Kłodzko Land

Silesian duchies of fragmented Piast-ruled Poland with Kłodzko Land as part of the Duchy of Wrocław ruled by Henry IV Probus (in orange)

Under Přemyslid rule, Kladsko became part of the Kingdom of Bohemia by 1198; it was administrated within the lands of Hradec Králové and governed by Bohemian burgraves like Witiko of Prčice (c.1120–1194), progenitor of the Vítkovci clan. From the 13th century onwards, under the rule of King Wenceslaus I and his son Ottokar II, the area was largely settled by German colonists in the course of the Ostsiedlung migration. The Kladsko estates were temporarily held by Silesian Piast dukes such as Henry IV Probus, who received it from the hands of King Rudolph I of Germany in 1280, or Henry VI the Good (in 1327) and Bolko II of Ziębice (in 1336); each time, the lands fell back to the Bohemian monarch as a reverted fief upon their death.

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.

From about 1425 onwards, Hussite forces campaigned the lands and used Hummel 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.

Museum of Papermaking in Duszniki-Zdrój, located in a 17th-century paper mill, is one of the historic landmarks of the region, listed as a Historic Monument of Poland

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 Hummel 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.

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.

During the Napoleonic War, in 1807, Kłodzko Castle was besieged by Confederation troops led by Jérôme Bonaparte, but successfully defended by the Prussian garrison under General Friedrich Wilhelm von Götzen the Younger. In the same year, manoralism was finally abolished in the course of the Stein-Hardenberg Reforms. By 1818 the county was finally abolished, and the territory was reformed into the three Landkreise of Glatz, Habelschwerdt and Neurode within the Silesian province. During the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 the area again became a deployment zone of Prussian troops on the eve of the Battle of Nachod. From 1871 it was part of Germany, until the country's defeat in World War II in 1945.

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.[2]

• Proposals by the Czechoslovak Delegation on incorporating Kłodzko Land into Czechoslovakia during the Paris Peace Conference, 1919
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  The maximalist variant
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  The intermediate variant
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  The minimalist variant

After the defeat of the German Empire in World War I, the newly established First Czechoslovak Republic raised claims to Kłodzko Land, that were however rejected in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. While the area remained with the Free State of Prussia and the Weimar Republic, the Czechoslovak government had extended border fortifications erected around the Kłodzko Land just after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. With the 1938 Munich Agreement, however, these security measures became obsolete.

During World War II, the Germans operated several subcamps of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp[3] and forced labour subcamps of the Stalag VIII-B/344 prisoner-of-war camp for Allied POWs in the region.[4]

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.

According to canon law of the Roman Catholic Church, the area remained part of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Prague until 1972.

The region suffered during the 1997 Central European flood.