Heimbach Commandery

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Commandery of the Knightly Order of the Hospital of St. John in Jerusalem
Gothic sandstone arch as a memorial at the former location, in the background the vegetation of the Hainbach river

Gothic sandstone arch as a memorial at the former location, in the background the vegetation of the Hainbach river

Data
place Zeiskam
Client Emperor Friedrich I.
Architectural style Gothic
Construction year 1185
demolition 1525, 1622, finally 1794/1795
Coordinates 49 ° 15 '0.8 "  N , 8 ° 14' 39.7"  E Coordinates: 49 ° 15 '0.8 "  N , 8 ° 14' 39.7"  E
Commandery of the Knightly Order of the Hospital of St. John in Jerusalem (Rhineland-Palatinate)
Commandery of the Knightly Order of the Hospital of St. John in Jerusalem
particularities
Originally coming from the Order of St. John, later the Order of Malta

The Komturei Heimbach , more seldom also Komturei Haimbach , original name "Commandery of the Knightly Order of the Hospital of St. John in Jerusalem", in the local community Zeiskam in the southern Palatinate ( Rhineland-Palatinate ) was a medieval complex consisting of a fortified monastery courtyard with a church duration. The remains are hardly preserved; a monument on site reminds of the former importance.

The Commandery initially served the Order of St. John as a so-called Coming , after the Reformation of its Catholic successor organization, the Order of Malta , as a regional administrative center. The institution was headed by a commander , both religiously and economically .

geography

The Heimbach Commandery was at almost 130  m above sea level. NHN in the north of the Zeiskam district outside the residential area and to the west next to today's Kreisstraße 1 , which leads to Freimersheim .

The Hainbach flows past 50 m south of the site , behind which the federal road 272 ( Landau - Schwegenheim ) runs parallel . The body of water, historically also called Heimbach , was used to fill the ditch that surrounded the fortifications and gave its name to the Commandery.

The north route of the Palatinate Way of St. James passed 6 km north of the Commandery , 12 km south the south route. Both had their starting point in the episcopal city of Speyer .

history

Foundation and heyday

Heimbach was originally a donation that Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa made to the Order of St. John in 1185; The first commander of the facility was Anselm von Weißenburg . Kuno and Hugo von Zeiskam , who belonged to the lower nobility , also gave the commandery considerable land.

Wedding of Prince Johann to Elisabeth (1310)

From 1306 to 1317 Egeno von Mußbach , also a member of the lower nobility, was Komtur in Heimbach. During his tenure there in August 1310 the 14-year-old Johann , son of Emperor Heinrich VII , and the 18-year-old Elisabeth of Bohemia were introduced to each other before they were married on September 1st in Speyer Cathedral, 16 km away . The groom later wrote about it:

“When I was 14, I met my beautiful bride, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, for the first time in August 1310 in the Johanniter-Kommende Heimbach in Zeiskam near Speyer. My father held court here for five days to celebrate his son's wedding. The glamorous wedding that followed in the Imperial Cathedral in Speyer was the fulfillment of his political foresight. "

- Johann , King of Bohemia from 1311 to 1346

Around 1350, when the Heimbach Commandery got into economic hardship, five commander-in-chief of Johanniter's German branches advised on the necessary land sales. The measures adopted were successful, as records from 1409 onwards; these report on recent acquisitions.

In the Heimbach settlement of 1382, the Brandenburg Ballei secured significant autonomy rights vis-à-vis the German Grand Priory of the order. The agreement marked an important turning point in the history of the Order of St. John and, in the wake of the Reformation in 1538, facilitated the division into a Catholic branch, called the Order of Malta, and a Protestant branch , which continued to be called the Order of St. John.

In 1483 Johann von Hattstein , who from 1512 also acted as the German Johanniter-Groß prior , became Komtur von Heimbach. His nephew Marquard was Prince-Bishop of Speyer from 1560 to 1581 .

Decline and destruction

The quadrangular complex in the edge of the house with the centrally located church no longer exists. In 1525, during the Peasants' War , the Heimbach Commandery was set on fire and plundered by rebellious peasants from the Nussdorfer Haufen , which had formed in nearby Nussdorf (today Landau-Nussdorf) , but rebuilt under Commander-in-Chief and Grand Prior Johann von Hattstein. He died in Speyer in 1546 and, according to the tombstone he had preserved in Heitersheim , was buried in the Heimbach church.

During the Thirty Years War , the renovated Heimbach Commandery and church were looted and destroyed again around 1622. In 1724, Grand Prior Goswin Otto von Merveldt donated a new high altar for the church that was once again built for worship. The settlement was finally destroyed by French revolutionary troops in 1794/95 and was not rebuilt.

Breakdown

The Heimbach Commandery included four sub-commanderies, which in Latin were called Membra (plural of Membrum , member). They were based in Mußbach (today part of Neustadt an der Weinstrasse ), Speyer , Bruchsal and Weißenburg . All four were spatially, but not as a sovereign, within the Electoral Palatinate or the Principality of Speyer , which at that time stretched on both sides of the Rhine . Today Mußbach and Speyer belong to the Palatinate located entirely on the left bank of the Rhine , Bruchsal to North Baden on the right bank of the Rhine and Weißenburg as Wissembourg even to the French Alsace . Within a radius of about 30 km around Heimbach, the Membra controlled the smaller monastery farms in their area, which dealt with agriculture , especially with viticulture . Two of the membranes have been preserved; that in Speyer has survived to a small extent, that in Mußbach almost completely survived as a manor house .

Membrum Mußbach

Medieval fountain in the Mußbach manor

Membrum Speyer

The Membrum Speyer was in today's Johannitergässchen. At the end of the 12th century, around 1183/89, the Order of St. John maintained an estate with a chapel there. In the archives of the city of Speyer files are received, according to which the Ordenshof the mayor and council of the city on payment of 5,000 guilders sued.

Bruchsal membrane

Bruchsal 1689
Bruchsal town church

The first documentary mention of a house in Bruchsal owned by the Johanniter is in 1272. The friars received an important donation in 1287 with the transfer of a court estate whose lands were near Durlach and Grötzingen . The Membrum Bruchsal was soon subordinated to the Kommende Heimbach, even if the affiliation is only documented for 1426. At first it developed favorably, but came into financial distress as early as the 14th century, possibly as a result of the Heimbach settlement of 1382. Therefore, the city lord of Bruchsal, the bishop of Speyer (at that time Nikolaus von Wiesbaden ), acquired part of the goods of the order. 1475 Heimbacher Commander entrusted with the approval of the German Provincial Chapter, the Membrum Bruchsal for so-called Arrendatio , so to manage a lifetime, the Order of Kaplan Johann Descheler. He had to pay 100 guilders and a load of red wine a year.

The memorial buildings were destroyed in the Thirty Years War in 1640 . It was not until 1653 that the order was able to take up its seat in a fiefdom building near the town church after lengthy disputes, especially with the Speyer bishop and Trier archbishop Philipp von Sötern .

Since 1648, the Bruchsal order house together with Weißenburg, which had also been a membrum of Heimbach, traded as the Kommende Bruchsal-Weißenburg. While the ownership of the order in Weißenburg was lost in the course of the French Revolution in 1794, the Electorate of Baden took provisional possession of the Bruchsal branch after the Peace of Pressburg in 1805, but initially allowed the Commander Adam Reich von Reichenstein to use it for an annual lease sum of 2000 guilders. Although the lease contract was concluded until 1813, the Baden government took over the entire complex on January 1, 1809 and sold it four years later for 78,688 guilders. The property was 330 acres . The former Komtur was granted an annual pension of 1,600 guilders, which was later reduced. Reichenstein died impoverished on November 21, 1821.

The actual religious house was in front of the then city wall of Bruchsal on the road to Bretten ; the associated chapel had no parish rights. There were other buildings within the city. There are no remains of any of the buildings, including the chapel. Only the Johanniterstraße and the name An der Komturei still remind of the former presence of the order.

Weissenburg membrum

Excavations

Border stone of the Heimbach Commandery

In archaeological excavations, which were carried out in 2010 by the General Directorate for Cultural Heritage Rhineland-Palatinate , Speyer Monuments Office, near Zeiskam, the soil of the former monastery church was located at a depth of 1.5 m and its exact location was thus determined. The municipality of Zeiskam has erected a memorial at this point. It consists of a Gothic arch made of sandstone , which has a height of 4 and a span of 3.5 m. The memorial was inaugurated in the spring of 2011 because at that time the celebrations in the Commandery and the wedding of Johann and Elisabeth von Böhmen in Speyer were celebrating the 700th anniversary.

A boundary stone, which comes from the Heimbach Commandery, stands today in the manor in Mußbach . It shows the St. John's Cross , the eight points of which refer to the eight Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel according to Matthew 5 : 3–12 EU , while the four bars represent the cardinal virtues of justice, bravery, wisdom and moderation.

Memorial events

  • The Eselshautfest in Mußbach has been held every summer in the historic Herrenhof since the 1970s and refers to the historical past of the farm.
  • On September 4, 2010 in Zeiskam and the following day in Speyer, the wedding of King John and Elisabeth of Bohemia was retold and re-enacted.

literature

  • Hans Ammerich : Small history of the city of Speyer . Ed .: City of Speyer. Verlag G. Braun, Karlsruhe 2008, ISBN 978-3-7650-8367-9 .
  • Kurt Andermann : The gentlemen from Zeiskam . Portrait of a family of the Palatine lower nobility. In: Historischer Verein der Pfalz (Ed.): Messages from the Historischer Verein der Pfalz . tape 98 . Verlag des Historischen Verein der Pfalz, 2000, ISSN  0073-2680 (ZDB-ID 5025035).
  • Peter Blickle , Horst Buszello , Rudolf Endres (eds.): The German Peasant War . Verlag Schöningh, Paderborn u. a. 1984, ISBN 3-506-99350-X (Uni-Taschenbücher - Geschichte, 1275).
  • Franz Xaver Remling : Documented history of the former abbeys and monasteries in what is now Rhine Bavaria . tape 2 . Christmann, Neustadt 1836, p. 303 ff . ( Digitized in the Google book search).
  • Walter Gerd Rödel: The Grand Priory Germany of the Order of St. John in the transition from the Middle Ages to the Reformation on the basis of the general visitation reports of 1494/1495 and 1540/1541 . 2nd Edition. Verlag Wienand, Cologne 1972.
  • Walter Gerd Rödel: The Johanniterkommende Heimbach in the Palatinate and its membrane . In: Association for Palatinate Church History (Hrsg.): Sheets for Palatinate Church History and Religious Folklore . Speyer 1973.
  • Walter Gerd Rödel: Former religious branches in Baden-Württemberg: Bruchsal . In: The Order of St. John in Baden-Württemberg . No. 87 , 1993, pp. 13-18 .
  • Edgar Schnell : Zeiskam in the past and present - a portrait in words and pictures . Ed .: Municipality of Zeiskam. Zeiskam 1999.
  • Klaus Sütterlin: King Johann, knight on the European scene . Verlag Knecht, Landau 2003, ISBN 978-3-930927-77-7 .
  • Johann Vogel: Johanniter-Comthurei Heimbach and neighboring towns in the past . Zeiskam 1910.

Web links

Commons : Komturei Heimbach  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Commandery Heimbach. Interest group Komturei Heimbach, accessed on October 5, 2018 .
  2. ↑ Topographic map (according to coordinates, with contour lines). from: opentopomap.org, accessed June 29, 2016 .
  3. ↑ About 7 km below the Hainbach flowed from the right into the Speyerbach , whereas today it crosses it to flow 600 m further into the left Speyerbach tributary Woogbach .
  4. ↑ a b Sütterlin: King Johann, knight on the scene of Europe . S. 64 ff .
  5. ^ The Coming Members. Interest group Komturei Heimbach, accessed on June 30, 2016 .
  6. ↑ Schnell: Zeiskam in the past and present - a portrait in words and pictures . 1999.
  7. ^ Andermann: The Lords of Zeiskam . Portrait of a family of the Palatine lower nobility. 2000, p. 97-118 .
  8. ^ A b Fördergemeinschaft Herrenhof Mußbach: Description of the Herrenhof. Retrieved November 4, 2014 .
  9. ↑ a b Jürgen Keddigkeit , Alexander Thon, Rolf Übel (eds.): Palatinate Castle Lexicon . tape 2 . University of Applied Sciences Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern 2002, ISBN 3-927754-48-X .
  10. ↑ Rödel: The Johanniterkommende Heimbach in the Palatinate and its membrane . 1973, p. 5-55 .
  11. ^ Ammerich: Brief history of the city of Speyer . 2008.
  12. ↑ Archives of the Imperial City of Speyer, 001 A (1543): Johanniterordens-Hof: Johanniterordens Colonel Master in German Lands vs. Mayor and council of the city of Speyer because of a debt of the latter amounting to 5000 fl. German Digital Library, accessed on July 1, 2016 .
  13. ^ General visitation of 1495: Mentioned by name as the membrane of the Heimbach Commandery are the goods in Bruchsal, Weißenburg and Mußbach.
  14. ^ Anton Wetterer: The Johanniterhof in Bruchsal . In: Bruchsaler Wochenblatt . No. 16-32 . Bruchsal 1920.
  15. ↑ Rödel: The Grand Priory of Germany of the Order of St. John in the transition from the Middle Ages to the Reformation . 1972, p. 236-239, 451 .
  16. ^ Rödel: Former religious branches in Baden-Württemberg: Bruchsal . 1993, p. 13-18 .