Qualla: Bad Iburg

Bad Iburg: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Basotxerri, CC BY-SA 4.0. Sophia Charlotte was born in Schloss Iburg on 30 October 1668. Forty years later she would be dead, having spent the intervening time becoming the first Queen of Prussia, a serious philosopher of considerable correspondence with Leibniz, and the most cultivated court in early eighteenth-century Germany. But on the day of her birth she was simply the only daughter of Ernest Augustus, the Protestant Prince-Bishop of Osnabrück, who had taken up residence at this old episcopal castle in the Teutoburg Forest because it was where the bishops had lived for six hundred years. The castle is still there. The room she was born in is part of the Schlossmuseum tour.

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Image: Basotxerri | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bad Iburg: Charlemagne's Border Castle

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MrsMyer, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Iburg has been a place of strategic importance since before there was a Germany. Documentation first mentions it in 753 as a Frankish stronghold. In 772 the Frankish king Charlemagne captured it from the Saxon leader Widukind, his great antagonist in the decades-long war to s...

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Image: MrsMyer | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bad Iburg: The Hagioscope

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MrsMyerDE, CC BY-SA 3.0. Inside the Church of St. Clemens there is a small angled window cut through the wall called a hagioscope. Its purpose was to allow people forbidden from entering the church - specifically, lepers - to see the elevation of the host during Mass from outside. Medieval theology held ...

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Image: MrsMyerDE | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bad Iburg: Six Anabaptists in the Bennoturm

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MrsMyerDE, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1534 the radical Anabaptist takeover of the nearby city of Münster was reaching its most violent phase. The Anabaptist leader John of Leiden had declared the city a New Jerusalem and was attempting to extend the movement outward. Six emissaries traveling from Münster toward Os...

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Image: MrsMyerDE | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bad Iburg: The Day the Zeppelin Crashed

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MrsMyerDE, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 28 June 1910, just after five in the afternoon, the airship LZ7 Deutschland crashed into Mount Limberg above Bad Iburg. The vessel was nine days into its career - it had made its maiden voyage on 19 June - and was on a publicity flight intended to popularize commercial Zeppeli...

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Image: MrsMyerDE | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bad Iburg: The Spa That Came Late

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stefan Oemisch, CC BY-SA 4.0. Bad Iburg is a Bad - a designated spa town - only since the modern era. The medieval and early modern town was first a fortress, then an episcopal residence, then a market town and Benedictine monastery. The kurhaus built in 1967 was torn down again in 2010 after years of local d...

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Image: Stefan Oemisch | CC BY-SA 4.0