Querengässer, Alexander Moritz von Sachsen (1521–1553)

Landes-, Reichs- und Friedensfürst

460 years ago, Elector Moritz of Saxony, a highly controversial figure of the Reformation and the Empire, fell in the Battle of Sievershausen. Born in the Freiberger Ländchen region, he succeeded his Protestant father Heinrich the Pious as Albertine Duke in Dresden. Fighting alongside the Catholic Emperor Charles V, he won the electoral dignity in the Schmalkaldic War, which the Ernestine Elector Johann Friedrich, captured after the Battle of Mühlberg in 1547, lost in the Wittenberg Capitulation. In Weimar, henceforth the residence of the Ernestine Dukes of Saxony, the born elector died a year after Moritz. Moritz, however, gained importance throughout the empire beyond the largely reunited Electorate of Saxony, which he reorganized with a renowned circle of advisors, leaving his brother and successor, Elector August, with a promising future with princely schools, the Lutheran denomination, and the new Dresden Palace. The supposed traitor to the Protestant cause, reviled as the Judas of Meissen, gradually distanced himself from the emperor and became his most important opponent in the empire. His energy and negotiating skills distinguished him as the leader of the German princely opposition. With the Treaty of Passau in 1552, he secured the recognition of the Reformation under imperial law and established Saxony's role as a leading Protestant power. He died in 1553 during the victorious battle against the empire's greatest troublemaker, Albrecht Alkibiades, Margrave of Brandenburg-Kulmbach. He was the last ruling prince in Germany to die on the battlefieldand yet he was also a prince of peace. The Leipzig historian of the Reformation and principal editor of the six-volume edition Politische Korrespondenz des Herzogs und Kurfürsten Moritz von Sachsen (Political Correspondence of Duke and Elector Moritz of Saxony) presents here, in a second, revised and expanded edition, a biography based on the best available sources for a broader readership interested in history.