Reichsburg Cochem
The Reichsburg Cochem is a castle in the Rhineland-Palatinate city of Cochem on the Moselle . It is their landmark and stands on a mountain cone that can be seen from afar at 154 m above sea level. NHN (entrance) above the city. As a summit castle , it belongs to the type of hill castle .
The complex, which served as a customs castle in the Middle Ages , was built around 1100 or in the first half of the 12th century, according to the results of current castle research. After it was destroyed in the 17th century, the Berlin merchant and later secretary of commerce Louis Fréderic Jacques Ravené had it rebuilt from 1868 to 1877 according to the taste of castle romanticism . Cochem Castle was designed in the neo-Gothic style during the period of historicism . According to the Monument Protection Act of Rhineland-Palatinate, it is a protected cultural monument and entered in the state monument list. In addition, the complex is a protected cultural asset according to the Hague Convention and is marked with the blue and white trademark.
History and building history
Palatine foundation
The name Cochem is first mentioned as Cuchema in a deed of donation from the Prüm Abbey of December 20, 866. The place was an imperial estate with which the Ezzone were enfeoffed . Older researchers assumed that the castle was founded in 996 or around 1020 by Count Palatine Ezzo (often also called Ehrenfried), son and successor of Hermann Pusillus of Lorraine , but no evidence can be given for this. The information that a Cochem castle was first mentioned in 1051, which is also frequently found, goes back to a deed of donation, which, however, is a forgery from around 1263. According to her, the former Polish Queen Richeza gave a castrum cuum Chuchomo to her nephew, Count Palatinate Heinrich I , on the condition that, as bailiff of the Brauweiler Abbey , protect the property of the Ezzonian monastery. With the death of Hermann II of Lorraine , the male line of the Ezzone died out and the Palatinate County passed to Heinrich II of Laach in 1085/87 .
However, a castle complex in Cochem is only mentioned for certain in a document dated March 17, 1130 issued by Count Palatine Wilhelm von Ballenstedt . Already at this time, a ship duty was levied "in front of the castle of our heritage, which is called Cochem". In addition, the biography of the Archbishop of Cologne, Anno II. († 1075), written around 1105 reports that the insane Count Palatine Heinrich II murdered his wife at Cochem Castle. This mention of a castle and the phrase "our heritage" in the document from 1130 show that the complex can be assumed to have existed around 1100.
The shape of the earliest Romanesque castle in Cochem is still largely unknown. According to Ernst Wackenroder's considerations from 1959, the octagonal tower was mostly viewed as a Romanesque square tower from the time before 1051, which is said to have been encased later in an octagonal shape. More recent investigations by Alexander Thon and Stefan Ulrich, with reference to octagonal towers from the late 11th and early 12th centuries, for example, on Neuchâtel near Freyburg an der Unstrut (Saxony-Anhalt) or Sulzbach Castle (Bavaria) and the actual first mention in 1130 the assumption that the Cochem octagonal tower probably also dates from around 1100. In addition to the tower, the Romanesque castle also included a residential and farm building, both of which were surrounded by an almost circular circular wall .
After the death of the childless Count Palatine Wilhelm von Ballenstedt, a dispute over his successor developed between Hermann von Stahleck and Otto the Younger von Rheineck , during which Hermann captured the castle in 1150. King Conrad III. put an end to the disputes by besieging and conquering the castle in 1151. In this way Konrad secured his royal authority. Subsequently, the castle became the administrative seat for the surrounding imperial estate. From this point on, Cochem belonged to the imperial castles .
Royal imperial castle
In the period that followed, the castle was initially administered by castle men and later by royal ministerials known as burgraves . In 1282, King Rudolf von Habsburg moved in front of the castle and was able to conquer it after a brief siege. The Archbishop of Cologne Siegfried von Westerburg had previously seized the complex and installed Kuno von Schönburg as burgrave.
Cochem Castle did not remain in royal possession for long, however, because in 1294 King Adolf von Nassau pledged the castle and city of Cochem, including a surrounding area that included fifty towns, to the Archbishop of Trier, Bohemond I von Warnesberg , in order to finance his royal coronation.
Belonging to Kurtrier
Adolf's successor Albrecht I could not redeem the pledge and therefore appointed the Archbishop of Trier as Burgrave of Cochem. This office, connected with the lucrative Moselle toll and the jurisdiction , was confirmed as hereditary by the king in 1298. Cochem remained with Kurtrier as an important state castle and administrative center until the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss 1803 . In 1328 the Archbishop of Trier Baldwin of Luxembourg had to pledge the castle to Countess Loretta von Sponheim , but was able to redeem it a year later.
Under Charles IV , the castle finally became the property of the Trier archbishopric, but remained an open house of the emperor. Thanks to their customs, economic and administrative rights, the burgraves appointed by the Electorate were powerful nobles in the Holy Roman Empire . Among them are, for example, the Lords of Winneburg and von Beilstein . From 1419, however, the burgraves were replaced by Trier officials .
In the older literature on castle history it is often stated that the until then rather modest complex was expanded under the Archbishop of Trier Baldwin of Luxembourg because of its strategic location in the late Gothic style, but there is no written evidence of this construction activity. Based on art-historical comparisons with castles from the 14th century in the Rhineland and neighboring regions, it can be assumed that at least the addition of the octagonal tower and the construction of the four final corner tours took place in the era of the bishop, who is known as "Bauwütig".
According to a copper engraving in the illuminated manuscript Civitates Orbis Terrarum by Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg from 1576 depicting the Cochem castle, it is certain that the complex was greatly expanded and rebuilt during the 14th to 16th centuries under the Trier electors. During clean-up work in the second half of the 19th century, the remains of the medieval castle were uncovered. Accordingly, their access was secured by three gate systems. A first gate on the north side joined a mighty with battlements manned gatehouse at. Behind it, on the eastern side of the complex, there was a bridge over the moat, which led to another gatehouse. Through this one got into the outer Bering with three Burgmannen houses, a small fortification at the southern tip, various farm buildings like the wine press house , the horse stable and the granary, the castle well as well as the so-called wall tower with spiral staircase and a three meter wide exit gate . The inner bering was formed by the old curtain wall from the Romanesque period. They protected the octagonal tower, the palace and a witch tower called round tower , the access to the west main castle monitored.
In the course of the War of the Palatinate Succession , the castle was shelled by troops of the French King Louis XIV under Philippe-Auguste Le Hardi, Marquis de la Trousse, in 1673 and captured on November 8, 1688 by French troops of the Maréchal de Boufflers with great losses. After all of Cochem was occupied by the French in March of the following year, the commander of the French troops gave the order to destroy the castle complex.
French and Prussian property
On May 19, 1689, the castle was set on fire, undermined and blown up under the command of a Lieutenant de Saxis. She shared the fate of many castles in the German southwest.
With the Peace of Rijswijk , Louis XIV gave the area back in 1697, but about a century later French revolutionary troops occupied Cochem and its castle ruins in 1794 during the First Coalition War , which were annexed to France in 1801 as a result of the Peace of Lunéville . After the Congress of Vienna , Prussia came into possession of the Cochem castle ruins.
The Ravené family
The Berlin merchant and later secret councilor Louis Fréderic Jacques Ravené (1823–1879) bought the ruins from the Prussian domain treasury in order to rebuild them as a summer residence for his family in neo-Gothic style. The remains of the building changed hands on September 26, 1868 "with a terrain of 4 acres , 75 rods and 20 feet ". All that was left of the castle was “a main tower with a pentagonal shape at the bottom and a square shape at the top and a round stair tower next to it, decorated with medieval frescoes ”. The plans for the reconstruction - based on the engraving by Braun and Hogenberg - came from the Berlin architect Hermann Ende , whose tasks were later assigned to the architect Julius Carl Raschdorff .
The extensive clearing up and securing work required for this began in 1868 with debris clearing under the direction of construction officer Schmidt in Cochem. This was followed in 1869 by the restoration of the curtain wall, which was provided with battlements at the same time. In 1870 the buried foundations of the medieval buildings were exposed. When the castle was rebuilt, which essentially took place from 1874 to 1877, its exterior was mostly fictitious. Among other things, the octagonal tower was raised by an additional floor with four tourelles , the witch's tower - including its medieval frescoes restored - converted into a bathroom on the upper floor and equipped with a conical roof, and the Burgmannenhaus at the third gate in the northeast was set up as a coachman's and administrator's house. The keystone of the northeast gate, which is marked with an R for Ravené and the year 1868, is visible evidence of this construction work .
After the death of Louis Jacques Ravené in 1879, in which the newly built castle chapel was also consecrated, his son Louis Auguste Ravené initially continued the work. The interior work under the direction of the architect Otto Walter lasted until 1890. Louis Auguste equipped Cochem Castle with an extensive art collection, which was largely destroyed in the Second World War .
The castle in public hands
In 1942 Louis Auguste Ravené had to sell the castle to the Prussian Ministry of Justice. The Reich Minister of Justice Otto Georg Thierack had a special Nazi training center set up here for lawyers in 1943, where he himself lectured to university professors. The mosaic portrait of St. Christopher created by an Italian master in 1870 was destroyed during the Nazi era.
After the Second World War, the castle fell to the state of Rhineland-Palatinate in 1947, which established an administration school there. In 1978 the city of Cochem bought the facility for DM 664,000 and has it managed by Reichsburg GmbH today.
description
The appearance of the castle today is largely determined by the new buildings erected in the 19th century. However, they often include or build on medieval building fabric. Romanesque or Gothic components can be found, for example, in the circular wall, the north gate, the octagonal tower, the witch's tower and the building with the knight's hall .
In the center of the polygonal structure is the four-storey octagonal tower, which shows a modern mosaic representation of St. Christopher on its north side . It is the oldest structure in the castle complex, which was given its current appearance in three construction phases. Its lower, octagonal part and its vaulted cellar were probably built when the castle was founded and were later supplemented by a square part. The top floor of the tower rises with its corner tourelles above a round arch frieze and is an addition from the period of historicism . The clear width of the tower, which is square on the inside, is 5.40 meters, while its walls in the lower part are 3.50 meters thick.
Of the former three-part staggered gate system, only the remains of the second gate are left, which are integrated in today's north gate. Today's main gate is where the gatehouse of the third gate used to be. A rebuilt Burgmannenhaus adjoins it to the northwest and serves as a museum cash desk, castle tavern and souvenir shop. To the southwest of it stands the three-storey witch's tower from the 14th or 15th century with remains of Gothic painting. Its crenellated crown protruding from an arched frieze was replaced by a conical helmet during the reconstruction.
On the south-eastern side, on the barrel-vaulted cellar of a former Burgmannenhaus, there is a modern building that was modeled on a late-Gothic residential building and, among other things, houses the knight's hall and the dining room . It is connected to the rebuilt hall via a gate with a clock tower. At the adjoining southern tip of the complex is the so-called Kavaliershaus from the 1870s, which served as a guest house, and the single-nave castle chapel with a three-sided choir and a roof truss in the form of an upside-down ship's keel. While the Kavaliershaus goes back to a previous medieval building, the chapel is a completely new creation from the 19th century.
During the Middle Ages there were farm buildings on the west side, but they are no longer preserved. The only remnant from this time is the 50 meter deep castle well with a diameter of 1.50–2 meters. His well house dates from 1984.
Todays use
Castle Museum
The castle houses a museum that can be visited on guided tours from March to November. You can see numerous of the rooms of the castle designed by Julius Raschdorf in the neo-renaissance and neo-baroque styles, together with their valuable historical interior furnishings, such as paneling , tunnel cabinets, carpets, tapestries as well as some paintings and historicist tiled stoves. Among these rooms is, for example, the dining room with a late Gothic fireplace and a beamed ceiling designed by Ernst Ewald , which is painted with the motif of the double eagle . It was supposed to symbolize the history of the Reichsburg and the resurrection of the German Empire after 1871. Among the furniture in the neo-renaissance style, a large buffet with Delftware is the most valuable item. The dining room is adjoined by the so-called kemenate with a late Gothic ribbed vault . It is furnished with Louis-quinze-style furniture and paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries. The adjoining Romanesque room , however, has a groined vault .
Another room that can be visited is the knight's hall , which can be reached via an anteroom equipped with Renaissance furniture - the so-called hunting room . The knight's hall has had a baroque , stuccoed wooden barrel vault since 1905 , which is supported by twelve wooden columns . A large neo-Gothic chimney on the north wall shows the coats of arms of the Trier electors and the count palatine. The stained glass windows, on the other hand, show the coats of arms of the Trier officials who used to administer the castle. From this room, visitors can take a splendidly designed wooden staircase to the so-called weapons room, where replicas of medieval armor can be seen.
The former private rooms of Ravené are only accessible as part of special and not regular castle tours.
Events and other facilities
Some of the historic rooms can be rented for private parties, and the castle chapel can be used for weddings.
There is a tavern in the castle. It is the seat of the German section of the "Route Gottfried von Bouillon ", an association that aims to make the beautiful castles in the Ardennes , Lorraine , Luxembourg and Rhineland-Palatinate better known. Until 2015, a falconry was located on the castle grounds, which held flight demonstrations with its birds .
In addition to changing cultural events, there is a three-day castle festival with knight games on the first weekend in August and the Cochem Castle Christmas on a December weekend.
literature
- Leopold von Eltester: Chronicle of Cochem Castle. Berlin 1878 ( digitized version ).
- Michael Losse : The Moselle. Castles, palaces, aristocratic residences and fortifications from Trier to Koblenz. Michael Imhof, Petersberg 2007, ISBN 978-3-86568-240-6 , pp. 41-46.
- Elke Lutterbach: Reichsburg Cochem. Guide, reference work and picture book (= knight castles. Volume 4), JP Bachem, Cologne 2013, ISBN 978-3-7616-2672-6 .
- Uwe A. Oster (Ed.): Castles in Germany. Primus, Darmstadt 2006, ISBN 3-89678-561-3 , pp. 111-112.
- Gunter Seifert: The Moselle castles. Between Koblenz and Trier. Self-published, Overath 1999, pp. 17-19.
- Alexander Thon , Stefan Ulrich: Blown by the showers of the past ... castles and palaces on the Moselle. Schnell & Steiner, Regensburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-7954-1926-4 , pp. 38-46.
- Alexander Thon: Between Empire, Rhineland Palatinate and Archdiocese of Trier - New Insights into the High Medieval History of the Castles of Cochem, Klotten and Bischofstein. In: Olaf Wagener (Ed.): The castles on the Mosel. Görres, Koblenz 2007, ISBN 978-3-935690-59-1 , pp. 65-82.
- Stefan Ulrich: Arras, Beilstein, Bernkastel, Cochem and Thurandt. Observations on some Moselle castles. In: Castles and Palaces . Journal for Castle Research and Monument Preservation. Volume 49, No. 3, 2008, ISSN 0007-6201 , pp. 154–160, doi: 10.11588 / bus.2008.3.48785 .
- The Reichsburg Cochem on the Moselle - castle guide. Seifert, Bensberg 1992.
Web links
- Site of the castle
- Entry by Jens Friedhoff about the Reichsburg Cochem in the scientific database " EBIDAT " of the European Castle Institute
- Floor plan of the castle with the building stock from 1877
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Alexander Thon, Stefan Ulrich: From the showers of the past blown around ... 2007, p. 44; Stefan Ulrich: Arras, Beilstein, Bernkastel, Cochem and Thurandt. 2008, pp. 157-158.
- ↑ a b Entry by Jens Friedhoff about the Reichsburg Cochem in the scientific database " EBIDAT " of the European Castle Institute, accessed on September 9, 2016.
- ↑ Alexander Thon: Between Empire, Rhineland Palatinate and Archdiocese of Trier. 2007, p. 66.
- ↑ General Directorate for Cultural Heritage Rhineland-Palatinate (ed.): Informational directory of cultural monuments - Cochem-Zell district. Mainz 2020, p. 20 (PDF; 4.6 MB).
- ^ The Reichsburg Cochem on the Moselle - Castle Guide. 1992, p. 3.
- ↑ a b c Alexander Thon, Stefan Ulrich: From the showers of the previous world blown around ... 2007, p. 39.
- ^ Stefan Ulrich: Arras, Beilstein, Bernkastel, Cochem and Thurandt. 2008, p. 158.
- ^ Quote from Michael Losse: The Moselle. Castles, palaces, aristocratic residences and fortifications from Trier to Koblenz. 2007, p. 43.
- ↑ Quote from Uwe A. Oster: Burgen in Deutschland. 2006, p. 112.
- ↑ Martin Broszat : On the perversion of criminal justice in the Third Reich . In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte . No. 6, 1958, pp. 390–334, on this p. 402, note 35 ( PDF ; 4.82 MB).
- ^ Lothar Gruchmann: Justice in the Third Reich. 1933-1940. Adaptation and submission in the Gürtner era (= sources and representations on contemporary history. Volume 28). 3. Edition. Oldenbourg, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-486-53833-0 , p. 312, note 58.
- ↑ Manfred Bukschat: memories of a desolate time. Cochem 1940-1950. Impressions and thoughts that can only be emulated by those who experienced this extraordinary epoch ( Memento from July 20, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Michael Losse: The Moselle. Castles, palaces, aristocratic residences and fortifications from Trier to Koblenz. 2007, p. 44.
- ↑ Alexander Thon, Stefan Ulrich: From the showers of the past blown around ... 2007, p. 42.
Coordinates: 50 ° 8 ′ 32 ″ N , 7 ° 10 ′ 1 ″ E