Inscriptions of Ingolstadt

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On a building situated in the historical center of Ingolstadt, diagonally opposite to the so-called High School, there are two inscriptions explaining the history of the building.

Latin Inscription

Comment

In my transcription of the Latin inscription (see above) I extended the conventional abbreviations of the inscription to the full text, putting the added letters in brackets.

The Latin word "dives" may effectively be translated by "rich", and according to the Bavarian duke George's German surname "der Reiche", this translation seems to be correct because the German word is the original one and the Latin word is merely its translation, but in fact the Latin word could also have the less precise meaning of "marvellous, splendid, wonderful" or so.

Roman numbers have been evolving for two thousand years and have not always been used in the same way during the same period, especially in public epigraphy. For the evolution and the formal rules of Roman numbers, see Wikipedia. The inscription described here gives a good justification of why the Roman numeral system was finally replaced by the (better) Arab one. Compare the Roman and Arab representation of the following calculation, which answers the question of for how many years the building was not renovated notably (contrarily to modern glass and ferro-concrete buildings, which rarely last more than a hundred years, in spite of constant renovation work).

The Arab system allows you to systematically proceed step by step without any other considerations than the purely mathematical ones whereas the Roman "system" forces you to reconsider the formal aspects of every number apart, without offering simple mathematical rules leading from the initial numbers to the result of the subtraction. If this rather chaotic Roman system had not been replaced by the clearly organized Arab one, many successes in modern science and technology, such as mathematics, physics, statistics, information technology, would have been impossible or at least much more difficult to be made. That is why Roman numbers have only survived in certain niches, such as epigraphy and typography.

Nowadays, if you ask German - or even Bavarian - people who was George the Rich (Georg der Reiche), you are likely to have no answer in most cases. But almost everybody - at least in Bavaria - knows the famous Landshut wedding (Landshuter Hochzeit), which is a modern pseudo-medieval re-celebration of George the Rich's wedding with the Polish princess Hedwig (= Jadwiga) Jagiellon, in 1475. If the real wedding was one of the greatest medieval festivals, its commemoration, which takes place every four years, is one of the greatest modern festivals, with about 2 000 medievally-clothed amateur actors.

In 1475, George's marriage with Jadwiga was considered as an event of great European importance because its intention was the reinforcement of the Roman Empire in its struggle against the expanding Turkish Empire.

For the chronology of this Ingolstadt building and its neighbors, see my comment on the German Inscription.

German Inscription

Comment

This more recent inscription tries to have an older aspect by using the so-called "long s" in "Dieses" as well as Roman numbers. But in vain! The whole rest of the inscription clearly offers a rather modern view.

Obviously the building was renovated again in very recent times but this is mentioned nowhere.

To get an idea of the history of the three very old buildings that are situated very close to one another in the historical center of Ingolstadt, see the following table.

Bibliography

Internet

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Arrival by Public Transport

For the arrival in Ingolstadt, see Inscriptions of Ingolstadt.

Looking at the front of the Old Cityhall (Altes Rathaus), take the Moritzstraße on the left of the cityhall. Then turn left into the Dollstraße and continue till the end of this street. Then successively turn right and left into the Hohe-Schul-Straße, where you will find the High School (Hohe Schule) on the left corner of the Goldknopfgasse. The former college is diagonally opposite on the right corner.

Indications concerning the arrival correspond to our personal knowledge or even experience, but we cannot assume any responsibility for their rightness. When you are reading this page, things may have changed in reality.

Hans-Rudolf Hower, 2012

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Last updated: April 4, 2016