History
The Koniecpolski was a magnate family. The family appears in the historical annals beginning in the 15th century. The family originated from the village Stary Koniecpol 40 km east of Częstochowa, currently in the Silesian Voivodeship. Their family name derives from that place's name. One of its first representatives was voivode of Sieradz Jakub Koniecpolski who participated in the Battle of Grunwald in 1410, considered the biggest battle in medieval history. In 1443 the Koniecpolski family founded the city-fortress Koniecpol, which became the seat of the family.
In the 16th century the family lineage split into two branches the "Hetman branch" and the "Castellan branch". In the 17th century the family acquired great political authority, and became owners of huge landed estates.
The most representative of the "Hetman branch" was Field and Grand Crown Hetman Stanisław Koniecpolski one of the greatest commanders of the 17th century. Stanislaw begun in 1643 the present-day construction of the Presidential Palace in Warsaw. He also ordered the reconstructing and strengthening of the Bar castle. Stanisław was owner of numerous latifundia situated in Poland's eastern borderlands. It was said that he owned so much landed property that he could cross the breadth of the Republic while spending every night in one of his own manors.
At the beginning of the 18th century the family began to decline.
Read more about this topic: Koniecpolski Family
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“Tell me of the height of the mountains of the moon, or of the diameter of space, and I may believe you, but of the secret history of the Almighty, and I shall pronounce thee mad.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)