Rheinstein Castle: a ruin bought for four talers

Four talers. That is what a Hessian official paid in 1822 for the empty shell of a castle above the Rhine at Trechtingshausen.

It had been built around 1316 by the Archbishopric of Mainz, under the name Vautsberg, to police river traffic and to enforce a rebuilding ban on the neighboring castle of Reichenstein. By 1524 the records already call it dilapidated. When Louis XIV's troops came up the Rhine in 1689 blowing up castle after castle, they walked past it. It was too far gone to be worth the powder.

Then on March 31, 1823, a 28-year-old Prussian officer bought it.

Prince Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig was an antiquarian who had seen Schinkel's 1816 sketches for a Rhine castle restoration and wanted to build one. The rebuilding ran from 1825 to 1844 under four hands: Schinkel's design vocabulary, Lassaulx directing, his pupil Kuhn finishing the main works, and Hoffmann adding the chapel and the royal crypt.

He renamed it Rheinstein, after the cliff.

What he did here had not been tried before. A ruin was to be brought back as a building people actually lived in, still legibly medieval. Stolzenfels, Sooneck, Lichtenstein, the Wartburg, Cochem and eventually Neuschwanstein all follow from it.

Three Hohenzollern coffins rest under the chapel altar.

Send this to whoever tells you every German castle you have seen is medieval.

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