Château du Haut-Koenigsbourg

The rock was church land first: in 774 Charlemagne deeded the Stophanberch and its lands to the priory of Lièpvre, a dependency of the basilica of Saint-Denis. The castle enters the written record in 1147, when the monks complained to King Louis VII of France about its unlawful construction by the Hohenstaufen duke Frederick II of Swabia — a builder so relentless it was said he rode with a castle permanently hitched to his horse's tail. By then the site already carried two towers watching the road through Alsace from north to south, one belonging to King Conrad III, the other to his nephew Frederick Barbarossa, the future emperor; before the century was out the castle bore the name Königsburg, the King's Castle.

In the first half of the thirteenth century, as Hohenstaufen power waned, the castle passed to the dukes of Lorraine, who entrusted it to the Rathsamhausen knightly family and then to the lords of Hohenstein, who held it into the fifteenth century.

The Hohensteins let robber barons use the castle as a hideout, and the neighbouring powers ran out of patience. Elector Palatine Frederick I occupied it in 1454, and in 1462 a coalition of the cities of Colmar, Strasbourg and Basel — five hundred men with artillery pieces — took the castle and put it to the torch.

In 1479 the Habsburg emperor Frederick III granted the ruins in fief to the counts of Thierstein, who rebuilt them for the artillery age: a western bastion of two gun towers behind a powerful shield wall, horseshoe towers and thick curtain walls around the lower yard, and an outer ring wall to keep enemy batteries at a distance. When the last Thierstein died indebted and heirless in 1517, the castle passed back to Emperor Maximilian I — and neither he nor any owner after him would meet the cost of its upkeep.

The end came in the Thirty Years' War. In July 1633 Swedish forces besieged what was by then a dilapidated fortress under the command of the captain Philippe de Liechtenau; with cannon and mortars they took it after fifty-two days, and the castle was looted, burned shortly afterwards, and abandoned. For two centuries the overgrown ruins drew romantic poets and artists, until Eugène Viollet-le-Duc took note of them in 1854. Consolidation work began in 1856, the ruins were listed as a monument historique in 1862, and the township of Sélestat bought them three years later.

By then Alsace was German, annexed after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. On 4 May 1899 Sélestat presented the ruin to Kaiser Wilhelm II, who meant it to proclaim the Germanness of Alsace and to mark the western edge of his empire, as the restored Marienburg marked its east. He entrusted the work to Bodo Ebhardt, a thirty-five-year-old Berlin architect and archaeologist, who cleared the site, surveyed the surviving walls, and rebuilt from archives and from close study of other castles of the period, improvising only where the evidence gave out — the keep is now reckoned about fourteen metres too tall. Wilhelm followed the works closely, lodging at a railway station rebuilt for him at Saint-Hippolyte, and pressed his own emphases on the design: the main dining hall was given a loftier roof than it had historically had, and the decoration laboured the links between his own Hohenzollern house and the Hohenstaufen and Habsburg emperors he claimed as forerunners.

The restored Hohkönigsburg was inaugurated on 13 May 1908, a historic cortège entering the castle under a torrential downpour. Caricaturists of the day — Henri Zislin, Jean-Jacques Waltz — mocked the Kaiser's dream castle, and for years it was fashionable in France to sneer at it as a fairy tale in stone; historians have since judged Ebhardt's reconstruction credible in its main lines, and revealing of what a Wilhelmine emperor wanted the Middle Ages to have been.

France confiscated the castle in 1919 under article 56 of the Treaty of Versailles, and Wilhelm's coat of arms is still visible inside. Jean Renoir shot scenes of La Grande Illusion there in 1937. Classified in full as a monument historique in 1993, restored parts included, the castle passed from the French state to the Bas-Rhin département in January 2007 — the first heritage property the state transferred to a local authority — and draws more than 500,000 visitors a year.