Marksburg

A fortification was raised around 1117 by the "noble freemen of Braubach" to protect the town and reinforce its customs facilities, though that stronghold may have stood in the town below, and the castle long carried the name Burg Braubach. The hill castle itself is first explicitly documented in 1231, as a palatine fief held by the Lords of Eppstein — one of whose line, Gerhard II, had styled himself Gerhard von Braubach since 1219, suggesting the castle already existed by then. Foundations of a Romanesque chapel discovered in 2014 appear to be twelfth-century work, hinting at an earlier complex of which no other trace remains.

The Eppsteins were among the most powerful families of the High Middle Ages, supplying four archbishops of Mainz in the thirteenth century alone. Their fortress at Braubach was a characteristic castle of the Staufer era: a three-storey tower keep and a simple hall within a triangular curtain wall. The keep, begun under Gerhard II in the late 1230s with walls more than two metres thick, still rises at the highest point of the castle rock.

When the Eppsteins died out in 1283, Braubach and its castle passed to Count Eberhard I of the younger line of Katzenelnbogen, who inherited through his wife. The wealthy counts made the castle what it is today: Count Johann II, who died in 1357, began the Gothic remodelling and his son Diether VIII completed it; in the course of that work the eastern defensive wall gave way to a two-storey hall used solely for feasts and assemblies. In 1437 the castle chapel of St Mark is first mentioned, when Philipp I the Elder of Katzenelnbogen endowed it with an altar, and in 1468 the same count raised the keep by a fourth storey crowned with the projecting "butter-churn" superstructure that still marks the castle's silhouette.

The saint of that chapel eventually renamed the whole castle, though not until long after the counts were gone: the name "Marxburg" first appears in a document of 1570, coined to distinguish the old fortress from the new Philippsburg by the riverbank.

In 1479 the county of Katzenelnbogen, and with it the Marksburg, fell to the Landgraves of Hesse, who adapted the castle for artillery — a gun house went up at the corner of the north building early in the sixteenth century, and in 1643–45 came a fresh campaign of bastions, batteries and the great vaulted powder corner. But the castle no longer met the living standards of the nobility: Landgrave Philipp the Younger of Hessen-Rheinfels made Braubach a widow's seat and built the palatial Philippsburg at the town's south end in 1568–71. Landgrave Johann the Warlike, resident at the Philippsburg from 1643 to 1651, had the badly neglected Marksburg repaired towards the end of the Thirty Years War, but it never again served as a noble residence, passing after his death to Hessen-Darmstadt.

In 1803 the Marksburg went to Nassau-Usingen and in 1815 to the Duchy of Nassau. Officially still a fortress, it served in practice as a state prison and a home for invalid soldiers — prison cells built into the Gothic hall were only removed in 1901, when scrawls left by the imprisoned freedom fighter Germain Metternich could still be read in the chapel. Prussia annexed Nassau after the war of 1866 and undertook no building work at all, and the castle decayed steadily.

In 1900 the run-down castle was sold for a symbolic 1,000 Goldmarks to the German Castles Association, founded the year before — a purchase driven by Bodo Ebhardt and backed by Kaiser Wilhelm II. The association set about returning the Marksburg to its late-medieval appearance, restoring in 1905 the butter-churn top removed in the early eighteenth century, and has had its head office here since 1931. Of the forty hill castles between Bingen am Rhein and Koblenz, the Marksburg is one of only two never destroyed, the other being Maus Castle — though the claim needs one qualification: on 20 and 25 March 1945 American artillery firing from across the Rhine half-collapsed the butter-churn tower and stripped nearly every roof on the river side. Restored again, the castle has been part of the Rhine Gorge UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2002.