Harburg Castle

The castle stands on a steep spur above the Wörnitz, at the south-eastern entrance to the Ries. It was raised without reference to any older settlement below, a sequence rare in the High Middle Ages; the town of Harburg grew afterwards on the narrow floor between river and castle rock.

The first written trace is Cuno de Horburc, Kuno of Harburg, named by about 1100 in sources on the founding of Berchtesgaden's Benedictine house. Half-brother of its founder Berengar of Sulzbach, he apparently held the Harburg at the end of the eleventh century and died childless on 30 June 1139; Jürgen Dendorfer has argued that the Harburg may have reached the Staufer as the dowry of Gertrude of Sulzbach on her marriage to Conrad III.

The castle itself first appears in 1150, in a letter sent to Constantinople by the thirteen-year-old Staufer Henry, son and co-king of Conrad III. Writing to his aunt, the empress there, and Manuel Komnenos, he told how on 8 February "that lofty and unfaithful Welf" — Welf VI — had entered "our country" in hostility while his father was away on affairs of state. Welf moved against Flochberg; Henry, he wrote, was in another castle, Harburg. He pursued with five large battalions, sent fast horsemen to cut off the retreat, and took three hundred knights. Harburg was a Staufer imperial castle at that date.

From the mid-twelfth to the mid-thirteenth century it was built out into a large imperial castle taking in the bailey: the two keeps, the palas later walled into the Fürstenbau, parts of the castle church of St Michael, the ring wall and the Inner Gate all date from it. In May 1239 King Conrad IV lived at Harburg and issued charters there.

King Albert I of Habsburg pledged the castle to the Counts of Oettingen in 1299 for 900 pounds heller. In 1418 Emperor Sigismund declared the pledge unredeemable and confirmed the counts in their ownership of the Harburg.

Count Wolfgang I and his son Karl Wolfgang used the Harburg as their residence from 1493 to 1549. Karl Wolfgang brought Paul Warbeck to the castle as court preacher and introduced the Reformation in 1524, which made the castle church of St Michael the first Protestant preaching place in the Ries; in 1539, after the Peasants' War, he called a synod at Harburg at which the Augsburg Confession was adopted.

He stayed neutral in the Schmalkaldic War and did not join the League, yet in September 1546 League troops occupied the castle; after their capitulation imperial troops plundered the market town and took the castle themselves. In December 1546, despite his neutrality, Karl Wolfgang was deposed, and he died childless at Harburg in 1549. His brother Ludwig XV, who had joined the League, was outlawed and banished, but after the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 he resumed the reforming work and Harburg turned Protestant again, staying with the Protestant Oettingen-Oettingen line when the house divided by confession. Count Gottfried rebuilt the main castle largely into its present form later in the sixteenth century, the Lower Gate finished in 1594.

The Harburg came through the Thirty Years' War undestroyed, unlike the other castles of the Ries. Prince Albert Ernest II meant to remodel it as a baroque residence in the eighteenth century, but only the castle church, the Fürstenbau and the hall building were altered, and the fortified character remained. His death extinguished the Oettingen-Oettingen line, and in 1731 the Harburg passed to the Catholic line of Oettingen-Wallerstein, which set up a district office and gaol there.

On 24 June 1800, in the War of the Second Coalition, 160 Austrian infantry under a lieutenant held the castle against the French advance from Ebermergen. After some thirty cannon shots and a threat to burn the Harburg with howitzers, the Austrians capitulated and were declared prisoners of war; French soldiers plundered the market town during and after the bombardment. Because the affair passed off comparatively lightly, Harburg still keeps the Bockfest.

In the 1940s the Hitler Youth ran military-training camp II/36 at the Harburg. The castle was also used by the Gestapo, which held prisoners there for interrogation.

Since 2000 the castle has belonged to the charitable Fürst zu Oettingen-Wallerstein Cultural Foundation, and it is a listed architectural monument in Bavaria. Two exhibition rooms in the tower-keeper's house at the White Tower opened in March 2025, and the interior is shown on guided tours daily from mid-March to early November.