Death
Engelbert earned the respect and affection of his subjects through his devotion to justice and his energy in maintaining law, and took great pains to ensure the well-being of the religious within his authority. However, his effectiveness in achieving his goals by all means necessary, including military action, his allegiance to the pope and the emperor, and his uncompromising defence of the law and the rights of religious persons and bodies, brought him into conflict with the nobility, including his own family, and this led to his death.
His cousin Count Frederick of Isenberg was Vogt of Essen Abbey, and was abusing his position by defrauding the nuns. Engelbert was determined to protect their interests, and sought to bring Frederick to justice. On 7 November 1225 as they returned together from Soest, where they had attended a judicial hearing, to Cologne in a defile near the present-day Gevelsberg near Schwelm, he was killed, possibly murdered, by Frederick.
It seems probable that behind the attack, which may have been intended to take Engelbert captive rather than kill him, was a whole group of disaffected nobility, in whose view the archbishop represented a major threat to their interests.
Engelbert's body was taken to Cologne on a dung-cart, and when examined, found to have forty-seven wounds.
Read more about this topic: Engelbert II Of Berg
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“Nature creates while destroying, and doesn’t care whether it creates or destroys—as long as life isn’t extinguished, as long as death doesn’t lose its rights.”
—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)
“And anyone is free to condemn me to death
If he leaves it to nature to carry out the sentence.
I shall will to the common stock of air my breath
And pay a death tax of fairly polite repentance.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with the emblems of life and procreation, and even with obscene symbols; in the religions of antiquity the sacred and the obscene often lay very close together. These men knew how to pay homage to death. For death is worthy of homage as the cradle of life, as the womb of palingenesis.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)