Weinsberg Castle: A Medieval Hilltop Fortress in Germany
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.5
- Popularity
- Low
- Country
- Germany
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- Duchy of Württemberg, German, Holy Roman Empire
- Site type
- Military
- Remains
- Castle
On this page17 sections
History
Weinsberg Castle is a ruined hilltop fortress in Germany, above the town of Weinsberg in present-day Baden-Württemberg, probably built as a military stronghold in the early eleventh century. Its history is connected with the Salian dynasty, the ruling family of German kings and emperors that included Conrad II, Henry III, Henry IV, and Henry V, and with the later Staufen dynasty.
Early owners and the Staufen siege
A foundation history of the Öhringen collegiate foundation, written around 1430 and referring to an institution established in 1037, states that Countess Adelaide of Metz or Egisheim lived at Weinsberg Castle before founding it. By her first marriage she was the mother of Emperor Conrad II, and by her second she was the mother of Bishop Gebhard III of Regensburg. She is regarded as an ancestress of the Salian dynasty.
After Count Godfrey of Calw died without sons in 1131, claims to Weinsberg Castle passed to his son-in-law Welf VI. Property rights held by Count Burkhard of Comburg were associated with the early noble lords of Weinsberg. Wolfram of Weinsberg, first recorded in 1130, belonged to the Reginbodons, a medieval noble family associated with southwestern Germany.
The castle became the scene of a major confrontation in 1140, when the Welf lord Welf VI opposed the newly elected Staufen king Conrad III. Conrad besieged Weinsberg for several weeks. On 21 December he defeated a relieving Welf army led by Welf VI, who narrowly escaped, and the garrison then surrendered.
The surrender is linked with the tradition of the Loyal Women of Weinsberg. The Cologne Royal Chronicle, written around 1175 or 1200, says that Conrad III allowed the women to leave with whatever they could carry on their shoulders, while the men were condemned to execution. The women carried their husbands down the hill, and Conrad honored his promise by sparing them. The episode cannot be confirmed beyond this chronicle, but neither can it be shown to be only a literary invention.
The story probably gave rise to the name Weibertreu, which came into use in the eighteenth century. Around 1500, Johannes Trithemius, abbot of Sponheim, revived the account in the Hirsau Chronicle and later the Hirsau Annals. It then appeared in Johannes Nauclerus’s world chronicle, printed in 1516, before becoming a wandering legend associated with other castles and towns.
Weinsberg under the Staufen and the empire
Following the surrender, Conrad III placed the garrison commander Burkhard, regarded as a brother of Wolfram of Weinsberg, and another probable brother, Rupert, in positions of authority on the Lower Main. A reconstruction by Wolfgang Hartmann connects these men with the royal castles of Mildenburg and Frohburg, the predecessor of Freudenburg, and with Conrad’s assumption of the chief bailiwick of Amorbach Abbey in 1144. Through that office he acquired territorial rights there. Rupert I of Frohburg, recorded as a witness for Conrad in 1149, became the ancestor of the lords of Dürn.
Conrad III installed his ministerial Tibert of Weinsberg at the castle. A ministerial was a dependent noble who served a ruler or lord in military, administrative, or courtly office. Tibert is documented in 1147 and 1150 and was probably responsible for building work at Weinsberg. Engelhard I of Weinsberg, the ancestor of the later lords of Weinsberg, is interpreted as a son of Wolfram of Weinsberg who entered Staufen service.
Wolfram had supported the Staufen side from the beginning. His use of the name Weinsberg in 1146, 1147, and 1160 indicates that Conrad III restored a residence there to him. Conrad’s son, Duke Frederick IV of Swabia, was also sometimes designated by the name Weinsberg and used the castle as a residence for periods.
In 1188 the castle appeared as castrum Winisperch, together with all its dependencies, in the marriage agreement between Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa and King Alfonso VIII of Castile. It formed part of the dower proposed for the marriage of Frederick’s son Conrad and Alfonso’s daughter Berengaria, although the marriage never took place.
From imperial fief to Württemberg possession
The lords of Weinsberg held the castle as an imperial fief until 1450. An imperial fief was a fortress or territory held from the emperor in return for service. The family included Conrad II of Weinsberg, who became Archbishop and Elector of Mainz in the late fourteenth century, and Conrad IX of Weinsberg, who became Imperial Hereditary Chamberlain in the early fifteenth century.
The lords claimed authority over the town, while Weinsberg sought the status of an imperial city and obtained it in 1430. The town became subject to the Electoral Palatinate in 1440. In 1450, financial difficulties led the lords of Weinsberg to sell the castle to the Palatinate.
Duke Ulrich of Württemberg captured the castle and town after a three-week siege in 1504 during the War of the Succession of Landshut, a conflict over the inheritance of the Duchy of Bavaria-Landshut. The fighting caused severe cannon damage, especially to the keep and the northern curtain wall. The Palatinate recognized the transfer to Württemberg in 1512.
Destruction during the Peasants’ War
On Easter Sunday, 16 April 1525, insurgent peasants captured Weinsberg Castle and the town during the German Peasants’ War, a series of uprisings in the Holy Roman Empire in 1524 and 1525. The castle’s earlier damage had been repaired only poorly. The insurgents plundered and burned it, and it has remained a ruin since then.
Ludwig von Helfenstein, the town official, and his companions were executed outside Weinsberg. His wife Margaretha and their young son were captured and sent to Heilbronn. The executions became known as the Weinsberg Bloody Easter. On 21 May, after the peasants’ defeat, mercenary forces of the Swabian League under Georg Truchsess von Waldburg-Zeil burned Weinsberg. The town lost its municipal rights until 1553.
Duke Johann Friedrich of Württemberg attempted to refortify the ruin shortly before or at the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War, the major European religious and political conflict fought from 1618 to 1648. The work was not completed. The strengthened northwestern curtain wall and its postern belong to, or preserve evidence of, these efforts, while the date of the Thick Tower remains uncertain between the early sixteenth century and this later fortification phase.
Stone removal and nineteenth-century preservation
For centuries, local inhabitants used the castle as an unauthorized and inexpensive source of stone. After the Weinsberg town fire of 1707, the Württemberg ruling house authorized the removal of rubble stone for rebuilding but ordered that dressed blocks remain at the castle. Even the dressed stone continued to be removed, helping to produce the ruin’s present appearance.
Justinus Kerner, who came to Weinsberg as chief district physician in 1819, helped halt the ruin’s further decay. With six local women he founded the Weinsberg Women’s Association on 8 December 1823. Queen Pauline of Württemberg became its patron, and the association acquired the vineyards inside the castle walls. King William I of Württemberg enfeoffed it with the ruin on 30 August 1824.
The association cleared rubble, removed the vineyards, created the present footpath, and promoted a chapel-like building made from the ruins. An appeal for donations in 1824 offered women donors rings set with a small stone from the castle. Often used as engagement rings, the gold rings continued to raise money for preservation for decades.
In 1855, Carl Alexander von Heideloff proposed a Gothic hall of fame for important German women as a counterpart to Walhalla, the nineteenth-century memorial hall near Regensburg devoted to notable figures associated with German history and culture. Queen Pauline supported the plan, but King William I postponed it to “quieter times,” and the hall was never built.
Modern interpretation and conservation
After Justinus Kerner’s death, his son Theobald chaired the Women’s Association from 1868 until 1902. He initiated the Stone Album, in which verses by Justinus Kerner, Theobald Kerner, Karl Mayer, Eduard Mörike, Nikolaus Lenau, and others were carved into the castle walls. The King’s Wall also preserves the names of prominent visitors, including Emperor Francis I of Austria, who visited in 1813, and the future King Charles of Württemberg, who visited in 1857.
The tradition of the Loyal Women became central to the castle’s later cultural interpretation. Gottfried August Bürger’s 1774 ballad The Women of Weinsberg, the Brothers Grimm’s 1818 version in German Legends, works by Justinus Kerner, Adelbert von Chamisso’s 1831 ballad The Women of Winsperg, and Gustav Schmidt’s opera Fidelity of Women, or Emperor Conrad before Weinsberg, first performed in 1858, helped circulate the story. Hermann Essig’s 1909 comedy and Paul Wanner’s 1967 play continued that tradition. Artists including Tobias Stimmer, Jacob Jordaens, Matthäus Merian, Nicolas Guibal, Alexander Bruckmann, Lovis Corinth, and Alfred Kubin also treated the subject.
Plans in the 1930s and 1940s sought to use the ruin for Nazi-era commemorative projects and women’s organizations. Proposals included making Weinsberg the “capital of German women’s fidelity” and establishing a training center for the National Socialist Women’s League. They failed, and celebrations planned for the 800th anniversary of the women’s episode were abandoned after war began on 1 September 1939.
From 1957, the Justinus Kerner Association and Women’s Association undertook extensive masonry repairs, restored the northern curtain wall, and built the present wooden gatekeeper’s lodge. Excavations in 1959 to 1961 greatly expanded knowledge of the castle. Further restoration in 1962 and 1963 repaired paths and involved planting shrubs and trees, while archaeological work and repeated repairs have continued because the ruin requires ongoing maintenance.
The castle and its landscape are protected as the Burgberg with Weibertreu landscape conservation area. Covering 17.3 hectares, the protected area aims to preserve the characteristic hill landscape with the ruin and prevent building and other landscape damage. It is classified in IUCN category V and has WDPA identification 320197. The ruin became Monument of the Month of the Baden-Württemberg Monument Foundation in May 2007, and a Staufer stele was inaugurated at the approach on 19 September 2009. The Justinus Kerner Association and Women’s Association of Weinsberg remain the owners, and the site museum presents archaeological material and the history of the Loyal Women.
Remains
Weinsberg Castle stands at 272.2 metres above sea level on a hill northwest and above the town center. The hill is now used almost entirely for vineyards, while the ruin occupies the southwestern corner of the Weinsberg motorway interchange. The surviving fortress is arranged within fragmentary and rebuilt curtain walls, with remnants of the principal residential building, defensive towers, water installations, later gun defenses, and nineteenth-century additions.
Approaches and defensive enclosure
The southern approach follows a path through the vineyards and enters through a breach in the wall at the level of the former third entrance gate. A much steeper original approach, called the Loyal Women’s Path, rises from the northeast and is not generally used for ordinary access.
Parts of the curtain wall survive, while other sections have been rebuilt. A western section retains part of the wall-walk, the raised passage used along the inside of a defensive wall. Only fragments of the keep and two gate towers remain. The northwestern curtain wall includes a postern, a small secondary gate intended for sorties or discreet passage, associated with the unfinished later fortification works.
Residential and artillery structures
Palas towers
The palas, the principal residential and representative building of a medieval castle, is represented chiefly by its southeastern tower and the remains of its southwestern counterpart. The southeastern tower is round at its base and octagonal above. It once carried two additional timber-framed stories and served as the stair tower of the palas. Today it functions as an observation tower. Excavations in 1959 exposed the southwestern tower, and the two towers remain connected by a low wall.
Thick Tower
The Thick Tower occupies the northeastern part of the castle and remains largely intact. It is a later battery, or gun tower designed to accommodate artillery, and is linked to the keep by the strengthened inner castle wall. Its precise date remains uncertain, falling either in the early sixteenth century or in the later attempt to strengthen the fortress before or at the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War. Justinus Kerner installed Aeolian harps in its loopholes. These stringed instruments are played by moving air, and the harps were later returned to their positions so that strong winds can produce sound.
Later fortification wall
The strengthened inner wall between the Thick Tower and the keep belongs to the later defensive arrangement. Beside it stands a cistern, a built reservoir for storing water. An external entrance to the lower level of the Thick Tower was created during the nineteenth-century preservation campaign; that level had formerly served as a powder magazine.
Water installations and quarry
A large, shallow cistern or water basin lies south of the former palas and was excavated in 1961. Together with the cistern beside the strengthened inner wall, it forms part of the castle’s surviving water infrastructure.
A small quarry lies north of the wall connecting the palas towers. It was used after the castle’s destruction and reflects the later removal of building stone that altered the appearance of the ruin.
Nineteenth-century buildings and inscriptions
Former chapel building
The building traditionally called the chapel stands in the southwestern part of the site. Constructed in 1824 from rubble stone according to plans by court architect Nikolaus Friedrich von Thouret, it was not a medieval chapel. It originally served as an exhibition or storage building. Since 11 September 2005, it has housed a small museum displaying finds from the 1959 to 1961 excavations and photographs of the archaeological work.
Stone Album and King’s Wall
The castle interior was redesigned as a park during the nineteenth-century preservation campaign. The present footpath was created during this work, as were the inscriptions of the Stone Album, which consists of carved verses and names on the castle masonry. The King’s Wall, southeast of the former chapel, preserves the names of aristocratic visitors.
A Staufer stele stands at the approach to the ruin. It was inaugurated on 19 September 2009 and forms part of the later interpretation of the castle’s connection with the Staufen period.
Nearby sites
