Landeck Castle

Landeck Castle is the ruin of a hilltop castle southwest of Landau, near Klingenmünster in the district of Südliche Weinstraße in Rhineland-Pfalz (Germany).

As with the overwhelming majority of Palatinate castles, the exact founding year of Landeck Castle is unknown. It is generally assumed that the castle was built as a successor to the nearby tower castle "Schlössel", which was probably destroyed in the second half of the 12th century. However, there is no direct evidence for this assumption, nor for the further thesis that both castles had a protective function for the nearby Klingen(-münster) monastery. The visible architectural stylistic features of Landeck point to the period around 1200.

Landeck is actually mentioned and thus reliably documented only in 1237 on the occasion of the division of the Leiningen estates between Counts Friedrich III and Emich IV of Leiningen. In this division, the castle with all its appurtenances fell to Emich IV, who founded his own line of Leiningen-Landeck.

By the middle of the 13th century at the latest, the complex was an imperial fief, which was in the joint feudal possession of the Counts of Zweibrücken and the Counts of Leiningen. In 1255, Emich IV intercepted messengers from Mainz and Worms, who were traveling to Alsace for a city council meeting, near Hördt and abducted them to Landeck. After the rapid extinction of the Leiningen-Landeck sideline in 1289/90, King Rudolf of Habsburg granted the reverted half of the imperial castle in 1290 to his nephew, the Alsatian Landvogt Otto III of Ochsenstein, while the other half remained in the possession of the Counts of Zweibrücken-Bitsch.

Only from the beginning of the 14th century can more or less justified, but in the long run successful, attempts by Klingenmünster Abbey be proven to claim Landeck and surrounding estates as its property, which primarily affected the Ochsenstein share. The ambitions of the Palatine Counts of the Rhine, recognizable from the middle of the century, to take possession of the castle also became important, which began in 1358/66 with the acquisition of the right of opening. Similarly, due to internal family disputes, disagreements among the commoners, and not least financial difficulties, another share fell to the Diocese of Speyer in 1405. The preserved written sources, especially the castle peace treaties, testify to the attempts of the now three owner parties – the Counts of Zweibrücken-Bitsch, the Lords of Ochsenstein, and the Diocese of Speyer – to sustainably regulate their castle community.

Although Landeck had been expanded at the end of the 15th century, the peasants of the Alsatian Kolbenhaufen conquered the complex in the Palatine Peasants' War in 1525 and burned it down. However, the damage caused at that time was apparently repaired. After the extinction of the Lords of Ochsenstein in 1485 and the Counts of Zweibrücken-Bitsch-Lichtenberg in 1570, the Palatine Electors were able to initially increase their share of ownership to three quarters and finally complete it in 1709 through an exchange with the Diocese of Speyer. Until the French Revolution, the Electoral Palatinate was to remain the sole owner of Landeck, which, however, had since been destroyed. When this destruction by French troops occurred, contrary to the common opinion that names the year 1689, cannot be clearly determined, but it is likely to have happened earlier, in 1680.

After falling to the Bavarian state after the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the impressive castle ruin is now one of the objects managed by "Burgen, Schlösser, Altertümer Rheinland-Pfalz" (Castles, Palaces, Antiquities of Rhineland-Palatinate). The Landeckverein, founded in 1881, has rendered special services to the preservation and promotion of the complex.