Burg Gieboldehausen

Burg Gieboldehausen stands in the municipality of Gieboldehausen, Germany, and was created during the medieval period, probably in the 1200s by local German secular or ecclesiastical authorities.

The area belonged in the early and high Middle Ages to the Saxon Liesgau. The locality appears in the written record in 1003 when King Heinrich II stayed there, and an entry for 919 indicates the place may have come into the hands of a clerical institution, probably the religious foundation Stift Gandersheim. A later tradition preserved in a 1256 duplicature claims that a castle belonging to a Count Biso was given to Stift Gandersheim and that its stones were reused for the village’s first church; that tradition is recorded only in that duplicature.

The castle itself was probably erected in the 13th century, and possibilities proposed for its builders include the Dukes of Brunswick or the Bishops of Hildesheim. The site first appears in wartime records in 1291, when it was captured and demolished during the Herlingsberger War fought between Bishop Siegfried II of Hildesheim and the Dukes of Brunswick and Lüneburg. By 1315 the place served as the administrative centre for local bailiffs, and it later continued in that role under officials appointed by Brunswick and then by Mainz.

Control of the castle and its jurisdiction passed gradually to the Archbishopric of Mainz, formally recorded in 1342. In 1377 Archbishop Adolf of Mainz pledged the site to Burchard von Medem and required an outlay of 400 marks for construction work. In 1403 forces of the Dukes of Brunswick besieged and partly ruined the castle; a peace settlement of 1405 returned it to Mainz. A documentary note from 1418 orders Adolf von Nassau to carry out restoration. An inventory drawn up in 1485 lists weapons, household goods, livestock, a mill and a brewery at the place, showing it remained a functioning administrative centre and estate.

In the later sixteenth century houses were built on the former burgh area, recorded in 1563 and again in 1588. During the Thirty Years’ War the castle was destroyed in 1622 by troops of the Duke of Brunswick. After 1673 the site was rebuilt and once more used as an administrative seat, but remaining medieval structures were removed by demolition in 1806. An administrative house and associated buildings that stood on the site burned in 1850. Four years later, in 1854, a Hanoverian administrative building was erected on the former castle area; that building was later occupied as a Prussian district court.