Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 8/A peep into the Palatinate - Part 2
A PEEP INTO THE PALATINATE.
PART II. LIMBURG ABBEY, ETC.
From Neustadt to Dürkheim the hills are somewhat quieter than those by Trifels, and their formation appears due rather to watery agencies than to subterranean volcanic upheavals. It is not advisable to walk the whole distance between the vineyards and the woods, though the view is finer, as the distance is doubled by the ups and downs and ins and outs. The long slope below our feet is one vast vineyard. If Neptune had ever acted on the suggestion of a well-known old song, that he would have done better to have filled the ocean with wine than with brine, he might well have sought his supply in the interminable acres of vines which lie about the feet of the Palatinate hills. There is no doubt that samples of all the different kinds of Rhine wine are grown on this one slope, and the tickets of other places are put on them according to their qualities. It is laughable to compare the acreage of Schloss-Johannisburg with its supposed produce, or that of the little wine-garden at Worms which produces the delicate Liebfrauenmilch. The deficiencies of these renowned places would be easily made up from the abundance of Deidesheim, Wachenheim, and Forst, whose avowed wines are excellent of their kind. Dürkheim produces a capital second-rate wine, and this year (1862) its grapes are mostly healthy, while those of Forst and Deidesheim have been somewhat touched by oidium, and south of Neustadt the plague is still worse. When Lycurgus, king of Thrace, endeavoured to put down Bacchus by violence, that classical teetotaller little thought how much more effectually his views would be promoted by this mysterious microscopic fungus. In the places most affected the vine-disease seems to spare every other tree; in those least so it withers a cluster here and there. But the vintage is a good average one in consequence of the magnificence of the autumn. The immorality of the long mountain-slope of the Palatinate in supplying the market with its wine under feigned names is countenanced by that of the plain below, which produces real Havanna cigars in any desired quantity.
For some time before the vintage—the day of which is fixed by authority, like everything else in Germany—the vineyard paths are closed, and the wayside clusters which are most exposed to depredation are protected by thorns. The Germans, however, are easily deterred from doing forbidden things. The word “verboten” has with them the effect of the taboo of New Zealand, and is a more effectual fence than with us a wall fringed with broken bottles, though I have once seen a board on which the word was inscribed peppered with shot by some profane wayfarer, probably previously demoralised by a course of poaching.
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Limburg Abbey, looking East.
Dürkheim stands at the opening of a valley which pierces the hills to the west. It is a noted place for the grape-cure. This agreeable regime, which is very fashionable in Germany, consists in spending an hour every morning in the garden listening to the band and eating a pound of grapes, for the sale of which stalls are set in the garden. At all the baths which do not gamble, the visitors appear much of the same grade in society, and of the same—a moderately advanced—age. It looks like society, not exactly precise or puritanical, but with the “fast” element completely weeded out of it. At Dürkheim is one of those inns which one finds at rare intervals, where travellers are treated as friends of the family, called the Hotel Reitz. An excellent character is also given of the Vier Jahreszeiten. On an independent hill in the valley of Dürkheim, which the Isenach flows through with water impregnated with iron, as its name denotes, stands the grand ruin of the Abbey of Limburg, a far and wide landmark. It closely resembles in the style of architecture, which is the round-arched Byzantine, the Abbey of Paulinzelle in Thuringia, built in a.d. 1114, while its position is much more imposing, and its remains more extensive. The hill on which the Benedictine Abbey of Limburg is placed is a natural fortress. Its position thus tells of a time when sanctity was not deemed of itself a sufficient protection. On the top is a considerable plateau, sufficient for all the buildings, and a garden such as the monks of old delighted in. The authorities of the town of Dürkheim have taken into keeping this ruin; and with the best possible intentions, but questionable taste, have planted rows of limes inside the area, which have now grown so high as to hide much of the architecture. They seemed determined, at all events, to do honour to the name of Limburg, derived from the limes which grew there. Among the objects seen in the fine view from the plateau are the once-formidable Castle of Hartenburg, crouching on the side of a neighbouring glen, and the hills crowned by the immense antique fortification called the Heidenmauer.
But, how comes it that the Abbey bears the name of Limburg, or Lime-castle? In very old times, before the abbey was built, a castle stood here, belonging to the Rhine-Frankish or Salic dukes, the race from which the Emperor Conrad II. sprang, who ascended the throne in 1024. It is said that the first born son of this emperor lost his life here by a fall from the rock, and that Conrad was moved by his wife, the pious Gisela, to consecrate the scene of the accident by changing the family castle into a religious house. It appears, at any rate, to be an historic fact that Conrad II., early in the morning of the 12th July, 1030, laid the foundation-stone of this abbey, and then rode immediately to Speyer and laid the first stone of the Cathedral at noon of the same day. Conrad did not live to see the work accomplished: it was finished and finally dedicated under his son and successor, Henry III., A.D. 1042.
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Limburg Abbey, looking West.
The Byzantine style was carried in this superb building to its utmost perfection; of the church, which was conspicuous in the midst, the Benedictine Abbot Trittheim declaimed that he had never seen a grander church among those belonging to his order. There were three towers in the facade, the middle one of which was the highest, crowning the chief entrance, richly adorned with carvings. The interior was built after the simple but imposing model of the Roman Basilica; it was 250 feet long, and in the naves 140 feet wide. Twenty pillars, the shafts of which consisted each of a single mass, supported the painted roof, and separated the principal nave from the lateral spaces, whilst the coloured windows created a solemn twilight within. Among the twenty altars which the church contained, the High Altar, built of agate and marble, was richly adorned with precious stones and the royal crown. Behind the high altar was the choir of the convent, and a vault where many ancestors of the Salic imperial house were buried. Under the transepts were two vaults—to the right containing graves of the Counts of Leiningen, and to the left those of Abbots of Limburg. To the north-west of the church were the conventual buildings, connected with the abbey by a cloister, the circumference of the whole amounting to 5000 feet. Twenty counts, knights, and nobles of the country were tributary to the abbey, when in the beginning of the 13th century the Counts of Leiningen settled themselves in the neighbouring Castle of Hartenburg without the leave of the abbots and became a thorn in their sides. In the year 1470 Count Emich the Seventh plundered the monastery, sparing only the library and the sanctuaries. A worse fate befell the abbey in the year 1504. The Abbot Machar, a man distinguished by learning and intelligence, fearing the sinister designs of Count Emich VIII., procured a garrison from the Elector Palatine, under whose protection the abbey had been placed since 1471. When the Elector, being hard pressed, was forced to withdraw his troops, the inhabitants of Limburg had no choice but in flight. At midnight, sixteen in number, they went to the choir, said mass, received the sacrament, and with tears quitted their beloved convent and retired to Speyer, whither their valuables had previously been conveyed. No sooner were they gone than the people of Count Emich took possession, and set all the buildings on fire. The fire lasted for twelve days and nights, till all the glories of this beautiful building were consumed. The Abbot Machar made complaints to the Emperor at the Diet at Cologne, 1605, but without success. His successor began the restoration in 1515, and in 1554, on the day of St. Benedict, the first mass was again said. This restoration is celebrated by an inscription over the entrance of the convent choir:
Conradus II. cenobium istud fundavit, a.d. 1035.
Sigfridus de Bergen, abbas, hoc opus fieri fecit, a.d. 1551.
In twenty years after this, the Reformation came, and the abbey was secularised, with the exception of a short interval of time, during which the Benedictine order, under the protection of Imperialist troops, occupied it in the Thirty Years’ war. From this time the abbey fell into decay. The original and restored portions are easily distinguished by the architecture, the former being Byzantine, the latter Gothic proper. The handsome tower still standing belongs to the restored part. In a gallery half way up it, were formerly placed statues of Conrad II. and St. Benedict, and in the back-ground of this gallery are still found traces of a sculpture in relief, representing the principal façade of the convent. The top of the tower was decorated with figures of the four Evangelists, with their attributes. To the east of the church is a well 300 feet deep, mostly hewn out of the rock. Lying on the side of a high hill in the valley below, we see that castle of Hartenburg which worked all the mischief to the Convent of Limburg, and which, in just retribution, a similar fate of ruin has overtaken. We seem to pass from a temple of taste, intellect, learning, and piety, to some den of human wild beasts, in passing from the convent to the castle. The exterior remains of the castle cover a labyrinth of vaults, dungeons, and subterranean passages, whose gloom and coldness even now makes the visitor shudder. We can well conceive the impression they produced on the captive in those days, when, except in those oases of civilisation the religious establishments and the free towns, the whole of Germany was a wilderness of howling savages, whose multitudinous and internecine feuds and wars find their best counterpart in geological illustrations of the saurian period, where each gigantic lizard is making a lunge and a snap at its neighbour. The castle is said to have been built by Count Frederick of Saarbrücken, greatly to the disgust of the Abbot of Limburg. A permanent feud arose between the castle and the abbey. It is said that the Count once invited the Abbot to the castle with a view to the peaceable arrangement of the difference; an invitation which the good man unsuspectingly accepted. The Abbot was splendidly entertained, but as even under the influence of the Count’s good cheer, he dermurred to surrendering the rights of the convent, the Count’s men-at-arms suddenly appeared in the hall, and conducted the Abbot to the dungeon. The retainers of Limburg came and attacked the castle to rescue their master, but found it too strong for them, and the Abbot was at length fain to yield. He was then released, followed by the laughter of the castle servants. The event is supposed to be commemorated by a monk’s head turned in the direction of Limburg, carved on the tower which leads to the hall of the knights.
This castle reached its greatest pitch of splendour at the end of the sixteenth century under Emich XI., who beautified its grounds and gardens as a residence for his wife, a Countess Palatine of Zweibrücken. It was little harmed by the Thirty Years’ war, and in 1674 it resisted the troops of Turenne, but in the Orleans war, 1689, the French managed to set it on fire and blow up the tower under which the powder magazine lay. After the removal of the residence of the counts of Leiningen to the town of Dürkheim, the castle began to fall into decay, till part of it was again restored about 1780, by the Count Charles William, who was created a prince. Its final ruin was consummated in consequence of the following event. At the beginning of the French Revolution, a burgher of Dürkheim had shot a tame stag in the park of Hartenburg, and was imprisoned for a long time in the dungeon by the Prussians, who occupied these parts in 1793. When the French appeared in Dürkheim, the inhabitants instigated them to set the castle on fire, and all its historic memorials perished. Another of the lions of Dürkheim is the so-called Heidenmauer, a vast fortification inclosing the square top of a mountain to the north-west of the town. Antiquaries seem pretty well agreed that this work, in spite of some Roman coins having been found there, was prior not only to the Romans, but even to the Germans. Passing the ditch we arrive at a strange rock in the wood, to which has been given the name of Teufelstein, or Stone of the Devil. It is a block about twelve feet high, and has the appearance of having been artificially brought to the spot. On the top is a depression, with three channels running from it, and it can be ascended from a kind of natural stair at the back. It was not improbably a Celtic altar, either brought to the spot by unknown means, or fashioned out of a block originally there. But its present name is owing to the mediæval legend.
When the Abbey of Limburg was being built, the Devil appeared in the disguise of a travelling mechanic, and asked what was the destination of the work. He was told, probably from the fact of his disguise being insufficient to conceal the tail, that the building was to be a tavern. Thinking thus that it was intended to forward his own views, he worked at it with a will, and owing to his agency it was soon completed. Then, and not till then, he took a general view of the whole, and to his great disgust, saw the stately abbey before him. He went off in dudgeon, and bent on vengeance took up an enormous rock on a neighbouring height with the intention of hurling it against the abbey. But the stone in his hands became miraculously as soft as butter, and slipped out of his fingers. Then he sat down on the rock and gave a huge howl of despair. The guides still show the depression on the top to testify to the fact of his having sat there, and marks on the sides which were made by his fingers. At all events, the Devil appears on this occasion to have become, in cricketing phrase, butter-fingered, and to have let drop the stone. Perhaps the rudiments of a grand moral lie under the numerous legends which represent the Author of Evil as so often outwitted. The knave is, after all, but a round-about fool.