Colmberg Castle

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Colmberg Castle
Colmberg Castle from the east

Colmberg Castle from the east

Alternative name (s): Kolbenberg Castle
Creation time : 1100 to 1200
Castle type : Höhenburg, spur location
Conservation status: Receive
Standing position : Counts, nobles, commoners
Construction: Humpback cuboid
Place: Colmberg
Geographical location 49 ° 21 '36.7 "  N , 10 ° 24' 29.3"  E Coordinates: 49 ° 21 '36.7 "  N , 10 ° 24' 29.3"  E
Height: 511  m above sea level NHN
Colmberg Castle (Bavaria)
Colmberg Castle

The Castle Colmberg , also called Castle Kolbenberg , is a spur castle at 511  m above sea level. NHN high "Heuberg" in the Altmühltal 35 meters above the Colmberg market in the Ansbach district in Bavaria .

prehistory

Traces of Neolithic hunters were found on the Heuberg (formerly Eichelberg), located just above the village of Colmberg . There may have been a small settlement there in Celtic times. At the beginning of the Middle Ages, the entire upper Altmühltal consisted of primeval forest on the heights and swamp near the river and streams.

After 720 the local area was taken over by the Franconian kings and used as a hunting area. Even Charlemagne is yet to aurochs have hunted to which the place name here Auerbach still remembers today.

In the Carolingian era , a small palisade castle with a wooden tower was built here on the mountain spur 511 meters high and 54 meters above the valley floor around the year 770 in order to be able to overlook the entire area from the Altmühlquelle near Hornau to the narrow point near Frommetsfelden . This is still proven today by the rectangular shape of the inner castle complex.

history

Colmberg Castle from the south-east

Counts of Truhendingen

After Colmberg came into the fief of the Counts of Hohenlohe in 1128 , the old fortifications were expanded to form an imperial castle around 1150 to 1240 under the German emperors and their bailiffs and in 1254 came to the Counts of Truhendingen . They had Colmberg Castle administered by poorly paid bailiffs, who took advantage of the unlawful state of the time for themselves by arrogant attacks. The oldest court books of the imperial city of Rothenburg testify to an almost endless chain of complaints about crimes committed by the Colmberg officials before the court there. B. unpaid debts, unpaid guarantees, trespassing, robbery, deprivation of liberty, theft and arson. Ultimately, in 1293, it was not the governor of that time, but the entire Colmberg Castle that was outlawed. Because the Counts of Truhendingen got into ever greater financial difficulties, they parted with this badly reputed fortress, a robber knight's castle that can be documented. Colmberg was finally sold on July 13, 1318 together with the city of Leutershausen and the surrounding area for 6200 pounds (Schwäbisch) Haller pfennigs to the burgrave Friedrich IV of Nuremberg .

Franconian Hohenzollern

Friedrich VI. from Hohenzollern

For almost 500 years this fortress and its surrounding area was an important property of the Hohenzollern family , which they pledged three times due to debts, but redeemed again and again. From here your bailiffs monitored the access to the imperial city of Rothenburg ob der Tauber, with which the burgraves had a very tense relationship. And so, in 1407, the castle became the gathering place of all the Hohenzollern feudal people and their allies in a feud with Rothenburg and its mayor Toppler . An estimated 10,000 men marched under the leadership of Burgrave Friedrich VI. for the siege of the imperial city. Rothenburg finally had to negotiate and five castles in their possession grind leave. Due to the enormous costs that the won war against Rothenburg had caused, Friedrich VI relocated. now his main residence at Colmberg Castle. The keeping costs here were considerably cheaper than at Cadolzburg or in Nuremberg.

After the successful campaign against the Turks , in which he saved Sigismund of Luxembourg , who was elected German king in 1410, Friedrich was given the hereditary dignity of Margrave and Elector of Brandenburg on April 30, 1415 : From the Burgrave Friedrich VI. was now the Margrave Friedrich I of Brandenburg . Because of the newly won territory, he was often in northern Germany and left the government of the local margraviate to his wife Elisabeth von Bayern-Landshut (called "Schöne Else"), who still resided here. When Friedrich died in 1440, the castle became the widow's seat of the "Schöne Else" for two years. The pictures of the famous couple can still be found in the castle chapel above the harmonium .

Elisabeth of Bavaria ("Schöne Else")

After the death of "Schöne Else", the castle remained the focus of the Margravial Oberamt Colmberg. The administrators of the Oberamt Colmberg were referred to as Oberamtsmen or Vögte (their deputies in the local bailiwick). However, the Hohenzollerns also had their problems with their castle bailiffs because they could not adequately monitor them from Berlin or Ansbach. Allegedly, the Colmberg Vogt Rüd had captured a Rothenburg councilor who was passing by in a wagon train and allowed him to rot in the castle dungeon. In any case, in 1449 the Rothenburg soldiers looted 18 margrave villages in the entire upper Altmühltal and burned them down together with the upper suburb of Leutershausen. Because they could not storm the walls of the fortress - which was shot at with catapults - the village of Colmberg was also burned to ashes. In return, Margrave Albrecht Achilles had his soldiers burn down many Rothenburg villages within the so-called Landhege from here .

On the well-fortified wall rings and trenches of Colmberg Castle, however, not only did the Rothenburg offensive in 1449 fail, but also all later attacks, including those during the Peasants' War . In 1525 the "Red Conrad", who had previously fallen victim to around 200 castles and palaces in Franconia, had to surrender to the strong walls. Shortly before the Thirty Years' War , the protruding bastion with small guns was added to the southern outer wall. The imperial general Tilly , who wanted to conquer the castle in 1631, was unsuccessful in trying to take the fortress. During the Thirty Years' War, the castle was a reliable protection for the surrounding population. During the following baroque period, however, the castle lost its importance. The margravial chief magistrate was mostly in Ansbach and was represented by the Vogt or Kastner.

Under Prussian and Bavarian administration

After the abdication of the last Margrave Alexander in 1791, Colmberg was under Prussian administration until 1806. When the Kingdom of Bavaria reorganized the area of ​​the former margraviate that Napoleon I had handed over, Colmberg Castle became the seat of a rent office in the Leutershausen district court in 1810 , which enabled the castle to be saved from being sold for demolition.

Colmberg Castle (around 1900)

Privately owned

After the Leutershausen district court was repealed at the beginning of 1880 and the local rent office was relocated to Ansbach, the Bavarian state sold the castle, which had become useless to it, to the Würzburg merchant Rösner. In 1888 the castle became the property of Alexander Freiherr von Siebold and was sold in 1896 to Major Klingebeil, who committed suicide in 1903 by throwing himself from the outer castle wall. His widow, Käthe Klingebeil-Glüber, lived in the castle for another 24 years.

From 1927 the castle was owned by Ernst Arthur Voretzsch , German envoy in Lisbon and from 1928 to 1933 ambassador to Japan . His nephew Ernst Adalbert Voretzsch, castle administrator in Colmberg, became the main operational leader in the Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) operations staff during the National Socialist era and deposited 25 truckloads of stolen cultural goods, including icons from Pskow and Novgorod , in Colmberg, in 1946 a first shipment of 1178 icons and paintings from the US occupation forces to the Soviet Union.

After Voretzsch's death in 1964, Colmberg Castle came into the possession of the Unbehauen family from Colmberg , who still own the castle today.

Building history and description

Keep of Colmberg Castle
Outer castle wall
Interior of Colmberg Castle with a view of the court arbor
Half-timbered building of the castle
Colmberg Castle from the north

Comberg Castle is a medieval section castle . From the time of around 1150, the lower part of the stems Palas with Kemenate as well as from the time of around 1250 of about 35 meters high, four-storey round keep . This has up to 6 meters thick masonry made of humpback blocks with holes and is connected to the battlement of the inner wall via a footbridge . The chapel on the 1st floor of Kemenatenbaues (women's shelter in the central part of the castle) Margrave Albrecht Achilles set. The gothic tracery of the chapel and the foundation deed from May 3, 1451 are still preserved.

The keep had a deep well (draw well). The court arbor next to the donjon is still reminiscent of the jury and ban judgment that was exercised in the castle by the Colmberger Oberamtmann. The castle dungeons , which are no longer accessible today, were located on the second floor under the Palas , above which the medieval kitchen and its storage rooms were housed. The weapons hall on the ground floor had no access to the castle courtyard. This was only possible on the inside through an external staircase with barrel vaults that led to the knight's hall on the first floor . All enemy attacks failed at the well-fortified castle complex with earth wall and ditch, double wall ring and outer well, 1.3 meter thick ring wall and neck ditch towards the ridge.

Around 1700, the still-preserved half-timbered building on the right side of the castle courtyard, the margravial caste office, was built above the ground floor of the former stables . Old parts of the castle complex were demolished. B. the accesses to the external abortion facilities. The southern wall of the inner courtyard was also torn down, so that the sun could finally shine into the courtyard. Before that, it must have been very dark, damp and cold in winter. Opposite the inner gate, a horse stable was built against the outer wall, because there was no longer a stables.

The oldest known description of the fortress was written by the margravial surveyor and lieutenant engineer Johann Georg Vetter in 1732:

“A high prince (Lich) Ansbach castle, which is well built with a beautiful high tower built from pure ashlar pieces, with a castle chapel, grain box, castner's apartment, box knife and servant house, with the same double wall and various towers, is located around midnight Fleckens Colmberg on the mountain. "

When the castle came into the possession of Rösner in 1880, Rösner invested large amounts of money to at least secure the castle's existence. However, he is said to have broken off the top stone layers of the outer wall and sold it. Under Alexander Freiherr von Siebold, Colmberg Castle was later restored in the Gothic style.

When the tiled roof of the keep was swept down in August 1928 by a severe storm, Voretzsch had it replaced with a copper hood, which is still there today.

Colmberg was badly destroyed on April 17, 1945 towards the end of the Second World War . The castle was also shelled by American troops. The damage was limited.

The Unbehauen family eventually converted the castle into a hotel with a restaurant.

literature

Web links

Commons : Burg Colmberg  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ulrike Hartung: Abducted and lost: a documentation of German, Soviet and American files on Nazi art theft in the Soviet Union (1941–1948) . Temmen, Bremen 2000, ISBN 3-86108-336-1 , p. 33, 267, 297 .