The bishop fled and Fribourg took his castle

The bishop ran and Fribourg seized his fortress

Sébastien de Montfalcon was Bishop of Lausanne, and his job was to hold onto Bulle. The Baillival Castle (Bulle) stood 304 meters from where you are, a square stone fortress his predecessors had built between 1291 and 1331. It followed the design used by the House of Savoy across the border in Vaud, even though Bulle had never belonged to Savoy. Nobody has fully explained why. A coat of arms found carved into a castle window during a later renovation only deepened the puzzle.

In 1536 the Bernese army swept through the Vaud, and Montfalcon ran. He left Lausanne and did not come back to defend Bulle either. The city of Fribourg had already been guarding Bulle for decades. This was done under an earlier alliance. This arrangement let the town survive the Burgundian Wars untouched sixty years before. With the bishop gone, Fribourg stopped protecting Bulle and started ruling it.

Fribourg turned the bishop's fortress into a bailiff's castle. A Fribourg-appointed official moved into the rooms Montfalcon's family had once held, ruling the old episcopal lands from inside the same walls. The arrangement was made formal with Lausanne in 1614, decades after the fact was already settled on the ground. The castle survived the shift completely intact. Its inner courtyard, its southwest tower, and the corner turrets still stand as they did the year the bishop left.

Townspeople threw out the Fribourg governor

The bailiffs did not finish out the century in the castle. French troops crossed into Switzerland. The government that had ruled from Fribourg for over two hundred years began to crack. In Bulle, people saw the opening. They marched on the castle and threw the Fribourg governor out of the rooms his predecessors had ruled from since 1536. Nobody restored him. The old episcopal quarters, taken once by force from a fleeing bishop, changed hands again the same way they had been won.

Prison cells were cut into the bishop's old rooms

The building did not stay empty of authority for long. It became the district's own administration building. It was the seat of a government that no longer answered to a bishop or a bailiff. Then, starting in 1854, the district began cutting prison cells into the same rooms Sébastien de Montfalcon's household had once occupied. A fortress built to project a bishop's power became a place to hold people who had broken the district's laws. The Baillival Castle (Bulle) never burned and was never torn down. The cells sat inside walls raised six centuries earlier. They stood thirty seconds from where you now stand.

Bishop Boniface walled Bulle against the counts of Gruyères

Long before any of that, the bishops had reason to worry about holding this ground at all. Bishop Boniface ordered a wall built around Bulle between 1231 and 1239. He laid out two lanes and four rows of houses inside a rectangular circuit. The counts of Gruyères held rights in the same town. They pushed against the bishop's claim for two more centuries. The wall was the bishop's answer: a market town worth defending needed to look defensible. The Baillival Castle (Bulle) itself went up a little later. It rose in the wall's southeast corner. Its tower rose to dominate the south gate.

Count Rudolph closed his market and backed Bulle's instead

The contest over this ground went back further than any wall. Count Rudolph ran the region's market from nearby Gruyères until 1195. Then he closed it outright. He threw his support behind the older market at Bulle instead. It was one man's decision. It was made while a rival arrangement was still standing. It settled which town would grow and which would not. Bulle was still a scatter of homesteads around a church at the time. The market Rudolph chose to back is the same square the castle would later be built beside.