The Weingarten History of the Welfs (Translation)

This unpublished translation relates to Germany, 1075-1288

This account of the history of the Welf family was written c. 1170, either by a cleric among their followers or by a monk of the abbey of St. Martin at Weingarten in the diocese of Konstanz in southern Swabia. Weingarten had been founded by Welf III, Duke of Carinthia, c. 1053 near the Welfs’ castle of Ravensburg, north of Lake Constance, after the family’s earlier monastic foundation, a nunnery at Altdorf (founded in 935) had been destroyed by fire. (The History occasionally still refers to Weingarten as Altdorf). The early parts of the History are largely legendary; the later ones offer a very valuable account of a powerful family who became increasingly important in the Reich from the later Salian period onwards. (Even so, the account only became really detailed after the death of Henry the Black in 1126). The original history concludes with the death of the young Welf VII in Rome in 1167, a second writer, who was probably a monk of the monastery of Steingarten in the diocese of Augsberg, then produced a short continuation which described the last years of his father, Welf VI, until his death in old age in 1191.