Mainz

MAINZ, mainta: A city of Germany, 20 m. w.s.w. of Frankfort, formerly the seat of an archbishopric and once the moat important ecclesiastical center of Germany. The beginning of the Christian Church there is involved in obscurity, although the statement of Irenaeus ( Hær. L, x. 2) that Christian communities existed in Germany in his time renders it probable that Christians then lived in Mainz. Old Christian inscriptions from the city are almost en tirely lacking, but Amxnianus Marcellinus (xxvii. 10) states that in 368 a large portion of the popu lation was Christian. According to Jerome (Epist. exTtiii. 16), thousands were killed in the church when Mainz was taken by the Germans in the early part of the fifth century, yet the effects of this disaster were only transitory, and ancient churches were still standing about the middle of the century, the Christian community having become Teutonized in the mean time.

Although the bishopric of Mainz certainly existed as early as 550, Christianity scarcely flourished there, for the local church was involved in the de cay of the Frankish Church in the closing years of the Merovingians. The revival first began when Boniface became bishop in 745 or 746, and it was then that the bishopric commenced to extend. Originally it seems to have embraced only the Frankish territories on the Rhine and Main, for bishoprics were erected in Buraburg and. Erfurt in 741, although they seem to have lapsed after the death of their first bishops and then formed part of the bishopric of Mainz. The diocese thus be came larger than any other in Germany, stretching from Donneraberg in the south to the Harz in the north, and from the upper portion of the Saale in the east beyond the Nahe in the west. Between 780 and 782 the successor of Boniface, Lullus (see Lullus of Mainz), was raised to the rank of an archbishop and Mainz became the metropolitan city. The province later comprised the Frankish bishop rics of Würzburg, EichatStt, Worms, and Speyer; the Swabian bishoprics of Augsburg, Constance, Strasburg, and Chur; the Saxon bishoprics of Pad erborn, Hildesheim, Halberstadt, and Verden; and the bishoprics of Bamberg, Prague, and Ohniitz. In 1047, however, Bamberg was detached from Mainz and made immediately subject to the holy see; and after the elevation of Prague into an arch bishopric in 1343 the Czech sees were taken from Mainz.

(A. Hauck.)

From the episcopate of Christian I. (1165-83), who had been chancellor to Frederick Barbarossa before his consecration, this office became permanently connected with the see of Mainz; and when the electoral system had its first beginning in 1125, largely at the suggestion of Adalbert I. (1109-37), it was natural that he should be one of the electors. When the number was later fixed at seven, of whom three were ecclesiastics (the archbishops of Mainz, Cologne, and Treves), the archbishop of Mainz, who in any case took precedence over the other princes of the empire, ranked as the first. In the period of the Reformation, the fifty-sixth and fiftyseventh archbishops, Albert II. of Brandenburg (1514-45) and Sebastian von Heuaenstamm (1545-1555) governed with wisdom and moderation, and checked the spread of Protestantism without recourse to violence. The see maintained its dignity down to the French Revolution, at which period the archbishop had an income of 1,400,000 gulden, and was both temporal and spiritual ruler of a population of 400,000. The territory of the see was incorporated with the dominions of the French Republic in 1797; and by the Peace of Luneville (1801) a settlement was made which, when the last archbishop, Frederick Charles Joseph, Baron von Erthal (1774-1802), died, allowed his coadjutor Dalberg to retain, with the title of arch-chancellor, the principalities of Aschaffenburg and Regensburg

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and the county of Wetzlar, the see being transferred to Regensburg. After the Concordat of 1801 had gone into effect, Napoleon arranged for the elevation of Mainz once more to the position of a bishopric, and the cathedral, which had been almost ruined in the wars, was finally restored. The territory of the ancient see was incorporated in 1814 with the grand duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt. The diocese was vacant from 1818 to 1830, when, on the creation of the ecclesiastical province of the Upper Rhine, it was placed under the metropolitan jurisdiction of the archbishop of Freiburg.

Bibliography: J. F. Böhmer, Regesta archiepiaeoporum Mapuntinenaium, ed. C. Will, 2 vols., Innsbruck, 1877-86; G. C. Joannis, Rensm Moguntiacarum iibri. 3 vols.. Frankfort, 1722-27; V. F. de Gudenus, Codes diplomaticus anecdotoru,m rea Moguntirws iRuatrantium, 5 vols., Göttingen, 1743-58; 8. A. Würdtwein, Dioeceaie Mopuntina in arrhidiaconatue diviaa, 4 vols., Mannheim, 1769; Monuments Moguntina, ed. P. Jaffé, Berlin, 1868; C. G. Bockenheimer, Die Mainxer Biach6Je des 18. Jahrhunderts, Mainz, 1888; J. Jaeger, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Erzetifta Mainz, Osnabrück, 1894; J. Schmidt, Die kathdische Reatauralion in den Kurnminzer Hernschaften, Erlangen, 1902; J. Simon, Stand and Herkurft der BiaehdJe der Mainzer Kirchenproainz im Mittelalter, Weimar, 1908; and literature under Boniface, Saint; Lullus of Mainz; Rabanus Maurus.