Imperial Palace Gelnhausen

The Imperial Palace at Gelnhausen (called in German Kaiserpfalz Gelnhausen, Pfalz Gelnhausen or Barbarossaburg) is located on a former island in the Kinzig river in Gelnhausen, Hesse, Germany.

The Palace was built during the decades of 1160–1180. The town in its neighbourhood (officially founded in 1170) was closely linked to the palace. The site of the palace was an island in the Kinzig river. The foundation of the walls and buildings was very difficult in such a soft underground and structural stability of the buildings proved a problem until today. The underground was stabilised by about 12,000 wooden poles on which the buildings stand.

Together with the palace an outer bailey was placed on the island containing the houses of the Burgmannen, a settlement in its own right independent from the town of Gelnhausen until the beginning of the 19th century.

The palace lay at the eastern rim of Wetterau, an imperial territory, and enabled its administration together with other imperial castles such as Frankfurt, Friedberg, Wetzlar, Trebur and Seligenstadt. The Gelnhausen palace also controlled the important long-distance highway Via Regia between Frankfurt and Leipzig as it passes through the valley of the Kinzig river.

Both, palace and town, go back to Emperor Frederick I (Barbarossa). The exact date when construction of the palace began was much disputed by historians. Debate revolved around the question of whether the building of the palace took place a few years before the official founding of the royal town in 1170. The relative chronology of the erection of its buildings is known since several decades due to a large amount of Mason's marks on the building site. About 60 different masons have worked on the site but never more than 10 to 20 at the same time. In 1992 it was possible to extract several poles of the wooden sub construction from under the gate building during restoration works.

Three of them could be analyzed by Dendrochronology, all three dating into the winter 1169/70 or the summer of 1170. So, knowing by the Mason's marks that the gate building was erected well into the second half of the building activities it gives the two decades between 1160 and 1180 as the time of construction.

Text adapted from “Imperial Palace, Gelnhausen” on Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Imperial Palace Gelnhausen ranks #5,263 of 8,764 worldwide in the atlas's castle fame ranking, and #437 of the 618 mapped in Germany. Founded 1160, it is older than 81% of the atlas's dated landmarks — one of 593 atlas entries founded in the 12th century. Its Wikipedia articles were opened 1,372 times in the last 60 days, more than 58% of the atlas. 2 more atlas landmarks stand within 25 km. The nearest day-trip guide is Frankfurt, 38 km away. See how Germany compares in the castle statistics.

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