Visegrád (Hungarian: [ˈviʃɛɡraːd]; German: Plintenburg; Latin: Pone Navata or Altum Castrum; Slovak: Vyšehrad) is a castle town in Pest County, Hungary.
The town is the site of the remains of the Early Renaissance summer palace of King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary and a medieval citadel.
It was crucial in creating a peace between the three kingdoms and securing an alliance between Poland and Hungary against Habsburg Austria.
In 1540, after the death of Zápolya, Habsburg general Leonhard Fels took the city, as well as Vác, Pest, Tata and Székesfehérvár.
In February 1991, the leading politicians of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland met here to form a periodical forum, the Visegrád Group, with an intentional allusion to the meeting centuries earlier in 1335.
After the Mongol invasion, King Béla IV of Hungary and his wife had a new fortification system constructed in the 1240s and 1250s near the one destroyed earlier.
In the 14th century, at the time of the Angevin kings of Hungary, the castle became a royal residence and was enlarged with a new curtain wall and palace buildings.
In 1544 Visegrád was occupied by the Ottoman Empire, and, apart from a short period in 1595–1605, it remained in Turkish hands until 1685.
At present, the Tower houses exhibitions installed by the King Matthias Museum (Mátyás Király Múzeum) of Visegrád.
[4] In the last third of the 14th century, King Louis and his successor Sigismund of Luxembourg had the majority of the earlier buildings dismantled and created a new, sumptuous palace complex, the extensive ruins of which are still visible today.
The palace complex was laid out on a square ground plan measuring 123 x 123 m. A garden adjoined to it from the north and a Franciscan friary, founded by King Sigismund in 1424, from the south.
In the 10th and 11th centuries, the fortification, rebuilt as a castle, became a regional centre of the recently formed Hungarian state.