Princely land

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The Fürstenland is a landscape in eastern Switzerland . It roughly includes today's constituencies of Wil , St. Gallen (excluding the then city ​​of St. Gallen ) and Rorschach in the canton of St. Gallen . The name comes from the fact that this area - also known as the Old Landscape - formed the core of the territorial rule of the Prince Abbey of St. Gallen until 1798 .

term

The term "old landscape" for the area between Rorschach and Wil SG first appeared in documents in 1580. The name probably came about through the acquisition of the County of Toggenburg by the Prince Abbey of St. Gallen. Their old heartland thus became the old landscape. The term Fürstenland for the same area can only be proven from the 18th century and is based on the princely position of the abbots of the St. Gallen monastery.

Outline and boundaries

The St. Gall monastery state 1468–1798

The old landscape was divided into an upper and a lower office . The sub-office was also called Wileramt . The Oberamt included the Landshofmeisteramt , the Oberbergeramt and the Rorschacheramt , to which the exclave Altenrhein belonged, and the Romanshorneramt , which did not belong to the Fürstenland . Abbot Ulrich Rösch had the local legal systems valid in the late Middle Ages recorded in openings .

The lower courts and main teams of the old landscape are listed in the individual articles of the offices of the Princely Land.

The border with Appenzell was fixed as early as 1458 to 1460 . The border to Toggenburg , mainly formed by the Thur and Glatt , was recorded as early as 1471. The border to Thurgau was drawn after the Swabian War in 1499. The Markbach, east of Wartensee, formed the border against the Rhine Valley . Individual princely sovereignty rights such as appellation , homage and, in some cases, team rights were also retained outside the Old Landscape in the Lower Courts of Thurgau and the Rhine Valley .

history

Uniform of the Princely Team

The beginnings of the secular rule of the Abbey of St. Gallen go back to the immunity obtained by Emperor Ludwig the Pious in 818 . In the period that followed, the high level of jurisdiction was exercised by monastic castvogtes who, after the castvogtei had become an imperial bailiff through inheritance in 1180, were no longer directly dependent on the abbey. Abbot Ulrich Rösch acquired all the high courts of the abbey in the old landscape and began to standardize the prince's rulership rights. Rorschach , St. Fiden , Gossau and Wil became high courts. This development led to the formation of the early modern territorial rule of the Prince Abbot of St. Gallen.

In 1512 Pope Julius II gave the Old Landscape a valuable « Juliusbanner » for the services rendered in the «Great Pavier Campaign» in 1508–1510 to expel the French. The monastery and the city of St. Gallen each received one separately.

The population of the old landscape, the so-called church people, were involved in conflicts with the abbots of St. Gallen over their legal status several times, especially in the course of the Reformation between 1525 and 1531. The city ​​of Zurich tried to attract the abbey subjects who were mostly Reformation-oriented to take under their auspices . The aim of this policy was to transform the old landscape into a common rule within the Swiss Confederation . The defeat of the reformed cantons in the Second Kappel War put an end to these efforts in 1531. The inhabitants of the old landscape had to turn to the Catholic faith again and the prince abbots ruled here as absolute masters without the people having a say.

After the French Revolution , a new freedom movement emerged, which resulted in the so-called Amicable Treaty with the abbey in 1795. The last abbot of the St. Gallen monastery, Pankraz Vorster , granted the old landscape its own seal and the election of a district administrator in 1797 . On February 4, 1798, the monastery of St. Gallen finally released the old landscape into independence and on February 14, the constituent parish of the "Free Republic of the St. Gallen Landscape" took place in Gossau , which only existed for just under three months. After the adoption of the Helvetic Constitution in May 1798, the old landscape was integrated into the canton of Säntis , which was created on May 12, 1798 . After its dissolution, it became part of the canton of St. Gallen in 1803 .

The constituencies of the canton of St. Gallen

literature

  • Hans-Peter Höhener: The border atlas of the old landscape of the Abbey Sanctuary of approx. 1730. In: Cartographica Helvetica. No. 6, 1992, pp. 33-37, doi: 10.5169 / seals-4424 .
  • [Johannes Huber]: Along the Fürstenland-Strasse: The cultural landscape of the St. Gallen Abbey. 2 volumes. Verlag am Klosterhof, St. Gallen 2008, ISBN 978-3-906616-88-9 .
  • Johannes Huber: Discover the Fürstenland-Strasse in the cultural landscape of St. Gallen (= publications of the Association for the History of Lake Constance and its Surroundings. Vol. 130). Thorbecke, Stuttgart 2012, ISBN 978-3-7995-1718-8 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g Werner Vogler: Old Landscape (SG). In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
    These sections are largely based on the entry in the Historical Lexicon of Switzerland (HLS), which, according to the HLS's usage information, is under the Creative Commons license     - Attribution - Share under the same conditions 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).
  2. ↑ Lorenz Hollenstein: Rorschacheramt. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
  3. ↑ Winfried Hecht: The Julius banner of the town facing Rottweil. In: Der Geschichtsfreund: Messages from the Central Switzerland Historical Association . 126/7 (1973/4). doi : 10.5169 / seals-118647