The site of Lorch Monastery on a mountain chain above the Rems river valley was already an important place in Roman days. The Rhaetian and the Upper German "Limes" (Roman border wall for defending the Empire) met here. Today a Roman architrave with inscriptions above the western portal of the Monastery Church (Klosterkirche) and a reconstructed Roman watchtower near the monastery remind visitors of this past.
The history so important for the monastery began around 1100. The Hohenstaufen duke Friedrich von Schwaben, his wife Agnes and his sons Friedrich and Konrad give the existing monastery to the Pope in Rome as a gift with a formal document. The purpose of this donation was founded both in the concern for the salvation of the Hohenstaufen family, which was to guarantee unceasing prayer while alive and a tomb after death, and in the expansion of Hohenstaufen power in their principal region.
The most important persons entombed at Lorch Monastery include the founder, Friedrich I, his brothers Ludwig and Walther, the mother of Friedrich Barbarossa, Judith von Bayern, the wife of the Barbarossa son King Philipp von Schwaben, the Byzantine Princess Irene and her daughter Beatrix. The last Hohenstaufen king to be buried in Lorch was Heinrich von Staufen (1137-1150). With the change in Hohenstaufen politics (Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa shifted the emphasis of Hohenstaufen politics to Southern Italy), the Hohenstaufen family monastery became less important.
Not all buildings have been preserved from the at that time densely populated monastery complex. In addition to the remains of the cloister, the monastery church is the focal point, once built as a Romanesque, three-nave, flat-roofed pier basilica. From this period the nave, the eastern transept and parts of the western structure remain today.
Abbott Nikolaus Schenk von Arberg had the Romanesque chancel of the church vaulted around 1470 and, after the apse had been torn down, extended with a rising Gothic chancel structure.
After Lorch Monastery had suffered under economic and intellectual decay in the 14th and 15th centuries, it experienced a heyday in the late 15th century. As the monastery administrator, Count Eberhard von Württemberg pursued the joining of the "Melker Reform" that took place in 1462. Its member monasteries supported each other in renewing their monastic life.
Under outstanding abbots the monks achieved an economic and spiritual boom, the monastery was expanded, structural alterations ware made and a "Skriptorium" of high quality was maintained. The sarcophagus produced by an unknown artist, which can still be seen today in the central aisle of the church, also originated during this time. It held the bones of the founder and his descendants following the opening of the Hohenstaufen graves in 1475.