Old Navarino Castle

The rock at the northern edge of the bay of Pylos rises some 200 metres between sheer cliffs, and it carried the Athenian fort of the 425 BC Battle of Pylos. The Fourth Crusade brought the Morea under the Frankish Principality of Achaea in 1204. The French and Greek versions of the Chronicle of the Morea credit the castle to Nicholas II of Saint-Omer, lord of Thebes; the Aragonese version gives the work to his nephew Nicholas III a few years later. Greek tradition dates the foundation to 1278, while Antoine Bon judged a build under Nicholas II in the 1280s likelier, perhaps during his term as bailli of Achaea in 1287–89.

Whether Nicholas III ever inherited it is unclear; if he did, it stayed his until he died childless in 1317, when Navarino and the family's Messenian lands reverted to the princely domain.

The fortress counted for little thereafter, apart from the 1350s, when the Genoese used it as a base for raids on nearby Venetian possessions; Venice and Genoa fought a naval battle there in 1354. Robert of Taranto had granted Navarino to his wife Mary of Bourbon in 1358, and after his death she pressed her claim to the Principality against Prince Philip of Taranto. In 1364 the castle was hers, and its castellan briefly imprisoned the new prince's bailli, Simon del Poggio. She kept Navarino until her death in 1377.

Navarrese, Gascon and Italian mercenaries were active there in 1381/2, and under the Navarrese Company the castle was known as Château Navarres, and to the local Greeks as Spanochori, the village of the Spaniards.

From the early 15th century Venice eyed the fortress, fearing the Genoese would seize it and strike at Modon and Coron. The Venetians took it themselves in 1417 and had the possession legitimised by the Prince of Achaea, Centurione II Zaccaria, in 1423 — the year Navarino suffered its first Ottoman raid, under Turakhan Bey. Emperor John VIII Palaiologos embarked here in 1437 for the Council of Ferrara, and in 1460 the last Despot of the Morea, Thomas Palaiologos, sailed from Navarino with his family after the Ottoman conquest of the Morea.

Venetian control survived the First Ottoman–Venetian War of 1463–79 but not the second. After the Venetian defeat at Modon in August 1500 the garrison, 3,000 strong and well provisioned for a siege, surrendered. A Venetian force of only fifty men retook it almost by chance on 3/4 December, but on 20 May 1501 a joint Ottoman attack by land and sea under Kemal Reis and Hadım Ali Pasha carried it back.

In 1572, after Lepanto, John of Austria attacked Old Navarino, having already failed to take Modon. Ottoman reinforcements arrived in time, the barren terrain offered no cover and the besiegers lacked provisions, and the enterprise was doomed. In 1572/3 the Kapudan Pasha Uluç Ali Reis built the New Navarino fortress to replace the outdated Frankish castle, covering the bay's practical southern entrance more effectively and drawing on a surer water supply. The old castle held only a token garrison by the late 16th century and grew increasingly dilapidated through the 17th.

In the Morean War the Ottomans put their strength into the new fortress; the old castle's hundred-man garrison surrendered without resistance to Otto Wilhelm Königsmarck's far more numerous Venetians on 2 June 1686, and its 43 cannon were captured intact. Venetian inspectors rated the old site's natural position far superior to the new one, but nothing was done; by 1706 its artillery came to five guns of consequential size and it was intended for demolition. The Ottoman reconquest of 1715 interrupted those plans, and the Ottomans made no major repairs, keeping a token force there.

Russian forces held the area from April to June 1770, during the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74 and the Orlov Revolt. After the Greek War of Independence broke out in March 1821 the Greeks captured New Navarino and slaughtered its garrison in the first week of August; the district stayed in Greek hands until Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt took the old castle on 29 April 1825 and New Navarino on 11 May. The Ottoman-Egyptian garrison remained until spring 1828, when the works were handed to French troops under General Nicolas Joseph Maison, who found the old castle essentially a ruin.

In the municipality of Pylos-Nestor, the site is designated both an archaeological site and a protected building. Nothing physically bars access, but the ruins have been declared closed because the structure is considered dangerous.