Bauska Castle

Having won full control of the Bauska district under a peace with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Livonian Order set about a fortified administrative centre where the Mūša and the Mēmele meet to form the Lielupe, on a narrow rock-walled peninsula that had carried a Semigallian fortress. The first stone building went up between 1438 and 1450 under the Master of the Order, Heidenreich Vinke von Overberg; 1443 is the year traditionally given, being the date of a letter of the master that mentions the work. The castle was to strengthen the Order's grip on Semigallia, guard the border with Lithuania and control the trade road running from Lithuania to Riga.

Votes, a Finnic people, worked on the building and afterwards settled along the banks of the Mēmele, where they were known as krieviņi. A deep ditch was cut across the whole peninsula in front of the castle, crossed by a drawbridge; the walls ran to 3.5 metres thick, there were five towers including a great watch tower with a prison beneath it, and the garrison lay inside. The builders used local dolomite, fieldstone and brick.

Until the middle of the sixteenth century the castle was run by vogts of Bauska appointed by the Order. From 1536 to 1540 the poet Burkard Waldis was held prisoner here, and while confined he put 150 psalms into German verse and composed melodies for them.

By a treaty of alliance in 1559 the Order passed the sovereignty of town and castle to Poland; Gotthard Kettler pledged the castle to the Polish king in the same year. Wilhelm von Brandenburg, Archbishop of Riga, held it when the Livonian Order collapsed in 1562, and it was turned over to Kettler as he became the first Duke of Courland, passing to the new Duchy of Courland and Semigallia.

Bauska became one of the chief ducal residences, and the Landtags of the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia met here in 1568, 1590 and 1601. A residence holding the ducal chancellery and the court was raised on the site of the old forecastle, and the medieval village beside the castle was pulled down along with the work. The duke was living there by 1587; the work is dated as finished in 1596 by some accounts, others carrying it through a new wing of 1590 under Duke Friedrich to a further expansion in 1599 that gave the palace its two massive round towers. Under the constitution of 1617, the Formula regiminis, the Hauptmann of Bauska held court in the castle.

In the Polish-Lithuanian wars with Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus took the castle on 17 September 1625 and thoroughly looted the "safeguarded" treasures the surrounding nobility had stored there. Polish troops took it in 1628 and the Duke of Courland recovered it in 1629. In 1647, under Duke Jacob, the windows, doors and stoves were repaired and the fortifications modernised.

By the end of the seventeenth century, after long wars, only part of the castle was still lived in and the medieval buildings held storehouses. Swedish troops occupied it in 1701, and strong earthworks were thrown up around it, among the most striking of their kind in Latvia.

After the battle of Mūrmuiža and the capitulation of Jelgava, Tsar Peter I sent several regiments against Bauska, where only 250 men were left under Lieutenant Colonel M. G. Stael von Holstein. A relatively light bombardment was followed by an act of surrender on 12 September 1705, signed for Russia by Major General Chambers; three days later, the handover of castle and town complete, the Russians left Colonel Nikolaus Balck there with an infantry battalion and a dragoon regiment. Retreating in 1706, Russian troops blew up part of the castle. It was not lived in again during the eighteenth century and the buildings fell to ruin.

In 1874 the ruins and their surroundings became the property of the princely Lieven family; Prince Paul von Lieven bought them and set about their restoration, and a landscape park was laid out around the castle. A viewing platform was fitted into the medieval tower in the 1930s. Reconstruction of the later, ducal part began in the 1990s and was carried through in 2008, and that wing is reckoned one of the foremost works of Mannerist architecture in Latvia.

The site has been protected as an archaeological monument of state importance since December 1998, and is listed as an architectural monument of state importance. Only ruins remain of the Order's castle; the palace holds a museum and a café and opens daily through the summer months, with the lookout in the 22-metre tower.