By the mid-14th century the castle had become the seat of the Moravian margraves, decades before it turned into anything resembling a prison. That transformation came later and slowly: the medieval seat grew into a huge baroque citadel, and only then into the prison the Austrian Empire feared, before ending its career as barracks. The dungeons were not a later addition bolted onto an existing fortress, they were part of Špilberk from an early stage. Stendhal's protagonist Fabrice del Dongo brings up those dungeons more than once in The Charterhouse of Parma, a detail drawn from the fortress's real notoriety.