Egbert Belcredi

Egbert Graf Belcredi (2 September 1816 – 11 October 1894) was an Austrian officer (Rittmeister), member of the House of Deputies of the Austrian Imperial Council and Czech patriot.

Biography

The Belcredi family came from Lombardy and was raised to the hereditary Bohemian nobility by Maria Theresa in 1769. Belcredi was a large landowner and entail commissioner in Moravia. He owned the estates of Lösch / Líšeň near Brno, today a district of the Moravian capital, and Ingrowitz / Jimramov (both castles returned to Belcredi ownership after 1989) as well as Bosenitz / Tvarožná.

The son of Count Eduard Belcredi (1786–1838) and of Maria Countess of Fünfkirchen (1790–1860), he had two sisters and two brothers and married Christiane Countess of Nostitz and Rokitnitz on 7 March 1848. He was the elder brother of Count Richard Belcredi (1823–1902), Minister-President of the Austrian Empire from 1865 to 1867.

Egbert Belcredi was a staunch defender of Bohemian constitutional law, which in Cisleithania was completely overshadowed by state legislation, because the German Bohemians and German Moravians, in alliance with the other Germans of the western half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, were opposed to detaching the lands of the Bohemian crown from legislation in Vienna.

He was one of the most influential conservative politicians in Moravia in the second half of the 19th century. Already in the late Vormärz period he belonged to the Estates opposition and was in close contact with his cousin Baron Victor Franz von Andrian-Werburg. He was a member of the Moravian Estates and the Moravian Parliament in 1848 and again from 1861 until his death in 1894. From 1868 to 1894, he was president of Matice moravská, an important scientific association.

In 1860, Egbert Belcredi was one of the founders and co-owners of the Viennese conservative daily newspaper Das Vaterland: Zeitung für die österreichische Monarchie, of which he was editor-in-chief from 1888 until his death. In 1877, he served as president of the first general Austrian Catholic Congress in Vienna. From 1879 to 1891, in the period before the introduction of universal and equal male suffrage, Belcredi was a member of the Reichsrat (Imperial Council) for the Moravian large estates according to curia suffrage.

Belcredi kept a diary, which was transcribed in the 1970s by the Brno historian Antonín Okač and was later edited by the Commission for Modern Austrian History, founded around 1900 and headed by Lothar Höbelt.

He was an honorary member of the Catholic student fraternity KÖStV Austria Wien.

Works

• Die Tagebücher des Grafen Egbert Belcredi, 1850–1894. Wien: Böhlau Verlag (2016; edited by Lothar Höbelt, Johannes Kalwoda and Jiří Malíř).

External links

• Egbert Belcredi