As far as the history of the Rabí Castle is concerned, historiographers and archaeologists believe that this castle was founded in the middle of the 14th century by Lords of Riesenberg. Lords of Riesenberg owned the Rabí Dominion almost two hundred years. In the course of this time they became one of the most powerful and the richest noble families in the Bohemian Kingdom and their social expansion accompanied economic blossoming of all their dominions.
The best known moments of the history of the Rabí Castle are also connected with the name of Lords of Riesenberg. Under Johann von Riesenberg this Catholic castle was two times (in years 1420 and 1421) besieged and conquered by the Hussite (non-Catholic) troops, leaded by the famous medieval general Jan Žižka z Trocnova. During the Hussite sieges the castle was damaged and partly destroyed. However the above-mentioned Lord of Riesenberg received compensations from Sigismund of Luxembourg, the Holy Roman Emperor and Bohemian King. So the castle of Rabí could be quickly renovated.
The last rebuilding of the Rabí Castle was initiated by Půta Švihovský Lord of Riesenberg, undoubtedly the most powerful and eminent owner of the castle. This noble man was a well-educated person: he was able to read and write, he had great language skills as he spoke Latin, German and French, at that he studied law at the university in Leipzig. Later he became a diplomat and an officer in court of Bohemian King Vladislaus II of Hungary. Půta Švihovský was a good businessman and a generous benefactor, too. And he begged also the ruling monarch into giving a charter which defined laws and privileges for the town of Rabí.
After Půta′s death in the year 1504 the fortune of Lords of Riesenberg was divided between his sons. These four men followed the way of their father and held the important posts in the then royal court in Prague. Their success didn′t last for a long time: in the second fourth of the 16th century Lords of Riesenberg began to have financial problems, ran into debts and in the end they had to sell the Rabí Dominion. Between the years 1544 and 1561 the Rabí Dominion was owned by two not so much known noble men and afterwards Wilhelm von Rosenberg, one of best known person of the Czech history, gained this dominion.
Since the 1560s, Barons Chanovský von Dlouhá Ves were owner of the castle of Rabí. Members of this noble family were not too rich and were not able to improve economic conditions of their region and therefore they kept the castle only in habitable condition and didn′t initiate any building adaptation. The Thirty Years′ War strengthened the bad condition of the Rabí Dominion because it was connected with demographic, economic and cultural decline.
At the beginning of the 18th century Johann Philipp Count von Lamberg, the bishop of Passau and a Cardinal, bought the Rabí Dominion as well as the neighbouring dominions of Žichovice and Žihobce His heirs, Count von Lamberg, owned the Rabí Castle till the beginning of the 20th century.
On the one hand the castle premises were mostly destroyed during the reign of Counts von Lamberg (in the first half of the 18th century the castle burned by a fire and all roofs as well as wooden parts were destroyed; afterwards – until the 1830s – inhabitions of the ton of Rabí and its surroundings came into the non-guarded castle area to take building materials), on the other hand Gustav Joachim Count of Lamberg began to look after the castle premises and to renovate the oldest part of the castle in the middle of the 19th century (in the Romantic period for which interest in medieval monuments was typical in the Central Europe).
In the year 1920 a cultural society from the nearby town of Horažďovice (The Society for Maintaining of Monuments in the Horažďovice District) assumed a care for the castle. Members of this society did a lot of reconstruction and archaeological works, founded a castle museum and began to organize guided tours for public. As a matter of interest it could be mentioned that the Rabí Castle was opened for public in the course of the Second World War.
Since the year 1953 the castle of Rabí is owned by the Czech state. In the late 1970s it was declared as a monument of great importance (so National Cultural Monument in the system of the Czech cultural heritage) and from the 1980s till now gradual renovations of the castle premises are under way.
