Nuremberg Castle

Medieval German kings had no capital. They travelled with their entire courts from one royal castle to the next, and the sandstone rock at Nuremberg became one of the stops they returned to most often. A royal fortress was raised here in the eleventh century, and in 1050 the castle appears in the records for the first time, when the Salian king Henry III held a court assembly in the newly built stronghold. Its first real test came in 1105, when Henry V besieged and took it during the bitter war between himself and his own father, Emperor Henry IV. The Staufer dynasty gained the castle in 1138 and made it grander, and the Double Chapel that still stands in the inner courtyard was finished around 1220. Meanwhile a second power took root next door. The burgraves, officials responsible for keeping and defending the castle, became hereditary lords in their own right, and from 1192 the office passed to the Zollern family. For centuries the ridge held two castles with two sets of interests, standing almost wall to wall. The town growing below the rock changed the balance. In 1356 Emperor Charles IV's Golden Bull ruled that every newly elected king must hold his first Imperial Diet in Nuremberg, which turned a prosperous trading town into a fixture of imperial ceremony. The Zollern burgraves, for their part, were heading somewhere far larger. Burgrave Frederick VI was granted Brandenburg in 1415, and his descendants, the Hohenzollerns, became kings of Prussia and, in 1871, emperors of a united Germany. The family that once looked after a rock above a Franconian town ended up ruling a good part of Europe. The city and the burgraves did not stay friendly. After a feud in 1420 left the Burgraves' castle burned, the city bought the remains in 1427 and took over the whole ridge. The council then built for itself at the eastern end, including a granary and stable block in the 1490s that is now a youth hostel, and in the sixteenth century it ringed the north side with bastions modelled on Italian designs, ready for the age of gunpowder. The castle never lost its imperial glow, though the emperors visited less and less. The free imperial city fell to Bavaria in 1806, and the castle went with it. Bavarian rulers of the nineteenth century treated the old walls as a monument to German history and had parts of the complex restored. A heavy restoration in 1934 stripped away years of use as barracks and rebuilt several interiors, which means some of what visitors see today reflects the taste of the 1930s as much as the Middle Ages. On 2 January 1945 an air raid destroyed most of the old town and left the castle badly damaged. Rebuilding began under the architect Rudolf Esterer and carried on for decades. Today the rebuilt Palas, the round Sinwell Tower and the pentagonal tower still mark the line along the ridge that Nurembergers see when they look uphill from the Hauptmarkt.