Kronberg Castle

The date and circumstances of the founding are unknown, and a building date between 1220 and 1230 is often given. Building evidence in the chapel tower and the five-sided tower suggests a first phase around 1170, reaching back into the early years of Frederick I Barbarossa, though whether those first builders were already the later knights of Cronberg is unclear. The family that would govern the castle's history into the eighteenth century descended from ministeriales at Eschborn, which had earlier belonged to the Salian royal estate, and those Eschborn ministeriales are recorded by name from at least 1189. They are assumed to have taken over the more defensible ground of the later castle on the emperor's behalf around the turn of the twelfth into the thirteenth century, but no document survives to show it. The name von Cronenberg, or something close to it, first appears in 1230 with an Otto von Cronenberg - roughly sixty years, or two generations, after the presumed start of the first towers.

The stone curtains linking those towers were raised after the towers themselves, and the oldest pottery from the area of the later Mittelburg, greyware dishes and tiles, is dated to between about 1200 and 1250. Further buildings for servants, mostly timber, are likely to have stood close by from early on, though no trace of them has been found. Three motives for the building of the castle, or for its takeover by the later Cronberg knights, are argued over: that it formed part of a protective ring of castles around the crown estate of the Wetterau; that it was raised as additional cover for the imperial city of Frankfurt with its royal palace of the day; or that it was given the task of guarding the Frankfurt-Cologne trade road, which ran past within sight. It stands on a spur of the Altkönig about 285 metres above sea level, on the southern slope of the Taunus, and gave its name both to the imperial knightly family and to the town that grew up beneath it.

From about the middle of the thirteenth century the castle appears to have been granted to the family in firm fief, to be theirs for as long as male heirs could be counted. Held jointly across several branches and individuals, it was a Ganerbenburg, a castle of co-heirs, and it acquired quarters to match. The Flügelstamm, the Wing line, which branched off in the fourteenth century and died out in 1617, and the Ohrenstamm, the Ear line, extinct in 1461, appear to have occupied buildings of the Unterburg beside the castle gate and the chapel, while the Kronenstamm, the Crown line that survived until 1704, lived in the Mittelburg or at least held it as the official seat. The chapel of about 1342 served numerous Cronberg knightly families as a burial place and still holds several epitaphs in the choir. The castle gate next to it was put up in about 1478 to replace an earlier one, and its upper floor long housed a gatekeeper.

From the fourteenth century at the latest, some of the lordly branches settled on estates inside the town of Kronberg itself, at the Hellhof and the Westerburg, and later family members bought, built or inherited holdings further afield - in what is now Hesse and Rhineland-Palatinate, in the Black Forest, and as far as Bohemia. Cronberg knights and Junkers also took service with regional territorial lords, in particular the Electoral Palatinate and the Archbishopric of Mainz. The motive was probably to secure the income of a long-growing house, since the relatively small imperial fief of Kronberg-Eschborn could not have supported every member of the branching families. For such men the centre of life was no longer the castle or the town, but the castle went on serving the house and the community of co-heirs as their point of identity. Within the walls, a draw-well already mentioned in 1367 stood in the open before the great vaulted kitchen of the north wing was built around it; a broad spiral stair went into the corner of the west wing behind the Fahnenturm in 1444; and the north wing itself was completed in about 1505 on the site of a predecessor.

Shortly after 1500 the castle was reworked for gunfire. The Fünfeckturm, in origin probably a residential tower, was converted into a gun tower, square inside and given a protective vault as a casemate, and reinforced with walling up to 2.5 metres thick, pierced by the slit-mouth loops that are rare in military building and belong to this phase. The Freiturm, raised on the bergfried of the medieval castle, was carried to its height of more than 43 metres with the butter-churn top that begins at 33 metres. At roughly the same time a zwinger was thrown round the upper and middle castle with three bulwarks on the north and west sides. All of it was work to defend the place better against attacking weapons that were becoming more effective.

In 1617 the last male descendant of the Flügelstamm died at the Hellhof in the upper old town of Kronberg. The Thirty Years' War of 1618 to 1648 cut the male lines of the house back severely, and by then the family had for some time been living mostly on other properties. Estates in Bohemia, among others, had fallen to the Catholic line of imperial counts; the Protestant baronial line withdrew during the war from a Kronberg that had been forced back to Catholicism, and settled holdings in what is now Rhineland-Palatinate. Parts of the castle now decayed faster than before and were partly demolished or at least put to other uses. In 1704 the last male of the Kronenstamm died childless at Burg Hohlenfels in the Hintertaunus, and the lords of Cronberg were finished.

The houses of the Unterburg were pulled down in the decades after the Flügelstamm died out, the demolition falling at the end of the seventeenth century, and survive only as cellars, visible from inside the town history museum. Earlier in that century the Mittelburg had been partly remodelled inside and out: the stepped Gothic gables shown on the oldest engravings were replaced by the strapwork gables it carries now, and the oriel in the Rittersaal, the Wappensaal, was probably built out into a full storeyed bay at the same time. Outwardly little else altered.

After the lords of Cronberg died out in 1704 the castle passed to the Electorate of Mainz, with which the family had had dealings for centuries. The local Mainz Amtmann took his official seat in the Mittelburg for a time. Parts of the Mittelburg were used as a Catholic school and a teacher's dwelling, and below the castle garden, today called the Prinzengarten, the school garden was laid out that survives there still.

During the Napoleonic wars the castle was occupied by French troops, and was somewhat altered and damaged: the lower part of the Fahnenturm was used as a prison and the castle chapel for a time as a horse stable. From 1802-03 town and castle went to Nassau-Usingen, and in 1806 to the Duchy of Nassau; in 1866 Prussia took over both. The west wing was by then being put to very mixed use, including a small joinery, and had already fallen badly out of repair. In the narrow topmost stage of the Freiturm a watchman and his family went on living and keeping watch until 1839, long after the medieval use of the tower had ended.

All the surviving castle buildings were in an increasingly desolate condition, in places at risk of collapse and in many without intact windows or doors. Prussia nevertheless assessed the complex as a monument worth preserving, one that united in outstanding fashion different building styles from the Romanesque into the early modern period.

Between about 1875 and 1912 the Taunusklub improved access to the Oberburg and the Freiturm and fitted a spiral stair inside the tower. The heavier work was that of the dowager empress Victoria, wife of Emperor Frederick III, who called herself Empress Frederick after her husband's death. Having taken her summer widow's residence at what is now Bad Homburg, she had the complex restored towards its condition of about 1620 by the architect and Baurat Louis Jacobi, and designed as a public museum. She brought a considerable arms collection from Potsdam and assembled by purchase a rich interior in keeping with the seventeenth century, furniture, stoves and other objects among it. After her death in 1901 the work was continued by her son-in-law Friedrich Karl of Hesse.

Much in and on the castle was restored professionally, by present-day standards as well, and in line with the presumed state of the early seventeenth century, while other parts were made up relatively freely: various stoves and new fireplaces, the wall-walk and the Prinzenturm. Paintings and inscriptions in the Wappensaal of the west wing carry the marks of Historicism and Jugendstil around 1900 and are the work of Karl Julius Grätz and Jakob Hembus. The restored castle was opened to the public as a museum on 25 May 1912 and the main building on 1 June 1913. Through the two world wars and their consequences, through occupations and the want of supervision in the disorder, many objects went missing again in the first half of the twentieth century, others were carried away or sold. The chapel was destroyed by a bomb in 1943, which is why the graves of the House of Hesse, placed from the first half of the twentieth century in the area of the former nave, now lie in the part that has no roof. Choir and burial ground are not open to the public.

In 1989 the Burgverein Kronberg was founded with the primary aim of preventing the sale of the castle by the Hessian House Foundation to an investor. The town of Kronberg bought the castle in 1992, and in 1994 the foundation Burg Kronberg im Taunus was set up; since then representatives of the town and of the Burgverein have administered the castle together, with the association carrying the upkeep, the opening to the public, the ticket office, guided tours and cultural events largely through volunteers. It also runs the museum of town history in front of the castle gate. The Oberburg was thoroughly restored in 2001-02 and the Mittelburg to 2004; extensive restoration in the west wing ran from 2012 to 2017, the Wappensaal on the first floor being handed over to the public in 2016 and the Rheinberger-Saal above it in 2017. Work on the castle and town wall behind the Mittelburg and on the school garden was still under way in 2023, and those areas had not yet reopened. The castle is protected as a Kulturdenkmal, and the interiors of the Mittelburg can be seen on guided tours.