The Last One Standing

It wasn’t the prettiest medieval castle on the Rhine, or the biggest, or the richest, or the most famous. But the Marksburg is the only castle in the whole middle-Rhine region that didn’t get destroyed. All the others had to be built up from ruins at one point or another. That makes the Marksburg uniquely valuable to an author like me.

Joe wasn’t that thrilled with the Marksburg, but that was because he had to see it on a guided tour and didn’t have time to set up any of those gorgeous photographs he does so well. Me, I don’t set up gorgeous photographs. I just point and click. So I thoroughly enjoyed the tour.

This isn’t a narrow room. It’s a window seat set into a wall that’s over eleven feet (3,5 m) thick! That’s a lot of wall, and it’s one of the reasons the Marksburg was never taken in battle.

I learned two truly wonderful things on the guided tour. The first is that the Marksburg belonged for several hundred years to the Grafen von Katzenelnbogen–the Counts of Cat’s-Elbow. No, they didn’t get the name because of cats or their constituent parts; in the ancient past, it was Cattimelibocus, which means something entirely different. But I think Cat’s-Elbow is a splendid name. I’ll have to work it into a book somewhere.

The second wonderful thing I learned is that when a king’s or high-ranking nobleman’s ship floated down the Rhine, a castle was required to fire its cannons in salute (without cannon balls, naturally). A salute is a pretty idea in principle, but there are over sixty castles on the middle Rhine, each one firing its own salute. To paraphrase Scott Adams, that has ‘long day’ written all over it.

Photographs taken in September, 2011, at the Marksburg, Germany. Text and photographs copyright 2011 by Clare B. Dunkle.