Qualla: Wartburg

Wartburg: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Metilsteiner, CC BY 3.0. The story goes that Louis the Springer wanted this ridge badly enough to cheat for it. The hill above Eisenach was not quite inside his territory, so he had baskets of clay carried up from land he did own and spread across the summit, which allowed him to swear on oath that his castle stood on his own soil. Whether he really did it or not, the manoeuvre suits the place. For nearly a thousand years the Wartburg has been a stage for people determined to change the facts on the ground - a saint, a fugitive monk, five hundred angry students - and it has usually worked.

Read more: Wartburg on Qualla

Image: Metilsteiner | CC BY 3.0

Wartburg: Wait, Mountain

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jörg Braukmann, CC BY-SA 4.0. The foundation was laid around 1067 by Louis, a Thuringian count of Schauenburg, who built it together with its larger sister castle Neuenburg to hold the far edges of his lands. Tradition claims the name came from his first sight of the ridge, when he supposedly shouted "Warte, ...

Read more: Wartburg on Qualla

Image: Jörg Braukmann | CC BY-SA 4.0

Wartburg: Poets on the Payroll

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Metilsteiner, CC BY 3.0. Between 1172 and 1211 the Wartburg was one of the great princely courts of the German Reich, and Landgrave Hermann I spent freely on the finest German poets alive. Walther von der Vogelweide sang here. Wolfram von Eschenbach wrote part of Parzival at the castle in 1203. Out of th...

Read more: Wartburg on Qualla

Image: Metilsteiner | CC BY 3.0

Wartburg: The Girl Sent Up the Hill

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.Savin, FAL. Elisabeth of Hungary arrived at the Wartburg at the age of four, sent by her mother to be raised into a suitable consort for Landgrave Ludwig IV. She lived in the castle from 1211 to 1228 and married Ludwig in 1221, and what the chroniclers remembered was not her rank but her rel...

Read more: Wartburg on Qualla

Image: A.Savin | FAL

Wartburg: Junker Jörg

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Moser (18..-19..? ; photographe). Photographe, Public domain. In May 1521 a party of horsemen ambushed a traveller in the Thuringian forest and carried him off. The abduction was staged, the traveller was Martin Luther - excommunicated by the pope and declared an outlaw by the emperor - and the man who arranged it was his own prince, Freder...

Read more: Wartburg on Qualla

Image: Moser (18..-19..? ; photographe). Photographe | Public domain

Wartburg: The Bonfire and the Backlash

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. On 18 October 1817, around five hundred students from the newly founded Burschenschaften climbed to the Wartburg to mark two anniversaries at once: three hundred years since the Reformation began, and four years since Napoleon's defeat at Leipzig. They wanted a united Germany and...

Read more: Wartburg on Qualla

Image: Public domain