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nephew, Henry, son of the second duke of Carinthia from the Spanheim dynasty, Engelbert.
Henry entered the Morimond Abbey in France, one of the four primary abbeys of the
Cistercian order, as did another aristocratic son from the same region and time, the renowned
chronicler Otto of Freising (d. 1158), whose father was the margrave of Austria, Leopold III
of Babenberg. In 1132, Henry founded a monastery in Villars in Lotharingia, where he served
as abbot, and from where the first Cistercians came to Carinthia. The route the monks
followed to Kostanjevica is good evidence of the fact that during the Middle Ages the
monastic orders, who continually travelled between their foundations, were – like the nobility
– expressly supranational and international. The Spanheims’ links with France, and the West
in general, may well have influenced the arrival of the Knights Templar in Ljubljana in 1167.
At the start of the thirteenth century, they appear to have come to the Križanke monastery
complex, where Duke Bernhard later settled the Teutonic Knights. These reports date from
very much later, but need not be discounted for that reason.
In the twelfth century, there were therefore five monasteries in the territory of present-
day Slovenia, representing four different orders. The picture had changed significantly by the
following century, when there were 21 monasteries from eight different orders. The increase
was mainly linked to the expansion of the new orders. In addition to the Dominicans of Ptuj
mentioned above, three convents of Dominican sisters were founded during that time
(Velesovo in 1238, Studenice before 1245 and Marenberg (Radlje) in 1251), along with three
foundations by Teutonic Knights (Velika Nedelja, Metlika and Ljubljana, all three after 1200)
and, most significantly, six Minorite monasteries in urban settlements (Gorizia in 1225, Koper
c. 1260, Ljubljana 1242, Celje probably before 1250, Ptuj after 1250 and Maribor c. 1250), to
mention only the most important. Over the next 150 years, the number of monasteries
increased further, growing until the crisis and decline of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
when several monasteries collapsed or changed their purpose (Gornji Grad, Pleterje,
Jurklošter, and almost all the Franciscan monasteries at some time).
The ideas that the monasteries were the major bearers and centres of cultural life
during the Middle Ages on the territory of modern-day Slovenia, and that their relatively late
establishment in the region – three centuries after Christianity had started to spread – caused a
significant delay in the diffusion of a literary culture are both very well established. The
wealthy episcopal residences and princely courts, and of course universities, also functioned
as cultural centres during the Middle Ages, in addition to the monasteries. Excluding the
coastal diocesan towns (among which Koper already had a cathedral Latin school by the end
of the twelfth century), the first diocese in modern-day Slovenia was founded as late as the
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middle of the fifteenth century, in Ljubljana, while there were only two princely courts: the
court of the Gorizian counts, from which there is no evidence of any significant cultural
production, and the court of the counts (princes) of Cilli, in Celje. In the first half of the
fifteenth century, under the last three counts of Cilli, who in many ways acted as Renaissance
princes, this court became a cultural centre with attested humanistic links, but the end of the
dynasty also brought an end to the court. Of the other noble castles, only Turjak in Carniola is
known to have started a library in the Middle Ages. The library of the Auersperg (Turjak)
lords became very important, and part of this is today kept in the Library of Congress in
Washington, DC.
Monasteries were therefore institutions that introduced, often for the first time since
the end of Antiquity, the cultural life typical of the rest of Europe into Slovene territory. This
was reflected in many different ways: in Romanesque ecclesiastical architecture, in music, in
miniature illustration in codices, and above all in books, i.e. the manuscript codices collected
in monastery libraries. Books were very much the monks’ tool, an idea held throughout
Europe, as was expressed in 1170 by Godefroy of St. Barbe-en-Auge, Normandy, in the well-
known phrase: “Claustrum sine armario quasi castrum sine armamentario” (“a monastery
without a library is like a fortress without an arsenal”). By the twelfth century, a network of
monasterial libraries had been established throughout Europe, and routes for lending,
ordering, copying or buying books criss-crossed the continent. The literary language of the
time was naturally Latin, given its international and scientific use in the Middle Ages, the
nature of monasteries as institutions, and the international nature of the monastic community.
Indeed, there was no real alternative as a written language. Each monastery required a range
of religious books for daily monastic life – the Bible, evangeliaries, missals, commentaries,
breveries, and the works of some of the most respected of the Church Fathers, such as
Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory the Great. These and similar writings comprised the basic
collection sought after by every monastic or ecclesiastical library. One of the most notable of
the latter was the extremely impressive collection of the Freising church of Sts. Primus and
Felician at Maria Wörth at Wörthersee in Carinthia, which, in the second half of the tenth
century, contained 42 manuscripts, including parts of the Bible, missals, psalters, lectionaries,
two antiphonaries and two graduals, and a book on the lives of Saints Primus and Felician.
Also very much worthy of passing mention is the will of Duke Eberhard of Friuli (from 863
or 864), which has preserved one of the very few lists known today of the contents of a lay
library before the turn of the millennium. In Eberhard’s time, many renowned pilgrims
travelled to Friuli, including figures from the Slavic East, such as the Carantanian count