St. Hedwig gives her widow's lands to feed a thousand at Trebnitz

TREBNITZ, Silesia, 1203 AD — In 1202 or 1203 AD, Duke Henry of Silesia built a convent for Cistercian nuns at Trebnitz, a short way north of his capital, Breslau. Silesia is a duchy in what is today south-western Poland, and the two towns are now called Trzebnica and Wrocław. Duke Henry paid for the building out of his own funds, on the advice of his wife, Saint Hedwig of Silesia. It was the first house for religious women in Silesia, and it was given land and income enough to feed and house a thousand people and to take in guests for as long as it stood. St. Hedwig gave the convent her dower. A dower was land set aside out of a husband’s estate at the wedding, so that the wife would have a living for the rest of her life if she outlived him.

St. Hedwig was born about 1174 AD at the castle of Andechs in Bavaria, one of eight children of Count Berthold of Andechs, and as a girl she was taught by the nuns of Kitzingen. In 1186 AD, at twelve, she was married to Henry, the son of Duke Boleslaw of Silesia. The marriage was her parents’ choice, not hers. When Duke Boleslaw died in 1201 AD, Henry succeeded him, and she became Duchess of Silesia.

St. Hedwig counted the saving of souls among the greatest works of mercy, so she kept advising and urging her husband until he built the house. Duke Henry endowed it hoping to hear at the Last Judgment the words Christ speaks in the Gospel of Matthew: “I was a stranger, and you took me in.”

St. Hedwig’s dower was the estate of Sauon: about four hundred peasant farms on the best land, with the villages around them. She gave all of it to Trebnitz. Duke Henry’s own gift to the nuns was the town of Trebnitz and a long list of villages, with their rents and dues, given for ever. St. Hedwig’s dower rights covered those lands too, so they would also have helped support her as a widow. She gave up that claim as well.

The thousand were not all to be nuns. A hundred were nuns at the first foundation. The rest were girls from families that had fallen on hard times. They were to be brought up at Trebnitz and then given money to marry, or left free to take vows if they chose.

The men who oversaw the work put the cost of the building at about thirty thousand marks. The walls alone were reckoned at twenty thousand marks, and the whole cloister was roofed with lead. The church and cloister were dedicated to God, the Virgin Mary and the Apostle Bartholomew.

While the walls went up, St. Hedwig let no one sentenced to death in the duke’s courts be executed. Each condemned man was put to work on the building instead, for a term fixed by his crime: the worse the crime, the longer or harder the work.

St. Hedwig sent home to Germany for the nuns. Her brother, Bishop Ekbert of Bamberg, chose them from his own city and diocese, with her consent. On November 22, 1202 AD, before they had arrived, Pope Innocent III took the new house under his protection.

Their abbess was Petrussa, a German who had taught St. Hedwig at Kitzingen. Petrussa had been a Benedictine there and wore that order’s black habit. She took the white habit of the Cistercians in its place so that she could lead the new nuns to a distant country none of them knew.

On January 13, 1203 AD, Bishop Cyprian of Breslau installed the nuns from Bamberg at Trebnitz. In his charter for the house, Duke Henry set down why he had chosen nuns: “I chose this order of nuns because, while there are in my land cloisters of three orders to which men could and can flee for the salvation of souls, the refuge of cloistered quiet was lacking only to women. But now in this cloister, by the mercy of God, the frailty of women can have a refuge for the expiation of their sins.”