Until the mid-fi fteenth century, Starogród Chełmiński ( Althausen in German) was the most important pilgrimage destination in the state of the Teutonic Order – the gord which was later to become the town of Chełmno transferred to its current location in 1251. 1 It was here that the relics of the head of Saint Barbara, 2 an early fourth-century martyr, 3 were venerated. Probably already in 1319 the sanctuary in Starogród was granted an indulgence, which is now lost. By the turn of the fourteenth to the fi fteenth century Starogród had also become a travel destination for pilgrims from outside the Teutonic Order state. They included Anna, wife of Vytautas, grand duke of Lithuania, who visited Starogród in 1400, and the traveller and diplomat Gilbert de Lannoy, who went there in 1414. The latter saw the reliquaries containing the saint’s skull and arm. He also saw some kind of depiction of her, most probably in form of a silver fi gurine. The considerable importance of the Starogród sanctuary is refl ected in the high number of votive offerings it attracted, which are recorded in the fi fteenth-century inventories. 4

In 1457, during his thirteen-year-long war with the Teutonic Order, the king of Poland, Casimir Jagiellon, pledged the valuables of the Gdańsk and Starogród burghers in an effort to raise money for the purchase of Marienburg castle from Teutonic Order mercenaries. 5 Sacred objects that were not repurchased from the pledge remained in Gdańsk, where they were venerated until 1577, when they were melted into scrap. 6 As confi rmed by the early sixteenth-century Polish chronicler Matthias of Miechów, Saint Barbara’s head was at that time still in Gdańsk. According Teresa Mroczko, however, documents relating to the pledge mention only the fi gurine and arm reliquary of Saint Barbara, while stating that her head had remained in possession of the king. Mroczko further believes that the Gothicstyle herm of Saint Barbara at the monastery of canons regular at Czerwińsk in Mazovia, fi rst confi rmed in 1631, was, in fact, the Starogród reliquary. In her opinion, the Gothic-style herm which the Teutonic Knights had commissioned had replaced the Romanic-style box reliquary which had contained the relic when it had come into the possession of the Teutonic Order. According to this view, after Casimir Jagiellon had won his war with the Order, he donated the herm to Czerwińsk abbey to commemorate the fact that his father Ladislaus Jagiellon’s

survived and the Starogród jewels are not clearly specifi ed in the sources, however, this conclusion is far from certain.