Peniscola Castle

Ibero-Roman remains excavated at the port of Peníscola date to the 1st–2nd centuries BC, and in the 11th century the Arab writer Al-Idrisi described a Moorish castle above the sea at a place he called Baniskula. No detailed account of its defences survives before the 13th century, when James I of Aragon turned his attention to the crag during the conquest of Valencia.

Accounts differ on how the fortress passed from Muslim to Christian hands. One tradition holds that James I failed to take it by siege in 1225 and simply bypassed the crag as he pressed on with the wider conquest, extracting a capitulation only in 1233; another records a negotiated surrender in April 1229, when Zayd Abu Zayd, the last Almohad governor of Valencia, signed an accord ceding Peníscola along with other castles in the east.

In 1294 Berenguer de Cardona, master of the Order of the Temple in the Crown of Aragon, struck a bargain with James II: the Temple ceded Tortosa and its district to the crown in exchange for a cluster of castles in the north of the Kingdom of Valencia, Peníscola among them, together with Pulpís and Xivert. The Templars demolished the existing Muslim fortifications that same year and rebuilt on the fortress-convent model already tried at Miravet, on a crag with its own drinking-water source that storms could briefly turn into an island by flooding the tombolo below.

Work was overseen by the Templar commander Arnau de Banyuls, with Berenguer de Cardona directly involved; the fortifications were already well advanced by 1307, when the order itself was suppressed and James II placed its property in the hands of royal administrators. In 1319 Peníscola passed to the newly founded Order of Montesa, which finished the fortress and installed a knight-commander with a small garrison; the priory of Sant Jaume was founded inside the castle in 1329.

During the Western Schism, Pero Martines de Luna — the Aragonese pope known as Benedict XIII, or Pope Luna — was forced out of Avignon and moved between towns of the Crown of Aragon before the Order of Montesa granted him Peníscola; he settled there with his small court in the autumn of 1411. The castle's protection and its open sea route to Rome kept him there until his death in 1423, still refusing to accept the Council of Constance's 1414 verdict deposing and excommunicating him as an antipope, a ruling that left him recognised as pope only by a handful of French and Castilian dioceses.

His residence drew artists and craftsmen who converted the upper floor into a residential palace with a substantial library, its remains now split between the Vatican and Paris's National Library. Benedict also had the Sant Pere gate built in 1414 as a papal embarkation point, later sealed for military reasons in the 18th century. On his death the cardinals of his court elected Clement VIII as successor; he abdicated in 1429, ending the schism, and the castle passed to the crown before reverting to Montesa in 1441 for 150,000 sous and finally becoming crown property in 1488.

During the Germanies revolt of 1519–1521, the viceroy of Valencia, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, took refuge in Peníscola with royalist forces; in gratitude he granted the town the title Fidelíssima in 1522 and pardoned its rebels in Charles I's name in 1525. Through the rest of the century the crown modernised the walls against artillery and Barbary pirate raids, commissioning the Italian military engineer Giovanni Battista Antonelli, whose fortifications — finished in 1578 — shielded the town on the one side of the crag that could be approached on foot.

Loyalty was tested again in the War of the Spanish Succession: between 1705 and 1707 Valencian supporters of Philip V held the walls against a heavy assault by forces loyal to the Archduke, earning the town the style Molt Noble, Molt Lleial i Fidelíssima Ciutat and two fleurs-de-lis added to its coat of arms. The garrison's commander built the sanctuary of the Mare de Déu de l'Ermitana in thanks between 1708 and 1714, against the castle's north tower, whose upper level held the Templar chapel.

French troops occupied Peníscola in 1812 during the Peninsular War and held it until 1814, when a Spanish naval bombardment drove them out, wrecking most of the town's houses and part of the castle. After the Carlist wars and the arrival of far more powerful firearms left its defences obsolete, the Spanish army finally vacated the castle in 1890, and it was declared a national historic monument in 1931.