Despite its enclosed geographical situation, Kłodzko Land since ancient times has been traversed by the Amber Road and other important trade routes connecting Bohemia with Silesia and Moravia, running over easily accessible mountain passes in the south and west, and along the Nysa water gap at Bardo. The land is named after its historic administrative capital Kłodzko (Kladsko, Glatz), formerly the administrative seat of the Bohemian governor (Zemský hejtman) and gathering place of the local estates (Landstände). The area roughly corresponds to the current Kłodzko County (Powiat kłodzki) of Lower Silesian Voivodeship.
History
Kłodzko, the historic capital and the largest town of the region
Historically, the area may have been part of the Great Moravia under King Svatopluk I by the late 9th century, though the extent of his realm is disputed. According to the Chronica Boëmorum (1125) by the Prague dean Cosmas, the provincia glacensis belonged to the dominions of the Bohemian nobleman Slavník, residing at the castle of Kłodzko on the road from Prague to Wrocław in Silesia until his death in 981 AD. The Slavník dynasty, among them Prince Slavník's heir Soběslav and his brother Saint Adalbert of Prague, ruled in the eastern territories of Bohemia until they were overthrown by the rivalling Přemyslid family in 995.
Medieval Bohemian and Polish rule
While the Přemyslid Dukes of Bohemia obtained the status of immediate Princes of the Holy Roman Empire, their rule was disrupted by internal dynastical struggles: during the rivalry between Duke Boleslaus III and his brother Jaromir in 1003, the Polish duke Bolesław I the Brave invaded Bohemia, but had to pull back the next year, facing the forces of King Henry II of Germany. In turn the Bohemian duke Bretislaus I campaigned the adjacent northern territory of Silesia in 1039. An armistice mediated by Emperor Henry III in 1054 demarcated the spheres of influence, leaving Kłodzko with Bohemia.
About 1300, Kladsko was governed by the Bohemian noble Arnošt (Ernest) of Hostýně, whose son Arnošt of Pardubice became the first Archbishop of Prague by appointment of Pope Clement VI in 1344. He also was a close advisor to the Luxembourg emperor Charles IV, who in 1348 separated Kladsko Land from Bohemia and raised it to an immediate Land of the Bohemian Crown. Under Charles' rule, Kladsko flourished; the development, however, ended abruptly with the beginning of the Hussite Wars in the early 15th century.
In 1424, an alliance between Duke John I of Ziębice of the Piast dynasty and the towns and estates of Kłodzko Land was forged in Paczków near Kłodzko Land against the Hussites.[2] From about 1425 onwards, Hussite forces campaigned the lands and used Homole Castle as a base for their attacks. They laid siege to Karpień Castle and devastated the towns of Bystrzyca, Radków and Nowa Ruda. A major battle with the royal Bohemian forces led by the Kladsko governor Půta III of Častolovice and the Silesian duke John I of Münsterberg was fought at Stary Wielisław on 27 December 1428. Duke John was killed in action and Půta received his Duchy of Münsterberg (Ziębice) as well as Kladsko and the adjacent Silesian lands of Ząbkowice as a pledge from the hands of Emperor Sigismund. After Půta's death, his widow Anne of Colditz sold Kladsko Land to the former Hussite leader Hynek Krušina of Lichtenburg in September 1440, and married him three weeks later.
In 1454 the Utraquist Bohemian regent, and later king, George of Poděbrady re-acquired Kladsko Land from the heirs of the late Hynek Krušina; together with the adjacent Náchod lordship and the Silesian Duchy of Münsterberg, it became his powerbase to assume the Bohemian Crown. Once elected king by the Bohemian estates, in 1458, he raised Kladsko to a county in its own right and conveyed the title of an Imperial count to his second son Victor, for which he obtained the confirmation by Emperor Frederick III the next year.
The comital title became hereditary in 1462 and could also be bequeathed by Victor's brothers Henry of the Elder Münsterberg and Henry the Younger of Poděbrady. Henry the Elder ruled Kladsko upon King George's death in 1471; he attached the Lordship of Homole to his comital lands by 1477 and had Kladsko Castle rebuilt as his permanent residence. His overindebted sons and heirs Albert, George and Charles, however, had to sell the estates to their brother-in-law, the Austrian noble Ulrich of Hardegg. Nevertheless, their descendants retained the comital title until the extinction of the line in 1647.
When the Bohemian Crown fell to the Austrian Habsburg monarchy in 1526, the rights of the Hardegg family were confirmed by King Ferdinand I. Johann von Hardegg finally sold Kladsko to Ferdinand in 1534/37; from that time on, the Habsburg rulers pledged the county several times: first to the Bohemian noble and former governor John III of Pernstein, later to the Salzburg administrator Ernest of Bavaria, who implemented stern measures of Counter-Reformation. After Ernest's death in 1560, his heir Duke Albert V of Bavaria sold Kladsko back to Emperor Maximilian II. The Habsburg rulers raised the pledge sum with the support of the local estates, and the Counter-Reformation efforts ended.
When the Thirty Years' War broke out, Kladsko became a centre of the Protestant revolt in Bohemia. Even after the lost Battle of White Mountain, the estates refused to submit to Emperor Ferdinand II, who had their lands occupied and numerous punitive measures enacted. His son and successor Ferdinand III commissioned the Jesuits to continue the recatholization policies.
Prussian rule
City and fortress of Kladsko (1737)
In December 1740 the Prussian Army under King Frederick the Great invaded Habsburg Silesia and also occupied the County of Kladsko; while they were largely welcomed by the Protestant population of Silesia, Kladsko remained a suspiciously eyed Catholic area. By the 1742 Treaty of Berlin, again confirmed by the 1763 Peace of Hubertusburg, the Habsburg empress Maria Theresa ceded Kladsko to the Kingdom of Prussia.
From a traditional Czech perspective, Kłodzko Land was culturally and traditionally a part of Bohemia, although the region has been a part of the Lower Silesia region since its conquest by the Kingdom of Prussia in 1742. Referred to as "Little Prague", the Kłodzko Valley region on the Nysa Kłodzka river was the focus of several attempts to reincorporate the area into Czechoslovakia, one of several Polish–Czechoslovak border conflicts.[6]
Proposals by the Czechoslovak Delegation on incorporating Kłodzko Land into Czechoslovakia during the Paris Peace Conference, 1919
The last Czech attempt to capture the region occurred at the end of World War II, when Czechoslovak forces tried to annex the area on behalf of the Czech minority present in the western part of the Kłodzko Valley known as the "Czech Corner". Pressure brought on by the Soviet Union led to a ceasing of military operations, with the remaining German population and the Czech minority being expelled to Germany and Czechoslovakia. With most of the former Silesia province, Kłodzko Land passed to Poland in 1945.
^Semotanová, Eva; Felcman, Ondřej (2005). Kladsko. Proměny středoevropského regionu : historický atlas [Kladsko Region. The Transformations of the Central European Region : A Historical Atlas] (in Czech). Hradec Králové; Prague: Univerzita Hradec Králové; Historický ústav AV ČR. p. 15. ISBN80-7286-066-6.
^Słownik geograficzny Królestwa Polskiego i innych krajów słowiańskich, Tom VII (in Polish). Warszawa. 1886. p. 813.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
^Wolniewicz, Paweł (2019). "Włodzimierz Adolf Dołęga Wolniewicz". Wieści Lubońskie (in Polish). No. 1 (338). p. 27.
^Brygier, Waldemar; Dudziak, Tomasz (2010). Ziemia Kłodzka. Przewodnik (in Polish). Pruszków: Oficyna Wydawnicza Rewasz. p. 348.
^Konieczny, Alfred (1974). "Więzienie karne w Kłodzku w latach II wojny światowej". Śląski Kwartalnik Historyczny Sobótka (in Polish). XXIX (3). Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, Wydawnictwo Polskiej Akademii Nauk: 370–371.
^Megargee, Geoffrey P.; Overmans, Rüdiger; Vogt, Wolfgang (2022). The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933–1945. Volume IV. Indiana University Press, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. pp. 669–670. ISBN978-0-253-06089-1.
