Nuremberg Castle

Excavation inside the castle has turned up wall remnants dated around 1000, and older work below them that may belong to a building of Henry of Schweinfurt. The first written record is of 1050, when Henry III issued the Sigena document at Norenberc, releasing a bondswoman. He used the castle in his campaigns to extend his rule over Bohemia, Poland and Hungary.

In 1105 the rock fell to a two-month siege mounted by Henry V against his father; before the year was out Henry IV had been forced by his son to abdicate. Henry V died in 1125, the last Salian, and his successor Lothair of Supplinburg moved to take the crown lands from the Hohenstaufen brothers Frederick and Conrad, who counted Nuremberg part of their inheritance. Lothair besieged it for ten weeks in 1127 without result, and took it only at a second attempt in October 1130.

Lothair died in 1137 and the Hohenstaufen Conrad was elected king the following year. He soon began a new imperial castle, comprising the Palas, the Imperial Chapel and the Heathens' Tower; with Eger and the Wartburg it secured the empire's eastern frontier. Conrad also created the burgraviate so the castle would be held in the king's absence, and the first burgraves, the Austrian house of Raabs, built their own castle beside the imperial one. When the last count of Raabs died, his son-in-law Frederick of Zollern was granted the burgraviate by Henry VI in 1192; the Zollerns, soon renamed Hohenzollern, would hold it until 1427.

At his first diet in the castle, in 1219, Frederick II granted the city the Great Letter of Freedom: town rights, imperial immediacy, the privilege of minting coin and an independent customs policy, making Nuremberg an Imperial Free City answerable only to the emperor. He also handed the city responsibilities for the castle's upkeep, the start of its long quarrel with the burgraves on the same ridge. Frederick stayed at least sixteen times, his son King Henry (VII) twenty-one; in 1225 Henry married Margaret of Babenberg in the castle.

The Golden Bull of 1356 named Nuremberg as the place where a newly elected ruler must hold his first Imperial Diet, and the burgraves rose with the city, Sigismund granting them the Margraviate of Brandenburg. The two then turned on each other: in 1367 the city walled off the burgraves' access to the town, and in 1377 raised the Luginsland tower beside their main gate to watch what went on inside their castle. The burgraves' complaints to Charles IV came to nothing, and in 1388-89 the city took the Burgraves' Castle by force, giving it up again under the settlement made at Eger.

In 1420 Duke Louis VII of Bavaria attacked the Burgraves' Castle and burned it, probably with the city's consent. Sigismund gave the city care of the Imperial Castle in 1422, and in 1427 Frederick I, Elector of Brandenburg, sold the ruins to the council for some 120,000 gulden. That was the end of the burgraviate of Nuremberg.

The castle was left for formal occasions as emperors did business in the town hall completed in 1340; Maximilian I, the last king to hold his first Imperial Diet at Nuremberg, stayed almost six months in 1491. Between 1538 and 1545 bastions were raised on the northern side against improved artillery, to a design by the Maltese military engineer Antonio Falzon. In 1632 the armies of Gustavus Adolphus and Wallenstein appeared before the walled city; neither took it, and both were thinned less by hostilities than by typhus and scurvy. With the Imperial Diet sitting permanently at Regensburg from 1663 the castle kept practically none of its old importance; in 1806 French troops occupied Nuremberg and handed it to Bavaria.

Ludwig I set Carl Alexander Heideloff to restoration work in the 1830s but disliked his neo-Gothic manner and stopped it; August von Voit continued more plainly in the 1850s. After 1933 the castle was remade again, to serve as a setting for the Nuremberg party rallies and as lodging for senior guests of the regime: from 1934 Rudolf Esterer removed most of the nineteenth-century installations and returned the buildings to what was thought to be their original state. Air raids in 1944-45 laid a large part of the castle in ruins, only the Imperial Chapel and the Sinwell Tower remaining entirely intact. Rebuilding in historic form took some thirty years, including the Luginsland, destroyed outright, and the Kemenate, last of all in 1971. The nineteenth-century interiors were not restored, so the rooms remain as Esterer's work left them.