The House of Henckel von Donnersmarck is an old Austro-German noble family that originated in the former region of Spiš in Upper Hungary, now in Slovakia. The founder of the family was Henckel de Quintoforo in the 14/15th century. The original seat of the family was in Donnersmarck (Slovakian: Spišský Štvrtok). History In 1417, during the time of the Council of Constance, the Holy Roman Emperor and Hungarian King, Sigismund of Luxembourg, granted the three brothers Peter, Jakob and Nicholas a coat of arms. During the 15th and 16th centuries, John II (1481–1539), an eminent scholar, corresponded with Martin Luther, Erasmus of Rotterdam and Philipp Melanchthon. He began his career as a pastor in Levoča and Košice. Later, he stayed at the court of Louis II of Hungary and his wife, Maria of Austria. In 1531, he came to Silesia and became a canon in Breslau (Wroclaw), Silesia. He died there eight years later and was buried in the local cathedral. Lazarus Henckel (or Lazarus the Elder; 1551–1624) was a banker and mine owner, and the financier of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II's war with the Turks. In return for his service, he was given a number of privileges. In 1607, he and his sons were ennobled with the surname von Henckel von Donnersmarck. The family seat became the castle at Neudeck (Świerklaniec). Barons Lazarus II (or Lazarus the Younger; 1573–1664), called the Lazy, was made Baron of Gfell and Vesendorff by the Habsburg emperor, Ferdinand II, at Regensburg in 1636. Counts In 1651, Archduke Ferdinand Karl of the Tyrol raised his title to that of Count in the Habsburg Hereditary Lands. He received the same title in the Kingdom of Bohemia from Emperor Leopold I in 1661, that title being hereditary for all legitimate descendants, male and female, in the male line. In 1697, the Henckels' inheritance of the Freie Standesherrschaft Beuthen (Free Lordship of Beuthen), under the Bohemian crown, obtained Imperial confirmation as a hereditary Fideicommis, a family trust heritable by masculine primogeniture, on which estate would later be based the family's admission to Prussia's House of Lords until 1918. In the following centuries, the descendants of Lazarus II split into several lines and branches. At the beginning of the 20th century, the family was the second richest in Prussia after the Krupps. Hugo Henckel von Donnersmarck (1811–1890), a steelworks founder and owner, and Guido Henckel von