MILLSTATT. - Former Benedictine abbey in Carinthia, diocese of Gurk, founded around 1020 by the brothers Arbo and Botho, Bavarian nobles, with monks from Nieder-Altaich (Hirsau reform). Frederick III, in 1469, with the consent of Paul II, suppressed the abbey in order to make it the seat of the Knights of St. George, whom he had instituted to fight the Turks.
Since the Knights passed more or less openly to Lutheranism, Charles I of Styria diverted a large part of M.'s revenues to the Jesuits for their college, later University, of Graz; in 1598, the Knights having been suppressed, M. and its district passed into the domain of the Jesuits themselves. In 1783, the Jesuits also having been suppressed, the district passed to the diocese of Gurk, the church became parochial, and hotels and offices were installed in the monastic buildings (M. is a famous resort on the lake of the same name).
The importance of M. is above all artistic: from the Benedictine period date the great church of around 1150, with three naves,
Romanesque (only the vaults are Gothic), with two bell towers, a grandiose figurative portal (around 1170), a Romanesque cloister (around 1200), with strange carvings, all well preserved. Only the interior furnishings are Baroque (the "Jesuit" style in gold and black). The highly picturesque monastic buildings are for the most part from the age of the Knights, in late Gothic.
According to a legend M. would be of Roman foundation under the name of "a thousand statues," by the work of a Roman duke Domitian, whose tomb is venerated in a most sumptuous chapel; certainly, remains of chancel screens in Lombard style attest to an older church. Famous are the manuscripts of M., today in Klagenfurt; above all the illuminated Sacramentary, of the Salzburg school of around 1160, and the illuminated codices of the Genesis and of the Physiologus of M. from the second half of the 12th century.