Świdwin Castle

Świdwin Castle (Schivelbein) houses a regional cultural centre. The castle stands on the left bank of the river Rega in a bend of the river, north-west of the town.

The first castle was built at the end of the 13th century by the Ascanian margraves of Brandenburg, who had bought the area around Świdwin/Schivelbein from the Bishopric of Cammin in 1258. It had a trapezoidal ground plan with a residential building against the northern curtain wall.

The noble family of Wedel, represented by the court marshal Wedego von Wedel, owners of the town of Schivelbein from 1319, began to enlarge the castle, but for lack of money sold it in 1384 to the Teutonic Order. The knights turned the castle into the seat of a bailiwick. At the end of the 14th century they demolished the old residential building and erected the new east wing and the bailiff's house on the northern section of the curtain wall, as well as a new castle gate with a gate tower.

In 1445 the Elector of Brandenburg Frederick II, "the Iron", of the House of Hohenzollern, reacquired the castle for the margraviate. Through an exchange of territory between the district of Schivelbein and the Knights of St John's commandery of Quartschen, the castle belonged from 1540 to the Protestant Order of St John, which built two new wings. This created an enclosed inner courtyard. The Herrenmeister Veit von Thümen is regarded as the overall patron of the building.

Melchior von Barfuß, who had been commander at Quartschen until 1540, subsequently served as the electoral governor of the Schivelbein and Dramburg districts and was at the same time commander there. In 1545 Franz von Neumann, a councillor swiftly ennobled by Margrave John of Küstrin, became commander at Schivelbein; he continued his career in the order as Herrenmeister, but as a person he remained a controversial figure in the historiography of the Knights of St John.

Machine-translated from “Schloss Świdwin” on the German Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Świdwin Castle ranks #5,514 of 8,134 worldwide in the atlas's castle fame ranking, and #214 of the 374 mapped in Poland. See how Poland compares in the castle statistics.

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Read the full history on Wikipedia (in German) ↗