About the neighborhood
Castle complex in Budapest, Hungary
Buda Castle (Hungarian: Budavári Palota, German: Burgpalast), formerly also called the Royal Palace (Hungarian: Királyi-palota) and the Royal Castle (Hungarian: Királyi Vár, German: Königliche Burg), is the historical castle and palace complex of the Hungarian kings in Budapest. First completed in 1265, the Baroque palace that occupies most of the site today was built between 1749 and 1769, severely damaged during the Siege of Budapest in World War II, and rebuilt in a simplified Baroque style during the state communist era. Presently, it houses the Hungarian National Gallery, the Budapest Historical Museum, and the National Széchényi Library.
The palace complex sits on the southern tip of Castle Hill (Hungarian: Várhegy). Its defensive walls extend to surround the entire Castle Quarter (Várnegyed) neighborhood to its north, which is well known for its medieval, Baroque, and neoclassical houses, churches, and other monuments. Several prominent government buildings, including Sándor Palace and the Carmelite Monastery of Buda, are located in the Castle Quarter. Locally, this neighborhood and the palace are collectively called a Vár (lit.'the Castle').
Castle Hill is linked to Clark Ádám Square and the Széchenyi Chain Bridge by the Castle Hill Funicular. The Castle Quarter falls within the part of Budapest that UNESCO declared a World Heritage Site in 1987.
History
Middle Ages
The first royal residence on the Castle Hill was built by King Béla IV of Hungary between 1247 and 1265. It is uncertain whether it was situated on the southern tip of the hill or on the northern elevation, near the Kammerhof.
The oldest part of the present-day palace was built in the 14th century by Stephen, Duke of Slavonia, who was the younger brother of King Louis I of Hungary. Only the foundations remain of the castle keep, which was known as Stephen's Tower (Budapest)hu' (Hungarian: István-torony). The Gothic palace of King Louis I was arranged around a narrow courtyard next to the keep.
King Sigismund significantly enlarged the palace and strengthened its fortifications. Sigismund, as a Holy Roman Emperor, needed a magnificent royal residence to express his prominence among the rulers of Europe. He chose Buda Castle as his main residence, and during his long reign it became probably the largest Gothic palace of the late Middle Ages. Buda was an important artistic centre of the International Gothic style.
Construction began in the 1410s and was largely finished in the 1420s, although some minor works continued until the death of the king in 1437. The palace was first mentioned in 1437, under the name "fricz palotha".
The most important part of Sigismund's palace was the northern wing, known as the Fresh Palace (Hun: Friss-palota). On the top floor was a large hall called the Roman Hall (70×20m or 230×66ft) with a carved wooden ceiling. Great windows and balconies faced toward the city of Buda. The façade of the palace was decorated with statues, a and coat-of-arms. In front stood the bronze equestrian statue of Sigismund, later repaired by King Matthias Corvinus.
The southern part of the royal residency was surrounded with narrow zwingers. Two parallel walls, the so-called "cortina walls", run down from the palace to the River Danube across the steep hillside. The most imposing structure, the Broken Tower (Hun: Csonka-torony), on the western side of the cour d'honneur, remained unfinished. The basement of the tower was used as a dungeon; the top floors were probably the treasury of the royal jewels.
The last phase of large-scale building activity took place under King Matthias Corvinus. During the first decades of his reign the king finished the work on the Gothic palace. The Royal Chapel, with the surviving Lower Church, was likely built at that time.
After the marriage of Matthias and Beatrice of Naples in 1476, Italian humanists, artists and craftsmen arrived at Buda. The Hungarian capital became the first centre of Renaissance north of the Alps. The king rebuilt the palace in an early Renaissance style. The cour d'honneur was modernised and an Italian loggia was added. Inside the palace were two rooms with golden ceilings: the Bibliotheca Corviniana and a passage with the frescoes of the twelve signs of the Zodiac. The façade of the palace was decorated with statues of John Hunyadi, László Hunyadi and King Matthias. In the middle of the court there was a fountain with a statue of Pallas Athene.
Only fragments remain of this Renaissance palace: some red marble balustrades, lintels and decorative glazed tiles from stoves and floors.
In the last years of his reign Matthias Corvinus started construction of a new Renaissance palace on the eastern side of the Sigismund Courtyard, next to the Fresh Palace. The Matthias Palace remained unfinished because of the king's early death. The palace had a monumental red marble stairway in front of the façade. Matthias Corvinus was usually identified with Hercules by the humanists of his court; the bronze gates were decorated with panels depicting the deeds of Hercules, and a great bronze statue of the Greek hero welcomed the guests in the forecourt of the palace complex, where jousts were held.
The walled gardens of the palace were laid out on the western slopes of the Castle Hill. In the middle of the enclosure, a Renaissance villa was built by Matthias. Only one column survives of this so-called Aula Marmorea.
After the death of Matthias Corvinus, his successor, King Vladislaus II, carried on the works of the Matthias Palace, especially after his marriage with Anna of Foix-Candale in 1502.
Under the reign of King John Zápolya (the last national ruler of Hungary) the palace was repaired. On the southern tip of the Castle Hill, the Great Rondella was built by Italian military engineers. The circular bastion is one of the main surviving structure of the old palace.
Ottoman Era
After the Battle of Mohács, the medieval Kingdom of Hungary collapsed. The Ottoman Turks occupied the evacuated town on 11 September 1526. Although Buda was sacked and burned, the Royal Palace was not damaged. Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent carried away all the bronze statues (the Hunyadis, Pallas Athene and Hercules) with him to Constantinople. The statues were destroyed there in a rebellion a few years later. The Sultan also took many volumes from the Bibliotheca Corviniana.
In 1529 the Ottoman army besieged and occupied Buda again, and the palace was badly damaged. On 29 August 1541 Buda was occupied again by the Ottomans, without any resistance. Buda became part of Ottoman Empire and the seat of the Budin Eyalet. The original German and Hungarian population left the city, immigrants from the Ottoman Empire and the Balkan peninsula came to their place.
Although Turkish travel writers wrote enthusiastically about the beauty of the palace of the Hungarian kings, the new Ottoman government let the palace decay. It was partially used as barracks a storage place and stables, and otherwise it stood empty.
The palace was called Iç Kala ("Inner Castle") and Hisar Peçe ("Citadel") by the Turks. The name of the cour d'honneur was "Seray meydani". The favourite nickname of the complex was "Palace of the Golden Apples".
The economic decline of Buda was characterised by the stagnation of population, which was not larger in 1686, than the population of the city two centuries earlier in the 15th century. The Ottomans allowed the Hungarian royal palace to fall into ruins. The disused palace was later transformed into a gunpowder storage and magazine by the Ottomans, which caused its detonation during the siege in 1686. The original Christian Hungarian population did not feel secure during the Ottoman conquest, their numbers significantly shrank in the next decades, due to their fleeing to the Habsburg ruled Royal Hungary. The proportion of the population who were of Jews and Gypsy families increased during the Ottoman rule in Buda.
In the era between 1541 and 1686, the Habsburgs tried to re-capture Buda several times. Unsuccessful sieges in 1542, 1598, 1603 and 1684 caused serious damage. The Ottoman authorities repaired only the fortifications. According to 17th-century sources, many buildings of the former Royal Palace were roofless and their vaults collapsed. Nonetheless, the medieval palace mostly survived until the great siege of 1686.
Destruction of the medieval castle
The medieval palace was destroyed in the great siege of 1686 when Buda was captured by allied Christian forces.
In 1686, two years after the unsuccessful siege of Buda, a renewed Western European Christian campaign was started to take the city. This time the Holy League's army was much larger, consisting of 65,000–100,000 men, including German, Hungarian, Croat, Dutch, English, Spanish, Czech, Italian, French, Burgundian, Danish and Swedish soldiers and other Europeans as volunteers, artillerymen and officers. The Turkish defenders consisted of 7,000 men.
In a heavy artillery bombardment, many buildings burned and collapsed. The Stephen's Tower, used as a gunpowder store by the Ottomans, exploded when hit by a single cannon, said to have been fired by a friar called Gábor, also referred as Tüzes Gábor ("Gabriel Fiery"). According to contemporary sources, the explosion killed as many as 1,500 Turkish soldiers and caused a wave on the Danube that washed away artillery batteries and guards standing on the opposite shore.
Habsburg military engineers made several plans and drawings of the buildings in subsequent decades. Although the walls mainly survived, the burned-out shell rapidly decayed from a lack of maintenance. Between 1702 and 1715, Stephen's Tower disappeared completely, and the palace was beyond repair. In 1715, King Charles III ordered the demolition of the ruins. Johann Hölbling surveyed the still-existing structures. The king ordered the surviving marble statues, antiquities, inscriptions and coins should be spared (there is no evidence about the realization of the royal decree). The main part of the palace and the Broken Tower were totally demolished, the hollows and moats were filled and a new flat terrace was established. The southern fortifications, zwingers and rooms were buried under tons of rubbish and earth.
Early Baroque palace
In 1715 a small Baroque palace was built according to the plans of Johann Hölbling. It was a simple rectangular building, with an inner court and a shorter side wing, which was later demolished. The Hölbling palace is identical with the core of the present-day palace, where the Baroque Court of the Budapest Historical Museum is now located.
The interior of the palace was left unfinished when work stopped in 1719. The Hofkriegsrat commissioned Fortunato di Prati to make several plans for the palace, but lack of money hindered their implementation.
In 1723 the palace was accidentally burned down and the windows were walled up in order to stop further deterioration. Several drawings from the 1730s and 1740s show the unfinished decaying shell of the simple two-storey blockhouse. Some engravings show an idealised finished version which never existed. Sometime around 1730 the roof was repaired.
Era of Maria Theresa
In 1748 Count Antal Grassalkovich, President of the Hungarian Chamber, appealed to the public to finish the derelict palace by means of public subscription. Palatine János Pálffy called upon the counties and cities to award grants for the project. The moment was favourable because relations between the Hungarian nobility and the Habsburgs were exceptionally good. The Hungarians supported Queen Maria Theresa in the dire need of the War of the Austrian Succession. The queen was grateful for this, and the new Royal Palace became the symbol of peace and friendship between the dynasty and the nation.
The plans of the splendid, U-shaped Baroque palace with a cour d'honneur were drawn by Jean Nicolas Jadot, chief architect of the Viennese court. After 1753 the plans were modified by his successor, Nicolò Pacassi. Ignác Oraschek, master builder, who guided the works, and modified the plans according to his own ideas. The foundation stone of the palace was laid on 13 May 1749, which was the Queen's birthday. The work continued at a good pace until 1758, when financial difficulties caused a seven-year break. By that time only the interiors were left unfinished.
According to surviving historical documents, the layout of the palace followed Jadot's signed plans of 1749. The façades, some interior elements and the St. Sigismund Chapel are the works of Pacassi, while the special double false domes were probably planned by Oraschek, formerly the master builder of Count Grassalkovich. Double false domes were typical features of the so-called Grassalkovich-type Baroque castles like Gödöllő. However, this feature was later removed from the palace.
In 1764 the Queen visited the palace and allotted 20,000 thalers a year for the work, which recommenced in 1765 according to the plans of Franz Anton Hillebrandt. Hillebrandt altered the cour d'honneur façade of the central wing in Rococo style. In 1769 the St. Sigismund Chapel was consecrated and the palace was finished the same year. According to the aggregate statement of Grassalkovich, the costs were 402,679 forints.
Nuns and scholars
The future of the complex was uncertain; the Queen had no intention to use it as a royal residence, because she did not spend much time in Buda. In 1769 she gave one wing to the Sisters of Loreto, who came from Sankt Pölten. The building was handed over on 13 May 1770, but the elegant Baroque rooms were considered unsuitable for a nunnery. Alexander Keglevich, rector of the Eötvös Loránd University, had provided financing to Maria Theresa, which supposedly should have been repaid, according to her letters to her children and friends. In 1777 the Queen decided that the university of Nagyszombat should move to Buda.
The nuns moved out and the palace was hastily adapted to use as a university. The work was guided by Farkas Kempelen and led to classrooms, teacher's cabinets, museums, a library and a university press being built. In the front, the false dome was removed and a four-storey observatory tower, planned by Franz Anton Hillebrandt or Karl Georg Zillack, was erected.
In 1778 Hillebrandt built a new chapel for the first king of Hungary, Saint Stephen's, the mummified right hand, which was recovered by Queen Maria Theresa from the Republic of Ragusa in 1771. The Chapel of the Holy Right was situated near the St Sigismund Chapel, in the middle of an inner court. The outer form was octagonal and the inside was oval, crowned by a dome. The altar-piece was painted by Joseph Hauzinger.
Encyclopedic content adapted from the Wikipedia article on Buda Castle, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
