Dachau Palace

Arnold I of Scheyern, a younger son of the counts of Scheyern, married Beatrix von Reipersberg, heiress of the county of Dachau. Around 1100 he built a castle on the Schlossberg beside the settlement of Dahauua and thereafter called himself Count of Dachau. His nephew Otto V of Scheyern moved his seat in 1124 from Burg Scheyern to Burg Wittelsbach, and the Scheyern main line became the Wittelsbachs.

Dachau passed to Arnold's son Konrad I and, on his death around 1130, to Konrad II. The election of the Staufer king Conrad III in 1138 opened a war between Staufer and Welf in which Konrad II of Dachau at first wavered. The king took the duchy of Bavaria from the Welf Henry the Proud in 1139 and gave it in 1141 to his Babenberg half-brother Henry Jasomirgott, who came in 1142 with an army reinforced by the emperor, besieged Dachau until it was starved out and then destroyed the castle, as he also had the walls of Freising thrown down. Konrad II returned, rebuilt it, and in 1152 was made Duke of Merania, the first of the Wittelsbach line to hold a ducal office. Bavaria itself went back to the Welfs, to Henry the Lion, in 1156.

In 1182 the last Count of Dachau, Konrad III, died without heirs, and his cousin Otto of Wittelsbach, since 1180 the first Wittelsbach duke of Bavaria, bought castle and lordship from the widow shortly afterwards. The Wittelsbachs installed a ministerial family who took the name of Dachau in their turn; that line died out in 1439 with Konrad Dachauer von Lauterbach.

The old castle, partly timber-built, was pulled down between 1398 and 1403, and a first stone four-wing building went up in its place. In 1467 Duke Sigismund laid down his rule in Bavaria-Munich and kept only the new duchy of Bavaria-Dachau until his death in 1501; on 3 September 1467 he took the castle as one of his residences, and the art-minded duke is said to have embellished it.

Under Sigismund's nephew Wilhelm IV and Wilhelm's son Albrecht V the castle was built out between 1546 and 1577 into a four-wing palace, the work of the Munich court architects Heinrich Schöttl and Wilhelm Egkl. Hans Wisreutter of Munich fitted the hall in the south-west wing with a coffered wooden ceiling between 1564 and 1566, and it is reckoned one of the outstanding Renaissance halls north of the Alps.

The court garden was begun in 1572 and from 1578 laid out as a walled Renaissance garden to plans by the painter-architect Friedrich Sustris. In 1597 Duke Wilhelm V bought a dairy farm with a small chapel near Dachau from the Freising cathedral chapter, the beginning of Schleissheim. Dachau thereafter lost ground at court, Schleissheim being preferred as a summer residence.

Joseph Effner, son of the Dachau court gardener, went to Paris in 1706 to study garden design, and afterwards remade palace and garden for the Elector Max II Emanuel. The west front was recast in 1715 in the Régence style, its large round-arched windows and colossal twin pilasters marking out the banqueting hall at the centre; for its staircase Effner took the Petit Luxembourg of his master Boffrand as his model, and the Antwerp sculptor Guillielmus de Grof made the stucco trophies of arms in 1716 and 1717.

In 1717 Effner and his brother Johann Christoph laid out the garden anew in the Baroque manner, replacing the flower and herb beds with two broad parterres of clipped box. Sixty wrought-iron parapet grilles in six patterns, commissioned by Max Emanuel and made by Antoine Motté in 1724 and 1725, were fitted to the facades.

Napoleonic troops quartered in the palace left it badly damaged, and King Max Joseph I, lacking the money after the war for a thorough repair, had three of the four wings pulled down early in the nineteenth century. Only the Baroque banqueting-hall range survived. The Renaissance ceiling was taken out in 1868 and carried off to the Nationalmuseum in Munich, and was put back in its original place in 1977. From 1907 the palace housed the exhibitions of the Dachau artists' association, and in 2015 its facade and interiors were thoroughly renovated.

The palace stands in the Bavarian monument registers twice over: as a listed building, and as a ground monument for the buried medieval and early modern remains of it and its forerunners. It is run by the Bavarian Administration of State-owned Palaces and is open to visitors, the banqueting hall bookable for events and used for the palace concerts the town of Dachau stages.