Lobkowicz Princes: Survivors of the Great Bohemian Purge

The Kingdom of Bohemia has a unique place in European history. As the only kingdom within the boundaries of the Holy Roman Empire, and the only mostly Slavic state in a sea of German principalities, it was an anomaly, as were its leading noble families in the middle ages. These Bohemian lords, speaking Czech, always had an independent streak, for example jumping on the idea of a reformation of the Catholic Church long before Martin Luther and his 95 theses. Many Bohemian nobles then did embrace the Lutheran reforms—and this led them into trouble when their very Catholic king re-conquered the country in 1620. Many prominent Bohemian noble houses were simply wiped out, replaced wholesale by Catholic families from Austria and other parts of the Empire. One of the few native survivors were the lords of Lobkowicz, who not only survived, they thrived. Raised to the unprecedented rank of Prince of the Empire in 1624, they one of the very first of the ‘new princes’ created by the Habsburg emperors in the seventeenth century to solidify the loyalty of the upper aristocracy of Central Europe.

The House of Lobkowicz (or Lobkowitz in German, and Lobkovic in modern Czech) was not ancient, as noble families go. Genealogists trace their founding ancestor to a squire in the late 14^th century, Mikuláš ‘Chudý’ (Nicholas ‘the Poor’), who hailed from the region of northern Bohemia where the two main rivers of the Kingdom, the Labe (or Elbe) and the Vltava (or Moldau) come together. The former drained Bohemia’s northern forested mountains, while the later came out of the hills of the southwest and passed through the capital Prague, before joining the Elbe and flowing north into Saxony and across the North German plain to the sea. The Vltava’s journey across Bohemia is famously portrayed in music by the Czech composer Bedřich Smetana in 1874.

Mikuláš Chudý attended Charles University in Prague and gained the attention of King Václav (or Wenceslas) IV, as one of his scribes. He rose through the ranks of the royal administration and was created Grand Scribe of the Kingdom in 1417. Meanwhile, the King made him a landed nobleman by granting him an estate, Lobkovice, near his place of origin, and he took this as his surname. He rebuilt the old fortress there as a gothic style castle, and his family have owned it—with a few breaks—continuously ever since. It is not certain where this village got its name, but one story relates it to the love of the hunt (lov in Czech), which is certainly apt for a noble estate.

In 1418, Mikuláš z (‘of’) Lobkowicz helped his royal patron Václav IV secure the castles of several rebels in the far north-western reaches of the Kingdom, and was given several to keep for himself, notably Hasištejn which guarded one of the main roads from Prague to Saxony. Like many of Bohemia’s castles, Hasištejn had been originally built by a noble family who habitually crossed this northern frontier and had a dual identity (and name) as both Germans and Czechs (in this case Schönberg and Šumburka), and so it also had a German name, Hassenstein. Hašistejn Castle became the main seat of the senior branch of the family, who were thus called the Hasištejnský z Lobkowicz, until the senior line became extinct. Hasištejn Castle itself, however, was mostly abandoned by the family in the 16^th century, then damaged by a major fire. It is still owned by the family but remains in ruins.

The two sons of Mikuláš the founder, Mikuláš II and Jan Popel, built on their father’s successes and were raised to the level of Freiherr (free lord or baron), of the Empire in 1459. Though the Habsburgs were not yet permanently kings of Bohemia, this was the first contact between the Austrian ruling dynasty and the House of Lobkowicz, a close relationship that would endure for the next 500 years. The sons of Mikuláš II would later (1479) also be created barons of Bohemia, which ensured them a voice in the Kingdom’s House of Lords. Mikuláš II married an important heiress, Žofie ze Žirotina, whose family, the lords of Žirotín, had been prominent warriors and knights in north Bohemia for centuries, and conveniently died out at this time. Mikuláš added their black eagle to his family’s fairly plain red on white coat-of-arms, thus adding some noble lustre to the rather nouveau lineage of the House of Lobkowicz.

The most famous member of the early House of Lobkowicz was Lord Bohuslav (d. 1510), a renowned humanist writer and poet, who built up an enormous library at Hasištejn Castle. He had studied at the famous universities in Italy and while there renounced Utraquism, the uniquely Bohemian faith that had challenged orthodox Catholicism in the 15^th century. He was rewarded with the prestigious court post of Provost of Vyšegrad, the older royal castle just outside of Prague. Bohuslav travelled to the Holy Land in 1490 and later wrote about his travels, all the while accumulating more books and manuscripts for his great library. The Lobkowicz Library still exists today, split between the family’s palace in Prague and the Castle of Nelahozeves, about 11 miles north of the city, which has recently been remodelled to house and display much of the family’s great collections (see below).

Bohuslav’s older brother, Jan II, Baron of Lobkowicz, served as a diplomat for King Vladislav II in the 1470s-80s, an envoy to various cities in the Low Countries and to Rome. He too went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land and wrote a book about it. He also founded a monastery at Kadaň, near the castle of Hasištejn. Jan II relocated his seat to lands acquired by the founder of the family in the more central fertile valley near Lobkovice itself, Castle Obříství, and his branch took that name, while Hasištejnský was used by a junior branch. The senior line remained barons throughout its history, and by the 18^th and 19^th centuries had moved into service in Bavaria and Austria. The last Baron von Lobkowitz died in 1961. The junior line were a bit more prominent, notably in the person of another Bohuslav, who became vogt (or governor) of Lower Lusatia in 1555 (another Slavic region, just north of Bohemia, across the mountains, now in Germany), then Chief Justice of Bohemia in 1570, and finally Grand Chamberlain of Bohemia, one of the most senior members of the royal court in Prague, in 1576. Two members of this branch were rectors of the University of Wittenberg in Saxony in the middle of the 16^th century—which indicates that this branch of the family had become firmly Lutheran—and several of the daughters of this branch married into mixed Saxon/Bohemian noble houses, like the Schönburgs (see above) or the Schwambergs (Švamberka). This line also remained barons, until their extinction in the early 17^th century.

The second major branch of the Lobkowicz family, founded by Jan Popel (d. 1470), produced all the later lines of counts and princes. Until the extinction of the Hasištejnská branch, they used the additional surname ‘Popel’, taken from the village of Popelov in Českolipska (in the far north of the Kingdom). The word popel in Czech means ‘ashes’, and the family turned this into a punning motto: ‘Popel jsem a popel budu’ (‘I am ashes and ashes I will be’), reminiscent of the lines spoken about piety humility at a Christian funeral. This branch split in the early 16^th century into the Bílina branch and the Chlumec branch, named for their primary residences. As above, it was the cadet branch that surpassed the senior branch in prominence, so before we get to the line of princes, we should look at the line of counts. The Castle of Bílina was in northwest Bohemia, near the mountains. It was famous for its spa waters—developed as an international business in the 18^th century. The castle was built in the 13^th century, and acquired in 1502 by this branch of the Lobkowicz family. Violently re-catholicised after the revolt of 1620, they nonetheless held on to it, rebuilt it as a baroque palace in the 1670s, then passed it to the line of princes by marriage in the early 18^th century. The spa was developed as a major resort in the 1870s, with stunning buildings including a faux Roman temple. Like many properties, Bílina was confiscated by the state after the Second World War, then restored to the family after the fall of Communism. The spa was sold to a private company in 1997 (and they still sell the famous bottled water).

Prominent members of this branch included Kryštof (Christoph) ‘the Younger’ (d. 1609), who was a key supporter of Emperor Rudolf II who moved his capital from Vienna to Prague (by this point the Habsburgs were both Holy Roman Emperors and kings of Bohemia). Kryštof was an important diplomat, sent to Spain to help keep the branches of the Habsburg family united in the late 16^th century, and hosting envoys from Poland when they visited Rudolf’s court. Another cousin prominent at Rudolf’s court was Děpolt Matouš (Leopold Matthias; d. 1619), a senior member of the Order of Malta in Bohemia, who was appointed Viceroy of the Kingdom of Bohemia in 1591 (a royal placeholder for when the Emperor-King was absent). He was one of the four Regents of the Kingdom who were assaulted by Protestant rebels in Prague Castle in May 1618, but he was removed from the room just before the famous Defenestration (see below). Another cousin, Jiři (George), was an especial royal favourite of Rudolf, but belongs to the junior Popel branch, so we’ll return to him below.

From this branch, Vilém (William) ‘the Elder’ (d. 1626), brother of Kryštof, was a leader of the Protestant nobles in Bohemia. Though he had frequently served the Habsburgs as governor of the western counties of the Kingdom, he avidly joined the revolt of 1618, and personally threw one of the Habsburg ministers out of the window of Prague Castle in the famous Defenestration that sparked the Thirty Years War. One of the few Protestant nobles to escape the death penalty after their defeat in 1620, he was nevertheless imprisoned and dispossessed of his major estate, Horšovský Týn. This castle, in the mountains in the west of Bohemia, had belonged to the bishops of Prague since the 12^th century (its German name is Bischofteinitz), but was acquired by this branch of the Lobkowicz family in 1542, and transformed into a modern Renaissance palace. After confiscation, it was given to the powerful Austrian house of Trauttmansdorf, so it remains part of their story (a future blog post), well into the 20^th century.

In contrast, Vilém ‘the Younger’ (d. 1647) stayed very loyal to the Catholic Habsburgs, bought up lots of confiscated estates after 1620, and was appointed Judge of the Court in 1628, and after 1634, Grand Master of the Hunt of Bohemia, an office that became hereditary in his line. Vilém and his wife, Benigna Kateřina (herself born a Lobkowicz), demonstrated their wealth and their Catholic piety by building one of the most magnificent buildings in Prague, the Loreto ‘Santa Casa’ (to emulate the ‘Holy House’ of the Virgin Mary in Loreto, Italy), right next to the Royal Palace. The Baroness financed most of he project from the estates she had acquired from defeated Czech Protestants. From these beginnings the Loreto complex would continue to rise thanks to Lobkowicz patronage later in the century.

This incredibly wealthy couple’s son, Baron Kryštof Ferdinand (d. 1658)—who was given his second name as a display of loyalty to the new (and very Catholic) Habsburg Emperor and King of Bohemia, Ferdinand II—was appointed viceroy of Silesia (then still a dependency of the Bohemian Crown), while his son, Václav Ferdinand (d. 1697), became a busy ambassador for the emperor, in Bavaria, France, Spain and England, and was elevated to the rank of Count of the Empire, in 1670. He was awarded the Order of he Golden Fleece, the highest honour in the Habsburg world, in 1695. His marriage to Maria Sophia von Dietrichstein highlights the integration in this century of the native Czech nobility with new Austrian families being imported into Bohemia: her father was a Prince of Dietrichstein, while her mother was a princess of the House of Liechtenstein. Her brother was, like her husband, a major diplomat in this period of strained Spanish-Austrian relations.

But the branch of Lobkowicz counts did not last very long. After Václav Ferdinand’s death, and that of his son, Count Leopold Joseph, in 1707, he was succeeded as head of this branch by his cousin Count Ferdinand Vilém (d. 1708), already eminent as president of the Bohemian Court of Appeals and even Viceroy of the Kingdom of Bohemia (from 1670), and then by his brother Count Oldřich Felix, who was the family’s last hereditary Master of the Hunt of Bohemia, who was killed ignominiously—probably while on a hunt—by a falling tree in 1722.

The next line down the tree of this Popel branch of the House of Lobkowicz was based in Zbiroh, one of the grandest Renaissance castles still extant in the Czech Republic, with an ancient Gothic castle at its core, including a chapel from the mid-1200s. It has been held by various noble families, and at times by the Bohemian Crown itself, and served as a residence for famous European scholars and visiting dignitaries, and as a prison for Protestant nobles during the Thirty Years War, including Baron Vilém ‘the Elder’ of Lobkowicz. Jan III had originally acquired Zbiroh, along with the much more rugged looking fortress of Točník, in the mid-16^th century. Both are in the western part of Bohemia. But Jan III spent a lot of his time at court in Prague, as he was (since the 1540s) Grand Justiciar of the Kingdom and Master of the Royal Household.

When he died in 1569, Jan III was succeeded by six sons. The eldest, also Jan, continued his father’s career in high positions in the royal judiciary. Other sons were given posts in local government as ‘hetmen’ or marshals of Bohemian districts. The fifth son, Jiři, rose to greater heights and became a favourite of Emperor-King Rudolf II. At first Grand Chamberlain of Bohemia (1582), he added his father’s office of Grand Justiciar, then in 1585 his uncle’s office of Grand Master of the Household, the second highest position in the Kingdom. He ardently pursued Protestants, and forcibly reclaimed and re-founded the monastery in his family’s lands at Kadaň. But Jiři of Zbiroh felt he was not rewarded sufficiently for his zeal, and in 1593 turned against Rudolf, hoping the other Bohemian nobles would rise with him. They didn’t, and in 1594 he was captured, stripped of his lands and titles, and held in prison for the many years. His older brother Ladislav III also joined the rebellion, fled the country and was condemned to death–he left behind a gorgeous portrait. He was pardoned just before he died, but when his son died (1614), the Zbiroh branch became extinct. The castle passed into royal hands until it was sold in the 1860s

This finally takes us to the most junior branch, but the one that rose the highest. The uncle of Grand Master Jiři, Ladislav II, had held this position from 1570 to 1585. He founded a separate line of the family based at the castle Chlumec (or Vysoký [‘high’] Chlumec), in the forested hills south of Prague. This castle, built in the 14^th century, was acquired by the Lobkowiczes in 1474, and remained one of the main family seats in Bohemia until the 20^th century. Like most of their castles, it was confiscated in World War II, nationalised under the Communists, then restored in the 1990s—but this one was not retained, and in 1998 was sold to a relative, Count von Arco-Zinneberg.

Ladislav’s eldest son, Ladislav the Younger, rose to become another of Rudolf II’s favourites, Captain of his guard, and eventually Governor of Moravia, 1615, where he started the process of re-Catholicising this separate province of the Bohemian Crown. He also extended his influence outside of Bohemia, having married two countesses of the prominent imperial family of Salm-Neuburg, and acquired a lease, then the fief outright in 1575, of two immediate imperial territories in Franconia just across the western Bohemian border. ‘Immediate’ means there’s no other lord above you in the feudal chain besides the emperor, and this will be important later. These two fiefs were called Sternstein (today spelled Störnstein) and Neustadt an der Waldnaab, and they had been possessions of the kings of Bohemia since the mid-14^th century. The old castle of Sternstein sits high on a rock overlooking the river Floß, which flows out of the hills into the ‘New Town’ (Neu Stadt) on the Waldnaab river, which flows south and becomes simply the Naab before it joins the Danube at Regensberg. The old castle at Sternstein was already a ruin by the time Ladislav of Lobkowicz acquired it, and the rest was pulled down to provide materials to refurbish the Old Schloss at Neustadt. This castle became the main seat of this branch of the family until a New Schloss was built, in a fashionable Italian style, in the 1680s. The family abandoned both castles in the early 18^th century, however, and they were sold altogether to the King of Bavaria in 1807.

Ladislav’s younger brother, Zdeněk Vojtěch (also called Zdenko in German) inherited these Franconian properties in 1621, and in 1624 was raised to the rank of ‘Prince of the Empire’. As noted at the start, these so-called ‘new princes’ were created by Habsburg emperors starting in the 1620s as a means of building up more support (primarily Catholic) for their rule in the Imperial council of princes—since several of the older princely houses had now become Protestant (like Brandenburg, Brunswick or Nassau). Lobkowitz (as it was now being increasingly spelled, and its members increasingly speaking German, but I’ll keep using the old Czech spelling) was one of the very first of these new princes. There was a major qualification required, however, in that the new princes had to own an immediate fief, and one that was deemed to be of princely rank. From 1641, therefore, the fief of Sternstein was declared a sovereign Imperial County, and its owners full Imperial Princes. This great honour was first won by Zdenko, who, like so many of his kinsmen rose in the service of Emperor Rudolf II, to become Grand Chancellor of Bohemia (1599). He remained in this post under Rudolf’s successors, Matthias and Ferdinand II.

His wife also played a major role in the family’s elevation: Polyxena z Pernštejna (or von Pernstein) was from another major Bohemian noble house, daughter of the previous Grand Chancellor, and of a Spanish aristocrat, Maximiliana Manrique de Lara. She was also widow and heiress of the incredibly wealthy Vilém z Rožmberka (von Rosenberg). From her father she inherited the fabulous Pernstein Palace in Prague, and from her first husband the majestic Roudnice (Raudnitz in German) Castle north of the city. Rožmberka’s fortune was used by Polyxena to buy up lots of confiscated properties of Protestant nobles after the Battle of White Mountain in 1620, like Nelahozeves and Dolní Beřkovice (see below), and even to re-acquire some old Lobkowicz properties like Obříství. Together Zdenko and Polyxena were the leaders of the Catholic faction at the court of Prague, and Polyxena famously defended the Habsburg ministers in her palace immediately following the Defenestration of 23 May 1618.

Pernstein Palace, now renamed Lobkowicz Palace, had been built by Polyxena’s father in the late 16^th century, at the far end of the narrow ridge upon which earlier Bohemian kings had constructed the Royal Palace and the basilicas of St Vitus and St George. After centuries of Lobkowicz possession, it was confiscated by the Nazis in 1939, and finally restored to the family in 2002 (opened soon after as a museum), and is today the only part of the Prague Royal Castle complex in private hands.

As noted above, the other parts of the Lobkowicz collection on display today are in a restored castle a few miles north of Prague, Nelahozeves, which had been built as a country retreat by the Habsburgs in the mid-16^th century, and afterwards purchased by Polyxena, 1^st Princess of Lobkowicz in 1623. It became mostly an administrative centre for the dynasty rather than a residence. After the family regained possession in 1993, they immediately re-opened it as an art gallery with temporary exhibitions, then launched the first of its permanent displays in 1997 which featured some of the most significant works from the Lobkowicz Collections. The town of Nelahozeves’s other claim to fame is as the birthplace of composer Antonín Dvořák (in 1841).

The 2^nd Prince of Lobkowicz (from 1628) was Wenzel (Václav) Eusebius, one of the most influential statesmen in 17^th-century Europe. As President of the Imperial War Council in Vienna from 1652, then President of the Imperial Privy Council from 1669, he was essentially the first minister for Emperor Leopold. He became increasingly tied to the pro-French faction at court from the 1670s, however, which led to clashes with the Emperor, to the extent that he was arrested in 1674 and sent to his residence at Roudnice, where he died three years later.

Roudnice, located on the River Elbe, about 20 miles north of Prague, was built to guard one of the major crossing points of the river in the 12^th century. Rebuilt in the 15^th century as the summer residence of the bishops of Prague, it was later sold to various nobles and eventually to Vilém z Rožmberka. The 2^nd Prince of Lobkowicz made it his seat in the 1650s, hiring Italian architects to remodel it as a grand residence worthy of princes, adding a chapel, theatre, clock tower and formal gardens. During the Communist era, Roudnice housed a state music school, which remained after it was restored to the Lobkowicz family for two more decades, and since 2009 it has been opened to the public as a museum.

The 2^nd Prince confirmed his family’s princely status with the recognition of the County of Sternstein as an immediate imperial fief in 1641. This was confirmed in 1652 and he was admitted as a fully voting member of the Council of Princes of the Empire. To bolster this new status even further, he married not a Czech noblewoman, but an Imperial princess, from a junior branch of the Wittelsbach family (the Counts Palatine of Sulzbach), and in 1646 he purchased the formerly sovereign duchy of Sagan in Silesia, a Polish province that had been part of the Crown of Bohemia since the 14^th century (Żagań in Polish). The duchy, the northernmost of Silesia’s numerous component dukedoms, had been ruled by a branch of the former royal dynasty of Poland, the Piasts, then by the kings of Bohemia, the dukes of Saxony, and again Bohemia. In 1627, Ferdinand II gave it to his leading general, Wallenstein, but confiscated it again after his betrayal in 1634. The Lobkowicz princes rebuilt its castle as a baroque palace, but after the entire province of Silesia was conquered by Prussia in the 1740s, they sold it to another German princely house, the Birons, in 1786.

The coat-of-arms of the princely branch of the House of Lobkowicz was by now more complex: with elements for Pernštejn (the bull’s head); for the duchy of Sagan (the angel and the golden lion), and for the duchy of Silesia (the black eagle); for Sternstein and Neustadt (the star and mountains for Sternstein—literally ‘star stones’—and black and gold stripes); and the Lobkowicz family arms overall.

The 3^rd Prince of Lobkowicz, Ferdinand-August, was less prominent, but maintained his father’s place on the Imperial Privy Council and the family’s place amongst the high Habsburg aristocracy by being awarded the Golden Fleece in 1689. At first excluded from high politics due to his father’s disgrace, by the 1690s he had repaired the damage and acted first as formal Representative of the Emperor at the Imperial Diet in Regensburg (1691-98), then as Master of the Household of Empress Amalia, wife of Joseph I (1698-1708). Like his father, Ferdinand-August also demonstrated the family’s new social prominence through his marriages, first to a princess of the House of Nassau, then a princess from Baden-Baden. They were now genuinely part of the trans-national princely order of Central Europe. The 3^rd Prince was particularly known as a connoisseur of fine paintings—adding Veronese, Rubens, Breughel and Cranach to the family art collections—as well as musical scores. His son, Philipp Hyazinth, the 4^th Prince, continued this trend and collected musical scores, including some from far-off England. His wife, Eleonora Carolina, was the heiress of the Bílina branch of the Lobkowicz family, so added that castle to their domains, along with another, a bit further into the western mountains, Jezeři, or Eisenberg. This medieval castle had been held by various noble families until it was confiscated in the rebellion of 1618 and granted to Vilém ‘the Younger’ of Lobkowicz. In the 18^th and 19^th centuries it was used as a hunting lodge; in the 20^th it was nearly destroyed by coal mining.

By the mid-18^th century, therefore, the Lobkowicz family had enough estates to create a second majorat (an estate held together by rules of entail), which was done for the 4^th Prince’s younger brother, Prince Johann Georg Christian (Jan Jiří Kristián), a successful soldier in Habsburg service who was Governor of Sicily in 1732, Field Marshal in Transylvania and Bohemia, then Commander-in-Chief of forces in Italy and Governor of Milan, 1743-44. His branch, called the Second Majorat branch, or the Mělnik branch, would give numbers to their heads like the senior branch, and continue to the present—we’ll pick them up again towards the end below.

The 5^th Prince of Lobkowicz was just a teenager when he succeeded, and died just two years later in 1739. So the 6^th Prince, Ferdinand Philipp (d. 1784) headed the family for the middle of the 18^th century. He went against tradition by supporting Frederick the Great in his war against the Habsburgs in the 1740s, in an attempt to safeguard his duchy of Sagan (since Silesia was taken by Frederick early in the war). He therefore spent a lot of time away from Vienna, living for a spell in London. But when he returned to Bohemia, he acquired a second major city palace in Prague, on the outskirts of the old city, the much grander Palais Lobkowicz, sometimes called the Kvasejovic Palace after its original builder, Count Kvasejovic—he had it constructed in 1702 but almost immediately sold it due to financial difficulties. The Lobkowicz family acquired it in 1753 and moved out of the older, more cramped palace up on the Hradčany. In 1927, this much grander palace was sold to the new Czechoslovak state which used it as the Ministry of Education. From 1948 it was the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China, then since 1974 the Federal Republic of Germany.

The family of course by now needed a permanent seat in the imperial capital of Vienna as well, so the 6^th Prince purchased in 1745 the Dietrichstein Palace, one of the first major baroque palaces that had been built after the Second Siege of Vienna of 1683, when Imperial aristocrats felt secure in the expansion of Vienna into a truly imperial capital. This palace was very close to the Habsburg imperial palace complex, across the street from what is today called the Albertina. From the mid-19^th century, the family let it out and mostly lived in Bohemia, in Roudnice or in Prague, and it served for many years as the Embassy of France. After the First World War, the Palais Lobkowitz was the Czechoslovak embassy, then after the Second World War, it was the Institut Français. In 1980 it was finally sold outright to the Austrian government, and today it houses the Theatre Museum, a wing of the Kunsthistorisches Museum.

Both Lobkowicz palaces in Prague and Vienna are also known for their connections to the composer Ludwig van Beethoven. The 7^th Prince, Joseph Franz Maximilian, like his ancestors, had a passion for music, and was himself a talented cellist and singer. He participated in the founding of the Society of Friends of Music in Vienna (better known as the Musikverein), which first met in his Vienna palace, and he was a director of the Court Theatre. The Prince was a patron of both Haydn and Beethoven, who dedicated several symphonies to him—the 3^rd Symphony was premiered in his Vienna palace in 1804 (and the hall was thereafter referred to as the ‘Eroica Hall’); while many of his works were premiered in Prague at the Palais Lobkowicz. Beethoven dedicated his 5^th and 6^th symphonies both to the Prince and to his brother-in-law and fellow patron, Count Razumovsky.

By this point, the Duchy of Sagan had been sold, so in 1786, the Emperor rewarded the family’s renewed loyalty with the title Duke of Raudnitz (the German name for Roudnice). As the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved in 1806, the imperial county of Sternstein did not survive as an independent state within the new German Confederation, so the 7^th Prince sold his estates there to the new King of Bavaria. His son, Ferdinand Joseph, 8^th Prince of Lobkowicz (d. 1868), solidified their hold on princely status however by obtaining the honorific title of Durchlaucht (‘Serene Highness’) in 1825 (this was initially for the head of the family only, but in 1869 it was extended to all members of the senior line), and eventually a seat as hereditary member in the Austrian House of Lords in 1861. He married a Lichtenstein princess, as many of these old Viennese families continued to be intertwined dynastically well into the 19^th century. The 8^th Prince also began to modernise the family business, embracing the entrepreneurial spirit of the 19^th century by opening a large sugar factory in Bílina.

The 8^th Prince had many brothers, and the estates were divided to create several new sub-lineages. Prince Johann Nepomuk founded the line of Křimice. The next brother Prince Joseph Franz, who served as Head of Household of the Empress Elisabeth (the famous ‘Sisi’), founded the line of Dolni Beřkovice. See more on these lines below. The fourth brother, Prince Ludwig Johann, founded a line in Hungary (ext. 1918); while the youngest, Karl Johann (Karel Jan), rose in the Imperial administration to become Governor of Lower Austria in 1858, of Moravia in 1860, and of Tyrol in 1861—but left no descendants.

The 9^th Prince (Moritz Alois) and the 10^th Prince (Ferdinand Zdenko) continued to lead prominent lives in Vienna and Prague, both with seats on the Privy Council and both awarded the Order of the Golden Fleece. By the end of the 19^th century, they were one of the largest landowners in the entire Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, with nearly 30,000 hectares. The 10^th Prince (d. 1938), was particularly close to the last Habsburg emperor, Carl, as he had been his chamberlain since 1907. After the war, reform acts passed by the new Czechoslovak government reduced the family landholdings by about 80% in return for monetary compensation. The Prince was a loyal supporter of this new regime, and ceased using his titles; both of his eldest sons embraced the new world and married for love, renouncing their claims to the (now empty) titles of Prince of Lobkowicz and Duke of Roudnice, which in theory passed to their cousins (below).

The second son, Maximilian, was, like his father, a republican, and, having married an Englishwoman in 1924, served as a diplomat for Czechoslovakia in the crucial years during the Second World War. He was formally exiled from Czechoslovakia in the late 1940s, became the head of the family (after the death of his nephew, a jazz musician, in 1964), and died in Massachusetts in 1967. His grandson William Lobkowicz (b. 1961) returned to the Czech Republic in the 1990s to work for the restoration of the family’s main properties, the Lobkowicz Palace in Prague, Roudnice Castle, the art collections, and so on. His older brother Martin (b. 1954) is the lineal head of the family. Today the family maintains interesting connections with their native Boston, for example, in 2023 Boston Baroque is sponsoring a programme of music connected to the Lobkowicz Collections in Prague.

One of the first family residences to be restored in the 1990s and re-opened for tourism is Střekov Castle (aka Schreckenstein), built upon a rocky outcrop far above the Elbe. Over the centuries it became a symbol of Northern Bohemia, an inspiration for poets, painters and musicians. Střekov Castle had been built by the King of Bohemia in the 14^th century to collect tolls on the river, and then given to various vassals until it was sold to the Lobkowicz family in 1563, who rebuilt and expanded it. By the 17^th century it was uninhabited, however, and fell to ruin. Like all other noble properties, it was confiscated in 1948, and was restored in the early 1990s.

The princely title—though no longer recognised by the Czechoslovak or Austrian governments—passed in 1938 with the death of the last prince to conclude a dynastically ‘equal’ marriage (the 10^th, above) to the branch based at Křimice. This castle, on the outskirts of the western city of Plzeň (Pilsen), was built by local burghers in the 13^th century, then passed to the noble house of Vrtba in the 17^th century, who rebuilt it in classical style in 1811, then passed it by marriage to Prince Johann Nepomuk von Lobkowitz (above). Nationalised in 1948, Křimice was used as a school run by the Škoda car company, a home for youth and a museum depository, falling into near ruin before it was restored to the family in 1994.

The 11^th Prince of Lobkowicz, Jaroslav Aloys, was a lawyer, and began the family’s long association in the 20^th century with the Belgian aristocracy, through his 1905 marriage to the daughter of the Duke of Beaufort-Spontin (who also held lands in Bohemia). His sisters also married Belgian aristocrats. Their son, Friedrich Franz (Bedřich František), briefly the 12^th Prince (1953-54), moved to France and lived at the Château of Breuilpont in Normandy.

Prince Jaroslav still held significant lands in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s (about 1,000 hectares) but also had a good income from the old castle brewery at Křimice, as well as some local factories. After the Communist takeover, he did not leave the country, and was allowed to stay in the castle until 1951, when it was given to Škoda—though he was allowed to live in the old brewery. His second son, Jaroslav Claude, who became the 13^th Prince of Lobkowicz (nominally) in 1954, also stayed in Czechoslovakia, and worked as an administrator of the castle at Křimice, then later as a journeyman in Plzeň. He died in 1984, so it was his sons, Jaroslav and František who reasserted their branch of the family’s place of prominence in the Czech Republic (as Bohemia was called after 1992). Jaroslav, 14^th Prince of Lobkowicz, Duke of Roudnice, Count of Sternstein, etc (b. 1942), is a civil engineer who worked for Siemens in Munich until he returned to his homeland in the 1990s and was elected as a Member of Parliament in 1998 (he served several terms, retiring in 2017), and was also a member of the Plzeň city council. His son, Hereditary Prince Vladimir Jaroslav (b. 1972), now runs the family agricultural estates at Křimice. The current Prince’s brother František (1948-2022) became a priest in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s, and in 1996 was elected first bishop of a newly created diocese of Ostrava-Opava, in Moravia.

The youngest of the many brothers of the 13^th Prince, Ladislav Otto (1925-1958), did not stay in Czechoslovakia, but left in the late 1940s to develop the family’s connections in Belgium. In 1958, he was formally created ‘HSH Prince de Lobkowitz’ by the King of the Belgians—in part aided by his brother-in-law, the Count of Limburg-Stirum who was Head of the Household of King Leopold III. His son Prince Stéphane (b. 1957) is head of the Belgian branch today—recognised as one of the six princely houses of Belgium—and has been elected several times to the parliament for the Brussels region (as indeed have his wife and his daughter). He lives in the suburbs of Brussels in Uccle, and has written a biography of the late King Baudouin. So although he is not the most senior member of the Lobkowicz family, he is the only one recognised legally as a prince.

The younger branch of this senior line was based at Dolni Beřkovice (Unterberkowitz). This castle, near the old Lobkowicz heartlands in north-central Bohemia, is also located on the river Elbe. As with other properties, the old castle was confiscated from the local nobility in 1620 and acquired by Polyxena z Pernštejna. The ancient fortress was rebuilt as a palace in the early 17^th century, then rebuilt again in the mid-19^th century once it became seat of the junior line. In the Communist era Dolni Beřkovice was used as a school and a warehouse, and when it was restored to the family it went to a female descendant who had married into the House of Thurn und Taxis.

Prominent members of this branch include the son of its founder, Prince Ferdinand Georg (d. 1926), who was Vice-President of the Bohemian House of Lords in the 1890s, and Grand Marshal of Bohemia in 1913; and a great-nephew, Prince Edouard (d. 2010), who in 1959 tied this family to royalty by marriage to Princess Marie-Françoise de Bourbon-Parme, daughter of Xavier, head of the House of Parma (and Carlist pretender to the Spanish throne). She was also a niece of Prince Felix, consort of Grand Duchess Charlotte of Luxembourg, and of Zita, the last Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary (and the last Queen of Bohemia, for that matter). Their children are thus first cousins to the current reigning family in Luxembourg and the Habsburg pretenders to the thrones of Austria, Hungary and Bohemia.

Prince Edouard was born in the US to an American mother (the golfer Anita Lihme) and educated in Paris and America. Late in life he served as ambassador from the Order of Malta to Lebanon (1980-90). His eldest son, Edouard Xavier, graduated from college in the US then joined the French army before he was suddenly murdered in Paris in 1984—a case that is still unsolved. The surviving son, Prince Charles-Henri, a society favourite, is currently restoring several ancient castles inherited from his Bourbon-Busset grandmother in central France: Boszt (old and new) and Rochefort, both in the town of Besson in the Bourbonnais.

The current head of this branch of the family is Prince Maria Ferdinand (b. 1942), who lives in Canada. His cousin Michel (b. 1964), was a member of the Czech Parliament several times in the 1990s, and briefly Minister of Defence in 1998.

Finally the branch of the ‘Second Majorat’, also known as the Mělník branch, founded in 1715 for the second son of the 3^rd Prince of Lobkowicz. The first prince of this line, Field Marshal Jan Jiří Kristián (seen above), was originally intended to be based at the old Bílina branch castle of Jezeři, but right away he made a deal with is older brother ceding this property in exchange for cash. It wasn’t until the 4^th son, Prince August Antonín’s marriage to the heiress Countess Ludmila Czernin z Chudenic in 1753, that the family was established permanently in a residence, the Castle of Mělník. Mělník is located in that same flat plain of north-central Bohemia from which the Lobkowicz family emerged, specifically in this case, right at the confluence of the two great rivers, Elbe and Vltava, a fertile land known for its agriculture and wine. It was also a place of symbolic value to Czech nationalism of the early 19^th century, as it was seen as the ancient heartland of the Czech people, and these rich lands were often used by the Crown as dower lands for queen-consorts as widows. In the middle ages there was a fortress here, on the heights overlooking the river, dating from as far back as the 9^th century. In 1542, the King gave Mělník Castle to a powerful nobleman, Zdislav Berka of Dubá, who rebuilt it as a renaissance palace. It then belonged to the Czernin family by the 17^th century who thus passed it to the House of Lobkowicz by marriage.

Across the river Elbe was another castle, Hořín, built by the Czernins in the 1690s on a grander scale and surrounded by parklands. This too became Lobkowicz property in the 1750s. Restored to the Lobkowicz family in the 1990s (with about 2,000 hectares), today Mělník is renovated and partly open to the public; while Hořín has fallen into disrepair. Attempts were made in the 2010s to convert the latter into flats, but as of 2022 the castle is for sale.

August Antonín, 4^th Prince of this 2^nd Majorat (d. 1803), was a diplomat, Austrian envoy to Spain in the 1770s, and later Grand Marshal of Bohemia. His son, Antonín Isidor, 5^th Prince (d. 1819), was Grand Chamberlain, or head of the Royal Household in Bohemia. In 1847, this branch was extended the honorific style the senior line enjoyed, that of Durchlaucht (Serene Highness) but only to the head of the branch, not all its members. The most prominent member in this century was Prince Jiří Kristián, 7^th Prince (d. 1908), who was the leader of the conservatives in Bohemia and President of the Bohemian Diet (as ‘Grand Marshal of Bohemia’), from 1871 until the year before his death in 1907 (with some interruption). He was also a deputy in the Austrian House of Deputies and then promoted to a hereditary member of the House of Lords in 1883.

Another Prince Jiří Kristián, the 9^th Prince of the 2^nd Majorat, was a car racer and died in a crash in Berlin in 1932, so the title passed to his uncle then his cousin. Today the 12^th Prince is Antonín Otokar (b. 1956), though it is his twin brother, Jiři Jan, who worked for the restoration of the family properties and manages the estates. This branch has spawned several academics, MDs and PHDs, male and female. Two younger brothers of the 11^th Prince made a name for themselves in the 20^th century: Nikolaus (d. 2019) was a political theorist and philosopher who taught in the United States in the 1960s, then was Rector then President of the University of Munich and then President of the University of Eichstätt in Bavaria (until 1996). He was given the Order of the Golden Fleece by the exiled head of the House of Habsburg in 1978, but much more recently the Order of Tomáš Masaryk by the Czech Republic, in 1998. His brother Frederick (d. 1998) was an esteemed Professor of Physics at the University of Rochester in New York. The heir to this branch (since neither of the twins has a son) is Nikolaus’ son, Johann von Lobkowicz (b. 1954), who in the restitutions of the 1990s, regained the Castle of Drahenice. This most recent acquisition of this ancient princely house, was built by the Valdštejna family in the 17^th century, then went through several hands before it was purchased by the Mělník branch of Lobkowicz princes in 1870. Today it is restored, but not open to the public.

Now go grab a cold beer, Czech style, from a brewery whose roots stretch back to noble Lobkowicz breweries in the hills and forests of north-central Bohemia…

(images Wikimedia Commons)