Impregnable. That was the word for the rock above the Vienne, and for a long time it held. The Forteresse Royale de Chinon runs about four hundred meters along a tuffeau spur in Indre-et-Loire, over the medieval crossing into Touraine. Whoever held the ridge held the road from Tours. Henry II of

The throne hall has no throne. A church-like apse was built at its north end to hold one, and the throne was never made. That is the honest shape of Neuschwanstein, and this timeline is the reason for it. Ludwig II came to the Bavarian throne in 1864 at eighteen. He visited the restored Wartb

Six in the evening, August 17, 1661. Louis XIV arrives from Fontainebleau with his mother and some six hundred courtiers. Nicolas Fouquet, superintendent of finances, had built Vaux-le-Vicomte to flatter his king, and he had spent four years doing it. Charles Le Brun personally guided the royal

184,000 Mark, spent on doing as little as possible. That is what Count Karl zu Eltz laid out between 1845 and 1888 on his family's castle above the Elzbach, roughly fifteen million euros in today's money by the castle's own reckoning. What makes the work unusual is not the sum. It is

1623. The finest library in the Palatinate is carried over the Alps and presented to the Pope. The Bibliotheca Palatina had been assembled at the Reformed court of the Electors Palatine at the Heidelberger Schloss. Tilly's Catholic League army stormed the town in 1622, and the library went s

A rhinoceros put this island on the map. King Manuel of Portugal was shipping the animal to Pope Leo X as a gift. When the ship put in at Marseille the beast was set down on the little island of If to wait, and crowds rowed out to gawp at it. François I was among them. He crossed on January 2

Three German emperors came out of this family. Not one of them held a court in the castle built to celebrate it. Hohenzollern Castle stands at 855 meters on an isolated limestone cone in the Swabian Jura, with no town at its feet, no river below it and no other high ground competing with its sil

Mary Shelley was seventeen and a few days old when her boat tied up for a night at Gernsheim in 1814. Gernsheim is a Rhine town about sixteen kilometers from Frankenstein Castle. In clear weather a traveler might just make out towers on the distant hills. That is the whole of the geographic conn