Beatus Widmann

Beatus Widmann (* around 1476 in Baden-Baden ; † 23 August 1551 in Talach near Horb ), also to be found under the name Beat Widman or Beat Widmann , called Machinger , Malchinger , Möchinger or Maichinger von Mühringen , doctor in ecclesiastical and secular Law ( utriusque iuris doctor ), was a German lawyer and diplomat. From 1505 to 1519 he was a councilor in the service of Duke Ulrich of Württemberg , then from 1520 to 1550 as a councilor and later as Tyrolean chancellor in the service of Archduke Ferdinand I of Austria , who later became emperor.

Life

Beatus Widmann was the eldest son of the influential Tübingen professor of medicine and the count and ducal personal physician Johann Widmann-Salicetus and brother of the utriusque iuris doctor Ambrosius Widmann, who was provost chancellor of the University of Tübingen from 1509 to 1561 . He began his studies in the winter semester 1489/1490 at the University of Tübingen . There he received his doctorate on October 14, 1491 at the artist faculty for bachelor's degree and on August 13, 1493 for master's degree. In the following winter semester he moved to the University of Basel , then probably to Italy . His doctorate in ecclesiastical and secular law , with which it is proven in Tübingen in 1506, he obtained after the usual study period around 1500.

From May 22, 1505, Widmann was a member of the Württemberg councilors. When Emperor Maximilian I intensified his contacts with influential personalities in Württemberg after the Treaty of Tübingen in 1514, Widmann received a fiefdom from the Innsbruck regiment in the County of Hohenberg in 1515 . In the same year he was also elected as an assessor at the Reich Chamber of Commerce. He held this office until 1519, the year Duke Ulrich was expelled from Württemberg by the Swabian Federation .

In 1516, under the name Möchinger , Widmann bought the rule of Mühringen near Horb am Neckar with Wiesenstetten and the Dommelsberg farm for 5,800 Rhenish guilders. Under the name Widman von Mühringen he was accepted into the imperial knighthood in the canton of Neckar-Black Forest and thus rose to the so-called lower nobility.

At the beginning of the Austrian reign in Württemberg in 1520, Widmann was one of the government commissioners in the service of Emperor Charles V , who had been elected a year earlier , and in 1521, following an instruction from July 18 of the same year, in the service of Archduke Ferdinand I of Austria as one of the regents and Councils that were attached to the Württemberg governor. At the beginning of 1524 Widmann became Vice Chancellor in Innsbruck and in April 1525 Chancellor of Tyrol as the successor to Zyprian von Serntein, who died in 1524. Widmann's request to be dismissed from this office in 1525, the year of the Peasants' War, was not fulfilled until the end of June 1526 and from July 1, 1526, he transferred the office of Chancellor to Jeronimus Baldung, a doctor of ecclesiastical and secular law. Widmann was still Ferdinand's counselor with permission to stay at his court for about six months.

In 1530 Widmann appeared at the Reichstag in Augsburg under the councilors of Ferdinand and in 1531 after Ferdinand's election as royal commissioner in Stuttgart. In the same year he granted Ferdinand 1,000 guilders in return for an assurance that he would not be deposed as Obervogt von Horb until repayment. At the beginning of 1532 Baldung resigned his chancellery for health reasons, and so Widmann was reinstated in the Tyrolean chancellery in Innsbruck in March 1532. He remained in this office until 1550, the last year before his death.

Widmann took over the office of Obervogts in Horb near his estate Mühringen on August 25, 1526. In the previous year of the Peasants' War, the government in Innsbruck asked the city of Horb to take a personal look at the castle and estate of Mühringen during the absence of Widmann ain getrew . Between 1524 and 1528, Widmann was able to acquire several properties, including two thirds of Labers Castle near Meran in 1524 , Katzenstein Castle near Untermais in 1525 and rights in Kirchentellinsfurt near Tübingen, and in 1528 the castle and village of Unter-Sulmentingen near Laupheim. It was not until 1530 in Kirchentellinsfurt that Emperor Charles V granted him high jurisdiction and a ban on blood. With his brother Ambrosius Widmann, the Tübingen university chancellor, he tried to suppress reformatory efforts in Kirchentellinsfurt from neighboring Reutlingen . However, he was no longer involved in the Kirchentellinsfurt village regulations of 1534, the year Duke Ulrich returned to Württemberg.

At the beginning of 1534, when Duke Ulrich's plans to regain Württemberg had taken on a threatening form for King Ferdinand, Widmann was summoned to Ferdinand's court several times. Even after the peace treaty of Kaaden on June 29, 1534, in which Ulrich was now granted the possession of his duchy in the form of an Austrian fiefdom, Widmann continued to be Ferdinand's advisor in matters of Württemberg.

Widmann appointed his son-in-law Ulrich von Lichtenstein zu Neckarhausen as administrative administrator for the Horber bailiwick in 1535. 1536 Widmann acquired the deposit rule Thaur east of Innsbruck and pledged it with the exception of the Court of Felldorf his rule Mühringen. In 1538 Ferdinand commissioned him to reform the Tyrolean law firm. In 1540 the chancellery rules he had written came into force. As royal commissioner, he took part in Tyrolean state parliaments in 1540 and 1549 and in state parliaments in Ensisheim in 1545 and 1546 .

In the last years of his life, Widmann lived with his wife Barbara Schad, a relative of Cardinal Matthäus Lang, in his house in Innsbruck, acquired in 1547, today Herzog-Friedrich-Strasse 20, and according to his son Hans Jacob died on August 23, 1551 in Talach near Horb on a return trip to Innsbruck. With his wife he had three sons and six daughters, most of whom were aristocratic and therefore appropriately married.

literature

• Irmgard Kothe: The Princely Council in Württemberg in the 15th and 16th centuries (representations from the history of Württemberg, Volume 29). W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1938, pp. 152f., No. VI, 62.
• Walter Bernhardt: The central authorities of the Duchy of Württemberg and their officials 1520-1629 , volume 1 (publications of the commission for historical regional studies in Baden-Württemberg, series B, volume 70). W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1972, ISBN 3-17-001117-0 , p. 178f.
• Renate Spechtenhauser: Authority and administrative organization of Tyrol under Ferdinand I in the years 1520–1540. Official scheme of the Upper Austrian Essence . Diss. Mach. Innsbruck 1975, pp. 51-55 ( Chancellor of Tyrol , No. 1).
• Hansjörg Rizzolli: Authority and administrative organization of Tyrol under Ferdinand I in the years 1540–1564. Official scheme of the Upper Austrian Essence . Diss. Mach. Innsbruck 1975, pp. 40-42 ( Chancellor of Tyrol , No. 2).
• Peter Maier: Kirchentellinsfurt in the county of Hohenberg and in front of Austria (from 1381) - The village rule of the Widman von Mühringen , in: Derselbe and Andreas Heusel: Kirchentellinsfurt. The chronicle of a village . Self-published by the Kirchentellinsfurt community in 2007, pp. 91–114.
• Erik Beck, Andreas Bihrer et al .: Old Believer diocese historiography in a Protestant city. The Konstanz diocese chronicle of Beatus Widmer from 1527. Study and edition , in: Journal for the history of the Upper Rhine 157 (2009), pp. 101–189.
• Karl Konrad Finke: Beatus Widmann alias Möchinger (around 1476 to 1551) , in: The Professors of the Tübingen Faculty of Law (1477 to 1535) (Tübingen professor catalog , volume 1,2), edited by Karl Konrad Finke. Jan Thorbecke, Ostfildern 2011, ISBN 978-3-7995-5452-7 , pp. 370–379.