Mildenburg

According to research by Wolfgang Hartmann, King Konrad III likely had the castle built from 1144 onwards by Burkard von Weinsberg. The background was the 1140 Battle of Weinsberg, which gave rise to the legend of the "Faithful Wives of Weinsberg": the women carried their husbands out of the surrendering castle on their backs, saving them from execution. Konrad kept his word and let them go free. A few years later he commissioned Burkard and his brother Rupert to build two castles on land belonging to Amorbach Abbey: the Mildenburg and the Frohburg, predecessor of the so-called "Robbers' Castle" Freudenburg. Their names expressed gratitude toward Konrad.

Around 1200, during the German throne dispute between the Hohenstaufens and Welfs, the castle likely passed to the Mainz archbishop Siegfried II von Eppstein. It secured Mainz's power and a toll station on the south-western Main, serving until the 18th century as the seat of the Mainz castellans in the Miltenberg district. Captured during the Peasants' War in 1525 and destroyed in the Second Margrave War of 1552, it was later partly rebuilt under Archbishop Daniel Brendel von Homburg.

Since July 2011 the restored castle has housed the Miltenberg Castle Museum, displaying around 170 works of 20th- and 21st-century art, Russian and Greek icons from the 16th to 19th centuries, and over 180 Romanian reverse-glass icons.