Saint-Pierre Abbey (Bèze)
The former Burgundian Abbey of Saint-Pierre and Saint-Paul was a Benedictine monastery in what is now the municipality of Bèze and existed from its foundation in 630 until it was dissolved after the French Revolution in 1791 .
The abbey is now privately owned and is only open to the public on the occasion of the Journées du Patrimoine , the French days of open monuments .
history
founding
In 630, the Dux des Pagus Attoriensis , Amalgar , together with his wife Aquilina , donated the family property near a spring that was venerated as a sacred spring by the Celts under the name Besu and which was named Fons Besua after the Roman conquest of Burgundy a monastery.
The donation came to repentance for the murder of Neustrian nobles Brodulf , who at the instigation of the same year Merovingian King Dagobert I. jointly by Amalgar and the two Burgundian Great Arne Bert and Willibald had been slain.
For Gründungsabt her convent the donor couple certain her son Waldelenus, which was probably intended as the second child early for the clergy and his priestly ordinations in Luxeuil Abbey , a foundation of the holy Columban received. Waldelenus directed the convent in terms of his spiritual education under the Regula Columbani and, with the political and economic support of his parents, expanded the convent into a sacred family center and burial place for the Attoarian dukes.
The monastery in the early Middle Ages
With the introduction of a Schola Monastica from 655 , Saint-Pierre was one of the first abbeys in the Franconian Empire to maintain its own monastery school . This was located in the monastery complex to educate the young monks.
In 658 , the abbey was donated to the Saint-Martin convent in Brégille, now part of Besançon . The abbess, Waldelenus sister Adalsind, acted on the instructions of her eldest brother Adalrich , who had succeeded Amalagar as attorney duke and tried to limit the extensive donations from his parents to Saint-Martin. Due to the transfer of ownership, violent clashes broke out with the local nobility, in the course of which the nuns were expelled from Brégille and accepted into the Abbey of Bèze, which was probably run as a double monastery until 731 .
In 675 the abbey got caught up in the turmoil of the civil war after the murder of Childerich II. Amalgar's grandson Eticho , who ruled as duke over the Pagus Attoriensis, faced his ruler, the Neustrian King Theuderich III , in the struggle for power in the Frankish Empire . After Theuderic's victory, Eticho was relieved of his Burgundian possessions because of his ties to the Austrasian side; It is noteworthy that this was not added to the crown property, but the family property was completely transferred to the Abbey of Bèze.
In the course of the Saracen incursions into the Franconian Empire, the monastery was destroyed in 731 . Pippin the Younger transferred the abbey property to his half-brother Remigius von Rouen , which was not approved by the monks' convent - in the aftermath of the dispute with Remigius, most of the monks finally left Saint-Pierre and joined the Luxeuil monastery. In the years that followed, monastic life in Bèze came to a complete standstill, until 826 , under the reign of Louis the Pious , the abbey was rebuilt by the Bishop of Langres , Alberich , who introduced the Regula Benedicti for the monastery.
While the increasing raids of the Normans from the eighties of the 9th century led to a serious impairment of monastic life, the abbey was completely destroyed again during the Hungarian invasion in 937 and remained deserted for half a century. It was not until 990 , under the abbiat of Wilhelm von Volpiano , that the monastery was rebuilt and fortified and quickly developed into a center for spirituality and culture in close connection with the neighboring Saint-Bénigne abbey in the spirit of the Cluniac reform - so can be found among the for the year 1025 recorded conventuals of the historian and hagiographer Rodulfus Glaber .
The time of the high and late middle ages
Under the abbot Étienne de Joinville, the monastery flourished economically at the end of the 11th century and the number of conventuals increased to 150 monks.
During Joinville's Abbatiat, Pope Paschal II visited the Abbey of Béze from February 17-19 , 1107 and consecrated the high altar of the monastery complex in a service the day after his arrival .
After a devastating fire in 1198 , the abbey was rebuilt and the village of Béze was fortified. The abbot of the monastery took on the title of Baron von Béze from 1253 - as in many abbeys of the Christian West of that time, in the monastery of Saint-Pierre the observance of the Benedictine rules was no longer the focus of monastic life, but rather the increase in life Property as well as political influence. Since the abbey was not only responsible for the training of novices at the end of the 13th century , but the religious also increasingly took on the education of the children of the local nobility, the old monastery school within the abbey was dissolved and replaced in 1280 by a new building in front of the monastery walls.
In 1350 , the great European plague epidemic, the Black Death, also raged within the walls of the Saint-Pierre monastery and claimed a high number of deaths - in 1379 , long after the pandemic had ended, only 12 monks were left in the abbey of the 150 inhabitants left free.
In 1423 , during the Hundred Years War , Abbot Simon de Torcenay fortified the abbey by surrounding it with a moat with a drawbridge and a double defensive wall with two towers, Tour d'Oysel and Tour de Chaux , to protect the monastery and village; under his abbatiate, the first forge was built in Béze in 1425 .
From modern times to the French Revolution
The extensive construction work by the Abbot de Torcenay and the armed conflicts of the 16th and 17th centuries ultimately put the abbey in an economically threatening position. In 1513 the monastery of Saint-Pierre was occupied and plundered by the Swiss mercenaries of the League during the Italian wars , in November 1636 an army of the Catholic League led by Matthias Gallas devastated the abbey and left it in ruins. It wasn't until 1662 that 12 monks from the Saint-Maur Abbey settled in Béze again and rebuilt the destroyed monastery.
The abbey's cultural and economic decline proved unstoppable, however, due to the pre-revolutionary crisis of French absolutism, which found its expression in a permanent financial hardship. The reconstruction of the buildings was very slow due to a lack of financial resources - the new abbey church was only consecrated in 1731 by Jean Bouhier, the Bishop of Dijon , and the last work for the renovation of the monastery complex was completed another seven years later. An episcopal revision in 1768 found that the convent of the Abbey of Bèze only consisted of 8 religious at that time.
After the outbreak of the French Revolution , the abbey was requisitioned as national property in May 1790 and the movable monastery property was all sold; In January 1791 , the last 3 remaining monks were finally forced to give up their religious house and leave the monastery.
The orphaned abbey was sold in August of the same year to a paper manufacturer from Langres who used the premises as a production facility for an industrial spinning mill until 1796 , after which part of the building was demolished and the bricks were sold as building material. In 1872 the abbey changed hands one last time when it was sold to the ancestors of the current owners.
List of known abbots of the Saint-Pierre monastery in Bèze
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Individual evidence
- ^ Eugen Ewig: The Merovingians and the Franconian Empire. 4th supplemented edition, Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-17-017044-9 , p. 135.
- ↑ Suzanne Fonay Wemple: Women in Frankish Society: Marriage and the Cloister, 500 to 900. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 1981, ISBN 978-0812212099 .
literature
- Louis-Émile Bougaud, Joseph Garnier: Chronique de l'abbaye de Saint-Bénigne de Dijon, suivie de la chronique de l'abbaye Saint-Pierre de Bèze. Ed. Darantière, Dijon 1875.
- Solange de Montenay: L'Abbaye bénédictine de Saint-Pierre de Bèze: 630–1790, son histoire au fil des jours. Ed. de l'Alei͏, Dijon 1960, ISBN 978-2-9046-1416-3 .
- Eugen Ewig : The Merovingians and the Franconian Empire. 4th supplemented edition, Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-17-017044-9 .
Coordinates: 47 ° 28 ′ 2 ″ N , 5 ° 16 ′ 20 ″ E