Messelhausen Castle

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Messelhausen Castle

The Castle Messelhausen is a baroque - Castle in Messelhausen in Tauberfranken in Baden-Wuerttemberg .

history

The community and castle were first mentioned in documents at the beginning of the 13th century. The castle initially belonged to the Counts of Hohenlohe ; the fiefdoms often changed later through buying and selling or through struggle and negotiations. So used z. For example, the city of Rothenburg used the castle as a base to damage Bishop Johann I von Würzburg and his followers. However, he conquered the "robbery castle", but had to give it back in 1401 after peace negotiations. In 1530, the castle and village of Messelhausen came to the Zobel family through the lords of Tottenheim and Thüngen : Balthasar von Thüngen's widow married Christoph Zobel von Giebelstadt zu Guttenberg, who died soon afterwards. In 1538 she sold “Messelhausen Castle and Village, along with all its affiliations, for 9,000 guilders (...) to her dear Aidam Stephan Zobel von Giebelstadt zu Darstadt, who had become the husband of her youngest daughter Anastasia. In this way, the castle and village of Messelhausen together with Marstadt came to the Zobel family from Giebelstadt zu Darstadt. "

Originally the castle, which until 1699 was only owned by the village rulers, was nothing more than a castle stables of the Counts of Hohenlohe. It was originally where the manor now stands. In accordance with its military purpose, the castle was surrounded by a rampart and moat, blocked off by a drawbridge and provided with strong towers, i.e. a moated castle. The so-called prison tower is still preserved from the previous facility.

During the Peasants' War , the castle was burned down by rebellious peasants in 1525. It was rebuilt after the war, but again devastated and destroyed in the Thirty Years' War ; also in 1688 when it was burned down by the French.

Johann Franz von Zobel built the castle for the third time in 1699 (today the tenant's apartment is at this point behind the park), now in the baroque style, and had a lake and a drawbridge built. At this point in time the castle was already functioning as a mansion, but architecturally it was so bad that in 1740 the rulers felt compelled to build a new apartment, the current castle. From 1740 to 1744 the castle was the main building and the ancillary buildings to the south of it, consisting of three economic buildings and an orangery.

The chapel of the castle

The house chapel was set up back then as it can still be seen today. However, "this building was not a happy one either". The mansard roof of the main building was poorly constructed and unusually heavy, so the masonry soon developed serious cracks. At the beginning of the 19th century, the rulers left the castle to decay and resided in Würzburg . The castle almost fell into ruin and the garden was completely neglected. In 1829 the former canon Friedrich von Zobel decided to bring the building back into a habitable condition with his own funds. The walls were repaired, the heavy mansard roof replaced by the current, lighter one, and the second floor expanded. The two current gatehouses and the laundry were built at that time. The palace garden was restored with numerous foreign trees and ornamental shrubs and the lake was rebuilt. In addition, greenhouses and two pools with goldfish and fountains were created. Instead of the old crumbling enclosure wall, the current wall was built in the 1840s and 1850s.

Use as a monastery

In 1932 the Augustinian order acquired the complex and since then has also provided pastoral care for the town. The property was used as the Pius-Keller-Haus by the Augustinian monastery in Würzburg.

In 1944, the research facility of the Physics Institute at Heidelberg University - kept strictly secret from the local population - worked on an insulation layer for submarines in the Messelhausen palace building, which could no longer be used to target them. The head of the research assignment was Philipp Lenard , Nobel Prize Laureate in Physics in 1905 and co-discoverer of X-rays. The establishment of the research work in the former castle caused severe damage to the buildings in Messelhausen when the Americans moved in in the last days of World War II ; there were also heavy losses among the fighting troops and the civilian population.

Between 1947 and 1956 the monastery was the meeting point for the Augustinian brothers and their relatives who had been expelled from Czechoslovakia , but who, after setting up their own branches in Vienna , Stuttgart-Sillenbuch and Zwiesel, returned the house to the German Augustinian province. In 1956 the house was modernized; Fundamentally renovated in 1987 and the top floor expanded in 1998.

In 2013 the monastery was abandoned and sold by the German Augustinian Province. The castle building is now used by the Malteser relief service as a senior citizens' residence.

See also

literature

  • Johann Anton Zehnter : History of Messelhausen. A contribution to the state, legal, economic and moral history of Eastern Franconia . Winter, Heidelberg 1901.
  • Dagmar Zimdars u. a .: Baden-Württemberg I: The administrative districts of Stuttgart and Karlsruhe ( Handbook of German Art Monuments ). German art publisher. Munich 1993, ISBN 3-422-03024-7 , p. 537.

Web links

Commons : Messelhausen Castle  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e LEO-BW.de: Palace complex (Freiherr-von-Zobel-Strasse 39, Lauda-Königshofen) . Online at www.leo-bw.de. Retrieved October 17, 2018.
  2. ↑ The monastery is dissolved .

Coordinates: 49 ° 34 ′ 32 "  N , 9 ° 47 ′ 11.2"  E