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Cologne, Germany has enriched my life in two important ways. First, it’s where my wife, Ulrike, was born on December 29th in a year that I’m too smart to specify. Second, it’s the home of Kölsch, a tasty ale that Schlafly now brews on a year round basis, using yeast from Cologne to which Ulrike gave us access.
Cologne has a long and proud history of brewing, which was controlled by the Catholic church at least until the 13th century. In 1254 the non-clerical brewers in the city formed a guild to defend their economic interests. In 1288 they played an important role in the battle of Worringen, ousting Archbishop Siegfried II of Westerburg and gaining for the city of Cologne its independence from the Archbishopric.
Meanwhile, the city was in the process of constructing its famous cathedral, which is also known as the Church of the Three Kings. The project had been initiated by Siegfried’s predecessor Archbishop Konrad von Hochstaden in 1248 and wasn’t completed until 1880. More than 750 years after the initial groundbreaking, the cathedral is still the most famous landmark in Cologne, comparable to the arch in St. Louis. As any local resident will proudly explain, it contains the Shrine of the Three Kings, whose three crowns are part of Cologne’s official seal. January 6th, the Feast of the Three Kings, is an important local holiday.
All of this civic pride notwithstanding, there’s one question to which few people from Cologne seem to know the answer: How did these Middle Eastern Magi (sorcerers) come to be buried on the banks of the Rhine? For the benefit of alert readers (ARs) in Cologne and elsewhere I’m pleased to shed some light on this mystery.
The Magi were members of a priestly caste of Persian Zoroastrianism, from whose name the word “magic” is derived. Although the New Testament accounts are rather sketchy, subsequent scholars concluded that there were three of them, respectively the kings of Arabia (Melchior), Ethiopia (Balthazar) and Tarsus (Caspar). They were reportedly baptized in India by St. Thomas the Apostle and then ordained as priests. They were later martyred and buried in Jerusalem.
Nearly three centuries later the Roman Empress St. Helena found the bodies while on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and brought them back to Constantinople (named for her son, Emperor Constantine I). A few years later Constantine packed the remains in a marble sarcophagus and shipped them to Milan as a gift to Eustorgio I, the bishop. After more than 800 years in Milan, the remains were looted by Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich I, aka Barbarossa, and taken to Cologne, where they were given to the archbishop in 1164.
It’s worth noting that Friedrich at the time was not a member in good standing of the church to which he made this generous gift. Having been crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Adrian IV in 1155, he was excommunicated five years later by Pope Alexander III. It’s also important to distinguish the Roman Empire over which Constantine reigned from Friedrich’s Holy Roman Empire. As the French satirist Voltaire explained, the Holy Roman Empire wasn’t holy, Roman or an empire.
Getting back to St. Helena, ARs might be interested to know that the remains of the Three Kings weren’t the only souvenirs she brought back from the Holy Land. While she was in Jerusalem she destroyed the temple of Aphrodite and among its ruins found the cross on which Jesus had been crucified. She also found the nails used in the crucifixion and sent them back to her son in Constantinople. The Emperor Constantine had them melted down and fashioned into a bridle for his horse.
Constantine wasn’t the first Roman emperor to pamper his horse in ways that would strike us as somewhat bizarre today. Three centuries earlier, Caligula had housed his horse Incitatus in a stall made from ivory inside a marble stable. The noble steed was dressed in royal purple and had a jeweled collar. He attended sumptuous banquets and drank wine from a golden goblet.
Speaking of wine, I need to clear up a serious but understandable misconception on the part of some ARs. It has its origins in a sobriquet I acquired during army basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina 40 years ago. Because my drill sergeant had trouble pronouncing my last name, I became known as Shoofly, one of the few names he called me that can be printed in The Growler. After four decades the moniker has endured among some of my friends and was even among the names Dan Kopman and I briefly considered for our beer when we started the company in 1989.
Imagine my surprise when I recently learned that the name we rejected for our beer 20 years ago had been adopted by an Australian winery. Inevitably, people I’ve known for years have encountered the wine and asked me if I had anything to do with it. The answer is no. We’ve got our hands full keeping up with beer production. For the first time ever, fresh Schlafly Kölsch is available on the Feast of the Three Kings; and we want to be sure we have enough to toast them with their favorite beer.
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