Barfüßerkirche, Erfurt

The Barfüßerkirche (pronounced [bafyskç], "Discalced's Church") in the historical city centre of Erfurt in Thuringia, Germany, belonged to the most important church buildings of the city and was one of the most elaborate mendicant churches in Germany until its extensive destruction by bombing in 1944. It was mainly built in the 14th century as a monastery church of the Franciscans, who were also called Barfüßer (the Discalced, meaning "the Barefoot"). The choir was restored in the 1950s; beside the nave's ruin, it is situated west of the Schlösserbrücke bridge on the right bank of the Breitstrom, a branch of the Gera river.

On 11 November 1224, the friars of the Franciscan Order, founded in 1210, settled outside the gates of Erfurt as the first mendicant order of the city. From 1221, the order spread throughout the empire as far as the Baltic Sea within a decade and favoured the cities for its monasteries. In Erfurt, they first took over the abandoned Church of the Holy Spirit, which had previously belonged to an Augustinian nunnery. At the instigation of the Archbishop of Mainz, they began building a church and monastery in 1229–30 and probably devoted themselves to nursing the sick. Seven years after their arrival, in 1231, they moved into convent buildings on the Gera river on a plot of land given to them by the archbishop's vicedominus of Apolda, Gunther. On 25 September 1259, Archbishop Gerhard I of Mainz was buried in this church. The monastery was ravaged by fires several times; in 1463, numerous Franciscans died of the plague. In the course of the 13th century, the Erfurt convent became one of the central places of the order's province, where most of the provincial chapters of Saxonia were held in the Middle Ages. Therefore, it can be concluded that the buildings must have been of a certain size. The Franciscans probably soon founded a school and, from the beginning of the 1230s, a house of studies (studium custodiale, studium particulare) existed in Erfurt for the education first of the young friars in the Custody of Thuringia, a subdivision of the Saxon Franciscan Province (Saxonia) founded in 1230, but the studies soon developed both in terms of their level of content and their extent. The lector had a socius at his side, and from 1371, a second lector is recorded. The Order's studies were integrated with those of the Augustinian Hermits and the Dominicans into the theological faculty of the newly founded University of Erfurt in 1392; within the Order, Erfurt acquired the status of a general study of the Order, to which gifted friars were also sent from numerous other provinces of the Order to study – in 1467, from a total of fourteen provinces, including the provinces of Argentina (Strasbourg), Sicilia and Burgundia. For Saxonia, Erfurt was the educational centre for leaders; six of the twelve provincial ministers until 1517 had earned doctoral degrees in Erfurt. The first Franciscans to matriculate were the provincial minister Johannes von Chemnitz in 1395 and his successor (from 1396) Johannes von Minden who, from 1400 onwards, also acted as magister regens, head of Franciscan studies, and held a chair at the university. The university's teaching staff subsequently included Franciscans almost throughout, who formed a teaching branch at the theological faculty aligned with the theology of the Franciscans Bonaventure and Johannes Duns Scotus. The Franciscans in Erfurt were very reserved towards the Franciscan Observance movement and therefore belonged to the Saxon Province of the Order of St John the Baptist from 1518. They opposed the Reformation; the Guardian of the convent, Conrad Clinge, had been a cathedral preacher in Erfurt since 1530 and vehemently defended the Catholic faith. As no new friars were al

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