Werdenstein Castle Stables

Werdenstein Castle Stables
Werdenstein castle stables - Highest point in the castle stables, there was probably a tower-shaped building here
Creation time :	Early 12th century
Castle type :	Höhenburg, spur location
Conservation status:	Burgstall
Place:	Etzelwang - Rupprechtstein - "Bärenberg"
Geographical location	49 ° 32 '14.3 "  N , 11 ° 35' 21.1"  E Coordinates: 49 ° 32 '14.3 "  N , 11 ° 35' 21.1"  E
Height:	544.1  m above sea level NN

The Postal Werdenstein is the residue of a dialed high medieval hilltop castle , the mountain peak was once named in the Bear Mountain close to the castle Rupprechtstein rose. The Burgstall is located north of the parish village of Etzelwang in the Upper Palatinate district of Amberg-Sulzbach in Bavaria , Germany . From the castle , which was probably founded at the beginning of the 12th century and once also belonged to the later Emperor Charles IV, only a moat carved out of the rock and a few remains of the foundation wall , which lie below the surface, have survived.

Geographical location

The place of the lost castle is in the center of the low mountain range Franconian Alb , on the 544.1  m high mountain top of the Bärenberg. Its western slope drops steeply, partly interspersed with rocks, into the Haslachgrund, which is about 100 meters lower, as well as to the north to the valley of the Reinbach and the church village Kirchenreinbach. The east side of the Bärenberg is also well protected by an adjoining cut in the terrain, here the road connecting Kirchenreinbach and Etzelwang crosses the Spitzenberg, at the highest point of which, at around 510 meters above sea level, the access road to the small town of Rupprechtstein branches off.

View of the Bear Mountain, the second highest point in the picture, from the northwest. The ruins of Rupprechtstein Castle are on the highest peak

To the southwest, the Bärenberg is connected to a neighboring mountain top by a saddle , which means that this side only drops a few meters steeply and then rises again. The earlier access to Werdenstein Castle was on this mountain side.

The Burgstall is located in the immediate vicinity of the village of Rupprechtstein, about 590 meters south of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Sankt Ulrich in Kirchenreinbach, or 1240 meters north of the Evangelical Lutheran parish church of Sankt Nikolaus in Etzelwang.

There are other former medieval castles nearby:

The ruins of Rupprechtstein Castle are located 200 meters west-south-west or south-west of Werdenstein Castle , of which only a remnant of a tower, the cistern and a cellar vault have been preserved. The Trutziger Kaiser castle stable was a tower in front of Rupprechtstein Castle.

In an east-southeast direction is the former Neidstein Castle and today's Neidstein Castle above the village of Tabernackel, a little further in this direction is the Hartenfels Castle Stables above Neukirchen near Sulzbach-Rosenberg . In Kirchenreinbach to the north is the former Hofmarkschloss and about 2.9 kilometers to the northwest you can see the Hauseck castle ruins , of which only a few remains of the wall are preserved on a promising rock cone.

History of the castle

The Nuremberg castle researcher Hellmut Kunstmann puts the date of origin of Castle Werdenstein at the beginning of the 12th century due to the design and the ceramic shards he found and dated.

The exact location of Werdenstein Castle was determined by Kunstmann on the basis of a description of the boundary of the Neidstein rule from 1467, it ran from Rittmannshof “to Kirchenreinbach to the village to out onto the Rangen to under the Werenstein [Werdenstein] and to the Ring to the garden under the Reupprechtstein [Rupprechtstein] ” . Other researchers such as Anton Dollacker suspected it was above the village of Oed in the community of Weigendorf , Leonhard Bär identified the Steinberg east of Kirchenreinbach as the location of the castle, but no traces of fortifications were found there.

It is believed that Werdenstein Castle came from the Counts of Sulzbach, among others, to the sons of Duke Ludwig II of Bavaria around 1280 .

The castle was first mentioned in a document in 1305, when the land was divided after the death of Count Gebhard VII von Hirschberg . The Werdenstein office with the castle came with Etzelwang, Ammerthal , the sub-office Rosenberg with the Rosenberg Castle (at that time Reichslehen, today a castle stable near Sulzbach-Rosenberg ), the markets Sulzbach and Lauterhofen and the office Sulzbach to the dukes of Bavaria. The dukes took their own inherited property to King Albrecht I as a fief and got it back in 1307 with Rosenberg Castle as a hereditary imperial fief . In the Bavarian Salbuch from 1326, Werdenstein Castle was run as an official castle.

In the house contract of Pavia of August 4, 1329, in which the territorial duchy of Bavaria is divided, Werdenstein came to Duke Rudolf II, and when the country was divided further by the Count Palatine on February 18, 1338, the castle came together with Neidstein, Rosenberg and Sulzbach to Count Palatine Rudolf II.

From 1354, Werdenstein Castle was owned by the Bohemian and Roman-German King Charles IV ; how it came into his possession is not known. In the New Bohemian Salbüchlein from 1366/68 it is written: "The Werdenstein with all its affiliations, woods, fields and Wismats, belongs to the Neidstein" , with the addition: "I like a measure of grain" . In addition, it is said that “the third part or more” of the affiliations of the Neidstein was desolate, from which it can be concluded that Werdenstein Castle only existed as a ruin from 1368 at the latest. Whether the castle was abandoned at the time due to lack of importance or whether it was destroyed in a military conflict is unknown today.

The castle was mentioned for the last time in the above description of the border of the Neidstein rule from 1467.

Current condition

The castle has almost disappeared and you can hardly see anything of it. Pretty much everything is covered with a layer of green and grown together. You can still see the plan of the building because of the walls.

The ground monument registered by the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Monuments as "Medieval Castle Stables" has the monument number D-3-6435-0044.

literature

• Stefan Helml: Castles and palaces in the Amberg-Sulzbach district . Druckhaus Oberpfalz, Amberg 1991, pp. 235-237.
• Hellmut Kunstmann : Communications of the Altnürnberger landscape . Published by Altnürnberger Landschaft eV, 2nd year, issue 3, December 1953, pp. 9–12.
• Armin Stroh : The prehistoric and early historical monuments of the Upper Palatinate . (Material booklets on Bavarian prehistory, series B, volume 3). Verlag Michael Lassleben, Kallmünz 1975, ISBN 3-7847-5030-3 , p. 112.

Web links

Commons : Burgstall Werdenstein  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

References and comments

1. ^ Topographic map 1: 25000, sheet 6435 Pommelsbrunn
2. ^ The Rupprechtein castle ruins on the site of the Bavarian State Office for Monument Preservation
3. ^ The Burgstall Trutziger Kaiser on the side of the Bavarian State Office for Monument Preservation
4. ↑ The former castle and today's Kirchenreinbach Castle on the side of the Bavarian State Office for Monument Preservation
5. ↑ The floor piece dated by him comes from 11/12. Century: Hellmut Kunstmann: Mitteilungen der Altnürnberger Landschaft , p. 10
6. ↑ Hellmut Kunstmann: Mitteilungen der Altnürnberger Landschaft , 2nd year, issue 3, December 1953, p. 11
7. ↑ This castle stable was possibly the tower in Weidental, although this has recently been doubted and the castle stable in the local area of ​​Hartmannshof, which has been transformed by modern buildings, is identified with it
8. ^ Source history with a few exceptions: Stefan Helml: Burgen und Schlösser im Kreis Amberg-Sulzbach , p. 236ff.
9. ^ The Burgstall Werdenstein on the website of the Bavarian State Office for Monument Preservation