Katz and Maus: two Rhine castles, the mouse won

The Cat and the Mouse. Two castles on the same bank of the Rhine, a few kilometers apart, built by rivals who wanted the same toll money.

The Mouse came first. In 1353 the Archbishop-Elector of Trier bought the village of Wellmich, got an imperial license to fortify it in 1356, and had the first phase up by 1362 under the intended name Burg Peterseck. A twin was planned for the far bank to close a pincer. It was never built.

The Cat was the answer. Count Wilhelm II von Katzenelnbogen put up a larger castle upstream at St. Goarshausen, chapel consecrated in 1371, officially Burg Neukatzenelnbogen. With Rheinfels across the water it let him tax ships going both ways.

Here is the part the guidebooks skip. The story that Wilhelm boasted his cat would eat that mouse is repeated everywhere and documented nowhere. The name Maus first appears in writing in 1719, by which time the castle was a derelict shell.

And the joke came out backwards.

The Mouse was never besieged, never stormed, never destroyed. The Cat was besieged and partly destroyed by Hessian cousins in 1626 and 1647, damaged again in 1692 while the French besieged Rheinfels across the water, then mined and blown up by French engineers on Napoleon's orders in 1806.

What stands on the Cat's rock now went up in 1898 and 1899. Genuine medieval fabric survives in three places only.

Most river cruises point out one of these two and let the other slide past. Tell me which one your boat named.

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