Agnes Bernauer

Her life and death have been depicted in numerous literary works, the most well known being Friedrich Hebbel's tragedy of the same name and the folk musical Die Bernauerin by the composer Carl Orff.

Since Ernest's son Albert participated in a tournament in Augsburg in February 1428, it is generally assumed that the latter met Agnes on that occasion and shortly thereafter brought her to Munich.

She took part in the capture of the robber baron Münnhauser, who had fled to the Old Court in Munich, and she annoyed the Palatine Countess Beatrix, Albert's sister, because of her self-assured manner.

Albert's frequent residence at Blutenburg Castle beginning in 1433 and the sale of two properties in the vicinity to Agnes suggest that the couple lived there together.

While Albert was on a hunt arranged by his relative Henry of Bavaria-Landshut, Duke Ernest had Agnes arrested and drowned in the Danube River on 12 October 1435 near Straubing.

All that is known is that the church trustee Franz von Paula Romayr had the tombstone moved to the wall of the chapel in 1785 in order to protect it from further damage "caused by depredatory footsteps".

When the German poet August von Platen inspected the gravestone in 1822, he heard from the female sexton that Agnes and Albert had been switched as infants so that she was actually the duke's daughter and he the son of the barber-surgeon, but that the book which would have confirmed this exchange had been stolen by French soldiers.

[12] After excavations in the Chapel at St. Peter failed to produce any results, the Bernauer biographer Felix Joseph Lipowsky had the Carmelite cloister grounds searched in 1897 for evidence of her grave.

[15] Albert and Agnes' tragic love story has long been a staple of folk songs, and over the centuries many new literary and musical versions have been created.