Czech history

It’s not easy to relate a connected Czech past because Czechia (Česko) began (as the Czech Republic) only in 1993. To follow the story of the Czech people, it is necessary to stitch together the stories of Bohemia, Moravia and a small part of Silesia, the history of Czechoslovakia (Československo) from 1918 to 1993, as well as the backdrop of events from the Holy Roman empire, the Austro-Hungarian empire, and the Third Reich between 1938 and 1945. The so-called Soviet or Eastern Bloc from 1945 to 1991 was a different world again. Prague was twice the centre of the Holy Roman empire.

Czech lives have been shaped by all these factors. But Czech identity is much older.

Czech history is enigmatic, too. National traditions are taken seriously, but today Czech society is considered secular. State atheism through the years of Soviet domination has had an effect. Only about 10% of Czechs now profess Roman Catholic faith and less than 2% identify as Protestant. Although the Protestants are outnumbered, Protestant figures such as Jan Hus and Jan Žižka are still revered as nationalists.

Prehistory & Great Moravia

The Celtic Boii tribe, the Germanic Marcomanni and Slavic settlers took turns to dominate the Vltava valley and Bohemia in the 1000 years before the 6th century CE.

Archaeology shows the elites had become a martial horseback class and weapons quickly became marks of status. The influence of the Avars (in modern Hungary), then the Franks and what historians call the Great Moravians was evident in the region.

Great Moravia (Velká Morava) had been established to the east of Bohemia by the 9th century and grew under Svätopluk I to cover modern Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary and possibly parts of Poland, Austria, Germany and Croatia by the 890s. So Great Moravia enjoyed powerful influence over Bohemia, but the main trade routes ran along the Elbe and Vltava. Svätopluk was regarded as a king by the Franks and in Rome, but Great Moravia was in an uneasy, sometimes warring relationship with the eastern Frankish kingdom and Svätopluk was briefly imprisoned by the Franks.

Weapons appeared in graves in the 9th and 10th centuries, when elites began to Christianise their burials. At the Stará Kouřim hill fort in eastern central Bohemia in the 9th and early 10th centuries archaeological finds included weapons and a silver-plated hammer axe. Weapons and fittings came from two princely graves at Kolín, east of Prague. These are now in Prague's Národní muzeum.

Church & power

The Czech nation’s founding myths are powerful and supported by a lot of history.

The second Great Moravian prince Rastislav, Svätopluk’s uncle, asked the Byzantine emperor for missionaries. The brothers Constantine, a priest, and Michael, who both knew Greek and Slavic speech, arrived with their message. It seems clear that Christianity already had a foothold, due to the influence of the archbishopric of Mainz and the German city of Regensburg, but Rastislav likely wanted to be independent of the Roman church.

The brothers set about translating the Greek Bible into the language linguists now call Old Church Slavonic, creating the beginnings of the Cyrillic script. They also wrote laws. The bases for a Czech language, letters, law and a Slavic church were being laid.

However the brothers also visited Rome, and Constantine, after taking the name Cyril, died there. The pope Adrian II ordained Michael, who took the name Methodius. Cyril and Methodius are now acclaimed as saints and their pupils continued the work of the church.

When Svätopluk took over Great Moravia he also dealt with the popes and expelled Methodius’ successors in a bid to appease Rome. The Slavonic liturgy with its Byzantine influences was banished to eastern Europe. The Magyars (Hungarians) swept through the region after 900, ending Great Moravia.

Bohemia as a power centre

Slavs were settled at Hradčany on the hill above today's Prague about 800, and later in that century the forerunners of today's castle buildings appeared. By the 880s the Přemyslid duke Bořivoj I based himself at Hradčany and had himself baptised.

In 921 Bořivoj’s grandson Václav, known in the west as ‘king’ Wenceslas, became duke of Bohemia (Čechy). He is associated with piety, partly because his mother, after having Václav’s regent grandmother killed, had banished many Christian nobles. When Václav came of age he instead banished his mother and used the Roman church (and German priests) to help consolidate his rule.

But in 935 Václav was killed by his younger brother Boleslav I, soon being regarded as a martyr. The ‘good king Wenceslas’ tradition was born, advancing the notion of a Christian Bohemia. Václav was declared a saint, a hymn and further legends of piety emerged, and his feast on September 28 is now celebrated as a national holiday. An equestrian statue of Václav, unveiled in 1912, dominates Václavské náměstí in Prague.

Boleslav turned his energy to enlarging Bohemian territory and power into modern Poland, Moravia, Hungary and Austria. But Bohemia also fell under the influence of the eastern Frankish kingdom from the 950s and was brought into the Holy Roman empire just after 1000. Waves of German settlers helped develop trade and town life, and for centuries Czech and German-speakers lived side by side.

By imperial decree Bohemia became a kingdom in 1212. The Přemyslid Ottokar II became king in 1253, crusaded in the old Prussian lands and fought the Hungarians. He acquired multiple titles, founded towns and ruled mainly from Vienna, becoming the second-most powerful figure in the Holy Roman empire. But he failed to win imperial election and was forced to submit to Rudolf I of Habsburg. He was finally defeated and killed in 1278.

Riches for Bohemia

Silver mines produced much wealth for Bohemia and in the 13th century mines opened up at Jihlava. Silver had been mined near Kutná Hora for at least three centuries and its mines were especially rich, aided by new regulations that received royal approval in 1300. The industry funded a city that possibly rivalled Prague in population and size and became the site of a royal mint. In the 15th century the flow of silver funded the expansion of Prague.

The Luxembourg dynasty held power in the empire and Bohemian kingdom from 1308. Prague-born Charles IV was crowned king 1347 and emperor in 1355. He made Prague the imperial capital for the first time and set about developing and enlarging it, encouraging trade and building a university and a new stone bridge across the Vltava.

Charles was succeeded by his son Václav IV as king of Bohemia in 1378. In contrast with Charles’ Prague vision, Václav, also king of the Germans, became famous for executing a clergyman. Jan Nepomucký remained loyal to his archbishop Jenštejn, who protested at Václav’s plan to appropriate an abbey’s revenues. Václav had Jan tortured and hurled into the Vltava. In a more popular legend, Jan was the confessor of Václav’s queen Sophia but refused to divulge her confession despite Václav’s demand. Jan (as Johannes Nepomuk) became a prominent Czech martyr and widely revered as a guardian of the confession and a protector against flood in Germany and Austria, as well as in Czechia.

Václav, who was never crowned emperor, nonetheless led the imperial government, which he returned to Vienna, but his reign ended amid disillusionment among his nobles after he was arrested and deposed as king of the Germans. The Luxembourg senior branch ended in 1437, replaced by the Habsburgs.

Religious strife takes hold

Reformist ideals took a wide hold earlier in the Czech lands than in Germany. Jan Hus, who became the principal figure, was appointed preacher at Prague’s Betlémská kaple in 1402, increasingly challenged what he saw as church corruption and called for reforms consistent with the ideas of England’s John Wycliffe. After Hus was declared a heretic by church leaders and executed at Konstanz in 1415, a reformist majority of Czech knights and the nobility protested and in parts of Bohemia priests were driven from their parishes. A monument in Prague’s Staroměstské náměstí, unveiled in 1915, celebrates Hus today.

In 1419 a priest leading a protest in Prague, struck by a rock hurled from the Nové Mĕsto town hall, stormed the building with followers and threw royal officials and councillors out of the windows (the First Defenestration of Prague). Václav died a month afterwards and unrest continued throughout Bohemia. The so-called Hussite wars broke out later that year, with crusading church forces under the aspiring Holy Roman emperor Sigismund, backed by the pope, facing Hussite armies.

Doctrinal disputes among Hussites hardened. The Hussites splintered into several factions and two chief groups, the Taborites and so-called Utraquists, emerged. The Taborites, who had a rural base and established their own fortified community at Tábor, were radical in rejecting Roman Catholic doctrines and practices. The Utraquists held that communion of both the sacramental bread and the sacramental wine should be given to the congregation. The church held that only priests should take the wine, representing the precious blood of Christ. Taborites recognised only baptism and communion.

Jan Žižka was the most prominent among four Taborite leaders. Žižka, an able commander, won victories from his base in Tábor but was killed in battle 1424. The conflict raged until 1432, when the more moderate Utraquists allied themselves with the church and defeated forces of the Taborites and their allies in 1434. The Utraquists were fully reconciled with the Roman church, backed by the Habsburgs, in 1485 and their style of communion was accepted by the church in Bohemia.

What is sometimes called the Second Defenestration took place in 1483, when Utraquists hurled Catholic Prague town councillors from the Staré Mĕsto and Nové Mĕsto town halls. When the Lutheran Reformation developed after 1517 Protestant states began to appear, especially in the northern German lands and in Scandinavia. Utraquist and Taborite ideas and antagonisms revived.

Capital returns to Prague

Rudolf II of Habsburg was elected Holy Roman emperor in 1576 and moved the capital to Prague from Vienna in 1583. The aloof and reclusive Rudolf guaranteed religious toleration in an edict of 1609 but appeared more interested in the arts, astrology, alchemy and the Enlightenment aims of science than statecraft.

However he started a long war with the Ottoman empire that sapped imperial resources and provoked a Hungarian noble revolt. His younger brother Matthias tried to repair the situation but eventually forced Rudolf to concede some of his crowns and in 1611 imprisoned him in the castle in Prague. When Rudolf died in 1612 the pro-Catholic Matthias, the new emperor, moved the court back to Vienna.

But religious tensions had heightened during Rudolf’s reign and in the Third Defenestration of Prague in 1618 Bohemian Protestants revolted and violently asserted the freedoms granted to them by Rudolf, hurling royal officials from the castle window. The childless and ailing Matthias was set to be succeeded by Ferdinand of Styria and the destructive Thirty Years War was brewing. The Habsburgs backed the Counter-Reformation, a hard-line bid to reconvert Protestants.

The Thirty Years War

Ferdinand II succeeded at Matthias’ death in 1619. A Protestant nobles’ revolt was defeated by an imperial army under Tilly at Bílá Hora outside Prague in 1620 and 27 Protestant leaders were executed in Staroměstské náměstí in 1621. Today the site is marked by white crosses.

The religious conflict drew in Catholic and Protestant forces from throughout Europe, in which branches of the Habsburgs had far-flung possessions including Spain and the Netherlands. Saxony, Sweden, Denmark and eventually France became involved on the Protestant side and fighting and loss of life was extensive through the empire, mostly in Germany. But Bohemia and Moravia also lost almost half its population.

A Protestant army from Saxony occupied Prague in 1631. The ambitious Catholic military supremo Albrecht von Wallenstein, who won many of the imperial side’s greatest victories and built a magnificent palace in Malá Strana, was assassinated at the emperor’s orders in 1634. Swedish armies broke into parts of Prague in 1648 and looted the castle district and Malá Strana. Later that year the Thirty Years War was closed by the Treaty of Westphalia.

Habsburg decline begins

Maria Theresa succeeded to the Austrian throne in 1740, which started the War of the Austrian Succession. During the hostilities French and Bavarian armies occupied Prague in 1741, but Austrian armies drove them out in 1743 and Maria Theresa was crowned queen of Bohemia in Prague. Her son Joseph II’s Enlightenment reforms were accompanied by an insistence on the use of German in official contexts, effectively depressing Czech culture.

The arrival of Napoleon in central Europe signalled the end of the Holy Roman empire. After a brief halt in Znojmo in 1805, Napoleon fought the Habsburg and Romanov Russian forces at Slavkov u Brna in southern Moravia, known to Western historians as Austerlitz. Napoleon’s military genius carried the day and he marched on Vienna. The empire dissolved the following year.

Brewing in the Czech lands has a long history, going back to the 10th century, when it began in monasteries. Official brewing rights in Brno were claimed from the 12th century. The cities of Plzeň and České Budějovice in southern Bohemia had breweries soon after. But the beer now known as pilsener (from Plzeň) did not begin until the 1840s. There are now more than 100 breweries.

The Austro-Hungarian empire that followed it was never strong, but still exercised control over the lands of the Czechs. A Prague student uprising in 1848, the year of European revolutions, was suppressed by troops from Austria. An area of western Bohemia became popular as spa resorts, although the hot springs had been in use for centuries.

Under Franz Joseph I, who ruled the Czech lands for 67 years, the Czech people never attained the recognition that the Hungarians enjoyed within the empire.

In this period the Silesian-born monk and biologist Gregor Mendel developed his pioneering researches into genetics in an abbey garden in Brno.

The emperor promised to take the Czech crown but never did. Amid disillusionment, feelings of Czech nationalism were expressed through culture, notably in music, and the Czech language. Jaroslav Hašek wrote the satirical masterpiece known in English as The Good Soldier Švejk, demonstrating the absurdity of the Austro-Hungarian military system during World War I. His more famous Prague-born contemporary Franz Kafka, who wrote in German, crafted unsettling, sometimes surrealist short stories about the themes of bureaucracy and alienation, the best known as Metamorphosis, The Trial and The Castle.

Republic is born – then shattered

When the Austro-Hungarian empire collapsed at the end of World War I, the Czechs were ready for independence. A one-week war with Poland was fought over disputed areas of Silesia. Tomáš Masaryk took over as provisional head of the new republican state of Czechoslovakia. Masaryk was then elected president, serving three terms. Edvard Beneš succeeded Masaryk in 1935.

Beneš resisted pressure from the German government under Adolf Hitler to cede areas dominated by Sudeten German-speakers to Germany. But the 1938 Munich Agreement signed by Britain, France, Germany and Italy effectively surrendered Sudetenland and in March 1939 the Germany army marched into the rest of Czechoslovakia, including Prague.

Reinhard Heydrich became governor under the German administration and began coordinating the expulsion of Jews. In a secret operation, Czech paratroopers assassinated Heydrich in Prague 1942 and Hitler responded by ordering the killing or deportation of the residents of Vyhlazení Lidic/Lidice and razing the village with artillery fire.

As German forces retreated from the Soviet Army early in May 1945, an uprising by resistance fighters in Prague was joined by citizens. The rebellion suppressed German SS units just before the arrival of the Red Army, but about 3,000 rebels were killed.

Communism dashes new hopes

Beneš, who had been in exile in Britain, returned to power at the head of a new democratic government with a Communist-dominated cabinet. After elections in 1946, the Communists were strengthened and Klement Gottwald, a Communist with some nationalist credentials, became prime minister. Jan Masaryk, son of the first president, served as foreign minister.

Beneš and Masaryk had an agreement with Josef Stalin that Czechoslovakia would be independent after the defeat of Germany, though aligned with Soviet policy, but Masaryk mistrusted Soviet intentions. Moves towards a collectivised economy had begun and Communist Party surveillance and arrests were under way. The writer Jaroslav Seifert, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1984, had left the Czech Communist Party in the late 1920s over concerns about Stalinist tendencies among the party’s leadership.

In 1948 most of the non-Communist cabinet resigned in a bid to force new elections, but Gottwald formed a Communist government, backed by the Soviets and leaving Masaryk increasingly isolated. The Communists outmanoeuvred their opponents, forcing Beneš to accept a new national constitution. In February Beneš resigned and Gottwald took over as president.

In March Masaryk was found dead in his pyjamas below his apartment window at the foreign ministry, a death that was found to be suicide. Opinions and investigations in following decades put forward various theories, but a forensic investigation in 2004, one of several reviews, found that at least one other person was involved in Masaryk's death. Another reappraisal was under way in 2026.

Gottwald’s presidency was confirmed by a national vote in June. Under pressure from Moscow, he nationalised industries and collectivised farms on the Soviet model. Gottwald died after years of ill-health in 1953.

Under Antonín Novotný, the Czech people found themselves with the familiar features of life in Soviet Bloc countries – repression through restricted intellectual freedoms, social control through secret police and a network of informers, and a centrally planned economy emphasising heavy industry and collective farming. The edifice was held together from 1955 by the Warsaw Pact.

Prague Spring & Velvet Revolution

When the reformist Alexander Dubček replaced Novotný in 1968 the economy was faltering and social discontent was clear. Dubček fired hope by abolishing censorship and expressing ideals of economic and democratic liberalisation and a program of socialism ‘with a human face’. The so-called Prague Spring was under way, attracting widespread support among Czechs.

But conservatives in surrounding countries and in Moscow were alarmed, fearing loss of control. In August Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, seizing control and forcing Dubček to reverse his reforms. From 1969, Gustáv Husák, who replaced Dubček, instituted ‘normalisation’ – a return to conservative repression.

In an act of protest, in Prague the student Jan Palach set himself on fire at the east end of Václavské náměstí in January 1969 and died soon after. Others followed his example.

During this period, the playwright Václav Havel was becoming a leading dissident figure, publishing biting absurdist and satirical plays in which state repression and surveillance in various guises was attacked. In 1977 he was one of more than 200 signatories to Charter 77, which asserted the government’s failure to recognise human and political rights. Havel, whose works became famous among intellectuals outside Czechoslovakia, was alternately jailed, banned from writing and forced to work as a labourer.

Pressure rose steadily on Soviet Bloc governments from the activities of the Solidarity trade union in Poland, the faltering of the Soviet Bloc economies and the opening of Hungary’s border to Austria. East German citizens on holiday in Czechoslovakia refused to return, instead arriving at Prague’s West German embassy. A chain of events in East Germany led to the opening of the Berlin Wall.

Havel formed a political group known as Civic Forum that became a driving force in the Sametová revoluce (‘Velvet Revolution’) from November 1989. A Prague student demonstration was attacked by riot police and further street unrest and a short general strike followed. At the end of the month the Communist Party agreed to release its grip on power. By the end of the year Havel was president, installed by the national federal assembly.

But by 1992 the Slovak people petitioned for a separate state and agreement was reached to dissolve Czechoslovakia. Havel was re-elected as Czech president the following year and held the post until 2003.