Hohenwerfen Castle

Archbishop Gebhard of Salzburg took the side of Pope Gregory VII against King Henry IV, and the king's loyalists plundered and laid waste his archbishopric for it. His answer was to build in haste. Between 1075 and 1078 he raised Hohenwerfen and Hohensalzburg together — both far smaller than the fortresses that now carry their names — and had Petersberg Castle at Friesach in Carinthia extended as well, three strongholds securing the route through the Eastern Alps along the Salzach. The first work at Hohenwerfen was modest: a ring wall of roughly 35 by 35 metres enclosing a small palas and a chapel, of which only fragments of masonry survive.

The rock closes the only approach to the Pass Lueg from the south, where the Salzach runs through a narrow valley — the key point on the old alpine road carrying Salzburg's traffic towards Graz and south-eastern Europe, and towards Venice and Italy. Gebhard's speed protected the bishop's city and its church treasure, and barred Henry IV, after his walk to Canossa, the shorter way home through the eastern Alpine passes. It did not save the archbishop himself: he was driven out of Salzburg, returned only in 1086 with the backing of the Bavarian duke Welf I, and died at Hohenwerfen two years later.

Archbishop Konrad I took the papal side in the same quarrel and enlarged both of the great bishops' castles. His medieval biography preserves a saying of his about Hohenwerfen and the Salzach valley: this far you may come, but no further. Between 1127 and 1142 he set a larger palas at right angles to the old one and joined it to the chapel, both built into the continuous castle wall and together making the monumental block that still dominates the rock. Frescoes uncovered in the chapel in 1983 show the angels' battle against the Whore of Babylon, readable as the papal cause against the emperors, alongside a knight in 12th-century dress whose almond shield carries a Latin motto: the whole world may come, but nobody passes unpunished. A century after the Crusades came arrow slits, defensive oriels, a zwinger and flanking towers, after which the archbishops largely stopped building.

The fortress also served as a state prison, which gave it a somewhat sinister reputation; prisoners spent their days there in inhumane conditions, and for some those days may have been their last. Not all were common criminals: Archbishop Adalbert III was arrested here by his own ministeriales in 1198, and Count Albert of Friesach was held in 1253.

In the Peasants' War, farmers and miners from the south of the archbishopric moved on Salzburg in 1525 and 1526, setting fire to Hohenwerfen and damaging it badly; the Styrian governor Siegmund von Dietrichstein was taken prisoner by the insurgents and brought here in 1525. The rebuilding under Archbishop Matthäus Lang added a blocking-arch building with its gate guard and a small bastion, and further substantial work on the outer wards was finished by 1534 under the threat of a Turkish attack. Prince-Archbishop Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau was imprisoned here after Bavarian troops captured him in 1611, and Paris Lodron, trying to keep Salzburg out of the entanglements of the Thirty Years' War, strengthened the fortress along with the walls of his capital.

After the secularisation of Salzburg from 1803 the castle decayed under Bavarian rule, until Archduke Johann restored it between 1824 and 1833, after which it served as a hunting seat. Archduke Eugen bought the estate in 1898 and kept his large art and weapons collection there. In January 1931 a smouldering fire destroyed much of the east and south tracts and almost all of the north tract; the Burgahnl, the fortress bell cast at Innsbruck in 1568 and still rung on high feast days, was got out, but the loss was heavy. Eugen sold much of his collection to pay for the rebuilding, and in 1938 was forced to sell the castle itself to the Reichsgau Salzburg. During the Second World War it housed a Gauführerschule of the NSDAP, opened on 5 March 1939 by Salzburg's Gauleiter Friedrich Rainer; at the war's end it passed to the state of Salzburg, served at first as a training centre for the gendarmerie, and has been open to visitors since 1987.