Angelokastro

After Byzantium lost southern Italy in 1071, Corfu became the empire's frontier with the west, and the invasions of the Norman Kingdom of Sicily gave the Komnenoi reason to fortify it. The date the castle rose on the highest peak of the island's shoreline, 305 metres above the sea, is not known. It has been credited to the reign of Manuel I Komnenos, and to Michael I Angelos, the Despot of Epirus who took Corfu in 1214; his son Michael II further fortified the site and is named in some accounts as its builder.

Excavation at the summit has produced Early Christian finds, suggesting the acropolis was occupied and perhaps fortified between the fifth and seventh centuries. The name may descend from the Komnenoi Angeloi, Despots of Epirus, though the earliest text to mention the place, an Angevin document of 1272, calls it Castrum Sancti Angeli, 'Castle of the Holy Angel'.

Corfu passed through several rulers after the Crusaders took Constantinople in 1204 until the Angevins occupied it in 1267, Charles of Anjou having seized the island from Manfred, King of Sicily. In 1272 Giordano di San Felice took possession of the fortress on behalf of Charles I of Naples, and that document is the earliest written proof the castle existed. Angevin rule lasted until 1386, when, after the violent death of Charles III of Naples, the castle's occupants held out briefly for his successor Ladislaus before the transfer to Venice went through with virtually no loss of life.

Angelokastro guarded the northwest, Gardiki the south and Kassiopi the northeast, and its garrison signalled the approach of any enemy to Corfu city. In 1403 a Genoese fleet landed some 10,000 mercenaries at Palaiokastritsa, bound for the crusades under the French marshal Jean Le Maingre, known as Boucicaut. They laid siege to Angelokastro for a year, burning and pillaging the country around it. Their attempt on the castle ended in furious fighting with the Corfiot garrison, under a nobleman of the island, and was repulsed.

From 1387 until late in the sixteenth century Angelokastro was the capital of Corfu, and in the early sixteenth century it became the seat of the Provveditore Generale del Levante, governor of the Ionian Islands and commander of the Venetian fleet stationed at Corfu. Who appointed its castellan was contested: when the Corfiots petitioned in 1406 that public offices be filled locally under the capitoli, the privileges Venice had granted them, the Senate replied in 1408 that Angelokastro's castellany was exempt and would go to the Venetian bailo. Later petitions succeeded, and the castellan was afterwards chosen by the city of Corfu from the island's noblemen.

In 1537 Suleyman the Magnificent sent 25,000 men under the admiral Hayreddin Barbarossa against Corfu. They landed at Govino Bay, destroyed the village of Potamos on the march, and soon held everything on the island but the Old Fort at Corfu city and Angelokastro. At the Old Fortress the Venetians would not admit the women, children and elderly they called the inutili, the useless; kept outside the walls, many were killed or enslaved, and the Corfiots lost faith in Venice's defensive measures. Three thousand villagers had withdrawn inside Angelokastro, and its garrison threw the attackers back four times without the defences being breached. Paolo Giovio, in his History of 1555, singled out Angelokastro among the island's castles and praised the bravery of its defenders. As the Ottoman army retreated it devastated the undefended parts of the island; about 20,000 people who had reached neither castle were killed or enslaved.

In August 1571 Kilich Ali Pasha landed on Corfu's southeast shore and sent two-thirds of his force against Angelokastro while the rest attacked the city. The garrison, about 4,000 peasants from the nearby villages, held. When the Ottomans gave up and marched through the mountains to press the siege of the city, the garrison came out and rolled boulders down on them, and Kilich ended the siege of the island, destroying vineyards and fruit trees as he withdrew. The defeats east and west proved decisive; Angelokastro protected the population of the region again during the second Great Siege of Corfu in 1716.

The castle's importance declined with the advent of modern warfare and it fell into disrepair, time doing what no besieger could. From 1999 the 8th Ephorate of Byzantine Antiquities has run a restoration programme co-sponsored by the Greek Ministry of Culture and the European Union.