Ehrenfels Castle

During the contested double election of Philip of Swabia and Otto of Brunswick, the archbishopric of Mainz was attacked by the Count Palatine of the Rhine, who as imperial vicar in Franconia was working to cut back the archbishop's reach. Ehrenfels was raised in answer, about 1211 or 1212, by Philipp von Bolanden acting on the orders of Archbishop Siegfried II of Eppstein, on the steep north-eastern bank above the Rhine Gorge, on the slope of the Rüdesheimer Berg.

Bolanden had paid for the building out of his own means. When his widow Beatrix married Dietrich von Heinsberg, Mainz laid claim to the castle regardless, and a royal judgment settled the matter in 1222 by awarding Ehrenfels to the archbishopric. Mainz then garrisoned it with its own Burgmannen.

By the middle of the thirteenth century Ehrenfels had become a customs station. The toll station proper lay down at the water, connected with the Binger Mäuseturm, rather than at the castle on the slope above.

In 1301, in the Rhenish customs war of the electors against King Albrecht, Ehrenfels served as the base of Archbishop Gerhard II of Eppstein. After Albrecht's victory the castle was handed over to Gottfried von Brauneck for five years.

In 1353, during the second Mainz diocesan feud, the castle was pledged to the administrator of the see, Kuno II of Falkenstein, who enlarged the works. Archbishop Gerlach of Nassau wanted the pledge undone; he alleged that Kuno intended to have him murdered, and in 1356 he occupied the castle.

Forest reports of 1587 and 1588 record the Niederwald tied to the castle as its working woodland, together with a fief farm on the ground where the Niederwald hunting lodge was later built.

Through the Thirty Years' War Ehrenfels was besieged more than once and occupied in turn by different warring parties. How the castle came to be gutted is told two ways. One account has Archbishop Anselm Casimir Wambolt von Umstadt ordering it burnt in 1636 to stop it being used as a hiding place. What is not disputed is 1689, when the army of the French marshal Nicolas Chalon du Blé, Marquis d'Huxelles, badly damaged it in the campaigning of the War of the Palatine Succession that also brought the siege of Mainz.

The outer works were cleared away as further vineyards were laid out over the ground. The cathedral chapter of Mainz gave up the ruin, which put the Niederwald up for sale: by 1693 the woodland belonged to the Counts of Stadion, and part of the property passed that same year, the remainder in 1705, to Johann Franz Sebastian von Ostein.

The castle fell to Prussia in 1866 and is today owned by the state of Hesse, which lists it as a cultural heritage monument; since 2002 it has stood inside the UNESCO World Heritage site of the Upper Middle Rhine Valley. Of the toll castle of barely 600 square metres there survive the shield wall, 4.6 metres thick and 20 metres high, closing the landward side with two round corner towers 33 metres tall, and remains of the palas and of a gatehouse.

A footpath climbs from Rüdesheim through the vineyards to the walls. The courtyard is locked behind grilles, and because peregrine falcons breed on the ruin it is viewed only from the outside. The grape variety Ehrenfelser is named after the castle.