Castle of Arta

[3][2] The castle was the citadel of the city, and is attributed to the early 13th-century rulers of the Despotate of Epirus of which Arta was the capital, but its current form dates mostly from Ottoman times.

[5][1] The castle was most likely built under Michael II Komnenos Doukas (r. 1230–1266/68), the third ruler of Epirus: a monogram attributed to him has been found in a tower close to the main gate.

[6] As the capital of the Epirote principality, Arta was often besieged by the Byzantine Empire on the one hand and the Angevins of the Kingdom of Naples on the other.

[3] The Serbian ruler Simeon Urosh ruled the city after 1359, until it fell to the Albanian Peter Losha, who established the Despotate of Arta.

[2] From 1717 it was a mainland dependency of the Venetian Ionian Islands, until the Fall of the Republic of Venice in 1797, when it came under French control, only to be conquered by Ali Pasha of Janina two years later.