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

50 square meters. That is what was left of the Munich Residenz roof after the raids of 1944, out of 23,500. The Bavarian government did the arithmetic afterwards. Almost everything above the cellars was open to the sky. The palace had taken four and a half centuries to build. It started in 1385

September 22, 1862. A Prussian king had an abdication drafted and was ready to sign it. Wilhelm I had spent two years deadlocked with the lower house over the money for his army reform. He would not govern against his own conscience, so he prepared to walk away from the throne. Albrecht von Roon

Noble seat. District office. Workhouse. Hotel. Youth hostel. Porcelain museum. Leuchtenburg stands on a bare cone of rock above Seitenroda, near Kahla in Thuringia, first recorded in 1221 as the seat of the lords of Lobdeburg. A carved relief lists the changes of hands: 1221, 1333, 1396, 1485.

It started as a thank-you for a son. Ferdinand Maria and Henriette Adelaide of Savoy waited ten years for an heir. When Max Emanuel arrived in 1662, the Bavarian elector gave his wife an estate on open meadow west of Munich and the money to build on it. She got one tall Italian pavilion in a wal

Fanfaronade. A brag. Frederick the Great's own word for the largest building he ever raised, and the foundation that runs it keeps that judgment in its subtitle. Prussia had just survived seven years of war against Austria, France and Russia at once. The Treaty of Hubertusburg ended it in 17

Agincourt, 1415. Jean V de Bueil lost his father and his uncles there, and he was still a boy. He grew up to fight the English hard enough to be called le Fleau des Anglais, the Scourge of the English. He rode with Joan of Arc through the campaign of 1429: Orleans, Patay, and the march that carr

The lodge here was called the Dianenburg first, after the goddess of the chase. Duke Moritz of Saxony raised it on a granite knoll in 1542, and by 1549 the documents were writing Moritzburch instead. What stands there now was Augustus the Strong's idea. He sketched it himself around 1703, an

Three hundred meters of rock separate the two halves of Loches, in Touraine. At the south end, a keep about 37 meters tall, raised by Fulk Nerra between 1013 and 1035. Tree-ring dating moved that back some seventy years from where scholars had put it. At the north end, the Logis Royal, where

Two conditions came with the bequest. Never lend a single work. Never rearrange the galleries. Henri d'Orleans, duc d'Aumale, spent two decades of exile in England buying paintings, drawings and manuscripts. Allowed home in 1871, he found Chantilly dilapidated, rebuilt the Grand Chateau

Margarete Kuhn is on none of the signage, and Palace is standing because of her. It began in 1695 as a summer villa for Sophie Charlotte, a Hanoverian princess who filled it with poets and musicians and argued philosophy with Leibniz. She died in 1705 at 36, and her widower renamed the house for