Ginsburg: A High-Medieval Nassau Castle in Germany
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.6
- Popularity
- Low
- Country
- Germany
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- Holy Roman Empire
- Site type
- Military
- Remains
- Castle
On this page15 sections
History
Ginsburg is a high-medieval hilltop castle ruin in Germany, near Grund, a district of Hilchenbach in North Rhine-Westphalia. Built and expanded by the House of Nassau in the thirteenth century, it became a border fortress during the Dernbach Feud, a medieval territorial conflict in the region, and later served as a meeting place for William of Orange-Nassau during the Dutch revolt against Spanish rule.
Earlier fortifications and the Nassau castle
Archaeological finds point to a probable Iron Age ringwall on the summit. Above this earlier enclosure lie the remains of a square tower castle, probably from the eleventh or twelfth century. It may have belonged to the Cologne sphere of power or to Saxon-Westphalian rule, and may have been built by the Lords of Wegebach, who are known from 1144.
The thirteenth-century Nassau castle was built on these older foundations. Its construction or major enlargement is generally placed around 1220 to 1240 and is associated with Count Henry II of Nassau. Henry may have expanded an existing stronghold rather than established the site from the beginning. The castle protected Nassau interests along the frontier against the Counts of Wittgenstein and Cologne possessions in the Sauerland.
Ginsburg probably first appears in writing on 16 December 1255 as nowum castrum, meaning “New Castle.” The designation may have referred to a newly acquired castle rather than a newly constructed one. In 1292, Count Adolf of Nassau pledged Ginsburg, together with Nassau, Siegen, and Dillenburg, to Archbishop Siegfried of Westerburg of Cologne in exchange for the archbishop’s vote in the election of the German king. This document contains the first recorded use of the name Ginsberg.
Changes of ownership and the free court
A Nassau inheritance division in 1303 assigned the castle to Count Henry of Nassau-Siegen. In 1345, Count Otto II of Nassau sold half of it to Archbishop Walram of Jülich. Further transfers and pledges followed, but Nassau began buying the property back from 1360 onward. It then remained in Nassau possession until 1806.
In 1384, King Wenceslas authorized a Femgericht at Ginsburg. This was a Westphalian free court, an institution exercising a distinctive form of regional high justice. The associated free county extended between the lordship of Bilstein and the County of Sayn. Wenceslas renewed the authorization in 1389. Wynekin of Hilchenbach was the first known Freigraf, or presiding official, serving from 1398 to 1416.
The Arnsberg superior free court revoked the authorization in 1424 because Ginsburg was no longer regarded as part of the Westphalian judicial territory known as the “Red Earth.” Building and repair work nevertheless continued during the fifteenth century, with activity recorded in 1463, 1469, 1488, 1490, and 1496. A castle chapel existed by 1468 or 1469, was renewed in 1490, and was consecrated by an auxiliary bishop of Mainz.
Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century expansion
Ginsburg acquired new defensive and residential work from the mid-sixteenth century into the early seventeenth century. Building activity is recorded as early as 1523. In April 1568, William I of Orange-Nassau, known in English as William the Silent, met at the castle with officials, officers, and Dutch supporters to plan a campaign against Spanish rule in the Netherlands.
William assembled troops on Ginsberger Heide in 1572 before marching toward Friesland. These campaigns contributed to the Eighty Years’ War, the long Dutch revolt against Habsburg Spain, and to the political developments that led to the Union of Utrecht in 1579, an alliance of northern Dutch provinces that helped establish the basis of the Dutch Republic.
Spanish incursions into Nassau territory were feared in 1588, so the castle was placed in a defensive state and its walls were repaired. Work on the residential building and main tower followed in 1592 and 1593, while the drawbridge was renewed in 1603. The oldest surviving image of Ginsburg dates from 1580 and appears on a route map made by the surveyor Markgraff of Frankenberg.
After John VII of Nassau-Siegen died in 1623, Ginsburg passed by inheritance to William of Nassau-Hilchenbach. William intended to make it his residence, but abandoned the plan when the estimated cost reached about 4,000 guilders. Instead, he acquired the Wischel von Langenau family’s castle residence in Hilchenbach, later called Wilhelmsburg.
Decline, memory, and investigation
Count William Maurice of Nassau-Siegen ordered final repairs in 1683 to slow the castle’s deterioration. Opposition from the Catholic branch of the family brought the work to an end. From about the close of the seventeenth century, Ginsburg lost its military importance, deteriorated, and was largely forgotten.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling, a writer and scientist born in Grund in 1740, knew the site only as a ruin. His autobiography, first edited and issued in 1777 by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, gave the ruin a central literary role under the name Geisenberger Schloss. It presented Ginsburg as a personal pilgrimage place and as a symbol of transience.
During the nineteenth century, the Prussian forestry administration owned the land. Stone robbing reduced the surviving fabric, and in the 1880s the remaining walls and vaults were filled in while the Hilchenbach Beautification Association levelled the castle area. The general plan remained recognizable and was surveyed in 1883. Excavations in 1887 and 1910 were soon abandoned. The Siegerland Heritage Association organized a more systematic investigation in 1931, when senior secondary-school teacher Hermann Böttger established a rough outline of the plan. In autumn 1933, the association installed an iron plaque commemorating the four-hundredth anniversary of William I’s birth.
Systematic excavations began in 1961 after the Association for the Preservation of Ginsburg was founded in 1960. An agreement with the Siegen district and the government of North Rhine-Westphalia authorized the exposure, stabilization, and restoration of the surviving masonry. From 1967 to 1968, the remaining three-metre-high stump of the main tower was freely reconstructed in rubble stone and fitted with an observation platform. The restored tower and historic ruins entered the Hilchenbach monument register on 22 November 2008, and the tower and its interiors were renovated in 2009 and 2010.
Ginsburg is now owned by the Siegerland Castle Association, with support from the Association for the Preservation of Ginsburg. The restored tower contains a ceremony hall, a registry-office wedding room, a room for school lessons and seminars, and a small museum devoted to William and the Nassau family. The former outer ward contains a castle tavern. Since the late eighteenth century, and especially during the nineteenth century, the ruin has also appeared in literature and art, including poems by Katharina Diez and Heinrich von Achenbach, a watercolour by Heinrich Stein from 1840, and a painting made around 1860 by Wilhelm of Dillnhütten-Geisweid.
Remains
Ginsburg occupies the rocky summit of the 587.6-metre Schlossberg, also popularly called Geisenberg, in the southern Rothaar Mountains. The summit is a resistant witness mountain formed mainly of greywacke slate. The castle follows the southwest-to-northeast line of the terrain. Its inner castle measures approximately 80 by 50 metres and is enclosed by a continuous bottom ditch, now covered with grass, whose steep sides reach a width of about 7 to 10 metres and a depth of up to 9 metres.
Walls and inner defenses
Outer curtain wall
The outer curtain wall, a defensive enclosure wall linking fortified elements, has an asymmetrical, roughly pentagonal plan. Its northeastern side bends through approximately a quarter of a circle. Within the enclosure are the reconstructed foundations of a tower-like building and a residential structure known as the Long House. A well lies against the Long House’s southern long wall.
Inner courtyard enclosure
A second curtain wall, open toward the northeast, bounds the courtyard along its southern and eastern sides. Together with the southern section of the outer wall, it forms an additional defensive enclosure. The foundations of an eleventh- or twelfth-century residential tower occupy the eastern part of the courtyard.
Observation tower
A circular observation tower was erected over the earlier residential tower’s foundations during the twentieth-century restoration. The yellow-plastered tower is 16.5 metres high and has three stories. Its circumference is about 35 metres, its diameter is 11.20 metres, and its interior has a clear width of 2.70 metres. The earlier tower was probably about 30 metres high. The present platform looks across parts of the Rothaar Mountains, the Siegerland, and the southern Sauerland, including Vormwald, Hilchenbach, Grund, and part of the Breitenbach Reservoir. In exceptionally clear weather, the view extends to the Siebengebirge and the Hohe Acht, 103 kilometres to the southwest.
Buildings and water supply
Castle House
The remains of the tower-like building, also called the Castle House, stand in the western corner of the courtyard. Its nearly square walls adjoin a small rectangular courtyard on the west. The outer curtain wall forms the northwestern and southwestern sides of this space, while a rectangular defensive wall-walk provided protected movement beside the main wall.
Well house
A stairway from the Castle House area leads to a well house. A three-quarter-round flanking tower, projecting from a wall to support defense along its face, occupies the well house’s northwestern corner. The well shaft was excavated to a depth of 16.5 metres, a measurement recorded in 1981.
Outer ward and entrance
The outer ward lies southwest of the inner castle. It contains a rectangular rubble-stone building reconstructed in the 1980s and used as the castle tavern. A historically valuable half-timbered house also stands there. The building was formerly the owner’s house of a hammer works at Buschgotthardshütten in Weidenau. It was moved to Ginsburg and now houses a youth meeting centre.
A newly built wooden bridge crosses from the outer-ward area to the only entrance on the western side of the inner castle. It replaces a drawbridge believed to have occupied the same location. The castle’s position also relates to the historic road junction about 100 metres east-northeast, near the southwestern edge of Ginsberger Heide. The junction lies on the Rhine-Weser watershed and on the watershed between the Sieg and Eder river systems. Medieval long-distance routes crossed the heath before the Nassau castle was built, connecting the Rhine-Main region with the Sauerland. The Iron Road is known from 1345.
Excavated material
Excavations during the 1960s recovered more than 400 kilograms of iron, clay, and glass material. The finds include high- and late-medieval painted fragments from stove tiles, pots, and a coat of arms, as well as fragments of two probably early-modern Siegburg funnel beakers decorated with chest medallions. Weapons, tools, drawbridge fittings, numerous crossbow bolts and arrowheads, and several coins further illustrate activity at the castle.
One coin found in 1965 is a sterling-silver piece from the late thirteenth century. It came from the Siegen mint of Archbishop Siegfried of Westerburg of Cologne. Part of the excavated material is displayed in a case in the main tower. A copper plaque installed on one of the walls in 1933 commemorates William of Orange-Nassau’s planning and military activities associated with Ginsburg.
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