I. Introduction

In urbem Monasteriensem Westphaliae Metropolim

Westphalae gentis decus, aura, splendor,

Civitas Paulo celebris patrono,

Notior Delphis, variis Athenas

Artibus aequat!

[...]

Eminent turres nimium levatae,

Sunt domus altae, speciosa lucent

Templa; et obscurae decorata cingunt

Moenia fossae.

[...]

Et viros doctos veneratur omnis

Civitas, quorum ingeniis abundat

Ceteras longe superatque nostri

Climatis oras.

[...]

Poem to the City of Münster, Capital of Westphalia

Ornament and radiant sparkle of Westphalia,

You stand, magnificent city, under Paul's protection!

Extolled more than Delphi, as home of the arts,

You are like Athens herself!

[...]

Proud, mighty towers rise to the sky,

Tall magnificent houses and splendid churches

Adorn the city, and dark waters wash all around,

Encircling the walls.

[...]

Highly regarded by all citizens are the men

Who serve the sciences; no city has

As many scholars as this one, no other disputes

Your glory.

[...]

At the close of the Middle Ages, the Dutch scholar Johannes Murmellius portrayed in this way the old Bishop's and Hanseatic city of Münster, in which he worked for thirteen years (1500-1513) as deputy rector of the cathedral school and as director of the collegiate schools of St. Martin's and St. Ludger's for humanistic educational reform. These verses belong to the ode 'in urbem Monasteriensem Westphaliae Metropolim," comprised of 50 Sapphic stanzas, in which Murmellius effusively lauds the external appearance of the 'capital of Westphalia" and its civic society as home of the arts and sciences in the form of a traditional city laudation, Städtelob. [1]

The work, in which among other things the entire scholarly circle around Rudolf von Langen - to which Murmellius himself belonged - is also presented, has an interesting and informative origin: As the contemporary editions' subtitle reveals, the author wrote the poem because of a bet he had made one day, actually 4 July 1503, with the Cologne Professor of Rhetorik, Georg Sibutius, who was staying with him as a guest. [2]

Even if the depiction should therefore be regarded more as an example of humanistic erudition than as a realistic city portrait, it is still clear that Münster was an intellectual center in the Empire's northwest and a city of supra-regional significance and charisma at the beginning of the Age of Religious Discord. Despite the establishment and bloody end of the Anabaptist Kingdom in 1534/35, which severely and detrimentally affected the city and its artistic decorations [3], this remained the case during the entire sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries, as verified by extraordinarily extensive accounts. [4] In the following, several structures will be considered exemplarily, in order to clarify primarily which prerequisites had to be fulfilled so that during the last, most devastating phase of the Thirty Year's War, Münster could even be considered as the primary venue for the negotiations intended to end the conflicts and how it was possible for a city with approximately 10,000 inhabitants [5] to take on the role of hosting roughly 150 delegations from almost every German and European land, that is to say, several thousand people of the most varied nationalities and confessions [6], over the course of several years.



II. Topography

While Münster's external appearance is only mentioned in a few places in Murmellius' ode, another chronicler's writings two generations later impart a concrete and detailed picture. Hermann von Kerssenbrock, the rector of the cathedral school for many years (1550-1575), prefaced the history of the Anabaptist Kingdom he wrote in the 1570s with a detailed description of Münster, in which he discussed inter alia the city's spatial expanse, its fortification system, and public buildings as well as squares, churches, and cloisters. [7]

Almost simultaneous to this historiographical product of humanistic erudtion, where the city's origins are traced back to the early days of the Germanic tribes with the help of etymological interpretations of the original city name, Mimigernaford, and using older accounts as reference material [8], the first graphic portrait of the city orginated in the form of a cityscape engraved in copper plate. Remigius Hogenberg produced it in 1570, patterned after a sketch by Hermann tom Ring. This city portrait with its suprising precision and detailed exactness, which in addition to a dedication to the Basel doctor and humanist, Leonhard Thurneysser, also contains an abridged version of the city's founding legend formulated by Kerssenbrock, is evidence of the new scientific ambitions of the sixteenth century. [9]

In Münster, this tradition continued until the critical phase of the Thirty Year's War. New first-rate evidence of this tradition was created in 1636 with Everhard Alerdinck's aerial view, which was based on a precise topographic survey. Its accuracy in scale, with which streets and the parcellization of plots of land as well as the placement and shape of buildings were reproduced, still amazes today and can serve as a basis for archaelogical excavations of the city. [10]



II.1. Hermann von Kerssenbrock's Description of the City's External Appearance

Kerssenbrock begins his depiction with a description of Münster's natural geographic location 'almost in the middle of the old Saxon lands between the Rhine and the Weser, which is called Westphalia today"; because of this location, he regards the city as already predestined to be 'totius Westphaliae metropolis." [11] This pre-eminence was first confirmed for him by the superiority of its fortification system over those of other Westphalian cities and other regions. [12]

After a description of the fortification system, serving as impenetrable armor enclosing the city, Kerssenbrock turns to the city's interior. He begins with the churches and cloisters [13] and describes the cathedral first, which along with its surrounding ecclesiastical immunity forms the center of the city.

The picture of the city's external appearance is completed finally with brief descriptions of its public squares and buildings [14], 'so that posterity recognizes that in this, our city, everything one needs as well as that which decorates and amuses is abundantly at one's disposal [...], upon which one can easily appreciate the signficance and greatness of our community," as Kerssenbrock proudly notes. [15]

Finally, Kerssenbrock's depiction of the city is rounded off by general remarks about the streets with their house facades, the furnishings of private homes as well as waste and water disposal. Again, the author begins with an expression of his pride in his native city also in this respect: 'What should I say further with many words how great the richness and spendor of the city's public squares and private homes are, when it is surely clear that the city is superior to all other Westphalian cities in these things as well as in other ornament." [16]

II.2. The City's Pictorial Depiction by Hermann tom Ring / Remigius Hogenberg and Everhard Alerdinck

In order to illustrate Kerssenbrock's detailed description pictorially, Münster's most distinguished artist of the sixteenth century, Hermann tom Ring, drew almost simultaneously a portrait of his home town, conterfey, accurate to the smallest detail, which the Cologne copper engraver, Remigius Hogenberg, then distributed in print. The city's silhouette with its stalwart fortification system of trenches, walls, and ramparts and with the soaring towers and gables of its churches and secular buildings creates an imposing picture under the heading, 'Monasterium Westphaliae Metropolis." [17]

The engraving is also decorated elaborately with three cartouches presenting texts and three coats of arms. The coats of arms of the Prince-Bishop and the city of Münster frame the Empire's double eagle crest, certainly an allusion to Münster's understanding of itself as a Bishop's city as well as an autonomous civic community. The cartouche in the foreground bears the dedication to Leonard Thurneysser and the artist's name as well as the date, 12 May 1570. The two cartouches hovering over the city silhouette next to the three coats of arms contain concise historical retrospects about the city's genesis and history in Latin and German, closely following Kerssenbrock's depiction. It can be assumed that the author was familiar with Kerssenbrock's work or that Kerssenbrock himself was the author. [18]

Joining this side view from the south and west, which naturally presents the topography only perspectively and very conditionally [19], there emerged a good seventy years later in the middle of the Thirty Year's War another masterpiece from the combination of two disciplines: Everhard Alerdinck's aerial view with the same heading 'Monasterium Westphaliae Metropolis," printed in 1636. An exact survey of the city in 1634 served as the basis of this plan as revealed in a Latin text at the bottom edge of the etching. [20]

Although different from the artistically important conterfey of Münster in the tradition of portrait painting, Alerdinck's city outline is first-rate evidence of other characteristic disciplines of the time: geometry and cartography. Comparing both works, Geisberg wrote: 'If Remigius Hogenberg's engraving is the most artistically valuable depiction of our city that we own, then it is far surpassed by Alerdinck's etching in the abundance of depicted details and its great clarity; surely few other cities will be able to boast of a similarly exact representation." [21] Alerdinck himself, who described his work as a combination of mathematics and painting, stated the purpose of these endeavors as the presentation of the city in a new form, 'in which all of the city's qualities from house to house and from street to street, with its extensive properties are to be found and seen ad oculum quasi lineam." [22] In order to reach this goal, he implemented precisely with the help of the engineer, Nikolaus Knickenberg, that which he had learned from the well-known cartographer, Johann Gigas, and drew the buildings and street blocks in a true-to-scale outline of the city. [23]

Alerdinck's etching functions as a confirmation of Kerssenbrock's description and provides a very clear picture of Münster's appearance and expanse in the Age of Religious Discord.



III. Society

To the impressive external city appearance with its elaborate fortifications, its multi-faceted ensemble of secular districts characterized by the citizenry with public facilities, squares, and buildings as well as its immunity districts characterized by the clergy with churches and cloisters, there also corresponded an equally multi-faceted, self-assured civic society open to the arts and sciences, which was capable of filling this external shell in an appropriate fashion.

Again, it is Hermann von Kerssenbrock, who as a knowledgeable contemporary observer provides us with a very concrete picture of Münster's approximately 10,500 inhabitants, structured in social stations and strata, between the time of the Anabaptist Kingdom and the Thirty Year's War. [24]

This civic society was characterized in essence by a self-confident citizenry, which knew to create its representational architecture with artistic quality, as exemplified by the city council chamber, Ratskammer, and the administrative seat of the shopkeeper's guild, Amtshaus der Kramergilde. [25] During and directly after the peace conference, the citizenry was able to assert for the last time its autonomy rights, for which it had struggled against the Prince-Bishop since the Middle Ages, in the conflict surrounding the settlement of the Lorraine canonesses. [26] Through its representatives, for example Hermann tom Ring [27] and Bernhard Rottendorff [28], it also took part in the art of the Renaissance and in the European intellectual life of humanism.

It was this civic society then which was able to take on the role of hosting the European peace conference. Within it, confessional differences were reconciled to a large extent during the second half of the sixteenth century after the Anabaptist catastrophe; following the assumption of power of the Wittelsbach Prince-Bishops, these differences were then settled relatively unspectacularly in the course of the city's re-Catholicization, during which the Protestants were gradually suppressed. [29]



III.1. Hermann von Kerssenbrock's Description of the Population

According to the beginning of Kerssenbrock's depiction, the entire city contained two groups of residents, one consisting of the religious or clergy, the other of the secular or laity. The first group was subdivided into the upper and lower clergy; the forty exclusively noble members of the cathedral chapter constituted the canons, or the clerus primarius; all other priests at the cathedral, the canons of the four other collegiate churches (Old Cathedral, St. Ludger's, St. Martin's, St. Mauritz's) and additionally, the entire parish clergy at the six parish churches as well as the nuns at the seven convents (Liebfrauen Überwasser, St. Aegidii, Niesinck, Rosenthal, Ringe, Hofringe und Reine) and the monks at the four monasteries (the Teutonic Knights, the Knights of St. John, the Brethren of the Common Life (Fraterherren), and the Franciscans) belonged to the clerus secondarius. [30] Kerssenbrock sees the clergy's most important distinguishing feature with respect to the rest of civic society in the fact that its members were freed from all civic burdens.

Before turning to his description of secular society and the citizenry's political functions, Kerssenbrock mentions yet another group of persons whose members were not subject to civil laws: the nobility, or knighthood (ordo equester). Nobles maintained residences in the city, but really lived according to their own laws outside the city on their own fortified country seats and were thus not to be counted as part of civic society.

Kerssenbrock regards the laity, like the clergy, as also divided into two subgroups: the order of the patricians and that of the plebians. From of these two subgroups, a third emerged: that of the councilmen, senatorium ordinem, which was assigned with all political leadership functions. Members of both civic strata comprised this group of office holders and thus constituted a functionary elite, which obtained political power according to personal standing and wealth via a mandate from fellow citizens conferred in a complicated electoral process.

Kerssenbrock includes all other residents of the city, free and unfree, in the plebejus ordo. He points out yet another noteworthy element, which unlike those before it, does not indicate a so-to-speak vertical stratification of the society, but rather a horizontal division in sectors: the guild organization, in which the fundamental obligatory guidelines of commercial and economic life for merchants and craftsmen were established. Kerssenbrock lists the seventeen guilds, which at his time were already designated as 'offices," or curiae, and over which two elected guildmasters presided at any one time. These guilds possessed a special legal status with a written constitution recorded in a 'guild scroll," recognized by the city council. [31]

Altogether, Kerssenbrock provides a rather precise and complete description of the city population, from which merely the members of the 'travelling people" living outside the corporate and social order are missing. He does not supply either absolute numerical figures or any calculations regarding the statistical relationships among various population groups, though. These figures can, however, be indirectly won from contemporary appraisal registers, which list the names of the tax-payers and which are almost completely preserved from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The central unit forming the basis of tax-payer registration was neither the individual, nor the family, but rather the household, for which each respective head was responsible. If the entire clergy and the inhabitants of the poor houses, hospitals, and foundations as well as subtenants, Aftermieter, who presided over no independent households of their own, are not counted (although together they must have numbered approximately 1,500 persons), then Franz Lethmate's calculations for Münster at the turn of the seventeenth century total a good 2,200 such households with roughly 9,150 persons. [32]

These approximately 9,150 persons attributed to civic households, which are statistically ascertainable in the appraisal records, were spread relatively evenly throughout the city and its residential districts. For the purpose of observing its political autonomy rights, particularly the complicated electoral procedure for council members, the city was divided into six districts, in Münster called Leischaften. The borders of the Leischaften largely corresponded to those of the five large parishes - the small parish of St. Servatii was not assigned to a Leischaft -, whereby the large parish of Überwasser, encompassing the entire area west of the Aa river, was divided into two Leischaften. [33]



III.2. The Ratskammer and the Krameramtshaus as Representational Architecture of the Citizenry

Apart from the written and illustrated artistic depictions of the city's internal and external appearance, two significant architectural structures still exist from that period, even with the extensive alterations and renovations undertaken in the meantime. The redesign of the council chamber, Ratskammer, carried out in 1576-1577 and the building of the administrative seat of the shopkeeper's guild, Krameramtshaus, completed in 1589 document in a particularly impressive way the self-awareness and self-image of the citizenry organizing and characterizing Münster's civic society during the Age of Religious Discord. [34]

The remodelling of the council chamber was carried out in connection with extensive structural changes of the entire city hall. Until 1576, the domus civium with its 'burgher hall" and display gable on the Prinzipalmarkt, whose construction was undertaken during the Middle Ages at first as a half-timbered structure, or Fachwerkbau, was structurally separated from the stone building behind it, which housed the council chamber on the ground floor and the armory on the second. At this point, both were combined in one building under a new roof and fitted with a new gabled back wall. The city hall thereby took on the external appearance, which it retained until its destruction in World War II and which was then restored in the 1950s. For the council chamber, a new side wall with four large windows facing east, whose design became a part of the entire inner room's renovation, was built during the construction undertaken in 1576/77. [35]

The concept behind this design originated in all probability with Hermann tom Ring's assistance, according to the first attribution made by Max Geisberg. [36] It was carried out completely in keeping with the character of the room's function as the council's assembly room and as the central location of municipal jurisdiction. This jurisdiction, in addition to military sovereignty and market and trade privileges, was the most important element of the city's constitution and the core of Münster's civic autonomy since the Middle Ages. [37]

On 12 November 1589, the shopkeeper's guild led by its guildmasters, Arnold von Guelich and Johann Rall, took possession of its new administrative seat. It was festively opened with a four-day annual celebration, Gildezech, in which 84 members and 22 widows of deceased guildmasters participated. [38] As Alerdinck's etching shows, the new seat was larger and more prestigiously equipped than the Schohaus, the seat of the Gesamtgilde, or political union of the guilds, erected in 1525 on the old fish market. It is therefore not surprising that the eight-person delegation from the Dutch States-General resided here during the peace conference between 1646 and 1648. The peace between Spain and the Netherlands was thus negotiated here. [39] Just how much Münster's merchants, in emulation of the shopkeeper's guild, identified themselves with the house as a visible monument of their consciousness of their Hanseatic tradition and their self-image over the centuries can be seen among other things in the fact that after the guilds' dissolution and the confiscation of their wealth during the Napoleonic era, they bought the house back from the Prussian government in the 1820s and then made it the home of the Merchants' Society, newly founded in 1835. Later, it became the property of the city of Münster, which used it for various public functions and lastly, until 1993, as the main building of the city library. [40] When it was then passed over to the University of Münster for the founding of the Netherlands Center, Niederlande-Zentrum, the Merchants' Society moved its administrative office back to the Krameramtshaus in agreement with all of those involved and in memory of the old tradition.



III.3. The Conflict surrounding the Settlement of the Lorraine Canonesses (1643-1655) - A Manifestation of the Struggle over Civic Autonomy Rights

As seen in the redesign of the city hall and the Ratskammer and in the construction of the Krameramtshaus in the second half of the sixteenth century, the manifestation of the self-awareness and the desire for self-assertion of the citizenry, organized in guilds and Leischaften, were still present at the time of the peace conference. The conflict surrounding the settlement of the Lorraine canonesses in Münster serves as a concrete example of this. [41]

The Augustinians of the Congregatio Beatae Mariae Virginis came to Münster via Trier and Cologne seeking favorable conditions for their activities as a teaching order after having been driven out of Lorraine during the 1640s because of warfare. They hoped to find these conditions in re-Catholicized Münster - in the city of the peace conference which had been spared from the warfare - where they arrived in the course of 1643 in the entourage of their protector, the Count of Nassau. Apparently, the opportunity for their patrons among the conference envoys and the muncipal decision-making bodies to attend to the matter first arose after the end of the difficult peace negotiations and the conclusion of the Peace of Westphalia on 24 October 1648.

After extensive consultation and with grave reservation, the council finally reached a decision in its session on 25 February 1649, which tended to be positive, but was dependent on the fulfillment of difficult conditions. [42] Only in consideration of the high-ranking intervenors, namely the mediators Fabio Chigi and Alvise Contarini, and although, according to the council protocol, the clergy and religous orders already excessively burdened the citizenry, the council pledged the authorization of the settlement and its exemption from civic burdens; it demanded, though, a contractual committment from them containing considerable limitations, which had to be sanctioned by the Pope's authority, and additionally, it made its decision dependent on the approval of the Gesamtgilde.

In accordance with the procedural guidelines laid down in the city's constitution, the guild leaders discussed the matter at a general guild assembly. They flatly refused the council's decision and in their resolution, they went even further: according to the guilds' argumentation, the Lorraine canonesses belonged - by their own self-description - to the Augustinian order and that gave cause for the anxiety that members of the male order would soon follow their female counterparts. Additionally, through their teaching of the youth from the city and surrounding areas, the sisters would win new followers for their order and thus, a real cloister would soon develop. There were enough negative examples of this development in the recent past, therefore, the sisters should not only be denied permission for the sought-after settlement and tax exemption, but their current residence permit in the city should also be revoked within the shortest period possible. [43]

Because of this severe response, the council found itself in a difficult position, particularly since the Count of Nassau had in the meantime intervened on the canonesses' behalf. The council had to inform the papal and Imperial high representatives of the denial of their request and in doing so, additionally bring themselves into conflict with the sovereign, who had already agreed to the settlement in a mandate issued in 1647. [44] As to be expected, the intervenors were not satisfied with the negative decision. The matter dragged on through the entire summer and fall of 1649 without any change in the controversial positions.

Two things are worth noting from the proceedings: firstly, the guilds' often-stated reference to the bad experiences with the most recent settlements of religous orders in the city; secondly, the opportunities to participate in municipal matters, which this organization of merchants and craftsmen had at its disposal and which placed it in the position to defy not only the votes of the council and powerful intervenors, but even the sovereign's concentrated power.

The explanation for this should be sought in the city's altered legal status, more concretely in the changed relationship between the city and sovereign. With the declaration of neutrality at the beginning of the peace conference [45], Münster more or less briefly obtained the status of an Imperial Free City. Thereby, the right to make decisions and the right to self-determination found in the city constitution, which the episcopal sovereign and the cathedral chapter had restricted gradually in the previous decades, were regained without limitations. This non-codified city constitution, stemming from Münster's Hanseatic prime in the Middle Ages, allowed for the guilds' right of participation in all council decisions via their spokesmen and if need be, for the vote of the full assembly of all citizens, the Gemeinheit, in the city's most important decisions; the guilds' spokesmen had a veto right for all council decisions. [46] Accordingly, they had already refused to grant the Dominicans, who had resided in the city since the Middle Ages, permission to build a new cloister in 1642. [47]

The Lorraine canonesses therefore unknowingly landed in this situation when they, as so-to-speak war refugees, set out from Lorraine, devastated as it was from the Thirty Year's War, to seek a new place to settle. In the hope of favorable conditions and protective security, they made their way via Trier and Cologne to the Catholic conference city of Münster. Here, however, they encountered from the very beginning resistance from the guilds, who were now able to assert their political will, which not even the joint efforts of the Imperial and papal representatives could surmount.



III.4. Guild Citizens, Artists, and Scholars as Represenatives of Civic Society

It was thus the citizenry described above, organized in the seventeen guilds authorized by the city council, the Leischaften, and the Gemeinheit, which dominated Münster's civic society in the Age of Religious Discord. It experienced its prime in the second half of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries, a period which Josef Prinz described as the 'golden century." [48] The citizenry was characterized by peaceful cooperation and a balance of interests between the sovereign's, i.e. the Prince-Bishop's, claims to power and the city's struggle for autonomy, which led to the relicensing of the guilds soon after the Anabaptist catastrophe, for which the guilds and the Gemeinheit had at first been declared responsible. This atmosphere of religious and political tolerance provided the leeway for the development of trade and craftsmanship, art and scholarship. Even when a different spirit materialized with the Prince-Bishops Ernst (1585-1612) and Ferdinand (1612-1650) as well as with the settlement of the Jesuits (1588) and other reform orders and when inner-city tension and conflict arose from this, Münster's civic society remained republican-minded and constituted anything but the court society of a royal seat.

Although its representatives at the time of the peace conference had undergone Jesuit training at the Schola Paulina, the majority of them lived and acted more in the spirit of humanism and republican civic culture than in that of the Counter-Reformation and the Baroque culture of the court. The rector of the cathedral school and historian, Hermann von Kerssenbrock, who created a literary monument to the city and its residents, as well as the guildmasters of the shopkeeper's guild, who were responsible for the construction of their new administrative seat, belonged to this group; likewise belonging to this group were the guildmasters and those responsible at the Schohaus, who firmly made a stand against the further settlement of religious orders in Münster, the transfer of property to the 'dead hand," and the freeing of additional homes and properties from civic burdens. Representing this latter group was the guildmaster Everhard Alerdinck, for example, who carried out a topographic survey of the city and had it printed as an atlas.

The spirit and disposition of the Metropolis Westphaliae's civic society can be seen in an example of a member from the generation before and one from the generation after 1600: the aforementioned painter and guildmaster, Hermann tom Ring (1521-1596), and the city doctor and councilman, poet and scholar, Bernhard Rottendorff (1594-1671).

Hermann tom Ring represented the middle generation of the well-known painter family. [49] He was born on 2 January 1521 as the eldest son of Ludger tom Ring the Elder, who had immigrated to Münster and was shortly thereafter accepted as a master into the painter's guild. He attended the Schola Paulina, which had just been converted into a humanist gymnasium and then joined his father's workshop. After his father's death in 1547, he succeeded him. In 1556, he had already become second guildmaster and from 1569 until his death, he occupied the position of first guildmaster of the painters. He spent his entire life in the city, in which he had experienced the Anabaptist period as a youth, and developed here a far-reaching influence on many old and new areas of the arts and sciences. In addition to portrait and church painting, the following disciplines should be mentioned here as examples: book illustration, cartography, architecture, and even astronomy. He was also in close and animated contact with artists and scholars inside and outside Münster. To the best of his ability, he contributed to the lay-out and furnishing of his native city's religious, public, and private edifices and homes. For the guild's civic society and its legally authorized organization, he became involved in a special way in that he produced with his own hand a copy of the Gesamtgilde's statute book, which had been affected detrimentally during the turmoil of the Anabaptist period, and he ensured that the autonomy and participation rights in the city's constitutional life documented in it also remained provable in every detail. [50] A family memorial to the living and deceased members of his family comprised of two colossal panel paintings completely following the style of noble models and erected in their parish church of St. Mary's Überwasser displays his own self-awareness and self-image. [51] The artistic monument which he created for his native city is the extensively discussed city view engraved in copper by Remigius Hogenberg and dedicated by both the artist and engraver to their mutual friend, Leonhard Thurneysser. Paul Pieper rightly described Hermann tom Ring as a Renaissance homo universalis. [52]

Dr. Bernhard Rottendorff, like Hermann tom Ring, also belonged to Münster's civic society, but in the later generation. Just as the latter, he remained faithful to his native city until his death, serving her in many public offices and functions and spreading, via his scholarship and medicinal art, his and the city's fame far beyond the region's borders. In Helmut Lahrkamp's opinion, he was 'no doubt the most eminent scholar, which Münster had to show in the seventeenth century." [53]

Doubtlessly, his multi-faceted talent was able to develop to its fullest extent during the peace conference. For more than three and a half years, he housed the Swedish envoy, Baron Schering Rosenhane and his wife and in doing so, made his house the focal point of Protestant life in Münster. Nevertheless, he also maintained very personal contact to the papal nuncio and peace negotiator, Fabio Chigi, who dedicated the well-known humorous poem about the rain in Münster to him. Two other important conference participants underwent medical treatment by him: Elector Ferdinand, who summoned him to Bonn, and the Imperial plenipotentiary, Count Trauttmansdorff, who summoned him to Osnabrück.

Rottendorff revealed himself as a passionate spokesman for the desire for peace in an appeal directed at the plenipotentiaries of the war-waging parties gathered at the conference in Münster. In this appeal, which he had composed in Latin on 29 April 1646, he asked them to fulfill their Christian duty and finally end the bloodshed and war atrocities as well as to join together in the struggle against the Turkish threat to the Christian West. [54]

In a letter to a scholarly colleague, the Latinist Johann Friedrich Gronovius in Deventer, he also proudly called himself the 'inventor" of the exhibition coins, which the city of Münster had minted upon the conclusion of the peace with the inscriptions he had composed, Pax optima rerum and Hic mausoleum martis pacisque trophaeum, placed above the silhouette of Münster. [55]



IV. Conclusion

Corresponding to the preliminary treaty concluded in Hamburg on 25 December 1641, in which Münster was designated as the venue of the peace negotiations between the Emperor/Empire and France, the Imperial plenipotentiary, Counsellor Johann Crane, freed the city from all sworn committments to its sovereign in a festive ceremony on 27 May 1643. Additionally, Münster committed itself to neutrality in regard to all negotiating parties and was instructed to provide accomodations and provisions for the conference participants. After agreeing with guild representatives and a committee of the Gemeinheit, the city council acceded to these conditions and took on the obligations arising from them. [56]

It was therefore the above-depicted, republican-minded civic society that emerged as host of the conference, actually without its episcopal sovereign, who himself as Elector of Cologne was a war-waging and negotiating party. The self-confident and tradition-proud guild citizens and councilmen as well as artists and scholars of the likes of Hermann tom Ring and Bernhard Rottendorff were, however, obviously and absolutely capable of hosting this conference themselves. In their city with its massive defense structures, representative public and private buildings, cobbled streets, markets, and well-functioning supply systems, they, naturally including the canon-curia within the cathedral immunity and the buildings of the other ecclesiastical immunities, succeeded for more than five years in providing the delegations from all of Europe with the necessary external framework for their difficult negotiations. This was only possible because Münster found itself at the beginning of the 1640s, despite the previous decades of war, still at the height of its topographic, socio-economic, and cultural development as a civic community. [57] Even if the city certainly could not compare itself in terms of population, expanse, and economic power with the larger Imperial Free Cities or royal seats, to say nothing of the European capitals, it still possessed as Metropolis Westphaliae supra-regional significance in the Empire's northwest.

FOOTNOTES