Schmidtburg

Schmidtburg stands above Schneppenbach, Germany, and was built by Frankish nobles.

The site is said to have been founded in 926 by three Frankish nobles, Franco, Hunpert and Norpolt, as a strongpoint against Hungarian raids. The castle enters the written record in 1084 when a new owner, Emicho, is named. His descendant Emicho II inherited the place and took the epithet Comes silvestris, literally “count of the forest.” Over time Schmidtburg became one of the ancestral seats of the family known as the Wildgrafen.

By the mid and late thirteenth century the Wildgrafen’s holdings had been divided, with documented property partitions in 1258 and again in 1277 that produced several family branches. Feuding between the branch associated with Schmidtburg and the branch linked to Kyrburg led to outside arbitration; the contested fief was assigned to Baldwin, Elector-Archbishop of Trier. When the Schmidtburg line died out, Baldwin seized the castle as an escheated fief. The Wildgrafen continued armed attempts to regain the site, but these efforts failed through 1342. After that date the castle served the Elector-Archbishop of Trier as a regional fortress and as the seat of an administrative district.

In the fourteenth century the lower part of the castle accommodated many knightly households who served the lord as retainers. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries most of those dwellings were abandoned. One family, the Schenk von Schmidtburg, remained and transformed the north‑west corner of the lower enclosure into a largely independent sub-complex. The lower castle continued to decline through the sixteenth century. In 1688 French forces destroyed the remaining fortifications during the Palatine War of Succession. After that attack only a single residential house and one economic building remained standing, and those two structures were used by the district’s administrators until the end of the eighteenth century.

Tradition records two further associations: the ruin may stand on fourth‑century Roman foundations, and the outlaw Johannes Bückler, known as Schinderhannes, is suspected to have sheltered at the site while fleeing gendarmes.