Burg Kreuzberg

Burg Kreuzberg stands above the municipality of Altenahr in modern Germany. It is first recorded in 893 as Cruceberg in the Prümer Urbar and developed into a manorial residence after the Counts of Are established a steward’s dwelling on the hill around 1100.

In the later Middle Ages Archbishop Konrad von Are‑Hochstaden granted the site in fief to Kuno von Vischenich, who built there with the archbishop’s support. In April 1343 Kuno and his wife Guda yielded the castle to the Archbishopric of Cologne and were enfeoffed with it again, after which it functioned as an Offenhaus in the archbishop’s domain.

Kuno died in 1343 without heirs; Guda remarried Konrad von Schöneck in 1346 and the estate passed to the Schöneck family. The main defensive tower is often dated to the fifteenth century but may belong to the castle’s fourteenthcentury fabric. By the early fifteenth century the lordship was divided and the site became a Ganerbenburg shared by coheirs; over the next two and a half centuries ownership passed through many regional noble families.

In 1659 Johann Arnold Quadt von Wickrath reunited the lordship by purchase. French troops destroyed the castle in 1686, and after a succession of transfers the property was rebuilt in stages: a residential block was rebuilt in 1760, the tower received a new roof in 1781, and the present chapel was built in the 1780s under the von der Heyden family.

The estate passed by marriage into the von Boeselager family in 1820, who used it as a hunting lodge and later as a residence. The complex served as an airraid shelter during the Second World War and survived the conflict. Mid twentiethcentury adaptations converted the bergfried for habitation and linked it to the residential block; the von Boeselager family continues to own and live at the castle.