Bischofstein Castle

Bischofstein Castle
	Bischofstein Castle ( castles in the background )
Creation time :	before 1273
Castle type :	Höhenburg, spur location
Conservation status:	Rebuilt in 1930 using the preserved ruins.
Standing position :	Deacon (archdeacon), Archbishop of Trier
Construction:	Quarry stone
Place:	Münstermaifeld - Lasserg
Geographical location	50 ° 12 '49 " N , 7 ° 23' 2" E Coordinates: 50 ° 12 '49 " N , 7 ° 23' 2" E
Height:	150 m above sea level NHN

The Bischofstein Castle is a Spur castle on the western shore of the Mosel between Moselkern and Hatzenport in the district of Lasserg , a district of Münstermaifeld . The municipality of Burgen is located directly opposite on the other side of the Moselle . Destroyed by French troops in 1689, it was rebuilt as a holiday home in the 1930s. Since 1954 it has housed a school camp . The most characteristic feature of the castle is a white strip of plaster about halfway up the keep .

geography

Location of Bischofstein Castle in the Mayen-Koblenz district

Still on the edge of the southern plateau of the Eifel , the Maifeld at 150 m above sea level. Located at NHN , the Spornburg towers visible from afar halfway up the mountain on a rock spur above the Moselle valley. The B 416 runs below, which is called Moselschiefer-Straße on this section . The next larger cities are Cochem , around 25 km upstream, and Koblenz , which is 35 km downstream.

Opposite the castle, the Baybach flows into the Moselle, which has dug into the Hunsrück with gorges and valleys . The neighboring towns of Moselkern and Hatzenport, both about 2 km away, are typical wine-growing villages on the Moselle. Moselkern is the mouth of the Elzbach , in the valley of which Eltz Castle is located. The Hatzenporter winemakers press a white wine from Burg Bischofstein.

history

13th century to 1880

The construction of Bischofstein Castle was started by Archbishop Arnold II of Trier between 1242 and 1259. Another mention of the castle comes from the year 1262, when the Trier archdeacon Heinrich von Bolanden resided on Bischofstein. This emerges from a document dated June 10, 1262, in which he promised on Bischofstein to repay debts of the monasteries of Laach and Rommersdorf .

Bischofstein ruins around 1900, including the Paulus Chapel .

The exact start of construction is unknown. It is certain that Heinrich von Bolanden bought the half-finished castle at an unknown time and completed it at his own expense. This emerges from what is probably the most important document for Bischofstein from September 11, 1273. At this time Heinrich von Bolanden donated the castle Bischofstein, which he had completed, to the Trier cathedral chapter. The conditions for the donation were: a lifelong right of abode and the support that he and all subsequent public official with the castle he invested should be.

His successor Hermann von Weilnau granted Archbishop Peter von Nassau the right to open Bischofstein in 1303. In the event of war, Bischofstein was now available to the archbishop. Heinrich von Pfaffendorf, the third archdeacon enfeoffed with Bischofstein, committed himself in 1329:

not to tolerate opponents of the archbishop in the castle,
to protect the crossings over the Moselle and
no vassals or castle men to accept without the permission of the archbishop.

Heinrich's successor Gottfried von Brandenburg finally had to undertake to refrain from damage, so that he could only use Bischofstein with the consent of the Archbishop. After Friedrich Pfalzgraf bei Rhein, who was enfeoffed with Bischofstein in 1501, no other enfeoffment is known.

In 1552 Margrave Albrecht von Brandenburg is said to have besieged Bischofstein in vain. However, this cannot be proven.

The Thirty Years' War caused great damage to the Moselle. B. also on October 26, 1631, when troops of the Swedish King Gustav II Adolf invaded the nearby Münstermaifeld . A detailed visitation log of the furnishings of the castle chapel from 1680 allows the conclusion that the castle survived the war unscathed. In the Palatinate War of Succession in 1689, the castle was finally destroyed by the French troops of Louis XIV .

In the territories of the German Empire on the left bank of the Rhine annexed by the French in 1794, most of the ecclesiastical properties were dissolved by the repeal resolution of 1802 and placed under the French administration as national property. This also affected the Bischofstein ruins, which belonged to the St. Castor monastery in Karden . It was sold on September 29, 1803 in an auction by the department administration for 330 francs to the Burgen winemaker Nicolaus Artz.

In 1824 there was a report of a house with seven residents at Burg Bischofstein. After that, the ownership structure is in the dark.

1880 until today

The oldest photo of Burg Bischofstein (before 1884)

In 1880 Johann Franz Bienen from Rheinberg bought the castle. On April 11, 1930, their heirs sold it for 8,000 Reichsmarks to the Darmstadt merchant Erich Deku, who soon rebuilt it as a holiday home. It was not reconstructed, but rebuilt using the preserved walls. For this purpose, an access road for construction vehicles had to be created, which was partly realized by rock blasting. Deku put on an extensive art collection to furnish the castle. There was also a winged altar from 1530.

The reconstruction in its present form was completed by the Neuerburg family from Trier in 1937/38. The widow Aenny Neuerburg bought the castle from the Decku family after bankruptcy proceedings were opened against Erich Deku in 1936, to which the entire art collection fell victim.

From 1941 to 1946, Bischofstein Castle served as a convalescent home for soldiers, as a war hospital and refugee home under the direction of Aenny Neuerburg. Then the son Raymund Neuerburg and his family took over the management of the castle and made it a guesthouse. After Aenny's death in 1953, the Neuerburg family put the castle up for sale in 1954.

Since the early 1950s, the Fichte-Gymnasium Krefeld tried to acquire its own school camp. Of all the objects that the newly founded "Schullandheim Fichte-Gymnasium e. V. ”were offered for sale, Burg Bischofstein on the Moselle proved to be the most suitable in terms of structural condition and spatial conditions. On June 29, 1954, a purchase contract for the acquisition of the castle was concluded with the executor of the will of the deceased Ms. Neuerburg . The transfer of ownership took place on July 1, 1954.

View of the building from the keep

Bischofstein Castle (photographed from the lower courtyard)

Bischofstein Castle is now a listed building , but not as an 800 year old castle, but as an example of the architectural style of the 1930s in which it was rebuilt. In 2012 a house buck infestation was found on the entire castle, after which the castle was extensively renovated in 2014. To do this, the living quarters had to be completely wrapped in special aluminum foil and heated to 70 degrees Celsius.

The castle has four dormitories with a total of 38 beds, two teachers' rooms, a lounge, a dining and teaching room, a table tennis and table football room in the former knight's hall , a kitchen and storage rooms.

Keep

The keep with its white ring

View from the keep of the Moselle and Hatzenport

The 25-meter-high keep stands out from a distance due to its white ring at about mid-height. This is a remaining piece of plaster . In the late Middle Ages it was common in Central Europe for the keep to be completely plastered. Due to the weather , this plaster has largely disappeared over the centuries. In 1997 the keep was renovated. The battlements were rebuilt and the tower platform re-poured. A new wooden staircase was built into the castle tower based on a medieval model. This means that the tower can be climbed again without any problems, and every visitor can enjoy the view of the Moselle.

Say around the tower

In the course of time, many legends and assumptions have spun around the keep and its white ring.

One says that bands of robbers regularly attacked traders on the trade route that the castle was supposed to protect. To put an end to this, the Bishop of Trier had a ring put on the castle tower, and every captured robber was hung there as a warning to his own kind.

Another legend tells that there should have been a gigantic flood , the high water mark of which is the ring.

Another version claims that the Bishop of Trier rescued the lord of the castle from a predicament. As a thank you, he had a ring attached to the tower at the height of the Trier Mosel level as a symbol for the bishop's ring.

Castle chapel St. Stephanus

Burg Bischofstein, like every medieval castle, has a castle chapel . It is consecrated to St. Stephen . The chapel was also rebuilt in the 1930s. In 1995 the chapel was completely renovated in the medieval style.

The showpiece of the chapel is a door that comes from the outstanding baroque choir stalls of the Mainz Charterhouse . This was made 1723–1726 under the direction of the Hamburg cabinet maker Johann Justus Schacht. It is adorned with rich marquetry . After the abolition of the Charterhouse, it was acquired for the Trier Cathedral in 1787. Most of it can still be admired there today in the east and west choirs. However, in 1890, the cathedral chapter had 18 parts of the rear walls (dorsals) sold to the Berlin banker Adolf von Rath through the art trade. After the Rath art collections were auctioned off in 1933, 17 ended up in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Three are shown there, 14 were returned to Trier Cathedral in 1952. In 1933, the aforementioned collector Deku acquired part of the choir stalls from the Rath collection for Bischofstein Castle. However, he only acquired the architectural frame, the inner door panel, an inlay work, is of different origin. When the entire castle inventory was auctioned off at Hahn in Frankfurt in 1937, only the chapel door remained. In 1994 the owner of the castle planned to sell this important testimony to Middle Rhine art history via Sotheby's or Christie's, which would presumably have led to it being inaccessible in a private collection. However, the State Office for the Preservation of Monuments, which had made considerable grants for keeping citizens of the city, was able to avert the auction.

Look into the chapel
Door from the choir stalls of the Mainz Charterhouse
Candlesticks in the chapel

Others

Hiking around Burg Bischofstein

The Schoppenstecher hiking trail and the local hiking trail 7 to Eltz Castle and back via Moselkern run through the property of Burg Bischofstein . The Moselsteig Trail and the Mosel Camino of the Way of St. James lead above the castle. The WeinWetterWeg hiking trail in the Hatzenport community ends here.

Entering the castle grounds for tourist purposes is only possible after consultation with the castle administrator. However, Bischofstein Castle opens its doors every year on the Open Castle Day in spring and on the Open Monument Day in autumn.

The Paulus Chapel, built around 1200, is halfway up from Bischofstein Castle .

The British painter William Turner visited the Moselle on his travels through Germany in 1824 and 1839. He made numerous pencil sketches, which he later used as a free basis for paintings . Two paintings deal with Bischofstein Castle.

Burg Bischofstein is the end of the TorTour every year in late summer , a 190-kilometer bike tour that starts in Krefeld.

literature

Christa Becker, Winfried Schorre: Castle Bischofstein on the Moselle. Görres-Druckerei, Koblenz 2002, ISBN 3-935690-02-9 .
Alexander Thon, Stefan Ulrich: Blown by the showers of the past…. Castles and palaces on the Moselle. Schnell & Steiner, Regensburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-7954-1926-4 , pp. 34–37.
Alexander Thon: Between Empire, Rhineland Palatinate and Archdiocese of Trier. New insights into the high medieval history of the castles Bischofstein, Cochem and Klotten. In: Olaf Wagener (Ed.): The castles on the Mosel. Files from the 2nd international scientific conference in Oberfell on the Moselle. Koblenz 2007, pp. 62-82.