St. Trudpert's Abbey

According to tradition, St. Trudpert's Abbey originated with Saint Trudpert, an Irish missionary and martyr in the southern Black Forest in the first half of the 7th century. He established a hermitage in Münstertal which became a monastery in the 9th century, and which by, at the latest, 900 had expanded to a monastic community supported by the influential noble family of the Liutfride. It is recorded that relics of Trudpert were translated to the abbey in 901 and shortly after 965.

The abbey's development during the next few centuries seems to have been peaceful: no involvement either in ecclesiastical reform or in the Investiture Controversy is recorded. The community's estates lay principally in the Münstertal, the Breisgau, the Ortenau and in Alsace. It also acquired the lordship of Tunsel and the parishes of Münstertal, Grunern, Krozingen, Tunsel, Laufen, Biengen and others.

The abbey was also able to capitalise on the silver-mining industry that developed in the region in the later Middle Ages, on the basis of which the small town of Münster grew up below the abbey. In 1346, together with the castle of Burg Scharfenstein, a property of the Staufer (see below), it was destroyed by armed men from Freiburg, and shortly afterwards flooded, from which disasters it never recovered, and was abandoned. The monastery in turn suffered an economic decline in the latter half of the 14th century, apparently during the time of abbot Paul I (1435-1455). In 1525 St. Trudpert's was plundered during the German Peasants' War. In 1632 it was destroyed by the Swedes during the Thirty Years' War.

Around 1200 the lords of Staufen (de:Staufen (Adelsgeschlecht)), ministeriales of the dukes of Zähringen and unrelated to the Hohenstaufen, acquired Vogtrechte (rights of advocacy or stewardship) over St. Trudpert's. The monastery reacted by the production of forged documents purporting to establish a higher Vogtei of the Counts, later Dukes, of Habsburg, with the consequence that until their extinction in 1601 the Staufer functioned as under-Vögte of the Habsburgs. The Habsburg over-Vogtei also meant that the abbey became part of the lordship of Vorderösterreich and thus a Habsburg monastery. As such it was secularised in 1806 and became part of the Grand Duchy of Baden.

Several medieval church and monastery buildings are evidenced, for example a rebuilding of the monastery in 902, and again (possibly after an attack by the Hungarians at the beginning of the 10th century) at some time before 962.