Burg Neukastel

Burg Neukastel stands in Leinsweiler, Germany; it was probably constructed by the Salian dynasty. The castle first appears in a document of 1123 and is recorded in connection with Heinrich von Neukastel. Its name, meaning “new castle,” likely reflects that it was erected as a replacement for or addition to an older fortified site.

In 1246 Isengard, the wife of the imperial seneschal Philipp I von Falkenstein, handed Neukastel together with the imperial regalia kept at nearby Trifels to King Conrad IV. After that transfer Neukastel served as an imperial castle charged with helping to protect Trifels. By 1252 and 1253 Ludwig von Schüpf, who had been bailiff of the Speyergau since 1232, took his title from the castle, indicating its local administrative importance.

In 1307 Nikolaus von Speyer received Neukastel as a fief. Two years later, in 1309, King Henry VII granted the castle and the bailiwick in the Speyergau to Count Georg I of Veldenz, obliging him to invest 1,200 Pfund Heller drawn from the Jewish tax in Landau and from the toll in Germersheim into the castles Trifels and Neukastel. In 1330 Emperor Louis the Bavarian pawned Neukastel, among other holdings, for 6,000 marks of silver to the Palatine counts Rudolf II and Ruprecht I. By 1353 the castle was divided as an imperial fief within the Palatine family and was further sub-pledged.

The 1410 division of the Palatine comital seat assigned Neukastel to Duke Stephan, the founder of the Palatinate-Zweibrücken line. The castle suffered significant damage during the Peasants’ War in 1525; the Dukes of Palatinate-Zweibrücken carried out partial rebuilding afterward, although a proposed new circular artillery platform was never completed. In 1555 the administrative seat (Oberamt) was transferred from Neukastel to Burgschloss Bergzabern. Neukastel sustained further severe damage during the Thirty Years’ War, 1618–1648. French troops delivered the final destruction in 1689 during the War of the Palatine Succession; since that year the site has remained a ruin. At the foot of the hill the former manor farm was reconstructed in 1828 on the castle’s older foundations and survives today as the Slevogthof Neukastel.