Saint Peter’s Church, Fritzlar: A Historic Monastery and Collegiate Basilica
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.6
- Popularity
- Low
- Country
- Germany
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- German, Holy Roman Empire
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Basilica
On this page23 sections
History
Saint Peter’s Church, Fritzlar, in Germany, is a former monastery and collegiate church founded through the efforts of Saint Boniface around 723–724. The present basilica combines High and Late Romanesque, Gothic, and later additions, and the church became the starting point for the development of Fritzlar. It is now a Roman Catholic parish church in the Diocese of Fulda and is regarded as one of the most historically and architecturally important monuments in northern Hesse.
Boniface and the foundation of Fritzlar
According to the account of Willibald, Boniface, an Anglo-Saxon missionary and bishop who helped organize Christianity in central Germany, had a sacred Donar oak felled near the Chattic settlement of Geismar. Donar was a Germanic thunder deity, and the oak was associated with his cult. Around 723–724, Boniface is said to have used its wood to build an oratory dedicated to Saint Peter. The relationship between Geismar and present-day Fritzlar remains uncertain, although one historical hypothesis identifies the two places and places the church at the former oak site.
Around 732, Boniface ordered the foundation of a church and Benedictine monastery at Fritzlar. Saint Wigbert, an early medieval missionary and abbot, became its first abbot and is traditionally regarded as the monastery’s builder and leader. The institution was elevated to a royal abbey around 775 and reorganized as a collegiate foundation around 1005. Fritzlar probably came under the Archdiocese of Mainz around 1066.
Royal and ecclesiastical centre
The first predecessor church identified by archaeological excavation was built at the end of the eighth century or later. Fritzlar subsequently became a setting for imperial and ecclesiastical assemblies. Henry I, a tenth-century German king, was elected king there in 919, and a royal or imperial palace at Fritzlar was first mentioned in 1001.
In 1079, forces supporting Rudolf of Rheinfelden destroyed Fritzlar, the church, and the collegiate precinct during Rudolf’s conflict with Henry IV, the German king and Holy Roman Emperor. A small emergency church was then erected above the earlier predecessor. An initial attempt to rebuild the principal church was abandoned before construction of the present basilica began.
Romanesque rebuilding
Work on the High Romanesque basilica began around 1085–1090 and was probably finished by 1118. Its construction introduced architectural elements associated with the Rhenish Romanesque tradition of northern Hesse. The choir shows the influence of craftsmen from Worms and close connections with the building tradition of Worms Cathedral.
During a visitation in 1171, Christian I, the archbishop of Mainz, found the church in poor condition and ordered a restoration that became a major rebuilding. The Late Romanesque work, including the reconstruction of the western gallery, was probably complete by 1232. The rebuilding altered the choir and main crypt and gave the church much of the form that continues to determine its ground plan.
Gothic expansion and collegiate development
The west narthex, first known as the Elisabeth Chapel and now commonly called the Paradies, was built after 1253 and completed by 1267 at the latest. Its upper story was added during the Gothic period. From around the 1290s, two Gothic southern aisles replaced the earlier Romanesque southern aisle. The cloister and collegiate buildings were complete by 1323 at the latest, while the Marienkapelle was founded in 1354 and finished around 1365–1366.
A large wooden crossing tower stood above the intersection of the nave and transept from after 1358 until 1799. The collegiate institution was dissolved during secularization in 1803, a process that transferred ecclesiastical property and ended many religious foundations. Saint Peter’s then became solely a parish church.
Later alterations, damage, and restoration
The remaining stump of the crossing tower was given a Neo-Gothic form between 1822 and 1828, with a pyramidal roof rising about 10 metres above the main roof ridge. On 7 December 1868, a severe windstorm caused the high southern tower spire to collapse during Mass. The spire and masonry fell onto the nave and partly broke through the vaults, killing 21 people and injuring 31.
In 1873, Carl Schäfer replaced the previously different western tower spires with matching Neo-Romanesque diamond-shaped spires and added triangular gables. The northern side-aisle wall was remodeled in a Neo-Romanesque style in 1878, when restored round-arched friezes were supplemented with a base profile and pilaster-strip articulation.
A comprehensive restoration took place from 1913 to 1920. A planned Neo-Romanesque redesign and purification of the interior was abandoned, and earlier color schemes and wall paintings were restored instead. Further major restoration campaigns followed from 1963 to 1970 and from 1980 to 1997. Pope John Paul II granted the church the title of Basilica minor in 2004, an honorific designation for a church of particular ecclesiastical or historical importance. Between June 2010 and November 2012, the interior was renovated in three stages, including changes to the altar area, renewal of the heating system, and construction of an accessible entrance.
Remains
Saint Peter’s is a basilica with four aisles, a transept, two western towers, and an overall length of almost 80 metres. It is just under 30 metres wide, while the towers rise approximately 48 metres, or about 52 metres including their crosses. The surviving fabric combines the heavy masonry and round arches of Romanesque architecture with Gothic vaulting, tracery windows, chapels, and later additions.
Earlier churches and the Romanesque core
Archaeological predecessors
Excavations in 1970 revealed the foundations of an earlier church with a reconstructed transept about 24 metres wide and a total length exceeding 23 metres. It had a western transept and an apse extending westward. Excavations in 1916 uncovered the foundations of the smaller emergency church built after the destruction of 1079. Until the older building was found in 1970, these smaller remains had been identified incorrectly as Boniface’s church.
High Romanesque basilica
The High Romanesque church was laid out as a three-aisled basilica with a flat-roofed nave, a broad projecting eastern transept, and a choir ending in a straight wall. Its three-aisled main crypt extends beneath the crossing and long choir. The crypt is completely preserved and was originally entered from the central aisle. Later side crypts with eastern apses were added beside it, and the northeastern side crypt survives with a small archive room above. A half-timbered Renaissance room was built over that archive space around 1560.
Westwerk and royal gallery
At the western end, two towers flank a royal gallery. A planned two-tower facade was changed into a westwerk, a monumental western entrance block with towers, galleries, and upper rooms, by adding a transverse upper story above the gallery. Except for its renewed spires, the westwerk is preserved and forms the largest connected surviving section of the High Romanesque building. Its lower facade is concealed by the narthex.
Late Romanesque choir
The Late Romanesque rebuilding replaced the straight-ended choir with a polygonal apse and enlarged the main crypt. The apse has a profiled base, corner pilaster strips, and a dwarf gallery, a narrow arcaded gallery, above large round-arched windows. The Romanesque roof truss over the adjoining choir bay remains in place. Its timber was dated by tree-ring analysis to the felling year 1193, and the roof was erected in 1194.
Vaults, narthex, and Gothic additions
Nave and vaulting
The formerly flat-roofed basilica received continuous cross-rib vaulting. A new central nave was built using the earlier aisle walls and followed a bound system in which one central-nave bay corresponds to two groin-vaulted aisle bays. The western bays become progressively elongated, and the nave has high domical vaults with partly distorted band ribs.
Paradies narthex
The two-aisled western narthex, built in a Late Romanesque and Early Gothic transitional style influenced by Westphalia, contains numerous figurative capitals whose scenes cannot be interpreted securely. The building also served as a law court. Its upper story was simplified with low roofs in 1731, and a porch or wind vestibule called the Roter Hals was added beside the northern aisle in 1735.
Gothic structures
The Gothic additions include the two southern aisles, chapels within the southernmost aisle, three wings of the cloister, the collegiate buildings, large tracery windows in the transepts and choir apse, and the Marienkapelle attached to the northern transept. A late Gothic nave roof truss was constructed approximately between 1489 and 1494.
Altars, sculpture, and stained glass
Sculpture and furnishings
The main crypt contains the Gothic shrine of Saint Wigbert, dated 1340, along with a twelfth-century Romanesque relief of Saint Peter holding a key. It also contains a figure of Saint Peter from the mid-twelfth century and a representation of the Trinity dating from around 1300. The church has fourteenth-century choir stalls, a large crucifix from around 1300, a Baroque baptismal font dated 1693, and a pulpit dated 1696.
The high altar was made in 1686 by Stephan Jakobi and Heinrich Groene and includes a painting of the Adoration of the Magi from 1691. Jakobi also made the baptismal font, while Groene made the pulpit. A Renaissance altar dedicated to Saint John the Baptist stands in the northern transept, and an altar dedicated to Saints Mary, Elizabeth, and Mary Magdalene occupies the southern transept. Other furnishings include a late Gothic sacrament house, a Baroque Virgin-and-Child figure, and a Gothic winged altar brought from Bad Karlshafen in 1880.
Southern tower chapel
The chapel beneath the southern tower contains a fourteenth-century wooden Pietà carved from limewood. The figure is 150 centimetres high.
Stained-glass windows
Stained-glass windows were produced in several stages between 1914 and 1926 by Otto Linnemann of Frankfurt. A window in the northeastern chapel, dedicated to Saint Elizabeth, dates from 1912. Two windows in the Gothic southern aisle were made by Fritz Geiges in 1914–1915. One presents Pope Gregory III, Saint Vitus, Saint Boniface, and the Blessed Emperor Charlemagne, while the other depicts Saint Lullus, Saint Wigbert, Saint Sturm, and the chronicler Hrabanus Maurus.
Museum, organ, and bells
Cathedral museum and treasury
The cathedral museum occupies rooms in the cloister and contains paintings, sculptures, sacred objects, and other material relating to the history of the collegiate foundation from the Middle Ages to the present. Its best-known treasury object is the Heinrich Cross, a Romanesque gem-studded cross about 50 centimetres high and nearly 30 centimetres wide. Emperor Henry II donated it to the Saint Peter collegiate foundation in 1020. A fragment of the cross of Jesus is visible beneath the central crystal. Part of the former collegiate library survives in the cathedral library.
Organ and bells
The present organ was built by Johannes Klais of Bonn in 1929 and comprehensively restored in 1995. It has three manuals, a pedal, 45 stops, and 3,045 pipes. Its Baroque-style case incorporates a gallery prospect dating from 1768, and a cymbelstern was added in 2017.
The two towers contain eight bells, comprising five medieval bells, one Baroque bell, and two modern bells. The bells in the northern tower hang in a wooden frame with wooden yokes, while those in the southern tower hang in a steel frame with steel yokes. The yoke of the large Martinsglocke is slightly cranked.
