Špilberk Castle

Špilberk was founded in the middle of the thirteenth century on the rocky hill above Brno's old town by Přemysl Otakar II, margrave of Moravia and later king of Bohemia. The earliest written records of it date from 1277–1279. Bohemian rulers came only occasionally, Charles IV among them; in 1337 his first wife Blanche of Valois stayed here.

Špilberk became the permanent seat of the Moravian margraves in the mid-fourteenth century under John Henry, younger brother of Emperor Charles IV, who ruled from 1350 to 1375. His son Jobst of Moravia followed, margrave from 1375 to 1411. Jobst was elected king of the Romans in 1410, so that the castle briefly became the seat of the ruler of the whole Empire; he died here three months after the election and was buried in the crypt of the church of St Thomas. Those six decades of autonomous Moravian rule were the castle's high point, and Jobst the last of the line to hold court here.

Under Sigismund and his son-in-law Albert of Austria, the fortress mattered more than the palace. Victorin of Poděbrady, son of King George, held Špilberk as land captain; in 1469 Matthias Corvinus seized the castle — Brno, on his side, had already besieged it — and with it the government of Moravia. From the end of the fifteenth century it was repeatedly pawned and left to decay.

In 1560 the Moravian estates bought Špilberk with its whole domain and at once sold the castle to the town of Brno, which made it a municipal fortress. The town kept it for only sixty years: after the defeat of the estates' rising at the White Mountain on 8 November 1620, Emperor Ferdinand II confiscated it, and the leading Moravian insurgents were imprisoned here for several years.

The partial Swedish occupation of Moravia brought two direct threats to Brno between 1643 and 1645, and the defences were repaired at speed. In 1645 Brno and Špilberk, under Colonel Raduit de Souches, withstood a three-month Swedish attack by a far larger force. By the mid-eighteenth century Špilberk had been rebuilt as a baroque fortress, its bastions, walled ditches and casemates of 1742 forming one fortified system with the town below. In March 1742, during the War of the Austrian Succession, Brno and Špilberk turned back the Saxon and Prussian armies of Frederick II — the last time the fortress counted in a war. Napoleon's troops destroyed important parts of the works as they left occupied Brno in 1809.

A prison had always been part of the fortress: the Austrian generals Bonneval and Wallis were held here, and the pandur colonel Franz von der Trenck died in the castle on 4 October 1749. In 1783 Joseph II ordered its conversion into a civil prison for the heaviest offenders; the upper floor of the northern casemates was rebuilt and the first prisoners arrived in June 1784. That December he ordered men under life sentence into the worst casemates below, where twenty-nine cells of heavy beams and planks held prisoners permanently chained, until Leopold II abolished both the lower prison and the chaining in May 1790.

The political prisoners gave the place its European name: the French revolutionary Jean-Baptiste Drouet, the postmaster of Sainte-Menehould who had arrested Louis XVI; fifteen Hungarian Jacobins led by the writer Ferenc Kazinczy; and, from 1822, Italian Carbonari in cells built for 'state prisoners' in the northern wing. The poet Silvio Pellico served a full eight years and made Špilberk known across Europe with My Prisons, and Stendhal's Fabrice del Dongo invokes it repeatedly in The Charterhouse of Parma. The last large national group was nearly two hundred Poles, most taken after the Kraków Uprising of 1846. Franz Joseph I dissolved the prison in 1855; the last prisoners left three years later, and the rooms became barracks for the next hundred years.

In the First World War civilian objectors to the Austro-Hungarian regime were held here alongside military prisoners. In the first year of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia several thousand Czech patriots were imprisoned here and some were put to death; for most of them the castle was a stage on the way to other German prisons and to Nazi concentration camps. Between 1939 and 1941 the German army and the Gestapo rebuilt it extensively as model barracks in the historicising spirit of Third Reich architecture. The Czechoslovak army left in 1959, ending the castle's military era, and in 1960 it became the seat of the Brno City Museum.