Smederevo Fortress

When Stefan Lazarević died in 1426 his nephew Đurađ Branković had to hand Belgrade back to the Hungarians, leaving the Serbian Despotate without a capital. The site chosen, where the Jezava runs into the Danube, carried no earlier settlement: it lay near enough to Christian Hungary to keep that alliance alive, while letting Serbia control the river traffic and block Hungarian passage into the Morava valley, which suited Sultan Murad II.

Building began in the autumn of 1428, with stone carted in from the abandoned Roman cities of Mons Aureus, Margum and Viminacium and Greek and Ragusan workmen at the brickwork by the following spring. By 1430 the inner city stood: a palace along the moat wall, a throne hall against the Danube lit by four double-arched windows, and the Donžon kula, its walls over four metres thick, with hidden doors in the Jezava wall opening an escape route towards Hungary. A brick inscription on the Krstata kula names "in Christ the Lord faithful Despot Đurđ, Lord of Serbs and the Littoral of Zeta", by whose order the city was built in the year 6938 — 1430.

Nine more years went on a fortified suburb, bringing the circuit to 1.5 kilometres of wall and twenty-five towers. The despotess Jerina was seen among the foreign overseers, one of them her brother, and that, with years of grinding labour and heavy taxes, fixed on her the name Prokleta Jerina — "Damned Jerina".

On 20 April 1434 Đurađ's youngest daughter Katarina married Ulrich II of Celje in the fortress, a match that read in Edirne as a tightening Serbo-Hungarian alliance. By mid-1434 the vizier Mehmet Saridže-pasha arrived with the sultan's terms: Serbia's safety could be guaranteed only by marrying the elder daughter, Mara, to Murad II, and the council convoked in the palace gave way. On 14 August 1435 a contract of "brotherhood and friendship" with Venice was signed in the audience hall, counting Đurađ and his sons as Venetian citizens.

The peace bought by Mara's marriage broke in early June 1439, when Murad II brought 130,000 men onto the hills around Smederevo. Branković rode for Hungarian help and left his son Grgur in command; no help came, but the walls held even after the sultan brought up cannon, the first artillery fire seen in Serbia. Hunger did what the guns could not, and on 18 August, after nearly three months, the defenders surrendered. Grgur and his brother Stefan were sent to Anatolia and blinded, despite the pleas of their sister, the sultan's wife. The Peace of Szeged returned the fortress and both princes in 1444, and around the beginning of 1449 the despot held the Hungarian regent John Hunyadi in its dungeons until he was ransomed.

Mehmed II came against Smederevo twice in the mid-1450s and was held off both times. In the first, part of a raid that carried off fifty thousand Serbs, Thomas Kantakouzenos held the city with six thousand men against twenty thousand; the walls held again in 1456. What ended the Despotate was not a siege: after the early death of Despot Lazar Branković, the court around Stephen Tomašević, who took command that March, chose to negotiate, and the fortress was given up on 20 June 1459 without a fight.

Smederevo became the seat of an Ottoman sanjak until the capture of Belgrade in 1521 moved the administration there, and stayed a frontier garrison until the Ottomans took the lands beyond the Danube in 1552. Between 1460 and 1480 the new owners added escarpments, low walls and further towers, and in 1480 squat artillery batteries before the corners, one raised from the stone of the despot's demolished church of the Annunciation.

Habsburg armies held Smederevo in 1688–1690, 1718–1739 and 1789–1791. Serbian insurgents took it in June 1804, and it was the centre of the renewed Serbian state from 1805 to 1807 before Ottoman forces recovered it in 1813. Its soldiering ended when the fortress was handed to Prince Mihailo Obrenović in 1867; almost nothing about it had been altered since 1480.

German forces used the fortress as an ammunition store, and on 5 June 1941 it exploded. The blast reached settlements ten kilometres away, tore out much of the southern wall, destroyed the railway station while it was packed with people and reduced most of the buildings in Smederevo to debris; about 2,500 people were killed and some 5,500 injured. Allied bombing in 1944 added to the damage. Declared a Monument of Culture of Exceptional Importance in 1979, the fortress was placed on UNESCO's tentative list in April 2010.