History & cultural landscape
On August 10, 1716, the later auxiliary bishop of Münster and Osnabrück Joannes Wilhelm von Ahlhausen was born in Ahlhausen as the son of the "Bergische Vicedrosten" and treasurer Johann Wilhelm von Ahlhausen and his wife Adriana Christiana Hertzig, who after the death of the "Great Elector Clemens August von Bayern”, archbishop of Cologne and Münster and the builder of large baroque palaces in Rhineland and Westphalia, took over the management and administration of the diocese of Münster as papal capitular vicar from Rheine in 1761 until the new Archbishop of Cologne was elected. Himself a religious of the Crusaders and formerly prior of the Bentlage monastery, he will have remained connected to the ideal of simplicity in all things, as his birthplace on Ahlhausen allows us to sense and guess it, despite or perhaps because of all his intellectual spirituality. We assume that he was a son of the firstborn from the marriage of Heinrich Wilhelm Ahlhausen and Maria Magdalena Frowein. Both had 3 children, the last born of whom died very young. The first-born Johann Wilhelm would have had his son the auxiliary bishop Johann Wilhelm von Ahlhausen - often referred to in the literature as "d'Alhaus" - as heirs entitled to inherit; but after the death of Maria Magdalena Frowein in 1714, the second-born son Heinrich Wilhelm inherited Schloss Ahlhausen, perhaps because the first-born brother died before the mother.
The episcopal coat of arms of the Auxiliary Bishop d'Alhaus should adorn this website of Schloss Ahlhausen in the head. The two coats of arms to the right and left indicate the origin of the current owner's name of Schloss Ahlhausen: The coat of arms on the right is that of the family of the baron and imperial marshal Johann Ernst von Reuschenberg zu Setterich (1603 - 1660). As knights and commanders of the Teutonic Order, the von Reuschenberg zu Setterich were involved in various European peace negotiations in the 16th and 17th centuries. with. The hereditary family line with its headquarters at Setterich Castle near Aachen was closely connected to the Dukes of Jülich-Berg and ended in Setterich in 1746. In 1855 the descendant Margarethe Helene Reuschenberg from the non-hereditary successor line of “Johannes” von Reuschenberg who remained to Setterich married Wilhelm Timmermanns (1836 – 1881), who came from Flemish and whose grandmother was Maria Catharina Hubertina de Fernelmont (1771 – 1832). The baronial family of Fernelmont with the above-mentioned coat of arms on the left had their ancestral seat at Château de Fernelmont in the East Belgian province of Namur and came to the Spanish Netherlands from Barbitz in Piedmont at the end of the 16th century to “rescue” Catholicism. From Fernelmont, before the Thirty Years' War, they founded various other headquarters in Austria with Gilgenberg Castle and the Pürschkau and Schlava Castles in Silesia.
