Dürnitz

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Neuburg Castle on the Danube : Hofstube (around 1537/1560) on the ground floor of the west wing
Dürnitz the Meersburg Castle

The Dürnitz (from Slavic dorniza "heated room"), also called Dirnitz or Türnitz , is a smoke-free, heated dining and common room in Central European castles or early palaces . As a rule, this room was on the ground floor and served the common meals of the household and was lavishly equipped in larger facilities.

The terms “Hofdornse” were used equivalently in the Low German-speaking area (Dornse = room) and, since the 15th century, “Hofstube” in Central Germany.

history

Even if little is known about the structural framework of the daily meals in a German residence of the high Middle Ages, it can be assumed that then, as later, there was more and more often a smoke-free, heated, larger room for the meals of the male court members got to. The large hall on the upper floors, which is usually more reliable from an architectural point of view, was in many cases unsuitable due to the lack of a window lock. In the Dürnitz / Hofstube, the warmth was initially often disseminated by warm air heating (12th – 15th centuries), then more and more often generated by a rear-loading furnace (13th – 16th centuries).

Large ground floor halls under the ballrooms were built in the second half of the 13th century on the ducal grounds of Burghausen (built after 1255, vaulted shortly before 1446) and Trausnitz Castle over Landshut (around 1260). Probably breech-loading ovens were used here. Both systems were under the Wittelsbacher Heinrich XIII. (r. 1253–1290) expanded as the main ducal residences in Lower Bavaria.

The episcopal castle Ziesar in Brandenburg received a large ground floor hall in the residential building, which was newly built around 1340, and remnants of its warm air heating with several heating chambers have been found. In 1470, this older type of heating was renewed during a renovation.

The function of such ground-level common rooms has been evident since the 15th century in numerous regulations for life at larger princely courts, the so-called court orders . Up until the 16th century, a lord of a castle or palace usually dined twice a day with his entourage in the German cultural area. In 1526 the court order of Count Palatine Ottheinrich for his residence in Neuburg Castle on the Danube says: “Half of the set. Item, our maynung is that Kainer himself sits down, but, when our table is occupied, that every then the, so Rete, by the bailiff and subsequently the nobles, Cantzley clerks and the Ainspennigen, forter our servant, then the master of the court, afterwards the rete and on the last other servant and court servant [...] ye forever eight people are seated at aine table [...]. "

In most cases, the princely table is likely to have been erected on a dais at one end of the head, which can be proven in numerous sources (preserved in Neuburg an der Donau in 1544). Only when higher-ranking female members belonged to the court was there usually a separate dining room on the upper floors near their living quarters.

In keeping with their high-profile use, many of the courtyard rooms built or redesigned during this period were architecturally complex. In Wuerttemberg around 1443 large Dürnitzen (court rooms) with 1090 m² and 460 m² of floor space were built in the residences in Stuttgart and Urach . In 1471, the court room in the Electoral Saxon Albrechtsburg was designed to be comparable not only in terms of its dimensions, but also the rest of the architecture to the adjoining, also lavishly vaulted Great Hall. Other court rooms from this period have been preserved in the Dresden Residenzschloss (1468), in Merseburg Castle (around 1470/80), on the Ronneburg (1477) and in Gottorf Castle (end of the 15th century).

A particularly elaborate courtyard room with bay windows on all four sides was built around 1510/15 on the ground floor of the so-called women's room building of Heidelberg Castle . It was highlighted as one of the most splendid castle rooms in a fame poem on a princely wedding in 1534: "Eß were wol drey princely tables: / On the first, which is decreed / Gewest in the back above, / Which one of the art to praise / I think the temple auff montsaluat, / Has erbawet the titurell, / Doesn't like this work: / Gethierts, laubwerckh, and a picture, ma view, / Gantz artlich and reyn excavated, / Much possament technically sublime, / The Gewelb gracefully anthems, / Of colors already plumbed out. / Eß is not saved a lot. ”Relatively late examples of court rooms as elaborate vaulted rooms are preserved in Schwerin (1553) and Güstrow (1558).

Most of the time, the court rooms were accessible directly from the courtyard. Their architectural distance from the stately living space on the upper floors is expressed by the fact that they often had no internal connection to the residential floors above. For a long time, however, it was also not customary to put the court room as a dining room in direct connection with the kitchen or even just to place it in its vicinity, such as the situations in Albrechtsburg , in Hartenfels Castle in Torgau (1533) or in Bernburg Castle ( 1567) show.

One process that diminished the representative importance of the court rooms was the slow replacement of the natural food and thus the common table of the other court members. From the second half of the 16th century in particular, for budgetary reasons, more and more court households began to pay out food money to a larger proportion of their members, who were then no longer fed by the court kitchen and no longer ate in the castle.

proof

  1. ↑ Kern, Arthur (Ed.): German court regulations of the 16th and 17th centuries. 2 vol., Berlin 1905/07.
  2. ^ Hoppe, Stephan: The architecture of the Heidelberg Castle in the first half of the 16th century. New dates and interpretations. In: Rödel, Volker (Red.): Middle Ages. Heidelberg Castle and the Palatinate County near the Rhine until the Reformation. Publication accompanying the permanent exhibition, Regensburg 2002, pp. 183–190

Remarks

  1. ↑ Munsalvaesche is in the late Middle Ages popular poetry Wolframs und Albrechts the castle that holds the Holy Grail , and Titurel the name of its keeper.

literature