Ehrenberg Castle

Ehrenberg is the ruin of a hill castle at 1,100 metres on the north rim of the Lechtal Alps, above Reutte in the Tyrolean Außerfern, the centrepiece of a fortress ensemble that also includes the baroque Schlosskopf fortress above it, the Ehrenberg Klause gorge-fort below, and Fort Claudia to the east. The ensemble was long regarded as an impregnable bulwark and controlled the most important toll station between the northern and southern trade routes.

Lordship over the area came to Count Meinhard II of Görz-Tirol as a marriage portion through the widow of Konrad IV. The castle above Reutte was probably raised around 1290; that same year the Tyrolean count handed his castle near Pfronten, Burg Falkenstein, to the Bishop of Augsburg, which may have been one reason for the new build. A castle captain, Heinrich von Starkenberg, appears in 1293. Building costs were met partly from the prince's own income and partly by the surrounding communities, whose people were also pressed into labour service.

The toll station below brought rich revenue, and Ehrenberg became a prized pledge. In 1314 Meinhard's son, Duke Heinrich of Carinthia, pawned the castle and its court to Count Konrad von Kirchberg; the pledge was redeemed in 1317 and administration returned to Heinrich von Starkenberg. It was pawned again several times through the later Middle Ages, among them in 1352 to Duke Konrad IV of Teck, to whom the Margrave of Tyrol owed 14,000 Berner marks.

After further pledgings, Ehrenberg came to the Augsburg merchant Georg Gossembrot, under whom Reutte was raised to a market town. Gossembrot was deeply unpopular; when he died at nearby Füssen in 1502, he was said to have been poisoned by his own subjects. After his death the lordship passed in 1523, via the Augsburg Paumgartner family, to Gabriel Salamanca, a Spaniard known for his cruelty; the outraged population forced the duke to redeem the pledge again in 1525.

In 1546 the Schmalkaldic League tried to force its way into Tyrol. Castle and Klause were manned, but of the 200 subjects called up only 29 appeared, leaving about 60 men in total to defend them; the League took the Klause on 11 July 1546, and the castle was surrendered the next day. The Tyroleans recaptured it that September, positioning seven guns on the Falkenberg and bombarding the castle into a state fit for storming; the Protestant garrison escaped back to the Allgäu, and repair of the bombardment damage took until 1551.

In 1552 Moritz of Saxony invaded Tyrol by way of Füssen but could not take the castle; his troops simply marched around castle and Klause over the unfortified Falkenberg, again the fortification's weak point, and plundered the Klause on their eventual withdrawal. The Innsbruck government paid the castle little attention afterwards — by 1566 its garrison numbered five men and a stable boy, and in 1601 the warden moved his seat down to Reutte. Its value as a pass barrier was recognised: Archduke Maximilian ordered major rebuilding of the fortifications between 1607 and 1609, and further works followed in 1632, when a Protestant army threatened to invade during the Thirty Years' War; over 6,000 soldiers under Duke Bernhard of Weimar attacked the Klause but were repelled by the Tyroleans. From 1639 Claudia de' Medici, widow of Archduke Leopold V, had Fort Claudia built on the Falkenberg, under the master builder Elias Gumpp.

In 1703 the Bavarian Elector's forces captured Ehrenberg; the Austrians retook it a month later after local peasants dragged cannon up onto the Schlosskopf above the castle and bombarded it from there. The fighting had shown the strategic need for a proper fortress on the Schlosskopf, and the Austrian government built one there between 1726 and 1741. The new fortress never had to prove itself in battle: in 1782 the Tyrolean fortresses were abandoned, save for Kufstein, and the Ehrenberg system was sold off as a stone quarry and stripped.

In April 1857 the industrialist Friedrich Carl Hermann bought the ruin, then threatened with demolition. From the mid-20th century the association "Rettet Ehrenberg" carried out conservation work with the owners' agreement and halted the decay of the fortress ensemble. Ehrenberg is a listed monument in Austria, and in 2014 the Highline179 pedestrian suspension bridge — 403 metres long and 110 metres high, then the world's longest — was built linking the castle ruins to Fort Claudia across the pass the two structures were built in part to guard.