Freudenstein Castle (Jáchymov)

Freudenstein Castle
Preserved battery tower (Schlickturm) and remnants of the wall on the northeast side
Alternative name (s):	Schlickburg ; Czech Šlikův hrádek
Creation time :	1517-1520
Place:	Jáchymov
Geographical location	50 ° 22 '10.4 "  N , 12 ° 54' 41.3"  E Coordinates: 50 ° 22 '10.4 "  N , 12 ° 54' 41.3"  E
Height:	810  m nm

The castle Freudenstein (also Schlick Castle , Czech hrádek Freudenstein also Šlikův hrádek ) was from 1517 to 1520 for the protection and management of profitable silver mining of the newly formed mountain town of Jáchymov (Jáchymov) built castle . During the Thirty Years' War the castle was badly damaged by artillery fire and was not rebuilt afterwards. Two battery towers and a short remnant of the wall are evidence of the building .

Freudenstein Castle is a selected site within the “Jáchymov Mining Cultural Landscape” for the proposed candidacy for the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Ore Mountains Mining Region .

history

The late Gothic castle was built between 1517 and 1520 on behalf of the territorial lord Stefan Schlick from the Schlackenwerth line of Count Schlick to protect and manage the profitable silver mining of the newly founded mining town of Sankt Joachimsthal. The complex, designed by the master builder Johann Münnich, was created under time pressure for the purpose of quick construction of a residential and administrative seat - the military functionality remained subordinate - and was never finally completed.

Freudenstein Castle is considered to be the youngest castle complex in the Czech Republic.

The counts Schlick sold the silver yield, which had grown by leaps and bounds, to Nuremberg patricians , whose payments per mark of silver were, however, low for the circumstances at the time. In order to make better use of the silver , they decided, on the advice of their mining captain Heinrich von Könneritz , to mint the silver themselves and to set up a mint in Joachimsthal. According to the records of Johannes Mathesius , the first minting of the Joachimstaler Guldengroschen is said to have been made as early as 1519 and probably in the cellars of Freudenstein Castle. After obtaining the minting privileges with a certificate dated January 25, 1520, Stephan Schlick ordered the construction of a new mint. For this purpose, Könneritz had a house bought, in which the necessary fixtures were made and from then on minting took place.

Starting from the rich silver finds, thousands of people streamed into the newly founded city within a very short time, and the first social conflicts arose, which erupted in an initial riot as early as 1517. After a second uprising in 1523, in connection with the German Peasants' War, the largest of these uprisings broke out in Joachimsthal: On May 20, 1525, an angry crowd of around 3,000 miners and members of the community stormed and looted Freudenstein Castle, among others Supplies, food, drinks and clothing, and armor. Following a contractual agreement between the rebels and Count Stephan Schlick, the damaged castle was quickly repaired by the Annaberg negotiations on July 5, 1525, and from then on it became the seat of the mining authority .

In 1545, King Ferdinand I had five leading representatives of Count Schlick, Hieronymus, Lorenz, Caspar, Moritz and Heinrich Schlick, arrested in the White Tower of Prague Castle on the pretext of violating the royal decree . The prisoners had no choice but to waive all rights in the Joachimsthal estates, including Freudenstein Castle and the city of Sankt Joachimsthal, in favor of the king. They were only a ten-year ongoing mountain in the profits of silver mining tenth granted. From then on, Freudenstein Castle was the seat of the royal mining captain. After the failed uprising against the Habsburgs in 1547 , in which both the Schlick and the city council participated, the city and castle were occupied by troops under the Saxon Colonel Thumshirn in March 1547 . The mountain tithe and all other remaining Joachimsthal privileges were withdrawn from the mud, so that Sankt Joachimsthal was now only subject to the Bohemian Crown. With the onset of the depletion of the silver deposits, a general decline in Sankt Joachimsthal began almost at the same time, whereby the maintenance work on the castle was cut back, finally stopped and the facility increasingly fell into disrepair.

Steel engraving of the ruin after a drawing by Franz Alexander Heber , around 1840/45

On 4 May 1584, commissioned by the Bohemian Chamber , the commissioners Sebastian von Lobkowitz, Bernhard von Unruhe and Hans von Limpach, accompanied by the miners from Sankt Joachimsthal and Schlaggenwald, visited the dilapidated castle and laid down the necessary measures for its repair. In 1618, mining captain Christoph Gradl von Grüneberg took up his post, who was the last Joachimsthal mining captain to have his seat at Freudenstein Castle.

During the class uprising in Bohemia between 1618 and 1620, troops of the class general Count Ernst von Mansfeld were stationed at the castle and in the city . In 1621 the castle and town were occupied by the imperial army , and in 1631 the Swedes occupied Sankt Joachimsthal. In the following year, the city again had an imperial garrison , who expanded the fortifications of the castle. During the siege of Sankt Joachimsthal by troops of the Swedish field marshal Johan Banér , Freudenstein Castle was badly damaged by artillery fire and burned out. Then the area of ​​the defensive walls was destroyed. After the signing of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the Swedish garrison blew up the remains of the castle before they left so that it could not be used again as a base for military operations. In the following years the ruins were left to decay and their masonry was removed by residents as building material. Only two towers remained.

Development in the castle courtyard in the late 19th century, drawing by Karel Liebscher

In 1861 the northeast tower was converted into the municipal watchtower with a tower room . The tower keeper signaled the start and end of the shift to the miners by ringing the mountain bell. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the south-west tower served the Imperial and Royal Mining Authority as a warehouse for gunpowder .

In the course of the 19th century, several commercial and residential buildings were built on the foundation walls of the castle area, and building materials from the ruins of the castle were also used for their construction. At the transition from the 19th to the 20th century, the area was cut through to a small extent with the construction of a new road to New Town (Nové Město) .

After the expulsion of the German population at the end of the Second World War , all objects on the area of ​​the former castle became the property of the Municipal National Committee (Městský národní výbor) Jáchymov. The farm buildings and the preserved batteries were left to decay. In the 1950s, the dilapidated modern farm buildings were finally demolished. Due to the beginning of the collapse of the cellar vaults , access to the site was finally forbidden.

On May 3, 1958, the remains of Freudenstein Castle were entered in the state register of cultural monuments. On June 14, 1964, the city watchtower burned down after being struck by lightning. In 1973 the city administration decided to completely reconstruct the tower, after the completion of which this and the surrounding area were made accessible to the public again.

From April 22 to June 16, 2004, an archaeological exploratory investigation was carried out by the Karlsbad Museum in advance of the construction of a single-family house near the Powder Tower . In connection with the construction of another single-family house, which took place outside the castle grounds, the course of the original castle wall could be reconstructed. In 2011 an archaeological revision study was carried out on the Powder Tower by the National Monument Authority Loket and the Department of Archeology at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen .

description

The castle area is located west of the upper town center of Jáchymov on a mountain tongue known today in Czech as Zámecký vrch ( German  castle hill ) at an altitude of about 810  m nm The connecting road Jáchymov – Nové Město runs through the center of the area. The late Gothic castle with a relatively simple fortress architecture took up the north-eastern edge of the wide mountain tongue, which extends between two lateral notch valleys to the main valley of the east running Jáchymovský potok . On the south-west facing end there was a mighty neck ditch , of which only remains are preserved in the west. Behind this there was presumably a massive wall in front of the adjacent defensive wall. The Aareal had the ground plan of a regular rectangle of around 65 x 50 meters, the longer axis of which was perpendicular to the building axis. There were at least two, but probably four, towers at the corners. In front of the adjoining curtain wall was a significantly extended battery with cylinder towers eight meters in diameter and 1.7 meters thick. Between the towers was a 1.5 meter thick defensive wall, which was presumably provided with a gallery on the outside and on which the residential and farm buildings of the castle leaned from the inside. The castle gate was probably in the western defensive wall. Only two battery towers and a short remnant of the wall on the northeast tower are preserved.

The area at the south-west tower and in the area of ​​the western defensive wall was increased after the destruction of the wall and the buildings on it and currently shows the same level of terrain as the north-east tower. Only a section of the defensive walls directly on the northeast tower remained. The large window opening in it suggests that there was a building of unknown size and shape. The entire inner castle area was on one level. At the southeast corner of the castle there are two cellars one behind the other with barrel vaults of another castle building, which were still accessible through an architecturally non-classifiable entrance until the turn of the 21st century. The archaeologist Dobroslav Líbal described another, partially buried entrance to a cellar corridor in the northwestern part of the castle in an article from 1969. Another building stood on the western defensive wall not far from the southwest tower.

In the course of the last adjustments to the castle area to date, a small house and a shed that had been built within the castle complex in modern times were demolished. On plans from the middle of the 19th century, there are still spacious buildings about halfway along the northeast side, which were probably built on the old walls of the castle buildings and have now disappeared. The area east of the street and around the Schlikturm was redesigned to a park .

Silt tower

The 19 meter high Schlickturm ( Czech Šlikovka ) called Battery Tower is located on the northeast corner of the castle. Originally there was on the corbels an indented timbered attic with stone gallery and small bays that with a high domed conical shingle covered roof and a lantern was provided. The highest level of the tower was equipped with narrow loopholes . The tower had a cellar to a depth of eight meters, maybe even deeper. When it was converted into a municipal watchtower in 1861, the upper floor was romantically redesigned with the Gothic corbels . In addition, the wooden attic was removed and replaced with a new one. In 1973 the tower, which had burned out nine years earlier, was restored and opened to the public. The basement was closed with a concrete floor.

Powder tower

The 12-meter-high Powder Tower ( Prachárna in Czech ) called the Battery Tower is located in the southwest. Originally there was a high opening with an elliptical arch on the first floor on the side facing the castle area, which could be closed by a narrow wooden wall; it was probably walled up in the 16th century. The floor of the tower is vaulted with a cross vault, no notches can be seen over the entire height of the wall. On the north side of the tower, clear traces of its connection with the defensive wall are visible up to a great height, on the east side these are missing. The tower was probably initially only used for defensive purposes. Since the 16th century - as is the case today - it was covered with a conical roof. Near the tower, towards the southeast, is the remainder of a bastion or mantle wall . It may be a remnant of the upstream, three-meter-high semicircular bastion , most of which was still preserved in 1913.

legend

There is a legend according to which a knight should appear at the castle to play skittles on dark nights . A chance witness who had the courage to take part in the game is said to have made wealth by winning a silver ball.

literature

• Tomáš Durdík : Freudenstein Castle in Jáchymov (St. Joachimsthal) - the youngest new castle in Bohemia . In: Wartburg Society for Research into Castles and Palaces (ed.): The castle at the time of the Renaissance (= research into castles and palaces . Volume 13 ) . Deutscher Kunstverlag , Berlin / Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-422-07023-3 , p. 43-50 .
• Vinzenz Uhl: Castles and palaces of the Ore Mountains and Egertal. Kaaden, 1935.

Web links

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

• Jaroslav Vyčichlo: Jáchymov - hrad Freudenstein (Czech)
• Floor plan of the castle complex
• Freudenstein Castle on Burgenwelt.org (German)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Montanregion Krušné hory - Erzgebirge, ops (ed.): Monuments of mining in the Montanregion Erzgebirge / Krušnohoří . 2014, List of components nominated for World Heritage, p. 16 ( Pdf; 5.9 MB [accessed May 31, 2015]). Pdf; 5.9 MB ( Memento of the original from March 6, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
2. ^ Tomáš Durdík: Freudenstein Castle in Jáchymov (St. Joachimsthal) - the youngest new castle in Bohemia . .. p. 48 .
3. ↑ Johannes Mathesius : Chronica of the Keyserlichen Freyen mountain town Sanct Joachimsthal / which was previously the ConradsGrün genent . In: Berg-Postilla or Sarepta darinnen of all mine and metals / what their properties and nature / and how they are useful and well made / good report given / .. Zacharias Beckern, Freyberg 1679 ( digitized [accessed on June 2, 2015] ).
4. ↑ Eduard Fiala: The coinage of Count Schlick . In: Numismatic Society in Vienna and its Redactions-Comité (Hrsg.): Numismatic magazine . tape 22 . Self-published by the Numismatic Society, Vienna 1890, The Joachimsthal Mint, p. 176–181 ( digitized version [accessed June 1, 2015]).
5. ^ Siegfried Sieber : The Joachimsthaler uprising in 1525 in its relations with Saxony . In: Collegium Carolinum / Research Center for the Bohemian Countries (ed.): Bohemia - Yearbook of the Collegium Carolinum . 4th volume. Verlag Robert Lerche, formerly Calv'sche Universitätsbuchhandlung Prague, Munich 1963, p. 46 ( digitized version [accessed June 1, 2015]). Digitized version ( memento of the original from June 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
6. ↑ hrádek Freudenstein (Šlikův hrádek) ÚSKP 30170 / 4-858 in the monument catalog pamatkovykatalog.cz (Czech).
7. ↑ mapy.cz. Seznam.cz, as, accessed on May 31, 2015 .