Cyprus had passed through more hands than most medieval kingdoms. In 1191 Richard the Lionheart, sailing for the Holy Land, conquered the island from the Byzantine usurper Isaac Komnenos. Richard sold it to the Knights Templar; the Templars, after a revolt in Nicosia destroyed their castle there, sold it to Guy of Lusignan, the dispossessed king of Jerusalem. The House of Lusignan would rule Cyprus for nearly three centuries. They built castles in the Crusader manner, fought regents and pretenders, watched the last Crusader strongholds in the Holy Land fall, and tried to keep their island intact. By the late fourteenth century the threat was no longer Saracen; it was Italian. In 1373 the Republic of Genoa invaded, sacked Famagusta, and took most of the Lusignan nobility prisoner.

Among the captives was Prince John of Antioch, who, according to the chronicle of Philip of Novara, escaped from Famagusta by disguising himself as the valet of his own cook. He fled inland to Kantara Castle in the Pentadaktylos mountains, organized a counteroffensive, and pushed the Genoese out of much of the island. Famagusta itself remained in Genoese hands. With the Lusignan capital at Nicosia and their main port at Famagusta now in enemy possession, the kingdom needed a chain of fortifications between them. Kantara guarded the mountains. Sigouri would guard the plain. La Cava and Nicosia closed the line. When King James I of Cyprus returned from his own captivity in 1385, he immediately set about strengthening these defenses. Sigouri Castle was completed in 1391.

Nothing of Sigouri stands above ground today, but the medieval chroniclers described it carefully. It sat on an earthen platform raised three metres above the surrounding plain. Four square corner towers anchored the corners; their basements were barrel-vaulted, and one held a cistern. The plan was deliberately old-fashioned, a Roman-style castrum updated for the late fourteenth century rather than a sophisticated bastioned trace. A drawbridge crossed a wide moat thirty-five metres across, fed by water from the Pedieos river, which probably ran low or dry in summer. Sigouri was less a stand-alone stronghold than a stopover. Troops moving from Nicosia to Larnaca or Famagusta could overnight there in safety, and the castle occasionally served as an arms depot for inland operations.

Sigouri's strategic life lasted exactly seventy years. In September 1460 King James II of Cyprus, embarked on a campaign to take the island for himself, made Sigouri his first military objective. He took it. Shortly afterward he retook Famagusta, and the moment Famagusta returned to Lusignan control, Sigouri's reason to exist evaporated. The Republic of Venice acquired Cyprus from the last Lusignan queen in 1489, and the Venetians had no use for an obsolete castrum in the middle of a plain. By the early sixteenth century Sigouri was abandoned and partially demolished. The Ottoman conquest of 1570 to 1571 finished the job. Field stones were carried off for village houses; the platform sank into farmland; the moat silted up; the river kept running.

Sigouri lies today in the buffer zone of a divided island, in territory administered by the unrecognized Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. The crossroads it once watched still functions: the road from Nicosia to Famagusta runs nearby, and the Pedieos still flows past. Locals know the spot. Archaeologists have surveyed it without finding much above the topsoil. Most medieval castles fail by being captured and demolished, and the surviving stones tell their story for centuries. Sigouri's story is the rarer kind, of a castle that simply outlived its purpose so completely that even its ruins were forgotten. The chronicles preserve it. The plain has moved on.