Chlemoutsi

The castle rose between 1220 and 1223, in the reign of Geoffrey I of Villehardouin, Prince of Achaea, and was paid for out of a quarrel. Geoffrey had asked the Principality's clergy — who held almost a third of its lands but owed no military service — for donations towards defending the realm; when they refused, answering that they owed allegiance only to the Pope, he confiscated Church property and built with the proceeds. Honorius III excommunicated him, then agreed to lift it after Geoffrey answered that the money had gone into a fortress on which the Principality's survival depended.

Its French name, Clairmont or Clermont, most probably gave rise to the Greek Chloumoutsi and later Chlemoutsi. From the 15th century Italian sources called it Castel Tornese, confusing it with the Principality's mint at nearby Glarentza.

Chlemoutsi stood 13 kilometres from the princely capital of Andravida and five from its largest port, Glarentza. Yet throughout the history of the Principality of Achaea it was never the object of major military operations; its main use seems to have been as a prison for distinguished captives, among them the Byzantine generals taken at the Battle of Makryplagi in about 1263, one of whom, Alexios Philes, died in captivity there.

When Prince William II of Villehardouin died in 1278 the princely title passed under the Treaty of Viterbo to Charles of Anjou, King of Naples; Chlemoutsi did not, William having granted it to his wife, Anna Komnene Doukaina, who kept it with the hereditary Barony of Kalamata. Her marriage in 1280 to Nicholas II of Saint Omer, lord of half of Thebes, gave him what Antoine Bon called the most powerful fortress in the Morea, and it worried King Charles: on 25 September 1281 castle and barony were ceded to the princely domain. In the early 1290s Thomas Komnenos Doukas, son of the Despot of Epirus Nikephoros I, was held there as a hostage for his father's behaviour.

Around 1311 Margaret, William II's sole surviving daughter, pressed her claim to Chlemoutsi and Kalamata, and in February 1314 married her only daughter, Isabel of Sabran, to Ferdinand of Majorca, passing her titles to the couple. Back in Achaea the Angevin bailli imprisoned her in the castle, where she died in February or March 1315. Ferdinand landed at Glarentza that June and took Chlemoutsi and most of Elis quickly, but was defeated and killed at the Battle of Manolada in July 1316.

Glarentza and Chlemoutsi passed in 1418 to Carlo I Tocco, who began expanding in the Morea at the expense of Prince Centurione II Zaccaria. Beaten by the Byzantine navy at the Battle of the Echinades in 1427, Tocco ceded his possessions to Constantine Palaiologos, Despot of the Morea and the future last Byzantine emperor, as his daughter's dowry. Chlemoutsi became Constantine's residence and the base for his operations against Patras, the last major Latin stronghold, in 1428–30. Centurione's illegitimate son John Asen Zaccaria escaped the castle in 1453 to lead a rebellion against the Despots. It stayed in Byzantine hands until the Ottomans took it, with the rest of the Morea, in 1460.

The conquest cost the castle much of its strategic weight, though the Venetians occupied it during the war of 1463–79 and the Knights of Malta attacked it in 1620. When Venice held the Peloponnese from 1687 to 1715 it was the seat of a fiscal district, and in 1701 the provveditore generale Francesco Grimani proposed destroying it as too far from the sea and hard to defend. The Morea returned to Ottoman control in 1715, and by the early 19th century the fortress was completely deserted.

In 1821 Konstantinos Andravidiotis defeated the Ottoman forces of Elis, who fell back inside Chlemoutsi. The siege that followed, under Georgios Sisinis and Charalambos Vilaetis, was unsuccessful, and was lifted after Ottoman forces from Lalas counterattacked. In 1825 the forces of Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt took the castle and dismantled part of its walls so that the Greek rebels could not use it.

Later occupiers added little — Byzantine rule left no traces, and the Ottomans made only minor repairs and artillery platforms — and the castle is largely preserved in its original 13th-century state. Protected as an archaeological site, Chlemoutsi is held by the 6th Ephorate of Byzantine Antiquities; work from 2000 to 2009 turned several halls into museum rooms, with the permanent exhibition completed in 2008 and conservation in 2013–14. It is open to visitors.