Anholt Castle

The castle gave its name to the lordship of Anholt and to the town of Anholt, now a district of Isselburg in North Rhine-Westphalia, and its moat is fed by the river Issel. A lord of Zuylen styled "of Anholt" appears in 1169 as a vassal of the Utrecht bishop Godfrey van Rhenen, and historians take the water castle to have been raised before that year to secure the extensive territories of the prince-bishopric. The earliest traceable works were a round keep nearly eleven metres across, the Dicke Turm or Thick Tower, a small dwelling house in what is now the north-east corner, and a ring wall enclosing an oval site. The keep was entered high up, about seven metres above the present courtyard paving, by rope ladder alone, with the dungeon directly below that entrance.

By the time of Stephan IV of Zuylen, who died around 1347 and who released the inhabitants of Anholt from serfdom by a privilege of 25 May 1347, the feudal tie to Utrecht had ended and castle and surrounding settlement together already formed an imperially immediate lordship, later reckoned part of the Lower Rhenish-Westphalian Circle. In the fourteenth century the inner bailey was enlarged to dimensions only slightly short of the present ones: the original dwelling house was raised a storey and strengthened for defence, residential wings went up on its east and south sides, and the west and north fronts were left as walkable defensive walls two metres thick set with hexagonal watch turrets. When the Anholt branch of the Zuylens failed in the male line in 1380, castle and lordship passed through Herberga, a daughter of Dietrich II von Zuylen, to her husband Hermann III of Gemen.

Herberga and Hermann were granted no male heir either, and in 1402 the marriage of their daughter Margaretha to Gysbert von Bronckhorst-Batenburg carried Anholt into her husband's family. Emperor Sigismund confirmed the Bronckhorst-Batenburgs in the imperially immediate rights of their lordship in 1431.

During the Guelders wars Gysbert's son Jakob I took the side of Maximilian I, king of the Romans and later emperor, and fought alongside John II, Duke of Cleves, against Duke Charles of Egmond of Guelders. Charles answered in 1499 with an attempt to seize Anholt by surprise, and failed. His second attempt, in 1512, did not fail. Weakened by a plague epidemic that had gone before and short of supplies, the garrison opened the gates to its enemies after a siege of three months, and the castle remained a Guelders possession for twenty-five years.

Jakob's successor was his cousin Dietrich III von Bronckhorst-Batenburg, who had his imperially immediate rights as lord of Anholt confirmed in 1531 but who recovered the castle itself only by treaty in 1537. The Guelders duke's price was heavy contributions, along with an undertaking that castle, town and land be held open to the dukes; three years later Emperor Charles V released the lords of Anholt from those obligations. The armorial stones set into the walls of the Bell Tower, the gatehouse of the outer bailey, record the Guelders occupation still: Duke Charles of Egmond's of 1512 and Charles V's of 1540.

The imperial release counted for nothing with the supporters of the Union of Utrecht. In the opening phase of the Eighty Years War they invoked the treaty of 1537 and demanded that Anholt join the alliance against Spain. The Catholic Dietrich refused, and the Geuzen laid siege to a town that was poorly fortified. Hoping to protect it by negotiation, Dietrich opened the town gates once the members of the Union had promised to use no force at all; moments after passing through, they broke that promise, plundering Anholt and setting fires in many quarters. The looters fled only when Duke William of Jülich-Cleves-Berg sent troops to relieve the place. The Thirty Years War brought the castle a second round of the same, occupied, plundered and burned again.

In 1621 Emperor Ferdinand II raised Dietrich IV and his younger brother Johann Jakob von Bronckhorst-Batenburg, an imperial field marshal, to the rank of Imperial Count, with a seat in the Lower Rhenish-Westphalian college of counts. Dietrich IV, Count of Bronckhorst-Batenburg-Anholt, born in 1578, was the last male representative of the family and died in 1649. He had settled the succession before that: in 1647 he transferred the county of Anholt to the husband of his daughter Maria-Anna, Count Leopold Philipp Karl zu Salm, Wild- and Rhinegrave.

Castle and estate have belonged to the House of Salm-Salm from 1647 onward. Under Prince Charles Theodore Otto of Salm, who lived from 1645 to 1710, Anholt came out of its war-scarred condition as a representative baroque residence. The outer bailey was rebuilt between 1697 and 1703 to plans by the Milanese architect Tommaso Tommassini. Around 1700 the Dicke Turm was given the tall spire it carries now, the other buildings were crowned with a single slate roofscape, and a two-storey pavilion was set before the north front to open the house onto the first of the gardens. A picture gallery of some distinction began to be assembled.

The main branch of the princely house died out with Charles Theodore's son, Prince Louis Otto. His daughter Dorothea married a distant cousin, Count Nikolaus Leopold zu Salm-Salm, who was made Duke of Hoogstraten and, in 1743, granted the hereditary title of Imperial Prince. Anholt was not the family's only seat: the abbey-town of Senones in the Vosges served as the principal princely residence until revolutionary forces expelled them in 1793, and Hoogstraten Castle, the Gelmelslot near Antwerp, was theirs as well. In 1802 the lordship of Anholt was merged with the Bocholt and Ahaus districts of the suppressed Prince-Bishopric of Münster to form the Principality of Salm. The principality fell to France in 1810, and the Congress of Vienna declined to restore its sovereignty, awarding the territory to Prussia instead; the princes kept Anholt as their residence.

Garden plans drawn up from 1831 for Prince Florentin zu Salm-Salm put parts of the park into the hands of the Düsseldorf court gardener Maximilian Friedrich Weyhe and, from 1858, of the English landscape architect Edward Milner, who cut canals and dug ponds; the park was widely enlarged in the process. The neoclassical library hall of 230 square metres was finished in 1860, and its holdings include the library of the dissolved Cistercian house of Groß-Burlo, the Bronckhorst-Batenburg collection covering 1400 to 1650, and the Salm-Salm books from 1650 onward. The family archive keeps the lead bullet with which Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico was shot by court martial on 19 June 1867: Felix Prinz zu Salm-Salm, aide-de-camp to the executed emperor, took the bullet once the body had been embalmed and carried it home. Between 1892 and 1900 Prince Leopold zu Salm-Salm laid out the Leopoldspark in the south-west of the grounds for his wife, modelled on the Lake Lucerne of their honeymoon, with a miniature lake ringed by artificial rock and an original Swiss chalet.

Fighting in the spring of 1945 left the town of Anholt and the castle heavily wrecked, with seventy per cent of the complex damaged and the gardens destroyed. Many pieces from the collections had been moved into a mine tunnel during the Second World War and survive for that reason, among them the seventeenth- to nineteenth-century furnishings, the armoury and the extensive porcelain.

Prince Nikolaus Leopold zu Salm-Salm, the owner at the time, began measures to save the castle immediately after the destruction. Having recognised that its upkeep and its treasures needed a new economic footing, he brought the castle early into the plans for shopping and excursion traffic in Anholt. In 1947 and again in 1950 he invited to Anholt the group of architects and planners known as the Anholter Kreis, among them Rudolf Wolters, Ernst Neufert, Friedrich Hetzelt, Friedrich Tamms and Konstanty Gutschow, men who had worked in the immediate circle of the Reich armaments minister Albert Speer on the expansion of Berlin into the world capital Germania and on preparing the reconstruction of bomb-damaged cities. They offered a good many suggestions for the rebuilding of the town and of its castle.

The rebuilt house became habitable for the family again. The gardens were reconstructed between 1962 and 1995, partly in their original baroque style, and the Leopoldspark, converted into a game reserve early in the twentieth century, was restored by Prince Nikolaus Leopold and opened to the public in 1966 as the Anholter Schweiz. The main castle was opened to visitors in that same year, showing the largest private painting collection in North Rhine-Westphalia, with works by Rembrandt, Jan van Goyen, Gerard ter Borch and Lucas Cranach the Elder. Large parts of the site can be visited for an admission charge, the park and the library hall included. Anholt is protected as an architectural heritage monument in North Rhine-Westphalia and is one of the few large complexes in the state still in private hands.