Nitra Castle

Castle Hill carried a fortified centre as early as the Bronze Age, around 1600 BCE, and Celts held it in the first century BCE. After that settlement was destroyed the site lay empty until the early Slavic period of the seventh and eighth centuries, and Slavs held it permanently at least from the turn of the eighth and ninth centuries. A wooden palisade protected the summit in the first half of the ninth century; in the second half the Slavs replaced it with a massive earth-filled rampart between two drystone walls. The river Nitra covers three sides of the hill, and the fortified ground once took in the whole castle hill and the upper town, some eight and a half hectares.

The principality of Nitra began to form here at the end of the eighth century, and Pribina's church, tied to the oldest written mention of both the town and the principality, very probably stood on this hill. In 833 Mojmír I took Pribina's centre of power at Nitra. Once the principality had been absorbed into Great Moravia the town became the seat of its prince, who went on enlarging and fortifying the hillfort; confirmed written reports of it date from 871. In 892 Arnulf of the East Frankish realm and Braslav, prince of the Sava principality, plundered the territory of the Great Moravian ruler Svätopluk with Magyar help, without success for the time being. The Magyar commander Lél settled at Nitra in 920, after Svätopluk's death, and by 955 the castle had passed to the Árpáds, who used the administrative machinery of the Nitra principality in laying the foundations of their own state.

In 1001 the Polish prince Bolesław the Brave defeated the Hungarian duke Stephen and took the Nitra region, which Stephen I won back in 1029. After the German king Henry III and the Czech prince Břetislav defeated the Hungarian army in 1042 the inhabitants accepted Domoslav as prince of Nitra, a principality of nine comitats at the time, and once the allied armies withdrew King Samuel drove him out. Domoslav returned in 1046 to a Nitra region that had stayed out of the pagan rising led by Vata, and ruled until his death in 1048. Béla I then held the principality of Nitra together with Bihar from the castle, probably had it repaired, and was king of Hungary from 1060 to 1063.

The old rampart had been destroyed before the early eleventh century, and a castle was built in that century on the site of the earlier fort, growing out of the hillfort probably at the time the Kingdom of Hungary took shape. It held in 1074 against the emperor Henry IV and his Hungarian ally Salomon, whose army plundered the country round the town. It held again in 1109, when Otto I of Olomouc and his son Svatopluk of Olomouc, allies of the emperor Henry V, came into Slovakia to avenge King Coloman's raid on Moravia: they reached Nitra but took only the town with its suburb, laying it waste along with the property of the Zobor monastery before Svatopluk of Olomouc went home with heavy booty. The principality, whose princes had come in turn from Pribina's, Mojmír's and the Árpád line since the second decade of the ninth century, ceased to exist after 1108.

A fortified castle already stood on the hill when the Tatars invaded Slovakia in 1241, in the reign of Béla IV, and it withstood them. With the roads into the country open to the Golden Horde after the battle on the river Slaná, the king saved his life only by fleeing to Nitra castle, where he stayed a short time before the Tatars resumed their pursuit. The horde pressed on to Nitra and failed to take it, though it plundered the abbey completely and destroyed a very valuable archive. War broke out in 1271 between Stephen V of Hungary and Přemysl Otakar II of Bohemia, and the Czech king invaded, took Nitra, plundered the town and ravaged the castle; the church of St Emmeram burned in the fire during the siege, and church and defences both had to be rebuilt. He returned in 1273, seized Nitra and laid it waste entirely, and this time the bishop's cathedral burned with a large part of its historical documents.

In 1296 Andrew III of Hungary gave the castle and its surroundings to bishop Paschasius, who had the ruined castle and walls repaired; from that time the castle has been episcopal property. Matúš Čák of Trenčín fell into enmity with King Charles Robert and with the king's patron the pope, and thus with bishop Ján of Nitra. In 1311 and again in 1317 he brought his army into Nitra, plundered it, threw down the fortification walls and burned everything, the cathedral archive with its documents and valuables among the losses, and carried the remains of Svorad and Benedict away to his seat at Trenčín. Bishop Meško the Piast had a new cathedral built on the castle from 1328, and the work ran until 1355.

Stibor of Stiborice, a Polish noble later in the service of King Sigismund, besieged and took Nitra in 1403. The Orphans under the Czech priest Prokop the Lesser broke in during 1431 and occupied the town, but did not take the castle; the Hussite army of Ján Jiskra of Brandýs seized Nitra again in 1440. In 1465 the army of the Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus ravaged the castle once more.

The dynastic quarrel reached the gates six years later. Most of the nobility had chosen Matthias, son of John Hunyadi, as king after the death of Ladislaus the Posthumous, while a dissenting party called in the Polish prince Casimir, second son of Casimir IV Jagiellon. Casimir's army occupied a considerable part of Slovakia and he made Nitra castle his seat in 1471. Matthias besieged the place and took it in 1472; Casimir got away from the castle.

The empty Hungarian throne was contested from 1526 by the Transylvanian voivode Ján Zápoľský and the Austrian archduke Ferdinand I, founder of the Austrian Habsburg line. Nitra backed Ferdinand, and Zápoľský's army attacked the town and took it in 1528; he gave the administration of the castle to Valentín Török and appropriated its property. After the death of bishop Podmanický in 1530 the imperial general Katzianer took Nitra and carried the episcopal treasures off to Vienna, among them a precious reliquary of the Nitra patrons that never came back. The Peace of Várad put Nitra in 1538 into the hands of the Turzo brothers, Alexej, a county and royal dignitary, and František, bishop of Nitra, who exploited the town and the episcopal estates. The defences were strengthened again during the Turkish raids on southern Slovakia in the sixteenth century, when the Renaissance castle palace and a new inner castle gate were also built; the Turks besieged Nitra in 1588.

Bocskai's rebel army plundered the country round Nitra in 1606, and the town surrendered and avoided the sacking. The army of Bethlen, the Transylvanian commander and Hungarian anti-king, held Nitra briefly in 1620 before having to give it up to the imperial general Bouquoi, and his attempt to take it again with Turkish help in 1623 failed when the imperial army beat him. Bishop Ján IV Telegdy completed the church in 1624 and built the Upper Church. In 1663 the German commander of the town and castle betrayed his charge and sold himself to the Turks; they besieged Nitra, took it, and ruled there until May 1664, when an imperial army under general de Souches drove them out. Town and castle were left completely devastated by that fighting, and bishop Tomáš Pálffy had Nitra fortified again by 1673, the form in which the massive walls have stood since.

Thököly's rebels took only the lower town in 1697, and the kuruc army of Francis II Rákóczi under the general and convert Ladislav Očkaj did the same in 1703. Rákóczi's chief general, count Mikuláš Berčéni, took the castle in 1704, and the rebels held Nitra until 1708, when its commander Revaj surrendered to the labanc general Heister. The whole defensive system had been rebuilt after the Turkish occupation, and at the start of the eighteenth century the Upper Church was rebuilt and the bishop's palace added, the originally Gothic palace taking its Late Baroque appearance in that century. Most of the surviving fortifications belong to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a smaller share to the Middle Ages. The Romanesque church of St Emmeram remains the oldest surviving part of the cathedral, dated to the eleventh century by some accounts and to the first half of the thirteenth by others; the chronicle of Maurus, from the middle of the eleventh century, already mentions the basilica. The complex has been protected as a national cultural monument of Slovakia since 2 October 1963, the bishop's office sits at the castle, which is the seat of the Diocese of Nitra, and the cathedral church is under remodelling.