Ägidienkirche

About

The Ägidienkirche was a church in the German city of Speyer. Dedicated to saint Giles, it was founded around 1140 as part of a hospital complex by bishop Burchard on land owned by himself and his mother in what was then the city outskirts. In 1148, after his mother's death, he granted it to the Augustinian canonry at Hördt.

It soon became one of Speyer's parish churches, with clergy supplied or appointed by the canonry. Its last Roman Catholic priest, Jost Neblich, was presented in 1565. The Protestant Frederick III, Elector Palatine took control of the canonry in 1566, forcibly expelled the canons from the Ägidienkirche and in spring 1572 installed its first Protestant pastor, Johann Willing.

Leopold V's troops occupied Speyer during the Thirty Years War and he handed the church over to a new Capuchin foundation in the city on 1 May 1623. It was in such a poor state that they laid the foundation stone for a new hall church, designed by the Capuchin brother Peter of Cologne, completed in 1628 and costing Leopold 10,000 florins. The bishop of Speyer ordered that the new church's main altar retain the dedication to St Giles.

New monastic buildings and hospitals were also built on the...