St. George's Abbey in the Black Forest

The monastery was founded in 1084–85 in the Black Forest, by the source of the Brigach, against the background of the Investiture Controversy, as a result of the community of interests of the Swabian aristocracy and the church reform party, the founders being Hezelo and Hesso of the family of the Vögte of Reichenau, and the politically influential Abbot William of Hirsau.

At first a priory of Hirsau, the new foundation was declared an independent abbey in 1086, and under Abbot Theoger (1088–1119) began to accumulate the extensive estates, possessions and legal rights which made it one of the greatest religious houses of south-western Germany.

The abbey then came into conflict with the next Vogt, Ulrich of Hirrlingen, and was obliged to appeal to King Henry V. From 1114 the Vögte were the Zähringen Dukes; on their extinction in 1218, the office was taken over by the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II (1212/1215–c.

A particularly important papal privilege was that of Pope Alexander III, dated 26 March 1179, which makes clear the significance of St. George's as a centre of Benedictine reform in Alsace, Lotharingia, Swabia and Bavaria in the 12th century by naming numerous religious communities in close contact with St. George's, either as its foundations or because it exercised pastoral authority over them or had been involved in their reform.

The monks did not disperse at the suppression of St. George's, in which a Protestant religious community was established in 1566, but moved to the vacant monastery at Villingen, in Habsburg territory in nearby Austria.