Chapter 8

The first historical mention of the city was in 794, when Charlemagne convoked a Diet and a council of the Church.

Frankfort suffered greatly during the Thirty Years' War, in the War of Succession, and in the Revolution in 1793. Napoleon made the city a grand duchy in favour of the Prince-Primate Charles of Dalberg.

Of the ancient gateways of the city, but one remains to-day, that of Eschenheim, a fine monument of characteristically German features of the middle ages. It dates from the fourteenth century.

One of the principal attractions of Frankfort for strangers has ever been the Juden Gasse,--the street of the Jews. It dates from 1662. As one enters, on the left, at No. 148, is the _maison paternelle_ of the celebrated Rothschilds.

The cathedral at Frankfort is consecrated to St. Bartholomew. It was begun under the Carlovingians and was only completed in the fourteenth century.

At the extreme western end is a colossal tower which ranks as one of the latest and most notable pure Gothic works in Germany (1415-1509). Its architect was John of Ettingen, and it rises to a height of one hundred and sixty-three feet.

The façade of the cathedral is entirely lacking in a decorative sense, and the lateral portal, on the south, is much encumbered by surrounding structures, though one sees peeping out here and there evidences of a series of finely sculptured figures.

Above the entrance to the cloister is an equestrian statue of St. Bartholomew, a masterwork of sixteenth-century German sculpture. The skull of the apostle is preserved in the church proper.

The general plan of the church is that of a Greek cross, but the termination which holds the choir is of much narrower dimensions than the other three arms.

The grand nave offers nothing of remark, but the side aisle to the right contains a fine "Ecce Homo" in bas-relief, placed upon the tomb of the Consul Hirde, who died in 1518. Unfortunately the heads of many of the figures, including that of the Christ, are badly scarred and broken.

In the right transept are a series of very ancient German paintings and a number of escutcheons, coloured and in high relief, commemorating benefactors of the church.

The walls in the choir are covered with ancient frescoes of the frankly German school. They undoubtedly date back to the fifteenth century, at least.

At the right of the choir is the tomb of the Emperor Gunther of Schwarzburg, who died here in 1349.

Above the high altar is a fine tabernacle,--a feature frequently seen in German churches,--of silver-gilt. To the left is an ancient iron grille of remarkable workmanship.

At the head of the left aisle of the nave is a chapel containing a "Virgin at the Tomb," a coloured sculpture of the fifteenth century, surmounted by a very ornate Gothic _baldaquin_.

In the left transept is the tomb of a knight of Sachsenhausen bearing the date of 1371. Here, too, is a somewhat dismantled and fragmentary astronomical clock of the species best seen at Strasburg.

The Protestant church of St. Nicholas is a fine ogival edifice, which in more recent times was profaned by commercial uses. It has since been restored and its red sandstone fabric is surmounted by a fine spire.

The interior shows a remarkably fine ogival choir as its chief feature, an organ-buffet carried out in the same style, which is most unusual, and a charming wooden staircase with an iron railing leading to a tribune at the crossing. All of the accessories are modern, but the effect is unquestionably good.

The church of St. Leonard dates from the thirteenth century and possesses as its chief exterior features two rather diminutive spires. The Emperor Frederick II. ceded the site to the city, for the erection of a church, at the above mentioned period.

The church of St. Catherine is of the seventeenth century, and, like most religious erections of its age, is in no way remarkable. The exterior, however, shows a rather pleasing square tower, which is surmounted by an octagonal campanile. The interior has some fine modern paintings, well painted and equally well displayed.

The church of St. Paul was formerly a Carmelite foundation. It is strictly modern, and was only completed in 1833. Its form is rather more pagan than Christian, being simply a great oval, one hundred and thirty odd feet in length by one hundred and eight in width. The interior is surrounded by a fine Ionic colonnade.

In 1848 St. Paul's was appropriated to the sessions of the German parliament, to which purpose the structure was well suited.

The Liebfrauenkirche has a fine "Adoration" sculptured above its principal portal. It is a good example of German sculpture in stone. Within the walls is a painting attributed to Martin Schoen which merits consideration.

XVI

MAYENCE

Mayence has been variously called the city of Gutenberg, and of the Minnesingers. The Romans in Augustus's time had already fortified it and given it the name of Magontiacum.

Near Mayence is the cenotaph of Drusus, where his ashes were interred after the funeral oration by Augustus, who came expressly from Rome into Gaul for the purpose.

Mayence as a Roman colony was a military post of great importance, and the key to the fertile provinces watered by the Rhine.

An episcopal seat was established here in the third century, but Christianity had a hard struggle against wars and internal disorders of many kinds.

Many times the city has been devastated and rebuilt. In 718 Bishop Sigibert surrounded the city by a series of walls, and between 975 and 1011 Archbishop Willigis built the cathedral and the church of St. Stephen, at which time the real Christianizing of Mayence may be said to have begun.

The venerable old cathedral has many times been battered and bruised, and fire and bombardment have reduced its original form into somewhat of a hybrid thing, but it remains to-day the most stupendously imposing and bizarre cathedral of all the Rhine valley.

In general its architecture is decidedly not good, but it is interesting, and therein lies the chief charm of a great church.

During the siege of the French the cathedral at Mayence, in 1793, again took fire, and the western end of the roof of the choir, the nave, and the transept all succumbed.

For ten years it remained in this state, until the order for restoration came from the omnific Bonaparte, then first consul. In 1804 the edifice was consecrated anew.

In the year 636 there was held at Mayence an assembly of the bishops of the Frankish kingdom convoked by Dagobert, then king.

Among the bishops of Mayence none had a reputation so popular as that of St. Boniface, who had been sent out by Pope Gregory III. as a missioner to the Rhine country.

Boniface had given Pepin-le-Bref the sacrament at Soissons in 752, upon the fall of the Merovingian dynasty, and in return King Pepin gave the bishopric of Mayence to St. Boniface.

In 813 a numerous council met here, at the orders of Charlemagne, under the presidency of Hildebold, Archbishop of Cologne and chaplain of the holy palace at Rome.

In the tenth century the church at Mayence did not fall to the sad state that it did elsewhere. Ecclesiastical writers of France have always referred to this period as _le siècle de plomb_, but at Mayence it still steadily approached the golden age.

Mayence was still distinguished by the zeal of its archbishops, whose good influences were far-reaching.

Under the episcopate of St. Boniface and his immediate successors the cathedral of Mayence was probably a wooden structure, as were many of the earlier churches of the evangelizing period in Germany and Gaul.

The work on the mediæval cathedral was completed by 1037, under Archbishop Bardon, and its consecration took place in presence of the Emperor Conrad II.

Twelve years after this ceremony, Pope Leo IX. came to Mayence and held a famous council, at which the emperor was present, accompanied by the principal nobles of the empire.

The cathedral fell a prey to the flames in 1087, as well as three other neighbouring churches, say the older chronicles, and the ancient structure disappeared almost entirely, so far as its original outline was concerned.

Archbishop Conrad of Wittelsbach restored the nave inside of three years, and the monument again took on some of its ancient magnificence. In 1198 Emperor Philip of Suabia, son of Frederick Barbarossa, was solemnly crowned in this cathedral by the Archbishop of Tarentaise, the Archbishop of Mayence being at that time in the Holy Land.

The twelfth-century work doubtless was erected on the foundations of Archbishop Bardon's structure.

The restoration of the transept and the western choir followed, and the work went on more or less intermittently until the middle of the thirteenth century, when the fabric approached somewhat the appearance that it has to-day.

The completed structure was consecrated in 1239, and, save the chapels of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the body of the edifice has not greatly changed since that time.

During the Thirty Years' War it became practically a ruin, however, though its later rebuilding was on the original lines.

In 1793 the revolution which sprang up in France forced its way to the Rhine, and, when Mayence was besieged, the roof of the cathedral caught fire and the church itself was pillaged and profaned.

For a long time the old cathedral remained abandoned, as after an invasion of barbarians, which is about what the revolutionists proved themselves to be. In 1803 Napoleon saw fit to order it to be restored, and in the following year it was returned to its adherents.

The ancient metropolis, however, lost the distinction which had been given to it in Roman times, and the glory first brought upon it by St. Boniface lapsed when the arch-episcopal see was suppressed. Mayence is now merely a bishopric, a suffragan of Cologne.

In its general plan the cathedral at Mayence follows the outlines of a Latin cross, though its length is scarcely more than double its width.

It is most singular in outline and has two choirs, one at either end, as is a frequent German custom, and the sky-line is curiously broken by the six towers which pierce the air, no two at the same elevation.

There are three portals which give entrance from various directions. There is yet a fourth entrance from the market-place, which takes one through a sort of cellar which is not in the least churchly and is decidedly unpleasant.

The principal nave is supported by nine squared pillars, which are hardly beautiful in themselves, but which are doubtless necessary because of the great weight they have to bear.

In the Gothic choir is a heavy _baldaquin_ in marble, bearing figures of the twelve apostles. The high altar is directly beneath the cupola, or lantern, of the principal tower. It is quite isolated, and has neither flanking columns nor a _baldaquin_. On feast-days it is brilliantly set forth with candelabra in a fashion which would be theatrical, if it were not churchly.

Behind this altar is the space reserved for the clergy, a somewhat unusual arrangement, but not a unique one. At the extreme end is the bishop's throne.

The general appearance of the interior constructive elements would seem to place the work as a whole well within the thirteenth century, though the extreme easterly portion is more ancient still.

There is very little of pure Gothic to be noted. Mostly the fabric is a reproduction of the Lombard style, though much undeniably Gothic ornament is used. The bays of the nave are singularly narrow and of great height, almost the reverse of the pure Italian manner of building which elsewhere made itself strongly felt along the Rhine. The height of these bays is more than two and a half times the width. The bays of German churches, in general, have a much greater length than those of Italy, and herein is a marked difference between the Italian and German styles in spite of other resemblances.

There are in the cathedral numerous paintings of questionable artistic worth and an abundance of coloured glass, which is condemned as comparatively modern and of no especial interest.

The altar of St. Martin, with statues of Sts. Martin and Boniface, is near the baptistery. There are eight lateral chapels, out of fifteen in all, which are bare and without altars, showing a poverty--whatever may have been the cause--which is deplorable.

In the Bassenheim chapel is a remarkable marble group taken from the church of Notre Dame, a Gothic edifice destroyed during the siege of 1793.

There are numerous and beautiful funeral monuments scattered about the church, the most celebrated being that which surmounts the tomb of Frastrada, the third wife of Charlemagne, who died in 794, and was originally interred in the church of St. Alban. The remains were removed to the cathedral when the former church was burned in 1552.

On the tomb of Frastrada one may read the following eighth-century inscription:

"_Frastradana, pia Caroli conjux vocitata, Christo dilecta, jacet hoc sub marmore tecta, Anno septingentesimo nonagesimo quarto, Quem numerum metro claudere musa negat Rex pie, quem gessit Virgo, licet hic cinerescit, Spiritus hoeres sit patriæ quæ tristia nescit._"

There are also the tombs of thirty-two archbishops,--a veritable valhalla of churchly fame. Mostly these tombs are ordinary enough, those of Archbishop Berthould of Hennéberg and of the doyen of the chapter being alone remarkable.

The chapel of St. Gothard, a dependency of the cathedral, was built by Archbishop Adelbert I. in 1135-36.

The ancient cloister at Mayence dates from the mid-thirteenth century. Archbishop Siegfried was responsible for the work which was consecrated in the year 1243 in the presence of the Emperor Conrad, on the occasion of a synod which was being held at Mayence at that time. The cloister, as it exists to-day, is made up in part of this ancient work and in part of a more modern construction, this latter being the portion which adjoins the church proper.

The chapter-house was built at the end of the twelfth century or at the beginning of the thirteenth. It is a square apartment covered with an ogival vaulting which springs from a range of pillars with delicately sculptured foliaged capitals. It is decidedly the architectural gem of this composite edifice.

To the north of the cathedral, in the Speise-Markt, is a remarkably fine fountain, restored, or perhaps rebuilt, in the sixteenth century by the Archbishop of Mayence. A _baldaquin_ supported by three pillars rises above a well or spring, and on a stone slab one reads the following inscription in letters of gold:

"_Divo Karolo V Cesare semp Augus. post victoria gallicam rege ipso ad Ticinum superato ac capto triumphante, fatalique rusticor[=u] per Germnia (sic) cospiratione prostratâ, Alber. card. et archiep. Mog. font[=e] hanc vetustate dilapsa ad civi[=u] suorum posteritatisque usum restitui curavit anno MDXXVI._"

The Meistersingers of Mayence owed their origin to Henry Misnie, who, according to some authorities, was a canon of the Church, and, according to others, a doctor of theology. He was devoted, at any rate, to poetry, and was, in the fourteenth century, founder of the school of the Master-singers.

He dedicated a great part of his songs to the Virgin, his ideal of all that was pious and good. Later he widened the range of his dedications to include all of the female sex, and beautiful women in particular. He is known in the history of German poetry under the name of Henry von Frauenlob.

His death caused a universal sorrow among the fair sex of Mayence, who gave his funeral such honours as were never before known.

The majority of the great procession which conducted his remains to the tomb, which had been prepared in the cathedral, were women, "eight of the most beautiful bearing a crown of roses, lilies, and myrtle." This is a pretty enough sentiment, but it seems quite inexplicable to-day. History records that the master-singer's favourite drink was the noble wine of the Rhingau, and it is commonly supposed to have inspired many of his beautiful songs.

Legend steps in and says that "the naves of the cathedral were inundated by the libations which went on at this funeral ceremony."

A modern white marble monument, put into place in 1842, and replacing one that had previously disappeared, stands as a memorial to the sweet singer of the praises of women.

XVII

BACHARACH, BINGEN, AND RUDESHEIM

Bacharach is famous for its legends and its wine. With the former is associated the ruins of St. Werner's Church, a fragment of exquisite flamboyant Gothic, though built of what looks like a red sandstone. The Swedes demolished it in the Thirty Years' War, but the lantern and the eastern lancet window still remain to suggest its former great beauty.

This beautiful chapel was built as a memorial to the child Werner, whose body was fabled to have been thrown by the Jews, his supposed murderers, into the Rhine at Oberwesel. Instead of floating down-stream with the current, it went up-stream as far as Bacharach, where it was recovered.

There is at Bacharach a twelfth-century church in the Byzantine style, which is now a Protestant temple. It is an incongruous affair in spite of the fact that the style is fairly pure of its kind, so far as the body of the church is concerned. Surmounting it is a needle-like spire which rises above the crenelated battlement of its tower in a most fantastic manner.

The city walls have great ornamental and picturesque qualities, and were, in former days, defended by twelve towers of imposing strength.

The evolution of the name of Bacharach is decidedly non-Christian. It is frankly pagan, being descended from _Bacchi ara_,--the altar of Bacchus,--which was the name originally given to a rock in the midst of the river, which, in varying seasons, is sometimes covered by the flood, and again quite dry. When its surface appears to the light of day, the vineyard owner hails it as a sign of good vintage.

In proof of the quality of the wines of Bacharach, it is said that Pope Pius II. used every year to have a great tun of it brought to Rome for his special use, and that the Emperor Wenceslas granted their freedom to the citizens of Nuremberg in return for four tuns of the wine of Bacharach. To-day Bacharach is, with Cologne, the great wine centre of the Rhine valley.

Asmanhausen, a few miles up the river, is the central mart for the red wines of the Rhine. Near Asmanhausen is Ehrenfels, where the Archbishops of Mayence had a château in the thirteenth century. The château is still there, but it is nothing more than a magnificent ruin.

Opposite Ehrenfels is Bingen, with its Mäuseturm. The chief sentimental memory of Bingen is unquestionably the legend of Bishop Hatto and his "Mouse Tower on the Rhine."

The legend of Hatto, versified by Southey, has stamped the memory of the Mouse Tower and its associations so indelibly upon the mind that it overshadows in interest all else in the vicinity.

"'Tis the safest place in Germany; The walls are high, and the shores are steep, And the stream is strong and the water deep."

How the rats came and--

"...whetted their teeth against the stones And how they picked the Bishop's bones"--

is an old story with which children have been regaled for generations past.

The great white "Mouse Tower" stands to-day on its tiny island in the middle of the waters of the Rhine, between Bingen and Ehrenfels, to perpetuate the story, while its ruined walls look down, as they always have, on the steady flow of the Rhine water, making its way from the place of its birth in the Canton of Grisons to the cold waters of the German ocean off the coast of Holland.

_Rudesheim_

Rudesheim, but a small town of less than three thousand inhabitants, is noted for its wines and its ruins. Its church, though a fifteenth-century edifice of more than ordinary beauty,--if we except its nondescript spire,--comes decidedly last in the city's list of attractions.

The remains of the four châteaux in the neighbourhood are the chief object of the casual tourist.

The town is the centre of a vineyard, the grapes being grown in great profusion near it. The favourable nature of the locality for grape-growing was discovered, it is said, by Charlemagne, who, remarking the rapid disappearance of the snow on the slopes about Rudesheim, declared his belief that fine wine might be grown there. Sending to France for some plants, they were placed in the earth, and have ever since yielded a grape worthy of their parentage, a grape still called Orleans.

From this town the tourist may make a pleasant excursion to the Niederwald,--having first given his attention to the history of Rudesheim, once the seat of an imperial court held in the Nieder Burg,--and scan its four ancient castles. Of these, one belonged for a time to Prince Metternich, who, however, sold it to Count Ingelheim, its present possessor; another is picturesquely posted at the upper part of the town, and still retains some curious relics of the Bromser family, its old possessors. A tradition still exists, telling how Hans Bromser, being taken captive in Jerusalem, made a vow to Heaven that if released he would dedicate his only daughter to the service of the Church. Gaining his liberty soon afterward, he returned to the Rhine to find the child he had left when he started for the Crusades grown to womanhood; and he learned also that, secure of her father's sanction, she had betrothed herself to a youthful knight. Love and duty well-nigh rent the maiden's heart in twain, till love conquered, and she begged her stern parent to relent. This he refused to do, and threatened her with a father's curse should she marry.

Despairing, she threw herself into the Rhine, and her body floated down-stream as far as Bishop Hatto's Mouse Tower, at Bingen. This gave rise to another legend, that when the surface of the waters is troubled it is caused by the uneasy spirit of Bromser's daughter, wrestling with the dreadful fate to which she was driven.

XVIII

LIMBURG

The cathedral of Limburg-on-Lahn, not farther from the juncture of the Lahn and Rhine than is Frankfort-on-the-Main, may well be considered a Rhine cathedral.

The Lahn is by no means so powerful a stream as is the Main or the Neckar; nor is it either picturesque, or even important as a waterway.

It has this one virtue, however: it forms a setting to Limburg's many-spired cathedral that is truly grand.

Limburg played a great part in the middle ages, and its origin goes far back into antiquity. Under Drusus a _castellum_ was erected here, which was destroyed by the Franks and the Alemanni.

The counts of the lower Lahn province were among the most powerful in all Germany. They gave their city the name of Roemercastel, which name, to some extent, may be said to live up to to-day. Later the Franks called it Lintburc, from the little river Linther, which flows into the Lahn at this point.

The cathedral of Limburg is the most imposing and homogeneous of all the _romano-ogival_ edifices of Germany.

Consecrated to St. George, this church dates from the latter years of the twelfth century and the early part of the thirteenth. It was erected by Count Henry of Nassau, and replaced two more ancient edifices on the same site.

Without a doubt it is a mediæval monument which stands supreme in its class, though its grandeur comes not so much from mere magnitude as it does from the general disposition of its plan, and the wonderful blending of the transition elements which, after all is said and done, in Germany, are not elsewhere very pronounced.