Chapter 3 - Youth In Germany

Summary

CHILDHOOD IN LIEBSTADT

GEORG MARGGRAFE was born on 20/30 September 1610 (old style/ new style) in Liebstadt, a small German village in the region of Meissen, located 23 km southeast of the centre of Dresden near the border with Bohemia (the western part of the present-day Czech Republic). At that time the village was populated by some 350 people, living in about 70 houses and one castle overseeing the valley. GEORG was the oldest child of his eponymous father GEORG MARGGRAFE (1582-1634) and ELISABETH SIMON. The MARGGRAFE family lived more than a century in and around Liebstadt. Father GEORG was a schoolmaster, who in 1609 had married the daughter of the local vicar, JOHANN SIMON (1557-1618). As the Liebstadt school was situated next to the church and its vicarage, the bride ELISABETH SIMON was literary ‘the girl next door’ (fig. 12).

Father MARGGRAFE was a learned man. He studied at the Lutheran Gymnasium in Freiburg until 1593, after which he continued his education at the University of Wittenberg, also known as the ‘Leucorea’. He probably was related to another GEORG MARGGRAFE (1533-1575), who in 1553 had studied in Leipzig and worked since 1566 as a vicar in the village of Pappendorf, 100 km west of Liebstadt. His son, GOTTFRIED MARGGRAFE (1570-1632), studied in Leipzig (1587) and Wittenberg (1593), before becoming a vicar in Langhennersdorf, near Freiberg, some 60 km from Liebstadt. The thorough education of both GOTTFRIED and father GEORG MARGGRAFE is so similar that a family relation seems likely.

Education was also very solid on mother’s side. Father GEORG MARGGRAFE studied in Wittenberg together with his future father-inlaw, JOHANN SIMON (1557-1618), who originally came from the village of Jüchsen, north-west of Coburg. Simon would become the vicar of the Liebstadt community in 1594. He must have been quite a character. When Simon died in 1618, in his memory a huge epitaph with his life-size portrait was placed in the church, near the pulpit where he had preached for more than twenty years (fig. 13). Two years later, father GEORG MARGGRAFE left his profession as schoolmaster to become a Lutheran vicar, too, preaching in the nearby village of Dobra (an hour walk south of Liebstadt) until his own death in 1634