Prince's Palace

The seat of the rulers of Monaco was established on the Rocher de Monaco as a fortress in 1191, when the harbour below was acquired by the Republic of Genoa. The Emperor Henry IV granted the harbour and the ground around it to the Genoese on condition that they protect the coastline from piracy, and further territory was ceded to the new owners by the Council of Peille and the Abbaye de Saint Pons. Work on a new fortress began in 1215: four towers connected by ramparts and protected by a curtain wall, set on a rock standing some sixty metres above the Mediterranean. That enclosure forms the core of the palace that occupies the site today.

The Genoese divided when the Emperor Frederick II challenged the power of Pope Innocent IV, into Guelphs who supported the pope and Ghibellines loyal to the imperial crown, and among the patrician families siding with the Guelphs were the Grimaldi. The two camps fought throughout the thirteenth century, and at the end of it the victorious Ghibellines banished their opponents from Genoa. The Grimaldi settled along the stretch of coast now known as the French Riviera, where several castles still carry the name Chateau Grimaldi.

Legend relates that in January 1297 François Grimaldi, disguised as a monk, sought shelter at the castle, murdered the guard once inside and let in his men, who took the place. The fortress became the Grimaldi stronghold, and a statue of François in the precincts of the palace commemorates the story. Charles I, son of François Grimaldi's cousin Rainier I, ruled from 1331 to 1357 and enlarged the fortress considerably, adding one large building against the eastern ramparts and a second looking out over the sea, which gave the place more the appearance of a fortified house than of a fortress. The fortifications were still needed: over the following three decades the stronghold was alternately lost to the Genoese and regained.

In 1341 the Grimaldi took Menton and then Roquebrune, consolidating their power in the area, and strengthened both the defences of the harbour and the fortress on the Rocher. For the next hundred years they defended their territory against attacks from states including Genoa, Pisa, Venice, Naples, France, Spain, Germany, England and Provence, and the fortress was frequently bombarded, damaged and restored. An alliance gradually formed with France, which strengthened the Grimaldi position; more secure, the lords of Monaco began to want not only a defensible place but a home that reflected their standing.

Through the fifteenth century the fortress and the Rocher continued to be extended and further defended until the site accommodated a garrison of some 400 troops. The slow change from fortified house to palace began in this period, first with building by Lamberto Grimaldi, lord of Monaco between 1458 and 1494 and remembered as a ruler who "handled diplomacy and the sword with equal talent", and then by his son Jean II. The east side of the fortress gained a three-floored wing guarded by high scalloped walls linking the bastion towers of St Mary, Middle and South. It held the principal room of the palace, the State Hall, later known as the Guard Room, where the princes carried out official business and held court.

In 1505 Jean II was killed by his brother Lucien, who succeeded him, and peace did not last long. In December 1506 a Genoese force of 14,000 besieged Monaco and its castle, and for five months 1,500 Monégasques and mercenaries defended the Rocher before winning through in March 1507. Lucien I was left to hold a diplomatic line between France and Spain in order to preserve the fragile independence of a state that was in truth subject to Spain. He set about repairing the heavy bombardment damage at once, and to the main wing built by Lamberto and extended under Jean II he added a large further wing, the one that now houses the state apartments.

A treaty concluded at the beginning of Honoré I's rule clarified Monaco's position as a protectorate of Spain, and so of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and the security this brought allowed the lord of Monaco to think about comfort rather than constant defence. The courtyard was rebuilt, the architect Dominique Gallo designing two tiers of arcades; the upper tier became the Gallery of Hercules after Orazio de Ferrari painted its ceilings with scenes from the Labours of Hercules during the later reign of Honoré II. A new wing went up on the other side of the courtyard, its external walls frescoed by the Genoese artist Luca Cambiasi. Further enlargements were made in order to entertain Charles V in 1529, when the emperor stayed four nights at the palace on his journey to Bologna to be crowned by Pope Clement VII.

Defence still came first, for in spite of Spanish protection the risk of French attack remained high. Honoré I added All Saints Tower, a semi-circular work with gun platforms and cannon guarding the end of the promontory, and the Serravalle Bastion, a three-storey gun tower joined to it by a subterranean passage. Beneath the courtyard a cistern was sunk, holding water enough for 1,000 troops through a siege of twenty months. Little building work followed between 1581 and 1604, during the reigns of Charles II and Hercule, and Monaco's vulnerability was underlined in 1605, when the Spanish installed a garrison on the rock.

In 1633 the Spanish king addressed Honoré II as "Serene Prince", recognising Monaco as a principality for the first time, though with Spanish troops still in occupation the title was little more than a gesture. Educated in Milan and cultivated by the intellectual salons of Paris, Honoré II turned against the Spanish presence, and in 1641, heavily supported by the French, he attacked the garrison and expelled it, declaring "the glorious liberty of Monaco". That liberty depended entirely on France, whose protectorate Monaco now became and remained until 1814, and Honoré II is regarded today as the hero of Monaco. Secure on his throne, he collected works by Titian, Dürer, Raphael, Rubens and Michelangelo, and over some thirty years turned the fortress into a princely residence, commissioning the architect Jacques Catone to enlarge it and soften its grim fortified look, restyling the State Rooms wing into an enfilade and raising a new chapel dedicated to St John the Baptist.

Through the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries Monaco was officially independent and in reality a province of France, and its rulers spent much of their time at the French court, resembling the absentee landlords then common among the French aristocracy. Honoré II's grandson and successor, Louis I, held the unusual distinction of being both a foreign head of state and a peer of France. Taking the French king's works at Fontainebleau as his model, he had Antoine Grigho, an architect from Como, design a Baroque entrance arch bearing the Grimaldi arms and a double horseshoe staircase whose thirty steps are said to have been cut from a single block of Carrara marble. Louis led his own Monaco Cavalry in the Anglo-Dutch Wars in Flanders and Franche-Comté, which earned him the gratitude of Louis XIV and the embassy to the Holy See, charged with securing the Spanish Succession. The cost of keeping up his position at the papal court forced him to sell most of his grandfather's art collection, stripping the palace he had so lately enhanced.

Prince Antoine succeeded in 1701 and inherited an almost bankrupt Monaco. His daughter Louise-Hippolyte, married to Jacques de Goyon Matignon, a wealthy aristocrat from Normandy, succeeded him in 1731 and died months later. The King of France then overrode the Monégasque constitution, which confined the throne to the Grimaldi alone, ignored the protests of other branches of the family and approved the succession of her husband as Prince Jacques I, who took the Grimaldi name and arms and lived away from Monaco until his death in 1751. His son Honoré III was a soldier who fought at Fontenoy and Rocourt and was content to leave the country to be governed by others. It was on one of his rare visits, in 1767, that illness forced Edward, Duke of York, to land at Monaco; the sick duke was given the state bedchamber and died in it, and the room has been known as the York Room ever since. In 1776 the marriage of Honoré III's heir, the future Honoré IV, to Louise d'Aumont Mazarin brought the ruling family the estates bequeathed by Cardinal Mazarin, among them the Duchy of Rethel and the Principality of Château-Porcien.

In the late 1780s Honoré III had to make concessions to subjects who had caught revolutionary ideas from their French neighbours, and worse followed. In 1793 the leaders of the French Revolution annexed Monaco; the prince was imprisoned in France and his property and estates, the palace among them, were forfeited. The palace was looted by the prince's own subjects, and what remained of the furnishings and art collection was auctioned by the French government. Monaco was renamed Fort d'Hercule and made a canton of France, while the palace was put to use as a military hospital and poorhouse. In Paris the prince's daughter-in-law Françoise-Thérèse de Choiseul-Stainville was executed, one of the last to be guillotined during the Reign of Terror, and Honoré III died in Paris in 1795 without regaining his throne. Under the Treaty of Paris of 17 June 1814 the principality was restored to his son Honoré IV, who found the fabric wholly neglected after the years of exile: part of the east wing had to be demolished, along with Honoré II's bathing pavilion.

Honoré IV died shortly after his throne was restored to him. Structural restoration of the palace began under Honoré V and was carried on after his death in 1841 by his brother Florestan, whose reign was troubled by the financial strains of Monaco's new position as a protectorate of Sardinia, to which France had ceded it after the Napoleonic Wars. Florestan left the running of the country to his wife, Maria Caroline Gibert de Lametz, and then ceded power to his son Charles, too late to appease the Monégasques: Menton and Roquebrune broke away, and in 1861 became part of France, cutting Monaco's territory by 80 per cent at a stroke. Charles III, who had already been governing what was left and succeeded on his father's death in 1856, turned to completing the restoration his uncle had begun, rebuilding St Mary's Tower, restoring the chapel and redecorating the old great hall of the fortress. He also pursued the works of art looted, sold and dispersed during the revolution, and with new purchases a fine collection hung in the palace again, Titian's The Music Lesson among it. What paid for the restorations was a building of a different kind: Charles Garnier's Second Empire casino in Monte Carlo, completed in 1878, the first Monaco casino having opened in the preceding decade. Through gambling the country became self-supporting, and by Charles III's death in 1889 Monaco and Monte Carlo were spoken of as one place, with a reputation as a playground of the rich. Queen Victoria, who first began visiting the French Riviera in 1882, refused from then on to make a courtesy call at the palace, and the writer Sabine Baring-Gould described the habituées of Monaco as "the moral cesspool of Europe". Albert I succeeded in 1889. His marriage to Lady Mary Victoria Douglas-Hamilton, daughter of Scotland's 11th Duke of Hamilton and his German wife, a princess of Baden, produced one son, Louis, and was annulled in 1880. Albert founded the Oceanographic Institute in 1906 and then, as a pacifist, the International Institute of Peace, while his second wife, Alice Heine, established both ballet and opera in the city. In 1910 the palace was stormed during the Monégasque Revolution, and the following year the prince ended absolute monarchy by promulgating a constitution with an elected parliament.

Louis II, who succeeded in 1922, had had a law passed in 1911 legitimising his daughter Charlotte, born in Algeria in 1898, so that the throne should not pass to a distant German branch of the family; the challenge to that law grew into the Monaco succession crisis, which ended when he formally adopted her in 1919. During the Second World War Louis tried to keep Monaco neutral, though his sympathies lay with the Vichy government, which caused a rift with his grandson and heir Rainier, who strongly supported the Allies against the Nazis. After the liberation of Monaco by Allied forces the elderly prince did little for the principality, which fell into severe neglect, and he was living mostly in Paris by the time of his death in 1949. Rainier III began a programme of renovation on his accession in 1949. Many of the external frescoes of the courtyard were restored and the southern wing, destroyed after the French Revolution, was rebuilt; it holds the ruling family's private apartments, the palace archives and the Napoleon Museum, founded on Louis II's collection of artefacts belonging to Napoleon I. That museum closed in 2014. The American film star Grace Kelly became chatelaine of the palace on her marriage to him in 1956. From the 1970s the couple made the palace the headquarters of a business intended to lessen the country's dependence on gambling income, and in 1993 Monaco joined the United Nations, with Rainier's heir Prince Albert heading the delegation. Princess Grace died in 1982 after a car accident, and Rainier III in 2005, leaving country and palace more stable, financially and structurally, than they had been for centuries.

The palace is the home of Rainier's son and successor, Albert II, and remains the property of the House of Grimaldi, which in 1997 marked 700 years of rule from the same building. The state apartments are open to the public during the summer, and since 1960 the courtyard has been the setting for open-air concerts by the Monte-Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra. It is a working palace as well, with sentries on constant guard at the entrance and a staff of about 270 people across eighteen trades, among them 110 carabiniers. The religious marriage of Albert II and Charlene Wittstock took place in the court of honour on 2 July 2011, and it is for occasions of that kind, Grimaldi weddings and births, that the courtyard is opened and the assembled citizens are addressed by the prince from the Gallery of Hercules above. During restoration of the court of honour in the late 2010s, sixteenth-century frescoes were rediscovered beneath an old false ceiling, and the same happened in the Matignon and Louis XIII salons.