Proud
The family dynasty of Overstolzes was the ancestral family of Cologne patricians and was among the most influential and wealthiest families in medieval Cologne . The family clan went back to the same origins as the Lyskirchen and Quattermart clans and also had the same coat of arms, only in different colors.
Origin of name
The name is derived from “excessive pride”, “extremely” and “proud” (high spirits, high-mindedness, full of self-esteem). In Middle Low German it is "stolt", in Middle Dutch "stout". According to a legend , the name of the old Cologne merchant family can also be found among the fifteen families who are said to have moved from Rome to what was then Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium and who settled there permanently. Around 1200 the name changes to "Ouerstoltz" and is then called "de Oversburch". Later forms of the name appear in "Geradus Oyverstoiltz" and "Johannes, dictus Ouerstolz".
Origin of family and wealth
Her progenitor "Godescalsus Ovirstoth" (Gottschalk Overstolz) is attested in 1197 as the oldest Cologne family member (* 1145 Cologne, † 1212 ibid), lived in the house Lyskirchen in Airsbach in the southern suburb of Cologne in front of the medieval city wall , which stretches from Lyskirchen to the Cologne Witschgasse stretched and was a dressmaker by profession. He owed his wealth in part to the dowry of his wife Sophia de San Laurentio. Between 1197 and 1210, progenitor Gottschalk acquired numerous houses, particularly in the parish of St. Martin and in the parishes of St. Brigida and St. Aposteln . After his death he left 20 houses which he gave to his 8 children Gunther (* 1170, † 1214), Richolfus (* 1170, † 1239), Blithilde (* 1174, † 1255), Heinrich (* 1180, † 1246), Ger (h) ard (* 1185, † 1243), Gottschalk (* 1185, † 1266), Margarete (* 1190) and Sophia (* 1190) inherited. The sons Gottschalk I (1185–1266) and Ger (h) ard I (1185–1243) acquired the Zederwald farm in 1224 and built 16 apartments there, which formed the origin of today's banking mile Unter Sachsenhausen . Practically the entire patriciate of Cologne descends from the wealthy progenitor and his eight married children.
The family moved their headquarters to Rheingasse 8 around 1230, which was then called "Ryngazzin". The Overstolzenhaus, named after them today, stands there with its distinctive stepped gable. According to architectural studies, the time of construction can be assumed to be around 1230. At that time it was called “Haus zur Scheuren” (ad horreum) in the shrine books until 1257 and was built by Werner and Blithildis Overstolz, for whose social advancement the progenitor Gottschalk had set the course. Werner Overstolz was not related to the clan, but had adopted the name Overstolz at the wedding with Blithildis. He was originally called Ritter Werner von der Schuren and gave the house his name. Werner and Blithildis bequeathed the house to their son Johannes Overstolz (* 1195, † before 1255); the owners have apparently only changed in inheritance and apparently partly dispensed with an "anchoring" - that is, an entry in the shrine books. In 1337 the house came from the Overstolz to the patrician Eberhard Hardevust.
The Overstolz family owned a complete row of houses at Filzengraben 8-18, which was divided into smaller and smaller parcels by dividing the inheritance. When an inheritance was divided in 1416, no. 12-14 was separated as "Klein-Overstolz", no. 16-18 acquired the cooper's guild in 1537, and in 1611 the property returned to the Overstolz. In 1264 a "Overstolzenhof" was mentioned, a so-called "curia Overstolzorum" in the area of today's Ulrichgasse, then called "Ulregazzen".
Fight for supremacy in Cologne
The patricians of Cologne did not shy away from armed conflicts. On November 28, 1263 they triumphed over the allies of Cologne Archbishop Engelbert II. Von Falkenburg , who wanted to win the city regiment by force. Later, the Overstolz family drew other patrician families on their side to decide the rivalry with the previously leading patrician family from Mühlengasse, known as the "wise men". Since the beginning of the 13th century the wise men had succeeded in filling more and more seats in the college of aldermen and richerzeche . In 1259 this sex had already seven lay judges and up to this year at least three of the verifiable mayors, whereby it had a strong influence in both bodies.
Archbishop Engelbert II fueled this hostility to the family from April 1267 and sided with the wise. The power struggle was mainly about the tower house of the wise on Mühlengasse. The Mayor Ludwig Weise was arrested by the Overstolz in November 1267, who thus gained the city regiment. Ludwig Weise was able to remove the city seal required by the Overstolzians beforehand. On January 10, 1268, the armed wise men moved to the place of residence of the Overstolz on Filzengraben, who were able to repel the attack with 62 riflemen.
The Jude , Kleingedank and Scherfgin families sided with the Overstolz . The conflicts erupted on 14./15. October 1268 in the battle of the Ulrepforte (also Night of the Holy Moors ), which the Overstolzes also won. They eventually replaced the wise men who ruled the city and after their leaders died in battle, the remaining wise men had to leave the city. With the advance of the Overstolz from their humble beginnings to the top of the urban ruling class, a new era of gender rule emerged together with their party friends.
Growth of prestige and power
The circle of politically present families has now expanded and an economically and politically homogeneous leadership class between 15 and 30 families has formed with access to the college of lay judges, the Richerzeche and the Cologne City Council . As one of the victors of the battle at the Ulrepforte, the Overstolzes increased their influence in the city and, in 1271, appointed Daniel Overstolz, one of the many mayors of the clan, for the first time.
Patrician families like the Overstolz, just like the other “noble families” of the Raitz von Frentz , “Hardevust”, “Gyr” (“Gir”) or the “Unmaze”, “Cleingedank”, “von Horn”, “Aducht”, “ Spiegel, "Jude", "Lyskirchen", "Gryne" (or "Grin)", "Birkelin", "Quatermart", "Hirzelin" and "Scherfgin" as well as other influential families strove to gain wealth and to own their property to increase power and prestige. Heads of all families also served as mayors of the city and on the city council , some of them repeatedly until well beyond the end of the 14th century.
According to Ernst Weyden , the Overstolzen were considered the most powerful family in Cologne and divided into several sidelines. According to Anton Fahne there were u. a. the lines Rheingasse, Efferen, timber market, and Sandkaul Filzengraben and other secondary lines. All adult clan members of these lines owned land and thus belonged to the large landowners or were related to such. In these ramifications there were also marriages that were not in keeping with one's class. In all their ambitious endeavors, they also remained loyal to the work of their ancestors, the “ dressmaking ”.
In the year 1324 Werner Overstolz, an early mayor , was also a lay judge and “lord of the narrow council”, like his ancestors 100 years earlier, was able to personally sell “garments” (foreign cloth ). The inner political life of the imperial city Cologne was influenced by the "Overstolzen". As the leading sex within the Cologne patrician families, it asserted itself not only during the disputes in the 13th century among the “noble houses”, but until the end of the Middle Ages. Another Werner Overstolz published the history of his family in the Overstolzenbuch around 1440 , which he proudly traced back to the Romans under Trajan , who had been proclaimed emperor in Cologne. At that time, this tradition, which is also listed in the Cologne Chronicle Agrippina by Heinrich van Beeck of 1472, was still considered true.
The Overstolz von Efferen line was later called as the country nobility at Efferen Castle, only from Efferen . Its most important representative is the Worms Prince-Bishop Wilhelm von Efferen . In the 18th century this line gained importance in the Electoral Palatinate , where Johann Wilhelm von Efferen († 1724) worked as lieutenant general .
Political influence in Cologne
With the support of the patrician family Grin, Johann and Gottschalk II Overstolz won two lay judges' offices for the Overstolz family for the first time in 1232. Within a few years, the Overstolzes were able to permanently fit into the political leadership group. When the patricians were disempowered by the Archbishop of Cologne, Konrad von Hochstaden, in 1259, their influence was initially not impaired. On April 17, 1259, the archbishop removed the mayor Theoderich Weise von der Mühlengasse from his office for profit-seeking, abuse of office and corruption (medieval clique ) and excluded him from the city council. After the restoration of the family rule, the Overstolzes gained considerable power from June 16, 1262, especially through their representation in the city council, which increasingly ousted the lay judges from their leading position in the city government.
The battle of the Ulrepforte opened the way for the Overstolz to gain a dominant position in the new city regiment from 1268 onwards. In the “close council” of the 15 Cologne sexes, they were represented with two of their lines. The first documented mayor of Overstolz was from 1271 Daniel Overstolz, who in April 1273 assigned a quarter of the Overstolzenhaus to his brother Johann. Daniel was one of the lay judges who were deposed by Archbishop Konrad von Hochstaden in 1259. With his election as mayor, he acquired the right of full membership in the Richerzeche.
Daniel was followed in 1273 by Gerhard Overstolz, who was armed as an armored rider and fell in the Battle of Worringen in 1288 when he got off his horse and stood at the head of the infantry on foot. In the time of Werner Overstolz and his son Johann, the clan was represented in the three leading bodies of the city, the council, the Richerzeche and the college of aldermen. This position of political power was a direct result of the great victory over the wise.
Even in the 14th century, members of the family continued to belong to the “close council” and the Schöffenkolleg and until 1396 had a total of 21 mayors. The end of the rule of the sexes through the Cologne Verbundbrief excluded them from the political ruling class on September 14, 1396, but they still asserted their influence.
End of the dynasty
Until the middle of the 15th century, the Overstolians were able to stay in the Schöffenkolleg and remained present in Cologne's social life as members of the Marian Brotherhood of St. Maria in the Capitol . The leading line from the Rheingasse died out with the Teutonic Knight Werner Overstolz (1416–1493). He spent his old age in the small community of Judenroide ( Gödenroth ?), Where he died between June and August 23, 1493 at the age of 77. An insignificant branch line called "Steultzgin" was then represented in the city council and aldermen.
present
Today the Overstolzenstrasse running between the Sachsenring and the Volksgartenstrasse in Cologne's Neustadt-Süd commemorates the Overstolzen family. The shrine registers (land registers of the Middle Ages) show at least 18 houses called "Overstolz" in different parts of the city. The Overstolzenhaus that remains today at Rheingasse 8-12, near the Heumarkt , still bears witness to the past splendor of medieval buildings by the Cologne patricians.
The All Saints' Day Window in Cologne Cathedral , created around 1320, consists of eight individual panes, the so-called fields. The window is one of the most unusual creations of Cologne glass painting of the 14th century. It shows rows of saints above a starry blue segment of sky and two coats of arms of the Overstolz family in eight segment-arched ranks, an image of the heavenly hierarchy.
The former Cologne cigarette company Haus Neuerburg named its Overstolz brand , which was produced from 1917 to 2014, after the gender.
The Hürth-based writer Herbert Sinz , winner of the Rhineland Taler , wrote a novel about two generations of the Overstolz in 1988 under the title Der Junge Overstolz , in which a lot of color from Cologne and the Rhenish region but also pilgrimages and trips, for example to Venice, flowed. The Cologne author Frank Schätzing wrote Death and the Devil, a historic Cologne crime thriller in 1995 , in which the fatal fall of the first Cologne cathedral master builder, Master Gerhard, marks the beginning of a secret conspiracy by the Overstolz patrician family. The family does not get off well in the crime thriller, because Matthias Overstolz pulls the strings in the background and tries to maintain his power through criminal means.
In the Overstolzengesellschaft sponsor of the Museum of Applied Art, founded in 1888 e. V. committed citizens of Cologne have come together to support the Museum of Applied Arts Cologne (MAKK).
Literature / sources
- Adam Wrede : Neuer kölnischer Sprachschatz , second volume K – R, 9th edition, p. 269, Greven Verlag, Cologne 1984, ISBN 3-7743-0155-7
- Reinhold Neven DuMont: Instructions for use for Cologne , Piper Verlag, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-492-27532-X
- The Chronicle of Cologne , Chronik Verlag, Dortmund 1991, ISBN 3-611-00193-7
Individual evidence
- ^ Koehlhoff's Chronica van der hilligen stat van Collen (1499)
- ↑ Ahnenforschungen.de with detailed private family tree research ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Johann Peter Weyer / Ulrich Bock / Werner Schäfke, Kölner Alterthümer , Volume 1, 1993, p. 246
- ↑ Anita Wiedenau, Romanesque housing in the Rhineland , 1979, p. 38
- ↑ Hans Reykers, Im Schatten von St. Gereon , 1960, p. 131
- ^ Friedrich Baudri, Organ for Christian Art , 1863, p. 123
- ^ Paul Fuchs (ed.), Chronicle of the History of the City of Cologne , Volume 1, p. 221
- ↑ Wolfgang Herborn, On the reconstruction and edition of the Cologne mayor list up to the end of the Ancien Regime , in: Rheinische Vierteljahrsblätter 36 (1972), pp. 89-183, here: p. 156.
- ↑ Birgit Studt : House and family books in urban society in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period , 2007, p. 34
- ↑ Ernst Weyden, Das Haus Overstolz zur Rheingasse , 1842, p. 25
- ↑ Anton Fahne von Roland, History of the Cologne, Jülichen and Bergisch families , 1848, p. 317 f.
- ^ Robert Meier: Kölner Historschreibung im 15. Jahrhundert , lecture of the Cologne Prize winners, in Universität im Rathaus , Vol. 5, 1996/97, p. 81
- ↑ Website on the coat of arms of the Efferen and their origins from the Overstolzen family ( memento of the original from June 10, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Manfred Groten, Cologne in the 13th century , 1998, p. 86
- ^ Edith Ennen / Werner Besch, The City in European History , 1972, p. 498
- ^ Rolf Lauer / Elisabeth Jägers / Peter Berkenkopf, The All Saints Window in the Cologne Cathedral , in: Journal for Art Technology and Conservation. 1988, ISSN 0931-7198
- ^ Herbert Sinz, The young Overstolz , 1988, Bachem Verlag
