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The Roman-German King and Emperor Konrad II (1024-1039) wanted the case to be settled once and for all for all Christians in his empire.
When does Advent begin and how many Advent Sundays are there?
In the Middle Ages, not only theologians, but also many believers, repeatedly quarreled over this question, which is important for the practice of worship.
On December 3, 1038, a synod in the Palatinate monastery of Limburg near Bad Dürkheim, at the instigation of the Roman-German emperor, set the four Sundays of Advent: The first Sunday of Advent must always be observed between November 27 and December 3 .
This regulation has been in force for Catholic believers for almost 1000 years until today.
The Protestants followed them in it.
This year the first Sunday in Advent falls on November 29th.
Konrad II (approx. 990-1039), East Franconian king since 1024 and emperor in 1027, founded the Salian dynasty
Source: picture alliance / akg-images
The momentous meeting of the bishops in what was then the monastery on the edge of the Palatinate Forest was preceded by a conflict that went down in history as the “Strasbourg Advent Dispute”.
The founder of the Salier dynasty stopped by his uncle, the Strasbourg bishop Wilhelm, on the return journey from Burgundy to Goslar on November 26, 1038.
On this very day - a Sunday - he celebrated the first Advent with his clergy.
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Konrad was upset and stayed away from the celebration: the service was a week too early and a deviation from the church norm, he criticized.
Because Bishop Wilhelm began Advent on November 26th, there would have been a total of five Advent Sundays from 1038 to December 24th - one more than Pope Gregory the Great had prescribed for the Roman Church around 400 years earlier.
The four Sundays symbolized the 4000 years that people had to wait for the Savior after the Fall.
Place of the synod: ruins of the Limburg monastery near Bad Dürkheim
Source: picture alliance / imageBROKER
The cause of the dispute was that there were no uniform rules for the duration of the Advent season for the Christian West.
In it, Christians prepare for the feast of the birth of Jesus Christ.
Depending on the liturgy, there were four, five, six or even seven Advent Sundays in different regions of the empire.
Whenever Christmas fell on a Monday, as in 1038, it became an additional problem: Did Christmas Eve count as the fourth Advent?
And did the Advent season, which was a time of penance and fasting, last three or four full weeks?
A week later, on December 3rd, Konrad and his wife Gisela celebrated the first Advent in the Limburg monastery, which he founded and of which only a ruin remains today - and hastily convened a synod.
This clarified the canonical case in the presence of the emperor, as two later sources from Speyer and Weißenburg report.
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As the “keeper of Christianity”, Konrad felt obliged to ensure the unity of faith and worship practice in his empire, explains the Heidelberg medieval historian Bernd Schneidmüller.
The correct execution of the liturgy was "totally important" for medieval people: If there is no unanimity on questions of faith, according to this understanding, God himself is also called into question, explains Schneidmüller.
He is the scientific director of the Rhineland-Palatinate state exhibition "The Emperors and the Pillars of Their Power" in the Mainz State Museum, which is currently closed due to corona and is to be shown until April 18, 2021.
The historian Karl Josef Benz analyzed in an essay on the Strasbourg Advent dispute that the emperor had not only religious but also strong political power reasons to intervene within the church and regulate the length of the Advent period.
Konrad even considered a split in the church possible because of the dispute, and this in turn would have threatened the unity of the empire, argues Benz.
Ultimately, at the synod in the Limburg monastery, the participating bishops independently "resolved a tangible problem with the support of the emperor," says Pastor Mathias Köller from the archives of the diocese of Speyer.
The bishops supported the emperor's position that there should not be more than four Sundays in Advent.
Even the historian Schneidmüller does not believe that Konrad spoke a word of power against the church in the Advent dispute.
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It was not until the Council of Trento in 1570 that the regulation of the four Sundays in Advent became legally binding for the Roman Catholic Church.
Nevertheless, there has been a six-week Advent season in the Archdiocese of Milan to this day.
The Orthodox churches also celebrate Advent every six weeks.
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