Altshausen Castle
Altshausen Castle in Altshausen ( Ravensburg district , Upper Swabia ) was the residence of the Landkomtur of the Deutschordensballei Swabia-Alsace-Burgundy and is now the residence of the head of the House of Württemberg , Carl Duke of Württemberg , and part of the administrative building of the court chamber of the House of Württemberg .
history
Castle of the Counts of Altshausen
Altshausen Castle was the seat of the Counts of Altshausen, counts of Eritgau, first mentioned in 1004 . Hermann the Lame (Hermannus Contractus) was born here on July 18, 1013 as the son of a count . At the age of seven the boy was given to the Reichenau monastery as a wafer . Later he became one of the great scholars of the Middle Ages. His astronomical knowledge, his spiritual compositions still performed today and his world chronicle made the paralyzed monk famous. After his death on September 24, 1054, Hermann the Lame was buried in the family crypt of his father's Altshausen castle; the tomb is no longer known today.
Residence of the Teutonic Order
In the 12th century, the Counts of Altshausen moved to Veringen and subsequently called themselves Counts of Veringen . The castle and village of Altshausen came into the possession of the Imperial Treasurers of Bigenburg in 1246, who donated it to the Teutonic Order in 1264 . The first settlement of the Teutonic Order in Marbach near Saulgau was established as early as 1228. The Teutonic Order House, founded in 1264 on the Bigenburg (also called Beienburg), was moved to Altshausen in 1268. In 1444 the Kommende Altshausen was subsequently raised to Castle Beuggen to the seat of the Alemannic-Swabian Deutschordensballei Swabia-Alsace-Burgundy and thus permanent residence of the Landkomtur.
After a devastating fire in 1434, which did not spare the town of Altshausen, only the wall remains of the old castle, parts of the ground floor in the old castle. A new building was immediately erected on the rubble, which was rebuilt and enlarged in 1544 and 1589. During the Thirty Years War, Swedish troops set the Old Castle on fire. The upper floors burned out and have been rebuilt in the Renaissance style since 1655. In the 17th century, the castle complex no longer met the demands of representation as the seat of a provincial commander, so the construction of a new castle was started. The old and new castle were connected by the Capuchin building with arcades facing the courtyard on the ground floor. In 1691 work began on enlarging the New Palace by extending its main wing to the east. This work continued until 1710.
In 1729 the Teutonic Order hired Johann Caspar Bagnato as a master builder with the task of planning an extensive palace complex. The Württemberg State Museum in Stuttgart contains a design in the form of an inlaid picture by Franz Josef Denner. However, only fragments of this plan were implemented, for example the riding stables (1729–31), the gate building as a seminar building, the farm buildings that connect the gate building with the New Palace and the riding stables (since 1732), the riding school (1733) and the Official residences in front of the castle (since 1741), today partly school houses, partly in municipal and private ownership. A stately avenue led dead straight to the border of the small lordship. The Teutonic Order had a maze and a lake park with an extensive canal system, artificial islands and romantic buildings built here around 1800. It is also noteworthy that the palace complex and the avenue built by Bagnato were oriented towards Jerusalem in their symmetry. On the several thousand kilometers long route, the symmetry deviates only a few kilometers to the northeast.
The coat of arms of Landkomtur Hugo Dietrich von Hohenlandenberg with the year 1589 can be found on the old castle, which was probably moved from another location. Above the entrance to the New Palace are the coats of arms of the Grand and German Master Franz Ludwig von Pfalz-Neuburg (1694–1732), brother of the Elector of the Palatinate, then the black cross of the Teutonic Order at the bottom left and the coat of arms at the bottom right of Landkomtur Marquard Franz Leopold von Falkenstein (1709–1717 Landkomtur). In the church, a huge triple coat of arms was attached to the choir arch: In the middle appears the coat of arms of Grand Master Elector Clemens August von Köln (from the House of Wittelsbach), on the lower left the cross of the Teutonic Order, on the lower right the coat of arms of Landkomtur Philipp von Froberg.
In 1750, the renovation of the rooms in the New Palace began, the St. Michael Palace Church was baroque (1748–53). When Bagnato died on the Mainau in 1757, his son Franz Anton Bagnato continued the work. He completed the New Palace, the church and built the garden pavilion around 1774. Around 1780 the expansion of the park in the Hartwald on the border with the Weingarten monastery area began. At that time the Hartweiher was redesigned into a lake park. You could row through the forest on kilometers of canals.
Residence of the House of Württemberg
After the dissolution of the Teutonic Order in the German Empire (1809), its ownership passed to the state. First the Teutonic Order Altshausen came to Bavaria before it fell to Württemberg in 1807 . In 1810 King Friedrich von Württemberg exchanged the Altshausen Castle with extensive estates and forests from the State of Bavaria for the rule of Weiltingen ; he acquired the goods for the family estate. The castle remained uninhabited until after the First World War. Before the construction of the railways , it served as a stopover on the journeys of the royal family from Stuttgart to Friedrichshafen, but also for occasional hunting trips. A court camera office housed in the castle administered the private property of the Württemberg royal family in Upper Swabia .
With the relocation of the ducal family after the end of the monarchy, the property was revitalized after the First World War. In 1919 Duke Albrecht (1865–1939) moved from Stuttgart to Altshausen after King Wilhelm II had given him the palace as his residence. Three years later, after the death of the last King of Württemberg, Altshausen Castle and the entire Hofkammergut became the property of the younger line of the House of Württemberg. Today it is owned by Carl Herzog von Württemberg, the grandson of Duke Albrecht. Carl has lived with his family in Altshausen Castle since the death of his father Philipp in 1975 . Various complex construction measures have served in recent years to preserve Altshausen Castle and its facilities for future generations.
More Attractions
The castle itself is privately owned and cannot be visited; the former orangery can only be seen from a distance. The public part of the park and the church of St. Michael with the chapel, which was set up in 2003 and in which the completely preserved baroque holy grave of Altshausen from 1763 is placed, are freely accessible. Altshausen Castle presents itself as a complex where you can still read important baroque building principles today.
- Castle and parish church of St. Michael
- Crypt with the graves of 21 land committees [not accessible]
- Current burial place in House Württemberg with 16 sarcophagi
- Linden tree in the interior of the castle with a trunk circumference of 7.32 m (2015).
literature
- Johann Daniel Georg von Memminger : Description of the Oberamt Saulgau . Cotta, Stuttgart and Tübingen 1829 ( full text at Wikisource )
- Joseph Ludolf Wohleb : The life's work of the Teutonic order builders Johann Kaspar Bagnato and Franz Anton Bagnato . In: Zeitschrift für Württembergische Landesgeschichte 11, 1952, pp. 207–224.
- Gebhard Spahr: Oberschwäbische Barockstraße IV, Altshausen to Birnau . Weingarten 1982.
- Hans-Martin Gubler: Johann Kaspar Bagnato and the construction of the Teutonic Order in the Alsace-Burgundy Ballei in the 18th century . Thorbecke, Sigmaringen 1985.
- Eberhard Fritz: The House of Württemberg in Upper Swabia. For the administration of the Upper Swabian property . In: In the Oberland 1/1993 and 2/1993.
- Peter Liebert, Jürgen Bader: Altshausen Castle as a commercial enterprise around 1720 . In: In the Oberland 2003/1. Pp. 41-50.
- Eberhard Fritz: Kingdom instead of religious orders. The secularization and mediatization of the Teutonic Order Coming Altshausen. In: Volker Himmelein / Hans Ulrich Rudolf (ed.): Old monasteries - new masters. Secularization in the German southwest. Essays, Part One . Ostfildern 2003. pp. 529-542.
- Eberhard Fritz: Music at the court of the land commander in Altshausen. A contribution to Upper Swabian musical culture . In: Musik in Baden-Württemberg 15, 2008, SS 45–64.
- Hans Ulrich Rudolf (eds.), Berthold Büchele, Ursula Rückgauer: Places of rule and power - castles and palaces in the Ravensburg district . Jan Thorbecke Verlag, Ostfildern 2013, ISBN 978-3-7995-0508-6 , pp. 29-35.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Altshausen in the directory of monumental oaks . Retrieved February 5, 2017
Coordinates: 47 ° 56 ′ 8 ″ N , 9 ° 32 ′ 16 ″ E