The religious houses of the Hospitallers in Mecklenburg in their conflict with the Dukes of Mecklenburg in the 16th century

Abstract

During the Reformation the Hospitaller’s Bailiwick Saxony-Marchia-Wendland-Pomerania survived by the conversion of their knights to Protestantism. However, this does not apply for Mecklenburg. There the commanderies Kraak (1533), Mirow (1541) and Nemerow (1552) de facto went over in Lordly estate, where the houses more or less forcibly were taken by representatives of the Dukes of Mecklenburg. This de facto secularization stood at the end of a decising phase of a conflict between Knights and Dukes that began in the late 15th century, in which the Dukes were victorious. This conflict, which essentially was a process of land occupation by the Mecklenburg Dukes, its impressing escalation levels and strategies are the main matters of this contribution. A strong encouriging factor of this development on pages of the Hospitallers was an erosion process of convents which could be observed since the 15th century. It caused even before the Reformation, that the commanderies, apart from their incumbent commanders and priors, in the 16th century had no more friars in Mecklenburg and degenerated to manorial farms, which, aside from its revenues which were dissipated to the Knights Hospitallers, could not substantially be distinguished from public domains. For the Dukes, who considered the commanderies no longer as centers of spiritual life, too, their takeover and transformation into real domains of their states were facilitated, because due to lack of convents they much more radically could proceed, because they needn’t to take any consideration on existing friars and monasterial communities that they had to practise in secularizations of monasteries and foundations of other orders.