Hans von Trotha

Hans von Trotha (c. 1450 – 1503) was a German knight and marshal of the prince-elector of the Palatinate. He also bore the French honorary title of a Chevalier d’Or. In 1480, the elector enfeoffed him with the two castles of Berwartstein and Grafendahn which lay in the South Palatine part of the Wasgau region within the Palatinate Forest. In local folklore he is known as Hans Trapp or, more rarely, Hans Trott.

Hans von Trotha was born into the aristocratic Trotha family who came from the area of the present-day county of Saalekreis, and was the fourth son of the Archbishop of Magdeburg's marshal, Thilo von Trotha. He was probably born in the mid-15th century in Krosigk (today in Saxony-Anhalt). His exact date of birth is not known, but he was the younger brother of Thilo von Trotha, the Bishop of Merseburg who was born in 1443. Hans only had one son, Christoph, who succeeded his father as the lord of Berwartstein Castle. Because Christoph had no male issue, the line was extinguished on his death in 1545 and the estate went to his son-in-law from the Alsatian House of Fleckenstein.

As one of the younger sons of an family, Hans entered the service of the electors and counts palatine of the Rhine in Heidelberg as a young man in the late 1470s. The link to Electoral Palatinate probably came about as a result of Archbishop John of Magdeburg, the patron of Bishop Thilo von Trotha. Hans clearly proved himself, because by 1480 the Elector, Philip the Sincere, who was about the same age, gave him the hereditary fiefs of two castles in the Wasgau on hereditary, namely Berwartstein, "including its belongings", and Grafendahn.

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