Kokenhusen Castle

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View of the Kokenhusen castle ruins from the west

The Kokenhusen Castle ( Latvian Kokneses pils ) is the ruin of a medieval section castle in the Latvian Koknese ( German  Kokenhusen ) about 85 kilometers southeast of the capital Riga .

Erected at the beginning of the 13th century on the site of a previously burned down complex by the Bishop of Riga on the south-western border of his diocese , it stood on a 30-meter-high ledge on the Daugava Valley . It was part of a strategic chain of episcopal and religious castles along the Daugava, which began with Daugavpils and reached via Riga , Holme , Uexküll and Lennewarden to Kokenhusen.

Over the course of time, repeatedly changed and rebuilt, the facility was destroyed by blasting at the beginning of the 18th century. Its ruin , which was listed as a historical monument on December 16, 1998 , has been a popular excursion destination in the region since the end of the 19th century.

history

The castle hill and its ruins at the end of the 18th century

The Kokenhusen Castle Hill was settled long before the stone castle was built. He was first mentioned in writing as Kukonoyse in Heinrich's Livonian Chronicle , in which the chronicler Heinrich of Latvia lists a peace treaty between Albert von Buxthoeven , the bishop of Riga, and the local prince Vyachko for the year 1205 . At that time the hill was the site of a Latgallian wooden castle. In 1207 Vyachko contributed half of this castle and his country the bishop fief and thus became his vassal , but was following with his feudal lord in the dispute so that it burned down and the castle in 1208 Livonia then towards Rus left.

In 1209, Bishop Albert had the construction of a stone castle begin at the same place, which was able to withstand a siege by the Lithuanians in the following year . The bishop lent a third of the complex to the Knight of the Brotherhood of the Swords, Rudolph of Jericho, but by 1213 Albert was again the sole owner of the complex. It was then given to the knight Meinhard and, under Bishop Nikolaus von Nauen, to the knight Dietrich. This was called the following "von Kukenois" and was able to defy another siege with his castle garrison in 1221, this time by 600 Lithuanians. Dietrich's widow married Hans von Tiesenhausen for the second time, to whom Archbishop Albert Suerbeer confirmed the ownership of Kokenhusen on April 25, 1269. The von Tiesenhausen family remained the owners of the castle until 1397, when Archbishop Johannes von Wallenrode took over the complex himself and used it as a table and summer residence. From then on, Kokenhusen Castle was administered by an episcopal Vogt .

Rebuilt under Archbishop Henning Scharpenberg in the second quarter of the 15th century, the well- fortified Kokenhusen repeatedly played a major role in the disputes between the Archdiocese of Riga and the Teutonic Order over power and territory in Livonia. Landmeister Bernhard von der Borch arrested Archbishop Silvester Stodewescher there in 1479 , and Landmeister Johann Wilhelm von Fürstenberg used the castle as a prison for the last Riga Archbishop Wilhelm von Brandenburg and his coadjutor Christoph zu Mecklenburg in 1556 . Previously, at the end of the 15th or beginning of the 16th century, the system had been adapted to the requirements of modern firearms with extensive modifications. This was done by setting up shooting chambers in the building wings of the castle and building large round towers .

Kokenhusen in 1625, based on an original in the Stockholm War Archives; East and West are confused

After the archbishopric was secularized in 1566, its territory - and with it Kokenhusen Castle - came to Poland . As a result, during the Livonian War in 1577, the facility was attacked and captured by Russian troops of Ivan the Terrible , but was recaptured by Poland the following year. In the shadow of the castle, a settlement had already formed in the 13th century, which received city rights from Archbishop Johannes I von Lune in 1277 and was already surrounded by a city wall at that time . Later a trading center for goods of all kinds and a prosperous member of the Hanseatic League , the city was severely weakened by the numerous armed conflicts in the 15th and 16th centuries. In addition, after the construction of a river port in nearby Jaunjelgava , Kokenhusen had lost its economic dominance in the region and gradually sank into insignificance as a result.

In 1621 Swedish troops were able to take the castle after a 16-day siege. During the following Swedish rule, the city of Kokenhusen was demolished and moved a little further inland. On the area that the settlement had previously occupied, the Swedes built earth walls to further fortify the castle, in which they also repaired some vaults . Swedish rule, which lasted almost 80 years, was only interrupted between 1656 and 1661, when Russian troops captured the castle and held it for five years. Queen Christina gave most of the extensive Kokenhusener property to her war commissioner general Heinrich Struberg (later Heinrich von Cronstiern), who bequeathed it to his sons. They owned the castle until 1682, when it returned to the Swedish state.

The capture of Kokenhusen Castle in 1700, illustration by Johan Lithen

At the beginning of the Great Northern War , a Saxon-Polish army took Kokenhusen Castle in the autumn of 1700. After the lost battle on the Daugava in July 1701, the soldiers had to give way to advancing Swedes. Before leaving the castle, the Saxon commandant Adam Heinrich Bohse ordered that the two large west towers of the complex be blown up, which happened on July 25, 1701. After other buildings were blown up in 1702, the castle was abandoned and uninhabited. In 1744 the Russian Empress Elisabeth Kokenhusen gave her general feldzeugmeister , Count Peter Schuwalow, but in 1751 it belonged to the ducal Holstein chamberlain and district marshal of Riga, Andreas Georg von Bayer. He sold the castle on June 26, 1780 to his son-in-law and later district administrator Carl Otto von Löwenstern , who was married to Andreas Georg's daughter Anna Maria. The Löwenstern family built a splendid neoclassical castle in the vicinity of the castle ruins in the park of Kokenhusen in 1894 , but it was destroyed during the First World War. The Löwensterns remained the owners of the ruins and the surrounding land until 1920, before they were expropriated as part of the Latvian land reform .

From 1961 to 1966 excavations took place in the castle area under the direction of Adolfs Stubavs. Then the location of the ruins changed permanently with the construction of the Pļaviņas hydropower plant . The water of the Daugava was dammed into a large lake, so that the water level of the river and its tributary Pērse rose sharply. The foundations of the castle have been under water since then, which led to them being undermined and also endangered the aboveground structure. After a rescue excavation between 1991 and 1999, the underwater masonry was then surrounded with a concrete wall as protection and support. From 2002 to 2007, conservation work was carried out on the preserved, above-ground masonry.

description

Site plan of the castle from 1701

The remains of Kokenhusen Castle stand on a headland at the mouth of the Pērse and the Daugava. At that time, the development followed the shape of the Burgplatz, and so the complex had a triangular floor plan with sides of 100 to 135 meters. In the far west was the core castle , to the east of it, separated by an artificial dry moat, the outer castle . The town of Kokenhusen used to be located in front of the east side, separated by another ditch, which was in turn protected by a ditch to the east. With this structure, the castle was a characteristic example of a section castle. Despite excavations carried out in the 1960s and 1990s, the construction development of the complex has not yet been thoroughly researched, so that when describing the undamaged castle, one is almost exclusively dependent on plans and drawings. The oldest illustrations come from the beginning of the 17th century.

Buildings up to the early modern period

The 0.4  hectare outer bailey could be reached from the upstream city, which took up about 3.6 hectares, through a fortified gate tower with a drawbridge . In their area there were wooden farm buildings, for example accommodation for servants, a forge, granaries and stables. For their protection there was a large tower with a horseshoe-shaped floor plan on the north side. It was one of a total of four towers that protected the castle complex. From the outer bailey the visitor reached the inner bailey via another drawbridge, which was surrounded all around by a high curtain wall and had an inner courtyard with a walled-up fountain house. On the inside, two-story building wings with a length of around 60 meters leaned against the surrounding wall in the north and south. The main castle occupied an area of ​​about 0.2 hectares. Inventories from 1590 and 159 mention some rooms in the two wings of the castle. A brewery, a bakery and a kitchen were located on the ground floor of the wing on the Pērse side. A dining room and a castle chapel have survived for the upper floor . The wing on the Daugava side had a horse-powered mill on the ground floor. There were living rooms on its upper floor. The castle windows were glazed as early as the 16th century.

Today's building stock

Today, almost only the remains of the outer walls of the inner core made of dolomite stone and individual sections of walls in the inner courtyard are preserved from the large complex . The outer walls are between 3.8 and 4 meters thick, while the walls on the courtyard side are 2 to 2.5 meters thick. The ones on the 15th and 16th are still good on the ground floor. Firearms shooting chambers established in the 19th century. In the southern outer wall there are the remains of a round-arched double window that was dated to the Romanesque period by the art historian Armin Tuulse (see literature ) , while more recent publications say that it dates from the 16th century and thus from the Renaissance . Only a few spoils of all other parts of the complex have survived , which are now placed in the former courtyard.

Before the basement of the castle was flooded by the reservoir of the Pļaviņas hydropower plant, excavators were able to examine the basement of the blown-up south-western round tower, which was previously used as a dungeon . With a wall thickness of 4 meters, the diameter of the room was 3.9 meters.

literature

  • Karl von Löwis of Menar : Castle Lexicon for Old Livonia. Walters and Rapa, Riga 1922, pp. 71–72 ( digitized version ).
  • Roberts Malvess: The building history of Koknese Castle / Kokenhusen. In: Ieva Ose: Pētījumi par Vidzemes un Zemgales pilīm (research on the castles of Livonia and Zemgale). Latvijas Vēstures Inst. Apgāds, Riga 2010, ISBN 978-9984-824-16-1 , pp. 237-273.
  • Ieva Ose: The castles of the Archdiocese of Riga. In: Wartburg Society for Research into Castles and Palaces (ed.): Castles by church builders (= research on castles and palaces. Volume 6). Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munich / Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-422-06263-7 , pp. 235–244, here p. 238.
  • Ieva Ose: Riga and Koknese / Kokenhusen in plans and drawings of the 17th century from the war archive in Stockholm. In: Ieva Ose: Pētījumi par Vidzemes un Zemgales pilīm (research on the castles of Livonia and Zemgale). Latvijas Vēstures Inst. Apgāds, Riga 2010, ISBN 978-9984-824-16-1 , pp. 224-234.
  • Ilgonis Alfs Stukmanis: Looking for the architecture of Koknese / Kokenhusen Castle. In: Ieva Ose: Pētījumi par Vidzemes un Zemgales pilīm (research on the castles of Livonia and Zemgale). Latvijas Vēstures Inst. Apgāds, Riga 2010, ISBN 978-9984-824-16-1 , pp. 274-297.
  • Erik Thomson, Georg Baron von Manteuffel-Szoege: Palaces and manors in the Baltic States (= castles, palaces, manors. Volume 7). 3. Edition. Weidlich, Frankfurt a. M. 1980, ISBN 3-8035-1042-2 , pp. 79-80.
  • Armin Tuulse: The castles in Estonia and Latvia (= negotiations of the learned Estonian society. Volume 33). Dorpater Estonian Publishing House, Dorpat 1942, pp. 35–38 ( PDF ; 15.5 MB).

Web links

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

Footnotes

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g Gatis Pavils: Koknese medieval castle , accessed on January 15, 2019.
  2. ^ Friedrich Benninghoven: The castles as the cornerstone of the late medieval defense system in the Prussian-Livonian Teutonic Order. In: Konstanzer Arbeitskreis für Medieval Geschichte (Ed.): The castles in the German-speaking area, Part 1 (= lectures and research. Volume 19, No. 1). Thorbecke, Ostfildern 1976, ISSN  2363-8664 , p. 567, doi: 10.11588 / vuf.1976.1.16221 .
  3. ↑ Information on the castle ruins in the database of national cultural monuments of Latvia , accessed on January 15, 2019.
  4. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Entry by Ieva Ose on Kokenhusen Castle in the scientific database " EBIDAT " of the European Castle Institute
  5. ^ Karl von Löwis of Menar: Burgenlexikon für Alt-Livland. 1922, p. 71.
  6. ^ Armin Tuulse: The castles in Estonia and Latvia. 1942, p. 38.
  7. ^ A b Erik Thomson, Georg Baron von Manteuffel-Szoege: Palaces and manors in the Baltic States. 1980, p. 79.
  8. ^ A b Karl von Löwis of Menar: Burgenlexikon für Alt-Livland. 1922, p. 72.
  9. ↑ a b c Erik Thomson, Georg Baron von Manteuffel-Szoege: Castles and manors in the Baltic States. 1980, p. 80.
  10. ^ Ieva Ose: Castles and Wars in Latvia during the 16th to the beginning of the 18th century. In: Château Gaillard. Études de castellologie médiévale. Volume 19. CRAM, Caen 2000, ISBN 2-902685-09-2 , p. 227 ( digitized version ).
  11. ↑ a b Information on Kokenhusen Castle and Palace on lost-unlost-places.de , accessed on January 15, 2019.
  12. ^ Friedrich Benninghoven: The castles as the cornerstone of the late medieval defense system in the Prussian-Livonian Teutonic Order. In: Konstanzer Arbeitskreis für Medieval Geschichte (Ed.): The castles in the German-speaking area, Part 1 (= lectures and research. Volume 19, No. 1). Thorbecke, Ostfildern 1976, ISSN  2363-8664 , p. 572, doi: 10.11588 / vuf.1976.1.16221 .
  13. ↑ Ieva Ose: The castles of the Archdiocese of Riga. 2001, p. 238.
  14. ^ Ieva Ose: Some knowledge about the residences of the archbishops of Riga from the end of the 15th to the middle of the 16th century. In: Aleksander Andrzejewski (ed.): Castella Maris Baltici. Volume 12. Archaeological Institute of the University of Łódź, Łódź 2015, ISBN 978-83-938542-2-6 ( PDF ; 3 MB).
  15. ↑ See the publications by Roberts Malvess and Ilgonis Alfs Stukmanis

Coordinates: 56 ° 38 ′ 16.8 ″  N , 25 ° 25 ′ 2.9 ″  E