Peine Castle: A Medieval Fortress and Later Stronghold in Germany
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.2
- Popularity
- Low
- Country
- Germany
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern
- Civilizations
- Holy Roman Empire
- Site type
- Military
- Remains
- Castle
On this page13 sections
History
Origins and Medieval Development
Peine Castle is a medieval fortress in Germany, probably built in the twelfth century to protect a ford across the Fuhse. Its builder may have been Berthold of Peine, a ministerial, meaning a medieval official of the service nobility who could perform administrative and military duties. Berthold appears in 1130 as a witness to a document issued by the future Emperor Lothar III at the Imperial Diet in Brunswick.
Berthold’s son Ludolf was named in a document issued by Henry the Lion in 1154. Henry was the powerful Duke of Saxony and Bavaria whose fall in the late twelfth century led to conflicts with former supporters. Ludolf, or a son of the same name, apparently joined the Staufer dynasty, which supplied several German kings and Holy Roman Emperors. Around 1193, Henry attacked the castles of supporters who had defected, and Peine Castle was destroyed in the fighting. Ludolf rebuilt it as early as 1194.
Around 1220, Gunzelin of Wolfenbüttel founded the settlement of Peine, which received town rights in 1223. Around 1260, the town and castle entered the sphere of the Prince-Bishopric of Hildesheim, a church-ruled territory whose bishop exercised both religious and secular authority.
Sieges and Reconstruction
During the Hildesheim Diocesan Feud, a sixteenth-century conflict involving Hildesheim and regional powers including Brunswick, Peine served as a Hildesheim outpost. A Brunswick army besieged the town and castle in 1519. The castle held out while the town burned, and further sieges lasting several months followed in 1521 and 1522.
Tradition holds that Brunswick forces fired more than 300 cannonballs from 16 guns at the medieval castle tower known as Güntzel. They hoped that the badly damaged tower would fall into the moat and form a crossing. The garrison instead secured it with heavy chains and eventually brought it down into the castle courtyard. The castle’s resistance led to the epithet “Owl’s Nest,” while a related legend tells of owls that continued nesting there during the fighting.
After the Hildesheim Diocesan Feud, the damaged castle was rebuilt as a simpler complex. During the Thirty Years’ War, the major European conflict of 1618–1648 involving religious, dynastic, and territorial struggles, Imperial and Swedish forces changed control of the site several times. In 1633, troops of the Duke of Brunswick besieged the castle and town. After the Imperial garrison capitulated, Brunswick forces demolished the town fortifications.
Fortress Conversion and Demolition
From 1659, the Bishop of Hildesheim expanded the castle in a fortress-like manner. The works were largely halted in 1661 after available funds had been exhausted, and inadequate maintenance contributed to the deterioration of the buildings during the eighteenth century. In 1711, troops commanded by Erich Philipp von Schwan, an Electoral Hanoverian lieutenant colonel, captured Fortress Peine. The Electorate of Hanover was a German state whose ruler held the rank of elector within the Holy Roman Empire.
Prussian troops occupied Peine without resistance in 1802. Between 1803 and 1816, all the castle buildings were demolished. Administrative structures were later erected on the Schlossberg, including an administrative office, a prison, a stable for official horses, and a granary. Some of these buildings were subsequently demolished and replaced, and the Peine District Court buildings now occupy the Schlossberg.
Archaeology and Parkland
In 1893, the town of Peine acquired parts of the Schlossberg from the state. These included the northern corner bastion as an earthwork, a surviving section of the moat that was used as a fishpond, and the castle garden. An archaeological excavation took place in 1998 in the Amtmann-Ziegler Garden before its conversion into a park. Because the castle mound had been extensively reshaped over the centuries, the excavation focused on the area where the drained moat had run and recovered material connected with earlier castle phases and the sixteenth-century sieges.
Around 2000, the Amtmann-Ziegler Garden at the foot of the Schlossberg was redesigned as a park. The 6,000-square-metre Castle Park incorporates surviving earthworks and ditches and contains information panels on the castle’s history.
Remains
Setting and Fortifications
Peine Castle was a lowland fortress at the northern end of a slightly elevated ridge that projected like an island into the formerly wet lowlands of the Fuhse. The position offered natural protection, while the nearby river supplied the castle moat. The elevated area on which the settlement and castle developed measured approximately 400 by 800 metres. Repeated deposits of earth gradually enlarged the castle mound, also called the Schlossberg.
Ramparts and Bastion
After the fortress conversion that began in 1659, the previously round castle mound was reshaped into a square. Four corner bastions, projecting defensive earthworks, were built, and the water-filled moat reached a width of up to 15 metres. A carefully constructed escarp wall, a fortified revetment supporting the inner side of a ditch or rampart, reinforced the bastion rampart. This wall was approximately two metres high and dates from the redesign around 1660. The park preserves redesigned sections of the former ramparts and ditches, together with one surviving earth-built bastion.
Castle Buildings and Access
Post-Siege Castle Complex
Following the rebuilding after 1522, the castle consisted of economic buildings arranged in a circular pattern around a main building. The main building had a stone lower section and an upper storey made of half-timbering.
Drawbridge and Gate Guard House
Two stone bridge arches were uncovered beneath the road called Am Amthof. They formerly supported a drawbridge that connected the castle with the approach across the moat. Near the former drawbridge, excavation in the area of a casemate, a protected military chamber, revealed the foundations of a small gate-guard house. The casemate itself had first been exposed in the 1970s.
Drainage Shaft
A stone-block shaft system drained precipitation from the castle into the moat through a passage descending five metres. Its fill contained pottery fragments, a folding knife with decorated bone handle scales, and five dog skulls. These finds date to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Moat Finds
The former moat produced much of the excavated material. Finds included medieval pottery from the Peine pottery quarter of Gröpern, fragments of ointment pots and clay pipes, and glass from wine and medicine bottles. A stone ball and a burst cast-iron shell filled with oil and sulphur remained in the muddy part of the moat. They are associated with the sieges of 1519–1522 and probably struck the castle masonry before sinking into the waterlogged sediment.
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