History
Around the end of the first quarter of the 13th century, the oldest church or chapel was built on the grounds of the left-bank court of the Silesian princes. In 1243 or 1248, Duchess Anna, widow of Henry the Pious, and her sons, founded a hospital dedicated to St. Elizabeth on the court grounds. In 1253, she brought the Crusaders with the Red Star from Prague, establishing a richly endowed monastery of this order and giving the monks a church and hospital. In addition, after Anna’s death, the monks were to receive part of her court, the nearby mill on St. Matthias Island, half of the mill near All Saints’ Church, and, above all, St. Elizabeth’s Church with its surroundings and the associated tithes. The Wrocław monastery of the Crusaders with the Red Star relatively quickly became the administrative center of the Silesian-Kujavian branch of the order, while charitable activities gradually lost importance, as evidenced by the equal or interchangeable treatment of the call of St. Elizabeth and St. Matthias.
At the beginning of the 14th century, the monastery church of St. Matthias has undergone a Gothic reconstruction. First, the chancel was enlarged with a three-sided ending, and the construction of the tower began. The next stages of construction took place at the end of the 14th century and at the beginning of the 15th century, when three-side ended transept arms were added to the raised nave, first south one and then north one, giving the church a cross plan. The four-sided tower covered with a pyramidal copper helmet was completed in 1487 (date on the boss on the first floor), although it was even raised in the 16th century.
At the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries, the monastery began to devote more attention to the poor and the sick, partly due to pressure from the city council, which sought to take the patronage over the parish of St. Elizabeth, which ultimately occurred in 1525. The hospital’s dissolution at that time was prevented by the intervention of the Bishop of Wrocław, Jacob von Salza. Soon after, a pension system developed, transforming the monastery and hospital into a profitable institution. This resulted in the specialization and separation of individual wards, and consequently, the transformation of some of the monastery-hospital buildings (the main hospital building, converted into apartments for prebendaries who benefited from pensions previously collected for this purpose, was separated from the wards designated for the sick, elderly, and the poor).
In 1569, the monastery church was rebuilt, with the nave walls once again raised and new vaults constructed, still in the Gothic style. Moreover, under Master Bartholomeus Mandl, the adjacent hospital received a new roof in 1570, and the hospital buildings were renovated in 1581. In 1662, the upper part of the church tower’s weakened dome was dismantled and replaced with a Baroque one. In subsequent years, the church interior was redesigned in a Baroque style, a porch was added to the south, and a sacristy was built in 1675. Five years earlier, due to space constraints and the poor condition of the buildings, the northern part of the hospital, which until then had been constructed of wood, was thoroughly rebuilt.
In the early 18th century, the monastery’s caregiving activities continued, but on a much smaller scale. The Prussian occupation of Silesia led to the decline of the order, whose last visitation from Prague took place in 1748 (during which, 6 men, 19 women, and 32 students were recorded in the hospital). In 1807, part of the hospital was converted into a school, and as early as 1810, official notice of the order’s dissolution in Silesia was delivered. Following the secularization of the order, St. Matthias’ church became an auxiliary parish church, undergoing major renovations between 1895 and 1896. Damaged during fighting in 1945, it remained neglected for a long time, leading to the collapse of part of the northern transept and the chancel arcade during a storm. Ultimately, the entire church was rebuilt between 1961 and 1966. The last major architectural changes to the former monastery buildings were made in the 1930s and 1960s.
Architecture
The monastery and hospital was founded in the northern part of the city, on the site of the former ducal curia, where it formed part of a large complex of hospital and monastery buildings, the western part belonging to the Crusaders with the Red Star, the central part to the Poor Clares, and the eastern part to the Franciscans. The complex was bounded by the city walls to the north, by Szewska Street to the west, running towards the Mill Gate and the Oder River embankment, and to the south by the street running to the Franciscan church of St. James and then, arching through the Sand Gate onto the bridge towards Sand Island. The complex of Crusaders with the Red Star consisted of St. Matthias church, the adjacent cemetery to the south, and the monastery and hospital buildings on the eastern and northern sides of the church. A narrow internal alley separated them from the Poor Clares’ buildings.
The monastery church from the 13th century consisted of a two-bay, aisleless nave with interior dimensions of 10 x 14.5 meters, and also a two-bay, slightly narrower and longer chancel on the eastern side, interior dimensions of 6.7 x 15 meters. The entrance to it then led through the western wall, in a place later blocked with a low buttress. As a result of the expansion from the 14th-15th century, it achieved a cross-plan layout, with the arms of the transept closed polygonally and the chancel extended to the east, also closed polygonally. However, the cross did not have the traditional Latin form due to the addition of the transept to the short nave, and at the same time extending the eastern part of the church (expansion towards the west was not possible due to the street running there). The church was completed by a tower set between the chancel and the southern arm of the transept, square at the bottom, turning into an octagon from the 16th century. At that time, the nave was raised by about 2 meters for the second time.
The nave, transept and chancel were enclosed from the outside with stepped buttresses, in the western corners located perpendicular to each other, in the polygonal closures of the transept and the chancel set at an angle. The walls of the nave from the south and west were pierced with a pointed window, and an entrance portal was placed in the north and south walls (the latter was created in the 13th century). The transept was the only one with a plinth, while the tower in the octagonal part was covered with corner pilaster strips. The lighting of the central and eastern part of the church was provided by high, three-light tracery windows, all splayed on both sides. The tower was equipped with a portal in the ground floor, a wide, moulded opening on the first floor and narrow windows with stepped jambs.
The short nave was divided into two rectangular bays covered with a cross-rib vault. The chancel was covered with a cross-rib vault over two rectangular bays, and a six-part vault over the eastern closure. The transept arms were similarly solved, except that the rectangular bays were single there, and a late-Gothic, four-armed stellar vault was built over the northern arm. The ribs were supported in the transept on carved consoles and fastened with bas-relief bosses, while in the chancel were springing from the semi-octagonal shafts ended with decorative consoles in the shape of heads and symbols of the Evangelists. The arms of the transept opened to the interior with high, pointed, chamfered arcades. In the four-sided part of the tower, there were chapels on two floors, connected by stairs in the thickness of the northern and eastern walls of the tower.
The monastery and hospital buildings stood parallel to the adjacent Szewska Street, with their longer axes aligned north-south, with the exception of the northern wing that enclosed the complex. The oldest buildings were constructed of bricks in the Monk bond, later also in the Flemish bond, although until the 16th century the northern part of the complex was still constructed of timber or half-timbered. Individual buildings must have been of different heights or spaced at short intervals, as despite being situated in rows parallel to the street, their Gothic, decorated with blendes gables, were visible. The buildings likely contained two inner courtyards, perhaps related to the division of the hospital into men’s and women’s sections.
Current state
The medieval monastery and hospital buildings have been almost completely rebuilt over the centuries. The Gothic walls are partially hidden under early modern plaster and are only visible to the naked eye in a few places (one of the Classicist wings conceals a Gothic gable decorated with blind windows, and a gargoyle, used to drain water from the hospital building’s roof, adjoins the buttress of the church’s chancel). After renovations in 2006, a ceiling imitating that of a typical medieval hospital room was installed in one of the surviving hospital halls, but the fragments of 13th-century brickwork uncovered during architectural research were not exposed.
Although the former monastery church is a small building, compared to other main Gothic churches in Wrocław, it is distinguished by a very original layout and body, somewhat similar to the collegiate church of Holy Cross. Unfortunately, many of its original architectural details were lost due to war damages. The original bosses and vault consoles have survived in the chancel, the sixteenth-century boss is located in the nave, the southern portal from the second half of the thirteenth century (now in the early modern porch), the late Gothic portals of the tower, and the boss of the vault of the tower second storey with the date of its building have also been preserved.
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