Victory Castle
| Victory Castle | ||
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 Model of the Siegesburg, city model "Segeberg um 1600" in the Museum Alt-Segeberger Bürgerhaus |
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| Alternative name (s): | Siegburg, Siegeburg, Segeberg Castle | |
| Creation time : | 12th Century | |
| Castle type : | Höhenburg, summit location | |
| Conservation status: | Burgstall | |
| Standing position : | Count, duke, king, | |
| Construction: | Brick | |
| Place: | Bad Segeberg | |
| Geographical location | 53 ° 56 '7.9 " N , 10 ° 18' 58.7" E | |
| Height: | 120 m | |
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The Siegesburg (also Siegburg or often Segeberger Schloss ) was next to Flensburg and Plön the largest of the three hilltop castles in Schleswig-Holstein . The Burgstall was located on the rising ridge of the Kalkberg in Bad Segeberg up to the former summit and gave the city its name.
Construction of the castle
The first castle on the Kalkberg was built in the first half of the 12th century (1128) by the Danish Duke Knud Lavard and destroyed again in 1130 by Count Adolf I from Schauenburg because he perceived the fortress as a threat. The Roman-German Emperor Lothar von Supplinburg , following advice from the missionary Vizelin , ordered a new castle to be built on the Kalkberg in 1134, which was to serve as a base for the Christianization of Slavia on the edge of the border area to the Slavic Wagriern .
The early border castle probably only consisted of a wooden palisade wall with a moat on the ridge, which sealed off the equally simple wooden buildings on the summit. This castle was commanded by a bailiff, representing the respective Holstein count . As a pagan Wagrier after the death of Emperor Lothar III. the disputes between Staufern and Welfen took advantage of and burned down the settlement including church and convent building as well as the surrounding villages in 1138, only the outer bailey was destroyed on the Kalkberg. In the winter of 1138/39 the new Count of Holstein and Stormarn Heinrich von Bathide invaded Wagrien and, after the death of Burgvogts Hermann, was also able to occupy the imperial bulwark on the Kalkberg, which at that time expressly did not belong to the County of Holstein. It was not until his departure in 1139 that Heinrich von Badewide let the entire previous castle complex go up in flames, as he could no longer assert himself in the Siegesburg after his dismissal as Count of Holstein. So everything around and on the Kalkberg was in ruins again. His successor (and predecessor) Count Adolf II , reinstated in 1143 by his liege Heinrich the Lion , rebuilt the castle and surrounded it for the first time with a stone wall. Since Heinrich the Lion had expressly given the Victory Castle to his liege, Count Adolf II. As a count's residence, the Schauenburger increasingly expanded his sovereignty over Holstein, Stormarn and Wagrien from this largest and most important fortress in northern Elbe.
The Siegesburg in the consolidation phase
After Count Adolf III. In the course of a renewed dispute between Henry the Lion and Friedrich Barbarossa , the lion invaded Holstein and besieged the Siegesburg, which fell in 1180 due to a lack of water. Under Heinrich the Lion, the Segeberger Feste was now primarily expanded in stone. As on the construction site of the neighboring St. Mary's Church with its monastery buildings, the preferred building material for this was brick in the landscape with few celebratory stones . Probably the decision was made to construct a military necessary, Ellen 146 (84.2 meters) deep castle well in this time; Costs, clients and construction time are no longer known today, but signs of construction inside the well still reveal the work of the medieval skilled workers (miners and stone breakers) who carried out the technically complex construction of the well shaft. After the well was completed, the Siegesburg had to surrender since 1201 due to a lack of meat and grain, but never again due to a lack of water. The castle under construction was already in 1182 for Heinrich the Lion as safe custody for his prisoner Landgrave Ludwig III. from Thuringia available. When Heinrich the Lion tried again in 1189/90 to recapture his former territories north of the Elbe, he was only able to besiege the Siegesburg, but was unable to conquer it. After the renewed reign of Count Adolf III. fell through his defeat against the Danish governor of Schleswig Duke Waldemar in 1201 Holstein to the Danish royal family. After a year of siege, the Siegesburg had to surrender in 1202, Holstein came under Danish rule for decades and the Siegesburg was now also given a Danish bailiff. It was only during the fighting for supremacy in northern Elbe from 1223 that the young Adolf IV von Schauenburg was able to establish himself again in Holstein from the end of 1224 . Up until the Battle of Bornhöved (1227) , the Siegesburg, which was last besieged by the Danish, was repeatedly involved in fighting.
The victory castle among the Schauenburgers
As a result of the defeat of the Danish king Waldemar II , Adolf IV resided in the centrally located Segeberg Castle and was able to further consolidate his county of Holstein from here.
The Segeberger Feste also served as a prison in the future: The daughters of the Danish King Erichs IV. Plogpenning Ingeborg and Sophie were taken over by his brother Abel (Duke of Schleswig and guardian of Adolf's sons Johann and Gerhard for the County of Holstein) together with the Ripener Bishop and others Danish nobles kidnapped here as hostages for a year in 1247 to fend off a Danish invasion of Holstein. And in 1253, the Schleswig bishop and other personalities were imprisoned at the Siegesburg during the dispute over supremacy in Schleswig.
The central importance of the Siegesburg as a political center of power and as a residence becomes clear in the division of Holstein: In 1273 Count Gerhard I met with his nephews Adolf V and Johann II at Segeberg Castle to agree on the division of Holstein among themselves; The Segeberg share with the Siegesburg as the headquarters went to Adolf V. However, he died childless in 1308. His nephew and potential successor, Johann's son Adolf, fell victim to an assassination attempt by the Dithmarsch nobleman Hartwig Reventlow on his Segeberg castle in 1315 . In the following year, the cousins Johann III shared . and Gerhard III. from the Rendsburg line the county Segeberg among each other. While Gerhard took over the Segeberger share and converted it into a bailiwick , he again fortified the Siegesburg considerably. From then on, however, this fortress served him only as an insignificant secondary residence and as a prison for opponents such as the Danish Prince Otto, who was held captive at the Siegesburg for six years after a failed uprising in 1334.
Between 1342 and 1366, Heinrich II pledged the Kalkberg fortress, including the city and bailiwick, to the Hanseatic city of Lübeck , which it used to secure its trade routes and occupied it with 200 Hanseatic mercenaries until it was released. With Adolf VIII. , Who stayed frequently at the Siegesburg until his death in 1459, the family of the Schauenburgs died out as Counts of Holstein and owners of the Siegesburg.
Extension to the castle under Danish rule
After the Schauenburg family died out in the 15th century, the castle with the County of Holstein fell to the Danish King Christian I in 1459 , who came to the Segeberg Castle the following year to receive the enfeoffment with the County of Holstein. In the following years, Christian I stayed repeatedly at the Siegesburg to z. B. Issuing documents such as the Segeberger Regress (1469) and the Segeberger Concordat (1470) or holding regional parliaments (1480).
While more and more nobles moved to the city of Segeberg, the castle was expanded to become a representative palace and also served as a temporary residence for the subsequent Danish kings with their large retinues. In 1490 the Danish King John I and the Gottorf Duke Friedrich I negotiated the division of the duchies at the Siegesburg against the provisions of the Treaty of Ripen ; Segeberg Castle was again intended as the main castle in the royal or Segeberg part. Access to the important state documents in the so-called Blue Tower, on the other hand, was only provided for both sovereigns by mutual agreement, which, however, did not prevent King Christian II from violent access. During the count's feud , the Holstein trade wagons of the Hanseatic League kidnapped the Siegesburg; During the following precautionary target practice, an exploding cannon tore five knights to their deaths and also destroyed several castle buildings. Nevertheless, the Lübeck captain Marx Meyer besieged the Siegesburg in vain from May 27 to June 2, 1534 before he laid the city of Segeberg to rubble and ashes. But the castle was so badly damaged that Christian III. in 1550, on the occasion of a stay in Segeberg, did not reside on the Kalkberg, but in the Canon Monastery at the Marienkirche. The Danish governor and bailiff Heinrich Rantzau , who preferred his palace on the Kleiner Segeberger See as his residence in Segeberg, had the ruined Victory Castle restored not for himself, but for his sovereign Friedrich II . In Rantzau's New Description of the Cimbrian Peninsula from 1597, Segeberg says: “During the past few years the castle had largely become dilapidated due to the ravages of time; That is why the Cimbrian governor and castle captain Heinrich Rantzau had it repaired with funds from the king and given new buildings and walls. "
The extensive building complex on the Kalkberg at the end of the 16th century is recorded in a differentiated manner on a copper engraving by Braun and Hogenberg from 1588; You can see a number of castle buildings arranged in a ring along with a keep and a detached wall with a small door on the summit of the Kalkberg, as well as tower-reinforced fortress walls and some farm buildings including the rear gable of the gatehouse on the outer bailey. Halfway down to the town were the buildings of the Vorwerk, which also belonged to the castle as an agricultural supply facility. As early as 1563, the Danish King Friedrich II was received again in the castle on the Kalkberg. Even Christian IV. Stayed in September 1595 for two days already as a young king with a huge entourage and 700 horses on the victory castle.
Destruction and Demolition - The End of the Siegesburg
Already in the Kalmar War (1611–1613) the Segeberg bailiff Marquard Pentz set several Swedish prisoners on the Siegesburg. After the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War , Christian IV invited the Protestant dukes of Lüneburg, Lauenburg and Braunschweig, the envoys from England, Holland, Sweden, Brandenburg and Pomerania as well as the expelled Winter King to Segeberg Castle between January and March 1621 to meet the Protestants Revive Union . But after the defeat of the Danish king in the battle of Lutter am Barenberg , imperial troops occupied Wallenstein from 1627 to 1629 Segeberg and took the unfortified castle on the Kalkberg without a fight.
When the Swedes invaded Holstein under Swedish General Lennart Torstensson , the troops marched on to Jutland in 1643; Only on their way back in 1644 did the Swedes recognize the commanders of the so-called snap cocks in the bailiff at the castle Caspar von Buchwaldt and the castle bailiff Herrmann von Hatten , who constantly attacked them from ambush. In retaliation, Torstensson had the open victory castle burned down. Until the end of the Thirty Years War, only the ruins of the former castle remained on the Kalkberg.
In the following year (1649) Friedrich III. the right to extract gypsum stone on the Kalkberg to the Lübeck factor Heinrich Werger and in 1654 he negotiated with him the right to break stone from the ruins of the castle and even to demolish the ruins himself in order to sell the building blocks. In 1660, bailiff Buchwaldt still had the castle walls demolished. Nevertheless, in 1684 there were still visible remains of the castle wall. After centuries of intensive mining on the Kalkberg, today only the lower half of the only castle well carved into the rock in northern Germany, which is now located in a steep excavated wall, with its 42 meters depth that has been preserved, bears witness to the once mighty Victory Castle.
Reception of the Siegesburg
In the centuries after the Siegesburg was demolished, a number of pictures - copper engravings, paintings, wall plates, postcards, coins and other things - were created with the motif of the castle, but they show more or less successful fantasy representations. Lodges, leisure and sponsorship clubs as well as the Segeberger Kindervogelschießenverein's motto carriages also included the Siegesburg in their name. In 2014, the Alt-Segeberger Bürgerhaus Museum dedicated an exhibition to Segeberg Castle with a large number of retrospective depictions and explained the steps involved in its reconstruction.
Say
Since its end there have been a number of mysterious legends about the Siegesburg , such as that of the farmer Gottschalk , who appeared in front of the castle as a mercenary of Henry the Lion, that of the prisoners, princes or slaves who built the castle well and got their freedom back, or that of the duck, with which an underground connection between the castle fountain and the Great Segeberger See was proven. Other legends tell of how besiegers were deceived by lime instead of bread flour about the prevailing food shortage at the castle, or of the Black Magret, whose horse left a hoofprint in the stone, and of the noble Hartwig Reventlov, the murderer of Count Adolf on the Victory Castle.
literature
- Georg Dehio : Handbook of the German art monuments Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein. Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munich 1994, ISBN 978-3-422-03033-6 .
- Jürgen Hagel, Segeberger Sagenschatz. Bad Segeberg 1963.
- Jürgen Hagel: From the second end of the Siegesburg. In: Local history yearbook for the Segeberg district. 41. Jg. (1995), Bad Segeberg 1995, pp. 7-10.
- JC Hein: From Segeberg's past. Segeberg 1904.
- Nils Hinrichsen: The lost victory castle in Bad Segeberg. A reconstruction based on historical images, in: The castle in the picture - The picture of the castle, research on castles and palaces (JB of the Wartburg Society, vol. 19), Petersberg 2019, pp. 244-254.
- Christian Kuß: The city of Segeberg in the past. In: Archives for history, administration statistics and state rights of the duchies of Schleswig-Holstein and Lauenburg. Kiel 1847.
- Ulrich Lange: Basics of the rule of the Schauenburgers in Holstein. In: Journal of the Society for Schleswig-Holstein History. Neumünster 1974.
- Karl Müllenhoff : Legends, fairy tales and songs of the duchies of Schleswig, Holstein and Lauenburg. Kiel 1845.
- Otto Neumann: Christian IV's journey in 1595. In: Schleswig-Holstein. Husum 1969.
- Wolfgang Prange: Segeberg as Lübeck's pledge 1342–1366. Administration, use, archival features. In: The memory of the Hanseatic city of Lübeck. Lübeck 2005, pp. 253-264.
- CR Rasmussen, E. Imberger, D. Lohmeier, I. Mommsen: The princes of the country - dukes and counts of Schleswig-Holstein and Lauenburg. Wachholtz Verlag, 2008.
- CH Seebach: 800 years of castles, palaces and mansions in Schleswig-Holstein. Wachholtz, 1988.
- Ernst Stegelmann: From Segeberg's old and young days. Barmen 1900.
Individual evidence
- ↑ German Castle Association e. V. (Ed.): Castles in Central Europe. A manual. Vol. II: Castle landscapes, Schleswig-Holstein, hill castles. Stuttgart 1999, p. 115.
- ^ Heinrich Rantzau (1526–1599). Royal governor in Schleswig-Holstein. A humanist describes his country, Schleswig 1999. p. 227.
- ↑ Myth of Siegesburg. The castle on the Segeberger Kalkberg (1134-1644) inventory and image. An exhibition by the Alt-Segeberger Bürgerhaus Museum and the Kalkberg Archive Bad Segeberg. From April 1st to August 31st 2014.
- ^ Jürgen Hagel: Segeberger Sagenschatz. Bad Segeberg 1963, pp. 24-26.
