Kaunas Castle

The first masonry castle at Kaunas was raised in the middle of the 14th century on a rise by the confluence of the Neris and the Nemunas, some 100 kilometres from Vilnius. Property of the ruler of Lithuania, it guarded the trade routes and shielded the state from the west, an enclosure castle behind boulder walls and water-filled ditches. It enters the written record as a target — in 1361 the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, Winrich von Kniprode, ordered information gathered about the castle, the thickness of its walls above all, in preparation for an assault. Excavation suggests it was then still new and probably unfinished.

The attack came in the spring of 1362, while the main Lithuanian forces were away at the Blue Waters fighting the Golden Horde. The army that closed on Kaunas brought crusading volunteers from England, Italy and various German lands. They dug a ditch from the Nemunas to the Neris and sealed the castle off behind a rampart and a guarded palisade, then brought up siege towers and wall-breaking machines.

Wigand of Marburg put the garrison at about 400 Lithuanians under Prince Vaidotas, son of Grand Duke Kęstutis, and the chronicler — no friend of men he called heathens — allowed that, attacked day and night, they defended themselves heroically. After three weeks the Knights breached the walls and took the castle, wrecking it, and marked the victory with a Mass on Easter Sunday. Of the 400 defenders, apparently only 36 came out alive; why no relief reached them is unclear. Kęstutis soon recovered the site and rebuilt.

In 1384 the Teutonic Knights captured Kaunas again; Grand Master Konrad Zöllner von Rotenstein began rebuilding it and renamed it Marienwerder, threatening the whole chain of castles that defended the Nemunas. The Lithuanians came back the same year, probably mustering near Vilnius so that artillery and supplies could be floated down the Neris; the defenders' guns destroyed a Lithuanian trebuchet before the castle fell to them anyway.

After 1398 the Order never took it back. The Lithuanians rebuilt on the old foundations, thickening the walls to three metres and more and raising them above ten. Four towers now stood at the corners, the south-eastern one round and four storeys tall, with a timber gallery inside the walls for men shooting powder weapons. A garrison of 600 was recorded in 1409.

After the Battle of Grunwald the castle served mainly as a residence and a centre of state administration. Vytautas the Great stayed here often and received guests, and Władysław II Jagiełło frequently held gatherings in it. When the town received Magdeburg rights in 1408 it became the administrative core of the Kaunas Powiat.

In 1412 an envoy of King John II of Castile came to Vytautas's residence at Kaunas, the first diplomatic meeting of Lithuanian and Spanish representatives known to historians. The next year Benedict Makrai, arbitrating for Sigismund of Luxembourg over Samogitia and its borders after the Peace of Toruń, announced at Kaunas a judgment strongly in Lithuania's favour, awarding it Veliuona and Klaipėda.

After Vytautas's death the castle became the seat of the Kaunas elder, and a prison for nobles and prisoners of war kept in the tower in hard conditions; a list of Muscovite captives held there in 1519 survives. Among its notable inmates was Sheikh Ahmed, son of the Golden Horde khan Akhmat, who had sheltered in Lithuanian-held Kyiv, then opened negotiations with the Ottoman sultan and was arrested and long held at Kaunas. When Prince Michael Glinski rose in revolt in 1508 he tried, and failed, to take the castle and free him.

In 1549 Sigismund Augustus made over the castle, the town and its surroundings to his wife Barbara Radziwiłł. During the Livonian War a semicircular artillery bastion went up against the south-eastern tower from about 1570, though only its underground firing gallery was finished.

In 1601 the castle housed courts and an archive; between 1601 and 1611 the Neris washed part of it away, and more went in the wars of the 17th and 18th centuries. Swedish troops used it during their war with the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, after which its military functions ceased; in the 18th century it served again as a prison, and the Russian administration then permitted houses to be built on its ground, which damaged it badly. Those houses were cleared and archaeological work began in 1930, and in 2011 a branch of the Kaunas City Museum was established in the castle.