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TopicTolls, chains and the economics of a castle
Almost every castle in the gorge is a revenue instrument first and a fortification second. Reading them any other way makes their siting incomprehensible.
What a toll right was
A Rhine toll was a grant, usually imperial, to stop river traffic at a named place and levy a charge on it. The grant was the asset; the castle was the machinery for enforcing it. That is why so many of these buildings sit where they do — not on the most defensible ground, but at the narrowest or most awkward point of the channel, where a vessel cannot simply steer wide.
By the fourteenth century there were something in the order of sixty toll stations between Basel and the sea, and the Middle Rhine held a disproportionate share of them. The cumulative charge on a cargo moving the length of the river could exceed its value.
The apparatus
The physical means were simple: a chain or boom across the fairway, a tower to work it from, and enough armed men to make refusal pointless. Pfalzgrafenstein preserves the whole arrangement more clearly than anywhere else, because it never had to be anything but a toll post.
Where the channel was too wide for a boom, a pair of works on opposite banks did the same job by crossfire. Rheinfels and the Maus face each other for exactly this reason.
Consequences for the buildings
Three things follow. First, the castles cluster: a toll is only worth what the next toll upstream leaves for it, so holders built close together to intercept traffic before a rival did. Second, they are small: the garrison needed to stop a barge is not the garrison needed to hold a frontier. Third, they were fought over constantly, because taking one was taking an income stream, not a piece of ground.
The Rhenish League of the 1250s and the imperial actions against unlicensed tolls should be read in this light. The recurring complaint is not that castles existed but that they were charging without warrant.