A Late Gothic castle, the Albrechtsburg was built between 1471 and roughly 1495. It is situated in the German state of Saxony, in the heart of Meissen. It is next to the Meissen Cathedral, perched on a hill above the Elbe River. During the Siege of Gana in 929, King Henry I of Germany defeated the Glomacze tribe and established a castle on a rock above the Elbe river, where their village was located. This castle, named Misnia after a local creek, served as both the center of town and the home of the Margraves of Meissen starting in 965. The Margraves of Meissen went on to win the Electorate of Saxony in 1423. Frederick I was named Elector of Saxony in 1423. Ernst and Albrecht, his grandchildren, ruled over Thuringia and Saxony combined from 1464 to 1485. In 1471, they hired renowned builder Arnold von Westfalen to construct the first German palace on the site of the former margravial castle. Court of Wettin never really made Albrechtsburg Castle its center. The builders agreed on a split of their domain in 1485, while work was still ongoing. The united administration of the two brothers was disbanded, and the territory was split in half. Ernst, brother of Albrecht, gained the remaining Thuringian territories and the Duchy of Saxony with Wittenberg, to which the electorate was connected, while Albrecht received practically the Margraviate of Meissen with the freshly constructed castle and the eventual Thuringian district. Construction was suspended in the higher northern regions between 1495 and 1500 while internal finishing work was being completed. These lands were not finished until 1521 by Jakob Heilmann, the son of Duke Albrecht, Duke Georg, 1500–1539. The first floor of the northeastern structure features a loop ribbed vault in the style of the Prague-based architect Benedikt Ried, and the room above features a fireplace that dates from this era. During that period, the balustrades of the Great Staircase Tower required figural reliefs by sculptor Christoph Walther I, whose frames feature early Renaissance forms. In 1676, the castle was dubbed Albrechtsburg in honor of one of its founding lords. However, Georg the Bearded, son of Albrecht, was the one who initially moved inside Albrechtsburg Castle. The castle suffered severe damage during the Thirty Years War. It is been vacant ever since. Only in the early 1700s, after Augustus II the Strong established the Meissen porcelain factory at the castle in 1710, did Albrechtsburg Castle come back into the public eye. European porcelain was invented two years earlier by Johann Friedrich Böttger and Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus. Originally, Dresden was to be the factory, but Augustus the Strong decided on the abandoned castle because to its remote position because no other place would have had such a firm grasp on the formula for producing porcelain. The white gold became internationally known when the porcelain business moved into the erstwhile princely house on June 6, 1710. The castle was abandoned once more in the middle of the 1800s when the factory was relocated to a brand-new factory structure. The old manufacturing buildings were demolished and the castle is architecture was reconstructed between 1864 and 1870. Extensive paintings adorned the late Gothic walls, taking the place of the missing furnishings. Afterwards, the Frankfurt-based, well-known artist Alexander Linnemann was also involved in this process, helping to design the new doors, for example. The Albrechtsburg Castle was opened to the public at the close of the 1800s and continues to be a popular destination for both domestic and foreign tourists
[Information and Image Credit : Albrechtsburg, Wikipedia]
[Wikipedia-Link : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albrechtsburg ]
[Image : Albrechtsburg and Meissen Cathedral on the Elbe river; Wikipedia-Image-Author: Stephan Hoppe ]
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#Castles#History
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Monuments and Architecture
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