Bremen Synod of Lent

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The Bremen Synod of Lent was a provincial synod at which all secular priests and monks from the area around Bremen met on March 17th, 1230, the fourth Sunday of Lent of the year. It was the highest spiritual court in the archdiocese .

After the convocation of the synod by Archbishop Gerhard II of Bremen , the Stedians were accused of resisting the church, burning monasteries and churches, misusing hosts and conducting surveys of spirits and fortune tellers. The synod found the Stedinger guilty of accusation of heresy . This also initiated the Stedinger War of 1233/34, a crusade against the Stedinger Peasant Republic . The real cause of the archbishop's resentment, however, was a Stedinger uprising against the tax levy. In the war that followed, the army of the Archbishop's allies was victorious.

In history it was the only peasant uprising that was crushed by a crusade.

The charges

The archbishop could not justify the accusation of heresy with the refusal to pay tithes, but had to be proven religious offenses in order to be able to proceed against them. The Lent Synod had already been preceded by an excommunication from the Stedingers, but they showed no reaction. The eleven counts of the Synod come from a letter from Pope Gregory IX. emerged.

  1. Despising the key power of the Church and the ecclesiastical sacraments
  2. Contempt for the teaching of the Holy Mother Church
  3. Capture and killing of clerics of various classes and orders
  4. Devastation of monasteries and churches by fire and robbery
  5. Committing perjuries
  6. Host sacrilege
  7. Demon cult
  8. Wax picture magic
  9. Fortune telling
  10. Devil cult
  11. Refusal of all penance and rejection

Of the eleven charges, one can only prove that the Steding peasants refused to tithe and thus despised church violence. The allegations of the sacrifice of the host, the cult of demons or the killing of clergy cannot be confirmed from the sources.

See also

literature

  • Christoph Auffarth: The heretics: Cathars, Waldensians and other religious movements . Verlag C. H. Beck, Munich, ISBN 3-406-50883-9 , p. 51; here online at books.google, accessed on November 2, 2011.
  • Rolf Köhn: The hereticization of the Stedinger by the Bremen Synod of Lent . In: Bremisches Jahrbuch , Vol. 57, Bremen 1979, pp. 15–85.
  • Jens Schmeyers: The Stedinger Peasant Wars . True events and historical considerations . Lemwerder 2004, pp. 87-91.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Herbert Black Forest : History of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen . Volume I, pp. 54f. Edition Temmen, Bremen 1995, ISBN 3-86108-283-7 .
  2. ↑ Ehmck, Dietrich R. (Ed.): Bremisches Urkundenbuch , Volume I, documents up to 1300 . Bremen 1978, pp. 196-197.
  3. ↑ Schmeyers: Die Stedinger Bauernkriege , pp. 87–91.