Jakobe of Baden-Baden

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Jakobe von Baden, posthumous copper engraving around 1600
Spectacle on the Rhine to celebrate Jacob's wedding: The deeds of Hercules with fireworks, in the background the Düsseldorf Castle , copper engraving by Frans Hogenberg from the aforementioned magnificent volume by Diederich Graminäus

Jakobe, Princess of Baden-Baden (born January 16, 1558 , † September 3, 1597 in Düsseldorf , buried there in the collegiate church of St. Lambertus ) was a margravine of Baden and by marriage Duchess of Jülich-Kleve-Berg . The daughter of Margrave Philibert of Baden-Baden and Mechthild of Bavaria is compared to Maria Stuart because of her violent end in connection with the denominational conflicts of her time .

Life

Jakobe von Baden was orphaned at an early age and grew up at the court of her uncle, Duke Albrecht von Bayern in Munich , where she had several admirers. In order to bind Johann Wilhelm von Jülich-Kleve-Berg , the son of the religiously wavering Wilhelm the Rich, to the Catholic side, she was at the insistence of her cousin, the Archbishop of Cologne Ernst of Bavaria , the Emperor Rudolf II. , Philip II. , King of Spain, as well as Pope Gregory XIII. married to the unattractive, mentally and healthily unstable heir to the throne of the Triple Duchy of Jülich-Kleve-Berg .

The splendid wedding on June 16, 1585 in Düsseldorf, which was raged by the Truchsessian War , was written by the Bergisches Landschreiber Dietrich Graminäus in the splendid volume Description of their Fürstlicher Güligscher ec. Wedding documented. Wilhelm the Rich, however, could not get over the death of his first son Karl Friedrich and despised his successor Johann Wilhelm, gave him little chance to learn how to govern and thus did his part to steer the duchies into disaster. After the death of Wilhelm the Rich in 1592 Jakobe tried to take over the regiment for her weak husband, who was locked away from her because of his fits of rage. Born a Protestant and raised Catholic , she could not choose either of the two confessional sides, became, what she could have saved, probably not pregnant due to her husband's impotence , and to make matters worse, she got herself a lover, the much younger bailiff zu Monheim Dietrich von Hall zu Ophoven , and was finally arrested for her part and imprisoned in the tower of the Düsseldorf Palace , which was otherwise finally demolished after the fire in 1872 . When attempts to try her in Rome with the Rota and in Prague with the Emperor failed or were put on the back burner, the Catholic party, represented primarily by Jacob's sister-in-law Sibylle , went to extremes; Jakobe was found dead in her room on the morning of September 3, 1597, after she had received guests the previous evening and toasted her husband's wellbeing with them. Eyewitness accounts suggest that she was suffocated or strangled. The motive for such an act was obvious: space had to be created for a possibly more fertile successor who saved the dynasty , which was threatened with extinction . On the evening of September 10, 1597, the Duchess was buried in the Kreuzherrenkirche , closed to the public. On March 23, 1820, her bones were solemnly reburied in the Lambertus Church. A lock of her hair is in the Düsseldorf City Museum .

Afterlife

The comparison between Jacob and Maria Stuart is not entirely absurd, but it is probably too high a point. Jakobe von Baden perished above all from her excessive demands from the confused and denominationally rugged conditions at the Düsseldorf court, from which she fled in amusement and a love affair. When, in her humiliating imprisonment, all hopes for help from her wealthy Baden and Bavarian relatives were dashed, she demonstrated her stature and attitude. Her dark end has brought her an afterlife as a white woman , although all of her life she only wore the black Spanish court dress customary at her time. In this respect, Heinrich Heine's childhood memories are more accurate:

O God! The world was once so pretty, and the birds sang your everlasting praise, and little Veronica looked at me with silent eyes, and we sat in front of the marble statue on the castle square - on one side is the old, ruined castle in which it is haunted and at night a black silk lady without a head with a long, rustling train walks around ... ( The book LeGrand , 1826)

The popular belief that Jakobe von Baden had been beheaded also brings her closer to Maria Stuart. The fact that the legend rewrote her as a white woman was momentous in that it is said to have inspired the advertisement for the Persil detergent produced by Fritz Henkel in Düsseldorf .

literature

Web links

Commons : Jakobe von Baden  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ v. Zuccalmaglio, “The prehistory of the countries Cleve-Mark, Jülich-Berg and Westphalia”, p. 253.
  2. ↑ The murder of Jakobe has never been proven, but in view of the facts as well as the motives and interests, it is more necessary to search for evidence of her natural death. One of the most important testimonies here .
personal data
SURNAME Jakobe of Baden-Baden
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Jacobea
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Margravine of Baden, Duchess of Jülich-Kleve-Berg
DATE OF BIRTH January 16, 1558
DATE OF DEATH September 3, 1597
Place of death Dusseldorf