History
Saalfeld is one of the historic towns of Thuringia, possibly founded by the 7th century around a Thuringii (Gothic) fortress today called Hoher Schwarm or Sorbenburg (Sorbs' Castle). The area was first mentioned in a 899 deed. Kitzerstein Castle standing on an eminence above the Saale River, was said to have been originally erected by the German King Henry the Fowler, although the present-day building was not built before the 16th century. In 1012 the last Ottonian emperor Henry II ceded the former Carolingian Kaiserpfalz to Count Palatine Ezzo of Lotharingia, whose daughter Richeza bequested it to the Archbishops of Cologne.
According to the local chronicler Lambert of Hersfeld, Archbishop Anno II of Cologne in 1071 established a Bendictine abbey here, which quickly became an ecclesiastical centre in eastern Thuringia but was destroyed during the German Peasants' War in 1526. A Franciscan monastery was established about 1250, which also was dissolved during the Protestant Reformation. The Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick Barbarossa had ordered the lay-out of an Imperial city, parts of its medieval walls and bastions are preserved up to today. Nevertheless the citizens in 1208 had to receive town privileges from the hands of the Counts of Schwarzburg as their feudal lords.
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