Allendorf Monastery
Allendorf Monastery was a Cistercian abbey built after 1265 in the area of the city of Bad Salzungen in the Wartburg district ( Thuringia ). The convent changed to the Benedictine order at the beginning of the 16th century and was dissolved in the course of the introduction of the Reformation after 1525. Of the monastery buildings, only the church remained, which, profaned and rebuilt, served as a residential building until the 1980s and is now a ruin threatened with collapse due to the lack of structural maintenance. The nave of the former monastery is still used and managed as a residential building today. It is not open to the public.
location
The original facility was located about 300 m from the right bank of the Werra on the western slope of the Frankenstein , which was crowned by Frankenstein Castle , the ancestral castle of the donor family. It was named after the town of Allendorf , on the left bank of the Werra opposite the monastery, which is now a district of Bad Salzungen . A small settlement that has arisen around the monastery building forms what is now the monastery district .
In terms of canon law, Allendorf was always part of the Archdeaconate of St. Severi in Erfurt in the Archdiocese of Mainz .
history
The monastery was donated after 1265 on the site of an older Marienkapelle mentioned in that year by the Lords of Frankenstein , a branch of the Counts of Henneberg . In a document dated February 16, 1266, in which the Münster bishop Gerhard von der Mark grants an indulgence in favor of the founding of the monastery, the foundation becomes tangible for the first time in written sources. Possibly the cisterce was supposed to serve the family memory of the founding dynasty , who were in the process of installing their own small sovereignty. Already in its early phase, the monastery suffered destruction in 1295 during the campaigns of Adolf von Nassau in Thuringia.
As a women's convent, Allendorf was under the supervision of the Benedictine monastery in Fulda . The nuns lived according to Cistercian rules, but were never formally incorporated into the order .
In 1289 Allendorf was referred to as a monastery, in 1295 the provost , 1300 abbess and convent , in 1329 prioress and in 1346 the schoolmaster appeared for the first time in documentary light. Later the sexton and waitress are mentioned. In 1312 28 sisters lived in the monastery.
The founding equipment included property, rights and income in the Dermbach area and especially around Salzungen . It was supplemented by endowments from lower aristocratic families, whose daughters Allendorf served as a pension institution. Only for the final phase of the monastery history are nuns of bourgeois origin known. When wealthy women entered the monastery, (abusive) agreements were often concluded that removed the goods brought in in this context from the control of the abbess and the convent - a circumstance that Pope Innocent VI. arranged to commission the Petersberg provost with the repatriation of these estranged goods, which was ultimately unsuccessful. After 1334 there was no further significant increase in goods. Since 1295 the monastery was patron saint of the Salzung city church and later also of the parish church of Gumpelstadt . At the beginning of the 16th century, three vicarages are recorded in the monastery church .
Before 1330, sovereignty passed from the Frankensteiners to the imperial abbey of Fulda, then to the Wettins in 1366 . In 1409 the Archbishopric of Mainz acquired half of the town and office of Salzungen , which came to Würzburg in 1423 and to the Counts of Henneberg-Römhild in 1433, with Fulda always reserving the right to appoint and dismiss the provost. As a result, the Fulda Abbey competed with its provost and the convent, which was more towards Wettin rulership, for significant influence in the monastery.
In the 15th century, the convent did not develop any further, until 1508, provost Johann Löher, commissioned by the Fulda abbot Johann von Fulda , reformed the monastery and occupied it with (bourgeois) nuns from the Benedictine monastery of St. Ulrich in Würzburg , so Allendorf changed the order of affiliation . After 1522 Adolf von Biedenfeld officiated as provost, who quickly developed a good relationship with the Wettin rulers. During the Peasants' War , the archives and church treasures came into the care of the Salzungen bailiff, the nuns took to safety in Salzungen, Fulda or with their families. After the fighting ended, the property of the monastery was confiscated from the Protestant rulers, and Provost Biedenfeld was given the task of “handling” the nuns; only the worthless title of provost of Allendorf remained for the Fulda collegiate chapter .
archive
The archives that were taken into custody by the Salzunger bailiff during the Peasants' War and later "cleared" of irrelevant documents that did not establish ownership rights finally ended up in the Gotha archives of the House of Saxe-Gotha , which handed it over to the Thuringian State Archives in Meiningen in 1932 . It is still there today. The registers and the digitized documents can be viewed online (see below under web links).
Abbesses
The names of 21 abbesses are recorded in the sources.
| Surname | year |
|---|---|
| Lukard | 1300-1313 |
| Catherine | 1315-1325 |
| Kunigunde | 1326-1349 |
| Catherine | 1349-1357 |
| Euphemia von Lichtenberg | 1371-1395 |
| Richza von Wildsprechtroda | 1397 |
| Adelheid | 1399 |
| Richza | 1404 |
| Petrissa of herrings | 1406.1407 |
| Felicitas | 1411 |
| Elisabeth von Heringen | 1412-1415 |
| Petrissa from Rosenthal | 1413-1434 |
| Anna | 1428, 1429 |
| Margarete von Lichtenberg | 1436 |
| Elisabeth von Breitungen | 1441 |
| Margaret of Brend | 1449-1455 |
| Katharina von Morsberg | 1450 (?) - 1456 |
| Anna von Beenhausen | 1468-1480 |
| Katharina von Kohlhausen | 1485-1501 |
| Elisabeth Neidhart or Nithart | 1508-1523 |
| Dorothea Pfannstein | after 1523 |
building
In 1314 the Chur bishop Siegfried von Gelnhausen consecrated the monastery church on behalf of the Archbishop of Mainz, which served as a Protestant church until 1634 after the Reformation . It was then rebuilt and used as a residential building until the 1980s. The refectory , hospital and cloister as well as houses for provost, abbess and nuns and outside the monastery grounds a mill and a brewery are also documented . A fire in 1786 destroyed the buildings, the ruins of which were subsequently used as a quarry.
literature
- Johannes Mötsch : Allendorf . In: Historical section of the Bavarian Benedictine Academy (Hrsg.): The monastic and nunnery monasteries of the Cistercians in Hesse and Thuringia (= Germania Benedictina ). IV, 1-2. EOS Verlag, St. Ottilien 2011, ISBN 978-3-8306-7450-4 , pp. 53-61 .
- Ernst-Ulrich Hahmann: The knights from Frankenstein . Resch-Verlag, Meiningen 2011, p. 100 .
Web links
- Allendorf documents in the digital archive of the Thuringian State Archives, accessed on January 11, 2016.
- Thuringian monastery book: Allendorf Monastery , accessed on February 5, 2013 (obviously no longer maintained).
Individual evidence
- ^ Signature 004 , Allendorf documents.
- ^ Johannes Mötsch : Allendorf . In: Historical section of the Bavarian Benedictine Academy (Hrsg.): The monastic and nunnery monasteries of the Cistercians in Hesse and Thuringia (= Germania Benedictina ). IV, 1-2. EOS Verlag, St. Ottilien 2011, ISBN 978-3-8306-7450-4 , pp. 58 .
- ^ Signature 054 , Allendorf documents.
Coordinates: 50 ° 49 ′ 6.6 " N , 10 ° 15 ′ 29.9" E