Wittelsbach Castle

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Wittelsbach
The Gothic Marienkirche on the main castle

The Gothic Marienkirche on the main castle

Creation time : around 1000
Castle type : Location
Conservation status: Remnants in newer parts
Standing position : Count
Place: Aichach - Oberwittelsbach
Geographical location 48 ° 28 '7 "  N , 11 ° 10' 34.3"  E Coordinates: 48 ° 28 '7 "  N , 11 ° 10' 34.3"  E
Height: 515  m above sea level NN
Wittelsbach Castle (Bavaria)
Wittelsbach Castle

The Wittelsbach Castle was a castle in Oberwittelsbach , today a district of Aichach in Aichach-Friedberg in today's Bavarian Swabia .

The original fortress was mentioned in a document around 1000. In 1119 the retired Scheyern Count Otto IV, Count of Scheyern from the Castle Scheyern in the new Wittelsbach Castle. The castle name "Witilinesbach" appears as early as 1115 in a document from King Heinrich V as the place of origin of Count Otto IV. Since 1120, the Counts of Scheyern called themselves Count Palatine of Wittelsbach. Therefore, the castle is considered the ancestral seat of the Wittelsbach family .

In 1209 the castle was destroyed and not rebuilt. A church was built on the site of the castle, from which the village of Oberwittelsbach developed, which was independent until 1978.

On the castle hill in Oberwittelsbach, the Marienkirche reminds of the castle's wall remains, the neo-Gothic national monument and a memorial stone of Wittelsbach Castle.

In memory of the castle, the relevant part of the Aichach-Friedberg district is called the Wittelsbacher Land .

history

The first weir system (approx. 35 × 45 meters) on the eastern spur of the castle hill was only secured by a section wall of unknown date, which was certainly preceded by a ditch. In the High Middle Ages , a shield wall was built on the top of the rampart and the ditch was widened . This ditch ended roughly at the western wall of the later "Atonement Church". At the same time a stone ring wall was built around the main castle.

When the Counts of Scheyern took over the castle at the beginning of the 12th century, the old neck ditch was filled in. The shield wall also disappeared, the curtain wall was reinforced, partially renewed and extended to the west. The new core castle was roughly twice the size of the old fortification. In the run-up to this, two spacious berths were built. The ditch of this castle is still preserved.

The name of the castle is said to go back to a servant Vitilo or Vitilis of the Counts of Scheyern. This ministerial allegedly served the counts as captain of the Wartenberg castles near Erding and the new castle near Aichach. The count palatine and later dukes of Bavaria could have named themselves after one of their vassals . In fact, around 1110 a Vitilo von Aichach appears as a castle captain in a written source. However, this interpretation is rather unlikely. Firstly because of the chronological assignment and secondly because the place would otherwise be called "Wittelsburg" today. The place "Wittelsbach" is at least as old as the castle that already existed there around the year 1000. Its name (as well as the old form "Vitelinesbac") is derived from the Latin vitellus (adjectival: vitellinus) and means something like "Kälberbach", in analogy to the nearby town of " Kühbach ", which is also older than the one there Monastery founded in 1011. The names of other places in the vicinity are also derived from animal names. So z. B. Bernbach (Bärenbach), Sainbach (Säuenbach), Gallenbach (gallina = chicken), Áresing (aries = ram), Wöresbach (verres = boar) etc.

This fortress of the Wittelsbachers was destroyed by razing in 1209 as a reaction to the murder of the Roman-German King Philip of Swabia by the Bavarian Count Palatine Otto VIII von Wittelsbach on June 21, 1208 in Bamberg. The archaeological excavations from 1978 to 1980 did not provide any clear evidence for this. The ruins were apparently rather slowly removed for the extraction of building material. Fire rubble could not be found, the castle was probably only cleared and abandoned.

View into the choir of the castle church
Site plan (information board at the church)
The neo-Gothic “national monument” above the inner neck ditch
Memorial stone in the west of the main castle

After the castle was abandoned, the area was used for church purposes. Whether there is a connection with the former castle chapel is completely speculative. There are no written or oral records about the beginnings of this conversion.

In the 15th century the preserved late Gothic Catholic branch church Maria vom Siege was built on Burgplatz. According to tradition, this is supposed to be a "atonement church" of the Wittelsbacher ( Ludwig der Kelheimer ) to make amends for the Bamberg bloody deed. However, there are no references to this in the sources.

From the 16th century onwards, some small farmers and mercenaries settled on the castle grounds. The modest properties were removed in the 19th century in order to be able to erect the neo-Gothic "Wittelsbach National Monument". The monument was inaugurated on August 25, 1834 in front of hundreds of spectators. Altogether more than twenty thousand festival visitors are said to have stayed in and around Aichach, including 1,000 mounted farmers. However, the regent Ludwig I was represented by the district president Franz Arnold Ritter von Linck . As the ancestral seat of the royal family , Oberwittelsbach developed into a popular excursion destination, which was depicted on numerous engravings and lithographs .

On September 9, 1857, a Wittelsbacher visited the family castle of his ancestors for the first time, King Max II .

In the course of the preparations for the exhibition “Wittelsbach and Bavaria”, plans began for an archaeological excavation on the castle grounds, which was carried out from 1978 to 1980 under the sponsorship of the Swabian district. Then some foundations were built above ground level. The walls visible today can be traced back to this work.

description

About 150 meters northeast of the main castle is the small hill tower castle Klingenberg on a rib, the function and exact timing of which is unclear. The two castle squares are separated by a stream valley.

The Wittelsbach castle consisted of the elongated inner castle in the east and the two outer castles in the west. Wall and ditch (northern outlet preserved) of the inner outer bailey are largely leveled and built over (agricultural property, neo-Gothic beneficiary house), the earthworks of the outer outer bailey can still be seen, especially in the area of ​​the playground. The road to Aichach runs in the former ditch area.

Behind the filled-in moat of the first castle rises the late Gothic castle church, a single-nave brick building with a saddle roof tower and retracted choir . The west facade was changed in the 19th century, the tracery also date from this time. The walls visible to the side and to the east are masonry from the 1980s.

The "Wittelsbach National Monument" has stood above the northern outlet of the neck ditch since 1834. The high Gothic spire ntürmchen based on a design Joseph Daniel Ohlmüllers back. The building was erected as a particular state memorial for the Bavarian nation and in this context was intended to honor the role of the Wittelsbach family , which had been the rulers of Bavaria for centuries. The dedication inscription reads "Faithful Bavaria to his thousand-year regent tribe."

The layout of the entire facility is arched. The slopes of the inner castle fall about 20 meters into the valley. In the south there are two hillside ditches, which one would actually assign to early medieval castle building. Michael Weithmann therefore saw a possible connection with a Hungarian fortress from the 10th century. Such protective castles and troop assembly areas have been preserved in unusually high concentrations in the Augsburg area. Only a few kilometers away at Aichach- Ecknach is a very extensive ground monument of this type ( Schwedenschanze near Nisselsbach ) in Blumenthaler Holz. However, early medieval fortification concepts were still used until the early High Middle Ages. Most researchers do not date the castle's construction before the year 1000.

Weithmann interpreted Wittelsbach Castle as early as 1984/85 in his "Inventory of Upper Bavaria Castles" as a possible larger Hungarian protective castle. The hidden location and the typological features make this interpretation seem entirely plausible. In the vicinity of the great Hungarian walls in the diocese of Augsburg, hill towers and mansions were built in the high Middle Ages ( Haldenburg , Buschelberg , Schanze Wagesenberg ). One such castle seat, the Klingenberg (Klingsberg), is also located right next to Wittelsbach Castle. A Hungarian period of the ground monument remains speculative. However, the count palatine seem to have reactivated early medieval castle places. The unusually deep moat systems of the castles Sand and Friedberg could also point to such older predecessor castles .

The castle was about 200 meters long (core castle about 115 meters) and 90 meters wide in the outer bailey.

During the excavations in the area of ​​the first neck ditch in front of the church, a round cistern shaft made of bricks came to light, the floor of which was covered with parts of several millstones. The associated drainage shaft was filled with rubble. Shortly before the castle was abandoned, the cistern may have been used as a waste pit. Apparently it had not adequately fulfilled its actual purpose of obtaining water. The bottom of the shaft (width about 2 meters) is about 6 meters below today's ground level.

The curtain wall consisted of sandstone chunks that probably came from former local deposits that were completely dismantled for the construction of castles. The wall was about 1.50 meters wide, the exposed stone layers up to 1.70 meters high. In the area of ​​an older trench there are still 20 stone layers up to a height of 3.20 meters. After the end of the excavation work, the excavation cuts were backfilled.

See also

literature

  • Pankraz Fried : Noble and lordly Wittelsbach castle politics in high and late medieval Bavaria . In: The castles in the German-speaking area , lectures and research, published by the Konstanzer Arbeitskreis für Medieval Geschichte, Volume 19, 1976, Part 2, pp. 331–352.
  • Robert Koch: Excavations in Wittelsbach Castle near Aichach - A preliminary report on the results up to May 1980 . Augsburg 1980.
  • Robert Koch: The excavations in Wittelsbach Castle near Aichach 1978–1979 . In: Toni Grad (Ed.): The Wittelsbacher in the Aichacher Land . 1980.
  • Horst Lechner, Wolfgang Brandner: Aichach near Wittelsbach - historical views from four centuries . Augsburg 1999, ISBN 3-89639-191-7 .
  • Helmut Rischert: Castle stables in the Aichach-Friedberg district . In: Local history contributions from Augsburger Raum 1, 1975.
  • Wilhelm Störmer : Problems of the early Wittelsbacher in the Aichacher area. Lectures d. Workshop on 25./26. April 1980 go to the District Office Aichach on behalf of Aichach-Friedberg district . (Old Bavaria in Swabia, 1979/80), 1980.
  • Michael W. Weithmann: Inventory of the castles of Upper Bavaria . 3rd revised and expanded edition. Published by the district of Upper Bavaria, Munich 1995, pp. 502–506.
  • Michael Weithmann: Knights and Castles in Upper Bavaria - Forays into the medieval country between the Alps, Danube, Lech and Salzach . Dachau 1999, ISBN 3-89251-276-0 .

Web links

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