House of Ludanice

John of Pernštejn, the sole administrator of the Pernštejns’ property from 1534, faced serious economic difficulties that threatened the stability of the ancestral property, but after his death in 1548, the decline, primarily triggered by excessive credit, could not be stopped. The House of Pernštejn was forced to sell off their property, and the Helfštýn domain was one of the first victims of the incipient family bankruptcy. In 1554, Helfštýn was bought by Půta of Ludanice, a descendant of a Slovak aristocratic family that settled in Moravia in the second half of the 15th century, gaining wealth and an influential position there.

After Půta’s death in 1560, Helfštýn was held by his son, Wenceslas of Ludanice, former governor of Moravia. However, the era of the House of Ludanice at Helfštýn was rather short. Wenceslas of Ludanice died in Vienna in 1571 and the only heiress to the vast domain was Wenceslas’s five-year-old daughter, Katherine of Ludanice. Management of the domain was taken over by the then governor of Moravia, Zachary of Hradec, of the Telč line of the House of Hradec. A generous patron of Renaissance buildings, Zachary proved to be a greedy fraudster in this case, enriching himself by Katherine’s inheritance in a way that could not avoid a public scandal and judicial investigation. Nevertheless, Katherine of Ludanice was considered a wealthy heiress, and was picked as a wife for Peter Vok of Rosenberg. She married him in 1580, at the age of fourteen, and Helfštýn once again became part of a large family enclave, this time the House of Rosenberg. The castle was located too far from the core of the Rosenbergs’ domain in South Bohemia, and Peter Vok had great difficulties managing the castle and supervising bad officials. He was visiting Moravia every year with his wife and supported the construction of a church in Lipník, but he never grew too attached to Helfštýn and the domain around the castle. Bad experience with uneasy management led him to the decision to sell Helfštýn. The debt in the domain had reached 80,000 guilders and great earnings could not be anticipated. The Helfštýn domain was bought in 1592 by Hynek the Elder of Bruntál & Vrbno for 120,000 Meissen schocks (i.e., 120,000 Rhenish guilders).

Drawing of coat-of-arms courtesy of Ivan Rillich.