Vilnius Castle Complex

The hill above the Neris was fortified with wooden walls, reinforced with stone in the 9th century; a wooden castle stood there by the 10th century, and stone walls and towers by the 13th. Under Grand Duke Gediminas, who made Vilnius his capital, the castle was expanded in 1323. Pagan Lithuania had waged war with the Christian orders seeking to conquer and convert it for more than two centuries, and as Vilnius grew into one of the state's most important cities it became their primary target.

The Teutonic Order attacked the complex in 1365, 1375, 1377, 1383, 1390, 1392, 1394 and 1402 without ever taking it whole. The heaviest blow came in 1390, during the civil war between Vytautas and his cousin Jogaila, when Henry, Earl of Derby — the future Henry IV of England — joined the Teutonic assault with 300 knights; Vytautas was at times allied with the Order against Jogaila. The attackers burned the Crooked Castle, never rebuilt, but failed to take the Upper or Lower castles. A siege lasting over three weeks four years later battered a defence tower until it collapsed into the Neris.

The 1392 Astrava Agreement ended the civil war and made Vytautas Grand Duke. He had spent about four years living with the Teutonic Order during the fighting, time enough to study its castle architecture, and he drew on it after a fire tore through the complex in 1419. The Upper Castle he rebuilt was Gothic, its roof glazed green; the keep's second-floor hall, at 10 by 30 metres, was the largest room in the complex — smaller than the Grand Master's hall at Marienburg, larger than the Duke's Palace hall on Trakai Island. Reconstruction finished in 1422, and the state had planned to crown Vytautas king there, a coronation his death cut short.

The Lower Castle's Gothic, three-winged stone Royal Palace rose in the 15th century, apparently soon after the 1419 fire. Grand Duke Alexander, once King of Poland, moved his residence there and had it renovated into a palace; he and his wife, a daughter of Moscow's Grand Duke Ivan III, lived and died in it. Sigismund I the Old expanded it further — a new wing, a third floor, extended gardens, worth 100,000 ducats by contemporary accounts — and it was here in 1517 that an emissary of the Holy Roman Empire introduced him to his second wife, Bona Sforza.

Sigismund II Augustus was crowned Grand Duke in the Royal Palace and kept building it, living first with Elisabeth of Austria, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor, then with his second wife, Barbara Radziwiłł. An emissary of the Holy See reported the palace held more treasures than the Vatican, and Sigismund assembled one of the largest book collections in Europe there. Italian architects, among them Giovanni Cini da Siena and Bernardino de Gianotis, remodelled it in Renaissance style.

Under the Vasas the palace gained an early Baroque refit from Matteo Castello and Giacopo Tencalla. It hosted the wedding of Duke John, later King John III of Sweden, to Sigismund Augustus's sister Catherine, and in 1634 staged the first opera performed in Lithuania, mounted by the impresarios Marco Scacchi and Virgilio Puccitelli.

After the 16th century the Upper Castle fell out of maintenance, and until the early 17th century it served as a prison for noblemen. It was used as a fortress for the last time in 1655, when Russian forces captured the entire complex — the first time a foreign army had taken it whole. A Polish–Lithuanian army recaptured Vilnius six years later, but the Upper Castle was never rebuilt and stood abandoned.

The Royal Palace fared no better: badly damaged and plundered in the war, it was unfit as a state residence after the 1660–61 recapture and stood empty about 150 years. Families lived among its ruins after the Commonwealth fell; once the Grand Duchy was absorbed into the Russian Empire, Tsarist officials had the remaining sections demolished, and by the early 19th century the palace was almost gone, its bricks sold in 1799 to a merchant from Kremenchug. The World Wars brought further losses, leaving only Gediminas Tower standing.

On 1 January 1919 the Lithuanian tricolour was raised on Gediminas Tower for the first time, now marked annually as Flag Day. On 7 October 1988, during the drive to restore independence, 100,000 gathered at the complex to watch it raised again. Vilnius Cathedral had its own reversal: converted to secular use in the 1950s, its rededication as a church in the late 1980s was celebrated as a turning point in modern Lithuanian history.