People of the Valley get a Protector

How a medieval feud, a gift of vineyard land, a scribe's decision to write in dialect, a French siege and one priest's auction bid came together to give the Mergener family its land, its livelihood and its name.

Key takeaways

• Mergen is the Moselle dialect form of Maria. Mergener means "one who belongs to St. Mergen", the abbey of St. Mary of the Martyrs.
• The Moselle Feud (1008–1017) between Adalbero von Luxemburg and the emperor's archbishops, above all Poppo von Babenberg, set the stage for the abbey's great vineyard endowment.
• In 1030 Adalbero gave St. Mergen five Hufen (roughly 100–150 acres) at Wiltingen, the seed of the Scharzhof estate. The same year Poppo confirmed the abbey's possessions.
• In 1492 Abbot Johannes II had the abbey's land register written in the local vernacular, which fixed Mergener in writing as a family name.
• In 1675 French forces under Marshal François de Créquy fortified Trier against an imperial army. The clearing of land outside the walls scattered the abbey's tenant families upriver to Wasserliesch, Konz and Wiltingen.
• In 1797 the abbey's own prior, Johann Jakob Koch, bought Scharzhof at a French state auction on the abbot's behalf and kept it. His descendants became the Egon Müller wine family.

Timeline at a glance

Part 1Three Pivotal Turning Points: The Whole Map

Family names rarely appear by accident. When you follow the Mergener name back through German state records (the Landeshauptarchiv Koblenz) and the church rolls of the Diocese of Trier (Bistum Trier), you find that three moments across roughly 700 years did most of the work. Four people stand at the centre of them. The rest of this article explains each one in detail, but it helps to see the whole shape first.

Turning point 1: the feud and the keys to power (1008–1030)

In the early eleventh century Trier was torn apart by the Moselfehde, the Moselle Feud: a war for control of the archbishopric and, with it, the wealthy Moselle and Saar river valleys. Adalbero von Luxemburg seized the archbishop's seat without the emperor's approval. Emperor Henry II answered by sending loyal archbishops against him, the most formidable being Poppo von Babenberg. When the dust settled, Adalbero's family had lost the fight for Trier, and Adalbero himself gave vineyard land at Wiltingen, the future Scharzhof, to the Abbey of St. Maria ad Martyres. Placed in church hands, the land was protected, and Poppo confirmed the abbey's holdings. This created the protected estate economy to which Mergener ancestors would be bound for the next eight centuries.

Turning point 2: the birth of the written surname (1492)

For centuries church scribes wrote in Latin and described local people with phrases like de Sancta Maria, "of Saint Mary." When Abbot Johannes II took charge in 1492, he ordered a complete new register of the abbey's lands and tenants, and his scribes wrote it in the spoken dialect of the Moselle. Instead of the Latin phrase they wrote down the name as people actually said it: Mergener, "those belonging to St. Mergen." That change froze an everyday nickname into an official, written surname.

Turning point 3: the devastation that forced a migration (1675)

For generations Mergener families lived around the abbey walls on the northern plain of Trier. Then, in the Franco-Dutch War, the French commander Marshal François de Créquy prepared Trier for a siege. Buildings outside the city walls, which an attacking army could use as cover, were cleared, and the families who had farmed the abbey's land for centuries were made refugees. This answers a long-standing genealogical puzzle: why this branch of the family turns up upriver in Wasserliesch and Konz. Uprooted from the abbey plain, they carried their name and their wine-growing skills to the abbey's rural estates. From Wasserliesch, nearly two centuries later, descendants such as Mathias would board ships for America.

Part 2 · Thread 1: the landArchbishop Poppo von Babenberg: Imperial Tactician and Prince of Trier

To understand how St. Mergen became rich and protected, we start with the man who restored order to Trier. Poppo von Babenberg (died 1047) was Archbishop of Trier from 1016 until his death, one of the great churchman-statesmen of the Ottonian and early Salian empire. His authority came from four sources: royal blood, imperial backing, military skill and a gift for turning victories into permanent institutions.

1. Imperial bloodlines and a royal network

Poppo was a prince of the House of Babenberg, the dynasty that ruled Austria before the Habsburgs. He was a son of Leopold I, Margrave of Austria, and a brother of Ernest I, Duke of Swabia. That lineage gave him direct access to the courts of Emperors Henry II (reigned 1002–1024) and Conrad II (1024–1039).

Why does that matter? In the early 1000s the emperor relied heavily on bishops to govern. Unlike lay nobles, bishops could not pass their offices to sons, so the emperor could choose loyal men for each vacancy. When Henry II needed to break the hold of independent-minded regional families, such as the House of Luxembourg, he wanted an archbishop with high rank, iron loyalty and command experience. Poppo was that man.

2. A military mind on the Moselle

When Poppo arrived in 1016 he inherited a war already eight years old (Part 3 explains how it began). The Mergener Archive's reading of his campaign stresses method over bravado:

• Siege, not storm. Rather than throw men at walls, the archbishop's side cut supply lines along the Moselle and Saar and took outlying Luxembourg strongholds one by one.
• Controlling the rivers. By placing strategic river estates under monastic ownership and imperial protection, Poppo created zones that local robber barons could not easily attack without defying both church and emperor.
• Fortifying the city. Poppo is remembered for strengthening Trier, and above all for turning the great Roman gate, the Porta Nigra, into a church.

3. Turning victory into institutions

Poppo understood that battlefield wins fade unless they are written into law and property. His lasting achievement was administrative. He secured imperial charters and immunities for church estates so that monastic land could not be taxed or seized by local knights. For our story the key document is dated 1030, when Poppo confirmed the possessions of St. Maria ad Martyres. That confirmation is the legal shield that protected the abbey's Wiltingen land, including what became Scharzhof. Under Poppo the archbishopric also tightened its grip on Moselle wine production, river tolls and market rights, the money that paid for garrisons and new Romanesque churches.

4. Prestige and spiritual authority

Poppo's pilgrimage to the Holy Land, the relics and saint he brought home, and his building projects raised Trier's standing as a holy city of the empire. That prestige had a practical side: challenging an archbishop so closely tied to the emperor, and to the saints, risked imperial outlawry or excommunication. Monastic estates under his protection were, in effect, off limits.

Part 3 · Thread 1: the landAdalbero von Luxemburg: The Entitled Rebel and the Moselle Feud

Every story needs its rival. Adalbero von Luxemburg (c. 970 – c. 1036/37) is the man whose ambition started the Moselle Feud and whose land ended up in the abbey's hands.

1. Born to power

Adalbero did not build power; he inherited it. He was a son of Count Siegfried, founder of the House of Luxembourg, whose family held land across the Ardennes, the Moselle and the Saar. His sister Cunigunde was married to King (from 1014, Emperor) Henry II, and his brothers were counts, a duke (Henry, Duke of Bavaria) and a bishop (Dietrich, Bishop of Metz). Adalbero himself was a canon at Trier and provost of St. Paulin, one of the city's great churches.

2. The seizure of 1008

When Archbishop Liudolf of Trier died in 1008, Adalbero was chosen by his supporters in Trier and moved fast. He took the archbishop's palace, the city's strong points and the vital Moselle bridge, and acted as archbishop. He assumed that his brother-in-law the king would accept a family member in one of the richest sees in Europe.

Henry II refused. Trier was an electoral archbishopric: whoever held it had a voice in choosing kings. Letting the Luxembourgs turn it into a family possession was unacceptable. Henry appointed his own candidate, Megingaud (archbishop 1008–1015), and led troops to Trier himself in 1008. The result was the Moselfehde, a grinding regional war in which Adalbero's brothers took his side. The king punished them: in 1009 Henry of Luxembourg was deprived of the duchy of Bavaria, and Empress Cunigunde was left caught between husband and family.

3. The imperial counter-strike

After Megingaud died in 1015, Henry II appointed Poppo von Babenberg in 1016. The Mergener Archive's account describes Poppo methodically isolating Luxembourg positions along the Moselle and Saar. By 1017 the conflict was ending: Henry II reconciled with the Luxembourg family, and Henry of Luxembourg got Bavaria back. Adalbero did not become archbishop. He remained provost of St. Paulin for the rest of his life.

4. Surrender dressed as piety

Medieval nobles rarely admitted defeat in plain words. A traditional way to settle a quarrel with the Church was to give it land, which turned a loss into an act of devotion. The Mergener Archive reads Adalbero's gift of the Wiltingen land to St. Mergen this way: a settlement that served both sides.

• For the Church: land given to a monastery came under church immunity; attacking it risked excommunication.
• For the Luxembourgs: a "pious gift for holy prayers" let the family present the loss of land as devotion rather than surrender.

5. The Luxembourg pivot

Blocked in Trier, the House of Luxembourg turned to building up its own county. It worked. Three centuries later the dynasty produced four Kings of the Romans (Henry VII, Charles IV, Wenceslaus and Sigismund), three of whom were crowned Holy Roman Emperor (Henry VII, Charles IV and Sigismund), as well as four Kings of Bohemia.

Part 4 · Thread 1: the landLuxemburg's Bequest: Five Hufen at Wiltingen, 1030

Now we come to the gift itself: the moment the future Scharzhof passed to St. Mergen. To understand it, we need to know where the Luxembourgs' land came from, what a "Hufe" was and why a nobleman would give land away.

1. Where the Luxembourg land came from: Siegfried's trade of 963

Adalbero's father, Count Siegfried (c. 922–998), did not conquer Luxembourg. He traded for it. Siegfried belonged to the high nobility of Lotharingia (Lorraine), with descent from Charlemagne on his mother's side and close ties to Emperor Otto I. As a count in the Ardennes he held rich but scattered land along the Sûre, Moselle and Alzette rivers. What he lacked was a secure stronghold.

He found one on the Bock, a rocky promontory above a loop of the Alzette, where a small old fort called Lucilinburhuc ("little fortress") stood. It belonged to the powerful Abbey of St. Maximin in Trier. Siegfried proposed an exchange:

• He gave: fertile farmland he owned at Feulen, near modern Ettelbruck.
• He received: the Bock promontory and the Lucilinburhuc fort.

The exchange charter of 12 April 963 is celebrated as Luxembourg's founding. Siegfried built a castle, a town grew below it, and he married Hedwig of Nordgau, allying his house with powerful families in Alsace and the Rhineland. His descendants, who began calling themselves Counts of Luxembourg with Conrad I, grew the county through marriage, purchase and war.

Notice the pattern: the Luxembourgs gained their home by trading land with one Trier abbey, St. Maximin, and two generations later gave land to another, St. Mergen. Land and monasteries were the currency of power in this region.

2. The gift of 1030

In 1030 Adalbero, still provost of St. Paulin, gave five Hufen of land at Wiltingen, in the area that became the Scharzhof, to the Abbey of St. Maria ad Martyres. Three motives are usually given:

1. For the soul (pro anima). Nobles and senior clergy left land to monasteries in return for prayers for their salvation and yearly memorial Masses (anniversaria). An ageing churchman who had fought a war against his own Church had good reason to invest in prayers.
2. Patronage and alliances. The gift strengthened one of Trier's major monasteries while keeping the Luxembourgs visible as leading patrons of the region's religious houses.
3. Developing the land. Much of the steep Saar hillside still had to be cleared and cultivated. Benedictine monks were organised, literate and long-lived as an institution, which made them ideal for turning rough land into a permanent source of income.

Part 5 · Thread 1: the landFather Johann Jakob Koch and the Scharzhof Purchase

Jump forward nearly eight centuries. The abbey has held Scharzhof since 1030 and built it into its most valuable vineyard. Then the French Revolution arrives, and one of St. Mergen's own monks becomes the estate's new owner.

1. Who was Johann Jakob Koch?

Johann Jakob Koch (French documents call him Jacques or Jean-Jacques Koch) was born in 1762 in Prüm in the Eifel. In eighteenth-century Trier, becoming a Benedictine monk or a priest was not open to the poor: families had to pay for years of Latin schooling and seminary training, for example at Trier's Seminarium Clementinum or the University of Trier. The Koch family belonged to the comfortable, property-owning rural middle class of the region, the world of estate managers, millers, timber merchants and substantial wine-growers.

Koch rose to become prior of St. Mergen, second in command after the abbot. He also spoke French, which proved decisive. In 1796 he was sent to Wiltingen to assist the ageing parish priest, placing him right beside the Scharzhof.

2. Revolution comes to the Rhineland

French revolutionary armies occupied the left bank of the Rhine in 1794. The new authorities sequestered church property and began selling it as biens nationaux, "national property." For the monks of St. Mergen the danger was obvious: if Scharzhof went to auction, a speculator could buy it. Their plan was to use a trusted man with the right language to buy it back quietly on the abbey's behalf.

3. The auction of July 1797

Abbot Placidus Mannebach instructed Koch to acquire the property. At an auction held under the French administration of the Département des Forêts (whose capital was Luxembourg), Scharzhof was awarded to "citoyen Jacques Koch, ecclésiastique et habitant à Viltingen" on 24 July 1797, with the sale completed on 29 July. According to the auction documents studied by Mosel wine historian Lars Carlberg:

• 36,100 livres for Scharzhof itself;
• 9,000 livres for the abbey's Mergen press house;
• about 250 livres in fees: more than 45,000 livres in total.

The abbey supplied 8,000 francs, deposited with the Hospice Civil in Luxembourg, and Koch covered the rest with credit bonds, his own funds and family borrowing. The French paper-money collapse of the 1790s had made hard coin especially powerful, which helped the buyers.

4. Keeping the prize

Koch kept the estate in his own name. He left the Benedictine order in 1799, gave up his parish post and in 1801 married his housekeeper, Anna Maria Clomes. He ran Scharzhof as a private wine estate until his death in 1830. A man who began as a comfortably-off son of the middle class ended as one of the wealthiest private landowners in the Saar valley.

Part 6 · Thread 1: the landBetrayal at Scharzhofberg: Monasteries, Money and the Revolution

Part 5 told the purchase from Koch's side. This part steps back to see what the monks lost, how the "betrayal" has been told and retold, and where the land went next.

1. The sacred slate

The Scharzhofberg is a steep slope of grey slate above the Saar near Wiltingen. Its Rieslings are among the most sought-after white wines in the world. Long before it became a luxury name, it was the crown jewel of St. Mergen, built up across centuries of monastic work:

2. The abbey as an economic engine

By the High Middle Ages St. Mergen worked much like a corporation, investing in fields, forests, mills and vineyards across the Moselle and Saar. Around the mother house in Trier lay three kinds of garden: the Hortus (kitchen garden: leeks, parsnips, skirret, salsify, old brassicas, garlic and broad beans), the Herbularius (medicinal garden beside the infirmary: sage, hyssop, fennel, mint, feverfew, calendula) and the Pomarium (orchards of apples, pears, walnuts and plums), with vineyards terraced above the river.

Surplus became trade goods: cask wine (acidic, age-worthy Moselle whites shipped across northern Europe, the abbey's main cash crop), herb-infused wine vinegars for preserving food, dried fruit and apple leather, monastic mustard made with verjuice and honey, and salves of beeswax and walnut oil infused with St. John's wort or comfrey. Profits supported the infirmary, the scriptorium and grain stores that were opened to peasants in famine years. Tenant families like the Mergeners did the daily labour that kept this system running.

3. How the "betrayal" story grew

The popular version says Koch planned all along to steal the estate, and even used French gendarmes to chase hungry monks away from Scharzhof's door. It comes largely from a parish chronicle by Dean Schauffler, written about a century after the events. The French administrative records tell a more tangled story. The abbot explicitly told Koch to acquire the property in his own name (the only safe way to do it under French law). The monks later asked him to share it with them, and he refused. The gendarme story is dismissed as legend by historian Thomas Müller.

4. Koch's heirs and the Egon Müller dynasty

When Koch died in 1830, the estate was divided among his children:

• Elisabeth Koch (born 1810) married Felix Müller, founder of the Müller wine-growing family. Their line holds Scharzhof today as the world-famous Egon Müller estate.
• Susanna Clara Koch (1818–1906) sold her share, which included the original 1719 abbey manor house, to Trier Cathedral in 1851 for 24,900 Prussian thalers. She became a nun, Sister Mechtilde, and founded the convent of Perpetual Adoration in Trier-Gartenfeld. Family tradition says guilt over her father's actions moved her. The Cathedral still owns the 1719 building.
• Joseph Koch (born 1803) died in 1851, and his portion was also auctioned to the Cathedral.

The Müllers built a new, château-like Scharzhof in the late 1880s, rebuilt after a fire in 1917.

5. The end of St. Mergen

The abbey itself did not survive long after losing its vineyard. French secularization dissolved St. Mergen in 1802, and between 1804/05 and 1807 the church and most buildings were torn down. Many records were lost; surviving manuscripts went to the Stadtbibliothek Trier. Only former economic buildings (the east wing) remain. After use by the Prussian army, they became the Exzellenzhaus youth and cultural centre in 1972, in north Trier. After nearly eleven centuries, the institution that gave the Mergener family its name was gone.

Part 7 · Thread 2: the nameAbbot Johannes II (1492): The Birth of the Written Surname

A surname only becomes a surname when someone writes it down the same way again and again. For the Mergener family, the Mergener Archive's research points to one abbot and one register.

1. The world of 1492

Johannes II was elected abbot of St. Maria ad Martyres in 1492, the year Columbus reached the Americas. The Holy Roman Empire was changing. Maximilian I, King of the Romans from 1486, sole ruler from 1493 and emperor-elect from 1508, drove a programme of administrative reform (the Reichsreform, launched at the Diet of Worms in 1495). Lords and monasteries alike faced pressure to know exactly what they owned, who owed them what and on what terms.

St. Mergen held fields, river mills and vineyard parcels throughout the Moselle and Saar valleys, including the Scharzhof holdings. But after centuries of oral agreements, informal leases and overlapping feudal claims, its administration was a tangle, and local secular lords were quick to exploit any uncertainty.

2. Who was Johannes II?

In the Electorate of Trier in the late 1400s, abbots were usually drawn from the city's patrician families or the regional gentry. Johannes II's record suggests training in canon law and estate management, and deep familiarity with local custom. That combination gave him the authority to audit every abbey property without provoking armed conflict with neighbouring nobles.

3. The great reform: a register in the people's language

His defining act was to commission a complete new Urbar (also called a Salbuch): a register listing every vineyard parcel, field, tenant family, rent and obligation owed to St. Mergen. What made it unusual was the language:

• From Latin to dialect. Breaking with centuries of church practice, Johannes II had his scribes write the register in the local Moselle Franconian dialect instead of Latin.
• Names as spoken. Tenants were recorded by the names neighbours actually called them, not Latin descriptions such as de Sancta Maria.
• A family identity on paper. Among those spoken names was Mergener, "one belonging to St. Mergen," used for people who lived on or worked the abbey's estates. Written into a legal register, and copied into later leases across villages such as Wasserliesch, it became a fixed, hereditary surname.

4. A lasting foundation

By setting precise boundaries and written tenant contracts, Johannes II protected St. Mergen's income from encroaching lords. The system proved sturdy enough to survive the religious upheavals of the 1500s, the 1552 siege of Trier by Margrave Albrecht Alcibiades of Brandenburg-Kulmbach (which damaged the unwalled abbey), the Thirty Years' War and the wars of Louis XIV, and to keep tenant records that genealogists still rely on.

Part 8 · Thread 2: the nameMarshal François de Créquy and the Destruction of 1675

By the 1670s the Mergener name had been in the abbey's books for nearly two centuries, and Mergener families still lived close to the abbey on Trier's northern plain. A war between France and the Empire changed that.

1. The Rhine front of the Franco-Dutch War

In the Franco-Dutch War (1672–1678), King Louis XIV of France fought the Dutch Republic and, soon, the Holy Roman Emperor and his allies. The Electorate of Trier lay directly on France's route: holding the Moselle valley meant controlling supply lines between Alsace, Luxembourg and the Palatinate. French troops occupied Trier in 1673, with the Comte de Vignory commanding the garrison.

In 1675 an imperial army closed in. Marshal François de Créquy, a capable but hard commander, came to relieve Trier. Old medieval walls could not stand up to modern siege guns, so the French followed a harsh logic: anything outside the walls that could shelter an attacker had to go.

2. The destruction around St. Mergen

St. Maria ad Martyres stood just outside Trier's northern gates, near the Moselle. To a military engineer its stone church, towers and outbuildings were a gift to the enemy: cover, height and ready-made siege positions. The Mergener Archive's account describes the clearance:

• Buildings brought down: sappers undermined and collapsed stone structures so the enemy could not use them.
• Stores and archives lost: grain, wine, liturgical treasures and documents were seized or destroyed.
• Fields of fire cleared: orchards, outbuildings and tenant cottages around the abbey were burned to give French guns on the walls clear sightlines.

3. The Battle of Konzer Brücke and the fall of Trier

On 11 August 1675, Créquy's relief army met the imperial and allied forces of Duke Charles IV of Lorraine, Duke George William of Brunswick-Lüneburg and Otto de Grana at the bridge at Konz, where the Saar joins the Moselle, a few miles from Wasserliesch and Wiltingen. The French were badly defeated, with about 2,400 men captured and ten guns lost. Créquy escaped into Trier and took command, but after a siege the city surrendered on 9 September 1675 and Créquy was taken prisoner.

Put the map together and the war takes on a family dimension. The fighting ran right through the country Mergener families knew: the abbey plain at Trier, the bridge at Konz and the villages of the lower Saar and upper Moselle.

4. Dispersal of monks and tenant families

• The monks fled inside Trier's walls or to the abbey's rural estates on the Saar and Moselle.
• The tenant families, recorded as Mergener because of their tie to St. Mergen, lost homes and fields around the city.
• Rural refuge: they retreated to the abbey's outlying farms, mills and vineyards on the upper Moselle and Saar, above all the parish centres of Wasserliesch, Konz and Wiltingen.

5. From the abbey's doorstep to village life

St. Mergen was rebuilt in modest form in the eighteenth century, but the families' centre of gravity had moved for good. The Mergeners changed from a workforce living on the edge of a city into rooted, multi-generational farming and wine-growing families in the villages. In places like Wasserliesch they kept their name and trade through French occupation, the return of German rule under Prussia from 1815, and on to the nineteenth-century emigration that took Mathias and others to America.

ConclusionThe Unbroken Chain

Line the eight stories up and they make a single chain of cause and effect running from 1008 to the present day:

1. 1008–1017 · Adalbero von Luxemburg seizes Trier and starts the Moselle Feud; St. Mergen's monks are expelled.
2. 1016–1047 · Poppo von Babenberg restores imperial control and secures church estates by charter.
3. 1030 · The five Hufen at Wiltingen pass to St. Mergen and Poppo confirms the abbey's holdings: the birth of the Scharzhof estate.
4. 1492 · Abbot Johannes II has the tenants written down in their own dialect, and Mergener becomes a surname.
5. 1675 · Marshal Créquy's defence of Trier devastates the abbey plain and scatters Mergener families to Wasserliesch, Konz and Wiltingen.
6. 1797 · Johann Jakob Koch buys Scharzhof for the abbey and keeps it; in 1802 St. Mergen is dissolved.
7. 1830–1851 · Koch's heirs divide the estate between the Müller family and Trier Cathedral; the Egon Müller name is born.
8. 1800s · The Mergener families of Wasserliesch carry the name of a vanished abbey to the New World.

The abbey is gone and its church lies under a later city. But its name lives on twice: in a vineyard the whole wine world knows, and in the surname of the families who once worked it.

ReferenceGlossary

St. Maria ad Martyres / St. Mergen

"St. Mary of the Martyrs," the Benedictine abbey on the northern edge of Trier; Mergen is the local dialect form of Maria. Also known as St. Maria ad ripa ("at the riverbank") and the Marienabtei.

Mergener

"One belonging to St. Mergen": an affiliation name that became a hereditary surname.

Moselfehde (Moselle Feud)

The 1008–1017 war over the archbishopric of Trier between the House of Luxembourg and Emperor Henry II.

Provost (Propst)

The head of a college of canons, such as St. Paulin in Trier.

Hufe (pl. Hufen)

Land enough to support one farming family, about 30 Morgen or 24–30 acres.

Morgen

"Morning": land one man and an ox-team could plough in a morning, about ⅔ to 1 acre.

Pro anima

A gift "for the soul," made to the Church in return for prayers.

Urbar / Salbuch

A register of a lordship's lands, tenants and dues.

Moselle Franconian

The German dialect of the Trier region, the Moselle and the Saar.

Biens nationaux

Church property confiscated and sold by the French revolutionary state.

Département des Forêts

The French department (1795–1814) centred on Luxembourg, under which Scharzhof was sold.

Prior

Second in command of an abbey, after the abbot.

ReferenceFrequently Asked Questions

ReferenceSources and Further Reading

The eight Mergener Archive posts combined here

1. Three Pivotal Turning Points for the Mergener Name
2. (note) Archbishop Poppo von Babenberg
3. Adalbero von Luxemburg
4. (note) Luxemburg's Bequest of 5 Hufen in 1030 AD, Scharzhofberg
5. (note) Father Johann Jakob Koch and the Scharzhof Acquisition
6. Betrayal at Scharzhofberg: Monasteries, Money, and the Revolution
7. Abbot Johannes II of St Mergen 1492
8. Marshal François de Créquy & the 1675 Destruction of St. Mergen

Outside sources

• Lars Carlberg, How Scharzhof Came into Private Hands in the Early 19th Century (auction documents, Koch family, myths corrected)
• KuLaDig, Benediktinerabtei Sankt Marien zu den Märtyrern (founding, 1030 confirmation, Moselle Feud, 1552, dissolution)
• Klosterlexikon Rheinland-Pfalz, Trier – St. Maria ad martyres
• Wikipedia, Battle of Konzer Brücke
• Egon Müller, History: Egon Müller and the Scharzhofberg

Archives for primary records

• Landeshauptarchiv Koblenz: records of the Electorate of Trier and its monasteries
• Bistumsarchiv Trier: parish registers, including Wasserliesch, Konz and Wiltingen
• Stadtbibliothek / Stadtarchiv Trier: surviving St. Mergen manuscripts

Open research questions

• Locate and cite the 1492 Urbar (collection and item number) and the earliest entry spelled Mergener.
• Find the text of the 1030 gift and Poppo's 1030 confirmation: does either mention the feud?
• Earlier posts credit Abbot Placidus Mannebach with commissioning the 1719 manor house, but Mannebach was abbot in 1797. Identify the abbot of 1719.
• Establish whether the demolitions around St. Mergen were ordered by Vignory (1673–74) or Créquy (1675).
• Trace the first Mergener entries in the Wasserliesch parish registers to date the move from the abbey plain.

© Mergener Archive. All rights reserved. This article consolidates eight earlier posts and updates them with published archival research where noted.