Kronsegg castle ruins
| Kronsegg castle ruins | ||
|---|---|---|
 Kronsegg castle ruins |
||
| Creation time : | End of the 12th / beginning of the 13th century | |
| Castle type : | Section castle | |
| Conservation status: | ruin | |
| Standing position : | Ministeriale | |
| Place: | Schiltern | |
| Geographical location | 48 ° 30 '41.4 " N , 15 ° 36' 13.2" E | |
|
||
The Kronsegg castle ruins are located in the Kronsegg district of the Schiltern cadastral community in the Langenlois community in Lower Austria . The castle ruin, which rises on a steep rocky ridge above the Loistal on the edge of the Gföhl forest, is a listed building .
history
Kronsegg was first mentioned as "Chranzek" around 1250 as a Passau property. Towards the end of the 12th century or at the latest at the beginning of the 13th century, the castle is likely to have been built by the Lords of Maissau. At the beginning of the 14th century Kronsegg was a fief of the Kuenringer , whose follower Arnold the Praunsdorf resident here in 1309. In 1354, the fiefdom was bought by Ulrich dem Neidegger and passed on to Eberhard V. von Walsee , who is likely to have built a spacious new building with older components.
Together with the other possessions of the Kuenring-Seefeld line, Kronsegg came to the Margraves of Brandenburg-Hohenzollern as marriage property in the late 14th century and thus represented a foreign enclave in the territory of the Habsburgs until 1783. In 1381 Friedrich V of Brandenburg enfeoffed Heinrich von Zelking with the rule, from 1389 the Schad family was fiefdom takers and in the 15th and 16th centuries the lords of the castle changed frequently. Kronsegg, which at that time was already associated with Schiltern, came to the Leisser family in 1569.
During the Thirty Years War the castle was badly damaged by the Bohemians in 1619/20. Around 1629, Christoph Leisser had the fortification expanded like a castle. The adventurer Heinrich Konrad Schreyer, who was in Swedish service, settled in the castle, destroyed it in 1645 and devastated the area from here with his 150 riders even after the Swedes withdrew. After a while, however, he changed fronts and entered the imperial service.
When the Barons von Geymann were enfeoffed with Schiltern-Kronsegg in 1663, they repaired the castle again. Karl Freiherr von Hackelberg , who was the ruler from 1679, carried out repair work, but left the uninhabitable Kronsegg, moved to Schiltern Castle and left the castle to decay. In 1717, Kronsegg was assigned to thirteen localities in the area as a place of refuge in the event of danger, which suggests that the defense facilities had remained intact for a long time.
In the 18th century there were frequent changes of ownership. The Peace of Teschen of 1779 meant that all fiefdoms of the Brandenburgers in Austria were transferred to the Habsburgs, making Kronsegg sovereign. In 1856 Karl Wolfgang Graf Aichelburg , who had received Schiltern-Kronsegg by marriage, managed to keep the rule as property.
The municipality of Langenlois, which owns the ruin to this day, bought Kronsegg in 1928 after the last member of the Aichelburg family had died. Between 1988 and 1994 the ruins were secured, restored and opened for free viewing from Easter to the end of October.
Building description
The essential components of the ruin are the gate tower with a chapel, two Bergfriede , the Palas , some courtyards and the four-storey residential tower . The two defense towers are accessed by built-in staircases and provide a view of the wooded hills and the Kronsegg reservoir.
The outer walls of the former castle enclose an area of 50 by 16 m . At the end of the High Middle Ages, a deep neck trench was carved out of the rock on the endangered west side , which is now largely filled. From here the inside of the complex is accessed via the outer castle gate, which was originally provided with a drawbridge. The former Meierhof, now privately owned and inhabited, adjoins the circular wall in the south.
As a section castle, Kronsegg has several courtyards laid out one behind the other, each of which was secured by gates. An outer battlement wall , on which the beginnings of a battlement have been preserved, delimits the first three kennel-like courtyards. In this area were once stables and servant houses , of which nothing has survived .
The entrance to the main castle, the center of which is the transverse four-story residential tower from the 15th century with a floor plan of 15 by 8 m, is on the east side. The false ceilings of the residential tower are no longer preserved, only their beam holes can be seen. In the strong outer walls there are funnel-shaped seating niches with stone benches and the doors are partly framed by high-quality house stone . The remains of a lavatory and a large chimney can also be seen.
The southern of the two square keep from the 13th century secured the neighboring gate and has a two-story Gothic castle chapel on the first floor, which was first mentioned in 1429. The ground floor was intended for servants, while the upper floor was reserved for the lordship. The groin vaulted ceiling has a relief , heavily weathered keystone with a coat of arms of the Schad von Lengenfeld family. The rest of the altar lies below the east of two small pointed arched windows. Nothing remains of the wall paintings from the end of the 14th century. The door of the chapel has a flat clover leaf arch made of stone.
The second keep in the west, with a side length of 8 m and walls over two meters thick, is significantly more powerful than the tower at the gate. It was connected to the hall by a pointed arch portal and a corridor on the first floor.
There was a cistern in both the first and the second inner courtyard and the remains of kitchen structures can be seen, with a pyramid-shaped smoke vent preserved in the second courtyard.
Web links
- Kronsegg castle ruins on the website of the Institute for Reality Studies of the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times
- Kronsegg castle ruins on the site of fortifications in Austria
- Kronsegg ruin on the website of the municipality of Langenlois
- Kronsegg castle ruins on the Kronsegg website
- Kronsegg ruins at www.sunny.at
- Kronsegg ruins on the website Mittelalter Treff Austria
literature
- Dehio manual. The art monuments of Austria. Lower Austria north of the Danube. Edited by Evelyn Benesch, Bernd Euler-Rolle u. a. Verlag Anton Schroll & Co, Vienna 1990, ISBN 3-7031-0652-2 , p. 1033/34
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Kronsegg on the burgen-austria.com website , accessed on October 13, 2016
- ↑ Kronsegg ruins at http://www.waldviertel.at/ , accessed on October 13, 2016