Niedzica Castle

Kokosz Berzeviczy fought for Charles Robert in the Hungarian civil war, making his name at the sieges of Spiš Castle and Esztergom, and on 13 July 1306 the king rewarded him with lands in central Spiš. Whether he raised the castle is unsettled. One historian argues that building could not have begun before 1308, when Charles Robert's army secured Hungary's northern marches, while some archaeologists place a first defensive work on the hill before 1313. A deed of 1320 recording Kokosz selling four of the surrounding villages to his brother argues against a castle already standing, and the act of 1325 usually cited as the first mention survives in copies that differ and names as owner a son Kokosz never had.

The first certain reference is the 1330 testament of Wilhelm Drugeth, ispán of Spiš, who raised a stone castle, a castrum lapideum, on the hill; on his death in 1342 it passed to the crown.

In 1347 Louis of Anjou returned the castle to the Berzeviczys, and it descended to Piotr, a courtier of Sigismund of Luxembourg; a chapel and sacristy were added to the upper castle in the second half of the fourteenth century. The loan of 1412 fixed its place in Polish–Hungarian dealings: envoys of the Polish king lent the Emperor Sigismund 37,000 kopas of Prague groschen against the Spiš lands, and the pledge act named this castle as the place where the repayment was to be counted before being carried to Czorsztyn and handed over. The debt was never repaid, and the pledged Spiš lands stayed Polish until the partitions. Hussite raiders plundered the surrounding villages in 1431 and again in 1433 without harming the castle.

Jan Schwarz, the last Berzeviczy to hold the castle, pledged it to Emeryk Zápolya in 1463, the spring in which it hosted talks between envoys of Jan Wolski, starosta of Czorsztyn, and Tomasz of Tarcza, whose band was ravaging south-eastern Lesser Poland. When Jan died childless in 1470 it became Zápolya property outright.

Emeryk bought up the Berzeviczy estates of Zamagurze until the Dunajec lordship comprised ten villages, and it was he, ban of Croatia, Dalmatia and Slavonia, who had the lower castle built. After his death in 1487 the estate passed to his brother Stefan and then to Stefan's son Jan, the future king of Hungary.

King Louis II died at Mohács in 1526 and Hungary split between Jan Zápolya, elected by the nobility, and Ferdinand of Habsburg. In 1528 Zápolya granted this castle and its villages to Hieronim Łaski, voivode of Sieradz, rewarding the embassy to Suleiman the Magnificent that had saved Hungary from a Turkish invasion, a grant the Habsburg party refused to recognise. A Habsburg garrison under Stefan Potturniański held the castle until Mikołaj Kostka, a Zápolya man, took it late in 1528, beat off the imperial troops of Kasper Seredy who came to besiege him, and had his predecessor beheaded and the body impaled. The Habsburg faction retook the place in 1529, and Łaski took possession later that year, pledging it in January 1530 to Jan Horváth for 4,000 florins.

Early in 1533 robber knights under Jerzy Witzhumm and Erazm Pflug seized the castle, their band of mainly Czech and Silesian fugitives robbing the surrounding villages and keeping abducted notables in a prison within the walls until an expedition sent by Ferenc Bebek recovered it that May. Łaski's dismissed castellan Mikołaj Minkwitz tried to retake it by force in April 1535 and was broken in his camp below the walls by Wallachian mercenaries.

At the end of the sixteenth century the castle was bought by Ján Horváth of Plaveč, and it descended through the Palocsay branch of the Horváths and their heirs the Salamons. Successive owners rebuilt it in the fifteenth, sixteenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, giving the Gothic fortress its largely Renaissance character. After the First World War the castle and its Spiš villages, historically part of Hungary, were incorporated into Poland.

The Salamons abandoned it in 1943 as the front of the Second World War approached, the last countess leaving with her children two years before the Red Army arrived. The property was nationalised after the war, its final reconstruction was completed in 1963 under the Polish Ministry of Culture, and it has been a historical museum ever since, in the care of the Association of Art Historians. The damming of the Dunajec in 1994 created Lake Czorsztyn below the castle, and the limestone hill has since been reinforced and kept under constant monitoring.