Cultural heritage D-6-5821-0054 in Geiselbach

The remains of a medieval water castle stand in the centre of Geiselbach, a village in Lower Franconia. The site occupied a small spring-fed pool below the church and the vicarage, surrounded by a low earthen rampart. Historians believe the castle was built in the 13th century by the Abbey of Seligenstadt, which held the village after 1269. The fortress served as the local Vogtei seat until the monastery lost its lands in 1802. A legend recorded by the Aschaffenburg mayor Adalbert von Herrlein tells of a noblewoman and her two sons whose feud ended in mutual killing. After the Peasants’ War of 1525 the abbot himself came to Geiselbach to reissue the village’s laws from the fortified house. By the early 19th century it had become the vicarage and was finally demolished in 1855. Excavations in the 1950s uncovered the foundations of the rectangular house and its surrounding moat. Old maps from 1618 and 1726 show the same simple building inside a roughly square enclosure. Today only the faint traces of the rampart and the filled-in pool remain, yet the site still marks the spot where the village’s medieval rulers once held court.