Holzkirchen Abbey

Holzkirchen Abbey was a Benedictine provostry in Holzkirchen west of Würzburg in Lower Franconia.

Drudmunt, a son of the Franconian count Throand and founder of Holzkirchen Abbey in the Waldsassengau region of Lower Franconia, handed over the small "Holtzchiricha" monastery, built in 768, whose main patroness was the (most blessed) Virgin Mary, to Charlemagne in November 775. Charlemagne then transferred it in the palace at Düren to the imperial abbey of Fulda and its abbot Sturmius. Abbot Hrabanus Maurus interred the relics of Saint Magnus and Saint Januarius (subdeacons of Pope Sixtus II, who was beheaded with them in 258) in a stone sarcophagus at Holzkirchen Abbey. Initially staffed with monks from its mother abbey in Fulda, the monastery soon became independent and had a monastic school, for which 18 scholars are documented in the 10th century. The monastery, consecrated to St. Sixtus among other saints, was under the Vogtship of the Counts of Wertheim around 1130, who already from 1224 exercised partial Vogtship over the monastery's possessions in Unterleinach. Three manses or farmsteads belonging to the monastery were located in "lower Leinach" in the Rittergasse, later called Riedstraße. The oldest of the rent books of the monastery or provostry of Holzkirchen, preserved in the Wertheim State Archive in Bronnbach Abbey, dates from 1470. In 1552, in the course of the Reformation, the monastery was dissolved by Count Michael III of Wertheim († 1555). Already in 1561, the property was returned to the monastery or its mother abbey Fulda; however, monastic life remained extinct. In 1612, Prince-Bishop Julius Echter seized the monastery as an escheated fief for the Prince-Bishopric of Würzburg. A newly established convent with twelve Benedictine monks was driven out by Swedish soldiers in 1631.