Sponheim Abbey

A Benedictine abbey in the Rhineland whose most notable resident was Johannes Trithemius, elected abbot in 1483 at the age of twenty one. Trithemius rebuilt Sponheim's library into one of the largest private collections in Germany and wrote his most influential and controversial works there, including the Steganographia, before a dispute with his own monks over the strictness of his reforms drove him out in 1506 to a second abbacy near the river Main. The abbey was destroyed by French troops in 1689 during the Nine Years' War and never rebuilt as a working monastery; its surviving buildings now house a small museum devoted to Trithemius and his work.