Today's coats of arms come from a carved stone memorial mounted on the outside wall of St. Stephen’s Cathedral (German: Stephansdom), the main cathedral of Vienna. It stands in Stephansplatz in the 1st District (Innere Stadt) in the historic center of the city.
The memorial is one of several Renaissance-era memorial plaques set into the exterior walls of the cathedral. It is located along the north side of the nave, near one of the smaller side entrances, mounted high on the stone wall.
For centuries, grave markers and memorial epitaphs were embedded in the exterior walls of the cathedral because the churchyard cemetery once surrounded the building. When the cemetery was later removed, many stones remained built into the walls. I have seen such memorials mounted on the exterior walls of churches in other places, e.g., the Peterskirche (St. Peter's Church) in Heidelburg, Germany, where my great-grandfather was baptized.
But I digress. Here is the photograph that Katie took of this memorial:
The inscription is in two parts:
The shorter inscription on the small plaque above the two shields translates roughly into English as:
Those who die in God are blessed from now on. So that they all, who here in Christ fall asleep (die), shall be saved. (This is a paraphrase of Revelation 14:13 — a very common funerary text.)
The much longer inscription at the base of the monument translates roughly into English as:
To the honor of Almighty God and in special remembrance of the noble and learned lord Jacob Himmelreich Bieder, Doctor of Law of the Roman Emperor Ferdinand, city judge and also elder of the inner city council here in Vienna, who died on the 8th day of January in the year 1570, this epitaph was erected for the first lady of the house, Katherine née Freislebin, who passed away peacefully in God before the month of May 1555, and for her deceased children. This epitaph was erected by the aforementioned Count's retired son, Barthelm Himmelreich the expediter and tax assessor of the government of Archduke Charles of Austria, and Leopold Himmelreich, his brother, chamberlain to the Empress. May Almighty God, through Jesus Christ, raise them up again on the Last Day.
I have been unable to locate either the husband's or the wife's arms in the sources I have at hand. Not that I am surprised at this; armorials for German-speaking Europe and many and not easy to research; it often involves going though armorial after armorial page by page, and successful searches are pretty rare barring something like inclusion in J.-B. Rietstap's Armorial Général, which, alas, contains no arms for Bieder or Freislbin (or anything like it; yes, I know that often the "in" ending in German is a gender marker, i.e., "Mrs. Freisleb").
Herr Bieder's coat of arms (oh the left) appear to be: Quarterly: 1 and 4, An image of Atlas (a man dressed in a loincloth which is issuing a length of cloth to each side and bearing a globe of the world upon one shoulder); 2 and 3, A lion rampant. His wife Catherine's arms are: A lion rampant maintaining in three paws a halberd.
The crests are: Issuant from a ducal coronet a crowned demi-man dressed in a loincloth which is issuing a length of cloth to each side between and holding a pair of buffalo horns/elephant's trunks each tipped with a comet (Bieder); Issuant from a ducal coronet a demi-lion erect mainting in its paws a halberd (Freislebin).
Still and all, though, I'm always grateful to be able to put a name to a coat of arms, or here, names to two coats of arms, whether or not we can determine the colors of the shield and its charges.
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