Château d'Annecy

The castle sits on the last rocky spur of the Semnoz, 470 metres up, set to watch the road from Geneva into Italy and the bridges over the lake's outflow. Nothing certain is known of its beginnings, though charters were dated at Annecy from the end of the twelfth century. The first firm mention comes on 10 October 1219, as castra, when the house of Geneva made it their principal residence, having been obliged to leave Geneva to the sovereignty of its prince-bishop. The square keep on the vulnerable south front, the Tour de la Reine, rises 38 metres with walls up to 4.19 metres thick; called a twelfth-century keep, though archaeological examination suggests a later thirteenth-century base.

Fire destroyed the castle outright on 27 April 1340, and Count Amadeus III of Geneva rebuilt it as it had been; the castellany accounts for 1340 to 1344 record the painted decoration and the glazing of the great hall. Count Pierre received Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, here in March 1391. Robert of Geneva, born in the castle in 1342, was elected pope at Avignon in 1378 as Clement VII; he succeeded his brother Pierre as count in 1392 and put substantial works in hand before his death two years later.

Robert's inheritance passed to his nephew Humbert de Thoire-Villars and then to Humbert's uncle Odon de Villars, who ceded the castle on 5 August 1401 to Amadeus VIII of Savoy. Amadeus restored it in 1403 and settled in by 1405, receiving the homage of the Genevois nobility. After another fire in 1412 he rebuilt the Vieux Logis, and in 1418 he received Pope Martin V and the cardinals returning from the Council of Constance.

In 1440 Amadeus made the Genevois an apanage for the younger sons of the house of Savoy, who governed from Annecy as counts of Genevois; his own younger son Philippe took up residence, and Duke Louis I later settled it on his third son, Janus. Louis contracted in 1445 for a new tower on the site of the old keep, burnt out, and Janus added the Logis Perrière beside it later in the century. In 1477 the castle housed the conference that made peace between Duchess Yolande of France, who had taken the Burgundian side, and the Swiss at the close of the Burgundian Wars.

Charles III of Savoy created a new apanage on 15 August 1514 for his brother Philippe de Savoie-Nemours, who became Duke of Nemours in 1528 by his marriage to Charlotte d'Orléans-Longueville; she had the Logis Nemours rebuilt and the wall-walk remade. Their son Jacques, made Duke of Genevois in 1564, raised the Logis Neuf, though the dukes spent more of their time at the French court than at Annecy.

On 5 October 1600, during the war between France and Savoy, Henry IV of France entered Annecy in triumph with Henri I de Savoie-Nemours and slept at the castle, received by the duke, who wanted his backing to turn the apanage into a sovereign state. Disappointed by the outcome of the war, the duke signed a secret treaty with Spain; the plot was uncovered, and in the autumn of 1616 Savoyard troops under Sigismond d'Este, marquis de Lans, seized the castle, though the intervention of Francis de Sales left the prince his apanage. On 20 May 1630, in a fresh Franco-Savoyard war, the castle fell to the troops of Louis XIII under Gaspard III de Coligny, maréchal de Châtillon, despite the resistance of its governor Louis de Sales, the saint's brother; the king and Richelieu lodged there briefly. When Henri II, the last Duke of Genevois-Nemours, died in 1659, Charles Emmanuel II suppressed the apanage and the castle became the governor's residence.

The Spanish occupation of 1742 turned the fortress into a barracks and left it badly damaged; the courtyard chapel came down in mid-century, and a fire in 1758 destroyed the battlements of the Perrière tower. Declared national property in 1793 and renamed the Maison de la Montagne, it quartered Republican and Imperial troops, and the Perrière tower served as a prison. Military use ran on to the Second World War, and the buildings served as barracks until 1947.

Homeless people moved in once the army left, and another fire damaged it in 1952. In 1953 the commune of Annecy bought it back from the State, which had held it through the Ministry of the Armed Forces. Restored with help from the Monuments historiques, it took in a museum from 1956 in the Logis Vieux and Logis Nemours, and was classified a monument historique on 12 October 1959; since 1993 the Tour and Logis Perrière have housed the Observatoire régional des lacs alpins.