Imperial Abbey of Werden

Origins

Saint Ludger, a Frisian missionary and later first bishop of Münster, founded a monastery at Werden on the Ruhr around 799 on land he had acquired. He was buried there in 809, and his family's abbots ran the house for decades. In 877 it became a royal abbey under imperial protection.

Rule and society

Werden held estates from Frisia to the Rhineland, and its abbots ruled the area around Werden as princes of the Empire. Its library held the Codex Argenteus, the silver Bible of the Gothic language, before it passed to Prague and later Uppsala. The protectors of the abbey were the counts of the Mark and later the rulers of Brandenburg-Prussia.

Decline and legacy

Werden remained a Catholic island but a small one. In 1803 the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss secularised it and gave it to Prussia. Its Romanesque church, the basilica of Saint Ludger, survives in what is now a district of Essen.