Frankenberg Castle

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South wing of Schloss Frankenberg with part of the castle gardens

Frankenberg Castle is located in the southern Steigerwald amidst forest and vineyards on a mountain spur in the community of Weigenheim .

History of the castle

On the long mountain spur formed by the reed sandstone in the southern Steigerwald there were once two castles: Hinterfrankenberg Castle and Vorderfrankenberg Castle. The east, south and half-completed west wing of the originally planned four-wing Schloss Frankenberg complex (the medieval north wing and part of the west wing are said to have been destroyed by fire around 1700, but this is not documented) are still a striking eye-catcher today - can be seen far into the plains of the Ochsenfurter Gaus and Uffenheimer Gaus - and have an eventful history.

Double tower of the Hinterfrankenberg castle ruins

The remains of Hinterfrankenberg Castle belong to the older of the two castles. The castle was initially owned by the prince-bishops of Würzburg . Due to the territorial power struggles, the burgraves of Nuremberg built a new castle in the immediate vicinity in 1254, which was also called Frankenberg. Changes of ownership at both castles led to a complicated balance of power. Only after the secularization of 1803, Hinterfrankenberg and the Würzburg Monastery fell to the Electorate of Bavaria (Kingdom from 1806), which sold the ruins, which were still extensively preserved at that time, to Baron Karl Ludwig von Poellnitz on Vorderfrankenberg in 1810/11. Most of the ruins were then demolished.

Vorderfrankenberg was owned by the Lords of Hohenlohe around 1280 , who ruled the entire Uffenheim area and the southern Steigerwald in the 14th century. Since around 1365 the castle with the villages of Reusch and Ippesheim has been pledged several times and around 1380 it came into the possession of Burkard von Seckendorff. Until the end of the Old Reich, Vorderfrankenberg remained an autonomous knighthood, organized in the knightly canton of Odenwald, owned by the Seckandorff until around 1430, then the Absberg until around 1465, the Hutten from 1520 to 1783, then the Poellnitz (family owned until 1971). In the fight against the Catholic monasteries of Würzburg and Bamberg, Margrave Albrecht Alcibiades devastated Hinterfrankenberg Castle in the Margrave War in 1554 , which was destroyed by Sigmund von Schwarzenberg in 1462, but then rebuilt. Since then, Hinterfrankenberg Castle has been in ruins. There are still a double tower of the fortifications, moats, small remains of walls and a well, which is almost filled. At Hinterfrankenberg Castle there is a publicly accessible park, which would like to be an arboretum , and a private cemetery for the Barons von Poellnitz and other people who were connected to Schloss Frankenberg.

The Württemberg Duke Ulrich murdered his stable master Hans von Hutten in 1515 - a scandal that outraged the entire knighthood at the time. The von Hutten family received a large amount from Württemberg as a manslaughter. Presumably with this money, the already very wealthy Hutts bought the rulership of Vorderfrankenberg. Knight Ludwig von Hutten (1483–1548) had the old Absberg castle largely demolished and built a regular building with very early, then “ultra-modern” Renaissance elements (approx. 1525–1555). The Frankenberg Castle inhabited by Hutten until 1783 when the line died out. Her grave is in the church of Reusch .

After the death of the last Hutten, Margrave Christian Friedrich Karl Alexander (1736–1806) from Ansbach lent the fiefdom to Ludwig Karl Wilhelm von Pölnitz (1724–1801) - the Pöllnitz family lived in Frankenberg Castle until 1971. After the death of the last baroness von Pöllnitz in 1971 ownership went to the Barons von Lerchenfeld from Heinersreuth near Kulmbach. The total property covered an area of ​​over 500  hectares . Between 1971 and 2006, the castle, which last had around 100 hectares of land, was owned by the Barons von Lerchenfeld . After Carl von Lerchenfeld went bankrupt in 2006, the entrepreneur Roland Belz acquired the castle in 2008 (who died in 2011). The entire property was sold to the Livia Investment Group in 2014 and 2016.

Todays use

Baroque office building

The outer bailey of the castle including the castle chapel was renovated in the 1990s.

In 2014, the industrial holding LIVIA Group and Peter Löw's private investment company bought Schloss Frankenberg and the property belonging to it. The dairy buildings were acquired in 2016. Since then, the renovation of the castle, dairy and vineyards has been advanced. Peter Löw plans to invest a further 10 million euros in the renovation and expansion. In 2016, for the first time in many years, there were wines from Schloss Frankenberg, whose grapes were not only grown there, but also matured. In addition to 29 hectares of vineyards, the castle also has a herd of 40 Black Angus cattle. The herd of cattle was sold again in April. A realignment of the companies is currently being worked on. A hotel is planned in the old dairy, which should be operational by the end of 2019.

The Franconian Marienweg leads across the grounds of the castle .

Castle cemetery

Round temple of the castle cemetery in an IR photograph from 1981
Gravestone of Baron Karl Friedrich von Poellnitz Frankenberg

A few meters north-west below the ruins of Hinterfrankenberg is the private cemetery of Schloss Frankenberg on a terrace, where both the members of the von Pöllnitz family and the servants were buried. The center of the cemetery is a now dilapidated classicistic monopteros , which is currently barely recognizable because of a wooden support corset. It will soon be dismantled, restored and rebuilt in the same place. The graves of the deceased family members are arranged in a circle around the round temple.

The grave of the second castle owner from the von Pöllnitz family, Karl Friedrich von Pöllnitz Frankenberg (1758–1826), is not far from the castle and castle cemetery near the summit plateau of the Scheinberg , at 499 meters the highest elevation in the Steigerwald . In keeping with the nature-loving and social reformist ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau , the grave and gravestone are located on a Rousseau island in the middle of a small forest lake.

Lands

The lands of Schloss Frankenberg are located on the western edge of the Steigerwald Nature Park and include vineyards, forests, arable land and orchards.

Web links

Commons : Schloss Frankenberg  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Frankenberg, a mountain castle  - sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ [1]
  2. ↑ Schloss Frankenberg has a new owner. In: Main-Post. Wuerzburg, September 11, 2014.
  3. ↑ After a deep sleep, dream weddings soon? Frankenberg Castle: Owner Peter Löw has approval for the ten million euro renovation of the facility . In: Main-Post, December 16, 2016
  4. ↑ A gem in the heart of the wine paradise. inFranken.de , accessed on December 2, 2016

basic literature: Richard Schmitt, Frankenberg, property, social and economic history of a Franconian knighthood (= phil. diss. Würzburg), Ansbach 1986;

Wilhelm Engel, The castles Frankenberg over Uffenheim, Würzburg 1956

Coordinates: 49 ° 36 ′ 30 ″  N , 10 ° 15 ′ 56 ″  E