Niederhaus Castle

Niederhaus Castle
	Niederhaus Castle - general view from Hochhauser Berg
Alternative name (s):	Hürnheim Castle
Creation time :	12th Century
Castle type :	Höhenburg, spur location
Conservation status:	ruin
Standing position :	Noble
Place:	Ederheim -Hürnheim
Geographical location	48 ° 47 '25.8 " N , 10 ° 29' 46.7" E Coordinates: 48 ° 47 '25.8 " N , 10 ° 29' 46.7" E
Height:	490 m above sea level NN

The Castle Lower House is the ruin of a staufer time hilltop castle on 490 m above sea level. NN near Ederheim (OT Hürnheim) in the Ries in the Donau-Ries district in Swabia . In the immediate vicinity of the ruins, the - still managed - former farm yard has been preserved. Only about a kilometer away is the large high-rise castle ruins on the edge of the Kartäusertal .

Niederhaus Castle, aerial photo (2016)

history

The castle was built in the 12th century as the ancestral seat of the noble free von Hürnheim . They had come here from the Worms and Speyer area. In the 10th century they still had a farm in Hürnheim themselves. The original name of the complex was Hürnheim Castle , later the fortress was called Niederhaus to distinguish it from the nearby Hochhaus Castle .

Staufer column in front of the castle inaugurated in 2012

It is purely speculative whether there was a fort in the place of today's castle. In any case, the impressive double moats (see description) indicate such an early medieval castle complex. Just a few kilometers away on the Weiherberg there is a huge Hungarian fortress (10th century) in the forest, so the Niederhaus castle site could well have served as a Hungarian refuge.

In 1379 troops of the Swabian Association of Towns devastated the castle complex, which was quickly repaired afterwards. With Hans Johann , the men of Hürnheim died out in the male line in 1585, the daughter sold the castle to the Counts of Oettingen-Oettingen for 38,000 guilders in 1597 .

In 1633 ( Thirty Years' War ) a Swedish troop of horsemen demands provisions from the castle garrison, which - due to the small number of riders and the imagined impregnability of the Niederhaus - is refused. Allegedly the daughter of the bailiff is said to have even shot the Swedish captain. After the Swedes had requested reinforcements, they besieged the castle and penetrated into the courtyard through a breach in the water tower during the night.

The resulting destruction does not seem to have been so serious; the castle was repaired again and sold to the Teutonic Order in 1709 for 53,000 guilders .

When the Teutonic Order was dissolved in the course of secularization in 1805 , the castle complex passed to the newly founded Kingdom of Bavaria.

In the course of the romanticism of ruins in the 19th century, the two neighboring castles Hochhaus and Niederhaus were deliberately turned into ruins. The picturesque Kartäusertal is still a popular local recreation and excursion area in the nearby cities of Nördlingen and Donauwörth .

On May 6, 2012, a Staufer stele was inaugurated in front of the castle in honor of Friedrich von Hürnheim , who was beheaded on October 29, 1268 together with the last Staufer King Konradin in Naples . The German ex-astronaut and physicist Ulf Merbold gave the lecture .

description

Information board on the bridge

The castle ruins are impressively situated on the western end of a rocky ridge above the valley of the small trout stream . The complex is surrounded by a strikingly deep, double system of trenches. Such unusually deep trenches mostly point to older, especially Hungarian predecessor castles or ramparts, but there is no documentary or other evidence for this.

Particularly noteworthy is the former farmyard located northeast of the castle, which impressively documents the rarely preserved connection between the castle and the associated farm. The farm is still managed today, while the castle has been uninhabited for centuries.

Between the farmyard and today's ruin was once the outer ward , the remains of a gate were found near the present-day access to the castle grounds 1978th

A modern bridge is used to cross the outer neck ditch , behind which the slim donjon rises. With its basic dimensions of around 6.5 × 6.5 meters and a height of 23 meters today (formerly around 30 meters, about 7 meters removed due to the risk of collapse), the keep is one of the smaller representatives of its construction type, the wall thickness is 1.70 meters on the ground floor. The original high entrance is on the south side, today you can also get into the tower interior on the ground floor. The foundations of literature are said to still belong to the 12th century, in its current form it should date from the 13th century. In the ashlar masonry of Suevitstein some are humpback square incorporated.

The three-storey today Palas joins directly to the Keep on, the former fourth floor has been preserved only in remains. The hall had the basic dimensions of 29 × 13.6 meters (all dimensions according to Schmitt ). Access to the palace was via a 3-storey stair tower in the courtyard, which was about 4 meters in front of the west side of the palace, to the 3rd palace floor via a drawbridge, which could be placed from the palace on the stair tower . It was the only access to the palace building. In this third floor of the palace also was the bower . The upper floors have numerous - later apparently changed - window openings. The masonry essentially belongs to the 13th and 14th centuries and corresponds to that of the keep.

Passing the hall you get to the courtyard, the inner gate has disappeared today. A memorial plaque for Friedrich von Hürnheim , who was beheaded together with the young King Konradin von Hohenstaufen in Naples in 1268, is embedded in the circular wall . His brother Hermann v. Hürnheim, who had also moved with the Staufer, came back safely to Hürnheim Castle in January 1269. The castle courtyard is closed off by the remains of a small gatehouse , which formerly provided access to the so-called rear house , the ruins of which adjoin. This "back house" was the first castle "Hurnhain" = Hornwald, today Hürnheim, built as a fortified residential tower , on which 1153 the Hürnheimer is mentioned in a deed. There is still a room plan of this residential tower at Harburg Castle in the archives of the Princes of Oettingen-Wallerstein from 1619, where they renewed the ailing wooden interior walls. On the ground floor of the Rossstall, on the first floor the manorial apartment with a small inner battlement in the east and half of the south area of the residential tower from which one can get into a small room, the kitchen, a large room and the large chamber. On the 2nd floor there were two chambers of the same size, one behind the other, for the servants.

Originally, the residential tower on the 1st floor was accessible with a ladder. It was not until the beginning of the 13th century, when the castle was expanded to the east, that the stair tower (snails), which is still in ruins today, was added to the residential tower.

On the south side of the main castle is the eight-meter-high cistern tower , through which the Swedish conquerors are said to have penetrated the castle in 1634. It was originally about 10 meters higher and water was drawn from the battlement.

The castle ruins, secured by the Kingdom of Bavaria in 1868 and 1901 and in 1985 and 2006, are freely accessible at all times. Comparisons with engravings and drawings from the mid-19th century (see Sponsel / Steger) do not reveal any major loss of substance over the past 150 years. However, the low tower of the inner gate is still documented here, which is already completely missing from a view from 1861. At the beginning of the 19th century there were still larger parts of the outer curtain wall.

Southeast view from the Forellenbachtal
The castle above the Forellenbachtal
North-east view with the bridge and the slender keep
Memorial plaque from 1868 (left) and text on the Staufer stele from 2012 (right)
The "water tower" in front of the south side
The western part of the castle ruins
Look back to the east to the keep
The keep from the south
inside view

literature

Hans Frei, Günther Krahe: Guide to archaeological monuments in Bavaria, Swabia Volume 2: Archaeological walks in the Ries . 2nd Edition. Konrad Theiss Verlag, Stuttgart and Aalen 1988, ISBN 3-8062-0568-X , pp. 249-252.

Günter Schmitt : Burgenführer Schwäbische Alb, Volume 6: Ostalb - hiking and discovering between Ulm, Aalen and Donauwörth . Biberacher Verlagsdruckerei, Biberach an der Riß 1995, ISBN 3-924489-74-2 , pp. 167-176.

Wilfried Sponsel, Hartmut Steger: Past castles and mansions - a search for traces in the view of the Ries . Typesetting and graphics partner, Augsburg 2004, ISBN 3-935438-27-3 , pp. 46–61.

Georg Lill (Ed.), Karl Gröber: Die Kunstdenkmäler von Bayern, VII (Swabia), 1: District Office Nördlingen . R. Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 1938, ISBN 3-486-50514-9 , pp. 327-329.

Web links

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

Individual evidence

↑ Niederhaus Castle 2012 on stauferstelen.net. Retrieved March 23, 2014.
↑ Ronald Hummel: Ulf Merbold comes to the Stauferstele , Augsburger Allgemeine (accessed on September 22, 2012)

[1] Niederhaus Castle 2012 on stauferstelen.net. Retrieved March 23, 2014.

[2] Ronald Hummel: Ulf Merbold comes to the Stauferstele , Augsburger Allgemeine (accessed on September 22, 2012)