Spiez Castle

The castle sits on a tongue of land running out into Lake Thun between the Spiezberg and Bürg hills, on ground used long before any lord built in stone. Traces of Bronze Age and Iron Age settlement in the district run back to roughly 1750 to 1500 BC, Celtic occupation is attested, and the grave of an unidentified but evidently important horseman of the sixth to eighth centuries was found beneath the church. The plateau is assumed to have been settled and fortified from the seventh century onwards, though nothing of the detail survives. Elogius Kiburger, author of the Strättliger Chronicle, credited the building of the castle to Rudolph II, King of Burgundy, in 933, with the Freiherren von Strättligen settling there shortly afterwards. The fabric argues otherwise: the great square keep, long taken for tenth-century work, is now placed at the end of the twelfth century or the beginning of the thirteenth, and parts of the curtain walls and main tower are assigned to the twelfth century.

The keep, raised around 1200, is a square block of some 11 metres a side with lower walls about three metres thick; it stood at first among free-standing wooden buildings, replaced over the following centuries by a stone curtain wall and two concentric ditches. The barons of Strättligen, from near Thun, appear in the record in 1175 and were extinct before 1350; they probably acquired the lordship of Spiez during the thirteenth century, and Heinrich III of Strättligen was signing himself lord of Spiez by 1250. He is remembered as a troubadour too, with at least three long poems of courtly love copied into the Codex Manesse. By the thirteenth century a walled town had grown at the southern foot of the castle, and graffiti cut by visiting knights into the plaster of the main chimney is taken to mean that tournaments must have been held around it in the second half of that century. By 1280 the castle was listed as an imperial fief under the vogt Richard de Corbières, and in 1289 the Freiherr von Strättligen held it jointly with a succession of other noble families.

In 1308 King Albert I of Habsburg was murdered at Windisch on the Reuss by his nephew, Duke John Parricida. Part of the Habsburg retaliation fell on Spiez: half the fief was withdrawn from Thüring von Brandis and the whole of it granted instead to Johannes von Strättligen. Thirty years later, in 1338, the heavily indebted Strättligen lord sold the castle, the town, the church and the surrounding villages to Johann II von Bubenberg, Schultheiss of Bern, of one of the leading families of that city.

By 1340 the vogt the Bubenbergs installed at Spiez took his orders from Bern while remaining obliged to raise troops for the Habsburgs. Bern was by then independent of its former overlords in all but name, and the contradiction left Spiez in an unstable position that held for more than forty years. After the victory of Bern and the Swiss Confederation over the Habsburgs at the Battle of Sempach in 1386, the Habsburgs gave up their claims to land west of the Aare, Spiez among them.

Several Bubenbergs held high office in Bern, Adrian I von Bubenberg above all, who commanded the Bernese troops in the Swabian War. A fire brought heavy rebuilding at the castle between 1456 and 1469, years in which Adrian I took the estate back in hand. Towards the end of the fifteenth century the family fell into financial trouble of its own and sold off its many holdings piece by piece. The line died out in 1506, and the bulk of its property went to Ludwig von Diesbach.

Von Diesbach held Spiez for ten years before it passed to Ludwig von Erlach, the lords of Erlach being in possession by 1515. The family is attested from the end of the twelfth century and rose to great weight in Bern under the Ancien Régime, supplying the city with a long line of Schultheissen. They served abroad as officers, came home enriched, and spent as builders and patrons of unusual ambition. Rudolf von Erlach (1448–1507), Schultheiss of Bern, commissioned Diebold Schilling the Elder to write the chronicle that is known as the Spiez Chronicle because the illuminated manuscript was kept in this castle.

Franz Ludwig von Erlach (1575–1651), a statesman of consequence, remade the house. Work intensified between 1597 and 1602: a carved armorial relief bearing his arms and those of his wife Salomé Steiger was set above the southern entrance gate, and a three-storey oriel was raised from the first floor. In 1600 the top storey of the tower was heightened and crowned with a hipped roof that carried it to 39 metres, its merlons painted with the couple's arms, and the great hall and the northern buildings were enlarged and refitted the same year. In 1614 he had the banqueting hall on the second floor decorated by the stuccoist Gian Antonio Castelli of Melide in Ticino, who had previously worked in Munich in the residence of the dukes of Bavaria. Cabinetmakers spent five years at the castle on its many doors and panelling, and the central ceiling panel, dated 1614, carries his arms with those of his two successive wives, Salomé Steiger and Johanna von Graffenried.

Building continued after him. The Baroque New Castle went up on the south side of the gatehouse across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and was then enlarged and redecorated, an inn was raised on the south-east of the courtyard in 1743, and a rectangular terrace was planted with trees to the north. The Erlachs ruled the town and its villages until the French invasion of 1798; under the Helvetic Republic that followed they lost their land rights and their jurisdiction over the village, but kept ownership of the castle itself.

In 1870 the last Erlach owner tried to repair his finances with a property venture at the tip of the peninsula, commissioning the Franco-Bernese architect Horace Édouard Davinet, who also built the Grand Hôtel de Giessbach, to raise a large hotel with two projecting wings and a turret under a Mansard roof. The building proved too costly and bankrupted its promoter. Rudolf Albrecht von Erlach (1821–1884) was forced to auction the castle together with his valuable library, and the family's ownership ended in 1875. Hermann Karl von Wilke held it until 1900, when the estate passed to Rosina Magdalena Gemuseus-Riggenbach; she sold it in 1907 to her nephew Wilhelm Schiess.

The property was hard to maintain. In the later 1920s a national collection was raised under the slogan that Spiez Castle should be kept for the Swiss people, a foundation was formed, and the deed of purchase was signed; the foundation has held the castle and its church since. It carried out major restoration in 1935 and 1936, stripping out additions then judged unacceptable and having the architect Karl Indermühle convert the New Castle of 1746 to 1769 into a Bernese country house. Davinet's hotel was replaced in the 1970s by a far more discreet establishment. Spiez is a class A Swiss cultural property of national significance; its gardens are open to the public, its rooms are used for conferences, concerts and exhibitions, and a permanent exhibition opened in 2014 on the three families that shaped the house.