Malbork Castle Poland

Legendary

The largest castle in the world measured by land area.

Photo by Torsten Maue

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The Teutonic Knights lost their greatest fortress without a single battle being fought for it. They simply ran out of money.

By 1457, in the middle of the Thirteen Years' War against Poland, the Knights owed their hired soldiers years of unpaid wages. So they handed the castle over as payment.

The soldiers, mostly from Bohemia, weren't sentimental about it. They sold it to King Casimir IV of Poland for 190,000 florins, roughly 660 kilograms of gold.

The castle's story had started nearly two centuries earlier. The Teutonic Knights were a German religious order of warrior monks, founded during the Crusades.

When the Crusades in the Holy Land collapsed, they moved north to what's now Poland and conquered the local tribes. In 1274, they started building a fortress on the Nogat River.

They named it Marienburg, after the Virgin Mary. In 1309 it became the Order's headquarters, and it kept growing for over 130 years.

By the time it was finished in 1406, it was the largest brick castle in the world. Around 3,000 knights lived inside.

It's really three castles in one, wrapped in two rings of defensive walls. The whole complex covers 21 hectares, about 52 acres.

In 1410, Polish and Lithuanian armies crushed the Knights at the Battle of Grunwald and then besieged Malbork. The castle held, and a cannonball from that siege is still lodged in one of its walls.

Polish kings used it as a royal residence for over 300 years. It was badly damaged in World War II, then painstakingly rebuilt, and UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site in 1997.

Walk through the Grand Master's Palace, where the Order's leader lived in surprising luxury. Look for the cannonball embedded in the wall of the Summer Refectory. Visit the amber museum inside, since this region was the source of most of Europe's amber for centuries.