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Nikolaus von Zinzendorf

Nikolaus von Zinzendorf

1700 CE–1760 CE · Modern · Dresden

Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700–1760) was a German nobleman, theologian, and hymn-writer who became the central figure in the renewal of the Moravian Brethren (Unitas Fratrum) at Herrnhut on his Saxony estate from 1722 onward. His Christ-centered piety — emphasizing a warm, personal relationship with the Savior and the wounds of Christ — gave the renewed Moravian movement its distinctive spiritual character and liturgical creativity. Zinzendorf launched what historians regard as the first sustained Protestant overseas missionary enterprise, sending Moravian workers to the West Indies, Greenland, Suriname, and beyond from 1732, decades before the broader Protestant missionary awakening. He was ordained a Lutheran minister in 1734 and later a Moravian bishop in Berlin (1737), navigated repeated conflicts with Saxon and imperial authorities that forced temporary exile, and composed or inspired hundreds of hymns still in use. His theological legacy — integrating pneumatology, ecumenical vision, and missionary urgency — shaped later Pietism, Wesley's Methodism, and the modern missions movement.

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Stop 1 of 61700Born

Dresden

What they did here

Born 26 May 1700 into the Saxon nobility; his father died weeks after his birth and he was raised largely by his maternal grandmother, Henrietta Catharina von Gersdorf, a committed Pietist.

About Dresden

Dresden, the capital of Saxony in eastern Germany, had a Jewish community from the eighteenth century that built a notable synagogue (designed by Gottfried Semper) in the nineteenth. It was a center of modern German-Jewish cultural and religious life until the Nazi period.

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