The history of the Czech Republic

The Czech Republic is made up of the historic lands of Bohemia, Moravia and part of Silesia, in the centre of Europe. Celtic, Germanic and then Slavic peoples settled the region, and from the ninth century the Přemyslid dukes built a Bohemian state that became a kingdom and, under Charles IV in the fourteenth century, the heart of the Holy Roman Empire. The Hussite revolution made Bohemia the first European land to break with Rome, but defeat in 1620 began three centuries of Habsburg rule. Independent Czechoslovakia, founded in 1918, was dismembered by Nazi Germany, ruled by communists from 1948 to 1989, and split peacefully in 1993, since when the Czech Republic has joined NATO and the European Union.

The Czech lands have been inhabited for hundreds of thousands of years. In southern Moravia, mammoth hunters of the Upper Palaeolithic left the settlements of Dolní Věstonice and Pavlov, where the Venus of Dolní Věstonice, a figurine of fired clay made around 29,000 to 25,000 years ago, is among the oldest ceramic objects known. Farming arrived with the Neolithic Revolution around 5500 BCE, carried by the Linear Pottery culture, and in the Early Bronze Age the Únětice culture, named after a village near Prague, flourished across the region.

In the Iron Age the Celts settled the land. The most powerful tribe in Bohemia, the Boii, gave the country its Latin name, Boiohaemum, the home of the Boii, from which the word Bohemia comes. They built fortified towns such as Závist, south of Prague, and minted coins. By the start of the Common Era Germanic peoples, the Marcomanni and the Quadi, had pushed them out. These tribes were neighbours and sometimes enemies of the Roman Empire, whose frontier lay on the Danube. In the Marcomannic Wars of the 160s and 170s CE, Marcus Aurelius campaigned against them, and a Roman inscription at Trenčín in Slovakia and camps in southern Moravia mark the deepest Roman advance into the region.

After the Germanic tribes moved on in the Migration Period, Slavs settled the Czech lands in the sixth century. In 623, according to the Frankish chronicler Fredegar, the Slavs rebelled against their Avar overlords and chose as king Samo, a Frankish merchant who had joined them. Samo's realm defeated the army of the Frankish king Dagobert I at Wogastisburg in 631 but did not survive his death around 658.

In the ninth century the principality of Great Moravia rose in Moravia and western Slovakia. It was a rival of the Carolingian Empire to the west, and its ruler Rastislav, looking for missionaries who would not bring Frankish political influence, asked the Byzantine emperor for help. In 863 the brothers Cyril and Methodius arrived from Thessaloniki. They created the Glagolitic alphabet and translated the liturgy into Old Church Slavonic, the beginning of Slavic written culture. Under Svatopluk I Great Moravia reached its greatest size, but after his death in 894 it fell apart, and by about 907 it had been overrun by the Magyars, whose settlement founded Hungary.

In Bohemia the Přemyslid family, based at Prague, gradually brought the other clans under control. Duke Bořivoj, baptised in the Moravian church, moved his seat to Prague Castle around 880. His grandson Wenceslas was murdered by his brother Boleslaus in 935 and later venerated as the country's patron saint, the Good King Wenceslas of the English carol. Boleslaus I had to accept the overlordship of the German king Otto I in 950, and from then on Bohemia was part of the Holy Roman Empire, though with wide autonomy. A bishopric was founded in Prague in 973, and Moravia was joined to Bohemia in the early eleventh century.

Two Přemyslids received a royal title for their own lifetimes, Vratislaus II in 1085 and Vladislaus II, crowned in 1158 for helping Frederick Barbarossa in Italy. Ottokar I made the title hereditary, confirmed by the Golden Bull of Sicily in 1212. In the thirteenth century German colonists were invited to clear forests, found towns and work the silver mines, above all at Kutná Hora, making Bohemia one of the richest kingdoms in Europe. Moravia was devastated by Mongol raiders in 1241 during the Mongol invasion of Europe. Ottokar II built a realm stretching to the Adriatic, including Austria, but was defeated and killed by Rudolf of Habsburg at the Marchfeld in 1278. His son Wenceslas II also won the crown of Poland, but the male line died out when Wenceslas III was murdered in 1306.

The Bohemian nobles chose John of Luxembourg, who married the last Přemyslid princess. His son Charles IV, king of Bohemia from 1346 and Holy Roman Emperor from 1355, made Prague the imperial capital. He founded a university in 1348, the first in Central Europe, laid out the New Town, began the stone bridge that now carries his name and the Gothic cathedral of St Vitus, and built the castle of Karlštejn to keep the imperial crown jewels. His Golden Bull of 1356 set the rules for electing emperors and confirmed the king of Bohemia as the senior lay elector. The Lands of the Bohemian Crown, which also included Silesia and Lusatia, were at their height.

Under Charles's son Wenceslas IV, church corruption and disputes between Czech and German masters at the university fed a reform movement. Its leading voice was Jan Hus, a priest who preached in Czech at the Bethlehem Chapel in Prague and was influenced by the English theologian John Wycliffe. Summoned to the Council of Constance with a promise of safe conduct, he was condemned as a heretic and burned in 1415. His death provoked revolt. In 1419 a crowd threw town councillors from the windows of the New Town Hall in Prague, the first defenestration, and the Hussite Wars began.

The Hussites, whose symbol was the chalice because they gave communion wine to the laity, defeated five crusades sent against them. Their blind general Jan Žižka used armoured wagons as moving fortresses. The radical Taborites were defeated by moderate Hussites and Catholics at Lipany in 1434, and the Compacts of Basel in 1436 allowed the Bohemian church to give communion in both kinds. This was a century before the Protestant Reformation, and Martin Luther later said that he and his followers were all Hussites without knowing it. In 1458 the Bohemian nobility elected one of their own, the Hussite George of Poděbrady, as king. After him the crown passed to the Polish-Lithuanian Jagiellonian dynasty, under which the nobility and towns governed much of the country themselves.

When King Louis II died fighting the Ottomans at Mohács in 1526, the Bohemian estates elected his brother-in-law Ferdinand I of Habsburg, and the Czech lands became part of the Habsburg Monarchy. The emperor Rudolf II moved his court to Prague in 1583, where he gathered artists, alchemists and astronomers, including Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, who worked out his laws of planetary motion there. In 1609 Rudolf granted Protestants religious freedom in the Letter of Majesty.

His successors set out to restore Catholicism. In May 1618 Protestant nobles threw two imperial governors and a secretary from a window of Prague Castle, the Defenestration of Prague, and rebelled, electing Frederick V of the Palatinate as king. This was the start of the Thirty Years' War. The rebels were crushed at the Battle of White Mountain outside Prague on 8 November 1620, and 27 leaders were executed in the Old Town Square in 1621. The Renewed Land Ordinance of 1627 made the Habsburg crown hereditary, ordered Protestants to convert or leave, and made German an official language equal to Czech. Many Protestant nobles and burghers went into exile, among them the educator John Amos Comenius, and their estates passed to Catholic and often foreign families. War, plague and flight reduced the population by about a third.

The following period, which nationalist historians called the time of darkness, also produced the Baroque churches and palaces that still define Prague and many towns. Maria Theresa lost most of Silesia to Frederick the Great of Prussia in the 1740s, though a small part remains Czech. Her son Joseph II, a ruler shaped by the Enlightenment, abolished serfdom in 1781, granted toleration to Protestants and Jews, and promoted German as the language of administration. In 1787 Mozart's Don Giovanni had its premiere in Prague. In 1805 Napoleon won his victory at Austerlitz, near Brno in Moravia, during the Napoleonic Wars.

From the late eighteenth century scholars revived Czech as a written language. Josef Jungmann compiled a great Czech-German dictionary, and the historian František Palacký wrote a history of the Czech nation that placed the Hussites at its centre. In the revolutions of 1848 Palacký declined an invitation to the German parliament at Frankfurt and presided over a Slavic Congress in Prague, and the Prague uprising that June was suppressed by the army.

After 1867 the Czech lands formed part of the Austrian half of Austria-Hungary, while Slovakia was ruled from Budapest. Czech politicians failed to win the autonomy that Hungary had obtained from Franz Joseph I, and quarrels between Czechs and Germans over language in schools and offices paralysed politics. Meanwhile the Industrial Revolution made Bohemia and Moravia the industrial core of the monarchy, with coal, steel, textiles, glass and the Škoda works at Plzeň. Prague's culture was Czech, German and Jewish: Franz Kafka was born there in 1883, and Sigmund Freud was born in the Moravian town of Příbor in 1856. The National Theatre, paid for by public subscription, opened in 1881, and the composers Bedřich Smetana and Antonín Dvořák gave the nation a musical voice.

During the First World War, the philosopher Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and his associates Edvard Beneš and the Slovak Milan Rastislav Štefánik campaigned in exile for a joint state of Czechs and Slovaks, and Czechoslovak legions fought for the Allies in France, Italy and Russia. Independence was declared in Prague on 28 October 1918, with Masaryk as president. The new Czechoslovakia joined the Czech lands with Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia.

It was the only country in Central Europe to remain a parliamentary democracy throughout the interwar years, and one of the ten most industrialised states in the world. It also had large minorities. Some three million Germans lived mostly in the border regions known as the Sudetenland, and many resented their status in a state they had not chosen. Hit hard by the Great Depression, they increasingly backed Konrad Henlein's Sudeten German Party, funded and directed from Berlin. Slovaks, too, complained that the promised autonomy had not come.

In 1938 Adolf Hitler demanded the Sudetenland. At Munich on 29–30 September, Britain, France and Italy agreed, without Czechoslovakia at the table, that it must hand the territory to Nazi Germany; Poland and Hungary also took slices of land. On 15 March 1939, after Slovakia declared independence under German protection, the German army occupied the rest of the Czech lands, which became the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

The occupiers closed Czech universities in 1939 and executed or imprisoned thousands of opponents. In 1942 Czechoslovak paratroopers trained in Britain assassinated Reinhard Heydrich, the acting governor; in revenge the Nazis destroyed the villages of Lidice and Ležáky and killed their inhabitants. Of the 118,000 Jews of Bohemia and Moravia counted in 1930, most were deported, many through the ghetto at Terezín (Theresienstadt), and around 80,000 were murdered in the Holocaust. The Roma of the Czech lands were almost wiped out. The Second World War ended in the Czech lands with the Prague uprising of May 1945 and the arrival of the Red Army, while American troops liberated Plzeň.

Beneš returned as president. With Allied approval at Potsdam, almost all of the roughly three million Germans were expelled in 1945–46, along with smaller numbers of Hungarians from Slovakia; thousands of Germans died in the violence and forced marches. In the free election of 1946 the Communists won about two-fifths of the vote in the Czech lands, more than any other party. In February 1948, backed by the Soviet Union, they took full power, and Czechoslovakia became part of the Eastern bloc in the Cold War. Industry and land were nationalised, and in show trials modelled on those of Joseph Stalin, including the trial of the party secretary Rudolf Slánský in 1952, leading communists were executed.

In January 1968 the reformer Alexander Dubček became party leader and promised socialism with a human face. Censorship was lifted, and the Prague Spring raised hopes of a freer society. On the night of 20–21 August, armies of the Soviet Union and four other Warsaw Pact countries invaded. In January 1969 the student Jan Palach burned himself to death in Wenceslas Square in protest. Under Gustáv Husák a period of normalisation followed, purging the reformers and buying public quiet with a modest standard of living. In 1969 Czechoslovakia became a federation of Czech and Slovak republics. Dissidents, among them the playwright Václav Havel, signed the human rights manifesto Charter 77 and were imprisoned or harassed.

Encouraged by the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev and the collapse of communist rule in Poland, Hungary and East Germany, part of the Revolutions of 1989, Czechs and Slovaks took to the streets after police beat student demonstrators in Prague on 17 November 1989. Mass protests and a general strike forced the Communist Party to give up power within weeks, and on 29 December Havel was elected president. Free elections followed in June 1990.

Czech and Slovak leaders, Václav Klaus and Vladimír Mečiar, could not agree on the shape of the federation, and without a referendum they negotiated its dissolution. On 1 January 1993 Czechoslovakia split peacefully into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, an event known as the Velvet Divorce. Havel became the first Czech president. Klaus, as prime minister, carried out rapid privatisation, partly through vouchers sold to citizens.

The country joined NATO in 1999 and the European Union in 2004, and entered the Schengen area in 2007, though it has kept its own currency, the koruna. Its economy, built on car making and engineering and closely tied to Germany, grew strongly, and unemployment became among the lowest in the EU. Politics were dominated for two decades by the Civic Democrats and the Social Democrats, until in 2017 the populist ANO movement of the billionaire Andrej Babiš won the election and he became prime minister.

After Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Czech Republic took in around half a million Ukrainian refugees, the largest number per head of population of any country. Petr Fiala's centre-right coalition governed from 2021, and the retired general Petr Pavel was elected president in January 2023. In the parliamentary election of October 2025 ANO again became the largest party, and Babiš formed a coalition with the far-right Freedom and Direct Democracy party and the Motorists, being appointed prime minister for the second time on 9 December 2025.