Sigmaringen

Sigmaringen lies on the upper Danube beneath a castle perched on a rocky height. The castle was already strong enough to resist a siege by King Rudolf of Swabia in 1077, and the town was founded in 1250. Rebuilt as a palace in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, it became the residence of a Hohenzollern line after Count Karl received the county in 1535. The house secured Sigmaringen and Veringen by agreement in 1540.

The Thirty Years' War reached the castle in 1632, when Swedish troops occupied it. Imperial forces drove them out, but the Swedes returned under Gustaf Horn in 1633; a fire destroyed the eastern part of the palace. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Amalie Zephyrine of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen used her connections in Paris to help preserve the principality during Napoleon's reorganisation of Germany. From 1806 Sigmaringen was the capital of a sovereign principality, and new streets and princely buildings enlarged the town.