Benedictine Abbey St. Salvator

Prüm Abbey was founded in 721 by Betrada the Elder – Charlemagne’s great-grandmother.  In 752, Charlemagne’s parents Pippin and Bertrada the Younger occupied the abbey with Benedictine monks from Meaux and re-founded it as a house monastery of the Carolingians. Through this close connection with the Carolingian dynasty, the abbey had extensive possessions from the Rhine to Brittany and the Netherlands in 893.

Pippin gave the monastery the sandals of Christ as a relic, which he received from Pope Zacharias for his help in the fight against the Lombards. As a result, the abbey was eventually dedicated to the «Most Holy Redeemer» and came to be called «St. Salvator». The sandals of Christ can still be admired in a reliquary on high church feast days. Charlemagne finally had a collegiate church built for the abbey, which was consecrated in 799 in the presence of the Frankish king and Pope Leo III. In addition, the abbey came into possession of the relics of the Holy Three Physicians at this time.

The sons of the Carolingian dynasty as well as the greats of the empire were educated in the famous monastic school of Prüm. With its abbot Regino of Prüm, the abbey brought forth one of the most outstanding historiographers of the early Middle Ages. In addition, the Liber Aureus, the most important collection of Carolingian charters in the Rhineland region, was written in Prüm.

After the partition of Prüm in 855, in which Emperor Lothar I divided his kingdom among his sons, the latter retired to the abbey and died a short time later. The sarcophagus with the emperor’s bones, donated by Emperor Wilhelm I in the 19th century, is still in the St. Salvator Basilica today.

In the following centuries, Prüm Abbey was repeatedly devastated and burnt down by Norman invasions. Most of the monastery’s manuscripts got lost in this time. The monks of Prüm, on the other hand, rebuilt the collegiate church again and again, so that the abbey continued to exist and, due to its great importance for the Holy Roman Empire, was even made to an imperial principality by Emperor Frederick II in 1222.

In the 16th century, the abbey finally came to the Electorate of Trier. About 150 years later in the 18th century, the collegiate church and the abbey building were rebuilt in the Baroque style under Elector Franz Ludwig of Pfalz-Neuburg. Today’s restoration of the abbey essentially goes back to this construction.

The secularisation of the annexed territories on the left bank of the Rhine by Napoleon Bonparte in the late 18th century finally led to the dissolution of the abbey. At first it was the seat of various offices before being converted into a school in the 19th century.

The basilica of the abbey was converted into a Catholic parish church, where the Prüm parish community still holds its church services today.

After the already mentioned destruction in the course of the Second World War, the church and the abbey building were rebuilt and elevated to the status of «Basilica minor» by Pope Pius XII in 1950.

Due to sales in the course of the secularisation by Napoleon and the destruction in the course of the war, only a few precious items of today’s furnishings belong to the original treasure of the abbey. Only the choir seating and the organ from the 18th century, as well as the stone pulpit from the previous church, the relics and the tomb of Lothar I are to be mentioned here.

FLORIAN HARTMANN