An important line of burgwards lay along the Unstrut west of Merseburg, but it declined in importance in the early ninth century after the integration of the Saxons into the Frankish state.
After the German Burgward ("castle district"), which first crops up in one of Otto I's documents as "Pretimi", had passed in 1012 from Archbishop Dagino to the Church estate of Magdeburg, and then by way of the County of Brehna in 1290 to the Dukes of Saxony-Wittenberg, Rudolf I of Saxony-Wittenberg built the so-called "Schlösschen" (little castle) about 1335.