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Summary

Nizozemský malíř, Portrét mladého muže, 17. století, SH Šternberk

The castle in Šternberk was probably founded by the nobleman Zdeslav of Chlumec († before 1268), a son of the Přemyslid courtier Diviš, who ranked among the most important and powerful men of the kingdom under the reign of Wenceslaus I (1205–1253) and his son Přemysl Ottokar II (1233–1278). As his testimonies on numerous royal documents indicate, he was, since his youth, one of the closest allies of the knight-king Wenceslaus I, whom he also accompanied on his frequent journeys around the kingdom. The eponymous, new-built castle of Šternberk in Bohemia was unquestionably an emblem of his rise through social ranks: as early as 1242, Zdeslav added the nobiliary particle ‘of Šternberk’ to his title. The name of the new seat, built at the ancestral dominion overlooking the valley of the river Sázava referred, as was customary in the chivalric culture spreading to Bohemia from Germanic countries, to his family’s coat of arms with an eight-pointed star shining from its crest. No later than 1252, Zdeslav assumed the influential office of the Moravian Provincial Dapifer, thereby acquiring additional vast regions in the then barely inhabited Moravian forests stretching from the lowlands of the Haná all the way to the provincial border with Silesia. The acquisition of new properties is undoubtedly linked with the erection of the new castle shortly after the midpoint of the thirteenth century. The castle, which – like the main ancestral seat in Bohemia – was given the name of Šternberk, was to stand on a stone promontory with a rocky precipice, protruding from the foothills of the Low Ash Mountains, a site that allowed for control of a substantial part of the neighbouring lowlands, stretching past the dense riparian forest that fringed the river Morava. The oldest, not particularly large castle, finished either by Zdeslav himself or by the generation of his sons, was quite similar to the Český Šternberk