Dynastic History | Corvey Abbey, Höxter — The House That Wrote the Coronation

Charlemagne's Saxon wars ran for more than thirty years after 772 and ended with Saxony annexed and its people being christianised by the conquerors. An abbey east of the Weser was part of that programme. Louis the Pious announced it at a synod in Paderborn in 815; monks arrived in 816 from Corbie in Picardy; the first site proved unusable, and in 822 the community moved to the ground it kept, calling itself Nova Corbeia, the new Corbie. The right to strike coin came in 833, the first granted east of the Rhine. The church was consecrated in 844. As a Reichsabtei the abbot answered to the emperor directly in secular matters.

The school here produced Widukind, who entered the community around 940 and wrote the Deeds of the Saxons, three books on Henry the Fowler and Otto I. He was working after Otto's imperial coronation of February 962, dedicated the result to Otto's daughter Mathilde, abbess of Quedlinburg, and carried the narrative to the emperor's death in 973. Nearly everything now said about the Aachen ceremony of 936 comes through him: a monk of a house planted on conquered ground, writing for the family whose beginnings he was describing.

The westwork raised between 873 and 885 is the only part of the Carolingian abbey still standing, and the oldest surviving example of the form. Its upper hall keeps wall paintings of scenes from ancient myth given Christian readings, the only Carolingian work of that kind known. The rest of the imperial abbey survives as archaeology, only partly excavated. What surrounds it now is the Baroque residence raised after the Thirty Years' War. UNESCO inscribed the westwork and the civitas in June 2014.

📸 Cover: the westwork of the abbey church at Corvey — Aeggy, CC BY 3.0.