After the Thirty Years’ War and the conquest of Heidelberg, the collection ended up for decades in the library of the French scholar Jacques Dupuy who willed it to the king of France. Since 1657, it was in the possession of the royal library in Paris until it found its way home to Heidelberg in 1888, where it is now kept. One picture is of Herr Walther von der Vogelweide.

Walther von der Vogelweide, c. 1170-c.1230, was the most famous German medieval lyric poet. From his name, it is assumed that he was of noble birth and some believe that he was from Tirol, home to several noted Minnesingers of his time, although a farmhouse is mentioned 1556 as “Vogelweidhof” and may have been in Lower Austria’s Waldviertel. An ancient map shows a village and a field marked “Vogelwaidt” with a related house of a village long deserted, and scholars found evidence of the Christian name Walther in that region. In any case, the young poet probably learned his craft under an old master and spent a happy part of his life in the hills. From there, he wandered from court to court, singing for his lodging and his food, ever hoping to be saved from poverty by an admiring patron.

For a time, the enlightened Duke Friedrich I of the house of Babenberg answered Walther’s prayers. The Duke had turned Vienna into a center of poetry and art and Vogelweide studied here under the master Reinmar the Old. In Vienna, he produced spontaneous and passionate love-lyrics, but when the Duke died in 1198, Walther again became an itinerant musician, wandering from court to court singing for his food and lodging. An opinionated man, Walther was forced to leave several court jobs. He spent time under Duke Bernhard of Carinthia, the landgrave of Thuringia, and Dietrich I of Meissen where he complained that he had received neither money nor praise for his services. When Emperor Henry VI’s death initiated a struggle between empire and papacy, Walther stood firmly on the side of German unity and independence, and even though he was an ardent Catholic, he was steadfastly opposed to the pope’s extremism. When, in 1212, Friedrich II became the sole representative of German royalty against pope, Walther’s enthusiasm for the empire was rewarded with a small fief in Franconia.

This provided him with a home, but he did not stay long before moving again to Vienna. In or around 1224, after his stay in Vienna, he seems to have settled on his fief where he was active in urging the German princes to take part in the crusade of 1228, and may have even gone as far as Tirol with the crusading army. He died around 1230 at his fief. It is said that he had left wishes that upon his death birds were to be fed daily at his tomb.

The original gravestone with its Latin inscription has long since disappeared; but in 1843 a new monument was erected over the spot. There is also a statue of the poet at Bozen (Bolzano in Italian), a small city located in the valley of the Etsch, which is the capital of South Tyrol, a mountainous Austrian region now belonging to northern Italy, where the majority of the population consists of German-speaking ethnic Austrians.