Obere Burg Pfullingen
Pfullingen, The county of Reutlingen
The castle was located in the southern settlement area of medieval Pfullingen and was used by the city’s noble family. For a long time, locals as well as historians thought that the Obere Burg was home to the “Count of Pfullichgau,” who was said to have come from the so-called “Pfullinger Grafenhaus.” As of today, there is no proof of such a Grafenhaus to have ever existed in the area of Pfullingen. A noble family must have lived in Pfullingen in the 11th century. However, whether said family lived in the Obere Burg or whether the castle already existed at that point in time also remains a mystery. In the 13th century, a knightly family called “of Pfullingen” is mentioned, but cannot definitely be connected to the aforementioned family. Nevertheless, they owned the castle as a fief of the Greifenstein family.
All in all, this means that important basic knowledge about the castle, such as when it was built and by who, is still missing. In 1338, a so-called Mechthild of Pfullingen owned the Obere Burg, but, again, it is unclear whether she and her family inhabited it or whether it was even intact at the time. Like other Greifenstein castles, it could have been destroyed in the Reichskrieg, or, at the very latest, must have fallen in the War of Cities in 1388, because afterwards it was described as a Burgstall. With the help of old place names, the archivist Wilhelm Kinkelin was able to narrow down its approximate location. It is therefore known that the majority of the castle’s remains must have been gone by 1521, when a new garden was laid out at its estimated site. Any other visible traces seemingly got erased at the beginning of the 20th century, when the site was used to extract building material.