Ústí nad Labem

Ústí nad Labem stands where the Bílina joins the Elbe in northern Bohemia. A charter of 1056 or 1057 contains the first verified written mention, and by 1249 it was described as a royal town. King Sigismund pledged it to the elector of Meissen in 1423, and a Saxon garrison occupied it.

In 1426 Hussite forces defeated an army sent to relieve the besieged town and then destroyed it; rebuilding began in 1429. The town burned again in 1583 and was sacked by Swedish forces in 1639 during the Thirty Years' War. It remained small before the industrial expansion of the nineteenth century: the population was about 1,400 in 1830.