St. Emmeram's Abbey

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Small section of the huge St. Emmeram's building

St. Emmeram's Abbey (Kloster Sankt Emmeram or Reichsabtei Sankt Emmeram), now known as Schloss Thurn und Taxis, was a Benedictine monastery founded in about 739 in Regensburg in Bavaria at the grave of the itinerant Frankish bishop Emmeram, revered as a martyr.^[1]

From 739 to 975, the abbots of St. Emmeram were also bishops. In 1295, the abbey received from King Adolf of Nassau the grant of reichsunmittelbar status, making it an Imperial abbey (an independent sovereign power subject to no lordship except that of the emperor).

The scriptorium of St. Emmeram in the Middle Ages was a centre of scholarship. After something of a decline in its significance the abbey enjoyed a resurgence in the 17th and 18th centuries under abbots Frobenius Forster, Cölestin Steiglehner, Roman Zirngibl, and Placidus Heinrich. In 1731, the abbots were raised to the status of Princes of the Empire (Reichsfürsten). Between 1731 and 1733, there followed the magnificent refurbishment of the abbey church, which had been burnt out and repaired several times, by the Asam brothers.

In 1803, Sankt Emmeram, along with the Imperial City and the Hochstift Regensburg, completely lost its previous political status to the newly formed Principality of Regensburg headed by the former Prince-Primate Carl Theodor von Dalberg. After the Treaty of Paris of 1810, both Sankt Emmeram and Regensburg belonged, as they still do, to Bavaria.

In 1812, after the secularisation of the monasteries, the monastic buildings were granted to the Princes of Thurn and Taxis who had St. Emmeram's Abbey converted to Schloss Thurn und Taxis, sometimes known as Schloss Sankt Emmeram or St. Emmeram Castle.

The abbey church became a parish church, to which on 18 February 1964 the pope accorded the status of a basilica minor.^[2]

Notable burials in Sankt Emmeram: