The wealth of Traunkirchen Abbey
Donations, gifts, tithes and rights
A Christian and pagan army clash in the distance. You can almost hear the noise of the battle. The Christian army is victorious over the heathens. In memory of the glorious triumph, Count Ottokar IV of Traungau and Leopold V of Babenberg kneel before the Virgin Mary and present her with a model of a church. It is none other than Trunseo Abbey, which is said to have been built as early as 632 AD.
However, this depiction does not stand up to closer scrutiny. It possibly stems from a conflation of the memory of Trunseo with the foundation of Traunkirchen. Nevertheless, the painting is very valuable as a historical source. The abbess, Barbara Kirchberger, commissioned the foundation painting on the occasion of the 900th anniversary celebrations. The battle scene with the toppling pillar, the view of Traunkirchen Abbey, St John's Church and St Nicholas' Chapel reflect the situation around 1532 and give a good idea of the original appearance of the church and the late medieval abbey.
The name Trunkirchen was first mentioned in 1186 in the Georgenberger Handfeste, the inheritance contract between Ottokar IV, from the Traungau family, and Leopold V from Babenberg. It is regarded as a famous Benedictine nunnery and is the first of the ducal monastery foundations. At the beginning, the monastery owned around 15 farms. Further donations and benefices were subsequently added, securing the economic situation of the convent.
In the following period, the nuns acquired a rich and widespread estate through donations and the transfer of fiefs, richly endowed with villages and rights: Farmers, who had to deliver a tenth of their produce and who were conscripted into unpaid labour, into serfdom, rights to forests, fishing and mining rights secured the prosperity and wealth of the monastery. Shares in the Hallstatt salt mines were particularly lucrative, as was silver mining on the Bromberg.
However, the financial and economic blessings did not last forever. Protestantism spread to the centres of salt mining and the salt transport. The Benedictine nuns of the Traunkirchen monastery also turned to Protestantism. Monastic life comes to an end at the end of the 16th century.
A visitation judges the last abbess to be "simple-minded, childish and incapable of business and government". Under the Protestant administration, the entire Salzkammergut embraced Protestantism until the Counter-Reformation finally began under Emperor Rudolf II.
In the course of re-catholicisation, the Jesuits from Passau took over the monastery at the beginning of the 17th century. After a second fire - the first was in the 14th century - the baroque church we know today is built around 1632.
At the end of the 18th century, the enlightened, reform-minded Joseph II dissolved the Jesuit monastery and the monastery church became a parish church. The economic control and influence, be it the rights to forests, the ownership of villages or the shares in the Hallstatt salt mines, began to dwindle with Protestantism and finally came to an end with the dissolution of the monastery.
