Hodonín

Hodonín lies beside the Morava in the lowlands of southern Moravia. A castle was founded here in the eleventh century, and the first reliable written mention of the settlement dates from 1169. Hodonín became a town in 1228. Its position on the river placed it close to the frontier with Hungary, where rulers and armies crossed between the neighbouring lands.

In 1301 King Wenceslaus II received Hungarian nobles at Hodonín when they came to invite his son to take the Hungarian crown. The town changed hands during the Hussite Wars and suffered repeated devastation in the seventeenth century: Hungarian rebels burned it in 1605, and troops of Gabriel Bethlen plundered it in 1621. War reduced its population, but in the eighteenth century a tobacco factory established in the former castle helped draw people back.