Qualla: Stickhausen Castle

Stickhausen Castle: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dickelbers, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1744, Frederick the Great looked at a map of his newly acquired East Frisian territories and decided one particular castle was no longer worth feeding. The order went out: raze Stickhausen. Hessian fortifications, Mansfeld's mercenary outworks, a three-winged main castle with corner tower, batteries, barracks, a powder tower, a ravelin between the moat and the Jümme river — all of it came down. What survived the Prussian wrecking crew was the part nobody could quite bring themselves to topple: a single round brick tower built by Count Edzard I in 1498, squat and stubborn at the river's edge. It is still there today, the lone Roman numeral left from a fortress that once read like an entire timeline.

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Image: Dickelbers | CC BY-SA 3.0

Stickhausen Castle: A Hamburg Outpost on the Jümme

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Matthias Süßen, CC BY-SA 4.0. Stickhausen began not as the seat of an East Frisian chieftain, like most castles in the region, but as a trade-route checkpoint built by a city a hundred miles away. Around 1345, Hamburg commissioned the fortification to protect its westbound merchant traffic. The Jümme and the ...

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Image: Matthias Süßen | CC BY-SA 4.0

Stickhausen Castle: Edzard's Tower and the Siege That Followed

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit pixelfehler, CC BY-SA 3.0. Hamburg eventually tired of holding the place and, around 1453, pledged it to the local chieftains and then to Count Ulrich I of East Frisia. The castle changed character. It became a counts' residence, then a counts' problem. Around 1498, Count Edzard I added the brick round tow...

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Image: pixelfehler | CC BY-SA 3.0

Stickhausen Castle: Thirty Years of Foreign Boots

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Matthias Süßen at de.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Thirty Years' War turned Stickhausen into a passing trophy. Between 1622 and 1624, the feared mercenary troops of Ernst von Mansfeld occupied the castle and improved its defenses with new outworks. The counts of East Frisia got it back briefly before Hessian troops moved in f...

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Image: Matthias Süßen at de.wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Stickhausen Castle: What Frederick Spared

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hesse1309, CC BY-SA 3.0. Prussia inherited East Frisia in 1744 and inherited Stickhausen with it. To Frederick, it was a redundant inland fortress whose strategic logic had expired centuries earlier, and his crews leveled almost everything. The substation, ironically, survived by ceasing to be military —...

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Image: Hesse1309 | CC BY-SA 3.0