Palast Hohenems: Renaissance Residence of the Counts of Hohenems in Austria
Site at a Glance
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- Country
- Austria
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Early Modern
- Civilizations
- Holy Roman Empire
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Palace
On this page9 sections
History
The Hohenems Family
Palast Hohenems is a Renaissance palace in Hohenems, Austria, commissioned by Cardinal Mark Sittich III von Hohenems in 1562. Planned by the Italian architect Martino Longhi the Elder, it became the residence of the Counts of Hohenems and is considered the most important Renaissance building in western Austria.
The history of the palace is rooted in the Hohenems family, which was documented from 1180 as imperial ministerials, medieval officials serving directly under the Holy Roman Emperor or another great lord. The family served the Welfs and Hohenstaufen, major ruling dynasties whose political networks extended across the Holy Roman Empire. It held custody of the imperial castle of Ems, now the ruins of Alt-Ems, and supervised the imperial road to Italy.
The family’s rise at the end of the Middle Ages was supported by Merk Sittich I von Ems, who served Emperor Charles V as a lansquenet commander. A lansquenet was a German-speaking foot soldier in late medieval and early modern mercenary armies. His son Wolf Dietrich von Ems married Chiara de Medici in 1528. She was the sister of the Italian condottiero Gian Giacomo Medici, a professional military commander who led mercenary forces, and her younger brother became Pope Pius IV in 1559. In 1560, Emperor Ferdinand I raised the Lords of Ems to the rank of imperial counts because of their family connection with the new pope.
Construction and Expansion
Martino Longhi the Elder built the main palace between 1562 and about 1567. Mark Sittich had first pursued a military career in imperial service, but Pope Pius IV appointed him Bishop of Cassano and governor of the March of Ancona in 1560. He later served as papal legate at the Viennese court, became a cardinal of the titular church of Santi XII Apostoli in 1561, and was appointed Bishop of Constance later that year. Although he spent much of his life in Rome, he continued extensive building activity there and commissioned the palace at Hohenems. A ceiling on the second floor bears the date 1565.
Count Kaspar von Hohenems, Mark Sittich’s nephew, enlarged the palace principally between 1603 and 1610. During his rule, a Jewish community was established in Hohenems under a protection charter issued in 1617.
Changes of Ownership and Use
After Franz Wilhelm III, the last ruling imperial count of Hohenems, died in 1759, the estate passed to his daughter Maria Rebecca. She married Imperial-Royal Field Marshal Franz Xaver Graf Harrach-Rohrau-Kunewald. Their daughter Maria Walburga married Clemens Alois Reichserbtruchsess Graf Waldburg-Zeil-Trauchburg in 1779.
In 1813, Clemens Waldburg-Zeil-Lustenau-Hohenems acquired the Lustenau and Hohenems estates from his wife. Because his four children had died, he adopted his nephew Maximilian Clemens Waldburg-Zeil-Hohenems that year and named him his universal heir. The palace was converted into a barracks in 1840. From 1882, Count Clemens Waldburg-Zeil and his family renovated its rooms and used it again as a residence.
Franz Josef Waldburg-Zeil, a great-grandson of Emperor Franz Joseph I and Empress Elisabeth, took over Palast Hohenems and Schloss Glopper from his cousin in 1954. The properties remain in the Waldburg-Zeil family and are occupied by Franz Clemens Waldburg-Zeil and his wife Stephanie. In the twenty-first century, parts of the palace have served as a restaurant and event rooms operated by Palast Gastronomie GmbH.
The Hohenems Nibelungenlied Manuscripts
Palast Hohenems became known beyond the region because its library contained two medieval manuscripts of the Nibelungenlied, a Middle High German heroic epic about Siegfried, the Burgundians, and the destruction of their court. The two textual witnesses are identified as manuscripts A and C. An Alemannic scribe from the Upper Rhine wrote the manuscript around 1220 from an earlier Bavarian exemplar. The Counts of Hohenems, especially Jakob Hannibal I von Hohenems and Kaspar von Hohenems, probably acquired the manuscripts in the fifteenth or sixteenth century.
Jacob Hermann Obereit rediscovered manuscript C in the palace library on Saint Peter and Paul’s Day in 1755. He entered the library through his friend Franz Joseph von Wocher, the chief district official, after Johann Jakob Bodmer had directed his attention to the libraries of castles, palaces, and monasteries around Lake Constance. On 9 September 1779, Wocher returned to Hohenems at Bodmer’s request and found manuscript A, known as the Hohenems-Munich manuscript, among the library’s disordered and partly decayed books. He sent it to Bodmer.
In 1803, the two manuscripts, along with other objects and most of the palace’s paintings and portraits, were transferred to Bistrau in Bohemia, where Maria Walburga lived. She gave both manuscripts to her lawyer Michael Schuster in 1807. Schuster sold manuscript A to the Royal Court Library in Munich, where it remains. During the Congress of Vienna in 1814 and 1815, he sold manuscript C to a dealer named Frickert. The court chamber of the Fürstenberg family at Donaueschingen acquired it in 1853 with Joseph von Laßberg’s library. Since the Fürstenberg library was sold in 2001, manuscript C has been held at the Badische Landesbibliothek in Karlsruhe as the property of Landesbank Baden-Württemberg and the Federal Republic of Germany.
Fire and Survival
During the Second World War, Count Anton Lanckoroński moved many works from his collection in the Lanckoroński Palace in Vienna to Hohenems in an attempt to protect them from bombing. A fire in 1947 severely damaged the palace and the collection. Approximately 120 works of art were destroyed, although the exact number could not be established because the collection had no complete inventory.
Remains
Renaissance Palace
Palast Hohenems is a regular three-storey Renaissance building arranged around a rectangular courtyard. Its Renaissance design reflects the period’s use of ordered plans, symmetry, and monumental façades. The roofs are gabled, while the north and south sides have two-axis corner projections beneath tent roofs. The central axis is marked by a plastically articulated round-arched portal.
The main building belongs to the construction campaign begun in 1562 under Cardinal Mark Sittich III von Hohenems and carried out by Martino Longhi the Elder between 1562 and about 1567. A second-floor ceiling carries the date 1565. The palace was enlarged under Count Kaspar von Hohenems principally between 1603 and 1610, and rooms were renovated after its conversion into a barracks and subsequent return to residential use.
Library and Fire-Damaged Collections
The palace library was the setting in which manuscripts A and C of the Nibelungenlied were rediscovered in the eighteenth century. Manuscript A, the Hohenems-Munich manuscript, was found in 1779 among disordered and partly decayed books. Manuscript C, identified with the Donaueschingen manuscript, had been rediscovered there in 1755. Both manuscripts were later removed from the palace and entered separate collections.
The palace and the artworks stored within it were severely affected by the fire of 1947. The damaged holdings included parts of the Lanckoroński collection, with approximately 120 works of art lost. The surviving palace continues to contain residential areas, while parts of the building function as restaurant and event rooms.
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