Schloss Mespelbrunn

On 1 May 1412 Johann of Nassau, Archbishop of Mainz, made over to Hamann Echter a deserted site and homestead "genant Espelborn", together with a farm at Hessenthal, as allodial property. Echter was the archbishop's forest master in the Spessart, and the grant is recorded as a reward for his service against the Czechs. The family, ministeriales recorded from the 13th century in the service of the Mainz archbishops, took the name Echter von Mespelbrunn from the place.

Whether an older castle had stood on the site is unresolved. The Spessart was then unexploited forest, a refuge for bandits and Hussites who plundered the country round about, and against that background the house was made defensible with walls, towers and a moat drawn from the pond; the start of the work is not recorded, but is placed between 1419 and 1427. The round bergfried with its high entrance is the only part of the castle still standing from that century. In 1435 Hamann II Echter surrendered the finished castle to the archbishopric of Mainz as a fief, to be held open to the archbishop at need. Why a castle was raised in so slight a spot has been explained by Mainz wanting its position in the Spessart firmed up against its rivals, the counts of Rieneck. The pilgrimage church at Hessenthal was built in 1439 as the family's burial place.

Peter III Echter von Mespelbrunn (1520–1576) and his wife Gertrud von Adelsheim had the small fortified house rebuilt and enlarged in the Renaissance style from 1551. By 1569 the north wing with its little round chapel tower, the east wing and the eastern part of the south wing were up, the courtyard stair portal carrying reliefs of the couple with their arms and the years 1564 and 1569.

Their son Adolf (1543–1600) followed his father as bailiff and carried the work through to the mid-1590s, adding the western part of the south wing in 1581 and, from 1584, the west wing, along with the raising of the late-medieval bergfried. Adolf's brother Julius Echter, born at Mespelbrunn in 1545, was elected Prince-Bishop of Würzburg in 1573 and held the see until his death in 1617; he founded the Juliusspital in 1576 and the University of Würzburg in 1583, and the expansion of the Marienberg fortress goes back to him.

Its hidden situation in a side valley, ringed by forest, left Mespelbrunn one of the few castles in Franconia not destroyed in the Thirty Years' War. Peter's children were raised to the imperial baronage in 1623. The line of his son Valentin II died out in the male line in 1636, and the last Echter line in 1665.

Maria Ottilia Echterin von und zu Mespelbrunn (1629–1701) married Philipp Ludwig von Ingelheim, and the property passed with her. By the emperor's permission the two names were joined, the line becoming von Ingelheim genannt Echter von und zu Mespelbrunn; it was raised to the imperial baronage in 1680 and to the rank of imperial count in 1737.

Franz Adolf Dietrich von Ingelheim (1659–1742) had the castle restored between 1713 and 1717 after part of the west wing of 1584 fell in. Perhaps about 1840 the west wing on the pond side was pulled down, which had given the complex its closed and defensible look, and in the Romantic taste the courtyard was opened westward to the water by a flying arch joining the keep to the Baroque south wing. In 1851 the western part of the north wing collapsed and was rebuilt, and in 1875 a Romanesque Revival chapel was raised over the Elsava valley as the Ingelheim burial place. Count Philipp Rudolf von Ingelheim restored and modernised the house in 1904, refitting rooms in the historicist manner on the advice of the architect Friedrich von Thiersch.

Economic pressure brought the Ingelheims to open the castle between the wars, part of the north wing being accessible from the early 1920s. Seldom the family's principal seat, the house was little altered though kept in repair; in 1957 it served as a location for the film Das Wirtshaus im Spessart.

Mespelbrunn is a listed architectural monument of Bavaria and remains in the family: on the death of Albrecht Graf von Ingelheim in 2006 it passed to his eldest daughter, Marie Antoinette Gräfin von Ingelheim genannt Echterin von und zu Mespelbrunn, born 1973. The family lives in the south wing, and the castle is open to visitors from Good Friday to All Saints, drawing 90,000 to 100,000 visitors a year. In 2020 the roofs of the bergfried, the chapel tower and the rear tower were repaired and the formerly private part of the park was opened.