The Count of Gleichen (legend)
The Graf von Gleichen is a legend from Thuringia .
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The saga is about a Thuringian count who is called Ernst once and Ludwig von Gleichen another time. He went on a crusade with Landgrave Ludwig IV in 1227 and left his wife with two children. He is captured and held as a slave by a sultan for many years. The very beautiful daughter of the sultan falls in love with him and promises to free him if he takes her with him and wants to marry her. Accustomed to the fact that a man is allowed to have several wives, the Muslim woman does not mind that the count is already married. Both manage to flee by ship. Having arrived happily in Venice, the Count hurries to Rome. The Pope baptizes the Mohammedan and gives the Count permission for a second marriage. On arrival at Gleichen Castle in Thuringia, he praises his wife for the merits of the sultan's daughter, without whom he would remain a slave, his wife a widow and the children orphans . The two women get on very well, they share the bed with the count and the grave after their death. The legend speaks of the "two-woman" count and a "double marriage".
Relics should prove the legend to be true. Among them, above all, the corpse stone in Erfurt Cathedral , which shows a knight with a wife to the right and left, as well as several three-bedroom beds. According to legend , the Saracen wife had the castle path from Freudental , where the two women met for the first time, to today's ruins of Gleichen Castle paved; since then it has been called "Türkenweg".
Processing in literature, music and visual arts
The alleged double marriage was first mentioned in 1539 in a letter from Philip von Hessen to Luther, as an argument for a second morganatic marriage with Margarethe von der Saale . Luther, who had initially argued against this marriage, did not further contradict this reason for an exception, let Philip do it and agreed not to disclose it. The reformer Philipp Melanchthon was also present at the wedding and the second wedding became known, which led to a crisis in the Reformation . Since then, the legend has been further processed literarily and artistically. Initially it was the Counts of Gleichen themselves who had a woven carpet (tapestry) with a picture frieze made for the legend to decorate their ballroom in Ohrdrufer Schloss Ehrenstein in the first third of the 16th century . The figures shown in contemporary costume and armament fill eight fields of motifs. Michael Sachse, a count's court preacher from Ohrdruf, reports in detail about this work of art in his now-lost work Von den Graf von Gleichen . It was of great value and came into the hands of the burgraves of Kirchberg as a gift or dowry around 1600 , where it remained in the Farnroda Castle as a wall decoration. In 1620, the textile was damaged in a major fire in the Farnroda Castle, and an important image with the coat of arms of the Counts of Gleichen was lost. The damage was repaired to a lesser degree, which raised doubts about the age of the work as early as the 18th century. At the request of Grand Duke Karl August of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach , Goethe's brother-in-law Vulpius, as an art expert, examined the carpet that had been moved to the Weimar City Palace in 1814 . Vulpius had the still recognizable motif fields drawn and made a description. The documentation was later made available to the Jena University Library .
The geographer and polymath Johann Gottfried Gregorii alias Melissantes spread the legend through several of his books since 1708 in German-speaking countries. In particular his version of the legend of the equations from the work "The Renewed Antiquity" (1713/1721) served as a model for romantic writers.
The material has had a career in literature, music and the visual arts since the late 18th century. This is how ballads by Löwen , Bodmer and Friedrich Leopold, Graf zu Stolberg emerged during these years . In the first version by Stella. A play for lovers (1775) makes Goethe happy with reference to the legend of Count von Gleichen Fernando with both of his beloved women, Cäcilie and Stella, according to the motto “An apartment, a bed and a grave”. The adaptation of the legend "Melechsala" - that is what the sultan's daughter is called here - became popular in Musäus' "Folk Tales of the Germans" . Here the material is designed like a novel and enriched with anecdotes (e.g. the rose miracle of Saint Elisabeth of Thuringia); the numerous allusions and reflections contradict the later romantic conception of a legend.
In Romanticism, the story of the Brothers Grimm is canonized in their “German Legends”. In his “Legends from Thuringia's Prehistory” (1837), Ludwig Bechstein compiles an entire “saga of three equals”. The material inspired several dramas, singspiele , operas and operettas, including a drama by Arnim and the unfinished romantic opera by Schubert with a text by Bauernfeld . As a painting, “The Return of the Count of Gleichen” (1864) by Moritz von Schwind is of particular importance. There is a whole cycle of wall paintings in the Erfurt town hall. These adaptations interpret the material partly tragically, partly funny and vary it.
In the 20th century, too, the legend was picked up several times, for example in the ballad “Die Gräfin von Gleichen” by Agnes Miegel . The Thuringian composer Wolfgang Hocke carried out an assignment of the correct order of the facsimile of the opera and orchestration in Vienna in 1995/1996. The opera was premiered at the Meiningen State Theater in Schubert's style during these years. The sheet music is available from the Bärenreiter Verlag Kassel for further performances and is characterized by a marking of the composition handed down by Schubert in the original and the additions made by Hocke. The most recent arrangement is the musical Der Graf von Gleichen by Peter Frank , which premiered in Mühlberg in 2006 with a view of the Drei Gleichen .
Web links
- Count von Gleichen and his double marriage (pictures and texts)
- Marriage for three - The wives of the Count of Equals . Film by Winifred König, Ernst-Michael Brandt and Dirk Otto, MDR 2006
- Murals in the Erfurt town hall for the Graf von Gleichen legend
Individual evidence
- ↑ The saga of the Count von Gleichen , accessed on: November 19, 2015
- ↑ Marriage for three - The wives of Count von Gleichen , accessed on: November 19, 2015
- ↑ Edwin Zeyss: The castle Gleichen from the end of the 16th century to the middle of the 19th century . In: Messages of the association for the history and antiquity of Erfurt . Issue 50. Erfurt 1935, p. 99-104 ( digitized version [accessed February 26, 2017]).
- ↑ MELISSANTES: Das Erneuerte Alterthum, or Curieuse Description of some previously famous, partly devastated and destroyed, but partly rebuilt mountain castles in Germany ... , 2nd edition, Erfurt 1721, p. 18 f.