Foundation & dynasties
Founding moments, ruling dynasties, regime changes, coronations.
Part of Prague's story
20 moments in this segment.
- — The Founding of Prague Castle. Hradčany ridge above the Vltava, the long limestone spine on which Bořivoj raised his timber palisade. Place: Hradčany hill, above the Vltava ford Figures: Bořivoj I, first Christian duke of the Přemyslids · Saint Methodius (baptizes him) Before the castle there is a hill, and beneath the hill a ford where the merchant roads from Regensburg, Kiev, and Kraków cross the Vltava. The Přemyslid dukes have ruled the basin for perhaps two generations, from a wooden fort at Levý Hradec, four river-miles upstream. Around the year 870, Duke Bořivoj I moves the seat south, to the long limestone ridge that the Slavs call Hradčany: the place of the fortress. He builds in timber: a palisade, a stone-walled enclosure for the prince's hall, a small church to the Virgin. He is the first Christian duke of his line. Methodius, archbishop of Moravia, has baptized him not long before.
- — The Baptism of Bořivoj. Karel Javůrek's 1858 painting of Methodius baptizing Bořivoj and Ludmila at Svatopluk's Moravian court. Place: The court of Svatopluk, Great Moravia (probably Velehrad) Figures: Bořivoj I, duke of the Czechs · Svatopluk I, ruler of Great Moravia · Saint Methodius, archbishop, who performs the baptism · Ludmila, Bořivoj's wife, baptized with him Bořivoj is a tributary duke. The Czech basin pays its dues south to Great Moravia, the Slavic federation that runs from Nitra to the Sudeten foothills. Around the year 883 he comes to Svatopluk's court for a feast. He is, by Christian's Legend, made to sit on the floor like a pagan while the baptized eat at the table. Methodius, the Byzantine archbishop of Moravia, leans in and explains the protocol: receive Christ, sit on the bench. Bořivoj receives Christ. So does Ludmila his wife. The chronicle does not tell us how much of the catechism either of them understood, in a Slavonic liturgy newly invented for exactly this purpose. They are sent home with a priest, Kaich, who founds a small wooden church to Saint Clement at Levý Hradec, four river-miles upstream of the future Prague.
- — The Crowning of Vratislav II. Vratislav II crowned, in the Znojmo rotunda Přemyslid cycle (1134), the first king of Bohemia ad personam. Place: Cathedral of Mainz; coronation repeated at Prague Figures: Vratislav II, duke and now king of Bohemia · Emperor Henry IV · Egilbert, archbishop of Trier (who crowns him) · Jaromír-Gebhard, his brother and bishop of Prague (who does not approve) Vratislav II has been the most useful ally Henry IV has had during the Investiture Controversy. He has lent troops, lent siege engines, lent the formidable Bohemian crossbow contingent. He has fought for the emperor in Saxony and ridden with him to Rome to install the antipope Clement III. The reward, agreed at the diet of Mainz at Easter 1085, is a royal title: Vratislav, hitherto duke, is to be king. Not hereditary king. Personal king, for his life only. The diet of Mainz so decrees and the emperor crowns him there on 15 June 1085. He is crowned again, with greater ceremony, on returning to Prague. His brother Jaromír, bishop of Prague, refuses to officiate. The brothers have feuded for two decades. Archbishop Egilbert of Trier travels east to do the honors.
- — The Golden Bull of Sicily. itself: parchment, Latin, gold seal; the charter that makes Bohemia a hereditary kingdom. Place: Basel, the imperial chancery Figures: Emperor Frederick II (newly elected, still in his Sicilian title) · Přemysl Otakar I, king of Bohemia · the imperial chancery, drafting in Latin Frederick II is seventeen, has just crossed the Alps from Palermo, and needs Bohemian votes and Bohemian troops to consolidate his election against Otto IV. Přemysl Otakar I has backed him from the moment Innocent III did. At Basel on 26 September 1212 the new emperor issues, under a golden seal, three charters at once: the Golden Bull of Sicily proper for Přemysl Otakar, a companion bull for his brother Vladislav Jindřich the margrave of Moravia, and a charter for the bishop of Prague. The bull is short. It guarantees in seven articles that the kingship of Bohemia, granted personally to Přemysl Otakar in 1198, will descend by hereditary right; that the king of Bohemia is a prince-elector of the empire and one of the seven who choose its emperors; that the king alone presents the bishop of Prague to the emperor for investiture; that the kingdom is exempt from imperial campaigns except those near its borders; and that within his lands the king of Bohemia rules without imperial interference.
- — The Murder of Wenceslas III. Wenceslas III departing Hungary, miniature from the Chronicon Pictum (c. 1358); within months he would be dead in Olomouc. Place: Deanery house, Olomouc Figures: Wenceslas III, last male Přemyslid · an unknown assassin Wenceslas III is seventeen. He wears the crown of Bohemia by birth, the crown of Hungary by inheritance (briefly), and the crown of Poland by his father's last conquest. He has come to Olomouc in the summer of 1306 to muster an army; the Poles are restive, and Władysław the Elbow-High will not stay defeated. On the afternoon of August 4, the king is resting in the deanery. The day is hot. He has loosened his armor.
- — John of Luxembourg Crowned. Bust of John of Luxembourg, the rex peregrinus, in the triforium of St Vitus Cathedral, Prague. Place: St Vitus Basilica, Prague Castle Figures: John of Luxembourg, King of Bohemia · Eliška Přemyslovna, his queen and sister of the murdered Wenceslas III · Peter of Aspelt, archbishop of Mainz, officiating From the August afternoon of 1306, when a dagger ends Wenceslas III in an Olomouc deanery, the Bohemian throne is contested for four and a half years. Rudolf of Habsburg holds it for a year and dies. Henry of Carinthia holds it twice and is twice expelled. The nobility, the burghers, and the bishop of Prague Jan IV of Dražice all want a king they can manage. None of the local candidates can manage them in return. In August 1310, the Emperor Henry VII proposes his fourteen-year-old son. The Bohemian estates accept. The boy is betrothed at Speyer to Eliška Přemyslovna, eighteen, the last available daughter of the old line. Bohemia is to be ruled by marriage to a foreigner who has never seen it.
- — Charles Returns from Paris. Charles IV in 1365, the only known portrait painted in his lifetime, by Andrea di Bonaiuto in Florence. Place: Prague Castle and the Old Town Figures: Charles, margrave of Moravia, future Charles IV · Blanche of Valois, his queen · Pierre de Rosières (the future Clement VI), tutor at the French court He is sent to Paris in 1323, aged seven, by an absentee father and a court that has no place for him. He is baptized Václav, after the Bohemian saint; at confirmation in France he takes the name of his godfather and uncle, Charles IV of France, and is called Charles for the rest of his life. His tutor is the Benedictine Pierre de Rosières, who will become Pope Clement VI and crown him King of the Romans twenty-three years later. He is educated in Latin, French, Italian, and German. He marries Blanche of Valois at fourteen. In 1330 he is sent to govern Luxembourg, then to the Italian campaigns where his father is trying to extract money from Lombardy. By 1333 he is seventeen, scarred from a poisoned dish at Pavia, and is summoned back to a Bohemia that the chroniclers describe as desolata et destructa: ruined and depopulated, its castles pawned, its nobles in open faction.
- — The Founding of the New Town. Karlovo náměstí, Charles's vast cattle market at the heart of the New Town, founded 8 March 1348. Place: South and east of the Old Town walls, around the orchards and vineyards of the right bank Figures: Charles IV, King of Bohemia (newly crowned) · the burghers of the Old Town · unnamed surveyors of the royal chancery Three weeks before he founds the university, Charles issues the foundation charter of Nové Město on March 8, 1348. The new walled district is 360 hectares, three times the area of the Old Town, attached to it on the south and east. It is laid out on parchment before a single house is built: three vast market squares (one for horses, one for cattle, one for hay), arterial streets up to twenty-seven meters wide, and zoned quarters for trades the Old Town has expelled. The horse market becomes Wenceslas Square. The cattle market becomes Charles Square; at 80,000 square meters it is the largest medieval public square in Europe and remains so. The hay market becomes Senovážné Square. The walls run from Vyšehrad north to the Vltava, enclosing what is essentially a planned city dropped beside an existing one.
- — Karlštejn Founded. Karlštejn Castle, the imperial treasury for the Bohemian and Holy Roman regalia, on its limestone spur above the Berounka. Place: A limestone spur above the Berounka valley, thirty kilometers southwest of Prague Figures: Charles IV · Arnošt of Pardubice, archbishop (lays the cornerstone) · Matthias of Arras, master builder (initial design) · Petr Parléř (later, the Chapel of the Holy Cross) · Master Theodoric, panel painter Karlštejn is the third great foundation of Charles's miracle year. The university opens in April, the New Town in March, the Karlštejn cornerstone is laid on June 10. The site is a limestone outcrop above the Berounka, defensible on three sides and a day's ride from Prague. It is conceived from the beginning not as a residence but as a treasury. Charles is consolidating the relics and regalia of his empire and they need a vault. Three towers rise in stepped sequence up the ridge, theologically as well as physically: the residential Imperial Palace at the foot, the Marian Tower (with the Church of the Virgin and a private chapel of St Catherine) in the middle, and at the summit the Great Tower with the Chapel of the Holy Cross. The whole castle is a reliquary translated into stone.
- — Charles IV Dies. Petr Parléř's portrait bust of Charles IV in the triforium of St Vitus, cut within a few years of the emperor's death. Place: Prague Castle, the Old Royal Palace Figures: Charles IV, in his sixty-third year · Wenceslas IV, his elder son and successor, age seventeen · Sigismund of Luxembourg, his younger son, age ten · Arnošt of Pardubice (long dead) and Petr Parléř, the survivors Charles is sixty-two. He has reigned thirty-two years as King of the Romans, thirty-one as King of Bohemia, twenty-three as emperor. The choir of St Vitus has been consecrated in 1370 with him present. The new Hungarian succession is arranged through the marriage of his daughter Mary to Sigismund. The Bohemian succession has been arranged a decade in advance: Wenceslas IV was crowned King of Bohemia in his father's lifetime, in 1363 at the age of two, and elected King of the Romans in 1376 at fifteen, to make the transition impossible to contest. In late autumn 1378 Charles falls from his horse during a hunt and breaks his femur. The wound becomes infected. He is brought back to Prague Castle and lies in the Old Royal Palace through November. Wenceslas is at his bedside. Sigismund is brought from his apanage in Brandenburg. The court chaplain reads the office of the dying.
- — Žižka Dies at Přibyslav. Jan Žižka of Trocnov dies of plague before the walls of Přibyslav, 11 October 1424, undefeated in the field. Place: Hussite camp before Přibyslav, Bohemian-Moravian Highlands Figures: Jan Žižka of Trocnov (now Žižka of the Chalice), hejtman of the Orphans · Prokop the Bald, his successor in the field Žižka loses his second eye at the siege of Rábí in 1421, struck by an arrow or a sliver of splintered timber depending on the chronicler. From that day he commands from a wagon, with junior officers reading him the disposition of the field and a drummer relaying his signals. He fights for three more years, against crusaders, against the Prague Utraquists when they grow too moderate for him, against the Catholic Rosenbergs in the south. He has never lost a battle. Kutná Hora 1421, Německý Brod 1422, Hořice 1423, Malešov 1424: each time the wagon fortress (vozová hradba) opens at the right moment, the cannon and crossbows fire from inside, the flails come over the top, the heavy cavalry breaks and runs. By autumn 1424 he is besieging Přibyslav, a small Catholic-held town in the Highlands. The bubonic plague (or perhaps a carbuncle, the chroniclers disagree) takes him in camp on October 11.
- — The Compactata of Basel. The Compactata are proclaimed at Jihlava, 5 July 1436: Rome concedes the chalice to the laity in Bohemia and Moravia. Place: Market square, Jihlava (Iglau), Moravia Figures: Sigismund of Luxembourg, claimant since 1419 · Jan Rokycana, elected Utraquist archbishop of Prague · the legates of the Council of Basel The Council of Basel, which opens in 1431 partly to deal with the Hussite problem, has been negotiating with a Bohemian delegation since 1433. Prokop the Bald himself comes to Basel that winter and is received with grudging respect. The talks survive his death at Lipany because the moderates who replace him want a settlement even more than he did. On July 5, 1436, in the market square of Jihlava, the Compactata are sworn. They concede, in narrowly negotiated language, the lay chalice to Bohemia and Moravia. Communion sub utraque specie may be administered to adults and children in the lands of the Bohemian crown, by priests in communion with Rome. Free preaching is allowed in approved form. Confiscated church lands are tacitly recognized, not undone. Mortal sin is left to the ordinary courts. The Four Articles survive in the Compactata as ghosts of themselves, but they survive.
- — George's European Peace Proposal. Mucha's Slav Epic: George of Poděbrady refuses obedience to the legate and stakes Bohemia on a treaty league of Christian princes. Place: Royal chancery, Prague Castle · embassies to Paris, Buda, Kraków, Venice Figures: George of Poděbrady, King of Bohemia · Antonio Marini of Grenoble, his French diplomat · Lev of Rožmitál, his brother-in-law and ambassador · Louis XI of France · Casimir IV of Poland Under threat of crusade, surrounded by a Europe that questions his right to rule, George of Poděbrady commissions a diplomatic project of remarkable ambition. Antonio Marini, a Grenoble-born adventurer in Czech service, drafts the Tractatus pacis toti Christianitati fiendae (Treaty for establishing peace throughout Christendom) between 1462 and 1464. It proposes a permanent league of Christian European princes, governed by an assembly of envoys meeting in rotating capitals, with a common court to arbitrate disputes, a common treasury for shared defense (against the Ottomans), and a binding promise to refer all conflicts between members to the assembly before any resort to arms. Crucially, the papacy is excluded from the structure. The pope is recognized only in spiritual matters; the political authority of Christendom is vested in a federation of secular princes. For a Hussite king under threat of papal crusade, this is not subtle.
- — Ferdinand I Elected King of Bohemia. Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor and the first Habsburg elected King of Bohemia. Portrait by Hans Bocksberger the Elder, mid 16th century (cropped). Place: Old Town Hall, Prague Figures: Ferdinand I of Habsburg, Archduke of Austria · Anna Jagiellon, his wife and the dynastic claim · Louis II, drowned at Mohács two months earlier On 29 August 1526, the twenty-year-old Louis II Jagiellon, king of Bohemia and Hungary, drowns in a marsh fleeing the Ottoman field at Mohács. He leaves no son. The Bohemian crown becomes a vacancy in a season when half of Christendom needs a king. Ferdinand of Habsburg, younger brother of Charles V, has the strongest claim: his wife Anna is Louis's sister, and there are old Habsburg-Jagiellon treaties of mutual succession to wave around. He also has Austrian troops, a Spanish brother, and the willingness to spend. The Bohemian Diet assembles in October at the Old Town Hall to choose.
- — The Great Malá Strana Fire. Contemporary 1541 broadsheet by Heynrich Steyer depicting the fire that consumed Malá Strana, Hradčany, and the Bohemian Land Rolls. The wind drives the flames uphill toward the castle. Place: Malá Strana, Hradčany, Prague Castle Figures: Ferdinand I, in absentia · the burghers of the Lesser Town · the archivists of the Land Rolls (too late) On the afternoon of 2 June 1541, a fire breaks out in a Malá Strana house (the chronicles disagree on which one) and the June wind takes it uphill. Within hours it is in Hradčany. By evening half of the Lesser Town, the castle's western wing, the cathedral of St Vitus (still half-built since Parléř), and the deanery archive are burning together. The most consequential loss is the Bohemian Land Rolls, the medieval property register of the kingdom, kept since the thirteenth century in the Castle. Two and a half centuries of deeds, dowries, mortgages, and noble pedigrees go up in a single Tuesday.
- — The French-Bavarian Occupation. Charles Albert of Bavaria as Holy Roman Emperor Charles VII. Workshop of Georges Desmarées, Munich Residenz. He was crowned King of Bohemia at St Vitus on 19 December 1741, the first non-Habsburg to wear the Bohemian crown in two centuries. Place: Prague Castle, St Vitus Cathedral, the city walls Figures: Maurice de Saxe, marshal · Charles Albert of Bavaria (Charles VII, Holy Roman Emperor) · Maria Theresa of Austria · Prince Lobkowitz, besieging Austrian commander Maria Theresa has been on the throne for thirteen months. Half of Europe has decided that a Habsburg daughter cannot inherit; the Pragmatic Sanction is dead the moment her father is buried. Frederick II takes Silesia in December 1740. By autumn 1741, a French army under Belle-Isle, a Bavarian army under the elector Charles Albert, and a Saxon contingent under Rutowsky converge on Prague. The Austrian garrison is small. On the night of 25–26 November, Maurice de Saxe sends grenadiers up scaling ladders against the New Town walls near the Špitálské gate. The escalade succeeds before dawn. By morning the city is held by three foreign armies sharing the same billet. Belle-Isle writes to Versailles that Prague has fallen presque sans coup férir, almost without a blow.
- — Maria Theresa Expels the Jews. The Jewish Town Hall (Židovská radnice) on Maiselova street in Josefov. Its rococo façade and Hebrew clock-face survived the 1744 expulsion that emptied the surrounding quarter; two-thirds of the community returned by 1748 under the Toleranzsteuer. Place: Josefov (Jewish Town), Prague Figures: Maria Theresa of Austria · Frederick II of Prussia (intervenes) · the merchant houses of London, Amsterdam, and Venice (intervene) · roughly ten thousand expelled Six months after the Habsburgs recover Prague from the French and Bavarians, Maria Theresa signs a decree of expulsion. All Jews are to leave Prague by the end of January 1745 and the Czech lands by the following summer. The stated grounds: collaboration with the French. The grounds are not credible; the Jewish community had been bled by all sides of the occupation. The queen's biographers describe her antisemitism as personal and immovable. Her father had tolerated; she will not. Ten thousand people leave the Jewish Town in the depth of a Central European winter. The Altneuschul, the Maisel and Pinkas synagogues, the Old Jewish Cemetery, are closed. Property is confiscated or sold below value to Christian neighbors. The community that traced itself in Prague to the tenth century empties almost overnight.
- — The Patent of Toleration. First page of the Patent of Toleration, promulgated by Joseph II at Vienna on 13 October 1781. Lutherans, Calvinists, and the Orthodox are granted private worship throughout the Habsburg lands; a second patent in 1782 extends limited rights to the Jews. Place: Promulgated at Vienna; effective throughout Bohemia and the Habsburg lands Figures: Joseph II, sole ruler since the death of Maria Theresa in November 1780 · Cardinal Migazzi, archbishop of Vienna (opposes) · the Lutheran and Reformed congregations of Bohemia and Moravia Maria Theresa dies in November 1780. Joseph II has been co-regent for fifteen years and has chafed at every restraint. Within eleven months he issues the Toleranzpatent: Lutherans, Calvinists, and Orthodox Christians may worship privately, build prayer houses (without bells, without street-facing entrances, without towers, the cosmetic concessions to Rome), and hold civil office in the Habsburg lands. It is the first time since the Battle of White Mountain in 1620 that any confession but Catholicism has legal standing in Bohemia. The hidden Protestant communities of the Bohemian-Moravian highlands, who have kept their German Bibles in haylofts for one hundred and sixty years, declare themselves within weeks. By 1782 there are seventy-eight registered Lutheran or Reformed congregations in the Czech lands.
- — Palacký begins the Czech history. František Palacký, historiographer of the Bohemian Estates. Portrait by Jan Vilímek, late 19th c. In 1836 he publishes the first German volume of his Geschichte von Böhmen; the Czech edition follows from 1848 onward and becomes the founding text of the National Revival. Place: Prague (the Bohemian Museum, the Sternberg Palace); the volume is printed in Prague, the German edition first Figures: František Palacký, historiographer of the Bohemian Estates · Pavel Josef Šafařík, philologist and collaborator · Josef Jungmann, lexicographer (whose Czech-German dictionary, completed 1839, supplies the prose vehicle) Palacký is appointed historiographer of the Bohemian Estates in 1831, with a stipend, an archive pass, and a commission to write a complete history of the Czech lands. He works in German, because the Estates are still German-speaking and because there is, in 1831, almost no Czech historical prose vocabulary. The first volume, Geschichte von Böhmen, appears in 1836 and covers the pre-Christian and Přemyslid centuries to 1197. He has read every chronicle from Cosmas onward in the original. He has read the archives at Wittingau (Třeboň) and at Český Krumlov. He is thirty-eight. Five more volumes will follow over the next thirty-one years, taking the story to 1526 (he stops at the Habsburg accession, as if at a moral cliff). From 1848 onward Palacký rewrites the work in Czech as Dějiny národu českého v Čechách a v Moravě. Both editions are read; the Czech edition is read more.
- — The First Railway to Prague. Jan Perner, Czech engineer who surveyed the Olomouc–Prague stretch of the Kaiser Ferdinand Northern Railway. He rode the inaugural train into Prague on 20 August 1845 and was killed at Choceň the following month, struck while leaning from a carriage in a tunnel. Place: Bohemian State Station (now Masaryk Station / Masarykovo nádraží), New Town Figures: Jan Perner, Czech engineer, chief surveyor of the Olomouc-Prague section (killed in a service accident at Choceň in September 1845) · Archduke Stephen, viceroy of Bohemia, on the inaugural train · Anton von Negrelli, project engineer The Kaiser-Ferdinand-Nordbahn has been creeping north from Vienna since 1837. The Olomouc spur reaches the Moravian capital in 1841. The Prague extension, two hundred and fifty kilometres across rising Bohemian terrain, is the harder piece: three viaducts, eighteen significant cuttings, the long tunnel at Třebovice. Jan Perner, a thirty-year-old engineer from Bratčice, supervises the western half. Drop or rephrase the Negrelli Viaduct reference: the Negrelli Viaduct (1,100 m, then Europe's longest railway bridge) did not open until 1 June 1850, almost five years after the line began running. The 1845 line entered Prague from the east and terminated at the new Bohemian State Station (now Masaryk Station) without crossing the Vltava; the Negrelli Viaduct was built later to extend across the river toward Bubny/Holešovice. The first scheduled train pulls into the Bohemian State Station at 1:15 in the afternoon. Archduke Stephen and a delegation of the Bohemian Estates disembark; a brass band plays the imperial anthem; the assembled crowd is reportedly larger than the one that greeted Ferdinand I's coronation as King of Bohemia in 1836. Within forty-eight hours, regular passenger and freight service to Olomouc and onward to Vienna is operating. The journey from Prague to Vienna, which has taken three to four days by mail coach, now takes about sixteen hours.
