Who ruled Prague?

Prague lies on both banks of the Vltava in the centre of Bohemia, where a ford and later a bridge carried the trade routes of central Europe across the river beneath a rocky ridge. The castle built on that ridge has been the seat of Bohemian rulers for more than a thousand years. Prague's history swings between two poles: periods when it was an imperial capital of European importance, above all under Charles IV and Rudolf II, and periods when it was a provincial city ruled from Vienna, Berlin or Moscow. Several of the great crises of European history, from the Hussite wars to 1968, began in its streets.

The Celtic Boii, who gave Bohemia its name, lived in the region from around 500 BCE, followed by Germanic peoples and, from the sixth century CE, by Slavs. Around 880 the Přemyslid prince Bořivoj, who had accepted Christianity under the influence of Great Moravia, moved his seat to a hilltop above the river and founded Prague Castle. A market settlement grew below it, and in 973 Prague became the seat of a bishop. The Duchy, later Kingdom, of Bohemia formed part of the Holy Roman Empire, and in the thirteenth century German merchants and a Jewish community joined its Czech inhabitants in what became the Old Town and the Lesser Town.

Prague's first golden age came under Charles IV, king of Bohemia and from 1355 Holy Roman Emperor, who made it his capital. In 1344 it became an archbishopric, and in 1348 Charles founded both the university, the first in central Europe, and the New Town, one of the largest planned urban extensions of the medieval world. Work began on St Vitus Cathedral, and in 1357 on the stone bridge now named after him. With perhaps 40,000 people, Prague was among the largest cities north of the Alps.

The preacher Jan Hus, rector of the university, attacked the wealth and corruption of the Church; his burning at the Council of Constance in 1415 enraged his followers. In 1419 a Hussite crowd threw Catholic councillors from the windows of the New Town Hall, the first Defenestration of Prague, opening years of religious war. The Habsburgs inherited the Bohemian crown in 1526, and Emperor Rudolf II moved his court to Prague in 1583, turning the castle into a centre of art, alchemy and astronomy where Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler worked.

In May 1618 Protestant nobles threw two imperial governors from a window of the castle, a protest that set off the Thirty Years' War. After the Protestant defeat at the White Mountain outside the city in 1620, twenty-seven rebel leaders were executed in the Old Town Square in 1621, and Bohemia was forcibly returned to Catholicism. Prague became a provincial city of the Habsburg Monarchy, rebuilt in Baroque style. In 1784 Joseph II united its four separate towns into a single municipality.

During the nineteenth century the Czech national revival turned Prague from a largely German-speaking city into a Czech one, as industry drew workers from the countryside. When Austria-Hungary collapsed in October 1918, Prague became the capital of independent Czechoslovakia. Nazi Germany occupied the city on 15 March 1939, and most of its Jews were deported and murdered in the Holocaust. Czech resistance fighters rose in May 1945, just before Soviet troops arrived. The communists took power in February 1948. The reform movement of the Prague Spring was crushed by a Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, but in November 1989 mass demonstrations brought down the regime in the Velvet Revolution, part of the revolutions of 1989. Since 1993 Prague has been the capital of the Czech Republic, with about 1.4 million inhabitants and a historic centre that came through the twentieth century largely intact.