Czersk

Czersk was a centre of the dukes of Mazovia, set on a high bank above the Vistula valley. At the end of the fourteenth century Duke Janusz I built a brick castle on the site of an older stronghold. Its towers and gate guarded one of the chief seats of southern Mazovia, although Warsaw's growing importance eventually drew ducal attention elsewhere.

When the last Masovian dukes died without heirs in 1526, Czersk passed to the Polish Crown. Queen Bona Sforza later held the castle and its estates, commissioning an inventory of the buildings and their condition. The town suffered heavily in the Swedish war of the seventeenth century, and the castle was damaged in 1656. Its surviving walls recall the time when Mazovia's princes ruled from the Vistula bank.