Wolfgang Conrad from Thumbshirn

Wolfgang Conrad from Thumbshirn

Manorial seat and residence of Thumbshirns, today's Ponitz Renaissance castle

painted heraldic panel of the Thumbshirn coat of arms in front of Ponitz Castle

Painted portrait of Wolfgang Conrad von Thumbshirns in front of Ponitz Castle

Wolfgang Conrad von Thumbshirn (born April 28, 1604 in Ponitz ; † November 24, 1667 in Altenburg ) was negotiator and co-signer of the Peace of Westphalia . From 1653 he was princely Chancellor of Saxony-Altenburg .

family

Wolfgang Conrad von Thumbshirn is the fifth son of the Ponitz manor owner Hans Heinrich von Thumbshirn and his wife Anna von Einsiedel . He was lord of the villages of Ponitz , Robitz, Lohma and Frauenfels .

In February 1640 he married the only daughter of the then Chancellor of Saxony-Altenburg Bernhard Bertram, Maria Elisabeth. This marriage produced nine children, most of whom died relatively early.

career

From 1623 he studied law in Leipzig and Tübingen . He came into contact with the French culture in Strasbourg after he had to give up his trip to France due to the war . After Thumbshirn's return he was for a short time in military service in the Electorate of Saxony .

In 1632 he became the sustained-zerbstischen Hofmeister for askanischen Prince John of Anhalt-Zerbst called and lived for several years with him at the Count's court in Oldenburg . After his older brothers died, von Thumbshirn returned to Ponitz in order to serve in Saxony-Altenburg as a court and judiciary in December 1639 . So he became a member of the ecclesiastical court in 1641 . Two years later he became director of the tax collection in Altenburg , represented the small principality in the negotiations for the Peace of Westphalia , until he finally became Chancellor of Saxony-Altenburg in 1653.

Political activity and the Peace of Westphalia

In 1640/41 he was the authorized representative of Duke Friedrich Wilhelm II of Saxony-Altenburg at the Regensburg Reichstag and again in 1649/50 at the Nuremberg Execution Day . His most important diplomatic mission, however, came from 1645 to 1649 when he represented Saxony-Altenburg and Saxony-Coburg in the Princely Council at the international peace congress of Westphalia (peace negotiations at the end of the Thirty Years War ), supported by the lawyer August Carpzov . From autumn 1647 he was also director of the Corpus Evangelicorum .

In 1648, Wolfgang Conrad von Thumbshirn was one of the imperial ambassadors in Osnabrück and Münster , some of whom worked directly with the Swedish plenipotentiaries and some of them mediated the imperial-Swedish negotiations. His signature adorns the imperial-Swedish as well as the imperial-French peace treaties of October 24, 1648 in Münster, which formally ended the Thirty Years War. Thumbshirn was very committed to the Protestant right and played a much larger role in the peace negotiations than the small principality of Saxony-Altenburg actually had in the empire.

He strongly represented his Lutheran Protestant positions, whose piety is also expressed in the series of portraits of the envoys of the peace negotiations: he is the only one of the Protestant envoys to wear a conspicuous pectoral cross . His coat of arms motto read: "Recte Agendo Neminem Timeas" (in German roughly: Do right and do not shy away from anyone).

death

Thumbshirn died on November 24, 1667 in the presence of his family and the Altenburg general superintendent Johann Christfried Sagittarius (1617–1689) after he had been in the service of Duke Friedrich Wilhelm II for almost twenty-eight years .

literature

• Barbara Löwe, Günter Hummel: Wolfgang Conrad von Thumbshirn (1604–1667) and his family: a pioneer of the Peace of Westphalia from the Altenburger Land , Beier & Beran, 2007, ISBN 3937517774
• The coats of arms of the German baronial and noble families in a precise, complete and generally understandable description , Vol. IV, Vlg. TO Weigel, Leipzig 1857, p. 409 ff.
• Johann Ludolf Walther: Universal register over the six parts of the westphalian peace , p. 54, digitized biography