Cēsis Castle

In the autumn of 1206, during the Livonian Crusades, the Wends — a small tribe living where Cēsis now stands — converted to Christianity and became allies of the crusaders. In 1208 the Livonian Brothers of the Sword took up residence in the Wendish hillfort and replaced most of its timber defences with a stone wall; Henry of Livonia's chronicle calls that fort "the smallest in Livonia", though it withstood repeated sieges by Estonians and Russians. In 1213 or 1214 the Brothers began a stone castle of their own on the high ground beside it. Nothing survives of it but the chapel, whose Romanesque corbels date it to the 13th century.

The Livonian branch of the Teutonic Order took Cēsis over in 1237, and from the late 14th century the older fortifications gave way to a square castellum of four ranges around a courtyard, a convent-castle plan brought from Prussia that held chapel, refectory, dormitory and kitchen inside one defensible perimeter, with outer baileys beyond.

After 1413 Cēsis lay in a district under the Livonian Master's direct rule, and once Rīga Castle was destroyed in 1484 it became the Masters' sole residence and the political centre of Livonia, holding its archives, library and chancery. Wolter von Plettenberg, Master from 1494 to 1535, adorned his residence, in the chronicler Bartholomäus Grefenthal's words, "with three new towers, walls and bastions": three round artillery towers went up around 1500, and the Master's Chamber in the west tower was given its brick vault.

The Order's Livonian branch was dissolved in 1561, and the Livonian War brought the castle its first serious damage. In the summer of 1577 Ivan the Terrible marched from Pskov into Livonia with more than 29,000 men and 19 guns. On 28 August his troops took Ērgļi Castle and moved on Cēsis, where the tsar had Magnus, King of Livonia, arrested on suspicion of treachery. Inside were a few hundred townspeople and country folk, by the chronicler Laurentius Müller's account chiefly women and children.

The bombardment ran five days and nights, opening widening cracks in the thick walls. Unwilling to be taken, about 300 people gathered in a room above four barrels of gunpowder — men and women hand in hand, children about their parents, infants at the breast — and fired it. "All were blown up," the chronicler Salomon Henning reported, "aside from those who were hiding elsewhere in the castle." That December some 200 horse and as many foot under Jānis Bīriņš drove the Russian garrison out in a night attack.

The peace of Jam Zapolski in 1582 still named the battered place the citadel of the Cēsis district. The Polish–Swedish War brought Cēsis under Sweden and the castle was handed to the Lord High Chancellor Axel Oxenstierna, remaining with his family until the Swedish crown took it in hand in the early 1680s. Troopers of a mounted unit quartered there soon afterwards left it looking pillaged, burning doors and floors for firewood and melting window lead into musket balls; it was neither repaired nor lived in again. Russian troops carried the demolition further in the first years of the Great Northern War, and rain and frost brought down the roofless vaults until the castle buried itself in rubble. Only the outer bailey's gatehouse was renewed, rebuilt in the 1760s as the manor house called the New Castle.

Around 1830 Count Karl Gustav von Sievers, owner of the Cēsis manor, had "the damp spot by the ruins" turned into a landscape park taking in the Wendish hillfort and the medieval walls, which from 1841 served patients of his new water-cure establishment. From 1903 the Society for the History and Antiquities of Rīga campaigned to save the Western Tower, whose upper vault threatened to bring down the 500-year-old vaulting of the Master's Chamber below; a temporary covering went on in 1904 and a conical roof in 1914.

The agrarian reform of 1920 expropriated most of the manor from the von Sievers family for the new Latvian state: the manor house went to the Army of Latvia, the ruins on lease to the town council, and in 1925 the Monuments Authority listed the castle as a nationally important monument.

Excavations directed by Zigrīda Apala from 1974 to 2008 opened the basements of the collapsed western range, where the bones of adults and children lay under fallen ceiling beams, coin-dated to 1577. Cēsis has been an archaeological monument of state importance since 1998 and is open to the public year round, drawing 100,000 visitors in 2016.