Hohensalzburg Fortress

Excavation has turned up a Roman fort at the highest point of the Festungsberg — not to be confused with the more significant castrum superius on the Nonnberg terrace below — but the fortress proper begins in a quarrel between an emperor and a pope. Archbishop Gebhard von Helfenstein had risen from imperial confessor to imperial chancellor and, in 1060, to the see of Salzburg, and in 1072 he secured a suffragan bishopric at Gurk whose episcopal election lay beyond the reach of pope and emperor alike. When the Investiture Controversy broke he took the side of Pope Gregory VII and the German anti-king Rudolf of Rheinfelden against Emperor Henry IV.

In 1076 the Styrian margrave fell on Friesach, Salzburg's most important base south of the Alps. Gebhard's answer, according to his biographer, was to build: the pass barrier at Lueg, which controlled the chief Eastern Alpine crossing towards Italy, and three provincial castles at Friesach, Hohenwerfen and Salzburg itself. What went up on the Festungsberg from 1077 was modest — a residential tower that still forms the core of the Hoher Stock, with a small church and dwelling beside it, the whole in its first form a plain bailey behind a wooden wall.

Gebhard did not see it finished. Driven into exile by the controversy, he re-entered Salzburg only in 1086 and died two years later at Hohenwerfen; the building was carried on under the emperor's anti-archbishop Berthold von Moosburg and completed under Konrad von Abenberg. In 1105 Henry V, son of Henry IV and by then anti-king against his father, had his own confessor Konrad made anti-archbishop of Salzburg; Konrad drove the imperial bishop out of the city and took the fortress from him.

Between the 12th and 14th centuries the outer fortification ring was laid out, fixing more or less the ground the fortress still covers — 250 m long by 150 m wide, one of the largest medieval castles in Europe. In 1462 Prince-Archbishop Burkhard II von Weißpriach stiffened that circuit with four towers, the Glockenturm, the Trompeterturm, the Krautturm and the smiths' or prisoners' tower, shielded the eastern ascent over the Nonnberg with a wall a metre thick, and carried a bastion across the south side. From 1479 his successor Bernhard von Rohr raised the old ring wall and laid out the so-called Schlangengang, which turned the defence east towards the Nonntal and the abbey of Nonnberg. Johann III Beckenschlager then took the Hoher Stock up to four storeys and added the first armoury and the granary, which still carries the oldest armorial stone surviving on the rock.

Leonhard von Keutschach, archbishop from 1495 to 1519, built in a time of mounting danger of war, and made of the work a visible sign of his power. He extended the Hoher Stock through its second and third floors and added the Stockhaus on the site of the older chapel; from 1498 state apartments went in on the third storey, above the rooms the archbishops actually lived in and reserved for display and festivity. The Golden Hall's coffered ceiling carries gilded buttons for the stars, and its seventeen-metre beam is painted with Keutschach's arms beside those of the Holy Roman Empire, the most powerful German towns and the bishoprics tied to Salzburg. The turnip on his shield recurs all over the fortress, a signature on everything he raised — and the richness of these rooms shows that this was not merely a refuge in crisis but frequently a residence, down to the 16th century.

He built against a siege as well. A large new cistern went in to hold the water supply if the rock were ever invested, and several existing towers were heightened. Freight came up by the Reisszug, the very early and primitive funicular that his coadjutor and eventual successor Matthäus Lang von Wellenburg described in 1515; the line survives in updated form and is probably the oldest operational railway in the world. In the Krautturm he set a barrel-driven organ of more than two hundred pipes, the Salzburger Stier or Salzburg Bull, renewed by Rochus Egedacher in 1735 and still sounded daily from Palm Sunday to the end of October. The money came out of the ground: salt from the Dürrnberg above Hallein and metal from the Tauern, where at the height of the gold workings in 1555 the annual yield ran to nearly 831 kg.

The mines that paid for the walls also produced the men who came to take them. Experienced pitmen were fetched in, often from northern Germany, and in the peasant wars that followed they formed a hard core of resistance to archiepiscopal power. From 5 July to 31 August 1525, during the German Peasants' War, miners, farmers and townspeople besieged Prince-Archbishop Matthäus Lang von Wellenburg inside his own fortress and tried to put him out of it. They failed to take it. It was the sternest challenge Hohensalzburg met in its nine hundred years, and the only occasion on which the place actually came under siege.

The outer bastions that now shape the fortress were begun in the 16th century and completed in the 17th, added as a precaution against fear of a Turkish invasion. Between those campaigns the walls closed on one of their own masters: Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau, who had cared little for the defence works during his years as archbishop and spent his energy on building in the city, was deposed and held prisoner here by his successor Markus Sittikus von Hohenems until he died in the fortress prison in 1617.

Paris von Lodron, archbishop through the Thirty Years' War, refortified Salzburg on both banks of the Salzach and turned the medieval castle into a fortress fit for modern artillery. He built the massive Hasengraben bastions with their armoury, extended the Nonnberg bastions, raised the first blocking arch — the Lodronbogen — and the outwork called the Katze with its embrasure gates and rampart, laid in gunpowder stores and further gatehouses, and strengthened every wall that tied the rock to the town and the Mönchsberg. The last great defensive work came in 1681, when Max Gandolf von Kuenburg put up the Feuerbastei on the north side, thirty metres high and several metres thick. An inventory of 1790 counted in the armoury over a hundred complete cavalry armours, more than 1,100 breastplates together with spears and halberds, 415 mortars, and 460 iron and 130 bronze cannon — much of it, by then, probably obsolete.

In 1800, during the Napoleonic War of the Second Coalition, the city offered no resistance to the advancing French and the fortress was given up without a fight to troops under General Jean Victor Marie Moreau; the last prince-archbishop, Count Hieronymus von Colloredo, fled to Vienna. The bloodless surrender preserved it. Because it had not been held against them, the French issued no order for it to be slighted, and Hohensalzburg survived where the castle on the Schlossberg at Graz did not.

Neglect set in, and a fire took hold in 1849. A thorough restoration followed in 1851, chiefly to the interiors, and through the 19th century the fortress served as barracks, storage depot and dungeon; Franz Joseph I gave it up as a fortress in 1861, though the barracks use continued. The Festungsbahn funicular, built for tourism in 1892 and at first driven by water power, ran up from the town to the Hasengraben bastion, and the former house of Michael Haydn was destroyed in the process.

In the early 20th century the fortress was a prison again, holding Italian prisoners of war during the First World War and Nazi activists before Germany's annexation of Austria in March 1938. The ceramicist and sculptor Arno Lehmann lived and worked within the walls from 1949 until his death in 1973, and an exacting programme of structural stabilisation ran across the whole complex from 1951 to 1981. Once the property of the prince-archbishops, Hohensalzburg has belonged to the Land Salzburg since 2016.