Häme Castle

Häme Castle is generally dated to around 1300, though the exact founding is disputed. Tradition links its construction to Birger Jarl's second crusade into Häme in the mid-13th century, but no finds at the site are firmly dated earlier than the 1320s, and the Finnish Heritage Agency holds that building began only after Birger's possible crusade there, at the latest by the end of the 13th century.

Häme Castle's own first documentary mention is usually dated 1308, when a royal document names a single stronghold in Häme, Tauestahus. That description fits an earlier fortification twenty kilometres away at Hakoinen at least as well as it fits Häme Castle itself, since the Novgorod First Chronicle's account of a 1311 raid on Häme also names only one castle there.

The building sequence is disputed too. Scholarship long dated the grey-stone bailey and its three-towered curtain wall to soon after the crusade, with a brick phase — brick being rare in medieval Finland — running from the mid-14th to the mid-15th century. In 2001 Knut Drake argued instead, from a revised dating of Sweden's Tre Kronor Castle, that the stone castle began only in 1372, replacing an earlier timber fort, with brick not begun until 1472.

Häme Castle was built as a border stronghold but lost that role in 1323, when the Peace of Nöteborg moved Sweden's frontier away. It remained an important defensive base regardless, standing at a crossroads of the kingdom's main roads, and stayed largely undisturbed through the 14th and 15th centuries even as Turku and Vyborg were besieged whenever power changed hands. Only in the late 15th century, as Ivan III's Grand Duchy of Moscow armed for war, did danger return: after a failed assault on Vyborg in 1495, Russian forces pushed as far as Häme itself.

In the early 16th century Häme Castle was, like Turku and Vyborg, a seat of noble court life. Åke Tott became its bailiff in 1508 and grew into Finland's most influential bailiff, receiving the Swedish regent Svante Nilsson. He was still there in 1520, when Kristina Gyllenstierna, widow of Sten Sture the Younger, surrendered to the besieging forces of Denmark's Christian II on condition that she be given Häme Castle and the manor of Kokemäki as her widow's residence. Christian's troops arrived soon after and executed Tott.

The castle itself passed in 1522, as part of a larger fief, to the admiral Søren Norby. It returned to Sweden without a fight the following year, when the Danish garrisons were forced to surrender after the Swedes besieged both Turku Castle and the bishop's castle at Kuusisto in 1523.

Under Gustav Vasa the castle became the centre of an accounting fief, its surplus reserved for the Crown. In 1559 he sent Henrik von Cöllen to build two round cannon towers there, with repairs made to keep the main building presentable. By the century's end it had begun to decay — a clerk noted in 1587 that it had stood empty for three years — and most of the south tower collapsed in an explosion in 1599.

It was probably repaired soon after. Erik Hare, appointed castle commander in 1606, spent six years substantially improving its defences, and in 1614 King Gustav II Adolf visited the renovated castle; its great hall has been called the King's Hall ever since.

By the time the Great Northern War broke out in 1700, the castle had badly decayed, worsened by a fire in 1659. Its defences, judged too weak in 1713, were abandoned before Russian forces arrived, and Russian troops held it from 1713 to 1721, making some improvements of their own.

Afterwards the castle became the Finnish army's main depot, its main building turned into a grain store with a new crown bakery beside it; the wings between its towers were heightened, burying the south and east towers under the new roofline. Russians occupied it again without a fight in the Hats' War of 1741–43. Repairs resumed only in the 1770s, when Gustav III had Hämeenlinna's town moved to its present site and had the castle developed as a bastioned fortress, ringed with ramparts and a moat.

The castle surrendered without a fight in the Finnish War, on 6 March 1808, and passed under Russian military rule. It had long doubled as a prison; early Russian rule made it a crown prison holding nearly 300 inmates while it still served as a grain magazine, and in 1837 it was converted entirely into a prison to designs by Carl Ludvig Engel. Prisoners were not moved out until 1953, when restoration began; the main castle reopened as a museum in 1979.