Klatovy

Klatovy grew on a trade route between Bohemia and Bavaria. King Ottokar II raised the settlement to a royal town between 1260 and 1263, and walls were built to protect it. Despite the Hussite Wars and a fire that destroyed its suburbs in 1464, Klatovy continued to grow. By the early sixteenth century it ranked among the most important towns in the Czech lands.

Prosperity brought new buildings in the sixteenth century, but further fires and the Thirty Years' War damaged the town. Jesuits arrived in the middle of the seventeenth century and developed both its buildings and its schools. In 1689 another great fire destroyed Gothic and Renaissance monuments. Klatovy became a regional administrative centre in the eighteenth century, and part of its fortifications was demolished in the early nineteenth.