Martinuzzi Castle (Vințu de Jos)

Martinuzzi Castle (also known as Alvinc Castle) is a medieval historical monument whose ruins are in Vințu de Jos, Alba County, in the Mureș Corridor, at the south-eastern foot of the Metaliferi Mountains. It has been a listed historical monument since 2010 (LMI code AB-II-m-B-00394). The castle was built on the foundations of a Dominican monastery founded around 1300, the only Dominican monastery in Transylvania built outside a town. Monastic life, disrupted by the Ottoman raid of 1438, ended at the beginning of the 16th century, and after the nobleman Nicolae Kozar expelled the last monk in 1534, the estate was turned into a castle. Between 1546 and 1551 the building was strengthened and enlarged in the Renaissance style by Cardinal George Martinuzzi (Fra Gheorghe), governor of Transylvania, Bishop of Oradea and cardinal, who played a key role in the negotiations between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. Martinuzzi was murdered in his own castle on the night of 16 to 17 December 1551 by imperial mercenaries led by General Giovanni Battista Castaldo. In the following decades the castle passed through the hands of several noble families and princes, among them Gabriel Bethlen, who after 1614 had it turned, to plans by the architect Giacomo Resti, into a hexagonal fortress with corner bastions. The place has a dark history: Aron Vodă, ruler of Moldavia, was imprisoned here with his family from 1595 and later poisoned, and in 1601 the Italian architects Simone and Fulvio Genga were killed in the castle dungeon on the orders of General Giorgio Basta. Although in ruins, the walls still keep Renaissance door and window frames and details, attributed in part to the architect Domenico da Bologna. In the communist period the building was used as a warehouse and a meat-processing plant, and its north wing collapsed in 1981. Did you know that in 1680, on the orders of Prince Michael Apafi, the Orthodox Metropolitan of Transylvania, Sava Brancovici, was imprisoned in the castle dungeon?