Castle of Xàtiva

The smaller of Xàtiva's two fortresses, the Castillo Menor, began as a Celtiberian stronghold on the crag, taken by the Carthaginians in the third century BC. It is said to be where Hannibal planned his campaign against the Roman city of Saguntum, and where his son was born in 218 BC; the site was later conquered by the Roman general Scipio, and the Romans went on to add a second fortress on the mountain's other high point, the Castillo Mayor. The stronghold commanded the ancient Via Augusta, the road running from Rome across the Pyrenees and down the Mediterranean coast to Cartagena and Cádiz.

The castle fell to the Almoravid dynasty in 1092. An uprising drove them out in 1145, during which the fortress was besieged by the ruler of Valencia, Marwan Abd-al-Aziz. In 1171 it passed, with the rest of the Levante coast, into Almohad hands.

James I of Aragon began his conquest of the region in 1239; a five-month siege ended with Xàtiva's fall on 22 May 1244. Under the Treaty of Xàtiva that followed, the governor surrendered the smaller castle to James I at once, while the terms allowed the Muslim garrison to continue holding the larger castle for a further two years.

Once that period had elapsed, James I forcibly resettled much of the town with Catalan and Aragonese colonists, while a portion of its Muslim and Jewish population was killed or expelled; over the following decades many of the Mudéjar who remained left for Granada or North Africa.

After James I's conquest and the creation of the Kingdom of Valencia, the castle served not only to defend the city but as the state prison of the Crown of Aragon. Among its prisoners was Jaume, Count of Urgell, the defeated claimant to the crown after the Compromise of Caspe, who was imprisoned there and died in captivity; a sarcophagus in the castle's chapel of Santa María is said to hold his remains. Diego de Borja, brother of Francis Borgia, was another prisoner, beheaded at the castle in 1562.

The castle saw fighting again during the War of the Spanish Succession. Joan Baptista Basset, commanding the Austracist forces defending Valencia and an engineer and artillerist himself, reinforced Xàtiva's defences, including the castle; a surviving tower is still known as the Garita Basset. His work held off a first siege in May 1706 led by the Count de las Torres.

The following year, without Basset and facing heavier artillery, the town's walls were breached in two places and the castle itself suffered extensive damage. Troops under d'Asfeld, fresh from their victory at the Battle of Almansa, could not reach the elevated castle and bombarded it instead; the garrison, made up mostly of English troops and acting against the wishes of the Catalan defenders, negotiated its withdrawal with the French, leaving the castle on 12 June 1707 after a siege of more than a month.

The castle's decline after 1707 owed most to the devastation inflicted on Xàtiva itself, the earthquake of 1748, which seriously damaged the site, and the Peninsular War of the early nineteenth century, after which it was left without strategic importance.

In the twentieth century the castle passed to Gregori Molina, a businessman who had made his fortune in Xàtiva's paper industry and reportedly intended to build himself a villa within the old fortress. Carles Sarthou, the town's official chronicler and director of the Museu de l'Almodí, persuaded him instead to respect the site's architecture; the result was a new neo-Gothic range built in harmony with the older work, in effect a third castle added to the other two. The site later passed to a savings bank and from there to the Generalitat Valenciana; it is now managed by Xàtiva's town council, protected as a bien de interés cultural, and open to visitors, who can also hold civil weddings there. The partly ruined complex featured as a filming location in the Star Wars series Andor.