Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 8/A peep into the Palatinate - Part 1

by George Carless Swayne

A PEEP INTO THE PALATINATE.

 

PART I.—THE CASTLE OF TRIFELS.

That Danube voyage from Ratisbon to Vienna is worth the Rhine, Rhone, and Elbe voyages put together. There is one place, near Linz, where the gorge opens into a plain, and on one side the distant summits of the Austrian Alps appear only for some minutes, that suggests theatrical scene-shifting on an enormous scale. But this by the way. I had once seen the castle of Dürrenstein, where Richard Cœur de Lion was confined, and thought that I should like to see the castle of Trifels, to which he was transferred from Dürrenstein. A striking object from the neighbourhood of Worms is the long-backed Donnersberg mountain. This mountain is seen by everybody who goes up the hill behind Heidelberg Castle. I had visited it in 1861. The chief objects of interest on that walk, which began at Worms and ended at Kreuznach, were Pfeddersheim, with its crumbling mediæval walls; Zell, with its pure fountains and fine view; the village of Dannenfels, perched beautifully a little way up the Donnersberg, approached through a glade of chestnuts terminating a long prairie, the long flat top of the steep 2126 feet high; Thunder mountain, with its panoramic view; the gigantic beeches on the descent, with boles like the main-masts of three-deckers; the lower valley of the Alsenz, cragged and castellated, a miniature of the Nahe, which again is a miniature of the Rhine. This time we pass the Donnersberg and the first mountains of the Palatinate, and are duly delivered as ticketed and directed at the Neustadt station, where a branch of the railway pierces the hill-country, and connects it with Metz and Paris.

First appears the castle of Maxburg, on a most commanding position above the long village of Hamsbach. It was intended to restore this grand old historic ruin as a summer palace for the present king of Bavaria, Maximilian; and why the process of reconstruction was arrested we cannot tell. Probably his Alpine retreat of Hohenschwangau has greater charms of much the same nature. It often strikes one that princes and great folk who have many houses must experience to a certain degree that want of home which those feel who have no houses of their own. A feeling of desolation and failure is produced by the uninhabited state of the ambitious castle, while the respectability of the ruin has been destroyed. From the Donnersberg to the valley of the Queich extends the so-called Haardtgebirge, which is rather a small chain of mountains than a range of large hills. The highest point, the Kalmit, is little above 2000 feet; but the distinction is founded seemingly on something else than mere difference of size. Perhaps, from a geological point of view, hills are generally the result of location, mountains of dislocation,—the former a product of the more gentle, the latter of the more violent agencies of nature.

The Haardt is chiefly composed of variegated sandstone, and to the north its hills and valleys appear to have been mainly formed by the action of water; but beyond Edenkoben, where the Haardt merges into the Vosges, unmistakeable volcanic action becomes visible, and the broken hills are tumbled into huge hummocks, whose outline looks very strange from the neighbourhood of Carlsruhe. After passing the baths of Gleisweiler, a beautiful valley opens, in which are seen three of these hummocks, one behind the other, on the foremost of them a solitary square tower. This was the keep of the castle of Trifels. Considering its historic renown, there is very little to be seen of it. The three summits are called Trifels, Anebos, and Scharfenburg. On each a castle stood, and they were connected in ancient times, although separated from each other by a depression of considerable depth. Over against them is the strange rock-mass of Assenstein, which has been compared by Humboldt to the top of Mamanchota in the Cordilleras, and is supposed to have derived its name from the gods of northern mythology.

As we approach near the hill of Trifels, a poor violin-player comes out of the woods, and goes to the town to earn his kreutzers by seasoning the table-d’hôte with music at the Trifels inn. This is the fate of the race of Blondels in the nineteenth century. The castle of Trifels itself probably dates from the time of the Emperor Conrad II., who was known to have built many castles in the direction of Lorraine, and the valley of the Queich would have been an important military pass, which it was desirable to secure. Here it was that the unhappy Henry IV. found refuge, when the papal ban was launched against him, when his own son was in insurrection at the head of his disaffected nobles, and the burghers of the towns alone stood his friends. When Henry V. felt his end draw near, and named the Hohenstaufens, the sons of his sister Agnes, as his heirs, he placed in the castle of Trifels the jewels of the empire in the custody of Duke Frederick of Swabia. The choice, however, of the Diet held at Mayence, in 1125, did not fall upon Frederick, but on Lothair, of Saxony: this occasioned a long war, in which Trifels was besieged, and though the Hohenstaufens held the castle, they were obliged to surrender the jewels. The palmy days of Trifels began when the Hohenstaufens, represented by Konrad III., in the year 1138, were raised to the imperial dignity. It was a favourite resort of Frederic Barbarossa, as it lay between his seats of Hagenau and Kaiserslautern. Long after his death the people believed that a bed was made up for him every night at Trifels, under the supposition that he had been transported thither alive by enchantment from his castle of Hagenau. The castle was so much enlarged and beautified by him that his son and successor, Henry VI., was enabled to hold there a great court, to consult on the subject of the expedition to Syria. The booty collected in that expedition was brought to Trifels on 160 beasts of burden, and its spacious dungeons became the receptacles of many state prisoners of note. The most renowned of these was Richard Cœur-de-Lion of England.

On his return from the third Crusade, the King was cast away, near Aquileia, on the Italian coast. This obliged him to travel through the dominions of Leopold of Austria, who was his bitter personal enemy, in consequence of a dispute which had taken place at the siege of Ptolemais or Acre. His pilgrim’s disguise was not sufficient to prevent his recognition and seizure in the neighbourhood of Vienna. He was carried as a prisoner to the Castle of Dürrenstein, on the Danube. The Emperor, Henry VI., who was also a personal enemy of Richard, when he heard of this, demanded that he should be transferred to his custody, on the ground that only he had a right to keep a king captive in his dominions. Thus he was brought to Trifels, tried at Hagenau before an assembly of German princes, and his ransom fixed at 150,000 marks, on the payment of which he was liberated. In an age of romance, however, such a dénouement was deemed unsatisfactory, and a legend was invented more consistent with the chivalrous character of the English king. He was found by his faithful minstrel Blondel, who had long sought him in vain by going the round of the castles of Germany. One day Blondel found himself in the wild valley of Annweiler, under Trifels, and suspected from the extent of the works that it must be an important place. So he went into the woods to reconnoitre, and in order to attract the country people about him that he might question them, sang a song to his lute. He told the company of herdsmen that collected to hear him many a strange tale of foreign lands, and as he was talking he saw that a maiden present hung on his words with marked attention, while a shade of sadness passed by fits over her usually smiling face. He asked whether the castle was inhabited, and whether his music might not earn him a handsome welcome there. He was told that no one was suffered to approach the castle since some distinguished prisoner was brought there one night; that it was strongly watched, and commanded by a seneschal reported invulnerable. Then he examined the fair maiden apart as to the cause of her sadness. She confessed that she had heard a song similar to one of Blondel’s at a window of the castle, and seen the outline of a noble form in the darkness; that led by curiosity, she had gone to the place again, and had been seen by the prisoner, who spoke to her in friendly tones, and begged her to come again and gladden his loneliness with the sound of her sweet voice. Blondel then suspects that it is Richard, and the next evening is guided to the window by the shepherd-maid Matilda; sings part of a stave, to which Richard replies; gives notice to his men-at-arms, who are in ambush in the woods below the castle, who tie their horses to trees, bridge over the moat with timbers taken from the wood, beat down the gate, overpower the guard, and free Richard, who when he has once a sword in his hand easily effects the rest for himself.

After the death of Henry VI., in the war between Philip of Swabia and Otho IV., the castle remained in the hands of the Hohenstaufens. When Philip was murdered, in 1208, it came to Otho with the insignia of the empire. When this emperor was obliged, in turn, to yield to Frederic II., it returned to its old possessors. Frederic’s son Henry, who tried to depose his father and reign instead, sought here a refuge against his father’s anger, but when the emperor returned from Italy, the castle opened its gates to him, and the son had to expiate his ingratitude by a long imprisonment in it. In the year 1246, Frederic’s younger son, Conrad IV., received the castle from the hand of the seneschal, Philip of Falkenstein, on whose death William of Holland gained possession of it by stratagem. Trifels appears always as an imperial residence in these times, as testified by a letter of Pope Urban IV. to Richard of Cornwall, wherein Trifels is specified. All the following emperors, down to the time of Ludwig the Bavarian, planted here the standard of empire. Rudolph of Hapsburg transferred the insignia of empire to his castle Kyburg, in Switzerland, yet under Adolph of Nassau, they are found again in Trifels. Ludwig the Bavarian mortgaged the castle, in 1330, to the Palatine family, and it came thus to the Dukes of Zweibrücken.

Castle of Trifels.

From this date its splendour began to decline. In the peasant war it was much damaged, and the date (1529) at the entrance of the principal tower, seems to point to a subsequent restoration. In 1602 the great tower was struck by lightning, and a great part of the castle burnt. In the Thirty Years’ war the castle was used as a refuge by the surrounding country-people, and each party seems to have held it in turn. In 1635, its remaining occupiers were destroyed or driven out by an infectious epidemic. From that time its complete ruin dates.

The chief parts which remain are the main tower, built of vast blocks of stone, and about eighty feet high; the dungeon, a fearful vault, partially lighted from above by four openings; and the well-tower, built over a well now filled with rubbish. On Anebos, the second height, very slight trace of the old fortification is to be seen. On Scharfenburg, the third height, there is still a tower, about one hundred and fifty feet high. The very ditch here is not dug, but hewn out of the solid rock. This castle was separated from Trifels under the Emperor Frederic II., but shared the subsequent fates of the sister-fortress. The whole country round Trifels has a weird and ghostly look, and the grotesque masses of sandstone which crown the tops and crests of the hills, and in the sun are scarcely distinguishable from castles, but in the evening appear often like sharply-featured spectral heads, give the impression of a very “eerie” place.