Bissingen Castle

Bissingen Castle is a three-story, gabled rectangular building with a volute gable and square bay towers that transition into octagons on the third floor. It is located in the market town of Bissingen in the district of Dillingen an der Donau. The castle and church dominate the town and are visible from afar.

Around 1140, the first documented evidence of local nobility with Ruodbert von Bissingen. After a checkered past, Bissingen, which was owned by, among others, the Counts of Oettingen and the Lords Schenk von Schenkenstein, came into the possession of the Augsburg mercenary leader and city captain Sebastian Schertlin von Burtenbach in 1557, who had the castle built there for his son Hans:

The project was completed in 1560 and secured with a wall a few years later. The representative building characterized Bissingen as the central place in the Hohenburg-Bissingen dominion (Kreis- und Stadtsparkasse Dillingen 2003, p. 9).

Just eight years after the completion of the castle, Baron Konrad von Bemelberg the Younger acquired the small dominion of Hohenburg-Bissingen in 1568 after the death of his father Konrad von Bemelberg the Elder in 1567. In 1661, it returned to the possession of the Counts of Oettingen-Wallerstein, who had ruled there 200 years prior. The castle served several times as a widow's residence for Oettingen princesses. Until 1971, it housed the Princely Wallerstein Forestry Office.

Of the 16th-century castle complex, the castle building, the castle courtyard with some outbuildings, and two towers, the so-called Schertlin Towers, which probably served as corner towers of the castle courtyard, still exist.

Today, the castle is privately owned.