Château de Saint-Ulrich

The Château de Saint-Ulrich is one of three castles, with the Girsberg and the Haut-Ribeaupierre, that overlook the commune of Ribeauvillé in the Haut-Rhin, and it stands at an altitude of 528 metres. The site first appears in the record in 1038 under the name rocher de Reginbald, a reference in all likelihood to the lord Reginboldi who shows up in the sources at the beginning of the eleventh century. On 21 March 1084 the Emperor Henry IV handed the castle to the prince-bishop of Basel.

His successor Henry V took the fortification back in 1114 and held it militarily, using it as a strongpoint in his war against the counts of Eguisheim. It was afterwards returned to the Bishop of Basel.

Frederick I Barbarossa granted the castle around 1163 to one of his faithful men, Egenolphe d'Urslingen, who died about 1188 and had in all probability married Emma, heiress of the castle's first lords. Around 1200 the castle was reworked and given a building of state, of which only the lower storey now survives.

The title of sire de Ribeaupierre appears for the first time in 1219, carried by Egenolphe's grandsons, who had taken the name of the place. Down to the sixteenth century the castle was the principal residence of the powerful lords of Ribeaupierre, and medieval texts never used the name it goes by now: they knew it by the dynasty's own, Rappolstein in German, Ribeaupierre in the French form.

Anselme II de Ribeaupierre, who drove the other members of his family out of the castle, held it successfully through two sieges: the first in 1287 by Rudolf I, king of the Romans, the second in 1293 by his successor, Adolf.

A story told of the family has two Ribeaupierre brothers, one living at Saint-Ulrich and the other at the Girsberg, agreeing to go hunting the following day. The signal was settled in advance: whichever woke first would loose an arrow at the other's shutters. The brother at Saint-Ulrich woke first and shot. The other opened his shutters at the moment the arrow arrived, and died with his heart pierced.

The chapel that gave the site the name it carries today was raised around 1435 and dedicated to Saint Ulrich, bishop of Augsburg. The twelfth-century residence carried a chimney, and the knights' hall of the thirteenth century was decorated with nine fine windows in the Romanesque style that can still be made out.

In the fifteenth century the keep held a celebrated criminal, Dame Cunégonde d'Hungerstein, born Billing de Willsperg, accused of having strangled her husband Guillaume de Hungerstein in 1487; he was a vassal of the Ribeaupierre, established at Guebwiller. She was shut in the keep for close to twenty years, and tried to escape from it with the complicity of the watchman.

The Ribeaupierre left the castle in the sixteenth century for a mansion in the Renaissance style down in Ribeauvillé, and in 1518 the administrative centre of the lordship was transferred into it; that building is the town's school today. The castle was afterwards dismantled during the Thirty Years' War.

What is left of it runs across several periods: the square keep and the corps de logis of the twelfth century, the knights' hall and the great residential tower of the thirteenth, the entrance barbican and the outer enceinte of the fourteenth, and the chapel of the fifteenth. The ruins are classified as a monument historique under an order of 1 October 1841, carried again in the Journal officiel of 16 February 1930, and the castle is reckoned a very fine example of the military architecture of medieval Alsace.