House Palant

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North side of the remaining outer bailey with its gateway

The Palant House , also known as Palant Castle , was the ancestral seat of the influential von Palant noble family in the Weisweiler district of Eschweiler . It is located on its northeastern edge, directly on the A4 motorway that connects Aachen and Cologne .

Building description

Of the magnificent complex, which contemporaries described as “one of the most beautiful castles in the Jülich Land”, only the outer bailey remains today. This presents itself as a two-story three-wing building made of quarry stone with hipped roofs , the open side of which faces southeast - the location of the former manor house .

The facade is kept very simple with the exception of slightly emphasized side elevations and corner blocks made of bluestone . For this reason, the highly detailed gate construction with a mansard roof in the middle of the northern front protruding from the wall is particularly striking. In earlier times it was accessible via a drawbridge , which is now replaced by a brick arch bridge . Width Pilaster of carved Blaustein and changing, vertical layers of back - and Haustein decorate its north side.

history

Portal construction of the Palant house

Although Palant Castle was first mentioned in a document in 1456, historians see the property as the starting point for Weisweiler's development, as the complex probably goes back to an old Franconian royal estate .

In 1323 a Reinhard von Palant was first mentioned in a document as a feudal man of Cuyck. To this day, however, it has not been clarified in what kind of relationship he was to the later family von Palant, because this can be proven to go back to Karsilius, a son of the Aachener Meier Arnoldus Parvus. From 1342/44 Karsilius called himself "von Palant" after his castle at that time.

North side of the preserved outer bailey seen from the west

Emperor Charles V raised the family to the status of imperial barons and transferred Floris I von Palant ( Dutch Floris I. van Pallandt ) the county of Culemborg in the Duchy of Geldern in 1555 . His son Floris II (1577–1639) had the Palant house renovated around 1600 in the style of the Dutch Renaissance . A view in Codex Welser from 1723 shows the manor house as a square complex with four corner towers and a bridge to the north and south.

During the Third War of the Geldr Succession , the von Palant family had been temporarily driven from the Palant family by Wilhelm the Rich , Duke of Jülich , but had their property back in 1543 through the Peace of Venlo .

After Floris II died in 1639 without male heirs , his daughter inherited the barony and castle and brought it to her husband Wolrad IV von Waldeck- Eisenberg by marriage . His descendants sold the castle in 1682 to Count Adolf Alexander von Hatzfeld , whose family already owned the nearby Weisweiler Castle.

After the complex was largely destroyed by a severe earthquake in 1755 and the earthquake near Düren in 1756 , the Hatzfeld counts had the main house restored and a new outer bailey built. In 1769 the von Hatzfeld family left Weisweiler and sold the Palant house together with the Weisweiler Castle and the Breitenbend estate to the Duke and Elector Karl Theodor of the Palatinate of Jülich , who acquired the property for his illegitimate son Karl August , the Prince of Heideck and Bretzenheim .

House Palant was again badly damaged by French revolutionary troops in 1794. Karl August's heirs then sold the facility to the Counts of Hompesch-Bollheim at the beginning of the 19th century. In 1828 they had the dilapidated main house laid down except for the curtain walls .

In 1840 it was sold to the Aachen industrialist Charles James Cockerill (* 1817), a son of James Cockerill , whose descendants sold it to the family of Hans Leyers in 1917 . She is still in the possession of the complex today and uses it for agricultural purposes, which is why the Palant house cannot be visited.

In 1945 the then vacant property was looted and pillaged by Polish prisoners of war . Most of the damage was repaired by 1957.

The legend of the hard-hearted steward

When the French marched into the Rhineland at the end of the 18th century and set up the Département de la Roer , they appointed the French Rapolt as administrator in the abandoned Palant house. Rapolt was quickly hated by the population because he collected taxes ruthlessly and was of an imperious nature. Her resentment was discharged when Rapolt wanted to sell the goods quickly due to the announced arrival of the Allies in Eschweiler and use the proceeds to make off on horseback. The angry crowd killed him just behind Weisweiler.

literature

Web links

Commons : House Palant  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Karl Emerich Krämer : From castle to castle between Cologne and Aachen . 2nd Edition. Mercator, Duisburg 1984, ISBN 3-87463-117-6 , p. 80.

Coordinates: 50 ° 49 ′ 52.4 "  N , 6 ° 19 ′ 37.6"  E