Corvin Castle

A document of 18 October 1409 records King Sigismund of Luxembourg granting the royal territory of Hunedoara, and the fortified structure on it, to the nobleman Vojk — Voicu — Corbu, probably a Wallachian immigrant who had served as a knight at the royal court. What Voicu received stood on a limestone rock above the Zlaști River: an elliptical enclosure with walls up to two metres thick of limestone, gravel and dolomite, and a triangular tower brought to light by investigations during the First World War. Its date is disputed, some historians placing the first stone fortification in the 14th century and others in the 15th, and one tradition attributes the earlier keep to Charles I of Hungary. Hunedoara became the central town of Hunyad county, its castle one link in a chain of frontier defences built above all against the Turkish threat.

Voicu's son John Hunyadi, Voivode of Transylvania, made the fortress his family's ancestral seat. The accounts date the start differently: by the Romanian tradition the work was commissioned after 1440, with the chapel, the oldest part of the castle, begun in 1442; other historians date the laying-out to 1446, the year the Diet elected Hunyadi regent governor of Hungary. The first campaign wrapped fresh walls around the older fortress, raised the round Deserted, Drummers' and Capistrano towers, and added the residential wing and the Knights' Hall beneath it in 1452; a long gallery ran out to the new Neboisa keep, the last defence tower, whose name means "Don't be afraid" in Serbo-Croatian.

The double wall was flanked by both rectangular and circular towers, an architectural innovation for Transylvanian building of the period, and the rectangular towers carry large openings to take heavier weapons. Hunyadi's rooms were above the Knights' Hall, with the dungeon directly beneath them and, in the north-west bastion, the cell used by his friend John of Capistrano, the Franciscan who preached the crusade that relieved Belgrade in 1456.

Hunyadi died in 1456 and the work stagnated. His elder son Ladislaus, said to have been born in the castle in 1433, held the estate until 16 March 1457, when it passed to his brother Matthias, who is said to have taken the name Corvinus — Latin for raven — from the bird on the family arms. New commissions began in 1458 on the Matia wing, and the eastern extension and the access bridge, climbing from the valley floor on five tall brick piers, are attributed to Matthias as well. The Renaissance work was finished around 1480, the year cut in stone above the main gate, and the castle was by then reckoned one of the biggest and most impressive buildings in Eastern Europe.

Its best-known story is its least settled. Visitors are told that Vlad the Impaler was held prisoner here by John Hunyadi; the Romanian tradition says instead that Vlad never owned the place, came as a guest of its then owner and ally Matthias, and after fleeing into Transylvania in 1462 was imprisoned for twelve years at Visegrád and probably, for a time, at Hunedoara.

By 1526 the castle had passed to the Török family of Enying. In 1534 a quarrel between Valentin Török and Prince John Zápolya brought Emerich Csibak, a fervent supporter of Zápolya, against the walls: the castle was besieged, taken and partly destroyed. Török shortly went over to Zápolya, and in 1535 Zápolya confirmed his ownership and made good what Csibak had wrecked. In 1599, the year Michael the Brave briefly won control of Transylvania, part of the castle and the town beside it were burned by his Wallachians in the fighting; otherwise the century brought the building no improvements.

From these decades of Turkish war comes the castle's other legend: the courtyard well, 28 metres deep, is said to have been dug by three Turkish prisoners promised their freedom if they reached water, and when they finished, after fifteen years, the promise was broken.

In early 1605 Stefan Török, the last male of his line, pawned the castle to Gabriel Bethlen, then a cavalry general and later Prince of Transylvania, who came into full possession only after the death of Török's sister Catharina. He was the third owner to rebuild at scale, adapting the place to new civil and military uses: the Great Palace and the White Tower on the eastern side, a bastion for munitions, and an external yard for administration and storage. Under Peter Bethlen a wall called "the barrier" enclosed the Hussars' Court beyond the castle bridge, the ground floor of its buildings pierced with twenty-three openings for defence.

The inheritance was fought over harder than the walls. David Zólyomi, husband of the heiress Catharina Bethlen, was convicted of high treason on 21 August 1633, and their son Nicolae took the side of George II Rákóczi; after a skirmish with Ákos Barcsay, Rákóczi besieged Hunedoara to avenge Zólyomi's disloyalty, and after the siege Nicolae was taken and held in Hungary until June 1660. His death in 1671 left the property to Prince Michael I Apafi, and in 1724 it passed to the state treasury — Austrian until 1867, Austro-Hungarian until 1918, and Romanian since.

What stands now followed a disastrous fire and decades of neglect: a restoration in which, critics complained, the architects gave the building their own idea of how a great Gothic castle should look.