Burg Castle

Count Adolf of Berg raised a new seat above the Wupper in the first third of the twelfth century, on the foundations of an older fortification. The exact date went unrecorded — the charter said to have carried it has never been found — and building analysis narrows the work only to around 1150, though it was probably complete by 1133, when Cistercians took over the family's abandoned old seat, Burg Berge on the Dhünn. First named in a charter of 1160, it was far smaller than the present complex: keep, hall and outbuildings round a courtyard, with a shield wall and ditches on the attack side.

Count Engelbert I died on the Third Crusade in 1189, and his son before Damietta in Egypt in 1218. His younger brother Engelbert II, Archbishop of Cologne, took the county over the claim of Heinrich of Limburg, husband of the heiress Irmgard, after two feuds over the inheritance. Between 1218 and 1225 he rebuilt it as his family's chief residence, throwing up a two-storey hall block for which part of the inner ring wall came down. Adviser to Emperor Frederick II and guardian of the future King Henry (VII), he made enemies to match: on 7 November 1225, riding to consecrate the church at Schwelm, he was cut down near Gevelsberg by his nephew Friedrich von Isenberg. The male line of the counts of Berg died with him, and Heinrich of Limburg took the county after all.

The Limburg succession war brought the counts of Berg to Worringen on 5 June 1288, on the winning side. The beaten Archbishop of Cologne, Siegfried of Westerburg, was carried back to the castle and held thirteen months, freed on 8 July 1289 only after a heavy ransom and concessions to the house of Berg; the victory left the count free to make Düsseldorf a city under his own control on the Rhine. King Wenzel raised Count William to duke in 1380; five years later Düsseldorf became the capital of the duchy, and the castle, until then among William's favoured residences, never recovered its place.

The dukes kept it for hunting and ceremony and as the seat of the steward of the ducal lands around it. Around 1500 William of Jülich-Berg had the hall remodelled for guests, and half-timbered upper works, oriels and turrets softened the military outline enough that the building came to be called a Schloss, while the settlement below kept the name Burg. Maria of Jülich-Berg, betrothed here as a five-year-old in 1496 to John of Cleves-Mark, moved in with her three daughters when fire destroyed the Düsseldorf residence in December 1510 and held the castle as her widow's seat from 1539; the second daughter, Anna, was briefly married to Henry VIII of England.

In the autumn of 1632 Swedish troops under General Baudissin besieged the castle, then held by an imperial garrison; they could not take it, but incendiaries and cannon shot left it badly damaged. In February 1641 the imperial colonel Otto Christoph von Sparr attacked and captured it from a Hessian garrison.

After the peace of 1648 the imperial troops slighted much of the castle before marching out under Heinrich von Plettenberg: keep, gun tower, gates and walls came down, and the church of the Knights of St John with them. A report of 1692 found the stable, bakehouse and brewhouse gone too, so that nothing stood under a roof but the great building itself.

The patched-up hall served as the ducal stewardship until the last official left in 1807, and the site twice failed to find a buyer, in 1811 and again under Prussia. In 1849 Prussia sold the castle for demolition: the hall's roof timber, valued at 75 taler, went into the new Elberfeld courthouse, and neighbours quarried the rest.

By 1887 only some outer walls of the hall, a ruinous inner gatehouse, part of the shield wall and the Diebsturm stood. A committee formed in December 1886 under the manufacturer Julius Schumacher became the Schlossbauverein, which runs the castle still, and adopted Gerhard August Fischer's drawings for a reconstruction of its sixteenth-century form. Donations, lottery money and the imperial house paid for the work of 1890 to 1914, which closed with the battery tower; fire on the night of 26 November 1920 destroyed much of it again, and entry charges funded a second rebuilding between 1922 and 1925.

Protected as a monument since 2 October 1984, the castle belongs to the cities of Solingen, Remscheid and Wuppertal, houses the Museum of the Bergisches Land and a castle church popular for weddings, and is the largest reconstructed castle in North Rhine-Westphalia.