Gdańsk Castle

After the Teutonic takeover of Gdańsk in 1308, the city government installed by the Order made its seat on the site of an old gord that had been the residence of the dukes of Gdańsk and of Pomerelia. The commandery of Danzig was one of the highest-ranking in the entire State of the Teutonic Order, and the duties collected in the busy port gave its commander the means for castle-building. Work began in the late 1330s on the orders of Grand Master Dietrich von Altenburg, and the castle was completed by the late fourteenth century, standing between the Motława and the Radunia Canal, which was dug at around the same time.

Its core, the High Castle, was in use from about 1350: a block of some 60 by 63 metres around a cloistered courtyard, holding a chapter house, refectory, dormitories, chapel, treasury, scriptorium, armoury and kitchen. It was expanded in the 1380s and 1390s, and a new eastern moat had been cut in 1371 after the Vistula changed course. On the night of 15–16 October 1394 the castle caught fire and was destroyed; rebuilding continued until 1396.

Between 1384 and 1437 the castle carried three large guns alongside a growing battery of smaller pieces — eight in 1384, eleven in 1413, twenty-two in 1428 and sixty by 1434. Over the years the castle housed a resident community of thirty-two to thirty-five members of the Order. To the north and west of the High Castle lay a walled outer bailey with wall towers; the furthest northwest of these, the Swan Tower, controlled access to the river port. The bailey held a crossbow workshop, a sewer's shop and the commander's stables.

The castle's holder also controlled a string of properties across the Old Town: the Great Mill, the Little Mill (in fact a granary), a bathhouse, a bakery, a brickworks at Zaroślak and a carpenter's workshop on Ołowianka, with further land on Ostrów Island carrying a stable, a saddler's workshop, a cattle ranch and a forge.

During the Polish–Lithuanian–Teutonic War of 1409–1411, the city of Danzig surrendered to the Polish king, Władysław II Jagiełło, and a hospital was set up in the castle's outer bailey. Repeated attempts to force the castle itself to capitulate failed, and Jagiełło instead struck a deal with commander Johann von Schönfeld: if Malbork Castle fell, the gates of Gdańsk Castle would be opened. Malbork did not fall, and the city's hostility towards the Order's higher authorities during the war ultimately cost two of its mayors their lives by execution.

In 1454 the Thirteen Years' War began and an anti-Teutonic popular uprising broke out in Gdańsk. The castle's commander surrendered without a fight in the first year of the war, and the townspeople promptly took the castle apart — both to destroy a symbol of the city's subjugation and to prevent it ever being used against the city again. The demolition took a month. The emptied site became known as Zamczysko, the castle-ground, and was not built on again until 1648; no plan or drawing of the castle made in its own lifetime survives.