Braunschweiger Pfaffenkrieg

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The Braunschweiger Pfaffenkrieg , also known as Braunschweiger Papenkrieg , describes a non-armed conflict between the City Council of Braunschweig and the three large churches of the city, the Blasius and St. Cyriakus Abbey and the St. Aegidien Monastery over the years from 1413 to 1420 to fill a pastorate.

Triggers and Participants

The trigger of the dispute was the replacement of a parish office at St. Ulrici that had become vacant in 1413 . The Blasiusstift , which had previously held the right of appointment, filled the position with Johann Monstede, one of its deacons . As was customary in the city at the time, he in turn commissioned another clergyman to exercise the office. Angry about this, the Ulrici parish demanded the appointment of another pastor, named Heinrich Herbodes, also vicar to St. Blasii. Since no agreement could be reached, both opponents brought the matter before the papal court in Rome , which ruled in Herbodes' favor. Monstede had to vacate the position and the common council approved the establishment of Herbode. The Blasiusstift then closed the church, refused to hand over the keys and turned to the diocese of Hildesheim for help . This in turn commissioned Johann Ember , pastor of St. Andrew's Church, to exercise the office.

escalation

Ember openly opposed the city council and represented the interests of the monasteries St. Blasius, St. Cyriakus and the Aegidienkloster, which very quickly led to considerable hostility, which culminated in the fact that an archdeacon of the Archdiocese of Mainz added the diocese to its district Hildesheim belonged, finally, publicly and in the name of the Pope, the ban on the chapter of the colleges , which the dean of St. Cyriakus and Johann Ember uttered. This ban on pastors and clergy also extended to their entire communities, so that worship could no longer be held in their churches . Some of them stood empty for several years. Services were held in very few churches at this time. B. in the Katharinen- and Michaeliskirche , as well as in some monasteries and chapels.

The dispute then escalated: The cathedral monastery sent letters to all Guelph princes as well as to the cathedral chapters of Halberstadt , Hildesheim and Magdeburg with a request for help in the matter. As a result, at numerous church festivals in Braunschweig, this led to the disputing parties hindering or boycotting each other, and due to the hardened fronts, several attempts at arbitration by the dukes Bernhard and Otto initially remained unsuccessful. The mutual hostility now also led to assaults, so that various clergymen, among them the pastor of the Martinikirche and Johann Ember as late as 1413, were forced to flee the city for their own safety. In return, they had a ban pronounced against the city council. In 1414, the cathedral chapter finally turned to Pope John XXIII with a request for help . which further exacerbated the conflicting viewpoints.

The years of disputes also drained the financial resources of both sides considerably, as one robbed each other of sources of income in order to be able to cover their own costs.

School dispute

During the dispute over the occupation of the pastor's position at St. Ulrici, another point of contention arose in 1414: the establishment of Latin schools by the city council, from which the Braunschweig school dispute developed. Previously it was the right of the clergy to open and run Latin schools. However, this was no longer enough for the council in view of the city's growing political and economic importance. He wanted the schools to be removed from the sphere of influence of the clergy in order to be able to guarantee a more contemporary education with new content that did justice to the position of the Hanseatic city .

The dispute was sparked initially at the intended creation of two new schools - the "Martineum" and the "Katharineum" whose establishment of the Council in the soft form Old Town and Hagen decided in the same year. However, it still needed papal confirmation, which is why the Braunschweig mayor Fricke van Twedorp , as delegate of the council, went to the Council of Constance , the center of the Christian world at that time , in the autumn of 1414 .

The schools were founded there by Pope John XXIII. allowed in February 1415, whereupon the cathedral chapter and others first addressed the emperor and finally also to Rome. Very soon John XXIII. declared antipope, which also invalidated the document that Fricke van Twedorp had brought to Braunschweig. The following Pope Martin V then decided in accordance with the chapter and condemned the council. But on September 16, 1419, the Pope converted this saying into one in favor of the establishment of schools and in the interests of the council. The content of the privilege that has now been issued is a repetition of the document from 1415 that Fricke van Twedorp brought home, and therefore its confirmation. In 2015, Braunschweig could look back on a 600-year tradition of this by far oldest urban school in Braunschweig and one of the oldest in Lower Saxony.

Agreement and settlement

After eight years of arguing, the parties were financially exhausted and, as a result, ready to settle. So the Braunschweiger Pfaffenkrieg could finally be ended on February 24th 1420 by an arbitration award from Duke Bernhard. The slogan contained a comparison : Duke Bernhard, "Lord of the Land of Braunschweig and Wolfenbüttel", received patronage over the Ulrici Church, in return the Blasiusstift received the chapel in Stecklenburg and the City Council of Braunschweig the right to establish the two Latin schools “Martineum” (in Jakobstrasse) and “Katharineum” (at the Katharinenkirche 6) as well as the right to set up writing schools. In 1866 the two Latin schools were merged into the Martino-Katharineum grammar school, which still exists today .

literature

  • Hermann Dürre : History of the City of Braunschweig in the Middle Ages , Braunschweig 1861
  • Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller : Pfaffenkriege in the late medieval Hanseatic area: Sources and studies on Braunschweig, Osnabrück, Lüneburg and Rostock . Böhlau, Cologne 1988, ISBN 3-412-04487-3

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Heinrich Dürre: History of the City of Braunschweig in the Middle Ages , Braunschweig 1861, p. 198
  2. ^ Brigide Schwarz : Hanoverian in Braunschweig. The careers of Johann Ember († 1432) and Hermann Pentel († after 1463) , in: Braunschweigisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte , Volume 80, 1999, p. 23
  3. ^ Heinrich Dürre: History of the City of Braunschweig in the Middle Ages , Braunschweig 1861, p. 199
  4. ↑ a b Hermann Herbst : The library of the Andreas Church in Braunschweig ; in: Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen , vol. 58, issue 9/10, Sept./Oct. 1941, p. 313f
  5. ^ Heinrich Dürre: History of the City of Braunschweig in the Middle Ages , Braunschweig 1861, p. 202
  6. ^ Heinrich Dürre: History of the City of Braunschweig in the Middle Ages , Braunschweig 1861, p. 200f
  7. ↑ a b c Heinrich Dürre: History of the City of Braunschweig in the Middle Ages , Braunschweig 1861, p. 204
  8. ↑ a b Joachim Lehrmann : Fricke van Twedorp / von Zweydorff - From the life of a patrician and basin worker entrepreneur in the Braunschweiger Neustadt - around 1400. In: Braunschweigische Heimat, 2016, Vol. I, pp. 8-19.
  9. ^ Heinrich Dürre: History of the City of Braunschweig in the Middle Ages , Braunschweig 1861, p. 203