Wilhelm Heyd

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Wilhelm Heyd

Wilhelm Heyd , later von Heyd (born October 23, 1823 in Markgröningen , † February 19, 1906 in Stuttgart ) was a German librarian and historian . From 1857 he worked at the Royal State Library in Stuttgart, from 1873 as its director. His historical research focused on medieval trade history, particularly the oriental trade of Italian cities. On behalf of the Württemberg Commission for State History , he founded the Bibliography of Württemberg History in 1895 , which appeared in a total of 11 volumes by 1974.

Life

Heyd brought the affinity for history with him from his father's house. He was the son of the town pastor Ludwig Friedrich Heyd , who wrote a three-volume story of Duke Ulrich and other writings on the history of Württemberg. Like his father, whom he lost at the age of 19, Wilhelm Heyd was destined for theology and attended the evangelical seminars in Blaubeuren and Tübingen . But even then, historical studies fascinated him more than theology. His first literary attempt - at that time he was a repetiteur at the Tübingen monastery - was an article in Karl Biedermann's magazine "Germania - the past, present and future of the German nation" from 1851 on the mixture of German tribes with the peoples of the Western Roman Empire.

In the autumn of 1852, his wish for a longer study trip to Italy was granted. The journey went via Rome to Naples , from where he returned to Rome in November to spend the winter here. In addition to churches, galleries and ruins, Heyd mainly visited libraries and archives and on this trip he became acquainted with some famous scholars. In Rome the friendship with Ferdinand Gregorovius developed , which was strengthened by related studies and by repeated visits of the Roman historian in Stuttgart. At that time, however, he also made the acquaintance of Scheffel and, as he himself said in “ Swabian Mercury ” of May 2, 1886, was introduced to the company of a sociable circle of painters by him. They moved out into the Campagna together, strolled through the Via Appia or waited in the osterias on Monte Testaccio by the tornarello for the moonlit night to break. At the end of December a group excursion was made to the Sabine Mountains , to Palestrina , Genazzano , Olevano , where New Year's Eve was celebrated in the Casa Baldi with improvised living pictures. Scheffel, too, depicted those happy Roman and Sabine days in lively colors in the epistles to his Heidelberg friends in 1892 and gave a humorous description of "Mr. Wilhelm Heydt, Doctor of Divine Dealing and Repetent at the Stift zu Tübingen".

The trip was originally taken for general educational purposes, and it was only as the trip progressed that Heyd's studies took a more definite direction in the commercial history of Italy in the Middle Ages. He brought u. a. the realization that, among the cities of Italy, Genoa has been neglected by historiography, that its older constitutional history is still in a mess and that the city as a maritime and colonial power is not being honored according to merit. On closer inspection it turned out that the seaside cities of Italy, including the most treated Venice , had until then lacked a documented history of their overseas possessions. In order to close this gap, Heyd wrote the studies on the constitutional history of Genoa up to 1200 , which were published in the Tübingen " Zeitschrift für die Allgemeine Staatswissenschaft " in 1854 .

He held the repetent position at the monastery, which gave him the opportunity to give lectures on church history, until 1856. In these and the following years, the studies of the colonies of the Roman Church in the Crusader states and in the countries ruled by the Tatars were carried out in 1856 and 1858 published in the "Journal for Historical Theology".

In 1856 Heyd was appointed deacon in Weinsberg . However, in the following year, when Franz Pfeiffer went to Vienna, Christoph Friedrich Stälin called him to the Royal Public Library in Stuttgart. There he was librarian for the subjects of theology, philosophy and history and was responsible for revising the subject catalog. After Stälin's death in 1873 he took over his position as senior librarian, which he held for 24 years until his retirement in 1897 (since 1894 with the title of director).

With the resignation from the church office and the transition to the library, he now had free rein for scientific work on a larger scale. Ever since Georges Bernard Depping published a history of trade between the Orient and Europe (Paris 1830), new documentary material had become abundant. Just had Gottlieb Lukas Friedrich panel and Georg Martin Thomas started to issue certificates to the older commercial and state history of Venice. They left the exploitation of this material to the young scholar Heyd and encouraged him to write a coherent history of the Levant trade . Heyd first undertook this in a continuous series of treatises on the trade relations of the Italian cities with the Byzantine Empire , which he published from 1858 to 1865 in the Tübingen "Zeitschrift für die Allgemeine Staatswissenschaft". These treatises immediately caused a stir in the scientific world of Italy. They appeared in Italian translation and in book form as parts 6 and 13 of the collection Nuova collezione di opere storiche , edited by Joseph Müller in Padua under the title Le colonie commerciali degli Italiani in Oriente (2 vols., Venice and Turin 1860–1868). It was to this book that Heyd owed lasting, fruitful connections with Italian scholars. The success encouraged him to gain the interest of a larger audience in Germany and he extended his research to the trade relations of the entire Romance-Germanic world with the Orient. For his elaboration he used a variety of sources: the document collections of the seaside cities, the chronicles of the Crusades, the travel and diaries of the pilgrims to Jerusalem and Arab travelers, statutes and merchant's books, trading tracts, finds of coins and inscriptions. This is how Heyd's main work, The History of Levant Trade in the Middle Ages (2 vols., Cotta 1877–1879), which established his scientific reputation in Germany, was created. It was soon considered to be groundbreaking and fundamental to medieval trading history. In 1885–1886 a further French edition was published, posthumously in 1913 an Italian and 1975 a Turkish edition of the work.

In addition to this major work, numerous smaller monographs and essays were created in which Heyd expanded his research in this area. He wrote the article “Venice” for the “ Staatslexikon ” by Rotteck and Welcker . A treatise on the Fondaco dei Tedeschi (the house of German merchants) in Venice appeared in Sybel's “Historical Journal” in 1874 . As a commemorative publication for the University of Tübingen in 1877, he published new articles on the history of the Levant trade. Other articles, as well as reviews of related works, appeared in the "Göttinger Gelehrten Advertisements", in the "Meeting reports of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences", in the "Literarisches Zentralblatt", in the "Allgemeine Zeitung". He contributed biographical articles to the “ Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie ” on a number of Orient travelers and Swabian compatriots, including a biography of his father.

In the meantime Heyd led a quiet scholarly life in his library. Strangely enough, he never went to Italy again. Theodor Elze , who studied in Tübingen in 1842 and had become close friends with Heyd , lured him in vain to the Bella Venezia : “Didn't this sorceress do it to you at all? And does the big bell of San Marco not hum in your ear: come again, come again? ”As a substitute, Heyd conducted extensive correspondence with scholars from all cultures, who brought him notes, copies and corrections, and made inquiries, difficult or otherwise Discussed disputes with him. He was considered an authority, and his advice was sought from afar. In addition to the names already mentioned, among his numerous correspondents and collaborators we should also mention : Cornelio Desimoni and Luigi Tommaso Belgrano in Genoa, Pietro Ghinzoni in Milan, Carlo Cipolla in Turin, Guglielmo Berchet and Count Girolamo Soranzo in Venice, Cesare Guasti in Florence, Gustave Schlumberger in Paris, Ferdinand Wüstenfeld in Göttingen, Wilhelm Stieda in Rostock, Titus Tobler , Reinhold Röhricht in Berlin, Aloys Schulte in Breslau, Friedrich August Flückiger in Strasbourg, Dietrich Schäfer in Tübingen, Henry Simonsfeld in Munich, Wilhelm Anton Neumann and Joseph von Karabacek in Vienna, Philip Bruun in Odessa and Ernst Kunik in Petersburg.

At the end of his commercial history work, Heyd offered smaller materials that were close to him as a South German. He examined the trade relations of Swabian cities in the Middle Ages with Italy and Spain, with Geneva and Lyon, and published the results of these studies in 1880, 1884 and 1893 in the Württemberg quarterly journals and in the research on German history. In 1890 the first historical monograph about the large Ravensburger Handelsgesellschaft appeared , in which Heyd describes the Upper Swabian wholesale merchant's house of the 14th century using the documents known at the time. Of course, he could not have suspected a bundle of files slumbering at Salem Castle, which was found in 1909 and processed by Aloys Schulte in 1923 in a much more extensive presentation of this company.

Heyd's last work was more closely related to his profession as a librarian, because he now turned primarily to cataloging and initially completed a catalog of the historical manuscripts of the State Library in Stuttgart from 1889 to 1891. Subsequently, on behalf of the Württemberg Commission for State History, of which he had been a full member since it was set up in 1890, he edited the bibliography of Württemberg history (2 volumes, 1895 and 1896), an indispensable part of Württemberg regional studies, even after Heyd's death Reference work continued up to 1974 in a total of 11 volumes.

After his retirement in 1897, Heyd worked on behalf of the commission on the publication of the literary and artistic estate of the Württemberg builder and engineer Heinrich Schickhardt .

Honors

Heyd has received honors for his scientific achievements from various quarters. Member of the history societies in Genoa and Venice since 1871 and 1876, he was elected a corresponding member by the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in 1879 and by the Numismatic Society in Vienna in 1880. He was awarded medals and titles of nobility by the King of Württemberg. The philosophy faculty in Tübingen awarded him honorary doctorates in 1876, the political science faculty in 1893 .

literature

Web links

Wikisource: Wilhelm Heyd  - Sources and full texts
personal data
SURNAME Heyd, Wilhelm
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Heyd, Wilhelm von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German librarian and historian
DATE OF BIRTH October 23, 1823
PLACE OF BIRTH Markgröningen
DATE OF DEATH February 19, 1906
Place of death Stuttgart