Rapperswil Castle

The castle went up in the early 13th century, when the lords of Rapperswil left their older seat at Altendorf on the far side of the Obersee and built on the rocky spur across the Seedamm; Count Rudolf II and his son Rudolf III are named as its builders, and the family had acted as Vogt of Einsiedeln Abbey through the 11th and 12th centuries. Sandstone from the island of Lützelau went into the castle and the town walls, and the first mention of the place comes in 1229, at the foundation of Rüti Abbey.

Water surrounds the spur on three sides, and from it the counts could watch the waterway between the Walensee and Lake Zurich at its narrowest point, the Gotthard road between Lombardy and Zurich, and the pilgrim traffic on the Jakobsweg to Einsiedeln. The town of Rapperswil grew at the foot of the castle. The comital line ended in 1283 with the death of the eighteen-year-old Rudolf V, and Emperor Rudolf I took over the family's fiefs.

Elisabeth von Rapperswil, sister of Rudolf V, carried the lordship by her first marriage to the house of Homberg, in the person of Count Ludwig, who died in April 1289. Her second marriage carried the bailiwick around 1309 to Count Rudolf von Habsburg-Laufenburg, dead in 1315, and on to her son Count Johann I, who died at Grynau in 1337, and his son Johann II, who died in 1380.

In 1336 the Konstaffler, driven out of Zurich after a failed rising, took refuge in the castle, and with Count Johann II laid the plan for the Zürcher Mordnacht against the city's regime. The attempt failed. In the winter of 1350 the mayor of Zurich, Rudolf Brun, brought his troops before Rapperswil, took the castle and the town and burned both. Albrecht II, Duke of Austria, rebuilt town and castle in 1352/54, and since 1354 the castle has formed an almost equilateral triangle with a tower at each corner: the Gügeliturm donjon in the south-west, where the Hochwächter watched for approaching danger or fire, the five-sided Zeitturm in the east, and the Pulverturm in the north-west, reached along the battlements.

When the Habsburg-Laufenburg line died out in 1442 the castle passed to the citizens of Rapperswil. After the Old Zurich War the town was governed from 1458 to 1798 as a Gemeine Herrschaft of the Swiss Confederation, under two cantons and their Vogt. In 1464 the burghers bought themselves free of Habsburg-Austria and sealed a perpetual pact with the Confederation. The castle served as the seat of the confederal bailiffs, an administrative centre, a military base and a prison. French revolutionary troops plundered the interior in 1798.

The castle had fallen into disrepair by 1870, when Count Władysław Broel-Plater took a 99-year lease from the local authorities. A Polish émigré of the November Uprising of 1830, he had been in Switzerland since 1844 and restored the castle at his own expense, and on 23 October 1870 the Polish National Museum opened in it. That museum lasted until 1927, when the collection was moved to Poland and the rooms stood empty.

From 1936 to 1952 the castle held a second museum, devoted to contemporary Poland, which during the Second World War took on the cultural care of the Polish soldiers interned in Switzerland in 1940. Its collection went to Poland in 1952, after which the castle housed the international castle-research institute and, between 1962 and 1975, the Swiss Castle Museum. A third Polish museum, founded by Polish emigrants, occupied the walls from 1975; in 2008 some residents petitioned the authorities to evict it, two historical museums being reckoned too expensive to keep. The Polenmuseum closed in 2022, with a plan to reopen it in the former Hotel Schwanen. The Polish tenants are credited with saving the castle from decay.

Little of the castle's beginning is settled. A Roman watchtower connected with the Vicus Centum Prata is assumed to have preceded it, but nothing has been found to prove one; no significant excavation has been carried out on the Lindenhof and Herrenberg, and reliable data on the construction are few, so that only the renovations and the building's function rest on written sources. Castle and museum are entered in the Swiss inventory of cultural property as Class A objects of national importance. The city and local board of Rapperswil-Jona opened the tower, the battlements and the herb garden to visitors under a 2011 operating concept; the castle is otherwise only partly accessible, with a restaurant in the palais and guided tours for groups by appointment.