The Middle Ages were the time of the crusades. They were also a time when many good and above all inventive stories arose.

In 1189, Emperor Frederick I (known as Barbarossa) left for the crusades. Dietmar der Anhanger was a miller’s son. He was part of the Bavarian Duke’s entourage on the way to the Holy Land. The battle raged before the walls of Jerusalem. The Bavarians, and Dietmar along with them, stormed rashly over the walls. In the heat of the moment, they lost their standard. The resourceful Dietmar attached a peasant’s boot to his lance as a substitute. And so Jerusalem was conquered under the banner of the peasant’s boot. Dietmar returned to his homeland and was given the land around his father's mill as a reward. This was the land where Ried market came into being.

Unfortunately Ried's founding myth is only imaginary. The crusades came to a premature end. Emperor Frederick I drowned in the Saleph river in what is now south western Turkey. His crusaders never reached Jerusalem.

It is only 245 years after the failed crusade, in 1435, that the peasant’s boot appears in the Ried coat of arms. The story of the audacious Dietmar and the peasant’s boot was then invented another 100 years later, when Ried lawyer Andreas Pernöder attempted to explain the boot in the coat of arms through this legend. How the then popular lace-up boot came to be part of the coat of arms remains a mystery. Whatever the reason, truth is not always greater than fiction and the citizens of Ried continue to delight in their hero.