A castle on the highest hill in Brno that developed from a Gothic castle through a Baroque fortress into a prison and today serves as the seat of the Brno City Museum.
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Špilberk Castle is a castle built on the highest hill in Brno. According to the Brno City Museum, it was of chiefly strategic importance for the emerging town, as it formed a defensive point that prevented an enemy from occupying the hill and using it to attack the town[1].
Origins and the first century
The first written mention of the castle dates from 1277, when the Bohemian king and Moravian margrave Ottokar II of Bohemia, the probable founder of the castle, had the castle chapel consecrated to Saint John the Baptist and entrusted it to the administration of Jindřich, provost of Doubravník[1]. In 1278 a general diet of the estates of the Kingdom of Bohemia was held at Špilberk; Ottokar II of Bohemia did not preside over it in person, but it was conducted in a solemn spirit[1]. The name Špilberk is first documented in 1279, at first for the hill and subsequently transferred to the castle as well[1].
Seat of the Moravian margraves
In the 14th and early 15th centuries Špilberk served as the residential castle of the Moravian margraves of the House of Luxembourg, first John Henry, the brother of Charles IV, and then his son Jobst of Luxembourg, who lived at the castle until his death in 1411 and in the course of his political career attained the title of King of the Romans[1]. After the Luxembourg margravial line died out, the castle began to serve as a military fortress administered by burgraves and also played a role in the Hussite Wars, specifically in the conflict between the Bohemian king George of Poděbrady and the Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus[1]. In the following years the castle's military importance declined, as did the monarchs' interest in maintaining it. In 1560 Špilberk passed into the ownership of the town of Brno; the castle was then run by a municipal official and held a small military garrison. In 1578 the castle burned down as a result of its poor condition[1].
Provincial fortress and jail
During the Thirty Years' War some Moravian estates joined the Bohemian Estates' Revolt and were imprisoned at Špilberk as punishment. In 1621 the castle was confiscated from the town by Ferdinand II (1578–1637)[1]. In the summer of 1645, under the command of Jacob George Ogilvy (1605–1661), Špilberk withstood a three-month siege by a superior Swedish force despite being in a dilapidated state and, according to the museum, thereby contributed to a turning point in the war[1]. Over the following hundred years it was gradually rebuilt into a Baroque fortress under the military engineer Pierre Philippe Bechade de Rochepin. In the 1740s casemates were built into two of the castle's side moats; during the reign of Joseph II (1780–1790) they served as a prison of the Habsburg monarchy[1]. In the mid-18th century Colonel Franz von Trenck served a life sentence in a building in the rear moat and died in the prison there[1].
Building development
Relatively little has survived of the original Gothic castle of the 13th to 15th centuries, essentially only in its east wing, where rooms with the original rib vaults have been preserved on the ground floor, along with an upper-storey portal leading from the gallery into the space of the so-called royal chapel[2]. The present appearance of the east wing was determined by the reconstruction carried out to the design of Zdeněk Chudárek in 1995–2000, which at the same time raised the whole wing and its roof structure and changed the silhouette of the building[2]. An archaeological survey on the ground floor of the west wing uncovered the foundations of a massive cylindrical tower[2].
The Baroque fortress reconstruction was carried out successively by the military engineers N. Peroni, L. Rochet and P. Rochepin and the Brno builder M. Grimm[2]. The surviving inner fortification system consists of ramparts with bastions and curtain walls, and walled moats with casemates dating from 1742, which were adapted for prison purposes in 1784, converted into an air-raid shelter by the German army in 1945, and reconstructed as a heritage monument in 1992[2]. Around the middle of the 18th century single-storey barracks buildings, including the apartment of the fortress commander and a chaplain's house, were added on the parkan[2]. The well in the western part of the courtyard was deepened from 40 to 114 metres in 1714–1717 and a cistern was built next to it[2].
Most of the present-day buildings, the south, west and north wings and the middle tract dividing the former large courtyard into two parts, were created during the extensive conversion of the fortress into a prison in the 1830s, in which almost everything that remained of the original medieval castle, with the exception of the east wing, was removed[2].
Present day
At the turn of the second and third millennia the decisive part of the building works on the castle was completed. At the same time the Brno City Museum reached forty years of activity at Špilberk, where it makes the town's historical and cultural heritage accessible to the public in permanent exhibitions and occasional displays[2].