Moritz (Saxony)
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Moritz von Sachsen (born March 21, 1521 in Freiberg , † July 11, 1553 near Sievershausen ) was a prince from the house of the Albertine Wettins . From 1541 he was Duke of Albertine Saxony and from 1541 to 1549 Duke of Sagan and from 1547 also Elector of the Holy Roman Empire . He was one of the most important opponents of Emperor Charles V in the reform of the empire.
1521–1541: childhood and adolescence
Moritz von Sachsen was born on March 21, 1521 as the son of the later Catholic Duke of Saxony Heinrich the Pious and his Protestant wife Katharina von Mecklenburg .
In December 1532, at the age of eleven, he came to the court of his godfather Albrecht , cardinal and archbishop of Magdeburg and Mainz . For two years Moritz got to know the joyful life of the cardinal there, which led Moritz's uncle Georg the Bearded to take over the training of the future Duke of Saxony and raise him Catholic. After Moritz 'father had converted to Protestantism in 1536 , he and his wife took the upbringing of their son back into their own hands, and he was brought up by the Rochlitz pastor Martin Oberdörffer. Then they handed him over to his 18 years older cousin Johann Friedrich I , who resided in Torgau but was despised by Moritz, for further education . With another cousin, the Landgrave Philip of Hesse , whom he had met in Dresden, however, he had a lifelong friendship.
After Moritz came of age in 1539, his parents began to look for a wife for him. Philip's daughter Agnes became the favorite . The marriage plans threatened to fail when it became known that Philip was in a double marriage. Moritz remained unaffected and became engaged to Agnes without his parents' knowledge. The wedding, which was mainly disapproved by his mother, took place on January 11, 1541. Letters from that time testify to the couple's strong mutual trust. Together they had two children: Anna von Sachsen , born on December 23, 1544, and Albrecht, born on November 28, 1545, who died a year later.
1541–1542: Wurzen feud
Moritz's father died in August 1541, which made him Duke of Albertine Saxony. He replaced most of the councilors who had opposed his marriage to Agnes right from the start. The councilor Georg von Carlowitz advised Moritz to position himself as well as possible with Emperor Charles V and his brother, the Roman King Ferdinand and at the same time his neighbor as the Bohemian king, in order not to endanger the continuation of the Protestant movement.
On the one hand he took part in Charles V's campaigns against the Turks and French, but on the other hand he confiscated Catholic church property and thus appropriated enormous property. From the monasteries that had been dissolved, Moritz founded the princely schools in Schulpforta (100 places), Meißen (60 places) and Grimma (70 places) in their place. The legal basis for this was the “ New State Order ” of 1543.
Moritz initially kept his distance from the Protestant Schmalkaldic Confederation founded in 1531 , although Landgrave Philipp of Hesse , his friend and father-in-law, led the league. The main reason for this rejection is generally considered to be the membership of his 2nd degree Ernestine cousin, Johann Friedrich I , who he hated . In the Holy Week of 1542, in the course of the Wurzener feud (also called "Wurzener Fladenkrieg"), there was almost a fratricidal war because Johann Friedrich occupied the jointly administered "Wurzener Land". This was preceded by a dispute between Moritz and Johann Friedrich over the use of the tax money in this area. The mediation of Philip and Martin Luther prevented the threatening armed conflict .
1543: Founding of three state schools
In 1543, Moritz put an advice from Georg von Carlowitz , which he had given him in 1537, into action: On May 21, 1543, he issued the "New State Order", with which the Von Dreyen section laid the permanent foundation for the Princely and state schools Schulpforta (1543) near Naumburg , St. Afra (1543) in Meißen and - after the veto of the Bishop of Merseburg against the establishment of such a school in his city - St. Augustin (1550) in Grimma . More than 8,000 very well-trained school graduates emerged from these institutions in St. Afra and St. Augustin by 1945 (for Pforta, which became Prussian from 1815, it was probably a similar number). Studies have been optimally prepared for their tasks in administration, church, science, the military and government (this is also shown in the long lists of famous former students of these schools in the respective Wikipedia entries).
This “Saxon state and princely school model” proved to be so successful that it soon found imitators elsewhere: Following the example of these three schools, the Schwerin Princely School , founded in 1553 by Duke Johann Albrecht I , and the Heilsbronn Princely School in 1582, emerged founded by Margrave Georg Friedrich on the site of a monastery closed in 1578, the Joachimsthalsche Gymnasium , founded in 1607 in Joachimsthal in Brandenburg under Elector Joachim Friedrich and the Fürstenschule Neustadt (Hochfürstlich Brandenburgisch-Culmbachische Teutsche and Latin City School).
1546–1551: Schmalkaldic War and armored Reichstag
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Due to the attacks of the Schmalkaldic League against Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel imposed Emperor Charles V on July 19, 1546 imperial ban on Elector Johann Friedrich I. Upon successful execution Moritz was asked by the emperor, the elector dignity in view. Moritz hesitated for a long time, as his father-in-law Philipp von Hessen would have been affected by this punitive action. But when the emperor's brother, Ferdinand I, wanted to start a campaign against the Electorate of Saxony himself, he had to get ahead of him in order not to lose the initiative against the Habsburgs in his own countries.
After initial successes - he occupied the Electorate of Saxony almost without a fight - Moritz and his army found themselves in distress from the Schmalkaldic League and avoided the direction of Bohemia. In the decisive battle near Mühlberg on the Elbe, the emperor and his brother Ferdinand I and Moritz were able to defeat the Schmalkaldic League with the capture of Philip and Johann Friedrich I. According to contemporary chroniclers, all of this happened on one day, April 24, 1547. In order to avoid being beheaded, Johann Friedrich renounced his electoral dignity and a large part of his territory in the Wittenberg surrender in favor of Moritz. All mints that had been in operation up to that point came into his sole possession. The coinage community that existed between the Ernestine and Albertine princes was ended. Moritz now minted under his sole name in his mints Annaberg , Freiberg and Schneeberg . He merged the Buchholz mint with the Annaberger mint and ended the minting operation in Buchholz. The coin separation between the two Saxon lines under Moritz was final.
Shortly after the battle on June 4, 1547, Duke Moritz von Sachsen was made electoral prince of Saxony in the imperial field camp near the Bleesern court stud , south of Wittenberg. The official appointment came later, but at a high price: he had betrayed the evangelical cause and put his father-in-law Philip in a hopeless position. Moritz assured him that he would not be imprisoned if he surrendered to the emperor. In fact, Philip was arrested and taken out of the country after falling on his knees in front of Charles V.
After these incidents, Moritz, insulted by his compatriots as " Judas von Meißen", was deeply disappointed by the emperor, but hid his attitude towards him until the "armored Reichstag in Augsburg " on February 25, 1548, where the ceremony to elevate Moritz to electoral prince of Saxony took place. At this Reichstag, Charles V hoped to be able to end the religious split in the Reich through the Augsburg Interim .
1552–1553: Prince uprising and Passau Treaty
The free imperial city of Magdeburg refused to approve the interim , despite the negotiations in the course of the Westerhausischen farewell . Moritz then took over an army lying in front of Magdeburg and besieged the city at the emperor's expense. After he had achieved the surrender of the besieged city without a fight through secret promises to the Magdeburg magistrate, he turned against the emperor and allied himself with his enemies.
In the Treaty of Chambord with the French King Henry II of January 1552, Heinrich promised him money and support in arms for a campaign against Charles V. In return, Heinrich was to receive four border towns of the Holy Roman Empire ( Metz , Toul , Verdun and Cambrai ) and their bishoprics although Moritz had no right to dispose of them.
In March of the same year, King Heinrich, Elector Moritz, who placed himself at the head of the Protestant prince opposition to the emperor, and other Protestant princes began the “ prince uprising ”. They quickly conquered the cities loyal to the emperor in the south of the empire, while Heinrich advanced as far as the Rhine and occupied the cities promised to him. The Kaiser, surprised by the attack, fled across the Alps to Villach in Carinthia . In view of this success, Moritz terminated his alliance with Heinrich II and negotiated a contract with Karl's brother King Ferdinand I, which Karl reluctantly agreed to. This Passau Treaty of 1552 was a forerunner of the Augsburg Religious Peace of 1555, in which the Lutherans were legally recognized. In addition, his former opponents in the Schmalkaldic War, the related Johann Friedrich I of Saxony and Landgrave Philip of Hesse, were released.
When Moritz returned to Saxony after negotiating the Passau Treaty, he was no longer regarded as “Judas”; Protestants and Catholics alike showed him respect. The emperor, too, admonished him in letters to ensure peace in the empire in his place. Due to his behavior in the "Prince's Uprising", however, the friendship with the emperor's son and Spanish heir to the throne Philip , which had arisen in 1549 during his trip to Germany, on which Moritz had accompanied him, broke. Philip turned away from the “traitor”, deeply disappointed, and suffered a serious personal trauma that had a lasting impact on the future ruler of the then Catholic world power Spain on Germany and the Protestants.
Soon after Moritz's return, Margrave Albrecht Alcibiades of Brandenburg-Kulmbach conquered the dioceses of Würzburg and Bamberg , as Johann Friedrich I had done eleven years earlier. This marks the beginning of the Second Margrave War , which only ended with the Peace of Augsburg in 1555.
Death and burial
Albrecht Alcibiades was a former ally of Moritz, who fought on his side in the Schmalkaldic War and had successfully mediated between him and the French King Henry II at the end of 1552 . But now Moritz brought about an alliance of princes, including with Ferdinand I, against Albrecht Alcibiades. On July 9, 1553 there was the battle of Sievershausen near Lehrte , which Moritz won, but in the course of which he was so badly injured by a shot in the abdomen from behind that he died of the consequences two days later in the camp. He was only 32 years old.
Moritz's body was transferred to his native Saxony, but his heart and entrails were buried in the church of Sievershausen. The bullet hole at waist height can be clearly seen in his armor, which has been preserved and which has been on a wooden figurine in the funeral chapel of Freiberg Cathedral since 2010 after being stored for 46 years .
His final resting place was Moritz the first Protestant Wettiner the Albertine line in the royal funeral chapel in the cathedral of Freiberg, in 1563 a magnificent Renaissance - Cenotaph , the Moritz Monument , from Belgian marble and alabaster was built. It was created by the sculptor Antonius van Zerroen from Antwerp - as a subcontractor of the goldsmith Hans Wessel - based on a design by the brothers Benedetto and Gabriele de Thola from Brescia . It is one of the earliest Renaissance free graves in Saxony and one of the most important in Europe .
In Sievershausen in 1853, 300 years after the battle, a memorial was erected in his honor at the site of his wounding. The 7.5 ton granite stone comes from Moritz 'home in Saxony.
Since Moritz did not leave a male heir, his brother August succeeded him. Shortly after Moritz's death , he built another Moritzmonument , the first historical monument in Saxony, at the Hasenbastei , part of the Dresden fortifications . August also continued the representative renovation of the Dresden Residenzschloss , which Moritz began shortly after assuming the electoral dignity in 1548 and for which he brought important Italian artists to Dresden. Moritzburg Castle , which he built as a hunting lodge from 1542–1546, is associated with his name , as well as having the castles of Klippenstein in Radeberg (1543–1546) and Wildeck in Zschopau (1545–1547) converted into hunting castles in the Renaissance style.
Memorial from 1853 at the site of the Battle of Sievershausen
Herzog Moritz statue in the courtyard of the grammar school in Grimma
Today's St. Augustin High School in Grimma is reminiscent of its school founder Moritz von Sachsen in two ways: In the inner courtyard there is once again a traditionally built statue, and in the auditorium hangs a large-format portrait - surrounded by ten historical paintings by the principal .
ancestors
| Pedigree of Moritz of Saxony | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Great-great-grandparents |
Elector |
Duke |
Viktorin von Podiebrad (1403–1427) |
Smil von Sternberg (–1431) |
Duke |
Elector |
Wartislaw IX. (1400–1457) |
Duke |
| Great grandparents |
Elector Friedrich II. (1412–1464) |
King George of Podebrady (1420–1471) |
Duke Heinrich IV of Mecklenburg (1417–1477) |
Erich II of Pommern-Wolgast (1425–1474) |
||||
| Grandparents |
Duke Albrecht the Courageous (1443–1500) |
Duke Magnus II (1441–1503) |
||||||
| parents |
Duke Heinrich the Pious (1473–1541) |
|||||||
|
Moritz of Saxony |
||||||||
literature
- Political correspondence of the Duke and Elector Moritz of Saxony . 6 vols., 1900-2006. Edited by the historical commission of the Saxon Academy of Sciences. On-line
- Hans Baumgarten : Moritz von Sachsen , Berlin 1941.
- Karlheinz Blaschke : Moritz of Saxony. A second generation Reformation prince. Göttingen 1983.
- Erich Brandenburg : Moritz von Sachsen - Until the Wittenberg surrender (1547) , Volume I, Leipzig 1898. Online
- Maria Elisabeth Grüter: Moritz (Saxony). In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 6, Bautz, Herzberg 1993, ISBN 3-88309-044-1 , Sp. 137-142.
- Johannes Herrmann: Moritz of Saxony. Sax-Verlag, Beucha 2003, ISBN 978-3-934544-47-5 .
- Constanze Lenk: Moritz figure back in the cathedral , Wochenspiegel Freiberg, November 2010
- Wilhelm Maurenbrecher : Moritz (Duke and Elector of Saxony) . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 22, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1885, pp. 293-305.
- André Thieme and Jochen Vötsch (eds.), With the collaboration of Ingolf Gräßler: Hof und Hofkultur under Moritz von Sachsen (1521–1553) , on behalf of the Association for Saxon State History, Beucha 2004.
- Georg Voigt : Moritz von Sachsen , Leipzig 1876.
- Günther Wartenberg : State rule and Reformation. Moritz von Sachsen and the Albertine church politics until 1546. Weimar 1988.
- Günther Wartenberg: Moritz. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 18, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-428-00199-0 , pp. 141-143 ( digitized version ).
- Hans-Joachim Böttcher : Princess Anna of Saxony 1544–1577 - A life tragedy , Dresden 2013, ISBN 978-3-941757-39-4 .
- Hans-Joachim Böttcher: The Turkish Wars in the Mirror of Saxon Biographies . Gabriele Schäfer Verlag, Herne 2019, ISBN 978-3-944487-63-2 , pp. 41-69.
Individual evidence
- ↑ State rule and Reformation: Moritz von Sachsen und die ... Günther Wartenberg - 1988 - After Kreyssig, Martin Oberdörfer was an informator for Moritz and August from 1529 to 1535. This came from Rochlitz, in Leipzig SS 1510 imm. (Erler 1, 505, M 53: "Martinus Oberdorffer de Rochlicz")
- ↑ Die Landesschule ( Memento from August 2, 2013 in the web archive archive.today )
- ↑ Notarisation of the school's founding in 1543 ( memento from July 24, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Friedrich Gottlob Leonhardi: Earth description of the electoral and ducal Saxon lands, Vol. 1, Leipzig 1802, p. 378
- ↑ Juan Antonio Castro Jiménez: Felipe II. Rey de España (1527-1598). In: MCN Biografías, accessed June 12, 2017; see. Friedrich Edelmayer : Philipp II. Biography of a world ruler. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2009, p. 99; 206.
- ↑ Sarah Schrempel: ( The iconoclastic controversy between the school St. Augustine and the county museum Grimma. ) Grimma 2013, p.66 Online PDF
Web links
- Literature by and about Moritz in the catalog of the German National Library
- Literature by and about Moritz in the Saxon Bibliography
| predecessor | Office | successor |
|---|---|---|
| Heinrich |
Duke of Saxony 1541–1547 |
merged into the new Electorate of Saxony |
| Johann Friedrich I. |
Elector of Saxony 1547–1553 |
August |
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Moritz |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Judas of Meissen |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Duke, later Elector of Saxony |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 21, 1521 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Freiberg |
| DATE OF DEATH | July 11, 1553 |
| Place of death | near Sievershausen |