Visegrad, Hungary

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strategic location above the Danube founding a military camp on the Sibrik Hills in the 4th C (reconstruction of a watch tower near Fo utca). In the 9th C Slavs settled in the ruins of the Roman fort and named the settlement Visegrád (Slavic: high castle); later the conquering Magyars took over the castle. After the invasion of the Mongols in 1241, to which Visegrád also fell victim, King Béla IV built castles to defend the land. In Visegrád a lower castle was built with a defended residential tower in the center (the Solomon tower) which was connected by a wall with the massive citadel on the hill (upper castle). During the regency of Charles I of Anjou, who transferred his residence here in 1316, Visegrád developed into a flourishing political and cultural town. Charles kept the Hungarian coronation insignia, and following the coronation of his son Louis as the king of Poland (1370), the Polish crown jewels in a purpose-built tower inside the citadel. A new royal palace was built on the slope of the castle mound in 1330 which was the summer house of his son Louis, who moved his residence back to Buda. Visegrád experienced a final if brief climax in the second half of the 15th C when King Matthias I had the royal palace rebuilt in Early Italian Renaissance style.

On Matthias's death the town began to decline. The upper castle was laid siege to several times during the Turkish wars, taken by various parties and destroyed; the towers which were left standing were blown up by the Austrian Emperor Leopold in 1702. In the 18th C German settlers lived in Visegrád who built their houses from the stones of the ruined palace. A landslip buried the rest of the palace; the only evidence of its former glory until its discovery in 1934 being the comtemporary written sources.