Trausnitz Castle

By StoneKeep Atlas · Published May 26, 2026 · Last updated November 5, 2026 · Editorial standards

Trausnitz Castle crowns the Hofberg (about 460 meters above sea level) above the Altstadt of Landshut, the spur where Duke Ludwig I of Bavaria, called “the Kelheimer,” began building a Wittelsbach Stammburg in 1204, the same year he founded the city below it. For more than two and a half centuries the castle served as the primary residence of the Bavaria-Landshut dukes, hosting Emperor Friedrich II in 1235 and the eight-day royal wedding of George the Rich and Hedwig Jagiellon in 1475. In 1568, sixty-five years after the duchy was absorbed by Bavaria-Munich in 1503, Crown Prince Wilhelm V arrived to translate the medieval Stammburg into a Florentine-Mannerist residence, a project that produced the Narrentreppe, a stairwell painted with full-figure commedia dell’arte characters.

That tension between medieval bone structure and Renaissance overlay, between northern Wittelsbach authority and Italian artistic ambition, makes Trausnitz Castle one of Bavaria’s most layered residences. Three principal campaigns built it: the Romanesque-Gothic core of 1204–1255, the Rich-Dukes’ 15th-century expansion, and Wilhelm V’s Italianisation of 1573–1581. Each still reads distinctly across the castle’s courtyards and stair towers.

Quick Facts

In 1204, Duke Ludwig I of Bavaria decided that a wooded spur above the Isar was the right place for a Wittelsbach Stammburg. In October 1573, his descendant Crown Prince Wilhelm V decided that an Italian-trained court painter and his Florentine workshop were the right team to translate that medieval shell into a Renaissance residence. Today the medieval ring-wall, the Wittelsbacher Turm Bergfried, and the ducal apartments of Bavaria-Landshut survive intact; the Italian arcaded loggia and the famous Narrentreppe survive in spite of a catastrophic 1961 fire that destroyed nearly everything they framed. Together they record how Italian Renaissance court culture entered Bavaria at Landshut, on the Hofberg, while Wilhelm V lived there as Crown Prince between 1568 and 1579, before he took his patronage to Munich.

Foundation and the Stauferzeit (1204–1255)

According to the annals of Hermann von Niederaltaich, Duke Ludwig I, called “the Kelheimer,” began building castle and town at Landshut in 1204. Excavations under the Damenstock in 2001–2002 documented two earlier wooden fortifications on the same spur, the more recent dating from the 9th or 10th century, so the Hofberg had a defensive history of at least 300 years before Ludwig arrived. His new stone castle rose quickly: a high keep, a ring wall, a chapel, and a long palas. By 1235, when Emperor Friedrich II visited Landshut, Burg Trausnitz was essentially complete. For the next two decades it served as a center of imperial politics and of Staufer court culture, with the Minnesänger Walther von der Vogelweide and Tannhäuser said to have performed in its halls. Around 1227 the duke’s granddaughter Elisabeth of Bavaria, future German queen through her marriage to Konrad IV, King of the Romans and of Sicily and Jerusalem, was born inside its walls. After Otto II’s death in 1253, the first Bavarian partition (1255) created the Duchy of Lower Bavaria with its seat at Trausnitz, and the castle settled into the role it would play for the next 250 years.

The Rich Dukes of Bavaria-Landshut (1255–1503)

From 1255 to 1503, Trausnitz was the residence and seat of government of the dukes of Bavaria-Landshut. Under the third Bavarian partition of 1392, the duchy emerged as one of three Wittelsbach territories, and its rulers earned the byname die reichen Herzöge, “the Rich Dukes”: Heinrich XVI (1393–1450), Ludwig IX (1450–1479), and Georg (1479–1503). Their 15th-century building campaign gave the castle most of its present footprint. New ranges rose around the inner courtyard — the Neue Kemenate, the Neue Dürnitz, the Fürstenbau — and the medieval ring wall gained an additional story, new defensive towers, and a deep well sunk through the spur. The upper stories and roof of the keep, now known as the Wittelsbacher Turm, also date from this campaign.

In 1475, the second of the Rich Dukes oversaw the celebration that still defines Landshut’s cultural memory. Ludwig IX’s son Georg married Hedwig Jagiellonica, daughter of King Casimir IV of Poland, in eight days of festivities centred on St. Martin’s parish church in the town below. Archbishop Bernhard von Rohr of Salzburg officiated. The wedding was at once a sacrament and a foreign-policy statement: a Wittelsbach–Jagiellonen alliance positioned against Ottoman expansion, witnessed by Emperor Friedrich III, two prince-electors, and a guest list that the Brandenburg chronicler Johann Gensbein later estimated at 18,000. Hans Seybolt, a former scribe to the Cistercian nuns of Landshut, wrote the most important account in 1482, a detailed commissioned work drawing on the ducal chancellery’s records (now Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Codex germanicus monacensis 331). When Georg died without a male heir in 1503, the Landshut War of Succession (1504–1505) ended Bavaria-Landshut as a separate duchy. Albrecht IV’s primogeniture law of 1506 directed all subsequent ducal succession through Munich, and Trausnitz was demoted from capital to satellite.

Wilhelm V and the Italian Translation (1568–1579)

On February 22, 1568, the 19-year-old Wilhelm V married Renata of Lorraine in Munich in an 18-day celebration set to music by Orlande de Lassus. The new ducal couple then took up residence not at the principal court in Munich but at Trausnitz, where Wilhelm would live for the next eleven years as Crown Prince. In October 1573, on Hans Fugger’s recommendation from Augsburg, he called the painter and architect Friedrich Sustris and his collaborator Antonio Ponzano to the castle. Born in Padua, trained by Vasari in Florence, and recently employed on the decoration of the Fuggerhäuser am Zeugplatz, Sustris would spend the next eight years translating a Wittelsbach Stammburg into a Florentine-Mannerist residence.

Sustris did not work alone. By 1575 he had been joined by his brother-in-law Alessandro Scalzi (called il Paduano), the Florentine stuccoist Carlo di Cesare del Palagio, and the local Werkmeister Georg Stern the Younger. Stern completed the Italienischer Anbau, an Italian annex on the west side of the Fürstenbau, in 1575: a rectangular loggia containing a staircase, cabinets on each floor, and coffered vaults painted with Italian Renaissance ornament. Around 1578, Sustris designed two-story arcades to front the west and north façades of the inner courtyard, completing the unified composition that turned the medieval Burghof into a Schlosshof. The arcades themselves were installed by his workshop in 1587, six years after Sustris had followed Wilhelm to Munich.

The set piece of the campaign survives largely intact. Between 1575 and 1579, on a staircase connecting the courtyard to the prince’s living quarters, Sustris designed and Scalzi painted what is now called the Narrentreppe, the “Fool’s Staircase.” Life-size figures from the Italian commedia dell’arte ascend the stairwell walls: the Venetian merchant Pantalone on a donkey, his servant Zanni following behind, a Dottore with a urine flask, a chorus of masked players. Antonio Ponzano painted the grotesque masks of Pantalone and Zanni on the surrounding stucco. The Bayerische Schlösserverwaltung describes the cycle as the earliest monumental in-situ pictorial record of commedia dell’arte north of the Alps, commemorating the Italian troupe of court musicians who had performed at Wilhelm’s 1568 Munich wedding and was chronicled by Massimo Troiano in his Dialoghi (Venice, 1569). At Trausnitz, more than at the Stadtresidenz that Duke Ludwig X had built in the town a generation earlier as the first Italian-Renaissance palazzo north of the Alps, Wilhelm V was rehearsing the visual language he would later deploy on a far larger scale in Munich.

Renaissance Decline and Ludwig II’s Apartments (1579–1918)

When Albrecht V died on October 24, 1579, Wilhelm succeeded him as duke and moved the court to Munich. Sustris followed two years later as Kunstintendant, taking on the Antiquarium, the Wilhelminische Veste, and (from 1583) the Jesuit Michaelskirche. Trausnitz, now the secondary residence, settled into long centuries of quiet utility. During the Thirty Years’ War, Swedish forces occupied the castle twice, in 1632 under King Gustav Adolf and in 1634 under Duke Bernhard of Weimar, and damaged its outbuildings. In the 18th century, the castle’s halls were converted in turn into barracks, a wool-and-silk manufactory, and finally archive space; from 1809 to 2016 the Fürstenbau housed the Lower Bavarian State Archives.

One 19th-century episode interrupted the decline. Between 1869 and 1873, King Ludwig II of Bavaria commissioned a private apartment on the second floor of the Fürstenbau, fitted out by the Munich cabinetmaker Anton Pössenbacher in the eclectic Neo-Renaissance style that would soon define Neuschwanstein and Linderhof. Ludwig used the rooms only as an occasional Absteigequartier, a stop-over apartment for his journeys between Munich and the Bavarian forest. After his death in 1886 and the end of the monarchy in 1918, the apartment passed into the care of the Bayerische Schlösserverwaltung along with the rest of the castle, and would remain largely untouched for another four decades.

Fire and Reconstruction (1961–1978)

At four o’clock on the morning of October 21, 1961, a forgotten electric immersion heater used to warm cleaning water set fire to the Fürstenbau. Landshut’s volunteer brigade arrived within minutes and at first appeared to contain the blaze, but flames smoldered through the wooden floors between stories and erupted upward in what eyewitnesses described as an explosion. Professional brigades from Munich and Regensburg, the Technisches Hilfswerk, the Bundeswehr, and the Bavarian Red Cross all converged on the castle. Three firefighters were injured by collapsing chimneys; one of them, the 52-year-old Landshut firefighter Ludwig Denner, died of his injuries in hospital days later. The contents of the chapel and the state archive holdings were carried out in time. Inside, the Fürstenbau collapsed in on itself, the St.-Georgs-Rittersaal above the chapel burned through, and Ludwig II’s apartments were almost entirely destroyed. About a quarter of the castle’s historical fabric was lost. What survived rescued the campaign of 1573–79 from oblivion: the Narrentreppe in heavily damaged condition, the Italienischer Anbau and arcaded courtyard with smoke damage but structurally sound, and the Burgkapelle St. Georg with its Gothic sculpture and Rich-Dukes altarpieces wholly intact.

Stabilization began immediately. Concrete beams were driven under the entire complex to underpin walls left structurally unsound by the fire, the roofs were rebuilt, and a 13-year program of interior restoration followed. Ground-floor rooms, the chapel, and the Alte and Neue Dürnitz reopened in 1968; the upper-floor rooms in 1973; the Weißer Saal and a new Burgschänke in the Fürstenbau cellar in 1975. In 1978, Europa Nostra recognized the project with its European Heritage Award. Twenty-six years later, in 2004, the restored Damenstock opened as the Kunst- und Wunderkammer Burg Trausnitz, a branch of the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum displaying around 750 objects from the Wittelsbach collections.

Visiting Trausnitz Castle

Trausnitz is open daily and run by the Bayerische Schlösserverwaltung from the Burgverwaltung Landshut office at the castle itself. Hours follow a long summer season and a shorter winter one, with last admission an hour before closing; the dates and hours are in the Admission table below. From May 1 to August 2, 2026, during a special exhibition, regular guided tours were suspended and visitors went round on their own. Castle tickets are sold only at the ticket office at the castle.

Since August 3, 2026, the standing rule has applied again: Monday through Saturday, the castle interior can be visited only on a guided tour, held in German; on Sundays and public holidays, visitors tour on their own. The Kunst- und Wunderkammer is always self-guided. Pricing is consolidated across the whole site and is reviewed annually by the operator.

Admission

From the town center, bus 607 or 627 runs from the Altstadt stop to Kalcherstraße, leaving a walk of about a kilometer up the Hofberg; between March and October, buses on line 607 also stop on request at the Hofgartenparkplatz, about 800 meters’ walk from the castle. The Hofgartenparkplatz itself has a hundred parking spaces. The Burgschänke restaurant occupies the Fürstenbau cellar reopened in 1975. Across the Isar in town, Duke Ludwig X’s Stadtresidenz remains closed for a comprehensive restoration; the Bavarian Finance Ministry has confirmed that the building will reopen in time for the next Landshuter Hochzeit, from June 25 to July 18, 2027. Anyone staying overnight can compare hotels in and around Landshut.

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Common Questions

Is Trausnitz Castle open every day?

Yes, apart from five dates a year. Trausnitz Castle and its Kunst- und Wunderkammer have no weekly closing day and shut only on January 1, Shrove Tuesday (Faschingsdienstag) and December 24, 25 and 31. School classes are a separate case: the castle administration asks them to get in touch and announce their visit in advance, because without notice a visit may not be possible for capacity reasons.

How steep is the walk up to Trausnitz Castle?

Not very, if you start from the signposted castle car park on Pfeifergorigasse. The operator describes the route along Edmund-Jörg-Straße, about 800 meters, as easily passable with only a few inclines and a total height difference of 27 meters. It is asphalt on the street, then compacted gravel across the castle grounds, which are a pedestrian zone, and gravel with river cobbles in the inner courtyard. Seating is provided on the grounds in the summer season.

Is Trausnitz Castle wheelchair accessible?

Only in part. A ramp with an automatic door gives step-free access to the ticket office, an accessible toilet sits in the inner courtyard to the left of it, with the key available at the ticket desk, and the car park has a marked disabled space. The castle rooms are another matter: the tour route is not suitable for wheelchairs, the floors are reached only by stairs, about 30 steps per floor, and some rooms have steps inside. The Kunst- und Wunderkammer is step-free by lift.

Can you take photos inside Trausnitz Castle?

Not during the guided tours of the castle: the Bayerische Schlösserverwaltung states that photography and video recording are not permitted on them. In the Kunst- und Wunderkammer you may take photographs for private use, without flash or tripod, and exterior shots for private purposes are allowed free of charge. Any further photography or filming, and flying a drone or multicopter, as a rule needs a written photo or filming permit from the Bayerische Schlösserverwaltung, which may carry a fee.

What is in the Kunst- und Wunderkammer at Trausnitz Castle?

A museum that recalls the Wittelsbach art cabinets. Duke Albrecht V founded one in Munich in 1565 that held more than 6,000 objects, and his son Wilhelm built up a “Junge Kunstkammer” of his own at Trausnitz, taking it to Munich in 1579 to unite it with his father’s. Today’s display is ordered according to archival records, and the museum introduces the four categories into which nearly all princely cabinets were divided: Artificialia, Naturalia, Exotica and Scientifica.

Is there a ghost tour at Trausnitz Castle?

Yes, though the castle’s Geisterführung is meant only for children aged 6 to 10, without accompanying adults. It takes them into the dungeon of the Wittelsbacher Turm to see pillory and torture instruments, a suit of armor, halberds and the “knight’s toilet”, and it promises that, with luck, they may hear or see the castle ghost, the “White Lady”. Children should bring a flashlight and a jacket, even on warm days. For groups, the castle administration arranges separate ghost and legend tours.

Is there a restaurant at Trausnitz Castle?

Yes. The Burgschänke, a restaurant and bar at the castle, serves modern versions of Bavarian dishes made from regional ingredients and has a terrace looking out over the town. It is closed on Mondays and recommends reserving a table. From October through March it also holds a knight’s banquet for groups of 15 or more, booked at least seven days ahead, with the food served on wooden boards and in clay dishes and eaten with wooden spoons or fingers.

Is the Burg Trausnitz youth hostel at Trausnitz Castle in Landshut?

No. The Jugendherberge Burg Trausnitz is partly housed in a different castle of the same name, in the village of Trausnitz in the Upper Palatinate Forest, overlooking the Pfreimd valley, and the hostel’s own page asks guests not to confuse it with Burg Trausnitz in Landshut. Landshut’s own youth hostel is no alternative either: according to the German Youth Hostel Association, it closed for good on December 19, 2024.

Beyond Trausnitz

Trausnitz sits at the center of a small cluster of Bavarian castles where ducal residence, Renaissance ambition, and post-medieval reinvention intersect. Burghausen Castle, the longest castle in Europe, was Bavaria-Landshut’s second seat and the dynastic counterpart to Trausnitz: where Trausnitz held the ducal court, Burghausen held the gold. Plassenburg Fortress above Kulmbach offers the closest architectural parallel: in the same decade that Sustris was overlaying Florentine Mannerism onto Trausnitz, Caspar Vischer was applying a related Italian vocabulary — a famous arcaded Schöner Hof — to the Hohenzollern fortress. Both projects completed within months of each other in 1579 show two rival south-German dynasties reading the same Italian sources at the same moment.

Further south and east, Coburg Fortress and Marienberg Fortress represent the alternative late-Renaissance path, where defensive purpose dominated over residential refinement. Würzburg Residence and Johannisburg Palace show how the next generation of Bavarian and Franconian rulers would abandon hilltop sites altogether in favor of full Italian palazzo and four-wing Renaissance plans. For a curated tour of these and other Bavarian castles, see our hub on the best castles in Bavaria.

Conclusion

Trausnitz Castle records how Italian Renaissance court culture entered Bavaria. Its medieval shell is the work of the Wittelsbach dukes who built here from 1204; the Italian overlay that made it famous dates from Wilhelm V’s years there as Crown Prince, from 1568 to 1579. The fire of October 21, 1961 gutted the Fürstenbau, but the Narrentreppe, the Italienischer Anbau and the arcaded courtyard survived it, and the restored rooms reopened in stages between 1968 and 1975. What stands today is a medieval Stammburg refitted as a Florentine-Mannerist residence.

Principal Sources

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• Bayerische Schlösserverwaltung. “Burg Trausnitz.” burg-trausnitz.de, accessed May 25, 2026.
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• Schlabach, Nicole. “Prime rappresentazioni della commedia dell’arte. La Scala dei buffoni e il fregio del soffitto dello studiolo del Duca Guglielmo nel Castello di Trausnitz a Landshut.” In La ricezione della commedia dell’arte nell’Europa Centrale 1568-1769, edited by Alberto Martino and Fausto de Michele, 444-474. Pisa and Rome, 2005.

Image credits. Featured aerial and interior photographs by Bayerische Schlösserverwaltung (Veronika Freudling, Maria Scherf), used under institutional editorial license. Historical engraving from Matthäus Merian, Topographia Bavariae (1644), public domain. Atmospheric photography licensed via Adobe Stock. Freely licensed images are resized to fit; any other change, such as a crop, is named in the credit.