Trifels Castle was not just a simple knight's castle, but an imperial castle, the favorite castle of Emperor Barbarossa. The most distinguished royal fortress of the Staufer period stands on the highest of the three conical castle mountains above Annweiler, the Sonnenberg.
The castle is situated 494 m high, 310 m above Annweiler, on a triple split rock, which is 145 m long, 40 m wide and 50 m high. This is where the name "Tri - fels", i.e. threefold rock, is derived from. The Sonnenberg is said to have originally carried a ring wall. Through the Salians it received a wooden and stone castle. It was not until the Staufer dynasty that it was expanded into a state imperial castle. It became the treasury of the empire and the repository of the imperial regalia (imperial crown, imperial cross and sword), the highest symbols of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. Today, replicas of the imperial regalia are exhibited here. Trifels was also an important state prison, the most famous prisoner was the English King Richard the Lionheart (1193/94).
To this day, the name Richard the Lionheart is associated with the legend-like transfigured idea of the ideal knight and energetic king. How did this myth come about? What distinguishes the figure of the Lionheart so that he has served as a projection screen for chivalry and daring for centuries?
At Trifels Castle, Richard, as a prisoner of the Hohenstaufen Emperor Henry VI, was confronted with a long list of charges in a kind of show trial on March 22, 1193. The English ruler spent more than a year in captivity - here at the castle, in the imperial palace in Hagenau, now in Alsace, and in Speyer, Worms and Mainz, the important cities on the Upper Rhine. A ransom of unprecedented proportions was demanded for his release: 100,000 marks, equivalent to 23 tons of pure silver.