Pegau Abbey

The monastery of St. Jacob in Pegau was a Benedictine monastery, which was located in the city Pegau. It was one of the oldest monasteries were founded in Saxony. It was known mainly through the so-called Annales Pegaviensis that Pegauer annals, from the year 1155, which were an important medieval historiography.

History

The Margrave of Meissen and Lusatia Wiprecht of Groitzsch founded in 1091 the Benedictine monastery of St. Jacob in Pegau. He plans it as a family monastery and grave lay. Five years later the monastery was consecrated.

After the death of the first abbot Bero († 1100) was Windolf († May 1, 1156 in Schkölen ) second abbot ( 1101-1150 ), before he was canon of St. Martin, Aureus and Justin in the Holy City and head of the monastery school in Corvey what Wiprecht in the year 1101 brings to Pegau. Windolf provides the first economic blossoming of the monastery. From the monastery the eastward expansion has been driven in the direction of depression. The first settlers brought this Wiprecht II from Franconia.

Due to severe burns drawn, which he had suffered on his property in Hall, put Wiprecht in 1124 his temporal power off occurs at the monastery and died shortly thereafter. He was buried according to his wishes in the monastery.

In 1155, the so-called Annales Pegaviensis that Pegauer annals were written by a monk Pegauer.

A first fatality experienced the monastery in 1156 as it burns down to the bunkhouse. Only four years later, the bishop Johann I von Merseburg inaugurate the rebuilt abbey church.

In 1172 Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa renewed the monastery Pegauer the mint and market law and thus secured its economic importance.

With the 1184-1224 foregoing Abbot Siegfried of Reckin receives in the long struggle against the Bishop of Merseburg for Romfreiheit the monastery before the Curia, by an imperial arbitration, the right of the monastery founder back.

In 1198, after the death of the Emperor Henry VI. the monastery was placed under the Margrave of Meissen.

Margrave Dietz man destroyed after the Battle of Lucka the monastery. Margrave Frederick II of Meissen ordered in 1327 the Ephorie Borna the monastery. In 1502 it came to the power shift to the city Pegau. These acquired in 1502 the Upper jurisdiction from the monastery. After almost one hundred years of service in the monastery Pegau lost in 1522 his rights to Borna. This became Protestant during the Reformation. 17 years later, the city followed by Pegau and the monastery was secularized. In 1545, the Elector of Saxony Moritz sold as the new owner, the monastery for 19,500 florins to the city.

One in 1548 convened in the monastery convent, with the participation of Philipp Melanchthon and the Naumburg Bishop Julius von Pflug, tried in vain to an agreement between Catholics and Protestants bring. 1556 was the demolition of the monastery. The cenotaph Wiprechts of Groitzsch was then transferred to the St. Laurentius church in Pegau.