lives of the Caesars

updated 26.4.2026

Among all the Renaissance humanists and Reformation clerics who followed the fashion of translating their family names into Latin or Greek, some were luckier than others. I think the too blatantly obvious cases like Mercator or Piscator fell out of fashion pretty swiftly. Then there are the too difficult Greek names like Arthopoeus. I guess Caesar is a good middle way as it is memorable and not too trivial. There's also a justification in that the German word and name Kaiser is derived from Caesar, so rather than translating to a posh language, you could say they just reverted their name to its original version.

Anyhow, among the multiple clergymen that have popped up in the ancestry of Anna Katharina Andrae, there are also a few called Caesar, and I just can't resist the temptation to write their biographies under the title you see above.

Merian view of Nördlingen.
Source: Wikipedia Von Martin Zeiller - Scan eines Original Buchs, Gemeinfrei,

 

---

 

Valentin Konstantin Caesar (No. 70 in Anna Katharina Andrae's family tree)

Born in Suhl, County Henneberg (today Thuringia)

1585 vicar of Sien (Kr. Birkenfeld)

1593-98 vicar of Enkirch (Monatshefte 1914, 321-355)

In 1597 he was reported to be not strong enough for this tiring position, so he moved to become:

1598-1600 vicar of Dill

Married Sara, no further details of her are known. Their only known child was Catharina Caesar, who married Heinrich Orth (* ca. 1561 at Kirn, + … 1612/15, Braunsberg, see V-30 in the Orth genealogy). He was Amtmann in Merxheim and the son of the second Lutheran vicar of Kirn, Johann Balthasar Orth (IV-43).

 

---

 

Martin Caesar, the vicar of Traben (1585-98), was Konstantin's cousin, and came to Upper Sponheim because of this family relation. In the initial version of this blog entry I had a short bio based on Friedrich Back's piece about the parish of Traben 1560-1620 (Monatshefte 1917, 3-32), which sweeps most of Martin Caesar's trials and tribulations under the rug. After publication, Carl-Jürgen Caesar pointed me to the piece of H. Rodewald (Monatshefte 1921, 49ff) about Irmenach, where the whole sad story is spilt out in expansive detail. Which is somehow ironic, because virtually all of the trouble happened before Martin Caesar came to Irmenach. So here's now a somewhat longer biography based on Rodewald:

Martin Caesar junior

He was a son of Martin Caesar senior, vicar of Wasungen and brother of Sixtus, and thus a cousin of Konstantin. Note that the first name Martin could be read as a strong statement in support of the Lutheran creed.

Martin junior was immatriculated as a student in Wittenberg 14.5.1566. His first appointment was as a Diakon at Wasungen, working under his eponymous father from 1570 to 1572. In Wasungen he married a Margaretha from an unidentified family in early 1571 after his father, in his role as the church inspector, had agreed with her parents to dissolve her secret engagement to another man. It appears that Margaretha never forgave the Caesars and the couple lived unhappily for many years, moving to new places as and when the state of their marriage became too much of a scandal locally.

In 1572, Martin was promoted to become Archidiaconus at Suhl (County Henneberg, today’s Thuringia). Note that although his father had died in 1571, he was not promoted to inherit his position at Wasungen. Trying to run away from marital trouble, he moved to the Palatinate to become the vicar of Kriegsfeld in 1576. When that area switched to Calvinism, he moved to Finkenbach Bisterschied. When marital trouble became notorious again, he had to leave and found refuge with his cousin Konstantin Caesar who was then the vicar at Sien.

In 1586, he became the vicar of Traben, where he made the mistake of complaining to his superiors about the hardship of living without the support of his wife, who had by then gone her own ways. The superiors insisted he should try to take her back, which failed gloriously, while Martin tried to find solace with the wine of the Mosel region. After a few years and several attempts at making peace organised by officials including the inspector Johannes Conon whom we met here, the matter escalated again and Martin was evicted in October 1593, finding refuge in the village of Franken in the Eifel mountains, where he held a small parish that was an unpopular post for being an isolated Lutheran enclave in a mostly Catholic area.

It appears that Margaretha must have died during that stay, as nothing more is heard from her and Caesar was called back to Upper Sponheim to become vicar of Irmenach in 1597. Clearly, the authorities that suffered years of trying to rein in his marital troubles wouldn’t have given him this position if Margaretha had still been alive.

In Irmenach, removed from the temptations of the Mosel wine and without his former nemesis Margaretha, he became a very popular vicar, as a visitation happening just days after his death testifies. The only trouble that still awaited him there was that his successor in Traben Wenzeslaus Fend, vicar from 1595-1598, spread rumours suggesting that Martin had an intimate relationship with his former maid (this is the only part of Martin's multiple and long-running troubles that is mentioned in Back's piece about Traben). Truth was that the maid did visit his household in Irmenach, where his daughter looked after him, repeatedly.

We don’t know for sure, but Rodewald speculates that he solved the problem by marrying the maid. The only evidence for this is that the attacks on his relations with her stopped, and that on his death on October 25, 1608, he left a widow whose name we don’t know.

 

---

 

Sixtus Caesar (140.)
Sixtus Caesar, vicar of Demmingen and Salzungen, was Konstantin's father and Martin junior's uncle. (I originally referred to a text by O. Penningroth in Monatshefte which said "probably", but CJ Caesar has now confirmed this connection.) I found a Caesar family history where this Sixtus appears as many times great grand uncle, so I'll just translate their biography:

He was born ca. 1522
In 1537 he enrolled as student at Wittenberg.
In 1542 he graduated as a magister, then became parson at Wersternach. After the death of his father in 1543 he looks after his mother and younger siblings.

Further positions:
1543 parson at Finningen
1545/46 Planverweser (sounds like a planning admin role) in Löpsingen
Diakon in Nördlingen (that is the town that was famously built into the crater a meteorite left 15 million years ago, which kind of provided a degree of natural fortification)
1548 After the Augsburg Interim he moves to Thuringia
1549-1552 vicar at Salzungen
Also enrolles at the University of Jena since 1549.
1553/54 Lauffen (Neckar)
1554/55 Kürnbach then Finningen
1558 good report from a visitation at Finningen.
1561 Demmingen
1566 appointed to a positin at the palace of Count Wolfgang of Zweibrücken/Pfalz, possibly in parallel to the position at Demmingen.
1578 celebrates 18 years as vicar of Demmingen, aged 56
1584 presumed to have died as the position is filled anew.

 

---

 

Johannes Keyser (280.)
(listed as father of Sixtus and earliest ancestor in this Caesar family tree). Also listed on Gedbas.

born around 1480 in Nördlingen.
He served first as a Catholic then as a Protestant priest in Harburg / Ries. Married Barbara NN. They have at least ten children.
1518-25 Frühmesser in Harburg (this is a very Catholic thing, with a foundation set up to fund a priest reading the mass before everybody else goes to work)
9.8.1524 Son David Caesar born at Harburg. For the other 9 children there are only estimated birth years (interestingly, one site claims that eight of them were born in 1524).
1525-43 vicar in Harburg and Großsorheim, court preacher for the count Carl Wolfgang of Oettingen at Harburg.
1535 also listed as an assistant preacher in the town of in Nördlingen.
From 1538 Kapellan in the Frühmesshaus Großsorsheim.
Died 1543.

---

 

Long story short: A whole dynasty of Caesarean clergymen.

 

Unfortunately, not very much is known about the wives of those Caesars! However, in other parts of this network of clergymen I am currentlly unravelling the connections are very much matrilinear, will blog about those separately.

What I find absolutely mindboggling is the fact that this is the third lineage that leads us to a protestant priest of the first hour, taking office with the Reformation. Johannes Keyser joins Peter Siegel, the first vicar of Kirn, and Johannes Andreae of Schönbach (the elder). (Oh, and coming up, one Diakon who made himself very unpopular by triggering the removal of a first-hour Lutheran vicar for Calvinist tendencies.)

Overall, including the Andreae lineage and the Caesars as possible/plausible ancestors, I now have 14 clergymen in the family tree. Of those, 13 are (possible) ancestors of the five Kauer sisters. One (Peter Siegel) is from their mother's side, the remaining dozen connects via the people mentioned in the Weiß Chronicles, so they are all ancestors of the teacher Christoph Gottlieb Weiß, the father of their paternal grandmother. There may be a couple more hiding in the bushes. Plus quite a few more among the many-times-great uncles (such as David and Martin Caesar, above).

---

Confused about who is who? - see my new name index for all things family history.