Křivoklát Castle

Křivoklát sits at the edge of the Křivoklátsko — the dense oak-and-beech forest reserve that stretches westward from the Berounka River into Central Bohemia — and the forest is as much the point of the castle as the castle itself. Every Bohemian king who chose Křivoklát as a favorite residence chose it because of what surrounded it: the richest hunting ground within a half-day's ride of Prague, dense enough and remote enough to provide the combination of sport and retreat that medieval royal courts required. The castle and the forest shaped each other across four centuries of royal occupation, and today the Křivoklátsko is a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve — an unintended conservation legacy of the centuries in which royal hunting rights kept the forest intact.

The earliest Přemyslid settlement on the spur above the Berounka dates to the 12th century, when the founding of a royal hunting lodge established the site as a permanent court attachment rather than a seasonal camp. The Přemyslid dynasty — Bohemia's ruling house from the legendary founding of the dynasty to its extinction in 1306 — made Křivoklát a standard fixture of the royal itinerary, and the castle grew from a fortified lodge into a substantial military and residential structure as the 13th century progressed. The most significant Přemyslid expansion came under Přemysl Otakar II (r. 1253–1278), the 'King of Iron and Gold' whose territorial ambitions at their peak stretched from Bohemia to the Adriatic — a ruler with the resources and appetite to build seriously, and who treated Křivoklát as a major royal castle rather than a seasonal stop.

The Luxemburg dynasty succeeded the Přemyslids on the Bohemian throne after 1310, and the castle reached a new phase of significance under Wenceslaus IV (r. 1378–1419), who rebuilt it after fire damage and made it one of his most frequented residences. Wenceslaus was a complex figure — Holy Roman Emperor as well as King of Bohemia, frequently at odds with the Bohemian nobility and ultimately deposed from the imperial throne in 1400 — and Křivoklát's place in his story includes one of the more pointed reversals in medieval Bohemian history: in 1394, a faction of the nobility captured the king and held him prisoner at Křivoklát, the very castle he had rebuilt as a royal seat. The king imprisoned in his own favorite palace by the subjects of that palace.

The castle's architectural golden age came under the Jagiellon dynasty. Vladislaus II Jagiellon (r. 1471–1516) was King of Bohemia and later also King of Hungary, ruler of a domain that stretched from the Baltic to the Balkans and whose court produced the last great flowering of Gothic architecture in Central Europe — the Jagiellonian Gothic, recognizable from Cracow's Wawel Castle to Buda's royal palace and here at Křivoklát. Under Vladislaus, the castle received the Gothic chapel whose ribbed vaulting and carved stone altarpiece figures are considered among the finest Jagiellonian Gothic interiors in Bohemia; the library wing, housing one of the oldest dedicated library spaces in the country; and the great residential hall. These are the rooms that made Křivoklát, in contemporary accounts, one of the most magnificent royal residences in Central Europe.

The castle's later history is defined by two uses: as a state prison and as a victim of fire. Royal and imperial prisoners were held here across the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries — the list includes nobility, clerics, and the English alchemist Edward Kelley, who had worked alongside John Dee at Rudolf II's Prague court in the 1580s, contributed to the emperor's obsessive alchemical research program, and fell from favor around 1591. Rudolf II imprisoned Kelley at Křivoklát, where he died following an escape attempt. The castle's prison function, like its hunting function, made it useful long after its front-line military role had ended.

A severe fire in 1826 destroyed large sections of the castle and forced a decisive intervention. The Austrian imperial authorities sold the ruin to Karl Egon II, Prince of Fürstenberg, who undertook the comprehensive reconstruction that defined the castle's present appearance — re-roofing the burned-out sections, restoring the outer buildings in a Gothic Revival manner consistent with the surviving medieval fabric, and preserving the authentic late-Gothic chapel and library while rebuilding the residential portions around them. The Fürstenbergs held the castle until 1929, when it passed to the new Czechoslovak state.

Today the castle is administered by the Czech National Heritage Institute and visited by guided tour. The collections include late-Gothic panel paintings — among the most significant medieval painting collections in any Czech castle outside Prague — hunting weapons accumulated across the centuries of royal occupation, and the rare books of the library. [Karlštejn Castle](/castles/czech-republic/karlstejn-castle), 30 kilometres east in the Berounka valley, was built by Emperor Charles IV specifically to house the Crown Jewels and imperial relics — a companion to Křivoklát in the Central Bohemian castle landscape and reachable on the same day. [Prague Castle](/castles/czech-republic/prague-castle), 50 kilometres east, is the seat of the Bohemian kings whose hunting at Křivoklát was the other half of their lives.