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Buonconsiglio Castle (Italian: Castello del Buonconsiglio) is a castle in Trento, northern Italy. The castle originated from a fortified building that was erected in the 13th century next to the city's walls. This first building was called Castelvecchio ("Old Castle"), and was the seat of the Bishopric of Trent from the 13th century onwards to the end of the 18th century. The castle is composed of a series of buildings of different eras, enclosed by a circle of walls in a slightly elevated position above the town. The, as called, Castelvecchio is the oldest and most dominant building of the entire housing development. The Magno Palazzo is the sixteenth expansion in the forms of the Italian Renaissance, wanted by the Prince Bishop and Cardinal Bernardo Clesio (1485-1539), the third part, in the southern end of the complex is the known Eagle tower, which preserves the famous Cycle of the Months, one of the most fascinating pictorial cycles of profane late Middle Ages.
Bishop George of Liechtenstein was the first to enlarge the castle, in the late 14th century, turning it into a well-styled residence. The Castelvecchio was further modified by Johannes Hinderbach, who had the double loggia Gothic entrance gate built. In the first decades of the 16th century, Bishop Bernardo Clesio had a new residence, called Palazzo Magno ("Grand Palace") built in Renaissance style alongside the old castle. The last great addition was the so-called Giunta Albertiana, from the name of Bishop Francesco Alberti Poja (1686), with which the Castelvecchio and the Palazzo Magno were united
The castle remained the seat of the Prince-Bishops until 1803. Used by the Austrians as military barracks and, later, as a jail, it decayed. In the 1920s, when Trento was returned to Italy, it became seat of a National Museum and was restored. Since 1992 it is home to the Provincial Gallery of Art.
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The Prince-Bishopric of Trent (German: Hochstift Trient, Fürstbistum Trient, Bistum Trient) was an ecclesiastical principality roughly corresponding to the present-day Northern Italian autonomous province of Trentino. It was created in 1027 and existed until 1802, when it was secularised and absorbed into the County of Tyrol held by the House of Habsburg. Trent was a Hochstift, an Imperial State under the authority of a prince-bishop at Trento.
Originally a Bavarian fief, by 1027 the prince-bishopric was established, together with the similar Prince-Bishopric of Brixen. The states were created to favor passage to Imperial armies across the Alps towards Italy along the two ancient roads, the Via Claudia-Augusta and the Via Altinate, entrusting the area to two bishops instead of often rebellious lay princes.
The prince-bishops were true Holy Roman Empire princes, and enjoyed the right to take part to Imperial diets. The princes of Trento maintained a strong allegiance to the Emperor, even when the latter was excommunicated: this because they need his protection against the growing power of subjects like the counts of Tyrol, who controlled the area around Bozen, those of Eppan, and others. In one of the attempts to reassure his temporal authority over these lesser but fierce nobles, the bishop Adelpreto was slaughtered at Arco, on 20 September 1172, by the lords of Castelbarco. The supremacy of the prince-bishops of Trento and Brixen were however re-established by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa in 1179 and again by his son Henry VI of Hohenstaufen. The bishop earned the right to have a coin of his own and to impose tolls.
In 1419 the bishop George I of Liechtenstein (1390–1419) escaped the subjugation to Tyrol submitting directly to the emperor, but this did not prevent the bishops to lose further authority over the city and the countryside in the course of the 15th century, even though an attempt by the citizens to create a republic in 1407 was bloodily suppressed. In 1425 Trento was declared a commune. Another revolt broke out ten years later, and Austro-Tyrolese troops invaded the territory of the principality. In the following year, the bishops struggled in order to thwart the growing power of the Habsburgs, and in the end the principality reduced to an effective subjugation to Austrian authority.
In June 1511 the two principalities of Trento and Brixen received the status of "perpetual confederate" states among Austrian possessions. The peace of 1516 with the Republic of Venice, however, reduced the principality to a discontinuous enclave between large Habsburg possessions.
Bishop Cardinal Bernardo Clesio is considered the true refounder (Neubegründer) of the authority of the princes of Trento. An adviser of emperor Maximilian I of Habsburg and a friend of Erasmus of Rotterdam, he played an important role in the election of Emperor Charles V of Habsburg at Frankfurt in 1519, and in that of his brother Ferdinand I as King of Bohemia in 1526. His personal charisma reverted the subalterne status of the Trento state between the Habsburg territories, gaining the seignory of Castelbarco and Rovereto. His statute of the city, issued in 1528, remained in use until 1807.
Following the 1801 Treaty of Lunéville, the prince-bishopric in 1803 was secularized as the Principality of Trent, later part of the County of Tyrol, an Alpine crown land of the Austrian Empire from 1804. With Tyrol it was annexed by the Kingdom of Bavaria according to the 1805 Peace of Pressburg, passed to the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy in 1810 and in 1814 was again incorporated into the Austrian crown land of Tyrol.