Work on building the castle seems to have started in the 1290s in connection with the organization of the three major ‘castle counties’ in Finland under bailiffs subject to the king in Stockholm. Häme Castle (or Tavastehus in Swedish), the other great castle of the realm, was built in the very middle of the Häme wilderness and in the 17th century became surrounded by a town of the same name, Hämeenlinna. The importance of the castle is also evident in the fact that it was subject to nine sieges before the end of the 16th century, mainly due to internal strife within the kingdom. When the first king of the Vasa dynasty resided in Finland for eleven months in 1555-1556, the entire kingdom of Sweden was ruled from his hall in Turku Castle. The king of the realm naturally resided in Stockholm most of the time, but the suite in Turku Castle still deserved its name, as no other castle in Finland was so often visited by the monarch. The keep, which had over forty rooms, was subject to a rigid hierarchy and only select guests were allowed entry to the ‘Royal Suite’ at the furthest end of the north wing this consisted of a vaulted hall and an inner chamber. Extensions were successively built using granite from nearby, and by the beginning of the 15th century, it had both a keep and a bailey. The citadel had probably outlived its usefulness by the beginning of the 14th century, when three gates were walled shut and it was converted into a closed keep.
In Turku, the idea was apparently that the camp should be possible to both fill and evacuate quickly, for instance prior to the third crusade in 1293. The pattern was an ancient one, and can be traced back ultimately to the citadels built by the Romans in antiquity. The castle was built on an island in the estuary in the form of a rectangular fortified camp with four gates. Its name was Åbo in Swedish and Turku in Finnish the latter derives from a Slavonic word meaning ‘market square’. at the very time when an old trading site on the Aura River developed into a town, the oldest, and for a long time the biggest, in Finland. Turku Castle was probably founded in 1280, i.e. The name ‘Finland’ only meant the settlements in the southwestern parts of the country as late as the early Middle Ages. These three castles became the centres of three provinces discernible as early as the Iron Age, called Finland, Häme and Karelia. The third crusade led to the building of Viborg Castle, on an island in the Gulf of Finland off the coast of Karelia. Häme Castle in Häme was built after the second crusade. Turku Castle was built at the mouth of the Aura River in southwest Finland, by the city of Turku, the foremost town in Finland up to the beginning of the 19th century. After each crusade, a castle was built to serve both defensive and administrative purposes. Thus the Swedes consolidated their power east of the Åland sea through three crusades. The Swedes had to take up arms to defend the border numerous times during the Middle Ages and the 16th century, especially after the Muscovites took over Novgorod in the 1470s. These conflicts did not end until 1323, with the peace treaty of Pähkinäsaari, which finally established that Finland was part of the kingdom of Sweden. Meanwhile, the people of Novgorod made repeated raids into Finnish territory, burning the city of Turku in southwestern Finland as late as 1318. The Swedes arranged two more crusades, one in 1239, to Häme in central Finland, and another in 1293, to Karelia (Viborg) in the East. Finland was a country rich in natural resources in the middle and came to be seen as a desirable territory by both sides from about the twelfth century onwards. To the east of Finland lay the Novgorod republic, which was Greek-Orthodox. The first crusade was also part of much wider political and ecclesiastical perspective. Archaeological finds have shown that Christianity had reached the Finns as early as the eleventh century, and the main purpose of the crusade was thus to establish Swedish dominion in Finland and organize a bishopric there. The chronicle’s claim that the Bishop ‘baptized’ the Finns has later been modified. In Finnish history, the prehistoric era is generally considered to end and the Middle Ages to begin in the 1150s, when, according to a Swedish chronicle, King Erik of Sweden and English-born Bishop Henry undertook a crusade to the southwestern parts of Finland.
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