Burg Schloßböckelheim

Burg Schloßböckelheim sits on a mountainside at Schloßböckelheim, Germany, and was probably built in the ninth century on top of an earlier Roman settlement.

The place appears in a document of 824 under the name Becchilenheim. Around the turn of the first millennium a later record names a Duke Cuno of Beckilnheim, an individual most likely to be Konrad of Swabia according to that account.

In the eleventh century the castle was held as an imperial fief by Duke Gottfried III of Upper Lorraine, obtained through Mathilde of Swabia. In 1046 Emperor Henry III besieged and destroyed the stronghold and confiscated the fief after Gottfried’s rebellion. It is considered likely that in 1065 the fief over Böckelheim, together with the imperial estate at Kreuznach, passed into the possession of the Bishopric of Speyer, with Count Eberhard VI of Nellenburg acting as the bishopric’s vassal at that time.

In 1105 the castle was the scene of a dramatic political event when Emperor Henry IV was held captive there by his son Henry V and compelled to abdicate; immediately before this Henry V had appointed the Hirsau abbot Gebhard as Bishop of Speyer. The fief later passed through Adalbert of Mörsberg into the hands of the Counts of Sponheim. After a partition within that family Heinrich of Sponheim-Dannenfels sold the castle to the Archbishop of Mainz, and disputes over the site and its rights erupted. Those conflicts culminated in the feud known as the Battle of Sprendlingen in 1279, after which the castle became a permanent possession of the Electorate of Mainz.

Under Mainz administration the management of Sobernheim and other Mainz holdings on the middle Nahe river was transferred from Disibodenberg to the castle, creating the Böckelheim administrative district. In 1327 the Rhine count Siegfried II used the title Burgrave of Böckelheim, and in 1388 Antilmann von Scharfenstein died while serving as the castle’s administrator. Following further changes in ownership, the site was ceded to the Electoral Palatinate in 1471. French troops completely destroyed the castle in 1688 at the start of the Palatine Succession Wars.