Sigulda Medieval Castle

The Livonian Brothers of the Sword, German warrior monks founded in 1202 as the Militia of Christ of Livonia and the first such order raised outside the Mediterranean, took the land along the left bank of the Gauja in the division agreed with Bishop Albert of Riga in 1207. In the contest between bishop and order, castle placement was a strategic matter, and Sigulda, German Segewold, was built to control the Gauja waterway and to answer the bishop's castle at Turaida on the opposite bank. The Rhymed Chronicle places its building between 1207 and 1209 under Master Venno; the chronicle of Henry of Livonia has it already standing in 1212.

The Brothers used it as a base against the revolting Livonians of nearby Satesele. In 1224 the papal legate William of Modena stayed at Sigulda and established a church and a parish there. In 1237 the lands of the Brothers of the Sword passed to the Teutonic Order.

Ten commanders held Sigulda between 1239 and 1432, and twelve vogts between 1422 and 1559. From 1432 the castle was the residence of the Land Marshal of the Livonian Order, marsalcus terrae Livoniae, the second officer of the order after the Master, whose own seat was at Cesis. A revision of 1451 counted twelve knights, three priests and three half-brothers. A settlement had grown up beside it in the 14th century, on the road from Riga to Cesis and on to Tartu and Pskov; in 1434 its tavern was enfeoffed to the Blackheads.

The first building was a rectangular dolomite block with walls three metres thick; between the last quarter of the 13th century and the end of the 14th it became a convent-type castle, a square complex about an inner courtyard, with the chapel at the southern end of the second floor and the weapon store above. The main entrance ran through a four-storey gate tower of around 1400, fronted by a drawbridge. In the second half of the 15th century, as firearms developed, the machicolations were rebuilt and the chapel and hall given larger windows.

Sigulda was damaged at the very beginning of the Livonian War, and commanders returned to it for two years from 1560. It passed to the Duchy of Livonia, and from 1566 to 1578 it was the residence of the duchy's governor, Jan Hieronimowicz Chodkiewicz. The peace of Yam-Zapolsky in 1582 named it the citadel of the Sigulda district, arx Zigvold, and the Poles inspected the buildings in 1582 and 1590 and repaired the castle at the end of the century.

The Polish-Swedish war of 1601 to 1629 left castle and town heavily ruined, and the Swedes reported it empty and destroyed. It was restored in 1622, with a new residential building and a bathhouse. In 1625 the King of Sweden gave Sigulda to his privy councillor Gabriel Gustafsson Oxenstierna, but the reduction of manors returned it to the crown. A plan drawn around 1680 is kept in the War Archive in Stockholm.

The castle was abandoned after the Great Northern War. In 1737 Sigulda became a private estate, granted by the Empress Anna to Field Marshal Peter Lacy, Governor of Livland; the Riga governor-general George Brown acquired the manor in 1765, and his daughter married Michael von der Borch. By the early 19th century it was admired, in the fashion of the time, as a romantic ruin. Olga Borch married Prince Dmitry Kropotkin in 1867, and he fitted the outer forecastle with a gate carrying that date, set the Borch arms on the inner gate tower, and had the walls strengthened with two pseudo-Gothic arches. A new castle was built in the outer forecastle between 1878 and 1881.

After the First World War and the founding of the Latvian republic, the ruins came under the Monument Board, which renewed the gate tower and other parts. The castle was in a poor state at the end of the Second World War.

Research and renovation began in 1962 with the conservation of the north tower; the chapter hall and chapel were restored a decade later. The architect Tatjana Vitola devised the method used to fortify the walls repeatedly since 1962, and a topographic plan was made in 1978. Normunds Treijs directed excavations in 1987-88, Janis Ciglis in 1997. The ruins are protected as a national architectural monument, designated in 1998, and as an archaeological monument of state significance. A European Union co-funded project, 'Reconstruction of Sigulda Castle Ruins and Infrastructure Adjustment for Tourism Development', began in 2011 and concluded in 2012, when the walls and towers were opened to visitors.