[Preface] [Introduction] [Beginnings] [Antireformation] [Breakdown] [Dreams]

The History of the Centuries

A Genealogy of a Czech millers´family Kysilka

Part Two

Litomysl (Leitmischl) in the 17th century

INTRODUCTION

The town of Litomysl in eastern Bohemia was once the center of a large feudal estate and one of the most important settlements on the trade road from Bohemia to Moravia. A Benedictine Abbey was established there in A.D. 1098. The Benedictines and later the Praemonstrates affected all lives, culture, and political and social development in this region.

Litomysl is located on a small river called the Desna. Its mouth is high in the hills of the Bohemia-Moravian Highland, some 25 kilometers southwest of Litomysl, near the villages of Lubna and Svata Katerina. In the Middle Ages a strip of continuous settlement in the Desna basin emerged, forming the villages of Budislav, Porici, Desna, Horni Ujezd, Dolni Ujezd, and Osik.

Horni Ujezd on the right bank of the river Desna is the craddle of our family.

This entire region was a poor, wretched, hilly country. Agriculture (rye, oats, poppy, beans, lentils, and later potatoes, then cattle, poultry and bee-keeping), timber, and some trades (mills, weaving and spinning of flax) provided for the subsistence of its people.

In 1344 a new bishopric, second after Prague, was established in Litomysl. However, all church property disappeared a century later, when after the Hussite Reformation movement, the estate was acquired by the former Hussite army leader--Vilem Kostka of Postupice. The Kostkas were the landlords until 1567, when Litomysl and the estate were handed off to the most important Bohemian noble family, the Pernsteins. After the defeat of the Bohemian Protestant Uprising in 1619 (the White Mountain Battle) a strong anti-reformation movement began in the territory and the Litomysl estate fell into the hands of foreign nobility, the Counts of Trautmannsdorf, and later (1753) of Bohemian catholic Counts of Wallenstein-Wartemberg. The town of Litomysl, at that time, encompassed several surrounding villages.