Wartburg - History

History

The castle's foundation was laid about 1068 by the Thuringian count of Schauenburg, Louis the Springer, a relative of the Counts of Rieneck in Franconia. Together with its larger sister castle Neuenberg in the present-day town of Freyburg, the Wartburg secured the extreme borders of his traditional territories.

According to tradition, the castle (Burg) got its name when its founder first laid eyes on the hill upon which the castle now sits; enchanted by the site, he is supposed to have exclaimed, "Warte, Berg -- du sollst mir eine Burg tragen!" ("Wait, mountain -- you shall bear a castle for me!"). It is a German play on words for mountain (Berg) and fortress (Burg). In addition, Louis the Springer is said to have had clay from his lands transported to the top of the hill, which was not quite within his lands, so he might swear that the castle was built on his soil. In fact, the name probably derives from German: Warte, a kind of watchtower as stated in the above source.

The castle was first mentioned during the Investiture Controversy in a 1080 deed, when Louis's henchmen attacked a military contingent of King Henry IV of Germany. The count remained a fierce opponent of the Salian rulers, and upon the extinction of the line, his son Louis I was elevated to the rank of a Landgrave in Thuringia by the new German king Lothair of Supplinburg in 1131.

The Wartburg remained the seat of the Thuringian landgraves until 1440, and as a place of courtly culture it became around 1207 the venue of the Sängerkrieg, the Minstrels' Contest in which such Minnesänger as Walther von der Vogelweide, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Albrecht von Halberstadt (the translator of Ovid) and many others took part. The contest was later to be treated with poetic licence in Richard Wagner's opera Tannhäuser.

At the age of four, St. Elisabeth of Hungary was sent by her mother to the Wartburg to be raised to become consort of Ludwig IV of Thuringia. From 1211 to 1228, she lived there and was renowned for her charitable work. Three years after moving to Marburg upon the death of her husband, she died at the age of 24 and was canonized as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church.

From May 1521 until March 1522, Martin Luther stayed at the castle, after he had been taken there for his safety at the request of Frederick the Wise following his excommunication by Pope Leo X and his refusal to recant at the Diet of Worms. It was during this period that Luther, under the name of Junker Jörg (the Knight George), translated the New Testament into German. Luther's was not the first German translation of the Bible but it quickly became the most well known and most widely circulated.

From 1540 until his death in 1548, Fritz Erbe, an Anabaptist farmer from Herda, was held captive in the dungeon of the south tower, because he refused to abjure anabaptism. After his death, he was buried in the Wartburg near the chapel of St. Elisabeth. In 1925 a handwritten signature of Fritz Erbe was found on the prison wall.

On 18 October 1817, the first Wartburg festival took place. About 450 students, members of the newly founded German Burschenschaften ("fraternities"), came together at the castle to celebrate the German victory over Napoleon four years before, condemn conservatism and call for German unity. Speakers at the event included Heinrich Hermann Riemann, a veteran of the Lützow Free Corps, the philosophy student Ludwig Rödiger, and Hans Ferdinand Massmann.

With the permission of the absent chaplain Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, the Code Napoléon and other books were burned 'in effigy': instead of the costly volumes, scraps of parchment with the titles of conservative books (including August von Kotzebue's History of the German Empires) were placed on the bonfire. Karl Ludwig Sand, who would assassinate Kotzebue two years later, was among the participants.

This event and the similar gathering at Wartburg during the Revolutions of 1848 are considered seminal moments in the movement for German unification.