Muiderslot

Whoever held the mouth of the Vecht held the water road to Utrecht, one of the great trading towns of the age. Muiden was administered in the 13th century as a fief of the Sticht by the lords Van Amstel, who are thought to have raised a work of timber and later of stone here to guard the bishopric's northern boundary and their own revenues, a toll house probably standing where the castle later rose. After Muiden was taken into Holland, Count Floris V could stop passing ships with a chain across the river and levy on them.

The castle is credited to Floris V in 1280, a square of about 32 by 35 metres with a tower at each corner, brick walls over 1.5 metres thick and a moat; the building has also been dated to the last quarter of the century, and the count may only have bought a castle already standing there.

In January 1296 Floris turned on Flanders with French backing, and the English king, whose Flemish interests he had crossed, gave Jan I van Cuijk the task of seizing the count and carrying him to England. Floris was taken on a falcon hunt by Gijsbrecht IV van Amstel and Herman van Woerden, and the plan to ship him out broke down at Muiden. He was held five days in the castle, and when he tried to break out he was stabbed to death, Gerard van Velsen among those striking the blows. Tradition puts a private cause behind it too: that Floris had raped Van Velsen's wife.

In 1297 the castle was taken by Willem van Mechelen, bishop of Utrecht, and by 1300 it had been pulled down, the stone said to have gone into enlarging his castle of Vredelant. Around 1370 Albert of Bavaria, then count of Holland and Zeeland, is held to have rebuilt it on the same ground to the same plan, work running to about 1386 — though it has also been argued that the castle was never destroyed at all. The building accounts that survive suggest the place was usually in poor repair.

The castle was usually kept by castellans holding it for a lord — the bishop, or the landgrave. It belonged briefly to the Guelders early in the 16th century, and in 1577, during the Eighty Years' War, it was taken in the name of William of Orange.

In 1609 the castle became the official residence of the poet and historian P. C. Hooft (1581–1647) as drost of Muiden, and he was its chief occupant until his death. It could not be heated through the winter, so Hooft kept only his summers there, living in Amsterdam the rest of the year, and paid part of the upkeep himself. He extended the garden and the plum orchard while an outer ring of earthworks was thrown up around the castle.

His hospitality produced the legend of the Muiderkring, a supposed company of scholars and writers meeting at the castle for literary and musical evenings. That picture is a 19th-century romance, cut back to size by 20th-century research: Hooft lent the castle to his friends much as a holiday house. Bredero and Hugo de Groot were both there in 1616; the first documented gathering of the kind fell on 7 July 1633 and the last in the summer of 1645, and the visitors over those years included Vondel, Constantijn Huygens, Barlaeus and Roemer Visscher's daughters Anna and Tesselschade.

After Hooft's death the castle slid into decay. The French army quartered troops in it, and from 1795 nobody lived there at all. The Ministry of War used it as a prison and munitions store until the fabric was judged too far gone, and in 1823 recommended demolition. The king objected, but in 1825 the building was advertised for sale to be broken up: not the ground, only the right to pull the castle down and keep the materials. Appeals to King William I, among them one from the historian and writer Samuel Iperusz. Wiselius, stopped the sale, and the castle passed to the Ministry of the Interior, which had no intention of repairing it. A plan of 1830 to make it a national historical museum failed for want of money.

From mid-century the weakest parts were at least patched, and the castle became a national museum in 1878. Restoration began in 1895 to Pierre Cuypers's designs: a medieval exterior over interiors recalling Hooft's day. No medieval image of the castle existed, so Cuypers worked from imagination and crowned it with battlements, finishing in 1909. A second campaign from 1956 to 1972 stripped out his reconstructions as too fanciful and returned the grounds to their 17th-century state with the plum orchard and herb garden. A programme begun in 1999 repaired the fortifications and re-laid the original kitchen garden.