Weissenburg Abbey, Alsace

Weissemburg Abbey (German: Kloster Weißenburg, French: L'abbaye de Wissembourg), also Wissembourg Abbey, is a former Benedictine abbey (1524 –1789: collegiate church) in Wissembourg in Alsace, France.

Weissenburg Abbey was founded around 660 AD by the Bishop of Speyer, Dragobodo.

Thanks to donations from the nobility and local landowners the monastery quickly acquired possessions and estates in the Alsace, Electorate of the Palatinate and in the west-Rhine county of Ufgau. As a result, manorial farms and peasant farmsteads were set up and agriculture system introduced to create fertile arable farmland.

Around 1100, it was important for the monastery, which had now become wealthy, to distance itself from the Bishop of Speyer and his influence. To this end a new tradition was established about the origins of the monastery, backed up by forged documents (it should be noted that such forgery was not anything unusual in the Middle Ages). In the case of Weissenburg, the story now ran that the abbey had been founded in 623 by the Merovingian king, Dagobert I. Detailed historic research in recent decades has demonstrated that this was unlikely to have been the case.

Weissenburg developed quickly into one of the wealthiest and culturally most significant abbeys in Germany. As early as 682 it was able to purchase shares in a saltworks in Vic-sur-Seille for the princely sum of 500 solidi; in 760 it was given the Mundat Forest. The Gospel Book (Evangelienbuch) written around 860 by a monk, Otfrid of Weissenburg, represented a milestone in the development of German language and literature. At that time the abbey was in the charge of Abbot Grimald of Weissenburg, who was also the Abbot of the Abbey of Saint Gall and chancellor to Emperor Louis the German, and thus was one of the most important figures in the whole of the German imperial church.

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