Auerbach Castle (Upper Palatinate)

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Auerbach Castle in the Upper Palatinate

The Auerbach Castle is a abgegangenes castle in the Upper Palatinate town of Auerbach in Amberg-Sulzbach of Bavaria . It was originally in the north of the city and was separated from it by a moat and enclosed by a curtain wall and a moat .

history

Auerbach was a Bamberg bailiwick in the High Middle Ages . The Bamberg church fiefs were given to the Counts of Sulzbach ; after the death of the only son (Berengar II.) of Count Gebhard III. von Sulzbach , in the fourth Italian campaign in 1167, these fiefs came to Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa and were in 1188 after the death of Gebhard III. finally staufisch . Through the Conradin donation of 1269, the Wittelsbacher Duke Ludwig the Strict of Upper Bavaria acquired the bailiwicks of Auerbach, Vilseck and Hersbruck as well as other former Sulzbach estates. With the death of Gebhard VII, the last Count of Hirschberg , in 1305 the other parts of the Sulzbach inheritance came to the Wittelsbach family. In 1373 the Auerbach regional court was separated from the Sulzbach regional court.

The Auerbach Castle was probably built by the Counts of Sulzbach as the seat of a bailiff for their church property in the Nordgau outside of the Auerbach market; the names of the earliest bailiffs and judges are not known. After the city was expanded to the west in the 14th century, a new castle was built elsewhere as the caretaker's seat . The Romanesque castle was demolished and formed the rear building of property no. 105 on the market square.

Plan of Auerbach in the original cadastre of Bavaria ; the castle is formed by the rear buildings in the house complex No. 105

In the middle of the 14th century, the Nuremberg patrician family, the Stromer von Reichenbach , emerged from the ministerial office . Heinrich Stromer was born here in 1476 , later rector of Leipzig University and founder of Auerbachs Keller in Leipzig ; also Johann Stromer , most recently Professor of Canon Law in Jena . After two centuries, the castle property came to the cloth shearer Hans Neumüller in 1620 , who had married a woman from the Stromer family. His son Leonhard is mentioned as the owner in 1657. In 1672 the landlord and organist Johann Hertl had "brought back" the building, which had burned out during the Thirty Years' War. The landlord and shoemaker Hans Buchfelder followed from 1680 to 1695. He sold the property in 1695 for 500 fl to Johann Eder, mayor and innkeeper of Auerbach. His son Georg Jakob Ignaz Eder was the electoral forester and owned the building from 1792 to 1828. His heirs are registered here with the “Eder relics” between 1828 and 1833. From 1834 to 1870 the master butcher Kaspar Fellner owned the building. He was followed by his son Karl Fellner from 1870 to 1879 and then again by his son Gabriel from 1879 to 1904. In 1904, the master butcher and landlord Paul Wittmann succeeded him.

Construction

The palace's main hall was 10 m long and 7.5 m wide and around 8 m high. The wall thickness was about one meter on the ground floor. The building was built from rubble stones , but had bosses cuboids with edging at the corners . On the eastern long side there were two narrow Romanesque arched windows with ashlar at a height of 6 m . There were originally two such windows on the opposite side, but they were later walled up. In the upper part of the building was a single, flat-roofed hall. In the lower part of the east side there was still a Romanesque window, other small and irregular window openings came from later times. Originally the building was crowned with battlements, but was completed in the 17th century with a hipped roof. A large arched portal on the east side was not excavated until the early 17th century; The inscription "16 - HN - 06" could be seen on its arch, probably a reference to its owner at the time, Hans Neumüller. At the same time, a smaller and also arched portal was probably broken out on the west side. On the west side of the palace further buildings were probably added in the 14th century, but nothing is known about their appearance. A building was temporarily added to the north wall, as indicated by the beam holes above the Romanesque windows.

The entire complex burned down during the Hussite Wars in 1430 , as well as in the Thirty Years War in 1634 , and it was also badly damaged in the town fire of 1868. From 1747 the castle was used as a granary, which collapsed in 1788 and was no longer rebuilt.

In 1839 a chronicler spoke ironically of a "magnificent ruin". In 1905 part of the northern enclosure wall still existed as part of a barn. The lower part of the wall consisted of sandstone blocks; Loopholes could still be seen in the upper quarry stone wall . In 1971 the city castle was demolished.

literature

  • Stefan Helml: Castles and palaces in the Amberg-Sulzbach district . Druckhaus Oberpfalz, Amberg 1991, pp. 44-47.
  • Karl Wächter, Günter Moser: In the footsteps of knights and nobles in the district of Amberg-Sulzbach. Druckhaus Oberpfalz, Amberg 1992, p. 64.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Georg Hager: The art monuments of Bavaria. Administrative regions of Upper Palatinate and Regensburg (=  The Art Monuments of Bavaria . District Office Eschenbach, Booklet XI). Munich 1909, ISBN 3-486-50441-X , p. 49 , above ( = 2 digitized version [accessed on July 30, 2020]).
  2. ^ Max Piendl : Duchy of Sulzbach, District Judge Office Sulzbach . Ed .: Commission for Bavarian State History (=  Historical Atlas of Bavaria . Old Bavaria Series I, Issue 10). Munich 1957, p. 5 , above ( [1] [accessed July 30, 2020]).

Coordinates: 49 ° 41 ′ 33.7 "  N , 11 ° 37 ′ 44.4"  E