Alexandrine of Taxis

Portrait on the equestrian or wedding carpet from 1646

Alexandrine von Taxis (born: de Rye, Comtesse de Varax , baptized August 1, 1589 in Brussels ; † December 26, 1666 ), as the widow of Leonhard II von Taxis , was the representative of her underage son Lamoral Claudius Franz from 1628 to 1646 Postmaster General of the Imperial Post and Postmaster General in the Spanish Netherlands .

During the Thirty Years' War she proved to be a capable postal organizer and was able to expand the network of the Imperial Post Office despite the initial loss of territory . While she was still in office, the postal routes to Osnabrück and Münster , where the peace negotiations to end the Thirty Years' War took place.

Life

Alexandrine was a daughter of Count Philibert Baron de Balançon Comte de Varax and his wife Claudine de Tournon-Roussillon. On June 29, 1616 she married Leonhard von Taxis, who was five years her junior, the son and designated successor of the incumbent Postmaster General Lamoral von Taxis . She gave birth to the daughter Genoveva Anna, who was baptized on April 16, 1618, and the son Lamoral Claudius Franz, whose baptism took place on February 14, 1621.

During his stay at the imperial court in Prague, Leonhard II von Taxis fell ill with a “heated fever”, but was able to draw up a will on the day before his unexpected death on May 23, 1628. In it he appointed Alexandrine as guardian of the underage children on the condition that she would not remarry. It was only through the sudden death of her husband that Alexandrine stepped into the public eye. On August 1, 1628, Emperor Ferdinand II confirmed the guardianship and in the same month made her the postmaster general of the Imperial Postal Service, which she was to act on behalf of her underage son. The Spanish King Philip IV also installed Alexandrine on August 16, 1628 as postmaster general of the Spanish Netherlands , Burgundy and Lorraine.

Acting as postmaster general

In 1630, Alexandrine took over the ten post stations to Waldmünchen on the post route from Augsburg via Regensburg to Prague, which had previously belonged to the imperial court post , as head of the Imperial Post Office . They also improved the postal service with England by expanding the postal route to Calais .

Due to the intervention and conquests of the Swedes under Gustav Adolf in the Thirty Years' War from 1631, the Imperial Post Office lost many postal rates, and the post offices in Rheinhausen , Hamburg, Frankfurt am Main, Nuremberg and, for a time, even Augsburg came under Swedish control. The Frankfurt postmaster Johann von den Birghden, who was deposed by her deceased husband and reinstated by King Gustav Adolf, played a key role in the development of a Swedish rival company .

Despite the turmoil of the war, Alexandrine initially received two imperial warnings in November and December 1631 because of the "carelessness" in the post offices in Frankfurt am Main, Nuremberg, Rheinhausen and Regensburg, as the imperial mail was only delivered with a delay.

In a letter of justification, she made it clear that the Rheinhausen postmaster had been taken away from the Rheinhausen postmaster by " reconciling their highly damaging machinations", the post office, along with the letters and horses, and asked for it to move the Dutch postal rate to a safe route with new postal stations. According to an imperial letter to the imperial estates in January 1632, they set up a diversion route west of the Rhine from Augsburg via Breisach , Nancy and Flamisoul to Brussels, but this probably did not last long because the Swedes had entered Strasbourg. A postal route from Brussels via Cologne and Düren served as a further diversion for the post to the imperial court until 1636, which, however, meant a delay of several days and provoked attacks by the Dutch troops.

Only with the Battle of Lützen , in which Gustav Adolf fell, and after the defeat of the Swedes in the Battle of Nördlingen , the war turned in favor of the Imperialists, and the imperial post under Countess Alexandrine regained all post stations with the exception of Leipzig by 1636. Now the competition between the secondary messengers and the butcher's post became active again, so that in August 1635 the emperor allowed the "new postreutter and briefsambler" to be overthrown with the help of the imperial estates, which, according to the method of the time for eliminating competitors, meant that the messengers were dragged from their horses and the horses and letters were confiscated. After the engagement of new post keepers, the Dutch postal route could be shifted back to the traditional shorter route via Rheinhausen and Augsburg on imperial orders from 1636.

During the collegiate day of the Electors of Regensburg in 1636, there was a dispute over the delivery of the imperial mail between the imperial postmaster Johann Christoph von Paar and Countess Alexandrine. Emperor Ferdinand decided Solomonic. The handing over of the letters of the imperial court was allowed to couple, while Alexandrine was allowed to distribute the letters of the citizens and merchants.

After the death of Emperor Ferdinand II in 1637, Emperor Ferdinand III renewed the building . Alexandrine's temporary appointment as postmaster general and in 1638 also granted Alexandrine's daughter Genoveva, who had meanwhile been married, the right to the postmaster general post in the event of the death of the designated successor Lamoral Claudius Franz von Taxis. Ferdinand III. again issued a patent to turn off the messenger services in Nuremberg, Augsburg, Cologne, Frankfurt and Regensburg, which led to complaints from the Nuremberg and Augsburg messengers.

As early as 1638, soldiers attacked the Imperial Post again. Nevertheless, Alexandrine was able to expand the postal network of the Imperial Post Office and the Spanish-Dutch Post Office to what is now the Netherlands , where the important Roermond post office was established around 1640 . Only after the Thirty Years' War intensified again with the intervention of France in the Swedish-French War , route shifts became necessary again.

The first peace negotiations began in 1645. In the preparatory phase from 1643 onwards, Countess Alexandrine managed to set up the necessary postal courses to Münster and Osnabrück for all parties involved in the war and to receive letters of protection for the post offices and postal riders . In addition, she had a postal connection set up between Osnabrück and Münster. At the request of the emperor, a postal route from Münster via Frankfurt and Nuremberg to Linz was added in 1645 , and a direct postal route from Münster to Brussels in 1646. At that time, her son Lamoral Claudius Franz von Taxis was 25 years old and was therefore considered to be of legal age. He supported his mother in his own name until he was officially appointed General Postmaster by Emperor Ferdinand III. on September 11, 1646.

Attempt to improve status

Title of the book by Chifletius, graphic design N. van der Horst

In addition to her work as postmaster general, Countess Alexandrine tried to achieve a social advancement for her descendants, as the bourgeois origin of the taxis, which had meanwhile been promoted to counts, was considered a flaw and made a further rise in the aristocratic hierarchy difficult. For this reason, too, around 1640 she commissioned various Spanish and Italian genealogists to research the ancestry of the Taxis family. These genealogists believed that the taxis could come from the Italian family of the Torriani or della Torre (from the tower) from Valsassina in what is now the province of Lecco , which until they were expelled by Henry VII and the Visconti in 1311 via Milan and part of the Lombardy had ruled. Based on these assumptions, Alexandrine commissioned the canon Julius Chifletius to provide evidence of the connection between the House of Taxis and the Torriani. Chifletius published the new findings in 1645 in the propaganda book Les Marques d'honneur de la maison de Tassis (The Decorations of the House of Taxis), to which Nicolaus van der Horst contributed the illustrations and the book title. Alexandrine thus laid the foundation stone for the imperial and royal Spanish approval of a name change to “Thurn, Valsassina and Taxis” and the later rise of the Thurn and Taxis to the prince's rank .

resignation

Wolfgang Behringer described Countess Alexandrine as the “manager of the Reichspost at the time of the Thirty Years War”. Last but not least, her merit is that she guaranteed her son well-founded training in preparation for his post as postmaster general, so that the transition took place seamlessly. With her resignation as postmaster general and the appointment of her son as postmaster general in 1646, her traces in postal history are lost. All that is known is that she died on December 26, 1666.

anecdote

Countess Alexandrine spoke only French and Italian, but no German. Not only because of his religious affiliation, but also for this reason, she rejected the Protestant Balthasar Krauth, who in turn could not speak French, as Strasbourg postmaster in 1629 . It was only after Krauth had learned French (he often had a friend help him with the formulation of letters to Alexandrine) that she accepted him in 1636 and promoted him that same year to head of the Burgundian post to Gray . Even the Augsburg post office administrator David Frey corresponded with Alexandrine and later with her son Lamoral Claudius Franz in Italian.

literature

• Wolfgang Behringer: Thurn and Taxis. Piper, Munich / Zurich 1990, ISBN 3-492-03336-9 .
• Martin Dallmeier: Sources on the history of the European postal system 1501–1806. Part I, Verlag Michael Lassleben, Kallmünz 1977.
• Martin Dallmeier: Sources on the history of the European postal system 1501–1806. Part II: Register of documents. Publishing house Michael Lassleben, Kallmünz 1977.
• Martin Dallmeier: De post van Thurn and Taxis, La Poste des Tour et Tassis 1489–1794. Brussels 1982.
• Max Piendl: The Princely House of Thurn and Taxis. Verlag Friedrich Pustet, Regensburg 1981.
• Marita A. Panzer: Princesses of Thurn and Taxis. Verlag Friedrich Pustet, Regensburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-7917-2133-0 .
• European Family Tables Volume V, House Thurn and Taxis, Table 129 and 130.

Web links

Commons : Alexandrine von Taxis  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

References and comments

1. ↑ Your place of death cannot be found in the literature.
2. ↑ Mother's name . This is missing in the European family tables.
3. ↑ Joseph Rübsam: In: Archive for Post and Telegraphy. August 1893, p. 554.
4. ^ Martin Dallmeier: Sources for the history of the European postal system 1501-1806. Part II: Register of documents. Verlag Michael Lassleben, Kallmünz 1977, p. 100.
5. ^ Martin Dallmeier: Sources for the history of the European postal system 1501-1806. Part II: Register of documents. Verlag Michael Lassleben, Kallmünz 1977, p. 99.
6. ^ Wolfgang Behringer: Thurn and Taxis. Piper, Munich / Zurich 1990, p. 90, see also Martin Dallmeier: Sources for the history of the European postal system 1501–1806. Part II: Register of documents. Verlag Michael Lassleben, Kallmünz 1977, p. 103.
7. ^ Martin Dallmeier: Sources for the history of the European postal system 1501-1806. Part II: Register of documents. Verlag Michael Lassleben, Kallmünz 1977, p. 102.
8. ↑ Joseph Rübsam: In: Archive for Post and Telegraphy. August 1893, p. 563, quotation from the imperial letter.
9. ^ Martin Dallmeier: Sources for the history of the European postal system 1501-1806. Part II: Register of documents. Verlag Michael Lassleben, Kallmünz 1977, p. 101, Regest 223.
10. ↑ Joseph Rübsam: In: Archive for Post and Telegraphy. August 1893, pp. 564–569, different from Wolfgang Behringer: Thurn und Taxis. Piper, Munich / Zurich 1990, p. 90: "This had to be relocated far to the west: It ran via Elsas and Vorderösterreich (Freiburg / Br.) To Tyrol," and Martin Dallmeier: Sources for the history of the European postal system 1501–1806 . Part I, Verlag Michael Lassleben, Kallmünz 1977, p. 76f.
11. ^ Martin Dallmeier: Sources for the history of the European postal system 1501-1806. Part II: Register of documents. Verlag Michael Lassleben, Kallmünz 1977, p. 107; Wolfgang Behringer: Thurn and Taxis. Piper, Munich / Zurich 1990, p. 90.
12. ^ Martin Dallmeier: Sources for the history of the European postal system 1501-1806. Part II: Register of documents. Verlag Michael Lassleben, Kallmünz 1977, p. 105.
13. ^ Martin Dallmeier: Sources for the history of the European postal system 1501-1806. Part II: Register of documents. Verlag Michael Lassleben, Kallmünz 1977, p. 107.
14. ^ Martin Dallmeier: Sources for the history of the European postal system 1501-1806. Part II: Register of documents. Verlag Michael Lassleben, Kallmünz 1977, p. 107.
15. ^ Martin Dallmeier: Sources for the history of the European postal system 1501-1806. Part II: Register of documents. Verlag Michael Lassleben, Kallmünz 1977, p. 111.
16. ^ Wolfgang Behringer: Thurn and Taxis. Piper, Munich / Zurich 1990, p. 91.
17. ^ Martin Dallmeier: De post van Thurn and Taxis, La Poste des Tour et Tassis 1489–1794. Brussels 1992, p. 56
18. ^ Wolfgang Behringer: Thurn and Taxis. Piper, Munich / Zurich 1990, pp. 205f, as well as Max Piendl: The princely house of Thurn and Taxis. Verlag Friedrich Pustet, Regensburg 1981, pp. 34-36.
19. ^ After Max Piendl: The Princely House of Thurn and Taxis. Verlag Friedrich Pustet, Regensburg 1981, p. 35, however, only the descent of the Austrian Counts of Thurn and Valsassina from the Torriani is unequivocally established.
20. ^ Wolfgang Behringer: Thurn and Taxis. Piper, Munich / Zurich 1990, signature on the illustration after p. 96.
21. ↑ Joseph Rübsam: In: Archive for Post and Telegraphy. August 1893, pp. 555-561; and pp. 569-571.
22. ↑ FZA PA 1241, letters from David Frey.

predecessor	Office	successor
Leonhard II of Taxis	Postmaster General 1628–1646	Lamoral Claudius Franz von (Thurn and) Taxis