Haneck Castle (Alsace)

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The Haneck castle ruins (left) and Schrankenfels (right) on a lithograph by Jacques Rothmüller , 1839

The Haneck Castle ( French Château de Haneck , Château du Haneck or just Le Haneck for short ) is the ruin of a spur castle in the Alsatian municipality of Soultzbach-les-Bains in the Haut-Rhin department . It is probably founded in the 13th century and was successively owned by the von Gundolsheim , von Hattstatt and von Schauenburg families as a fief . At the end of the 16th century, the small castle complex was already in ruins.

The remains of the castle are now the property of the municipality. In the past, due to its name, the complex was often confused with Hageneck Castle in Wettolsheim , so that documents from the two castles used to be mixed up and Haneck's history was peppered with facts about Hageneck.

location

The neighboring castles Haneck, Burgthalschloss and Schrankenfels on an old map

The remains of the hill fort are 765  m above sea level on the north-western end of a rock spur of the right-hand valley wall of the Krebstal. The ruins of the Burgthalschloss and the Schrankenfels Castle are located on the same rock around 40 and 180 m away . They are only separated from each other by a deep cut in the terrain.

history

The beginnings of the castle are in the dark. It is 1307 first mentioned when Conrad Werner of Hattstatt four members of the family of Gundolsheim with Haneck belehnte . However, it was probably founded in the first half of the 13th century, because with its regular, rectangular floor plan it resembles other Alsatian castles from that time, such as Burg Liebenstein near Liebsdorf and Burg Hageneck. However, archaeological excavations would have to be carried out for an exact dating . Perhaps the foundation was related to the nearby Schrankenfels Castle, which was first mentioned in a document as early as 1241. Possibly it arose from disputes in the von Schrankenfels family or when an inheritance was divided. Thomas Biller and Bernhard Metz, on the other hand, are of the opinion that the strategically more favorable building site of Haneck Castle suggests that it is the older of the two facilities and that the gentlemen from Geberschweier built Schrankenfels later and on the less favorable building site that could be attacked from two sides.

In 1422 Haneck, including the mountain and accessories, was owned by the Gundolsheimers as a Hattstatter fief. From 1463 the property was then a fiefdom of the abbey in Münster , whose feudal taker was the von Hattstatt family. When this died out in 1585, the castle complex came - against the will of the monastery - as an inheritance to the Lords of Schauenburg. In 1598, however, it was already in ruins, because in a document from that year it was titled “old derelict Haneckh castle”. Three watercolors that were made in the course of a legal dispute in 1610 document this dilapidated state.

description

Floor plan of Haneck Castle

Only a few remains of Haneck Castle have survived. Next to the stump of the keep there are only rubble walls. Despite the poor condition, the rectangular floor plan is still easy to see. The 17 × 22.5 meter castle was surrounded all around by a curtain wall with three rounded corners. The pointed, southern corner of the wall consisted of humpback blocks . For the construction of the facility, the mountain spur was changed significantly at this point: in the north and south, deep trenches were dug into the rock and the two long sides in the west and east made artificially steeper. This created two terraces , on which the outer bailey and farm buildings were possibly located, but no traces of them are detectable above ground. The quarry stone from Grauwacke obtained when the trenches were built was used for the masonry of the plant.

Access to the complex was presumably from the northwest at the northern end of the west terrace, where the path coming from Soultzbach leads to the castle. On the south side of the attack, in the south-east corner of the castle, there is a six-meter-high remnant of the nearly square keep, measuring about 6.20 × 5.80 meters. The seams between the circular wall and the tower show that the keep was built in front of the surrounding wall. While most of the masonry was made of Grauwackebruchstein, the keep corners were made of humpback blocks made of granite . In the 1980s, small remains of its plaster remained on the defense tower . There are four simple light slits in the basement. The interior of the tower was divided into two by a transverse wall.

The keep probably also protected the castle gate , which was probably on the east side. On that side there are also small remains of a quarry stone wall that belonged to a narrow kennel . The entrance led into the castle courtyard, which occupied the eastern half of the complex, while the western part was probably occupied by a two-part residential building.

literature

  • Thomas Biller, Bernhard Metz: The late Romanesque castle building in Alsace (1200-1250) (= The castles of Alsace. Architecture and history. Volume 2). Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munich / Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-422-06635-9 , pp. 242–245.
  • Pierre Brunel : Soultzbach-les-Bains. Château du Haneck. In: Roland Recht (Ed.): Le Guide des châteaux de France. Haut-Rhin. Hermé, Paris 1986, ISBN 2-86665-025-5 ; Pp. 148-150.
  • Nicolas Mengus, Jean-Michel Rudrauf: Châteaux forts et fortifications médiévales d′Alsace. Dictionnaire d′histoire et d′architecture . La Nuée Bleue, Strasbourg 2013, ISBN 978-2-7165-0828-5 , pp. 128–129.
  • Charles-Laurent Salch: Nouveau Dictionnaire des Châteaux Forts dʼAlsace. Alsatia, Strasbourg 1991, ISBN 2-7032-0193-1 , p. 297.

Web links

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

Individual evidence

  1. a b Entry of the castle ruins in the Base Mérimée of the French Ministry of Culture (French)
  2. a b c T. Biller, B. Metz: The late Romanesque castle building in Alsace (1200-1250). 2007, p. 242.
  3. a b c d e Pierre Brunel: Soultzbach-les-Bains. Château du Haneck. 1996, p. 148.
  4. a b T. Biller, B. Metz: The late Romanesque castle building in Alsace (1200-1250). 2007, p. 243.
  5. a b c d e f g T. Biller, B. Metz: The late Romanesque castle building in Alsace (1200-1250). 2007, p. 244.
  6. C.-L. Salch: Nouveau Dictionnaire des Châteaux Forts dʼAlsace. 1991, p. 297.
  7. ^ Pierre Brunel: Soultzbach-les-Bains. Château du Haneck. 1996, p. 150.

Coordinates: 48 ° 1 ′ 25.1 ″  N , 7 ° 12 ′ 43.6 ″  E