Reign Bitsch
The Bitsch rule was a territory of the Holy Roman Empire , which stretched from Fischbach bei Dahn in the east to the Saar near Sarreguemines in the west. The lordship was founded in the 10th century by the Counts of Metz-Lunéville, came into the possession of the Counts of Alsace, then belonged to Lorraine, became the core of the County of Zweibrücken-Bitsch as a fief , and finally became part of Lorraine again. Today the French part of the area belongs to the Moselle department , the German part to Rhineland-Palatinate and the Saarland .
After the dissolution of the County of Zweibrücken-Bitsch in 1606, the Bitsch dominion often bore the name of Grafschaft Bitsch (French: comté de Bitche ).
history
The rulership derived its name from Bitsch Castle, which was first mentioned in 1098, but at that time did not stand on the site of today's Bitsch Citadel , but on the Schlossberg north of Lemberg in Lorraine.
The foundations for the Bitsch rule were probably laid in the 10th century by the Counts of Metz-Lunéville, who held the Gaugrafenamt in Bliesgau and who took possession of the forest area around Bitsch. This area bordered in the east on the Speyer and Alsace Nordgau, in the west on the Schwalb, which flows into the stream of the same name near the town of Hornbach, and extended north to the level of Hornbach and Pirmasens.
Until the middle of the 10th century, the Counts of Metz-Lunéville extended the rule mainly to the west towards the Saar.
Property of the Counts of Alsace
In the middle of the 11th century, Bitsch was already in the possession of the Counts of Alsace . Presumably she was brought into her second marriage to Eberhard IV., Count in Northern Alsace , from Liutgarde von Aachen (* 900), the widow of Count Adalbert I von Metz (* ~ 900; † 944) . The rule was inherited by the Alsatian counts until it came into the possession of Count Adalbert , Eberhard's great-grandson.
Property of Lorraine 1047–1297
In 1047 Adalbert was from Emperor Heinrich III. appointed Duke of Upper Lorraine. As a result, the Bitsch reign was united with the Duchy of Lorraine. Adalbert died a year later, his brother Gerhard was his successor .
In the period that followed, up to the end of the 13th century, Bitsch was handed over several times to the second eldest son of one of the dukes of Lorraine as his own rule and thus retained a certain degree of independence. However, no independent line of the House of Lorraine was created in this way, as the Lords of Bitsch either died childless or, after their older brother died without an heir, became Duke of Lorraine themselves.
Herr von Bitsch in the Lorraine period
| Reign | Surname | Status of rule |
|---|---|---|
| 1115-1128 | Dietrich of Alsace | independent |
| 1128-1139 | Simon I of Lorraine | united |
| 1139-1176 | Matthew I of Lorraine | united |
| 1176-1205 | Friedrich von Bitsch | independent |
| 1205-1213 | Frederick II of Lorraine | united |
| 1213-1220 | Theobald I of Lorraine | united |
| 1220-1238 | Matthew II of Lorraine | united |
| 1238-1274 | Reinald, † 1274, Lord of Stenay and Bitsch, Count of Blieskastel | independent |
| 1274-1297 | Friedrich III. of Lorraine | united |
After Reinald's death, Bitsch fell back to Friedrich III, the ruling Duke of Lorraine.
County of Zweibrücken-Bitsch 1297–1570
The county of Zweibrücken-Bitsch was created at the end of the 13th century through an inheritance division in the Zweibrücken house and a subsequent exchange of territory with Duke Friedrich III. from Lorraine:
The two brothers Eberhard and Walram were heirs of the property on the left bank of the Rhine of Count Heinrich II of Zweibrücken († 1284). The one on the right bank of the Rhine had already gone to her eldest brother Simon in 1263. It took the brothers almost 50 years (1286–1333) to completely split up the inherited property among themselves. This made Eberhard the founder of the Zweibrücken-Bitsch line. He initially received the Lorraine fiefdoms of Mörsberg, Linder and Saargemünd, the Lemberg office including the castle of the same name and shares in the Landeck and Lindelbronn castles. The resulting dominion was not contiguous, which is why Eberhard made an exchange of territory with the Duke of Lorraine in 1297: He joined Duke Friedrich III. his possessions in Mörsberg, Linder and Saargemünd and in return received the Bitsch Castle with accessories as a Lorraine man loan and subject to the right of opening. The exact extent of the Bitsch reign at this time is not known, as neither borders nor towns were listed in the treaty of 1297. From other documents, however, it emerges that some villages that were within the boundaries of 1196 were no longer part of the Bitsch rule in 1295.
As a result of the exchange, the Eberhard area bordered directly on his office in Lemberg. From this point on he called himself Graf von Zweibrücken and Herr zu Bitsch and moved his residence from Marimont to Bitsch.
The area of the county of Zweibrücken-Bitsch consisted mainly of the rule Bitsch, a fiefdom of Lorraine, and the Amt of Lemberg as free property of the Counts of Zweibrücken-Bitsch. In the following years this fact was more and more forgotten and Lemberg was seen as part of the Bitsch rule. This led to a dispute at the end of the 16th century when the Duke of Lorraine registered his claims to the entire County of Zweibrücken-Bitsch as the fief he had given.
The Counts of Zweibrücken-Bitsch owned the rule until 1570, when the male line with Jakob von Zweibrücken-Bitsch died out.
Dispute over the rule of Bitsch 1570–1606
After the death of Count Jakob von Zweibrücken-Bitsch, a dispute about his inheritance began. Since Jakob had no living heirs, four parties raised claims to the county and thus also to the Bitsch rule. All four asked Duke Charles III. of Lorraine for a share of the Bitsch lordship:
- Count Philipp V von Hanau-Lichtenberg , husband of Jacob's daughter Ludovica Margarete , who died in 1569, claimed the entire rule as a representative of his five children.
- Count Philipp I of Leiningen-Westerburg was married to Amalie, the last living daughter of Jacob's brother Simon V. Wecker . He referred to the Heidelberg settlement of 1541, which had settled Simon Wecker's estate. At that time Jakob had been awarded the reign of Bitsch, but with the proviso that it should revert to the daughters of Simon Wecker if Jakob were to die without a male heir. Therefore Philip I demanded half of the rule as his wife's inheritance claim.
- Elisabeth, the eldest sister of Simon V. Wecker and Jakob von Zweibrücken-Bitsch, claimed a quarter of the rule. She referred to her dowry contract from 1535, which had regulated the division of the inheritance after the death of her grandfather, Count Reinhard von Zweibrücken-Bitsch.
- Agathe , the daughter of Johanna, the deceased youngest sister of the two counts of Zweibrücken-Bitsch, also claimed a quarter of the rule. She also referred to the dowry treaty of 1535.
Charles III had no intention at that time to reunite the Bitsch lordship with the Duchy of Lorraine and enfeoffed all four parties with the share they claimed, however subject to the clause us and each of his rights . Thus the feudal rights to the rule were practically doubled.
The fiefdom letter for the Protestant Count Philip V contained a passage with which the strictly Catholic fiefdom giver Charles III. wanted to ensure that Philip left the Bitsch rule in the Catholic faith.
Philip V immediately took possession of the entire county of Bitsch and began to introduce the Protestant faith. He relied on his right as the sovereign ruler of an imperial immediate territory to determine the practice of religion in accordance with the Augsburg Religious Peace of 1555. However, Lorraine disputed the imperial immediacy of the Bitsch rule. From today's perspective, many facts speak in favor of Count Philipp's view, because the Counts of Zweibrücken-Bitsch had always exercised sovereignty over the Bitsch rule since 1297. The imperial immediacy is also evident from a document from 1442: Emperor Friedrich III. had given Count Friedrich von Zweibrücken, Herr zu Bitsch, the right to hold a weekly market in Bitsch. If the place had been under the sovereignty of Lorraine, the emperor would have given this right to the Duke of Lorraine or the duke to Count Friedrich.
The escalation of the dispute with Lorraine began in 1571 when Count Philip V refused to pay the Lorraine state tax for the Bitsch rule. Thereupon the Duke of Lorraine declared the count forfeited the fief because Philip had violated his fief obligations .
In December 1571, Philip V forced the abbot of Stürzelbronn Abbey to sign a treaty that brought the monastery under the control of the count and had to be seen as the initiation of secularization. Six months later, in June 1572, Lorraine troops occupied the Bitsch rule and also took possession of the Lemberg castle and office, which were not part of the fiefdom.
Count Philipp fled Bitsch and sued the Duke of Lorraine for breach of the peace at the Imperial Court of Justice . It was not until 1604 that Philip's son Reinhard was able to make a comparison with Lorraine. Hanau-Lichtenberg got Lemberg back, but the Bitsch rule remained in the Duchy of Lorraine. From this point on, the rule was more and more integrated into the duchy and lost its independence. In October 1680 Bitsch was united with France.
Geographical location
At the beginning of the 20th century, Carl Pöhlmann dealt with the exact borderline of the Bitsch rule. The Zweibrücker Oberregierungsrat Pöhlmann was a historical researcher and editor of the West Palatinate History Papers. He consulted a total of four sources from the second half of the 12th century, each of which described a part of the border in more or less detail. In one of these documents from 1196, Friedrich von Bitsch defined the limits of rule.
The following map shows the course of the border of the Bitsch rule as described by Pöhlmann.
Map of the Bitsch reign at the end of the 12th century
Map of the County of Bitsch, mid-17th century
literature
- Hermann Irle: The Bitsch Fortress . In: Contributions to the geography and folklore of Alsace-Lorraine . XX. Notebook. Strasbourg 1902.
- Karl Pöhlmann: The last count of Zweibrücken-Bitsch . In: West Palatinate history sheets . tape 21 , 1919, pp. 14-16 .
- Information on the map of the County of Bitsch in 1749 in the database of the Bibliothèque nationale de France , accessed on April 20, 2019.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Hans Ammerich : Zweibrücken-Bitsch . In: Werner Paravicini (ed.): Courtyards and residences in the late medieval empire . tape 4. , Counts and Lords / Teilbd. 2. Thorbecke, Ostfildern 2012, ISBN 978-3-7995-4525-9 , p. 1802–1805 ( Academy of Sciences in Göttingen [PDF]).
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i Carl Pöhlmann: Outline of the history of the Bitsch rule . Zweibrücken 1911.
- ^ Johann Georg Lehmann : Documented history of the county of Hanau-Lichtenberg . tape 2 . J. Schneider, Mannheim 1863, p. 179-483 ( MDZ ).
- ^ A b Hans-Walter Herrmann : The county of Zweibrücken-Bitsch . In: Kurt Hoppstädter , Hans-Walter Herrmann (Hrsg.): Geschichtliche Landeskunde des Saarlandes . tape 2 , From the Frankish conquest to the outbreak of the French Revolution. Saarbrücken 1977, ISBN 3-921870-00-3 , p. 323-332 .
- ↑ Hans Ammerich: Chronicle. In: Historischer Verein Zweibrücken. Retrieved March 24, 2019 .