History of Prague

Prague has been continuously inhabited for over 1,100 years and has been the capital of three different states (the Kingdom of Bohemia, the Holy Roman Empire and Czechoslovakia) plus, eventually, the Czech Republic. Here is the history in eight minutes — long enough to make sense of the buildings, short enough to actually read on the way over.

Before there was a city (to 880)

The Vltava valley has been settled since the Paleolithic. Celts arrived around the 3rd century BC and built a fortified hilltop at Závist, south of modern Prague — at the time, one of the largest Celtic strongholds in Europe. Germanic tribes displaced them in the 1st century BC; Slavic tribes arrived in the 6th century AD and would become the ancestors of the modern Czechs.

The Přemyslid foundation (880–1306)

According to Czech legend, the city was founded by Princess Libuše, who stood on the rocks of Vyšehrad and prophesied a great city "whose glory will touch the stars". Historically, the founders were the Přemyslid dynasty — Prince Bořivoj I built the first castle on the Vltava around 880, and Prague became the seat of the Bohemian crown.

The city grew quickly: a bishopric in 973, a major trading hub by the 11th century, drawing merchants and Jewish communities from across Europe. The Judith Bridge (the first stone bridge across the Vltava, 1172) was a sign of how confident and wealthy the Přemyslid kings had become.

The Golden Age — Charles IV (1346–1378)

If you walk through any old part of Prague you're walking through Charles IV's city. Born in Prague in 1316 to the Přemyslid princess Elizabeth and the Luxembourg John of Bohemia, raised at the French court, Charles inherited Bohemia in 1346 and within two years had been crowned Holy Roman Emperor. He turned Prague into one of the great cities of medieval Europe.

In thirty years he founded the first university north of the Alps (Charles University, 1348), laid out the entire New Town (Nové Město) with its still-visible street grid, started St. Vitus Cathedral, commissioned what would become the Charles Bridge (1357), built the storybook fortress at Karlštejn to safeguard the imperial crown jewels, and elevated the Prague bishopric to an archbishopric. He left Prague briefly third in Europe by population, behind only Rome and Constantinople.

Hussite turbulence (15th century)

The religious reformer Jan Hus — Prague-born, a professor at Charles University — was burned as a heretic at the Council of Constance in 1415. His followers, the Hussites, rose in armed revolt; their commander Jan Žižka (whose tomb sits atop the hill in Žižkov that bears his name) repelled five Catholic crusades before his death. The Hussite Wars left Prague battered but Czech religious independence intact for two centuries.

Rudolfine renaissance & the Defenestration (1576–1648)

Emperor Rudolf II moved the imperial court from Vienna to Prague in 1583 and stayed for nearly 30 years. Under Rudolf, Prague became a Mannerist and early-Baroque capital — alchemists, astronomers (Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler both worked here), painters and Jewish scholars (the Maharal of Prague, of Golem legend) flooded the city.

The party ended with the Second Defenestration of Prague on 23 May 1618, when Protestant noblemen threw three Catholic officials out of a window in the Bohemian Chancellery (they survived — Catholic propaganda attributed it to angels; Protestant accounts blamed a pile of manure). The incident sparked the Thirty Years' War. The Bohemian Protestant army was crushed at the Battle of White Mountain just outside Prague in 1620, and Czech independence ended for the next 300 years.

Habsburg twilight (1620–1914)

Under the Habsburgs, Prague slipped from imperial capital to provincial city. German became the language of administration; much of the Baroque architecture you see today dates from this period, including the Klementinum library complex and the rebuilding of much of Malá Strana. By the 19th century the Czech National Revival was reviving the language and culture — Smetana wrote Má vlast, Dvořák the New World Symphony, Mucha was painting Sarah Bernhardt posters in Paris.

The First Republic (1918–1938)

The First World War shattered Austria-Hungary. On 28 October 1918 the Czechoslovak state was proclaimed in Prague; Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the philosopher-president, returned from exile to lead it. The interwar period was Prague's second golden age — Functionalist architecture (the cubist Black Madonna House, the Müller villa by Adolf Loos), Karel Čapek's stories, Janáček's operas, Kafka's prose. It lasted twenty years.

Occupation, war, communism (1938–1989)

The Munich Agreement of September 1938 handed Czechoslovakia's border regions to Nazi Germany; six months later the Wehrmacht occupied the rest. Prague spent the war as the capital of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The 1942 assassination of the Nazi Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich by Czechoslovak paratroopers — and the brutal reprisals that followed — is one of the war's defining stories.

Soviet forces liberated Prague in May 1945. By 1948 the Communist Party had taken full control. The brief liberalisation of the 1968 Prague Spring under Alexander Dubček was crushed by Warsaw Pact tanks in August. Two decades of "normalisation" followed — a period defined for many Czechs by Václav Havel's plays and samizdat essays.

Velvet Revolution & today (1989–)

On 17 November 1989, a peaceful student march down Národní třída was beaten back by riot police. Within days hundreds of thousands were filling Wenceslas Square. The Communist Party gave up power on 28 November. By the end of December, Havel was president. There was no bloodshed; the world called it the Velvet Revolution.

Three years later, on 1 January 1993, the country split peacefully into the Czech Republic and Slovakia — the "Velvet Divorce". The Czech Republic joined NATO in 1999 and the European Union in 2004.

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