Royal Castle, Poznań

No document fixes when the first castle rose on the Poznań hill called mons castrensis, now Góra Przemysła. One view puts it in the reign of Przemysł I, who from 1249 may have raised a habitable brick tower with a well inside it and ringed the hill with a palisade; the residence was drawn into the walls of the town chartered in 1253. The other candidate is his son Przemysł II, who wanted a seat fit for a king of a reunited Poland. Przemysł II was born in the castle on 14 October 1257 and his daughter Elisabeth Richeza on 1 September 1288. He was crowned in 1295 and murdered the following year with the work unfinished; the break shows in the masonry, where a Wendish bond gives way to Gothic.

Przemysł's wife Ludgarda died in the castle on 14 December 1283, probably strangled by servants; chroniclers writing at the time record only unexplained circumstances, and the duke was first blamed in chronicles of the mid-14th century.

The Piasts of Głogów carried the work on, and it was finished before 1337 by Casimir III, who used the castle as his seat while he was governor of Greater Poland. In 1337 it was the largest castle in the Polish kingdom, modelled on Henry I the Bearded's palace at Legnica: Przemysł's tower and a great house of 63 by 17.5 metres, three storeys over a basement. The cellars held prisons and the wine store; the whole second floor was one chamber for two thousand guests.

From the reign of Władysław the Elbow-high the castle was the standing seat of the starostas general of Greater Poland. Casimir III sealed his peace with John of Bohemia here in 1337 and married Adelaide of Hesse here in 1341. Jadwiga and Władysław II Jagiełło came in 1386 and Eric of Pomerania in 1424, and in 1434 Jagiełło ordered the badly decayed tower rebuilt.

On 29 May 1493 the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, Hans von Tieffen, paid homage to King John I Albert in the castle. By the early 16th century the Gothic building no longer met royal standards, and Sigismund the Old lodged at the bishop's palace on Ostrów Tumski in 1513. The starosta general Łukasz Górka began a wholesale rebuilding, the chronicle notes recording that the buildings went up practically from new; the fire of 1536 burned the castle before it was finished.

Andrzej Górka raised it from ruin in Renaissance form — a main block of three storeys under four transverse roofs, an arcaded loggia to the courtyard, the tower cut down. Only the cellars survive from that phase. The oldest tower became the castle kitchen, using its well.

The Renaissance castle was wrecked in the Swedish Deluge of 1655–1660. John II Casimir wintered here with Marie Louise Gonzaga in 1657–58 and held the war council with Stefan Czarniecki that Józef Wybicki later set into Dąbrowski's Mazurka; Wybicki began his own legal career in the castle in 1765. Russian and Saxon armies sacked it in 1704 during the Great Northern War and the Tarnogród confederates took it in 1716. A partial rebuilding in 1721 did not halt the decay.

Kazimierz Raczyński, the last starosta general, used the walls of one 16th-century wing to build an archive, finished in 1783. After the Second Partition the Prussians pulled down the ruined southern part and raised a two-storey wing on the Renaissance cellars, which with the archive housed the regional government. The old castle held the Court of Appeal and then the state archive, the latter until 1939. In February 1945, in the fighting for the Poznań Citadel, Przemysł Hill lay in the line of artillery fire and what was left of the castle was brought down.

Zbigniew Zieliński drew a plan in 1949 to rebuild the castle in its 16th-century form; it went unbuilt after the chief conservator Jan Zachwatowicz ruled that Raczyński's part had to be restored. That block was rebuilt between 1959 and 1964, along with the Prussian building on the foundations of the presumed residential tower; the Museum of Applied Arts holds the first, museum workshops the "Royal Kitchen". From the old castle survive undisturbed 13th- and 14th-century foundations some two metres thick.

A committee for rebuilding the castle was formed on 22 April 2002, and the southern part was rebuilt in 2010–2013 to Witold Milewski's design, in mid-16th-century forms repeating Zieliński's project of 1949. The rebuilding drew charges of ahistoricity, and opponents nicknamed the result "Gargamel's Castle". A viewing point opened on the tower on 26 June 2016. The castle is entered on the register of immovable monuments in Poland.