Ziegenhain

Ziegenhain was the seat of a county in the Schwalm valley of northern Hesse. Its counts appear in a document of 1144, and the town received municipal rights in 1274, a few decades after its neighbour Treysa had been granted the same privileges. The neighbouring town of Treysa also belonged to the counts, who fortified it in the twelfth century. When the last count died in 1450, the county passed to the landgraves of Hesse.

The Hessian rulers remodelled Ziegenhain's castle as a residence in 1470. Between 1537 and 1548 Landgrave Philip I transformed it into a fortress surrounded by a moat, replacing the earlier residence with a more formidable work. Its defences made the former count's seat a stronghold of the Hessian lands in the age of the Reformation.