In 1249, Ottokar II of Bohemia granted the land of Mikulov, including a castle, and the surrounding area to the Austrian noble Henry I of Liechtenstein. Mikulov remained in the Liechtenstein family until 1575, when it was purchased by Adam von Dietrichstein, the Emperor's ambassador to the Spanish court. Mikulov was the site of the Treaty of Nikolsburg in 1621 during the Thirty Years' War. After a fire damaged the original Mikulov Castle in 1719, the Dietrichstein family reconstructed the chateau to its present appearance.
After the Austro-Prussian War, Count Károlyi began work on a peace treaty in Mikulov that led to the Treaty of Prague in 1866. In 1938, prior to the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, the population of Mikulov was 8,000 mostly German-speaking inhabitants. 472 Jews lived in Mikulov at this time, but only 110 managed to emigrate in time, and 327 of Mikulov's Jews did not survive the Holocaust. After Germany was defeated in World War II, the town's German population was expelled between 1945-46. In 1948, Mikulov's population was around 5,200.
Jewish Mikulov
The beginning of the Jewish settlement in Mikulov dates as far as 1421, when Jews were expelled from Vienna and the neighboring province of Lower Austria by the duke of Austria, Albert II of Germany. Fugitives settled in the town situated close to the Austrian border, some 85 kilometers from the Austrian capital, under the protection of the princes of Liechtenstein, and additional settlers were brought after the expulsions of the Jews from the Moravian royal boroughs by the king Ladislaus the Posthumous after 1454.
The settlement grew in importance and in the first half of the 16th century when Mikulov became the seat of the regional rabbi of Moravia, thus becoming a cultural centre of Moravian Jewry. The famous rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel (1525 – 1609), who is said to have created the golem of Prague, officiated here for twenty years as the second
