Essen city wall
The Essen city wall was a fortification structure that was built from 1244 and the last remains of it were laid down by the beginning of the 20th century. During this time, between three and five thousand people lived in the kidney-shaped wall ring. In doing so, it roughly encompassed today's city center of Essen .
history
In 1244 the community of ministerials of the Essen monastery and representatives of the citizenship of the city of Essen decided, with the consent of the abbess, the convent and the bailiff, to build a city wall together . The document on this is the first to which the Essen city seal was attached, because the place Essen transformed into a civil parish with city rights and self-administration and now separated itself from the agrarian environment.
When and how the massive construction work on the wall, decided in 1244, began is not documented. The next mention of the porta de Kettwich , the Kettwiger Tor, was not made until 1288. In a document from 1301, there is talk of inside the Essen walls ( infra muros Asnidensis ), which can indicate a stone mason ring. The only surviving invoice for the construction of the wall from the Middle Ages dates from 1347 and documents the ongoing construction on an unoccupied section of the wall with a master builder and his deputy, ten workers and other assistants over 15 weeks. The construction of the wall was completed in 1418 with the construction of the last of the four city gates, the Limbecker Tor. The east-west extension of the kidney-shaped urban area between Steeler- and Limbecker Tor was around 520 meters, and its north-south extension between Viehofer- and Kettwiger Tor was around 920 meters. These four city gates were each exactly in one direction, at least six additional towers reinforced the wall between these gates. A substantial part of the building material came from a quarry south of the Kettwiger Tor, where the city garden is today.
An important market and trading place for goods from the surrounding towns of Steele , Werden and Kettwig was in Essen's center on Hellweg , which led from Steeler Tor to Limbecker Tor in an east-west direction through the walled-in city. Within the city wall, the women's monastery with its immunity- designated area formed a specially walled enclave. The market church gained special importance when it was occupied in the middle of the 16th century by the bourgeoisie rebellious against the Catholic monastery and ultimately became Protestant. The city wall enclosed the city until the beginning of the 19th century.
The partially 600 year old structure fell victim to the beginning of industrialization at this time , as it was now partially used as a quarry for new buildings and paving work. Some of the massive round towers should continue to be used.
During construction work in February 2003, large amounts of rubble stones and rubble stone walls were found on Akazienallee. It is likely that some houses on this street were built from remains of the wall in the 19th century. They come from remnants of the city wall between the Kettwiger and Steeler Tor, which were still there until the 1930s and 1940s. It was still used as a quarry for paving work.
Since avenues were created along the abandoned city wall, the course of the wall can be roughly traced using the street names Acacia, Linden and Chestnut avenues that are still in existence today.
Kettwig Gate
The Kettwig city gate was first of the four gates mentioned in a document in 1288 and was located in the southern part of the city wall. The name has nothing to do with the town of Kettwig an der Ruhr, a district of Essen since 1975. Kettwiger Tor and today's shopping street Kettwiger Straße take their name from the "Kettwiger Bauerschaft" or "Kettwiger Neighborhood", the southern part of Essen's old town, which was popularly named after its location at the Beguine Convent "Im Ketvig" (old field name). Here the name of the Gildehofcenter shows that merchants and craftsmen organized themselves in guilds at the end of the 15th century . The guild of cloth merchants, so the guild book says, was the most important.
The Strata Coloniensis , one of the five old streets from the early Middle Ages that connected Cologne with the surrounding area , ran through the Kettwig Gate .
It is assumed that the Kettwig Gate was built in massive stone from the start. Different city views from the 16th century consistently show a main gate with a Gothic, angular tower and a front gate, which was flanked by two small round towers. A later view around 1680 shows a simpler main tower with a gable roof. The laying down of the Kettwig Gate cannot be clearly dated. It is assumed that it must have been in the course of the demolition of the section of the wall between Limbecker and Kettwiger Tor around 1820.
Steeler Gate
The Steeler city gate is first mentioned in 1322 and was located in the eastern part of the city wall. The name refers to the trade route to Steele . The Hellweg , an important long-distance trade route in the Middle Ages, led directly through the Steeler Tor. Until the beginning of the 16th century, the east gate was called porta Grintberghe after a small hill . In 1514 the name Stelsche Porten appears after the trade route to Steele.
The earliest pictorial representation of the gate can be found in the picture Descent from the Cross by Barthel Bruyn from the years 1522/1525, which was on the high altar of the Essen collegiate church , today in the Johanniskirche . On this the main gate with the tower is connected by long door cheeks with a front gate, which had round towers at the corners. The eastern, probably smallest quarter of the city was named after the gate. Within the city, the trade route led from the low city gate to the market square. Outside the city wall, a pond bordered south of the gate and a long ditch bordered the gate to the north. In 1823 the entire complex was sold for demolition, which went hand in hand with the removal of the entire old wall ring in the first half of the 19th century.
Viehofer Gate
The northern Viehofer Tor is named after a cattle yard and was first mentioned in 1315. It is the Fronhof of the Essen women's monastery, which was once located in the northeast of the city center and supplied it with meat and dairy products. On the area of the cattle yard, which presumably already existed when the monastery was founded, a craftsmen and traders settlement belonging to the city was built. In the spring of 1995 archaeological observations and finds were made during construction work. A wall was discovered running in a north-south direction at the point where one suspects the left gate cheek, which connected the main gate with the front gate via a ditch. The remains of the wall were preserved around 1.5 meters high, and animal bones and shards from the 14th and 15th centuries were also found. The site was filled in again and is now protected under the pavement. There are only few meaningful views of the appearance of the Viehofer city gate, dating back to the 16th century at the earliest and showing the tower of the main gate on a square floor plan. However, as with the other city gates, one assumes a system with a main gate and a front gate connected by cheeks via a ditch.
Limbeck Gate
The Limbeck city gate is the western of the four gates and was first mentioned in 1323 as the porta Lindenbeke and Lyndenbeker gate . It is named after the Limbecke, a stream in front of the city wall, which partially fed the moat and in 1457 the hammer mill of a harness maker and from 1465 a tiller mill . The name of this no longer existing brook comes from Lindenbecke (Becke for brook). The Limbecker Tor, for its part, gave its name to the district behind it, which was then most populous. No pictorial representations of the Limbeck Gate are known, as the city views that have been handed down since the 16th century basically only offer a view of the city from the east. Based on written records, however, it is probable that, as with the other three city gates, it was a main and anterior gate connected by cheeks. The entrance gate was built in 1418, as documented in a city bill. It thus formed the last construction phase of the Essen city wall. Coming from the central market square, Limbecker Strasse led through Limbecker Tor as part of the important trade route, the Hellweg. For example, tolls were levied by gatekeepers at the Limbecker Tor. The terrain level of today's Limbecker Platz is well above that of the former city gate. Archaeological observations prove it. The front gate of the Limbecker Tor was laid down around 1800, the main gate followed in the first half of the 19th century.
On May 27, 2008, the remains in the ground were entered as a ground monument in the list of monuments of the city of Essen.
Heckingsturm
As the last component of the Essen city wall, the Heckingsturm was demolished in 1865. It was one of at least six round towers that should make the city wall between its four gates safe. At the intersection of Kastanienallee and Turmstrasse, a 2 by 6 meter area was excavated in autumn 1995. One wanted to explore the preservation and exact location of the Hecking Tower using old maps. In the first four meters, which were modern embankments, mainly ceramics from the 18th and 19th centuries were found. Only below did the slate of the tower cover, as well as bricks and sandstone blocks, come to light. Under the embankment, about four and a half meters deep, the remains of a badly deformed wall made of sandstone and mortar were discovered running roughly in a north-south direction. It is believed that the north-eastern edge of the tower foundation was encountered here. On the basis of old records, one can roughly determine the dimensions of the Hecking Tower; its height was around 19 meters with a diameter of about 7.3 meters. If further tower foundations are preserved, they will be safely under the aforementioned intersection.
Tower at the Dunkhaus
The tower at the Dunkhaus , also called Ackener Turm , was part of the south-eastern city wall on today's Akazienallee between Kettwiger- and Steeler Tor. In 1314, one of six Beghinenkonvents was formed, almost next to it on a compartmental farmstead, in which penitentiary farming families met with pious women from the urban bourgeoisie. In the convent at the Dunkhaus, the beghines who did not belong to any order, who lived according to the Christian ideal of poverty and chastity, earned their living mainly by weaving, because dunk refers to a weaving room sunk into the ground. During excavations in 2003, remains of the wall of the convent were discovered that were dated to the 11th to 13th centuries.
The tower at the Dunkhaus was to continue to be used after the city wall was torn down and to serve as a prison. The secularization , with which the Essen monastery came to an end in 1803, did not affect the property of the beghines. Only the convent at the Dunkhaus became a military hospital, so that its residents moved to the convent at the Zwölfling. The convent building was later used as a poor house until around 1845 and demolished towards the end of the 19th century.
literature
- Jan Gerchow (ed.), The wall of the city, Essen before industry, 1244-1865 ; Pomp-Verlag, Essen 1995, ISBN 3893551247 .
- Detlef Hopp , Björn Skor: The Essen city fortification (= reports from the Essen monument preservation. Volume 5). City of Essen, Institute for Monument Protection and Preservation / Urban Archeology, Essen 2012 ( PDF ).
Individual evidence
- ↑ Essen.de: City life in the wall ring (PDF; 137 kB); Retrieved December 26, 2017
- ↑ a b c d Monika Fehse: Essen. History of a city . Ed .: Ulrich Borsdorf. Peter Pomp Verlag, Bottrop, Essen 2002, ISBN 3-89355-236-7 , p. 177 .
- ↑ Essen.de: Essen grows and grows (PDF; 183 kB); Retrieved December 26, 2017
- ↑ Limbecker Tor ground monument ; Retrieved December 26, 2017
- ↑ The other five convents were: the convent near the tower, the convent in the Zwölfling, the convent in Kettwig , the convent at the New Hagen, the convent in the old Hagen