History of the Michaelsberg Charterhouse near Mainz

On May 21, 1320, about two weeks before his death, the eminent archbishop of Mainz, Peter von Aspelt, donated the material foundations for a Carthusian monastery in a valley in the Rheingau. It was the first settlement of this order in what is now Germany. After only about three years, the monks moved to the Michaelsberg, a hill south of Mainz. In 1326 the monastery was incorporated into the order by decision of the general chapter, but the church was not consecrated until 1350. We do not know for sure from where the archbishop summoned the first monks, but the first rector seems to have come not from nearby France, but from the Charterhouse of Seitz in Slovenia. The settlement of the order near Mainz triggered a veritable Carthusian boom in the areas along the Rhine and Main, with foundations in Grünau in the Spessart in 1328, near Trier and near Koblenz in 1331, in Cologne in 1335, and in Würzburg in 1352.

The Carthusian Order originated from a hermitage founded in 1085 by Bruno of Cologne, a scholastic of Rheims, in the mountain massif of the Grande Chartreuse. It differs considerably from the other western monastic communities. Carthusian fathers and nuns see themselves as hermits or recluses, devoting most of their time to contemplation and manual labor in their cell houses. Only for mass and nightly choir prayers do they congregate in the church, and only on Sundays and high feasts do they dine together in the refectory at the Small Cloister. In order to enable fathers to lead a hermit life, lay monks (conventuals) and contractually bound donates took over the craft work and agriculture. While the houses of the fathers, equipped with a small garden, were located around the Great Cloister (which indeed had extraordinary dimensions), the convers and donates lived and worked in an outer monastic area. The isolated way of life of the Carthusians and the ban on silence, which was only lifted on Sundays, also had an impact on the structure and extent of the Carthusian libraries, since copying texts was, at least in the manuscript age, the most important means of being useful to the confreres and all the faithful.

The Charterhouse on the Michaelsberg existed for more than 450 years. Up to 23 monks lived in the cell houses around the Great Cloister, and the monastery owned extensive lands and several town farms. Around 1360, Ludolf of Saxony completed his Vita Christi, one of the most widely read texts of the European Middle Ages, in the Mainz Charterhouse. In the 15th century, the monastery experienced a period of prosperity, which was reflected above all in a rapidly growing stock of books; in 1453, the Heidelberg magister Marcellus Geist made his profession here.

However, the location of the monastery on the hill outside Mainz proved to be disadvantageous on several occasions. After a fire in 1552, the Charterhouse had to be rebuilt, as well as after the Palatinate War of Succession in 1698. The prior Michael Welcken, who was in office from 1712 to 1753, redesigned the Charterhouse into an impressive Baroque complex. While the monastery had already been a point of interest for visitors to the Main River because of its picturesque location opposite the mouth of the river, people now also admired the paintings and sculptures in the cloister and church as well as the choir stalls, parts of which can be seen today in Trier Cathedral and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 1781, Archbishop Friedrich Karl Josef von Erthal, who was of an Enlightenment mind, abolished the Charterhouse with the Pope's approval, together with the women's monasteries of Reichklara and Altmünster, in favor of the Mainz University, which had not flourished much until then. The confiscated properties formed the basis of the Mainz University Fund, which still exists today. The archbishop had the buildings of the monastery demolished in 1790/91 in order to be able to expand his neighboring palace, the Favorite, but this was already destroyed in 1793 in the course of the Revolutionary Wars.