their scattered possessions in southern Germany, two castles including Hintersassen, to the House of Hohenstaufen at a reasonable price.

To strengthen family ties, Otto was allowed to baptize the youngest heir of the Staufer family in December.

The boy's name was Frederick.

As emperor, he was nicknamed Barbarossa.

Privilege was the pillar of earthly power

In the Barbarossa exhibition in the Münster Museum for Art and Culture, a silver bowl is shown that records the act of baptism.

The bowl is a gift from Barbarossa from his early reign to Otto von Cappenberg, who mentions it in his estate.

However, the gilded engraving with the baptismal scene on the bottom of the bowl was not made until after Otto's death in 1171 (his brother Gottfried had died in 1127) as visual evidence of the Cappenberg Monastery's proximity to the emperor.

We are used to pictures immediately recording an event.

In the Middle Ages, however, pictorial representations were mostly created as an expression of memoria - commemoration - or privilege (and often both).

Privileges and titles were the pillars of earthly power.

The focus of the Münster exhibition is of course the so-called Barbarossa head by Cappenberg.

For a long time it was considered a portrait of the Staufer emperor and the first post-antique imperial portrait.

At the large Staufer exhibition in Stuttgart in 1977, he adorned the cover of all five volumes of the catalogue.

The fact that the head served as a reliquary of St. John has been explained for 150 years with the later reworking and gilding of a silver bust "after the face of an emperor", which appears in Abbot Otto's estate list.

It is now clear that the bust, with its pedestal of lion's feet and kneeling angels, served as a reliquary from the outset.

A material analysis also showed that there is not a single gram of silver under the gold layer.

The Cappenberger head was never a Barbarossa portrait.