Aggstein Castle

Aggstein was probably raised at the start of the 12th century by Manegold III of Acchispach (Aggsbach); by 1181 it had passed to the Kuenring family of Aggsbach-Gansbach. During Hadmar III's revolt, with his vassals, against Duke Frederick II of Austria, the castle was besieged and taken in 1230/31. Decades later, in the disputed succession that followed Frederick II's death, Leutold Kuenring outmanoeuvred the Austrian nobility in their own uprising against Duke Albert, and Aggstein was besieged and taken again in 1295/96. The last Kuenring to hold it, Leutold II, kept the castle from 1348 to 1355, after which it fell into disrepair. Later tradition held that Hadmar III had thought the castle impregnable, and there is no record of it ever being taken by direct assault — its captures are thought to have come through siege and starvation rather than storm.

In 1429 Duke Albert V granted the ruined castle to his chamberlain, Jörg (Georg) Scheck von Wald, and commissioned him to rebuild it to secure shipping on the Danube. In 1438 Scheck von Wald received the right to charge tolls on vessels travelling upriver, in exchange for maintaining the towpaths used to haul the barges, and he built a toll house on the riverbank that today serves as a forestry house. He nonetheless turned to raiding the river traffic himself; his cruelty towards the population is said to have earned him the nickname "Schreckenwald," a play on his own surname meaning "Terror Forest." In 1463 the castle was besieged by another robber baron, Georg von Stain, who defeated Scheck von Wald and took Aggstein as collateral for money the duke was said to owe him. Von Stain was expelled in 1476 by Ulrich Freiherr von Graveneck, who held the castle for a year before he too was forced to give it up. In 1477 the castle passed to a duke who installed tenants and caretakers to end the raiding — Leopold III by some accounts, Friedrich III by others.

In 1529, during the first Ottoman siege of Vienna, a party of Turkish troops razed Aggstein. It was rebuilt once more, this time fitted with embrasures for artillery.

In 1606 Anna Freiin von Polheim und Parz, widow of the last tenant, acquired Aggstein and had the middle ward renovated with Renaissance-style office buildings. After her death the decline could not be halted, and stone and timber were stripped from the ruin to build the nearby Servite convent at Maria Langegg. In 1685 the castle passed, together with Schloss Schönbühel, to a Count von Starhemberg; Ludwig Josef Gregor von Starhemberg sold both properties to Count Franz von Beroldingen in 1819.

The Beroldingen family held Aggstein until 1930, when the Schönbühel estate and the Aggstein ruins were sold to Count Oswald von Seilern-Aspang, whose descendants still own the site. The first measures to preserve the ruin were begun under the Beroldingens and completed under Seilern-Aspang. Between 2003 and 2004 a restoration project funded by the state of Lower Austria and the EU's Agricultural Guidance and Guarantee Fund repaired the masonry and services and reshaped the entrance and banquet hall. Aggstein is a listed heritage site and now receives around 55,000 visitors a year, one of the most-visited attractions in Lower Austria. The standing curtain walls, rock-built strongpoints, palace, women's tower and Gothic chapel — along with a rose garden laid out within the walls — mostly date from the rebuilding carried out between 1429 and 1436, using labour services owed by the surrounding population.