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– WIED – (continued)
SHIELD The shield of Wied is preserved – at least for the Braunsberg branch of the house of Isenburg which had the superior hereditary claim at the extinction of the first line of counts and held the Wied title after 1338. It is of the same design as the Isenburg shields, but its coloration contrasts sharply with Isenburg’s sable on argent, leading one to speculate that the colors, if not the design, are those of the original dynasty of Wied. The coloration, gueules on or, actually coincides with shields preserved for families such as Odenkirchen and Virneburg, which are likely to have some common background with Wied. The Bilstein line which held comital jurisdiction in Thuringia adopted a shield not too distant from the preserved shield of Wied, if one credits the evidence of the late fourteenth-century armorials Gelre and Bellenville. In both a shield for “counts of Bilstein” is provided among “Saxon” comital shields, although by this time the Bilstein counts were extinct for several decades. The Bilstein shield featured pals rather than fasces, and they were sinople instead of gueules. The color sinople was a modernism, or at least was eschewed by the old Frankish families of Hessen and the Rhine, though adopted readily in certain situations outside this region. The original Wied shield can hardly have featured sinople. But it may well have contained pals and not the fasces of Isenburg. Interestingly, after Wied county fell to the lords of Runkel in 1462 a new shield was devised, with bandes of gueules and or – the Wied colors, but now these were slanted lines that merged the fasces of Wied and the pals of Bilstein – and the color sinople was at last introduced through a peacock charge “in natural colors” – a far cry, however, from the lions and eagles of the crucible of imperial heraldry.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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