Einsiedeln Abbey: Benedictine Territorial Abbey and Pilgrimage Center in Switzerland
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.7
- Popularity
- Medium
- Country
- Switzerland
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- Holy Roman Empire
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Monastery
On this page16 sections
History
Einsiedeln Abbey is a Benedictine territorial abbey and pilgrimage center in Einsiedeln, Switzerland, founded from the hermitage of the monk Meinrad and organized as a monastery in the tenth century. As an exempt abbey, it stands outside ordinary diocesan jurisdiction, while its abbot governs the abbey’s territory with authority comparable to that of a diocesan bishop. It is regarded as Switzerland’s largest pilgrimage center and forms an important station on the Way of Saint James, the network of Christian routes leading to Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain.
Meinrad’s Hermitage and the Benedictine Foundation
The site’s history begins in 828, when the Benedictine monk Meinrad withdrew from Reichenau Abbey to the Etzel Pass. In 835 he established a hermitage and a small chapel farther south in the forest. Tradition holds that robbers murdered him on 21 January 861. Two ravens were said to have led the killers to justice, and the birds later became symbols on the arms of Einsiedeln Abbey and the village.
Other hermits settled around Meinrad’s former cell from 906. In 934, Eberhard, provost of Strasbourg, organized the community as a Benedictine monastery and introduced the Rule of Saint Benedict, the monastic code centered on communal prayer, work, discipline, and obedience. King Otto I confirmed the foundation on 27 October 947. His grant included land, the right of the monks to elect their abbot freely, and immunity from certain outside authorities. The first abbey church was consecrated to Mary and Saint Mauritius in 948.
Otto I’s grants also included Ufenau Island, although the island then belonged to the women’s abbey of Säckingen, which received other property in compensation. Since 1130, Fahr Abbey near Zurich has belonged to Einsiedeln. The abbot of Einsiedeln governs both communities, making them the only surviving Benedictine double monastery, a linked male and female monastic institution under one overarching authority.
Territory, Imperial Status, and Medieval Conflict
In 1018, Emperor Henry II confirmed the abbey’s possessions and immunity and granted it use of the surrounding Finstern Forest, an area stated as approximately 229 square kilometres. Legal protection and representation passed through successive advocates, including the Nellenbergs, the lords of Uster, and the Rapperswils, before these rights came to the Habsburgs. In 965, Abbot Gregory became a prince of the Holy Roman Empire, a status retained by successive abbots until 1806.
A fire in 1029 led to the construction of a three-aisled basilica with a crypt, a chamber beneath a church used for burial, relics, or worship. Work took place between 1031 and 1039. The foundation stone was laid on 10 May 1031, and Abbot Berno reconsecrated the church on 13 October 1039. Berno also composed a festival office for Saint Meinrad, a cycle of liturgical texts and music that the Einsiedeln Benedictines continue to sing and recite.
A second basilica, later known as the Lower Minster, was built over a walled courtyard in 1230. The abbey’s territorial interests brought conflict with the people of Schwyz, and border disputes are recorded from 1114. During the Marchen dispute, Schwyzer farmers attacked and plundered the monastery on the night of Epiphany in 1314 and took most of the monks captive. Leopold I, Duke of Austria and the abbey’s advocate, then attacked central Switzerland but was defeated at Morgarten in 1315. The conflict ended in 1350 after Einsiedeln had lost a substantial part of its landholdings.
Fires damaged the complex again in 1465, 1509, and 1577. After the 1465 fire, the Lower Minster received a vaulted ceiling. The original Romanesque miraculous image of the Virgin may have been destroyed in the same fire, after which a later image became the focus of Einsiedeln’s principal Marian devotion.
Reform, Renewal, and Pilgrimage
From the thirteenth century, admission to the community was restricted to sons of noble families. This policy contributed to a continuing decline in the number of monks. Huldrych Zwingli served at Einsiedeln as parish priest from 1516 to 1518. In 1525, Diebold von Geroldseck left the monastery for the Zurich Reformation, leaving the elderly Abbot Konrad III of Hohenrechberg as the only conventual monk.
Ludwig II Blarer von Wartensee became abbot in 1526 and was recognized by Rome in 1533. He admitted the first commoners to the community and helped revive monastic life. Abbot Joachim Eichhorn, who died in 1569, undertook extensive spiritual and material rebuilding and became known as a second founder. He was the only council father from the German-speaking lands to participate in the Council of Trent, the sixteenth-century Catholic council associated with responses to the Reformation and internal church reform.
Marian pilgrimages to Einsiedeln are documented from the fourteenth century. During the later Middle Ages, pilgrims arrived from northern Germany and the Netherlands. The Reformation caused the pilgrimage to decline, but Einsiedeln again became a religious center for Swiss Catholics during the second half of the sixteenth century. From the late nineteenth century, pilgrimage expanded in connection with the Kulturkampf, a political and religious conflict over the position of the Catholic Church within modern European states, and with the coming of the railway.
Religious life at Einsiedeln was also shaped by the Angel Consecration legend. According to the tradition, Christ, accompanied by saints and angels, consecrated the chapel at Meinrad’s hermitage on 14 September 948. The story gave rise to the Angel Consecration festival, which remains an important local observance and a public holiday in the district of Einsiedeln. When 14 September falls on a Sunday, the fourteen-day Great Angel Consecration is held. In 1466, about 150,000 pilgrim badges were sold.
The Baroque Abbey and Revolutionary Disruption
The present complex developed from the late seventeenth century into the early eighteenth century. Hans Jörg Kuen directed construction of the choir and Confessional Church between 1674 and 1684. Under Abbot Maurus von Roll, the foundation stone of the new complex was laid on 31 March 1704 according to plans by Caspar Moosbrugger, while Moosbrugger’s brother Johann directed the construction. The church was completed in 1734 and consecrated on 3 May 1735 under Abbot Nikolaus Imfeld.
During the 1770s and 1780s, members of the community supported aspects of the Catholic Enlightenment, an eighteenth-century movement that pursued intellectual, educational, pastoral, and social reform within Catholicism. At Einsiedeln, this included improvements to elementary education, general welfare, and relations between Christian communities.
French revolutionary troops reached Einsiedeln in early May 1798. Abbot Beat Küttel and the monks fled, the Chapel of Grace was destroyed, and the abbey was looted and declared state property on 17 September. The monks, led in the rescue of the miraculous image by the future Abbot Konrad Tanner, preserved the statue. Clergy began returning in 1801, and the Act of Mediation formally restored the abbey on 19 February 1803. The Chapel of Grace was rebuilt between 1815 and 1817 using surviving parts of the earlier structure.
Continuity and Wider Work
Einsiedeln monks founded numerous daughter monasteries, including Saint Meinrad in Indiana in 1854 and Los Toldos in Argentina in 1948. Pope John Paul II visited the abbey in 1984 and consecrated the new high altar in the Lower Choir on 15 June.
The abbey has also been associated with the breeding of the Cavalli della Madonna since at least the fifteenth century, as well as with viticulture, timber processing, education, and the preservation of cultural property. Its holdings include Ufenau Island, the Endingen peninsula at Rapperswil, Kloster Werd, and properties in Switzerland and Vorarlberg. Its Swiss landholdings are stated as approximately 2,140 hectares in five cantons.
Einsiedeln Abbey is listed as a Swiss cultural property of national significance. It continues to function as a Benedictine community, pilgrimage center, school, and institution responsible for historic buildings, manuscripts, and other cultural collections.
Remains
The surviving complex is a closed Baroque monastery arranged around the church and convent wings. Its east-oriented main façade has two central towers approximately 60 metres high and is framed by three-storey convent wings. Semicircular arcades containing devotional shops flank the Klosterplatz, the principal square before the monastery. The church, library, stable, fountain, and square together preserve the physical organization of the abbey’s religious, cultural, and economic life.
Abbey Church
Church Structure and Interior
Caspar Moosbrugger designed the two-towered abbey church. Its foundations were laid in 1719, the building was structurally complete by 1723, and it was consecrated in 1735. The interior is organized around a central octagon. Transept arms contain altars and chapels in the diagonal sides, while two free-standing piers support the large vault. Farther east are two domed spaces. The first has additional altar-bearing transepts, and the second leads to a recessed choir separated by a choir screen. The choir has two bays, an altar house, and a barrel vault with lunettes.
The Upper and Lower Minsters were renewed from 1719. Cosmas Damian Asam and Egid Quirin Asam produced the ceiling paintings and stucco between 1724 and 1726. Stucco is plasterwork used for architectural decoration and sculpture. Johann Baptist Babel added figures and the putti on the organ case in 1749. Domenico Pozzi built the high altar between 1749 and 1751 from designs by Giuseppe and Gian Antonio Torricelli.
The side altars contain life-sized polished-stucco figures by Diego Carlone. His brother Carlo Carlone painted The Death of Saint Benedict and The Virgin Appears to Saint Meinrad. Josef Anton Feuchtmayer produced the polished imitation marble of the altars in 1730. Between 1730 and 1743, Diego Francesco Carlone created sixteen statues, the allegorical decoration of eight older nave altars, and two tomb monuments above the crypt of the prince-abbots. Franz Anton Kraus renewed the stucco and figures in the Lower Choir between 1746 and 1750.
A comprehensive restoration from 1975 to 2001 sought to recover the appearance of the original Baroque interior, which earlier renovations had partly altered.
Chapel of Grace and Miraculous Image
The church incorporates the Chapel of Grace at the western entrance. Caspar Moosbrugger constructed it in 1682. French revolutionary troops destroyed it in 1798, and it was rebuilt in a Neoclassical style between 1815 and 1817 with surviving parts of the earlier fabric. Stone reliefs from the former chapel, made by Hans Konrad Asper, are preserved in the monastery.
The chapel contains the Black Madonna of Einsiedeln, a late Gothic miraculous image from the mid-fifteenth century. A Black Madonna is a Marian devotional image whose dark appearance may result from pigment, aging, or soot. The statue replaced an earlier Romanesque image that may have been destroyed in the fire of 1465. In the early seventeenth century, it received a bell-shaped Spanish robe, which is changed according to the liturgical color of the church year.
The statue’s black surface is associated with centuries of soot from candles and lamps. During restoration in Vorarlberg in 1803, its original color was exposed, but the figure was painted black again before returning to Einsiedeln. The image remains the focus of the abbey’s principal pilgrimage.
Organs and Bells
Four organs serve the church: the Choir Organ in the Upper Choir, the Psalter Organ in the Lower Choir, the Marienorgel at the front left, and the Mauritiusorgel at the front right. The Choir Organ originated in 1754 and was restored in the 1980s. The Marienorgel was rebuilt in 1988 using eighteenth-century registration models, while Mathis Orgelbau of Näfels built the Mauritiusorgel in 1994.
The church has twelve bells. The principal bells hang in the two main towers, and four smaller bells in the surviving roof turrets supplement the main peal on major feast days. Four earlier bells were melted down in 1941 and replaced by castings from Rüetschi of Aarau. The largest bell, the Trinity Bell, hangs separately in the south tower and weighs approximately 5.9 tonnes.
Library and Manuscript Collections
The abbey library contains approximately 230,000 printed books, 1,230 manuscripts, and 1,040 volumes of incunabula and early printed books. Incunabula are books printed before approximately 1501, during the earliest period of European printing. The library was founded in 934, and a writing school existed at the monastery by the mid-tenth century. Sixty-four manuscripts from that period survive. The collections were long kept in the monastery cellars, which helped them survive the repeated fires affecting the complex.
Abbot Augustin I Hofmann established a separate library building in 1602. The Great Baroque Hall was created between 1738 and 1740, with bandwork and foliate stucco and medallions of popes and emperors around the window reveals by Josef Anton Feuchtmayer. The library was restored in 1998. A scriptorium, a room associated with the copying and production of manuscripts, opened above the Baroque library in 2022 to present medieval book production and writing with ink and quill.
Stable and Monastic Economy
The Baroque Marstall, built in 1765, houses the abbey’s stud farm. Its horses, known as Cavalli della Madonna, are warmbloods. A written reference to horse breeding at Einsiedeln appears in a grant of rights issued by King Henry IV on 24 February 1064. The stable represents one part of the abbey’s continuing association with agricultural and estate management.
Klosterplatz
Square and Fountain
The Klosterplatz acquired its present form between 1745 and 1747 according to plans by the Milanese architect Paolo Federico Bianchi, supervised by Johannes Rueff of Bregenz. Statues of Otto the Great and Henry II stand beside the stairway. A building ban imposed in the area directly in front of the monastery during the fourteenth century was intended to reduce the risk of village fires spreading.
At the center of the square stands the Marienbrunnen, also called the Liebfrauenbrunnen or Mother of God Fountain. It developed from a fourteen-spout fountain made by H. J. Kuen between 1684 and 1686. Domenico Pozzi created its bronze, copper-gilded figure of Mary in 1752. Restoration in 2013 sought to recover the fountain’s original light-and-dark coloration.
Theater and Later Works
Since 1924, the Klosterplatz has served as the performance space for the mystery play The Great World Theatre. Until 1992, performances used an adaptation associated with Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Later productions used versions written specifically for Einsiedeln by contemporary authors including Thomas Hürlimann, Tim Krohn, and Lukas Bärfuss.
Restoration of the Klosterplatz began in 2007. The work left part of the paving unfinished because of an objection, while a pilgrim shelter was added in the northern arcades and the Meinrad spring was made accessible.
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