Altenkirchen Castle

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Altenkirchen Castle was a smaller castle building in Altenkirchen (Westerwald) that served as the residence of the County of Sayn .

Already in the middle of the 12th century Altenkirchen must have come into the possession of the Counts of Sayn , who were the governors of the St. Cassius monastery . On December 16, 1314, King Ludwig of Bayer granted Altenkirchen town rights , which Emperor Karl IV confirmed in 1357. It was here that in 1317 a castle, apparently in connection with the town fortification was built and the intersection of Cologne Frankfurter with the Cologne-Leipzig-street protected. A gate passage with a round tower on both sides still existed from the medieval complex in the 18th century . This passage was at the site of today's district court on Siegener Strasse.

The plan of the entire newer complex has been handed down in floor plans and records from the 18th century. They probably go back to the new town planning following the fire in the city of 1728 and took the place of the medieval buildings. The so-called hussar wing was parallel to the street in the south of the complex (roughly at the height of today's Schlossplatz) ; a passage led through it to the castle courtyard. Here there were stables below, chambers above, and the guardroom to the west of the passage. At a right angle, the so-called Münzflügel joined the eastern end , a three-storey building whose western front and southern gable wall with a built-in round tower were completely solid, while the eastern front wall was only at the level of the ground floor. The two floors above had half-timbered walls . The west side had a bay-like porch. The so-called Corps de Logis was attached to this wing of the building , a wing made of quarry stone masonry protruding at right angles to the east. The actual castle courtyard, bounded to the north by the Corps de Logis , was closed to the west by a wall, behind which there was a right-angled side courtyard to the south, which was bordered on the north side by a wall and on the west side by a stable building. In the south it was bounded by the hussar wing.

The later county of Sayn-Altenkirchen only rarely experienced the royal splendor . The actual capitals of the houses of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach and Brandenburg-Ansbach , which Sayn-Altenkirchen had acquired through marriage or inheritance, were far away from Altenkirchen, so that the sovereigns only used the castle temporarily. With little interest from the sovereigns, Altenkirchen Castle soon shared the fate of Friedewald Castle : it fell apart. The structural condition ultimately turned out to be so poor that it had to be sold for demolition in 1862. The remaining remains were almost completely destroyed towards the end of the Second World War . Today only the Altenkirchener Schlossplatz is a reminder of the building.

literature

  • Konrad Fuchs: Art monuments of the Altenkirchen district (II). In: Heimat-Jahrbuch des Kreis Altenkirchen (Westerwald) 1976.
  • Horst G. Koch: Bergland to Sieg, Heller and Wied - Altenkirchen district . Siegen (self-published), 1977.
  • Hildegard Sayn: Old castle on the great Heerstraße. Photo documentation of the history of Altenkirchen Castle, Part I. In: Heimat-Jahrbuch des Kreis Altenkirchen (Westerwald) 31 (1988), pp. 180-189.
  • Hildegard Sayn: Old castle on the great Heerstraße. Photo documentation of the history of Altenkirchen Castle, Part II. In: Heimat-Jahrbuch des Kreis Altenkirchen (Westerwald) 32 (1989), pp. 185–191.
  • Hildegard Sayn: Old castle on the great Heerstraße. Photo documentation of the history of Altenkirchen Castle, III. Part. In: Heimat-Jahrbuch des Kreis Altenkirchen (Westerwald) 33 (1990), pp. 145–154.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cf. Marcel Oeben / Daniel Schneider: The granting of city rights to Altenkirchen, Hachenburg and Weltersburg. With edition of the document from 1314. In: Nassauische Annalen 125 (2014), pp. 53–65.
  2. ^ Cf. Daniel Schneider: The urban policy of the Counts of Sayn in the late Middle Ages. In: Jahrbuch für Westdeutsche Landesgeschichte 41 (2015), pp. 33–49.