Hohenstaufen Castle

The conical hill between the Rems and Fils rivers — 684 metres up, its shape likened to an upturned Stauf, a drinking cup — carried people long before the castle: a burial ground found on the summit in 2003 held twenty graves dated from the early eighth century into the early High Middle Ages, and later digs found traces of Bronze Age and Iron Age settlement.

The medieval castle was built around 1070 by Frederick I of Hohenstaufen, then still a count, as a fortress to protect his family's interests. The chronicler Otto von Freising records that Frederick moved a settlement up into the castle and enlarged it, which suggests he was rebuilding a simpler fortification rather than starting bare rock. Because it went up before his elevation to Duke of Swabia in 1079, the castle began not as an imperial stronghold but as the Staufer's own family property — and Frederick was the first of his line to take his name from the hill.

Hohenstaufen was the ancestral seat of the dynasty that held the Duchy of Swabia from 1079 to 1268 and supplied three Holy Roman Emperors between 1155 and 1250. It was tested early: in 1132, after Duke Frederick II ravaged Welf lands in Upper Swabia, Duke Henry the Proud of Bavaria burned his way to the foot of the Hohenstaufen in retaliation — but the castle itself went untaken, as it did again in the campaign of 1134. The defences were strengthened during the twelfth century, when a cross-wall was built dividing the site into a kind of outer ward and citadel.

Emperor Frederick Barbarossa's presence is documented once beyond doubt: on 11 May 1181 he issued a charter for Adelberg monastery "in castro Stoufen", the original of which survives in the Stuttgart state archives. On 27 August 1208 Queen Irene, widow of Philip of Swabia — murdered little more than two months earlier — died at the castle giving premature birth to her child. The castle last appears as Staufer property in the imperial tax register of 1241.

After the fall of the Staufer in 1268, King Rudolf I of Habsburg declared the castle an imperial possession and visited it in 1288. The site then became a standing quarrel between the Counts of Württemberg and the Empire. Count Eberhard of Württemberg besieged and took it in 1319; Emperor Charles IV besieged it successfully in 1360, and in 1366 sold it with Achalm to Duke Albrecht of Austria. By 1371 Charles IV was approving extra pledge money for repairs — the walls and roofs had "quite fallen down" — and from 1372 the Hohenstaufen was back in Württemberg hands for good.

After the Swabian League drove out Duke Ulrich of Württemberg in 1519, Georg Staufer of Bloßenstaufen, chief bailiff of Göppingen, claimed the castle as a professed descendant of the old imperial house, and Emperor Charles V granted it to him in 1520 for his services to the League. So when the German Peasants' War reached the hill, only a small force held the walls. On 29 April 1525 the rebel "Bright Band" of Gaildorf and Schwäbisch Hall peasants stormed up after a short siege; the garrison under the knight Michel Reuß von Reußenstein fired every gun mounted at the gate and fled through the powder smoke — an end the chroniclers judged less than glorious. The peasants plundered the castle and set it alight, though the accounts differ: one credits the band of Jörg Bader of Böblingen with taking it at the second assault, and another dates the burning precisely to the early afternoon of 1 May 1525, "between 1 and 2 o'clock".

The burnt ruin was never rebuilt. From 1555 Duke Christoph of Württemberg used it as a quarry for his Renaissance castle at Göppingen; when the Tübingen historian Martin Crusius climbed the hill in 1588 he found "nothing but bare walls and towers without roofs or beams", and noted the stones still being carted downhill. A tower still left standing, cracked and dangerous, was pulled down in 1705, and Duke Carl Alexander's 1736 scheme for a new fortress on the summit died with him the following spring. In 1769 sixty wagonloads of stone were reportedly carted off the summit for house-building, and by the early nineteenth century nothing of the castle showed above ground.

After German unification in 1871 the bare hill was treated as a national monument, though three nineteenth-century schemes to rebuild collapsed for lack of money. Excavations in 1936–38 under Walther Veeck and again in 1967–71 uncovered and secured the buried foundations, and in 2002 a Stauferstele was raised on the summit in memory of the dynasty.