Kapitelplatz

Kapitelplatz has room for market stalls, giant chess, and the Salzburg Festival’s summer screen. There is space for all this because of the cathedral that was begun and then dismantled down to foundation level.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Cathedral Monastery stood here—a complex with a cloister and chapels that belonged to the chapter. The chapter was a college of noble canons attached to the cathedral. They managed church affairs, governed the Prince-Archbishopric of Salzburg during an interregnum, and elected a new archbishop. The square took its name from them.

On the night of December eleventh to twelfth, fifteen ninety-eight, the old cathedral caught fire. Prince-Archbishop Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau, Salzburg’s secular ruler and the patron of the city’s reconstruction, initially intended to preserve the surviving parts. He then decided to clear the site for an enormous new church. In sixteen oh six, on his orders, the cathedral ruins and the northern half of the Cathedral Monastery were demolished. He had already built the canons a new Cathedral Chapter House on the neighboring Kapitelgasse. Twenty-four marble coats of arms of chapter members were placed above its portal, and above them was Wolf Dietrich’s own coat of arms, with an inscription stating that he had created the building.

By then, the archbishop had been disputing with the canons for many years over how far they were entitled to interfere in governing the Prince-Archbishopric of Salzburg. The dispute with Bavaria over salt brought matters to a head. Salzburg’s treasury depended on extraction in Hallein and on selling salt through neighboring lands. In the autumn of sixteen eleven, Wolf Dietrich ordered his soldiers to occupy Berchtesgaden, which was governed by the brother of Maximilian I, Duke of Bavaria. Wolf Dietrich wanted to uphold Salzburg’s claims and its trading terms; he was risking the revenues that supported his court, army, and construction projects.

Maximilian responded with an invasion. The chapter tried to stop the war through negotiations, but the archbishop rejected mediation and fled the city. The canons then asked the duke not to let him escape. Bavarian soldiers caught up with Wolf Dietrich, and in March sixteen twelve, the prisoner was forced to renounce his office. Among the terms, he was promised release. The promise was not kept: he spent the remaining five years in solitary confinement in Hohensalzburg Fortress, where he died.

Eleven days after the abdication, the chapter elected his cousin, Markus Sittikus von Hohenems, as archbishop. The new prince inherited a city with the monastery dismantled and the foundations of a cathedral already laid, one that was meant to extend toward the fortress hill. Markus Sittikus ordered the foundations dug out. The new church was laid out again from scratch, with its altar turned eastward, and returned to the site of the former cathedral. Markus himself did not live to see its consecration; his successor completed the construction.

Thus, the site Wolf Dietrich had cleared for another version of the cathedral remained open. Beyond the passage into Kapitelgasse, the portal with his coat of arms and those of the canons survives. Inside the former Cathedral Chapter House, the university senate now meets—in the very hall where the canons once elected Salzburg’s archbishops.