Goslar Imperial Palace

The Goslar Imperial Palace — Kaiserpfalz Goslar — stands at the southern edge of Goslar's old town, at the base of the Rammelsberg hill whose silver mines paid for its construction. It is one of the oldest and most completely surviving royal residences in Germany: a Romanesque palace built for the Holy Roman Emperor Henry III in the 1040s, at a time when the Imperial court had no fixed capital but moved between a network of palace sites across the German-speaking territories of the Empire. Goslar was Henry III's preferred residence — he spent more time here than anywhere else in his domain — and he invested proportionally in making the site worthy of that preference.

The palace complex as it survives consists of two principal buildings: the Palas (the great hall, the ceremonial and governmental heart of the palace) and the chapel of Saint Ulrich. The Palas is the more remarkable structure for its scale: a two-storey rectangular building 47 metres long and approximately 15 metres wide, with a ground-level Romanesque arcade and a series of twin-light windows on the upper storey. Most comparable great halls from this period — the Carolingian Aula Regia at Ingelheim, the many other Pfalzen that Henry III and his predecessors used across the Empire — survive only as excavated foundations or in fragmentary form. Goslar's Palas is above ground, substantially intact, and still the largest and most dominant building in the historic town below it. This survival is partly due to luck and partly due to the comprehensive 19th-century restoration that gave the building its current condition.

Henry III died in 1056, aged 38. He had reigned for ten years as Emperor, reaching the peak of Salian dynasty power — he appointed three Popes in a single year in 1046 and held the Empire at its greatest territorial extent. His death at Goslar, where he had spent so much of his reign, was followed by a funerary arrangement that reflects the depth of his attachment to the place: his body was transported to the Cathedral at Speyer, the traditional burial church of the Salian emperors, but his heart was separately entombed in the chapel of Saint Ulrich at the Kaiserpfalz, where it remains nearly a thousand years later. The chapel itself — a centrally planned Romanesque structure with an octagonal crossing — is one of the few places in Europe where this kind of tangible physical connection to an 11th-century emperor is still in place.

The interior of the Palas was substantially transformed in the 1870s and 1890s, when Kaiser Wilhelm I — the first emperor of the newly unified German Empire — commissioned a comprehensive programme of monumental historical paintings by the painter Hermann Wislicenus. The paintings depicted scenes from medieval German imperial history: Otto the Great, Henry III and his successors, the conflicts between Empire and Papacy, the Investiture Controversy. The programme was explicitly nationalistic, using the medieval Holy Roman Empire as the historical ancestor and legitimating precedent for the new Wilhelmine German state. The paintings are in this sense as much a document of the 1870s as of the 1040s — they tell you as much about how late-19th-century Germany conceived of its historical identity as they tell you about the actual events depicted.

The UNESCO World Heritage designation (1992) covers both the historic town of Goslar and the Rammelsberg Mines, which are inseparably connected: the silver deposits at Rammelsberg, extracted continuously from approximately 968 AD to the mine's closure in 1988 — over a thousand years of production — created the wealth that funded the Imperial Palace, the merchants' guilds, and the half-timbered buildings of the old town. The Rammelsberg is a separate visitor site (a short drive south of the old town) with an extensive underground mine tour. Together, the Imperial Palace and the Rammelsberg represent the complete economic and political history of medieval Goslar.

The GYG guided tour (t616780, rated 4.5★/58 reviews, listed as 'Rare Find — usually unavailable') is a German-language guided tour. Visitors who prefer English should book an audio guide at the palace entrance instead — these are available in multiple languages and cover the same Palas and chapel circuit.