Room 2

A House for God and Man

The Babenberg family had received the Eastern Marches from the Roman-German emperor to protect the German Empire from the insecure east. Melk was one of the principal residences of this family, who expanded the Eastern Marches further and further to the East and the North.

As Vienna increasingly became the center of the Easter Marches, Leopold II founded a Benedictine monastery in Melk in 1089. Leopold III then secured the financial basis of the monastery through grants of property on what was then the periphery of the Eastern Marches (letter of donation 1113). The Babenbergs definitely wanted prayers to be said at the tomb of their ancestors in Melk, but they also recognized the cultural and missionary strength of the Rule of St. Benedict.

Individual Babenbergers gave the monastery important relics and works of art: the corpse of St. Coloman, a piece of the Cross of Christ, a portable altar. The legend of the theft of the Melk Cross, which was suddenly found in the Schotten monastery in Vienna, clearly shows that Melk had become countryside and Vienna was the center of the Eastern Marches. Melk’s importance as a monastery may be reflected in the fact that the cross did come back to Melk in the end.