Trutzeltz Castle

Archbishop Baldwin of Trier built Trutzeltz — also known as Balduineltz, Baldeneltz or Neueltz — as a siege castle to invest Eltz Castle, some 230 metres away and forty metres lower. The castle grew out of Baldwin's drive to extend Trier's authority along the Moselle: knights who refused to recognise their vassal status resisted him, and twenty-one of them — the lords of Eltz, Waldeck, Schöneck and Ehrenberg — bound themselves into a formal defensive alliance. When a direct assault on Eltz Castle failed, Baldwin had Trutzeltz raised on the hill above it, probably in 1331, and the following year built a second counter-castle, the Rauschenburg, against the three allied strongholds.

Trutzeltz was thrown up in haste to keep pressure on the lords of Eltz: its walls are built from small broken stone quarried on the spot and bonded with clay mortar unable to withstand the region's climate over the long term, a weakness that mattered little for a castle meant to serve only through a siege. The site is compact, some 30 by 25 metres, crowned by a tower house whose ruin still stands over ten metres high.

From Trutzeltz, Baldwin's forces bombarded Eltz Castle with stone-throwing trebuchets and, archaeological finds recovered at Eltz suggest, an early form of firearm known as the pot-de-fer. Eltz was never taken. The lords of Eltz and their allies sued for peace in 1333, though the feud was not formally settled until 1336, by an atonement treaty known as a Sühne. One combatant, John of Eltz, fought on — he had already clashed with Baldwin once before, in the Kempenich Feud, and was reluctant to make peace. Baldwin drew him onto his own side instead: in 1337, with Trutzeltz's survival guaranteed under the terms of the peace treaty with the other knights, he granted the castle to John of Eltz as a fief and made him hereditary burgrave.

The wider dispute that had produced Trutzeltz was settled at the level of the Empire on 9 January 1354, when King Charles IV enfeoffed Archbishop Baldwin with Eltz Castle itself, in recognition of his service against Emperor Henry VII. Trutzeltz itself, its purpose as a siege base long spent, was not kept up: a deed of 1453 records it as unoccupied, deserted and run down. What remains — the tower house fragment and short lengths of foundation wall on the hillside above the Elz — is protected today as a Kulturdenkmal.