Thuringian Count War

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The Thuringian Count War (also Thuringian Count Feud) was an armed conflict between a number of imperial noble houses and the House of Wettin for supremacy in Thuringia, which lasted from 1342 to 1346 .

prehistory

In 1247, Heinrich Raspe, the last Thuringian landgrave from the Ludowinger family, died and the Ludowingers became extinct in the male line. In the following War of the Thuringian-Hessian Succession , Heinrich the Illustrious , Margrave of Meißen , was finally able to win the Thuringian Landgrave Office for the House of Wettin, while the Hessian parts of the country fell to Henry I as the new Landgrave of Hesse . The grandson of Henry the Illustrious, Frederick I, the Honorable , and his son Frederick II, the Serious, tried to consolidate the sovereignty of the Wettins over Thuringia and inevitably came into opposition to the other aristocratic rulers in the country.

Course of events

On September 1, 1342, the Counts of Schwarzburg , Weimar-Orlamünde and Hohnstein and the bailiffs of Gera and Plauen allied against Friedrich the Serious in Arnstadt . In October the armed conflict began. The Archbishop of Mainz Heinrich III. von Virneburg , who was currently fighting with the citizens of Erfurt over the rights to the city, supported the counts, and the citizens of Erfurt therefore supported Frederick the Serious.

On December 14, 1342, a first peace brokered by the emperor was signed. Since the counts were obliged to pay a very high amount of reparation, the peace did not last and the fighting soon flared up again. Friedrich now tried to weaken the opposing alliance by concluding individual separate peace agreements with his opponents: on September 6, 1343 first with the bailiffs of Gera and Plauen, on July 28, 1345 then with the Schwarzburgers, on April 11, 1346 finally in Peace of Dresden also with the Counts of Weimar-Orlamünde. These had to give their home country to the Wettins as a fiefdom and thus lost their imperial immediacy and their political independence.

The outcome of the Count's War strengthened the position of the Wettins in Thuringia. They could not finally oust the Schwarzburgers and the bailiffs from Thuringia and they continued to play an important role until the end of the monarchies in Thuringia in 1918 (see Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt , Schwarzburg-Sondershausen , Reuss ). However, after the Count's War they could not expand further, were restricted to their home areas and were therefore no longer able to endanger the dominance of the Wettins in Thuringia. For the Counts of Weimar-Orlamünde, however, the outcome of the war meant the end of their imperial immediacy. A short time later, Weimar fell entirely to Wettin as a settled fiefdom and became an important residence of the Ernestine Wettins (cf. Sachsen-Weimar and Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach ).

literature

  • Wilhelm Füßlein : The Thuringian Count Feud 1342-1346 . In: Contributions to Thuringian and Saxon history. Festschrift for Otto Dorbencker for his 70th birthday on April 2, 1929 . Fischer, Jena 1929, p. 111-139 .