St. Martin, Memmingen: A Gothic Town and Parish Church
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.7
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- Country
- Germany
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Classical, Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- Holy Roman Empire, Roman
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Church
On this page17 sections
History
St. Martin is a Gothic church in Memmingen, Germany, whose present building was constructed mainly between about 1325 and 1500. It stands on a site with settlement traces from the second century AD and is one of the oldest churches in Upper Swabia, with a history reaching back to the ninth century.
Early church and medieval foundations
Excavations in 1912 revealed the remains of a Roman burgus, a small fortified military or administrative installation, beneath the church. The first Christian building cannot be dated precisely, although its construction is generally placed around 800. It remains uncertain whether St. Martin or the Frauenkirche in southern Memmingen served as the royal court church.
Memmingen came under the control of the Guelphs, a German ruling dynasty, during the tenth century. St. Martin probably became a Guelph proprietary church, meaning an ecclesiastical foundation under a ruler’s direct control. Chronicle traditions say that the church was built in 926, enlarged in 1077, and remodeled in 1176. Archaeological evidence does not confirm those dates, although the remodeling attributed to 1176 is considered plausible in view of Memmingen’s development at that time.
The church passed to the Hohenstaufen dynasty in 1178 or 1179. In 1214, Frederick II transferred its patronage to the Antonines, a religious hospital order devoted particularly to caring for people suffering from ergotism. The Antonines established their first settlement on German soil at Memmingen. Under their patronage, St. Martin developed into the town parish church as the city’s population and resources increased.
Pilgrimage and the new Gothic church
In 1216, St. Martin became a pilgrimage church after a blood relic was brought from nearby Benningen. In 1446, Peter von Schaumberg, bishop and cardinal of Augsburg, withdrew the relic’s status as an altar sacrament after the host gradually decayed. It could thereafter be venerated only as a relic. During the Reformation, the blood host was reportedly walled up at an unknown location.
The earlier church became too small for Memmingen’s expanding population, and work on the present building began around 1325. Construction continued intermittently through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The project was financed by the citizens, and the completed church was the largest Gothic town church between Lake Constance and the Lech.
Work halted around 1345. The reason is uncertain and may have been connected either with political unrest surrounding Emperor Louis IV or with the plague epidemic of 1349. Building resumed in the second half of the fourteenth century, but further pauses followed as earlier structures were incorporated or demolished.
From 1404 or 1405, the city council sought outside help with the difficult construction of the sixth bay, a structural division between successive supports. Conrad von Amberg was engaged in 1405. He raised the central nave walls to their final height and probably completed the fourth tower stage and its high pointed roof. By 1409 or 1410, he had completed the church as a six-bay basilica, a church with a high central nave flanked by lower side aisles.
The eastern porches were added in 1438. Side-aisle vaulting began in 1458 with substantial support from the Besserer and Wespach families. Foundations for several chapels followed, including the Funk Chapel, the Vöhlin Chapel in 1476, and the Zwicker Chapel in 1482. In 1489 to 1491, two houses on Zangmeisterstraße were demolished to permit the nave to be extended by two bays. The Ulm master builder Matthäus Böblinger was brought in for this work. Rebuilding of the choir from 1496 to 1500 brought the long construction history to completion.
The Antonines and the Reformation
The Antonines built the Kinderlehrkirche opposite the eastern porch as their monastery church and confined their activities to that building and their preceptory, the administrative and residential center of their local order. The Antonines were expelled during the Reformation in 1531, although the monastery’s formal separation from St. Martin was not completed until 1562. Their patronage ended in that year, when the church was finally transferred to the town.
The Reformation spread in Memmingen from 1524 under the Swiss preacher Christoph Schappeler. He held a well-endowed preaching post at the Vöhlin Chapel and performed the first baptism in German there. The city was initially aligned with Zwinglianism, the reforming theology associated with Huldrych Zwingli. In 1530, Memmingen joined Lindau, Constance, and Strasbourg in presenting the Tetrapolitan Confession at the Diet of Augsburg.
Memmingen adopted the Augsburg Confession in 1532 and accepted the Wittenberg Concord in 1536. These decisions moved the city and St. Martin into the Lutheran tradition, which developed from the teaching of Martin Luther. A city-council order of 1531 required ecclesiastical cult objects to be removed from the city’s churches. St. Martin lost 21 side altars and its late Gothic high altar, while the choir stalls were retained from the high-choir furnishings.
War, repair, and later use
During the Thirty Years’ War, Memmingen resisted the implementation of Emperor Ferdinand II’s Edict of Restitution. That decree sought to return property confiscated during the Reformation to Catholic owners. Imperial and Bavarian bombardment damaged St. Martin’s wooden ceiling in 1647. Hans Knoll replaced it with a painted board vault made from ribs and keystones and created a gallery for musicians and singers in 1656.
The medieval churchyard wall was demolished in 1810, and the former cemetery was converted into a park-like space with trees. The church was reroofed with slate in 1867 and 1872. Further renovations took place in 1926 to 1927, 1962 to 1965, and 1984 to 1988. St. Martin is now a protected historic monument, the deanery church and principal church of the Protestant-Lutheran church district of Memmingen, and one of the city’s four Protestant-Lutheran congregations. It also serves as a church and concert venue.
Remains
Plan, setting, and construction
St. Martin stands at the northwestern edge of Memmingen’s old town, on a rise above the Memminger Achtal and in front of the former cemetery. The Kinderlehrkirche faces the eastern porch. The church is an eight-bay, three-nave basilica with an elevated choir ending in a 5/8 polygonal apse, a termination formed by five sides of an octagon. It measures about 74.6 meters in length and 22.8 meters in width.
The central nave is 50 meters long, 11.40 meters wide, and 18.80 meters high. The north aisle is 50 meters long, 5.7 meters wide, and 9.45 meters high, while the south aisle is about 10 meters high. The choir measures 24.6 meters in length, 10.67 meters in width, and 17.62 meters in height. Plastered brickwork forms the walls, while the choir is built of tuff. The central nave has a gabled roof, and the side aisles have pent roofs.
Irregularities in the building reflect the incorporation of earlier construction. The eastern arch bay is about 1.20 meters wider than the others, while the sixth bay differs from the usual arch span by 80 centimeters. The southeast portal does not follow the rhythm of the Gothic arcades and opens toward a pier, suggesting that a Gothic porch was attached to an earlier Romanesque structure. The plastered brickwork conceals the separate building phases from the exterior.
Predecessor church and tower
The predecessor basilica is thought to have had two western towers and a transept in the first bay, with the towers located in the sixth bay. Six Romanesque bays may have stood between the transept and the towers. Nothing survives of the western predecessor towers.
The first tower on the present site dates from around 1300, while the lowest storey of the existing tower was built around 1325. The fifth storey dates from about 1370 and contains bricks measuring 34 by 16.5 by 7.5 centimeters. The remaining storeys were added around 1405 to 1410. The tower initially ended in a high pointed roof covered with green slabs.
A fire destroyed the tower’s spiral staircase in 1420. In 1428, a timber-framed belfry, the part of a tower that houses bells, replaced the earlier beam system connected to the masonry. The pointed spire above four stone gables was completed in 1430. Lightning in 1470 led to the addition of a finial and green-glazed roof tiles. Four lightning strikes caused a fire in 1482, but the tower was saved.
Lightning destroyed the tower helmet in 1535. It was replaced in 1537 by the present octagonal structure on the surviving tower stump. A wooden bay window was added above the clock face in 1573. Jacob Britzel and Bartholomeus Seybrand then erected a copper Welsh hood, a bulbous or curved tower roof, above the helmet. This gave the tower its present height of about 65 meters, making it the tallest building in Memmingen. The tower was renovated in 1966 and 2012.
Exterior and interior spaces
The west front is completely plastered and confined by the narrow passage of Martin-Luther-Platz. The west portal, known as the Bride Gate, is topped by two blocked former windows, a small round window, and a second, slightly larger round window near the roof ridge. The choir windows contain tracery, while the buttresses have restrained decoration. Simple tracery also appears in the clerestory openings above the side aisles. Baroque alterations removed tracery from the side-aisle windows and changed their former pointed arches into round arches.
The central nave is entered through the Bride Gate and receives light from clerestory windows. Octagonal piers support the bay arches. The easternmost piers appear to be reused elements from another demolished church, possibly the predecessor of Ulm Minster. The limited availability of natural stone in Upper Swabia encouraged extensive use of brick and restricted the possibilities for a fully developed High Gothic construction.
The central nave originally had a flat wooden ceiling. In 1845, during a historicist remodeling, this ceiling was lowered by 3.80 meters and a Gothic-style false vault was suspended from the roof trusses with iron rods. A false vault is a non-structural ceiling designed to resemble a masonry vault. The north aisle has an unpainted, whitewashed Gothic rib vault, while the south aisle has a similar vault and several larger chapels.
The north aisle is entered through two doors on Zangmeisterstraße. Its chapels appear as small pointed-arch niches between the buttresses, while the 1501 Brotherhood Chapel has a round-arched opening. The south aisle has entrances through the eastern and western porches. Its former cemetery lies along the south side of the church and contains beech trees more than 300 years old as well as younger chestnut trees.
Choir and furnishings
Choir stalls
The whitewashed choir has late Gothic high windows, with stained glass in the front section and clear glazing along the long sides. Tomb slabs once set into the floor are embedded beneath the windows in the slightly raised high-altar area. A Gothic star-net vault, whose ribs form a network of star-like patterns, contains the choir’s only frescoes.
The choir stalls were produced between 1501 and 1507 from carved oak. They contain 63 seats and 66 sculptures arranged in two cycles. Sibyls and Old Testament prophets stand beneath canopies in the theological cycle, while the front stall cheeks carry portraits of figures from Memmingen’s history. Some identifications remain uncertain. One figure once interpreted as an Antonine abbot is probably not one, while another is relatively securely identified as Maximilian I, the Roman-German king and later emperor.
Hans Herlin and probably his journeymen Hans Thoman and Christoph Scheller contributed to the sculptures. The backs contain numerous intarsia panels, made by inlaying contrasting pieces of material into the wood, together with varied calligraphic fields from Bernhard Strigel’s workshop. Two inlaid fields were inserted into each stall during its original manufacture. Leonhard Vogt restored the stalls and replaced missing parts between 1892 and 1901, including the canopy removed in 1813 to 1814. Research indicates that parts of the figures were originally painted.
Altars and grille
The late Gothic high altar was destroyed during the 1531 iconoclasm. A simple marble altar table was installed later. After a donation from Wilhelmine Clauß, a new high altar was planned in 1861. Anselm Sickinger designed and built it, and it was delivered in 1866. Beneath its Neo-Gothic canopy stands a crucifix flanked by Peter with keys and Paul with a sword. Angels hold the city arms and a blank scroll, while the predella, the lower section beneath the main altar, shows the Last Supper.
The 1531 Altar of the Cross was made under the city’s new Zwinglian religious orientation. It combines Gothic and Renaissance elements. Heavily worked columns with empty escutcheons support a massive tabletop carried by cross-braces formed from fish-bladder shapes and decorated with egg-and-dart ornament.
A choir grille surrounding the Altar of the Cross dates from 1603 and is decorated with spirals, flowers, and leaves. A simpler bar grille closes the entrances to the high choir. The area beside the grille was reportedly the burial place of the Antonine monks. A Solnhofen stone bearing the Antonine letter T was still present there in the early nineteenth century.
Pulpit and sacristy
Johann Friedrich Sichelbein designed the pulpit, which Georg Rabus and Christoph Heinrich Dittmar of Arnstadt made in 1699 to 1700. It is chiefly walnut with limited gilding. The onion-shaped sounding board is crowned by an angel playing a trombone and decorated with acanthus leaves. The basket contains Christ and the four Evangelists, while angels surround a golden bunch of grapes below. A figure of John the Baptist stands above the entrance.
The new sacristy contains a late Gothic furnishing made of conifer wood, probably at the time of the choir stalls. Its three-storey cupboard wall continues beneath the windows as chest-high credence tables. Foliage carving, intarsia, pewter fittings, and green-backed flat cutting decorate the ensemble. Heinrich Stark is considered a possible master. A Baroque table in the sacristy is probably by Johann Christoph Dittmar.
Paintings, frescoes, and glass
St. Martin contains paintings and woodcarvings dating from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century. Many paintings are associated with the Memmingen school. Hans Strigel the Elder painted a Last Judgment in the eastern porch of the south aisle in 1445. He also painted a Crucifixion in a niche in the west wall, below which are donor figures, coats of arms, and an inscription naming Erhard Hantteller of Graz as donor.
The same porch contains an Annunciation, the symbols of the four Evangelists around the Lamb of God, and scenes involving Isaiah, Ezekiel, Cain, and Abel. A Madonna pillar fresco in the south aisle was probably painted by Hans Strigel the Younger around 1480. Around 1510, Bernhard Strigel created the frescoes in the Zangmeister Chapel, including the Transfiguration, the Binding of Isaac, Saint Elizabeth visiting Mary, and Saint Eberhard exorcising a possessed woman. The chapel also contains ornamental frescoes and putti. These paintings were covered during the 1531 iconoclasm and uncovered again in 1963.
Frescoes of the wise and foolish virgins in the choir arch date from around 1500 and are stylistically attributed to Bernhard Strigel. Caspar Sichelbein the Elder probably added ornamental paintings in 1587 and a Passion cycle in 1588, probably based on Albrecht Dürer’s Little Passion. These paintings were covered in 1656 and uncovered and supplemented in 1926 and 1965.
A Last Judgment painted on the outer choir arch in 1588 extended 3.80 meters above the present false vault, and only a remnant survives above it. The so-called Green Devil, one of Memmingen’s seven landmarks, also disappeared above the false vault. Remaining traces were destroyed by fireproof paint applied to the roof structure during the Second World War.
Johann Friedrich Sichelbein painted eight scenes from the life of Jesus. They were formerly hung on the nave piers and were later moved to the chapels of the south aisle. An oil painting of Christ before Pilate by Abraham del Hel is located in the northwest portal. The present choir and new-sacristy windows date from 1894 and were made by Franz Xaver Zettler’s court-glass workshop in Munich. A small number of Gothic and Renaissance stained-glass panels survive in the chapels.
Organ, clock, and bells
Organ
The first organ was recorded in 1453 on a swallow’s-nest gallery along the south wall of the high nave. This type of gallery projects from a wall without columns. The organ was removed in 1528 for Reformation reasons. Kaspar Sturm and Aaron Ruck built a replacement in 1597 to 1598, and Hans Leo Hassler approved it in 1599. Joseph Gabler extensively repaired and modernized it in 1758, and Johann Nepomuk Holzhey overhauled it in 1778.
The old gallery was replaced by a west gallery in 1827, and the organ casing was later transferred to Illerfeld Castle, where its wings were incorporated into a coffered ceiling. A Walcker and Spaich organ installed in 1853 was repaired by Steinmeyer in 1900 and enlarged by Paul Ott in 1938. It was abandoned in 1962. A later Walcker instrument remained in use for 36 years.
The present Goll organ was inaugurated on 8 November 1998. It has 62 stops, 4,285 pipes, four manuals, and a pedal. Its untreated oak case and gallery, incorporating Gothic elements, occupy the west façade above the first gallery. The gallery accommodates about 70 choristers or a comparable instrumental ensemble.
Clock and bells
The first mechanical tower clock was installed in 1524. Bernhard Strigel designed its first dial, Ursus Werlin revised it in 1537, and a further revision in 1688 added Baroque coats of arms and an inscribed band. An iron dial replaced it in 1829. Karl Wachter removed the original during the tower restoration of 1927, and the Haugg brothers of Ottobeuren made a new version. The painting was renewed again in 1966, and the present design reflects the 1697 version.
The dial displays the arms of Memmingen, lions holding a cartouche with the imperial double-headed eagle, and a king’s head. The population interpreted the king’s head as Saint Hildegard and venerated it despite the city’s Protestant confession. The painted dial became one of Memmingen’s seven landmarks and bears the motto DOMINE HUMILIA RESPICE from Psalm 138:6. The winding mechanism remains municipal property, and a city employee winds it every few days.
Eight bells are associated with the tower. Four large, ringable bells hang in a wooden belfry more than 600 years old, while four non-ringable bells are positioned outside it. The noon bell of 1415 was sent to Hamburg for melting in 1942 and disappeared; a new casting replaced it in 1954. The large Osanna bell, cast in 1460 by Ulrich Snabelburg II, a bell founder based in Memmingen, is the oldest surviving ringing bell. It was dedicated to Saint Martin, Mary, and George, although that dedication was forgotten after the Reformation. Other ringing bells were cast in 1514.
The hour bell was cast in 1573 and recast by Leonhard Ernst II in 1644 after breaking during the bombardment of 1632. It hangs in a bay above the clock dial. The town fire bell, cast by Johann Melchior Ernst in 1728, hangs outside above the tower keeper’s room. It weighs 2.5 hundredweights, measures 48 centimeters across and 35.5 centimeters high, and bears the inscription DEO GLORIA ANNO 1728. A quarter-hour bell cast in 1990 replaced a stolen 1986 bell associated with condemned prisoners. A country fire bell cast in 1966 hangs in the small ridge turret above the southeast balcony and formerly signaled fires in the Protestant countryside around Memmingen.
