Wiblingen Abbey

Wiblingen Abbey was a former Benedictine abbey which was later used as barracks. Today its buildings house several departments of the medical faculty of the University of Ulm. The former abbey is located south of the confluence of the rivers Danube and Iller, south of the city of Ulm in the German state of Baden-Württemberg. Administratively, the former independent village of Wiblingen now belongs to the city of Ulm. The abbey is part of the Upper Swabian Baroque Route.

Wiblingen Abbey was founded in 1093 by the counts Hartmann and Otto von Kirchberg. The counts offered monks of St. Blaise's Abbey in the Black Forest lands near the river Iller, which the monks used to found a filial institution. In 1099, the first buildings were consecrated. The first abbot was Werner von Ellerbach. In the same year, the founding counts offered the abbey a splinter of the Holy Cross which they had acquired during their participation in the First Crusade.

During the High and the Late Middle Ages Wiblingen Abbey was famous for its scholarship and learning as well as being a place of exemplary monastic discipline due its strict adherence to the rule of St. Benedict. In 1504, the Benedictine Abbey and its dependent villages came under the sovereignty of the House of Austria and was to be from then on part of Further Austria until 1806.

During the Thirty Years' War the abbey suffered repeatedly from warfare. On the initiative of Abbot Johannes Schlegel the Holy-Cross-Relic was hidden in order to protect it from marauding Protestant Swedish troops. However, following the withdrawal of the Swedish troops the relic could not be recovered, since there was no one alive who remembered its hiding place, the witnesses to its concealment all having succumbed to the plague. Only years later, the immured relic was rediscovered.

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