Meissen (Upper Sorbian Mišno, Latin Misnia, Misena) is the
district town of the district of the same name in the Free State of
Saxony, has more than 28,000 inhabitants and has the status of large
district town.
The city of Meissen is internationally famous
for the production of Meissner porcelain, which was the first
European porcelain to be produced since 1708. The name of the city
with double s ("Meissen") is a registered trademark of the State
Porcelain Manufactory Meissen.
Albrechtsburg
The Albrechtsburg in Meißen is one of the most
famous late Gothic architectural monuments and is considered the
first castle in Germany. The hilltop castle is a protected cultural
asset under the Hague Convention.
The castle hill was settled
from the Young Bronze Age to the time of the Germanic peoples. So
far, no traces of fortifications have been found. When King Heinrich
I destroyed the Sorbian people's castle Gana in 929, he was looking
for a place for a new castle. He found this between the Elbe, the
Triebisch and the Meisa. The towering rock on which the later castle
called Misni (Meißen) was built, was ideal for ruling the country.
Because of its location above the Elbe, the Albrechtsburg is also
called the “Saxon Acropolis”. The report by the chronicler Thietmar
von Merseburg shows that he found a wooded hill. Heinrich's castle
consisted of a number of wooden structures surrounded by a
wood-earth wall. The name of the Misni Castle refers to the small
Misni stream (Meisa, see Meisatal), which flows into the Elbe just
below the castle hill.
From 936–968 the castle is no longer
mentioned in Saxon historical sources. It may have been lost in the
fighting with the Bohemians in September 936. A Margrave of Meissen
is attested from 968. While Slavs were settling on the Misni river,
the first German settlement in today's urban area was established
south of the castle at a small natural harbor. There is also
evidence of a burgrave since 1068. Over time, a Burgraviate of
Meissen developed, which the Meinheringer family was able to expand
further.
The conquest of Henry I marked the beginning of a
dispute over the rule of the region that lasted for many years.
After many campaigns, which were mainly carried out by Margrave
Gero, the lordly penetration of the Margrave of Meissen was
completed around 963. In 968 the diocese of Meissen was founded. It
had its seat and its cathedral church, the Meißner Dom, also on the
castle hill and acquired in the late Middle Ages with the bishopric
Meißen an independent territory compared to the margraves and
electors.
Meißen Castle had become the central location of
the Burgwardes, i.e. a larger area of dominion that corresponded
to the former Gau Daleminzien. It was the center of a royal
administrative area. Along with the royal palaces of Magdeburg and
Merseburg, together with Bautzen, it played a key role among the
many castle warden in the conquered area, so that it can be
described as an early state castle. The Burgward district of Meißen
was at the intersection of the interests of several ruling families.
After the conquests of Henry I, it belonged to the Ostmark under
Margrave Gero, who represented the interests of the empire. To the
east bordered the territory of the Piast, the later Polish kingdom.
In the south, the Přemyslids, the Dukes of Bohemia, tried to expand
their power. In this area of tension, the history of the castle in
the 10th and 11th centuries was very eventful and was by no means
secure German imperial possession.
After Rikdag's death in
985, Ekkehard I was installed as Margrave of Meissen. He came from
the royal Saxon family of the Ekkehardines. Its headquarters were in
Kleinjena near Naumburg. Ekkehard's most pressing task was to
conquer Meißen Castle. Boleslaw II of Bohemia had captured Meissen
Castle in 984 on the way back from a campaign together with the
Bavarian Duke Heinrich the Brawler, the opponent Otto II. led the
Thuringian army together with Mieszko I of Poland against the Slavs.
Ekkehard was related by marriage to Miezko through Reglindis, his
brother Hermann's wife.
The Polish Piast Duke Boleslaw Chrobry (the brave, son of
Miezkos) took the death of Emperor Otto III. and the assassination
of Margrave Ekkehard I of Meißen in 1002 as an opportunity to
conquer the Mark Meißen east of the Elbe. While he was able to
occupy the land relatively easily because he was in tune with the
Slavic population, the German occupation defended the castle.
However, it was ultimately taken with the help of Gunzelin,
Ekkehard's brother. The castle team was granted free withdrawal. The
newly elected German king, Heinrich II, appointed Gunzelin as the
new margrave in Meissen in 1002, who also came into possession of
the castle. In 1003, Boleslaw II of Bohemia demanded, as had
obviously been agreed, Gunzelin surrender the Meissen Castle, which
the latter refused. The background to the events was that the
Ekkehardines were closely related to the Polish Piasts. So far they
had turned against the Bohemian Přemyslid Duchy, which was allied
with Bavaria. After the assassination of Ekkehard, who had applied
for the German royal crown, it was feared that a different noble
family than the Ekkehardines could be appointed as margraves. With
the conquest of Lausitz and Meissen, Boleslaw had created a fait
accompli. Heinrich II had no choice but to appoint the Ekkehardiner
Gunzelin. With his actions Gunzelin ignored the claims of his nephew
Hermann, who had been at Meißen Castle with his mother Swanehilde.
Hermann certainly wanted to manifest his claims to his father's
inheritance.
Gunzelin could not enjoy his possession for
long. As early as 1009 he was accused by Heinrich II and lost the
margraviate. Meißen Castle was given to the great rulers of the area
for custody alternately for four weeks until Hermann, the son of
Ekkehard I, was appointed Margrave of Meißen in the autumn of 1009.
After King Heinrich II's unsuccessful campaign to the east in 1015,
the German army was repulsed. Hermann was only able to hold Meißen
Castle against the Piast Mieszko II with difficulty. The fighting
was probably so hard that Hermann asked the women in the castle to
take part in the fighting.
In 1046 the Ekkehardines died out.
The rule of Meissen fell back to the empire and Emperor Heinrich
III. re-awarded it to Count Otto I of Weimar-Orlamünde. After his
death, the Brunones Ekbert I. († 1068) and Ekbert II. († 1090) were
margraves. Both were opponents of Heinrich IV. Even Emperor Heinrich
III. had tried to protect the realm's claims to the castle
militarily and legally. In 1073 Heinrich IV appointed his trusted
follower, Duke Vratislav II of Bohemia, as margrave of Meissen. He
thus ousted Ekbert II. Finally, in 1089, Heinrich von Eilenburg,
since 1081 Margrave of Lusatia, became the first Wettin margrave of
Meissen. The legitimacy of his only, posthumously born son, Heinrich
II., Was questioned by his cousin Conrad I, who captured him in 1121
and had him poisoned in 1123. In 1125 Konrad I von Wettin was
appointed Margrave of Meissen by the Emperor. He had succeeded
through skill and energy in bringing a large territory under his
rule, the center of which was Meissen. With his striving for power
and that of his successors, he was in competition with the imperial
family, which from the end of the 12th century sought to create a
large area of rule in today's Saxony with the expansion of Germany
to the east.
The Staufer emperors tried not to let the power
of the Wettins grow any further. The Mark Meissen was therefore from
Emperor Heinrich VI. In 1195 withdrawn as a settled fief. But he did
not succeed in disempowering the Wettins. Margrave Dietrich the
distressed could finally secure the mark as Wettin property.
In addition to the margrave and the bishop, a royal burgrave had
his seat on the castle hill. When Meissen was founded it was
undoubtedly a royal castle, an imperial castle. The margrave held it
as sovereign. Because of his sovereignty, it was not possible for
him to always be present at the castle. Therefore there was a
bailiff or burgrave who had the residence obligation and was, in
addition to the economic tasks, the military commander of the
castle. There was certainly such a royal commander before Burchhard
was mentioned. For 1009 it is documented that the castle team
consisted of contingents of imperial princes changed constantly. It
is possible that the castle, which is located far in the conquered
area, had a changing occupation as early as the 10th century. There
was also a garrison of its own, as the Burgmanns seats at the castle
and in the upper suburbium suggest.
The first officially
mentioned burgrave named Burchard was appointed by Henry IV in 1069.
During the investiture controversy, the castle was included in the
politics of the empire because it was occupied by three parties with
different interests. Heinrich IV appointed the Bohemian Duke
Wratislaw as Margrave of Meissen in 1073. He thereby disempowered
Ekbert II of Weimar-Orlamünde, who belonged to the aristocratic
opposition. A few years later, however, Ekbert regained the mark.
Finally, Heinrich von Eilenburg became the first Wettin Margrave of
Meissen. The tripartite division of the political powers on the
castle hill also resulted in three separate castle areas. In the
north-east stood the margravial, in the south-east the episcopal and
in the west the castle-counts. The castle of the burgrave took up
the largest area on the castle plateau. In front of the castle gate
there was an early suburbium, today's St. Afra-Freiheit. In the
valley there was a moated castle connected to the margrave castle by
stab walls. Each castle had its own entrance. In the 12th century
the castle was expanded with representative stone buildings. A
square tower that has been found in the foundations today dates back
to around 1100. An archaeologically proven layer of fire suggests
that there was considerable destruction at the end of the 12th
century.
In the middle of the 13th century, the castle hill
was expanded. On the east side, the fortifications that serve today
as a substructure for the two castles were built. A round tower was
built at each of the three corners of the castle plateau. The stone
castle bridge was also built during this time. To the west of the
castle plateau, the burgrave's court consisted at least of a hall
and a chapel. A keep, the white tower, rose above the burgrave area.
This tower is clearly attributable to the Burggrafenburg and served
to protect the castle bridge. The castle bridge was an extraordinary
structure for the time and served as a representative entrance to
the Burggrafenburg. They are attributed to Florentine builders. The
front gate to freedom and the middle gate at the other end of the
bridge were part of this ensemble. But soon after the representative
expansion of the castle, the margraves pushed the burgraves further
and further away from the castle courtyard. 1308 joined Meinher III.
involuntarily surrendered the White Tower to Margrave Friedrich for
two years. He never got it back. When the reigning burgrave finally
fell in a battle in 1426, the margrave moved in as a settled
fiefdom. In the 15th century, the Margraves of Meissen introduced
significant changes to the castle area. The burgraves had been
eliminated as rulers around 1426. Their castle complex was left to
decay. Separating walls between the castle areas fell victim to the
pickaxe. The last building to be removed was the White Tower in
1607. The red tower on the top of the castle hill was probably
demolished around 1500. Strangely, the margraves only owned this
building as a fief of the Hersfeld monastery.
In 1423 Frederick IV, the pugilier, was appointed Elector of
Saxony. His grandchildren, Ernst and Albrecht, ruled Saxony and
Thuringia together from 1464 to 1485 and in 1471 commissioned the
builder Arnold von Westfalen to build the first German castle on the
site of the old margrave castle. Even if the castle was actually
designed as a residence for the two princes, it was never used as
such. In 1485 the government of the two brothers was repealed and
the country was divided into two parts. Albrecht (the Albertiner)
essentially received the Meissnian areas with the newly built castle
and the later Thuringian District, his brother Ernst the remaining
Thuringian areas and the Duchy of Saxony with Wittenberg, to which
the electoral dignity was bound. The castle was named
"Albrechtsburg" in 1676 after its first master and builder. But it
was only his son, George the Bearded, who took up the Albrechtsburg
as his residence. The castle was badly damaged during the Thirty
Years War. Since then it has been empty.
It was not until the
beginning of the 18th century that the Albrechtsburg received more
attention from August the Strong when he had the first European
porcelain factory set up in the castle in 1710. Two years earlier,
Johann Friedrich Böttger and Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus had
invented European porcelain. Initially, Dresden was planned as the
manufacturing site, but August the Strong opted for the vacant and
isolated castle because nowhere else would the secret of porcelain
production have been so secure. On June 6, 1710, the porcelain
factory started operations in the former royal residence, which was
supposed to make the “white gold” world famous.
In the middle
of the 19th century the manufacture was relocated to the newly built
factory building, the castle was empty again. In the years 1864 to
1870, the old factory fixtures were removed and the palace was
architecturally refurbished. The missing furniture was replaced by
elaborate paintings on the late Gothic walls. The later well-known
artist Alexander Linnemann from Frankfurt was also active here. B.
when designing the new doors, documents on this are in the Linnemann
archive. At the end of the 19th century, the Albrechtsburg was made
accessible to the population and still enjoys many visitors from
home and abroad. The case of the "blighting of the Albrechtsburg"
forced the legislature to give up its decades-long opinion that
Saxon antiquity protection does not require any statutory
regulation. In 1909, for example, he passed the law against
disfigurement of town and country (Verunstaltungsgesetz), in whose
draft the Albrechtsburg case was explicitly listed as an example.
In 2010 the Albrechtsburg celebrated its 300th anniversary as a
manufactory and shone again as a porcelain castle.
Overall
architectural picture
The former electoral palace rises above a
hook-shaped floor plan on a rocky plateau that slopes steeply
towards the Elbe north of the Meissen Cathedral. All floors below
the eaves line are arched, a great feature in German palace
construction, which meant an immense financial and design effort.
Above the high substructures of the core building are a low ground
floor and two main floors with unusually large so-called arched
curtain windows. Another storey used by a manor is already within
the roof zone and is illuminated through the windows of the row of
hatches.
The tower-like character of Meißen Castle, which is still so
eye-catching from all sides, should represent a well-calculated
picture with political significance. The Albrechtsburg was not only
intended to be a residential palace that was particularly
comfortable to live in, but also to set an unmistakable sign of the
Wettin territorial rule, which was increasingly consolidating and
gaining in imperial political, administrative and economic
importance. For this purpose, Arnold von Westfalen was expected to
formulate a new architectural language. While the architectural
decorations belong to the late Gothic period, as was the case with
Sachsenburg Castle, which was built from an older complex at the
same time, the structure of the building already leads to the Saxon
Renaissance. Due to the floor plan, the Albrechtsburg building,
which was already proportioned like a tower, was broken down into
individual tower figures; all facade strips tend to be in an upright
rectangular format; In terms of the effects of light and shadow, the
core structure presents itself like a crystal with a multi-fold
surface. In addition to the stair towers on the courtyard side,
however, only one structure in the central zone of the Elbe side
develops into a real tower; all the other structures are tied
together again by the mighty roof. In the roof zone, however, the
dormer windows, rectangular roof bay windows that sit on the eaves,
form a wreath of tower figures surrounding the building. The Lukarne
in its typical formation as a window bay comes from France; around
1470, however, it was only used in such a systematic and consistent
manner in individual cases (e.g. in the castles of Baugé and Le
Rivau).
Another
momentous adaptation of French building culture in Meißen was the
use of the viewing stair tower, as it was formulated as a type in
1365 with the - later removed - large spiral staircase in the
courtyard of the Louvre. The large main staircase in the south, via
which the access to the lordly upper floors leads, is a masterpiece
of stonemasonry with intricately curved steps that wind up around an
open eye in the middle. Their windows were originally open and
enabled diverse visual relationships between those walking on the
stairs and spectators in the courtyard. However, the overall shape
of the balcony in front of the Meissen stair tower and the adjacent
section of the facade has no direct French model. A smaller stair
tower is also located on the courtyard facade in the corner between
the north and east wings.
The builder had
to implement a highly complex spatial program inside the
Albrechtsburg.
Large areas of the first floor are occupied by
two hall-like rooms. Both are generously windowed on several sides,
have two aisles and, like the other rooms on the floor, are vaulted.
The centrally located hall, to which the main staircase of the large
stair tower leads, was the large ballroom of the palace, which can
be used on a case-by-case basis. It could not be heated and in
everyday life it fulfilled the function of a communication area
between the surrounding stairs and rooms, which also include a
chapel room.
In contrast to this, the north hall was the
court room heated by a large tiled stove formerly placed in the
northeast corner, in which the entire male court, including the
princes, was supposed to gather for main meals twice a day. Between
the two rooms there is a musicians' gallery above the connecting
door, which could serve both rooms as required.
Three
independent apartments are grouped around these two large rooms as
living and office areas, each consisting of an oven-heated room as
the main room and one or more subordinate chambers as bedrooms and
storage rooms. The architecturally most elaborate is the apartment,
which adjoins the courtyard room in the northeast. Its living room
and the unheated bedroom above it, which can be reached directly by
a walled staircase, occupy the structure that has been rotated 45
degrees from the main building and rises like a tower with three
free-standing sides above the Elbe valley. Above the elaborate and
costly substructures of the basement, the architect has created
spaces that allow a far-reaching view on three sides.
The structurally staged overview itself was already valued across
Europe in palace construction. However, the multi-view "fan view" in
Meißen differs fundamentally from the gaze routines customary in
France or Italy at the time, where the visual reference to the
surroundings was almost always formulated in the form of a directed
uniform image. In the following years such space formations should
u. a. in Wittenberg, Torgau, Neuburg a. d. Danube or Heidelberg
become a characteristic of the elaborate Central European palace
construction. The large northeast apartment of the Albrechtsburg
with three windows was probably originally intended for high-ranking
guests; in the course of the 16th century, however, the princes
withdrew to a separate table during the main meals. At the time of
building, it was only common for the female members of the court,
the so-called women's rooms, to separate from the entire meal. The
builder also designed a room with three window fronts for them,
albeit on the second floor, where this group of people was somewhat
isolated from the hustle and bustle of the courtyard.
On the
second floor, next to the Frauenzimmertafelstube and two other
smaller apartments on the south side, the elector's three-room
apartment was set up as the center between the Elbe and courtyard
fronts. In addition to the room with windows on both sides as the
main reception room and the subordinate, more intimate bedroom, the
Elector should have a small side room on the valley side. The
estudes or cabinets in French castles come into question as
typological models for such a retreat, but there is nothing to
prevent the Meissen innovation from deriving from the studioli
propagated by Italian humanists since Petrarch (1304–1374). A
famous, almost simultaneous example was established between 1472 and
1476 in the Duke's Palace in Urbino. The small room of the electoral
apartment in Meißen is architecturally designed to be a real
showpiece and offers views over the Elbe valley in different
directions. In its location, away from the hustle and bustle of the
castle courtyard, it corresponds exactly to the advice that the
influential Renaissance theorist Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472)
formulated for the construction of such rooms.
The ground
plan of the second floor is repeated in essential aspects on the
floor above of the porthole zone. Here one can assume the apartment
of the Electress with an internal staircase to the rooms of her
suite one storey higher in the roof.