Franzburg

Franzburg is a municipality in the Vorpommern-Rügen district of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany. It is situated 20 km southwest of Stralsund. Before the Protestant Reformation, later Franzburg was the site of Neuenkamp Abbey.
In the course of the medieval conversion of Pomerania and German Ostsiedlung, prince Wizlaw I granted the central parts of the woods covering the mainland section of his Principality of Rügen, then Danish, to Cistercian monks from Camp Abbey in Lower Saxony who build Neuenkamp Abbey on 8 November 1231. The monks erected a church that, with a length of 80 meters, a width of 15 meters, and an arch height of 25 meters, was then the largest church in all Pomerania. The possessions of the abbey rapidly increased, 50 years after its foundation the abbey's territory reached the coast. The woods were cleared, and numerous villages of the Hagenhufendorf type were set up and populated with German settlers. In 1325, the last prince of Rügen died without an issue, and Neuenkamp with the rest of the principality was inherited by the dukes of Pomerania. The abbey prospered until it was secularized in 1535, following the Protestant Reformation and the adaoption of Lutheranism by the Pomeranian nobility in 1534.

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