David Peifer

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David Peifer , also Pfeifer, Pfeiffer, David P. the Elder (born January 3, 1530 in Leipzig ; † February 2, 1602 in Dresden ) was a German lawyer , court counselor , chancellor of the Electorate of Saxony under Christian I and Christian II , a publicist and Poet.

Live and act

The conversion of the parents and his siblings from Catholicism to Lutheranism took place in 1539. Peifer himself was married to Barbara, geb. Blasius, from 1563 to 1591. They had 15 children, five of whom (two sons and three daughters) survived him.

School and study

The youngest son of the Leipzig legal scholar Nicolaus Peifer, who came from Ochsenfurt am Main, was privately tutored by Simon Malecast with some of his five brothers and other peers after briefly attending the St. Thomas School in Leipzig (1537). His skillful appearance in Latin theater plays was very well received. In 1544/1545 he attended the newly founded Princely School in Pforta . In a Latin exam on the subject of “Why should I prefer reading Cicero to all other Latin writers?” He surprised everyone with his astonishing answer in four Latin verses that were convincing in terms of grammar and content, which earned him the examiner's prize. In 1545 he enrolled at the University of Leipzig and, after completing his baccalaureate in 1551, passed the exam as Magister Philosophiae at the Artisten-, later the Philosophical Faculty. Afterwards he studied law with Pierre Lorioz, whom Elector Moritz had called to Leipzig. Peifer continued his studies of civil and canon law at the University of Bologna from 1555 to 1558 as a student of Marianus Socinus and Ferdinand Veza. He passed his doctorate in law with distinction. During the holidays he undertook long educational trips on horseback through Italy to Genoa, Milan, Rome and Naples. The journey home in 1558 took him through Switzerland, Strasbourg and Mainz.

Professional career

After his return he held legal lectures in Leipzig before he worked as a lawyer at the court of Duke Johann Albrecht von Mecklenburg (1525–1576) and gained a special reputation as a diplomatic advisor, mediator, envoy to Prussia and Poland and as a companion of the duke acquired. Johann Albrecht reluctantly dismissed him from his service in 1565 after he had been offered the position of court councilor from the Electoral Saxony. He first served as Elector August (1526–1586), who raised him to the Privy Council in 1564 , as a diplomat , legal advisor, envoy to the Reichstag in 1576 in Regensburg, as Electoral Saxony prevented the Reichstag from being blown up, and in Augsburg in 1582 and accompanied August to the election of Emperor Maximilian II. And Rudolf II. As a staunch Imperial Patriot , Peifer, who had been close friends with the Imperial Court Councilor Andreas Erstenberger (1520–1584) since his youth , supported August's active policy of stability, loyal to the empire . He helped redesign the administration and finances. Peifer was involved in the development of the exemplary unifying legal system of the Constitutiones Saxonicae of 1572. In 1570 Emperor Maximilian II accepted him and his five brothers into the nobility; But Peifer did not seem to have carried the title. An appointment as imperial councilor that had already been recorded was never carried out because of the death of Maximilian.

Ecce homo from the epitaph of David Pfeifer

In 1574, Peifer was accepted into the college of the newly founded Privy Council, which was only replaced by a cabinet government in 1831 as the central foreign and cultural policy authority of Saxony. The convinced Lutheran advocated the unity of Christian teaching. There is no evidence of any participation by Peifer in the persecution of the followers of Melanchthon ("Philippists") accused of Calvinism , which began in 1574 . Peifer contributed to the creation of the concord formula of 1577 and its inclusion in the concord book of 1580. He was, however, responsible for enforcing the Lutheran Orthodoxy of 1580 church and school regulations, which also included the universities. Whether and how he was involved in building up the art collection in the Albertinum has not yet been researched. August's successor, Elector Christian I (1560–1591) appointed him chancellor when he took office in 1586, although Peifer sought his dismissal and the first disagreements with the ruler arose. Peifer, however, had to renounce the responsibility for foreign policy, which the Secret Council Nicolaus Krell assumed. Whether at Krell's instigation or on his own initiative due to dissatisfaction, Peifer was dismissed as Chancellor in 1589 and retired to Goseck Castle. However, he was obliged to take part in court proceedings at the Upper Court in Dresden as an assessor every six months.

Krell, who was close to Calvinism , to Peifer's annoyance, suspended the formula of concord and wanted to overcome Lutheranism in the so-called Second Reformation in the spirit of Calvin. In foreign policy, Krell turned away from the previous policy of loyalty to the Reich and thus to the Habsburgs, and in the Torgau Bund he promoted the active participation of the Electorate of Saxony in the Alliance of Reformed States. After the early death of Christian I in 1591, Krell was deposed and arrested by the victorious Orthodox forces.

As a convinced but not blind Lutheran, Peifer stood in opposition to Krell's political and ecclesiastical policy of change. The 61-year-old was in November / December 1591 both by the administrator Duke Friedrich Wilhelm of Saxony-Weimar, who led the co-regency with Elector Johann Georg von Brandenburg for the underage Christian II (1583-1611), as well as by remaining members of the Secret council persuaded to take over the chancellorship again. Peifer had recently lost his wife Barbara, but took the office despite (or because of) reduced responsibilities. Contemporaries have not accused Peifer, who was nominally part of the victorious Orthodox party, of actively participating in the renewed, sometimes brutal, persecution or expulsion of Krell's followers, the “crypto-calvinists”. In 1594, Peifer and three other Secret Councilors, including his son-in-law Dr. Johann Badehorn (1554–1610), the administrator, to spare her from participating in the (legally controversial) trial against the former Chancellor Krell. Thereupon six professors from the universities of Wittenberg and Leipzig were commissioned to lead the “embarrassing process”. Despite diplomatic objections, Krell was beheaded in Dresden in 1601. In Peifer's eleven-year second term in office, Electoral Saxony developed very successfully, although the country, as a coalition partner of the Catholic powers, called up soldiers and contributed money during the “long Turkish war” (1592/93 to 1606).

Peifer wrote his will on January 2, 1600 with a scholarship foundation for family members that was in effect until around 1936. He was buried in a hereditary funeral in the churchyard of the old Frauenkirche . The grave monument in the form of an Ecce homo by Sebastian Walther is today in the entrance of the Dresden Kreuzkirche .

The journalistic and poetic work

Peifer began his journalistic work with political goals as a young student. As a 19-year-old, in the pamphlet Epistolae Ecclesiae afflictae ad Christum (Leipzig 1550) , he defended King Ferdinand and his sovereign Elector Moritz von Sachsen against the insults of the Spaniard Luis Avila, who had attacked both rulers in his history of the Schmalkaldic War. This commitment to the House of Habsburg was rewarded in 1550 with Peifer's coronation as Poeta laureatus . In the same year he presented the Elegy Imperatores Turcici (Basel after 1550) at the Reichstag in Augsburg. In it he called on the emperor and the German princes to jointly fight against the Turkish threat, a topic that also challenged him as a politician from the Electoral Saxony. His strictly Lutheran attitude was expressed in his four-volume history of the city of birth Leipzig (Merseburg 1689 / Leipzig 1700) and in the description of the state and history of Electoral Saxony under Elector August (Jena 1708). Peifer's solid humanistic education was reflected in an unsuccessful early alphabetical listing of Ovid's idioms and a translation of Oppian's books on the hunt into Latin. From temporary retirement on his Goseck estate, he wrote an elegy E Gossogiano Nonis Octob dedicated to Andreas Erstenberger in 1591 . MDLXXXXIX .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ koeblergerhard.de
  2. ↑ uni-mannheim.de
  3. ↑ slub-dresden.de  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.slub-dresden.de  
  4. ↑ sax-verlag.de
personal data
SURNAME Peifer, David
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Pfeifer, David; Pfeiffer, David
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer, councilor, chancellor of the Electorate of Saxony under Christian I and Christian II, publicist and poet
DATE OF BIRTH January 3, 1530
PLACE OF BIRTH Leipzig
DATE OF DEATH February 2, 1602
Place of death Dresden