Reformation & Confessional Geography

Frankish/Carolingian power and the Holy Roman imperial order in Central Europe.

1 chapter

1120 - 1500

The Staufer (Hohenstaufen) dynasty held the Duchy of Swabia from 1079 and the imperial crown from 1138, making this region a heartland of the Holy Roman Empire. Climb the Hohenstaufen hill near Göppingen and look across the Rems-Fils valley — the ruined castle walls are all that remains of the dynasty's ancestral seat, but the view reveals the dense medieval landscape they ruled. The Staufer era also produced the institutions that still organize Swabian life: the Cistercian Maulbronn Abbey (founded 1147) became a model monastic economy whose pond-and-channel system you can still trace on foot. Free imperial cities — Ulm, Ravensburg, Schwäbisch Hall, Rottweil — governed themselves under the emperor, and their wealth funded the great Gothic minsters and trade networks. Ravensburg's Große Ravensburger Handelsgesellschaft traded cloth and spices across Europe. This is also the era when Fastnacht customs first appear in written records: 13th-century sources mention pre-Lent festivities, and by the 14th century, dances, parades, and Fastnacht games are documented. The Christian civitas-diaboli framework — not pagan survivals — gave these customs their theological logic, as scholars Mezger and Moser have shown.

1648 - 1806

Post-Westphalian recovery produced two distinct state traditions whose rivalry still echoes in the hyphenated name Baden-Württemberg. The Dukes of Württemberg built Ludwigsburg Palace (1704-1733) as their Versailles — walk its restored baroque gardens and you see how absolutist display reshaped the landscape. The Margraves of Baden founded Karlsruhe as a planned capital in 1715, its palace radiating streets outward like a sun. Heidelberg Castle, destroyed by French troops in 1693, became a picturesque ruin that would later fuel Romantic imagination. The Swabian Hohenzollern branch maintained its ancestral castle on the Zollernalb. In Catholic towns, Fasnet continued under guild custodianship — the Markgröningen Schäferlauf (sheep run), documented since the 17th century as a Bartholomäus-kirche dedication festival that evolved into a shepherds' Zunftfest, shows how Catholic and guild-maintained traditions anchored communal life alongside the Protestant court culture of the capitals.

496 - 1120

Frankish conquest brought Alemannia into the Carolingian orbit and with it systematic Christianization. The founding of Reichenau Abbey on Lake Constance in 724 by the itinerant bishop Pirmin was the region's decisive cultural event — a monastery that became a center of manuscript illumination, learning, and liturgical practice whose influence shaped the very calendar rhythms that later anchored Fasnet. Stand in the Reichenau church and you are inside the institution that gave the Alemannic southwest its Christian temporal frame. The Duchy of Swabia emerged from this Carolingian county structure, and by the 11th century the Zähringer dukes were founding planned market towns — Freiburg im Breisgau in 1120 — whose street grids and Münster squares still structure the towns you walk today. The Weingarten monastery (founded 1056 on an earlier Altdorf foundation) began the Blutritt procession tradition that still fills the streets each Corpus Christi.

1806 - 1918

Napoleon dissolved the old order in 1806: Württemberg became a kingdom, Baden a grand duchy, and both absorbed formerly independent imperial cities and Further Austrian territories. The new borders consolidated the Catholic-Protestant patchwork into two states that would persist until 1952. Industrialization transformed the economy — the Stuttgart-Esslingen railway opened in 1845, Daimler and Bosch made Stuttgart the cradle of the automobile, and Black Forest towns like Schramberg and Oberndorf became clockmaking and arms-manufacturing centers. Yet Fasnet persisted in Catholic industrial towns: the Narrenzunft Schramberg was formally founded in 1911 (VSAN founding member in 1924), and Oberndorf's Fasnet traces roughly 500 years despite the Mauser weapons factory reshaping the town. In Haslach im Kinzigtal, the Narrenzunft — a VSAN Gründungszunft — maintained the Alemannic Fasnet tradition in a Black Forest valley town whose -ingen toponym marks Alemannic settlement continuity. The 19th century also saw a Fasnet revival movement that defined itself against the bourgeois Rhineland Karneval model, reasserting mask-centrality, dialect, and guild custodianship.