Hohenschwangau Castle

The first stronghold here was a double castle, Vorder- and Hinterschwangau, on the rock that Neuschwanstein now occupies; it enters the record as Castrum Swangowe in the late eleventh or twelfth century, held by its lords as ministeriales of the Welfs. The knights of Schwangau went on holding Hohenschwangau as an imperially immediate fief until their line failed in 1536. A charter of 1397 gives the first mention of Schwanstein — less defensible, but easier to reach, standing lower down on a rise above the Alpsee. That building is today's Hohenschwangau.

In 1440 Georg von Schwangau sold his inheritance, the Hohenschwangau castles and Frauenstein, to Duke Albrecht III of Bavaria-Munich, and by 1535 the last of the line were selling outright, for 35,000 florins, to a front man acting for the Augsburg patrician Johann Paumgartner. Paumgartner made the neglected castle the seat of his new lordship: his architect, Lucio di Spazzi, kept the outer walls and towers, rebuilt the interior for contemporary living and ringed the residential block with bastions, finishing in 1547. The floor plan he laid down is the one the building still has. The old double castle up on the rock was left to fall in.

The Wittelsbachs used the place for bear hunting and as a berth for younger sons of the house. Austrian troops plundered it in 1743, during the War of the Austrian Succession, and through the coalition wars of 1800 to 1809 it quartered French and Austrian troops and took a short, inconclusive French bombardment. In 1820 it was sold under King Maximilian I for 200 gulden to a local man, for demolition; Prince Ludwig von Oettingen-Wallerstein heard of the plan in 1821, bought it himself for 225 gulden to save it, and had it repaired before selling it on in 1823.

Ludwig I intended his son Maximilian to take the Hohes Schloss at Füssen; the crown prince went there in 1829, walked on towards Reutte in Tyrol, and passed through Hohenschwangau on the way. He gave up Füssen, negotiated for three years, and bought the dilapidated Schwanstein in 1832, renaming it Schloss Hohenschwangau — which is how the two castles came to trade names. Rebuilding ran from 1833 to 1837 under the architectural and theatre painter Domenico Quaglio, who gave the exterior its neo-Gothic dress and whom Maximilian put in charge over the architect Georg Friedrich Ziebland. Quaglio, no practical builder, exhausted himself and died shortly before it was finished; Joseph Daniel Ohlmüller and Ziebland saw the work out, and additions went on to 1855.

More than ninety wall paintings went up in 1835 and 1836, after designs by Moritz von Schwind and Ludwig Lindenschmit the Elder, drawing on the history of the Schwangau and on medieval legend — the Nibelungs, the Edda, and the Swan Knight Loherangrîn of Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, which Wagner later worked into Lohengrin. One fresco records a local tradition that Christoph von Langenmantel brought Martin Luther out of Augsburg to Hohenschwangau in 1518 for his safety.

Hohenschwangau was the summer and hunting residence of Maximilian, his wife Marie of Prussia, and their sons Ludwig and Otto. The king and queen lived in the main building, the boys in the annexe; Marie, who loved to walk in the mountains, made an alpine garden from plants gathered across the Alps and took her sons up to the ruins of Vorder- and Hinterhohenschwangau. When Maximilian died in 1864 Ludwig succeeded and moved into his father's room; as he never married, his mother kept her own floor through the summer months, and he used the castle mostly when she was not in it — the more so after 1869, when work began on Neuschwanstein, his own castle on the rock of the old Schwangau fortress above.

The one thing Ludwig altered here was his bedroom. In 1864 he had a group of rocks built into it with a waterfall running over them, an apparatus for making an artificial rainbow, and a night sky of moon and stars lit from the floor above through a system of mirrors; after his death in 1886 Marie had the room put back as it had been. She stayed on as the castle's only resident and died there in 1889. Prince Regent Luitpold brought electric light and an electric lift to the castle in 1905; after his death in 1912 it opened as a museum. Neither world war damaged it, and in 1923 it passed to the Wittelsbach Compensation Fund, which owns it still.