Prague Castle

The written record begins with the church of the Virgin Mary, raised by the Přemyslid duke Bořivoj, dated to 870 by some accounts and to some time after 885 by others. Excavation proved older occupation still — a 9th-century ditch cut across the Opyš spur, and a warrior grave found in 1928 by Ivan Borkovský, buried with sword, axe and dagger, marking an elite on the ridge before Bořivoj arrived.

Bořivoj's son Spytihněv I most likely began the hillfort. Steep slopes closed every approach but the west, where a ditch 30 metres deep and 24 metres wide was cut and bridged to the main gate; timber walls on earthen ramparts and several watchtowers, three of them serving as gates, held the rest, while stone was kept for the churches. Under Vratislaus II stone walls replaced the timber, with the Black Tower east and the White west; in 1135 Soběslav I began rebuilding the hillfort as a walled castle.

Ottokar II spent his early years as king on the defences, widening the ditches on the exposed western side and abolishing the gateway through the Black Tower, and rebuilt the royal palace for ceremony and residence. In 1344, as the Prague bishopric was raised to an archbishopric, Charles IV laid the foundation stone of St Vitus Cathedral with his father John of Luxembourg; Matthias of Arras began the work, Peter Parler followed, and the church was completed almost six centuries later.

Through the Hussite Wars and the decades after them the castle stood uninhabited. Vladislaus II Jagiellon, king from 1471, held court down in the Old Town until the religious unrest of 1483, when Catholic councillors were thrown from the New Town Hall windows; no longer safe there, he moved back up the hill. The Romanesque defences were by then obsolete, and rebuilding began in 1485 under Benedikt Rejt, who raised a new northern wall carrying three gun towers: Mihulka, the New White Tower and Daliborka. The strip left between the old circuit and the new later filled in as the Golden Lane.

Rejt then vaulted the whole ceremonial floor of Charles IV's palace into a single room 62 metres long, unbroken by a column. Its portals and windows, one carrying the date 1493, were the first Renaissance work in Bohemia.

Ferdinand I had begun turning the castle into a modern Renaissance residence, laying out the Royal Garden on the northern foreland in 1534 with the Belvedere summer palace inside it. Then, in June 1541, fire swept the whole of Prague's left bank. The All Saints chapel was gutted, the Old Royal Palace's late-Gothic tent roof burnt away, the Wing of the Land Rolls and the diet chamber destroyed together with the land rolls themselves, and the cathedral's half-built north tower wrecked and never taken up again. The years that followed went on repair: a Renaissance cupola for the south tower, fresh bells cast by Tomáš Jaroš including Zikmund, the largest of them, and a deliberately gothicising diet chamber to Bonifác Wohlmut's design.

Rudolf II took the Czech throne in 1576 and in 1583 settled on the castle as his permanent chief residence, moving the imperial court to Prague. The building that followed was the largest campaign since Charles IV: the second courtyard took shape, the Northern Building held stables with room for hundreds of horses, and above them the Spanish Hall and Rudolf's Gallery carried the imperial collections. Rudolf was buried in the crypt beneath the cathedral, where his remains still lie in their original tin coffin.

The Third Defenestration of Prague took place at the castle in 1618 and set off the Bohemian Revolt. The wars that came of it left the castle damaged and dilapidated, and in 1648 Swedish troops carried off many works from Rudolf's collection during the Battle of Prague, the final act of the Thirty Years' War. Maria Theresa's rebuilding in the second half of the 18th century was the last major one; after abdicating in 1848, the Austrian emperor Ferdinand V made Prague Castle his home.

In 1918 the castle became the seat of Tomáš Masaryk, president of the new Czechoslovak Republic. Jože Plečnik renovated the New Royal Palace and the gardens, and St Vitus Cathedral was finished and opened on 28 September 1929, for the St Wenceslas millennium.

On 15 March 1939, shortly after Nazi Germany forced President Emil Hácha — who suffered a heart attack during the negotiations — to hand his nation over, Adolf Hitler spent a night at the castle, surveying the city from its windows. Under the occupation it became the headquarters of Reinhard Heydrich, Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. Rumour had it that he put the Bohemian crown on his head, against the old legend that a usurper who does so is doomed to die within the year; on 27 May 1942, less than a year after taking power, Heydrich was ambushed on his way to the castle by British-trained Czech and Slovak resistance soldiers in Operation Anthropoid, and died a week later of wounds that had become infected.

After the communist coup of 1948 the castle housed the offices of the Czechoslovak government, and when Czechoslovakia divided in 1993 it became the seat of the Czech head of state. Guinness records it as the largest ancient castle in the world.