Untere Burg Unterbalbach

The Untere Burg Unterbalbach was a water castle near Unterbalbach, a village close to Lauda-Königshofen in the Main-Tauber district of Baden-Württemberg. It stood apart from the Upper Castle of Unterbalbach, which shared the same small settlement. Both castles belonged to the same noble families over the centuries, including the Truchsess von Baldersheim and the Sützel von Mergentheim. In 1590 the whole estate passed to the Teutonic Order after earlier changes in ownership. The castle’s final chapter came in 1523 when it was destroyed by the Swabian League. The League sent ten thousand foot soldiers and a thousand horsemen, supported by a hundred cannons and thirty arquebuses, to wipe out thirty-two strongholds belonging to the robber knight Hans Thomas von Absberg. Rüd Sützel, who had backed Absberg, lost his home at Unterbalbach on 17 June 1523 when the League’s artillery set the buildings ablaze. The scene was recorded by the artist Hans Wandereisen, whose woodcut shows the castle surrounded by a wooden palisade and a moat, with three towers and a gatehouse already in flames. Today the site lies beneath a modern housing estate. The old watercourses have been channelled and the ground levelled, so that the former moats and ramparts have disappeared. Only the street name ‘Untere Burg’ and a medieval cellar in one of the neighbouring buildings still mark the castle’s footprint. The woodcut remains the clearest picture of how the fortress once looked.