Spiš Castle

The travertine hill rises some two hundred metres above the country around it, its cliffs falling away 20 to 40 metres almost sheer — a place that needed no masonry to be hard to reach. Building of the medieval castle began early in the 12th century as a boundary fort on the northern frontier of the Kingdom of Hungary, and it served for centuries as the seat of the head of Szepes county.

The date of the first written notice is disputed: 1120 by some accounts, 1209 by others, the later date that of a charter recording a sale of land to the Spiš provost Adolf that was removed from the county head's jurisdiction — which implies the county seat already stood on the rock. A charter of Béla IV dated 19 September 1249 records permission to raise a tower and a palace “in castro nostro Scypus” — on our castle of Spiš. A round residential tower on the summit had by then been lost, probably to a tectonic fault, and was replaced in the first third of the 13th century, the years that also produced the two-storey Romanesque palace on the neck of the rock.

Spiš was one of the few castles to hold out against the Mongol invasion of 1241, and its defences were strengthened afterwards all the same, by north Italian masons who also worked at Spišská Kapitula and Spišský Štvrtok. When the Árpád dynasty died out with Andrew III in 1301 the war of succession reached Spiš. Omodej Aba took the castle and the county office, and his family soon went over to Charles I. In 1312, after the battle of Rozhanovce, Matúš Čák of Trenčín laid siege to the place, and the county head Filip Druget held it against him.

In the succession crisis that opened with Albrecht II's death in 1439, Elizabeth of Luxembourg called in Ján Jiskra of Brandýs and his Bratrík troops to defend the interests of her infant son Ladislaus. Jiskra reached Spiš in 1441; a first attempt on the castle failed, and he took it instead by arrangement with the castle captain Peter Basko. He made it his seat, refortified the lower courtyard and raised there a circular fortlet seventeen metres across. His captain Peter Aksamit left the castle in 1453.

In 1465 Matthias Corvinus rewarded the Zápolyas with Spiš in hereditary tenure, the title of hereditary count and eleven free Spiš towns. They rebuilt in the late Gothic manner, keeping the Romanesque palace as the principal building, adding a chapel around 1470 and turning the upper castle into a comfortable family residence. On 2 February 1487 the palatine Stephen Zápolya and his wife Hedvig had a son here, John, later king of Hungary.

The Thurzós held Spiš through most of the 16th century and built in the Renaissance taste their foreign trade had made familiar; when their Spiš line failed in the male succession in the 1630s a royal decision handed the castle to the Csákys, its last noble owners, who held it until 1945. Their remodelling, running from the 1640s to 1663, put an armoury in the Romanesque palace and rebuilt the entrance for defence by cannon. During the anti-Habsburg risings of Thököly and Rákóczi imperial troops quartered here broke through the high walls of the upper castle beside the palace so that guns could bear on the road from Branisko to Levoča, and set a second gun position in the middle of the courtyard. When they marched out only a small garrison remained, paid for by the family, who were already moving down to new manor houses below the rock.

In 1780 fire destroyed the castle. Its cause is unknown: that the Csákys burned it to escape the tax then levied on roofed buildings, that lightning struck it, and that soldiers distilling spirits in the castle set it alight are all told. Nobody lived there afterwards, and villagers carried off the loosened masonry as building stone. An imperial commission examined the ruin in 1865 and judged it too far gone to conserve. The state took it over in 1945, made it a national cultural monument in 1961 and began the long rescue, backed by archaeological research, that followed; in 1993 the castle joined the UNESCO World Heritage list with Spišská Kapitula and Žehra.