Eltz Castle

The rock above the Elzbach controlled a trade route in use since the Roman period, running up the valley to link the Moselle at Moselkern with the farmland of the Maifeld. After the Western Roman Empire fell the region passed to the Franks, and the division of Charlemagne's empire handed it to Louis the Pious in 814, when a manor hall behind an earthen palisade stood on the site. The castle proper was probably begun early in the twelfth century, its plan following the shape of the spur the Elzbach wraps on three sides.

The name first appears in 1157, in a donation charter of Frederick Barbarossa listing a "Rudolfus de Elze" among the witnesses. The lower five storeys of the Romanesque keep, the Platt-Eltz, date from that time and remain the oldest fabric on the site; between about 1252 and 1300 it was given its Gothic upper stage.

Before 1268 the brothers Elias, Wilhelm and Theoderich divided the castle and its estates between their three families. Later generations split further, taking names from their holdings and their arms: Eltz-Kempenich, the "Eltz of the golden lion"; Eltz-Rübenach, "of the silver lion"; Eltz-Rodendorf, "of the buffalo horns". What resulted was a Ganerbenburg, a castle held by a community of co-heirs, each family owning its own residential block while all of them shared the defences. The knights' hall and the chapel stayed in common use, and in 1323 the arrangement was codified in a Burgfriedensbrief.

Each branch then built upward on its own account. The Rübenach line raised the lower five storeys of its house from 1311 and finished its late Gothic wing in 1472; the Greater Rodendorf House was begun in the later fifteenth century and stood complete by about 1520. The Kempenich houses went up between 1604 and 1661, replacing the castle's original hall. At its fullest Eltz held over a hundred people in more than a hundred rooms, with a village of servants and craftsmen below the south side.

The only serious fighting in the castle's history came between 1331 and 1336. During the Eltz Feud, Johann of Eltz and other free imperial knights set themselves against the territorial policy of Balduin von Trier, Elector and Prince-Archbishop, and Balduin laid siege to Johann at Eltz. Rather than storm the rock he built a siege castle, Trutzeltz, on an outcrop on the hillside above, and bombarded the place from it with catapults and the primitive cannon known as pot-de-fer. The besieged held out two years before giving in.

The terms mattered more than the walls. The free imperial knights had to accept the laws and sovereignty of Trier and surrender their imperial immediacy; Balduin reinstated Johann as burgrave, but as his subject rather than as a free knight. A few ruined walls of Trutzeltz survive on the hillside to the north.

The family's reach ran well beyond the Elzbach — Jakob III von Eltz was elected Archbishop and Elector of Trier in 1567 and held it until his death in 1581, and Philipp Karl von Eltz was later Elector of Mainz and Arch-Chancellor for Germany. It was a position in another court that saved the building. Most of the Rhenish castles were destroyed during the War of the Palatine Succession in 1688 and 1689, but the lord of Eltz, Hans Anton zu Eltz-Üttingen, held senior rank in Louis XIV's Royal French Army and used the position to strike the castle bearing his own name off the list of buildings and fortifications marked for demolition. With Bürresheim and Lissingen, Eltz is one of only three castles in the Eifel never destroyed.

French rule on the Rhine from 1794 came closer to undoing the family than any siege. Count Hugo Philipp zu Eltz (1742–1818) was treated as an émigré, his properties confiscated and the castle placed under the command headquarters at Koblenz; when it emerged in 1797 that he had stayed hidden in Mainz rather than emigrating, he was restored to the use of his lands and revenues. His line had inherited the extinct Rodendorf branch's share in 1786, and in 1815 he bought the Rübenach house and its land from the barons of Eltz-Rübenach, leaving one branch holding the whole castle.

Castle romanticism drew visitors up the Elzbach from the early nineteenth century — German emperors and kings, the painter J. M. W. Turner, the writer Victor Hugo. Count Karl zu Eltz (1823–1900) put 184,000 marks into the building between 1845 and 1888, working carefully around the existing architecture. On 20 September 1920 fire broke out in the southern part of the Kempenich house and spread, destroying the chapel building and the archive above it, the furnishings of the Kempenich house and the ten upper rooms of the Rodendorf house; rebuilding was finished in 1930.

In 1945 the counts of Eltz, who had owned the Croatian castle at Vukovar since the early eighteenth century and lived mostly there since 1850, were expropriated and expelled, and came back to Eltville and Eltz; regular museum visiting began at the castle the same year. By 2009 the fabric was in trouble: the vault of the banner hall had cracked as its walls spread, the Kempenich house was threatening to slip and the Rübenach house had come off its footing. Between 2009 and 2012 forty-five stainless steel anchors up to twenty-five metres long were drilled through the buildings, at a total cost of around €4.4 million, two million of it from the federal government's stimulus package. In 2018 Jakob Graf zu Eltz took over the family seat in the thirty-fourth generation.