Scharzfels Castle

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Scharzfels Castle
Upper castle on dolomite rocks with access stairs

Upper castle on dolomite rocks with access stairs

Creation time : 10th to 11th centuries
Castle type : Höhenburg, rocky location
Conservation status: Few remains of the wall
Standing position : Clericals, counts
Place: Bad Lauterberg in the Harz - Barbis
Geographical location 51 ° 37 '44.5 "  N , 10 ° 24' 32"  E Coordinates: 51 ° 37 '44.5 "  N , 10 ° 24' 32"  E
Height: 376  m above sea level NHN
Scharzfels Castle (Lower Saxony)
Scharzfels Castle

The Scharzfels Castle is the ruins of a medieval fortress in the resin in Barbis and Scharzfeld in Lower Saxony Göttingen district .

It has been an impregnable fortress since it was built in the 10th century. The castle was captured and blown up after a siege during the Seven Years' War in 1761.

Geographical location

The Scharzfels castle ruins are located east of the Scharzfeld district of the city of Herzberg am Harz . It is located in a forest area at about 376  m above sea level. NHN high ridge about 150 meters above the Oder valley . Its core castle is designed as a rock castle on an approximately 20 meter high dolomite rock.

The rocky Frauenstein (approx.  400  m ), which once supported Frauenstein Castle with an observation tower and a forecourt , rises about 400 meters to the northeast of the castle ruins .

Schandenburg, first mentioned in 1596, lies south of the castle. It is a siege hill with a square plateau with an edge length of 20 meters, which is secured with a wall and ditch. It is believed that it is the earlier installation site of a Blide .

Building description

Scharzfels Castle around 1640

Apart from a well house, no visible parts of the fortifications of the earlier lower or outer castle have survived. In the Middle Ages it had a gatehouse . The grounds of the outer bailey used to be surrounded by gardens and a cemetery. The area of ​​the lower castle is now a flat terrace area on which there is an excursion restaurant. From the lower castle, an access staircase built in the 19th century leads up to the upper castle on the around 20 meter high dolomite rock. The castle did not have a gate, but the entrance to the castle interior led from the access staircase over a drawbridge into a tunnel driven into the rock. The rock has a footprint of about 20 × 60 meters. This eagle-eyed location with the vertically falling rock walls made the castle impregnable. The stone castle structures are set on the rock or built in spaces. According to contemporary representations it was at least a palace and the castle keep . Other buildings and facilities around the castle courtyard were the commandant's house, the chapel, the Landdrostenhaus, the page house, the barracks and the southwest bastion. Only fragments of the buildings and the defensive wall have survived and have since been restored. On the other hand, the corridors and rooms carved into the rock are still there, such as the approximately 15-meter-long corridor that connects to the castle entrance.

history

Origin in the Middle Ages

Partial view with the castle entrance;
Postcards no. 1B by F. Karl wonder , 1900
Castle entrance at the end of the stairs at a height of around 20 meters

Scharzfels Castle was probably built in the 10th or 11th century and in its early days belonged to the ore monastery of Magdeburg . It was first mentioned in a letter from King Otto I in 952, in which he donated Scharzfels Castle to Pöhlde Monastery, along with other goods . However, the castle did not remain in the possession of the monastery for long, as it was in the hands of the Counts of Lauterberg in 969 and was passed on to his son Bodo after Werner von Lauterberg's death. How long the castle was subsequently in the hands of the von Lauterbergs is unclear, but documents show that it was an imperial fiefdom as early as the 11th century and was handed over to the noble Wittekind von Wolfenbüttel in this way by Heinrich IV . After Wittekind's death in 1118, the castle fell back to the emperor as a completed imperial fief. The castle only became historically significant through the later emperor Lothar von Süpplingenburg , who acquired it in 1131 and made it an imperial festival. The document in which the castle is mentioned in writing as castrum quoddam Scartuelt is evidence of this purchase . Since then, the complex has been the seat of several count families, including the Counts of Scharzfeld named after the castle. After its extinction, the castle came into the possession of Count von Hohnstein around 1300 as a fiefdom of the Principality of Grubenhagen . After the line of the noble von Hohnstein family in the Harz region died out in 1593, the fiefdom and castle fell back to the Grubenhagen family. In 1596 Duke Heinrich Julius von Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel inherited the fortress. Later it passed into the possession of the Welfenhaus of the Hanover line.

Fortress and prison

Escape of Eleonore von dem Knesebeck from Scharzfels Castle in 1697

In 1627 there were expansions in which the complex was garrisoned and heavily fortified. In the centuries after the castle was built, no foreign power succeeded in taking it in times of war such as the Peasants' War and the Thirty Years War . Scharzfels became a state prison in the 17th century . From 1695 Eleanor von dem Knesebeck (* 1655) sat here , who came from a respected Lüneburg nobility, albeit a lower land nobility. From their marriage in 1682, she was the maid of Princess Sophie von Ahlden . A friendly relationship, a kind of mother-daughter relationship, developed between the defenseless sixteen-year-old Sophie Dorothea, who was married in Hanover, and she was an accessory to an extramarital love affair between her mistress and the reckless Count von Königsmarck , for whom she acted as the deliverer of letters. The family of Eleonore von dem Knesebeck tried again and again to initiate proper legal proceedings and also offered a deposit of 100,000 thalers in vain . The prisoner remained locked in a tiny chamber, seeing an old guard only once a day. Her family finally bribed the roofer Veit Rentsch. Eleonore was freed from the high castle rock in 1697 with the help of an adventurous abseil action over 20 m downwards, body to body with her rescuer, who abseiled with her. He had previously made an opening in the prisoners' ceiling and brought them up with a rope. Her brother-in-law was waiting below with a handful of mounted men and took them to safety. She traveled to Vienna, where she managed to obtain an imperial letter of protection, and went to Braunschweig. In 1717 she is said to have died in a village near this city. She received around 2,000 thalers from the family of her former mistress as support.

From 1731 to 1748 the castle was rebuilt according to a proposal by the bailiff at Scharzfels, personally approved by George II, so that eight prisoners could be accommodated “according to distinction”. One of the first was the Hanoverian pastor Franz Hemme . In the 1740s and 1750s, the names of several people from the state who served their sentences there and who were subject to mild prison conditions are mentioned in the files. In 1756, because of his poor health, the mint director Spangenberg was allowed to "go around the castle at times to get some fresh air" in the presence of a guard.

conquest

Rock passages on the upper castle
View from Bühberg near Barbis to the castle complex
View over the defensive wall to Barbis

During the Seven Years War in 1761 French troops with a strength of around 6000 men appeared in front of Scharzfels Castle. They demanded the handover of the castle, which was manned by 40 gunners, 100 infantrymen from the Harz region and 250 invalids from Hanover . When the voluntary surrender was refused, the French attacked the castle with an assault and shelling in vain. With a tip on a hidden path to the nearby Liethberg , the French were able to destroy the Frauenstein Vorwerk by shelling and from there also bombard the castle. After ten days of siege, the crew handed over the castle on September 25, 1761. The capture of the fortification, which was considered impregnable, caused great jubilation in Paris . The joy was dampened somewhat when it became known that most of the defense attorneys were invalids. After only four days of occupation, the French blew up the castle and withdrew when it became known that Prince Ferdinand of Braunschweig was approaching Scharzfels. Since then, the facility has been in ruins.

Burgraves

  • 1215 Burc. v. Scharzfeld

Hiking and climbing

The Scharzfels castle ruin is included as No. 151 in the system of stamping points of the Harz hiking pin. It is located on the Karst hiking trail . The north side of the dolomite rock is used for climbing .

Digital reconstruction

On the initiative of the working group Burgruine Scharzfels , a digital reconstruction of the castle as it was around 1700 was created in 2018, which is available on the Internet. The resulting 3D model can be viewed as a 10-minute video film as a drone flight over the castle or with virtual reality glasses. The photo-realistic model of the castle complex was created on the basis of high-resolution laser scan data of the castle hill, from which a three-dimensional digital terrain model was made. The representation of the castle is based, among other things, on historical construction plans from the Lower Saxony State Archives in Hanover as well as old illustrations and engravings of the castle. Old building files that documented the renovation work were also used for the reconstruction.

The cost of the digital reconstruction of almost 19,000 euros was covered by the district of Göttingen , the city of Bad Lauterberg , the Burg Scharzfels working group and the German Gypsum Museum and Karst Hiking Trail Association . In addition, were LEADER -means used.

literature

  • Ernst Andreas Friedrich : The castle ruin Scharzfels , pp. 73-75, in: If stones could talk , Volume II, Landbuch-Verlag, Hanover 1992, ISBN 3-7842-0479-1 .
  • Wolfgang-Dietrich Nück: Count Sigebodo II. Von Scharzfeld / Lauterberg , Publishing House for Regional History , Bielefeld 2008, ISBN 978-3-89534-692-7 .
  • Firouz Vladi : The castle Scharzfels , Verlag Jungfer, Herzberg 1990, no ISBN.
  • Hans-Heinrich Hillegeist: The capture and destruction of Scharzfels Castle by the French 250 years ago In: Our Harz, 12/2011.

Web links

Commons : Scharzfels  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Schartzfels in the Topographia Braunschweig Lüneburg (Matthäus Merian)  - sources and full texts
Wikisource: Friedrich Gottschalck: The castle ghost on Scharzfeld (legend)  - sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Map services of the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation ( information )
  2. ↑ a b The castle rock , information board with text and historical images, ArGe Scharzfels
  3. ^ The fountain house , information board with text and historical images, ArGe Scharzfels
  4. ^ Gate to the lower castle , information board with text and historical images, ArGe Scharzfels
  5. ↑ Office gardens, cemetery , information board with text and historical figures, ArGe Scharzfels
  6. ↑ Upper Burgtor , information board with text and historical images, ArGe Scharzfels
  7. ↑ Der Palas ( Memento of the original dated December 11, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Information board with text and historical images, ArGe Scharzfels @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.burgruine-scharzfels.de
  8. ↑ Bergfried , information board with text and historical images, ArGe Scharzfels
  9. ^ Upper castle courtyard , information board with text and historical images, ArGe Scharzfels
  10. ^ Commandant's house , information board with text and historical images, ArGe Scharzfels
  11. ↑ Die Kapelle ( Memento of the original from December 11, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Information board with text and historical images, ArGe Scharzfels @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.burgruine-scharzfels.de
  12. ↑ Das Landdrostenhaus , information board with text and historical images, ArGe Scharzfels
  13. ^ The page house , information board with text and historical images, ArGe Scharzfels
  14. ^ The barracks , information board with text and historical images, ArGe Scharzfels
  15. ↑ Südwest-Bastion , information board with text and historical images, ArGe Scharzfels
  16. ^ Backhaus, shield wall , information board with text and historical images, ArGe Scharzfels
  17. ^ Theodor Eckart: Castle Scharzfeld in history and legend . In: History of South Hanoverian castles and monasteries . 3. Edition. tape II . Publishing house by Bernhard Franke, Leipzig 1906, p. 4 .
  18. ↑ Uwe Ohainski, Jürgen Udolph: The place names of the district of Osterode . In: Jürgen Udolph (Hrsg.): Lower Saxony Place Name Book (NOB) . Part II. Publishing house for regional history, Bielefeld 2000, ISBN 3-89534-370-6 , p. 146 ff .
  19. ↑ Emil v. Ottenthal, Hans Hirsch .: The documents of Lothar III. and the Empress Richenza . In: Monumenta Germaniae Historica , The documents of the German kings and emperors, Vol. 8. Berlin 1927. No. 31, p. 47 f.
  20. ↑ 750 years of Knesebeck. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on December 30, 2016 ; accessed on December 11, 2016 . , from von-dem-knesebeck.org
  21. ^ Thea Leitner : Scandal at Hof , Ueberreuter, 1993, ISBN 3800034921 .
  22. ^ Thomas Krause: The administration of criminal justice in the Electorate and Kingdom of Hanover: from the end of the 17th to the first third of the 19th century. Diss. Univ. Göttingen 1988–1989, Studies on the German State and Legal History NF 28, Scientia-Verlag, Aalen 1991, p. 240 f.
  23. ^ RI V, 1,1 n. 829, in: Regesta Imperii Online, URI: [1] , accessed on August 22, 2017
  24. ↑ Harz hiking pin: stamp point 151 / Scharzfels ruins , on harzer-wandernadel.de
  25. ↑ Burgruine Scharzfeld ( Memento from September 25, 2004 in the Internet Archive ) ( IG Klettern Niedersachsen eV), accessed on October 31, 2010, from archive.org
  26. ↑ Scharzfels - digital reconstruction of a medieval castle in archeology in Germany from August 2, 2018
  27. ↑ Virtual castle reconstruction and video film
  28. ↑ Burg Scharzfels comes to life in Archeology online from June 15, 2018
  29. ↑ Hannah Scheiwe: A medieval castle in 3D: Adventure at Scharzfels Castle in Göttinger Tageblatt from June 20, 2018