Czech Republic historical timeline

Origins

Slavic settlement, then Great Moravia in the ninth century, then the Přemyslid dukes who made Bohemia a kingdom. Its high point came under Charles IV, who was both King of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor, and who made Prague the imperial capital: he founded central Europe’s first university there in 1348 and began the bridge that still carries his name.

Turning points

The burning of Jan Hus as a heretic in 1415 set off the Hussite Wars and a Bohemian reformation a century before Luther. In 1618 Protestant nobles threw imperial officials out of a Prague window, which began the Thirty Years’ War; the defeat at White Mountain two years later ended Bohemian self-rule and brought three centuries of Habsburg Catholic government. A nineteenth-century national revival rebuilt Czech as a literary language almost from scratch. Czechoslovakia was founded in 1918, dismembered at Munich in 1938, occupied, then taken by a communist coup in 1948. The reforms of the Prague Spring in 1968 were ended by Warsaw Pact tanks. The Velvet Revolution of 1989 took six weeks, and the country separated from Slovakia peacefully on 1 January 1993.

Influential people

Charles IV and Jan Hus. Jan Amos Komenský, known abroad as Comenius, who effectively invented modern pedagogy. Antonín Dvořák and Bedřich Smetana. Franz Kafka, who wrote in German in a Czech city. Karel Čapek, who gave the world the word robot. Jaroslav Hašek, whose Good Soldier Švejk is the national comic archetype. And Václav Havel, playwright, dissident and then president.

Cultural evolution

Czechs are among the least religious people in Europe, a legacy of forced Catholicism followed by state atheism. They also drink more beer per head than anyone else on earth, and the pale lager the world copies was invented in Plzeň in 1842. Puppetry is a UNESCO-listed tradition, glass and crystal a centuries-old industry, and the pub is the social institution that carries most of the rest.

Present-day significance

The Czech Republic is one of the most industrialised economies in the European Union, with carmaking at its centre, and is a member of NATO and the EU but not the eurozone. Prague receives visitor numbers far out of proportion to the country’s size, which the city is now actively trying to manage rather than grow.