Hugo XI. from Werdenberg

Count Hugo XI. von Werdenberg (* around 1440 ; † around August 7, 1508 in Sigmaringen ), better known as Haug von Werdenberg, was a count who descended from the Count Palatine of Tübingen on the Werdenberg-Trochtelfingen-Sigmaringen-Heiligenberg line of the Counts of Werdenberg . He is considered to be perhaps the most important personality of the whole sex.

origin

Count Hugo XI. was a son of Count Johann III. von Werdenberg and Countess Elisabeth von Württemberg . Three of his brothers were clerical. His brother Johann II von Werdenberg became bishop of Augsburg and promoted Hugo in political matters. Two older secular brothers were not particularly prominent. His sister Agnes married Count Jobst Nikolaus I von Hohenzollern , and one of their sons, Friedrich II von Zollern , succeeded his uncle as Bishop of Augsburg.

Hugo's oldest brother was Count Georg III. von Werdenberg-Sargans († 1500), who took over the Grafschaft Heiligenberg from his father in 1459 and exercised the family senior council after his father's death after meeting the Margravine Katherina von Baden , a daughter of Margrave Karl I of Baden and the Duchess Katharina of Austria in 1464 had married. Georg maintained good relations with Ravensburger commercial capital and entered the service of the Counts of Württemberg around 1476 .

Live and act

As early as 1460, at the age of around 20, Hugo appeared as "Stebelmeister" at the imperial court in Vienna. From 1466 to 1475 he was councilor and chief truchess of Friedrich III. and in this courtly position increasingly became the emperor's political confidante and advisor. He was its representative at the Reichstag as well as at the prince, city and state parliaments as well as its negotiator and mediator in dealings with princes and other lords. In addition, Hugo knew his way around the war trade and successfully defended the castle in Vienna against the rebellious citizens in 1462 and the city of Vienna against the Hungarians in 1477. In the meantime he moved in 1476 as the chief field captain against plundering Bohemian and against rebellious Austrian nobles.

Hugo had the thankless diplomatic task of asking for help from the estates on behalf of the emperor against his own subjects, the Bohemians, the Hungarians and the Turks. Hugo negotiated with the quarreling princes and the reluctant cities at the imperial assemblies, which were mostly incomplete and held in Augsburg, Regensburg and Nuremberg. With urgent speeches he endeavored to obtain grants from them for money or men. Even when he succeeded, the promises were often only partially kept or not kept at all.

Imperial politics at that time was influenced by the disputes between the Franconian Brandenburgers and the Bavarian dukes. Hugo tried in 1466 as the imperial envoy of Frederick III. to mediate between the two houses in order to bring about a state peace order, the precondition for a strong defense against the outside world. Later he was the emperor's advisor and companion in his negotiations with Duke Charles of Burgundy , which led to the meeting of the two princes in Trier in September 1473. The resulting rift formed the trigger for the siege of Neuss by the Burgundians in the following year . Hugo took part in the liberation of Neuss with the imperial army and rode into the liberated city on June 6, 1475 to receive the homage of the citizens in the name of the emperor. A decade later, when the Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus had conquered Vienna, Hugo went through the whole empire from one end to the other in order to seek help for the emperor who had been driven from his home countries.

Through his diplomatic activities, Hugo got to know the damage to the imperial constitution, which was in full dissolution, and tried to improve it. But he was not a great statesman who, out of far-sighted patriotism, would have endeavored to redesign the facilities that had failed and had become unusable.

At the imperial assemblies he was repeatedly hindered by the eternally reluctant attitude of the cities, whose messengers were never given the necessary powers and only wanted to get everything behind them. Therefore, at the Augsburg Reichstag of 1474, Hugo made the resolutions of the upper classes binding for the cities and declared their approval to be unnecessary. Logically, they were no longer invited to the imperial assemblies, but were nevertheless supposed to submit to their resolutions, which they did not. This resulted in such an uncomfortable situation for the cities that in 1487, after receiving a sharp imperial warning, they decided for the first time to refrain from “hiding” and to send messengers to the Reichstag with the appropriate powers. To this end, they were now called in to the preliminary advisory committees, and two years later the cities appeared for the first time at the Reichstag in Frankfurt as a third collegium with equal rights alongside the colleges of the electors and princes. Hugo had undoubtedly given the first impetus for this reorganization of the Reichstag deliberations.

This improvement did not result from general, political considerations, but from measures that were required at the moment, and it was immediately practical considerations that prompted Hugo in 1487 to try to unite the Swabian prelates, counts, lords and cities into a special league and thus to give the impetus for a significant new political formation in the empire. At the Reichstag convened by the imperial mandate on July 26th in Esslingen , Hugo announced that the implementation of the ten-year peace which had been decided at the Frankfurt Reichstag from 1486 should be the purpose of the federal government. In fact, a firm counterbalance was to be created against the Bavarians, which were spreading in all directions, who had laid their hand on the imperial city of Regensburg in the previous year and wanted to conclude a purchase agreement with Archduke Sigmund of Austria for all of the Upper Austrian regions and the bailiwick in Swabia . Preventing this purchase was also in the immediate interest of Emperor Friedrich as head of the Austrian family and of all Swabian estates, especially the Werdenberg family. The common danger threatened by Bavaria led to the conclusion of the Swabian Confederation on February 14, 1488, initially for the time of the Frankfurt peace, i.e. until 1496. As captain of the knighthood of St. George's shield, Hugo was also captain of the in appointed to the new federation of united Swabian nobility. The accession of the Count of Württemberg and various imperial princes increased the political importance of the Federation and made it the decisive power in southern Germany for the next few decades.

In the meantime, through the connection with Emperor Friedrich III. with the Tyrolean state parliament the catastrophe struck the archducal regiment in Innsbruck. On January 8, 1488, Sigmund's councilors were imposed an imperial ban. They scattered in all directions. The close connection they had initiated and continued to maintain with Bavaria was thus shattered and the greatest danger for Swabia removed.

One of the most outstanding counselors at the Innsbruck court was Baron Johannes Werner von Zimmer the Elder , whose lords Messkirch and Veringen were close to the Werdenberg lordships of Sigmaringen and Heiligenberg and who brought the two houses into multiple contact during the so-called Werdenberg feud. Johannes Werner von Zimmer had tried to assert claims against the Werdenberg family in the counties of Veringen and Heiligenberg. Thereupon Hugo was commissioned by an imperial mandate of January 22, 1488 to call in the mentioned rulers to the hands of the empire. By a deed of May 16, the Emperor Friedrich III. All regrets and possessions of the baron Werdenberg who fled to Switzerland, regardless of the fact that Johannes Werner, in anticipation of what was to come, had renounced them in favor of his children in order to keep them for his family.

Because of his position as captain of the Swabian Confederation and head of the Werdenberg house, which was hostile to Zimmer, Count Hugo was from now on held back in Swabia. He probably met briefly with his old patron, Emperor Friedrich III., In Innsbruck . In 1492 Hugo was the supreme captain of the Swabian Confederation at the side of King Maximilian when he brokered the reconciliation of Duke Albrecht IV of Bavaria, who had been declared an imperial ban, with the federal government. Even before that, in October 1491, the young king had appointed the count to his council with an annual appointment of 600 guilders, and in the same year Hugo had entered the service of Count Eberhart in the beard of Württemberg , who four years later, 1495, on which the Diet of Worms was solemnly elevated to Duke.

Through this employment relationship, Hugo had certainly sought closer ties to Württemberg in order to gain firm support in the Swabian house against the barons of Zimmer, who by no means gave up hope of regaining their dominions. The old baron Johannes Werner von Zimmer had already returned from Switzerland with the permission of King Maximilian and spent the last years of his life as a councilor at the court of Duke Albrecht of Bavaria. After his death in 1495, his two eldest sons, Veit Werner von Zimmer and Johannes Werner von Zimmer the Younger , who were raised at the court of the Electoral Palatinate, appeared again in the country and looked for and found friends and helpers in increasing numbers, so that Count Hugo after his death The Duke Eberhart († February 1496), who was connected and friends with him, considered it advisable to propose an agreement to the young barons, according to which Oberndorf am Neckar should fall back on rooms, but Messkirch would have remained with the Werdenbergers.

But Veit Wernher preferred to win Oberndorf back by an attack the following year, and in the same way Johann Wernher brought Messkirch into his power in 1502. The Counts of Werdenberg could not obtain any right against these breaches of the peace and, in order to regain peace, had to settle for the final renunciation of Oberndorf and Meßkirch at the Reichstag in Augsburg in 1504. This comparison was conveyed by King Maximilian between Count Hugo and his three nephews Johann, Christoph and Felix von Werdenberg on the one hand and the three von Zimmer brothers still alive on the other (the eldest Veit Wernher had died in 1499). Four years later, on August 6, 1508, Hugo died in Sigmaringen and was buried in Trochtelfingen .

relative

Of his three surviving nephews, the sons of his brother Georg, Johann died childless in 1522. Felix von Werdenberg , a capable warrior and courtier in the service of Maximilian and Charles V, gained wealth in Luxembourg by marrying a Walloon heiress and in 1510 left the rule of Sigmaringen with Veringen to his brother Christoph. He was small in stature but of irascible temperament and on May 10, 1511, killed a Count Andreas von Sonnenberg in the open field near Riedlingen in revenge for a mockery that the Sonnenberger had given him shortly before at the wedding of Duke Ulrich von Württemberg with Sabina von Had irritated Bavaria . All efforts of the slain’s relatives to bring Count Felix to account were in vain. The favor of his imperial master protected him, and he retained his high position safe and unpunished. In the Peasants' War of 1525 he put down the uprising in Hegau. At the end of 1529 he brought a few thousand soldiers to the Emperor in Italy. On the night of July 11th to 12th, 1530, he died a sudden death at the Reichstag in Augsburg, where his brother Christoph was also present, the type of a simple German country gentleman, while Felix and the brilliant Burgundian and Spanish gentlemen at the imperial court had competed in his appearance. With Christoph, who passed away on January 29, 1534 in Sigmaringen, the Werdenberg house went out.

literature

• Hermann Wartmann:  Werdenberg, Count of . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 41, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1896, pp. 749-759.
• Paul-Joachim Heinig: Emperor Friedrich III. (1440-1493). Court, government, politics (= research on the imperial and papal history of the Middle Ages. Vol. 17). 3 volumes, Böhlau, Cologne 1997, ISBN 3-412-15595-0 (at the same time: Gießen, University, habilitation paper, 1993), s. Vol. 3, Register, p. 1783 and especially Vol. 1, p. 335f. and pp. 337-347

Remarks

1. ^ Paul-Joachim Heinig: Emperor Friedrich III. (1440-1493) , Vol. 1, p. 335