Development of Resources and Ruling Areas during the Middle Ages. Monasteries and Castles

The members of the project B 03 cooperate within the framework of their research with the Kreisarchäologie Göppingen.

During its first phase the project dealt with monasteries and castles in Upper Swabia and a deserted site in the northern Black Forest. The respective strategies of use and development of settlement communities, religious orders and the nobility were scrutinised. It could be demonstrated that the development of resources and the exercise of power were closely linked and engaged in a constant process of social negotiation. The mutual conditionality of economic and spiritual resources – such as secular donations of land in exchange for the prayers of the monks – was a basic precondition for the economic and financial backing, the preservation and the identity creation of monasteries. During the second phase we apply an approach of regional history, enhancing the regional contextualisation and intensifying the interdisciplinary collaboration between Archaeology and History. Now the focus is on castles which are understood as a cultural resource for the social advancement of unfree ministeriales into nobility, and at the same time as an instrument for the development and safeguarding of tangible resources, and, as such, an essential necessity for the creation of power. Two closely interlinked case studies – ‘Castles and the Emergence of Lesser Nobility Rule in the Periphery of Centres of the High Nobility’ (Regional History) and ‘Resources of Cultural Landscapes as Factors for the Establishing of Medieval Castles’ (Medieval Archaeology) – are conducted. Working with the results achieved during the first phase, not only mechanisms of stately territorial expansion are analysed, but the interconnections with religious resources and spiritual centres and their respective means of authority. The project covers the region from the Rems in the north, the Filstal and to the Danube in the south, which facilitates the cooperation between the case studies. The time frame spans from the 12^th cent. AD, when there is first evidence for ministeriales as owners of castles, to the 14^th cent. AD, when independent rule of lesser nobility is existing.