2 - Civic Hospitals in the City and Archdiocese of Mainz

Summary

Abstract

This chapter discusses the establishment of an archiepiscopal rule for Mainz's hospital, and the hospital's subsequent transfer to civic oversight. Studying how the hospital's inclusion in the 1244 charter of civic liberties affected its claim to the privileges of religious status sheds new light on the transfer's effects. I pursue the hospital's late medieval history through 1462, when the archbishops of Mainz reasserted their political control over the city, and their rights over the administration of the hospital. I compare the civic hospitals of Worms and Speyer, and their relationships with civic and episcopal authority. Over the course of the later Middle Ages, civic hospitals in the Rhineland used their claims to religious status to carve out institutional independence.

Keywords: urban history, medieval hospitals, Worms, Mainz, Speyer

On 1 August 1236, Archbishop Siegfried III authorized the move of Mainz's hospital to new buildings on the edge of the city. In the elaborate prologue to the statutes issued on this occasion, the archbishop described his role in high-flown terms:

“We know that it is only fitting for us to eagerly assist, maintain, and guide all places where the sick and pilgrims find welcome, the weary rest, the hungry food, the thirsty drink, and all, whether rich or poor, find solace. We also know that their special care is incumbent upon us [as a duty.]”

In invoking provision for the sick as the key reason for the hospital's move, the document echoes early thirteenth-century councils that defined hospitals’ religious identity in terms of their provision of such necessities.

In the first half of the thirteenth century, many of the urban hospitals of Europe emerged from the aegis of episcopal patrons, establishing themselves as independent institutions. This process was in part a response to the changing requirements of canon law, and itself raised new questions about hospitals’ religious status. The early thirteenth-century history of Mainz's oldest hospital is representative of this process in the hospital's acquisition of a written rule, its move away from the cathedral close, and its oversight by the city council. The hospital is not consistently named until the thirteenth century; for the institution's early history, therefore, I avoid the designation “Heilig Geist Spital.”