Malbork

In 1457 the soldiers holding Malbork castle made a decision. They had gone months without wages. Their employer — the Teutonic Order, which had built the castle and sat in it for two hundred years — was insolvent.

The soldiers were Bohemian mercenaries, and they found a way to collect what they were owed: they sold the castle to the king of Poland. The Order lost the largest castle in the world not in a battle but over a payroll.

The Headquarters Of An Order

The Teutonic Knights were a military religious order founded during the crusades. In the thirteenth century they built their own state on the Baltic coast, and in 1274 they began a castle on the bank of the river Nogat.

In 1309 the Order's Grand Master moved his seat here from Venice. From that moment Malbork was not a frontier fort but the capital of a state — and it was enlarged to match.

The castle has three parts: the High Castle, the Middle Castle and the Lower Castle. Together they cover more than twenty hectares: the largest castle in the world by area, and the largest brick building in Europe.

Stone was not used because there is no stone here. The Baltic plain is rich in clay and poor in rock. The whole structure — walls, vaults, columns — is fired brick.

Heat From The Floor

The most remarkable technical detail of the castle is invisible. Beneath the great halls there is a heating system: furnaces fired on the lower level heat a mass of stones stacked above them. Once the stones are hot the furnace mouth is closed, and the stored heat is released upward through openings in the floor into the hall.

The system is a continuation of the Roman hypocaust and one of the few examples applied at this scale in medieval Europe. It can warm a hall for hours without a chimney in the room and without smoke.

Defeat And Siege

In 1410, at Grunwald, a Polish-Lithuanian army defeated the Order's forces. That was the battle that broke the Order militarily. But when the victors marched on Malbork they could not take it; the siege ran for some months and was lifted.

So the castle held, militarily. What finished it was not war but the cost of war. Indemnities after Grunwald and continuous campaigning drained the Order's treasury, and forty-seven years later unpaid wages changed the castle's owner.

Later Owners

The kings of Poland used it as a royal residence. When the region passed to Prussia at the end of the eighteenth century the castle was turned into barracks and storehouses; parts were pulled down and their brick used in other buildings.

Interest revived in the nineteenth century and a long restoration began. In 1945 the castle stood on the front line and was badly damaged; close to half of the structure was destroyed. It was rebuilt after the war — most of the surface you see today is the product of that repair.

Today

Malbork was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1997.

Brick is a more predictable material than stone, but it has its own problems: freeze-thaw cycles lift the face off the bricks in flakes, mortar washes out, and being next to a river keeps the moisture load constant. Maintenance proceeds by taking out failing bricks one at a time and setting new ones in their place.

There is no entry in this castle's ledger recording a change of hands by battle. It changed owner twice: once by sale, once because a state border moved.