MAULBRONN MONASTERY
Germany’s Best Preserved Cistercian Monastery
About the year 1147, a group of Cistercian monks traveling the old Roman road through the hills between Canstatt, now modern Stuttgart, and the medieval city of Speyer (spires for its early cathedral), stopped for their mules to drink from a tributary of the River Salzach, flowing into a lush narrow valley meadow. The monks looked around and decided this was the spot where they should establish a monastery, which became Maulbronn. Or, so the story goes. The Maulbronn Abbey Monastery complex in the southwest Germany state of Baden-Wurttemberg is regarded today as the most completely preserved monastery from the Middle-Ages to be found north of the Alps and a UNESCO World Heritage site.
The Cistercians were a reformed order of Benedictines based in the Burgundy region of France, were the other great preserved monastery survives, Abbey Fonteney (see Abbey Fontenay Burgundy). The Cistercians gained a wide presence across Europe from a well-refined structure and expansion under the influence Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, and advocate of the founding of the Knights Templar (see St Bernard Chatillon-sur-Seine).
The Monastery Abbey at Maulbronn is one of the most visited cultural monuments in Baden-Wurttemberg for the insight afforded into the spiritual and economic life of the Cistercian monastic life, as well as the classical music concerts held there in late summer. The Monastery at Maulbronn is formed from a collection of buildings within thick stone walls, like a fortress forming a small town of medieval buildings surrounding a broad cobblestone square.
The principal building of the complex is the Romanesque Monastery Abbey Church with later Gothic cloisters and reconstructions. Connected by the Gothic arched halls are the monks dining hall and the lay brothers quarters. One of the best known sights of Maulbronn are the fountain house in the cloister garden and the beautiful late gothic fan vault ceiling corridor ordered built by the late 15th Century Abbot Johannes Burrus as a chapel to the Virgin Mary.The corridor was the last construction completed as a Catholic monastery. Look for the likeness of Bernard of Clairvaux in the keystone of the monks corridor and the ornately carved choir benches.
Unlike most of the medieval abbeys of England destroyed and turned to ruins by Henry VIII and his Anglican successors, the monastery at Maulbronn survived the Lutheran reformation when it was turned into a Protestant School under the protection of the electors of the Palatine, founded by Duke Christoph of Wurttemberg in 1556, and famed for its prominent students, among them mathematician and astronomer Johannes Keplar and author Hermann Hesse.
Notable of the Maulbronn Abbey complex are the defensive walls, with three impressive towers; the western Gate Tower, through which the monastery is still entered, the five stories tall Witches Tower built of rough-hewn stone, which gets its name from its occupants during trials of the 1400’s, and the half-timber Faust Tower from the 1500’s, where the famous alchemist Dr. Faust lived while attempting to create gold for the then Abbot Entenfuss of Maulbronn. Whether Doctor Faustus actually produced gold is doubtful, but the legends that he had, resulted in his later literary fame as having sold his soul to the devil.
The central square of the monastery complex, surrounded by later buildings, operates like its own little town with restaurants and shops and the Rathaus town hall. The more modern but still quaint small town of Maulbronn is outside the walls of the monastery with a large parking lot for visitors to the site. Near the monastery at Maulbronn are many wine vineyards and hiking trails along the Salzach. Maulbronn is about 30 minutes from Stuttgart by car along the Wine Road of Wurttemberg, passing vineyards and wine villages, or ten minutes from the A8 autobahn north of Phorzheim and the A5 between Karlsruhe and Mannheim. The Kloster Maulbronn is about an hour by train from Stuttgart with a connection at Mühlacker and local bus from the Maulbronn West bahnhof station. © Bargain
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