A History of the Czech Lands

Main authors and editors:

prof. PhDr. Jaroslav Pánek, DrSc., PhDr. Oldřich Tůma, Ph.D.

Authors: PhDr. Jaroslav Boubín, CSc. PhDr. Pavel Cibulka, CSc.

† PhDr. Jan Gebhart, CSc. PhDr. Martina Ondo Grečenková, Ph.D.

PhDr. Jan Hájek, CSc. † doc. PhDr. Josef Harna, CSc.

prof. PhDr. Milan Hlavačka, CSc. prof. PhDr. Jiří Kocian, CSc.

doc. PhDr. Martin Kučera, CSc. prof. PhDr. Jiří Mikulec, CSc.

doc. PhDr. Jiří Pernes, Ph.D. PhDr. Miloslav Polívka, CSc.

prof. PhDr. Eva Semotanová, DrSc. PhDr. Jiří Suk, Ph.D.

prof. PhDr. František Šmahel, DrSc. † PhDr. Dušan Třeštík, CSc.

Mgr. Tomáš Zahradníček, Ph.D. prof. PhDr. Josef Žemlička, DrSc.

Reviewed by:

prof. PhDr. Zdeněk Jirásek, CSc.

(1st edition, 2009)

† prof. PhDr. Josef Petráň, CSc.
† prof. PhDr. Josef Válka, CSc.

Translators: Justin Quinn (Introduction, I–VIII)

Petra Key (IX–XV, XXIII)

Lea Bennis (XVI–XXII)

Published by Charles University,

Karolinum Press

Cover and layout Zdeněk Ziegler

Typesetting DTP Karolinum Press

Second, enlarged edition

© Charles University, 2018

Text © Jaroslav Pánek, Oldřich Tůma et al., 2018

Photography © Archiv bezpečnostních složek; Archiv Univerzity Karlovy;

Biskupství litoměřické; ČTK / Otto Ballon Mierny, Jovan Dezort, Michal Doležal, Jiří Finda, Jan Rychecký, Jan Kouba, Viktor Lomoz, Vladislav Jasiok, Čestmír Jírů, Jaroslav Hejzlar, Koláček, Leoš Nebor, Zdeněk Havelka, Jiří Rublič, Štěpán Šandrik, Jiří Šourek, Karel Kestner, Michal Krumphanzl, Pavel Hroch, Jana Košnárová, Jana Noseková, Libor Zavoral; Fotogen.cz; Galerie Středočeského kraje v Kutné Hoře; Historický ústav AV ČR; Jihomoravské muzeum ve Znojmě; Knihovna Národního muzea; Martin Gojda / ARÚ AV ČR a ZU Plzeň; Moravská galerie; Muzeum Kroměřížska; Národní knihovna ČR; Národní muzeum, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Wien; Slovenská národná knižnica – Literárny archív; Správa pražského hradu / Jan Gloc; Uměleckoprůmyslové museum v Praze; Vojenský historický ústav, 2018

ISBN 978-80-246-4073-0 (epub)

ISBN 978-80-246-4072-3 (kindle)

ISBN 978-80-246-3135-6 (pdf)

ISBN 978-80-246-1645-2 (print)

Historical emblem of the Bohemian Kingdom. A two-tailed jumping lion was an emblem of the Bohemian Kingdom from the 13th century. It has been used till today as part of the state emblem of the Czech Republic. Engraving from a new edition of the Renewed Land Ordinance for the Bohemian Kingdom from the 18th century.

Vojtěch Preissig’s poster, For Our Republic, We Shall Persevere to the End, from 1918.

Contents

1. Introduction to the second edition

2. I. Territorial Development and the Transformation of Landscape
Eva Semotanová

3. 1 The Formation of the Geographical Core of the Czech State

4. 2 The Bohemian Crown Lands

5. 3 Czechoslovakia in Central Europe

6. 4 The Czech Republic in the Heart of Europe

7. 5 Metamorphoses of the Landscape

8. 6 Landscape of the Czech Lands in the Neolithic Age and Early Medieval Colonization

9. 7 The Great Transformations of the Landscape in the Early Modern Era

10. 8 Landscape in the Time of Industrialization, Urbanization and the Rise of Transport

11. 9 The Landscape in Conflict with Modern Society

12. II. Prehistory and Beginnings of Slavic Settlement (to the 8th Century)
Dušan Třeštík

13. 1 The Significance of the Neolithic Revolution

14. 2 Celts in the Czech Lands

15. 3 The Transmigration of Nations

16. III. Great Moravia and the Beginnings of the State (9th and 10th Centuries)
Dušan Třeštík

17. 1 Beginnings of Great Moravia

18. 2 Great Moravia between Byzantium and the Empire of the Franks

19. 3 Political Unification of the Czech Lands

20. 4 The Crisis of 1000 and Its Resolution

21. IV. The Czech State in the Era of Přemyslid Princes and Kings (from the Beginning of the 11th Century to 1306)
Dušan Třeštík (1) – Josef Žemlička (2–4)

22. 1 Consolidation of the Czech State in the Era of the Princes

23. 2 Royal Titles and Their Historical Significance

24. 3 The Czech Lands in the Time of the Great Colonization

25. 4 The Realm of Přemysl Otakar II and Wenceslas II

26. V. The Expansion of the Czech State during the Era of the Luxemburgs (1306–1419)
Miloslav Polívka

27. 1 The European Dimension of Czech Politics

28. 2 Society and Culture in the Era of the Luxemburgs

29. 3 Before the Revolution

30. VI. The Hussite Revolution (1419–1471)
František Šmahel

31. 1 Beginnings of the Reform Movement

32. 2 The Hussite Wars in the Years 1420–1434

33. 3 The Era of Restoration and Interregnums after Lipany (1434–1452)

34. 4 Kingdom of Two Peoples

35. VII. The Bohemian Crownlands under the Jagiellons (1471–1526)
Jaroslav Boubín

36. 1 The Czech-Hungarian Personal Union

37. 2 The Estates and Society in the Jagiellon Period

38. 3 On the Eve of the European Reformation

39. 4 Education and Culture in the Jagiellon Era

40. VIII. The Czech Estates in the Habsburg Monarchy (1526–1620)
Jaroslav Pánek

41. 1 Integration of the Czech State into the Central European Monarchy of Habsburgs

42. 2 Land of the King and the Estates

43. 3 Society and Culture in the Century Preceding the Thirty Years’ War

44. 4 The Approach of Conflict and the Bohemian Estates Rebellion, 1618–1620

45. IX. Baroque Absolutism (1620–1740)
Jiří Mikulec

46. 1 Constitutional and Social Changes during the Thirty Years’ War

47. 2 Post-War Consolidation and Reconstruction of the Czech Lands

48. 3 The Czech State as an Integral Part of the Habsburg Monarchy

49. 4 Baroque Culture and Society in the Czech Lands

50. X. Enlightened Absolutism and the Birth of a Modern State (1740–1792)
Martina Ondo Grečenková

51. 1 On the Way to the Centralized State

52. 2 Enlightened Absolutism Reforms

53. 3 Czech Enlightenment and the Beginning of the Civic Society

54. XI. The Birth of the Modern Czech Nation (1792–1848)
Jan Hájek – Milan Hlavačka

55. 1 On the Threshold of a New Era in Czech History

56. 2 General Development Features

57. 3 Czech Lands as Part of the Habsburg Monarchy

58. 4 The Beginning of Industrialization

59. 5 Rise of Czech National Movement

60. 6 Spiritual Background. Bohemian and Moravian Revivalist Culture

61. XII. Czechs during the Revolution and Neo-absolutism (1848–1860)
Milan Hlavačka

62. 1 The Rise of the Nations in the Habsburg Monarchy and its Consequences

63. 2 The Birth of Czech Political Representation

64. 3 Two Faces of the Neo-absolutism

65. 4 Neo-absolutist Economic Policy

66. XIII. The Definition of Czech National Society during the Period of Liberalism and Nationalism (1860–1914)
Pavel Cibulka – Jan Hájek – Martin Kučera

67. 1 The Renewal of Constitutional Life and Struggles for State Rights

68. 2 Czechs and Germans – National Struggle’s Aggravation

69. 3 The Economic Rise of the Czech Lands

70. 4 Culture in the Czech Lands in the Second Half of the 19th Century and at the Beginning of the 20th Century

71. XIV. The Czech Lands during the First World War (1914–1918)
Josef Harna

72. 1 Reaction to the Start of the War

73. 2 Foreign Actions

74. 3 The Situation at Home During the War

75. 4 The Balance of Forces

76. 5 The Agony of the Habsburg Empire and the Czechoslovak Resistance

77. XV. First Czechoslovak Republic (1918–1938)
Josef Harna

78. 1 The Building of a State

79. 2 On the Path to Prosperity

80. 3 Cultural Life in the Conditions of Democracy

81. 4 The Economic Crisis Reflected in the Social and Political Spheres

82. 5 The Threat to Democracy

83. XVI. Czechoslovakia in the years after the Munich Agreement and in the Second World War (1938–1945)
Jan Gebhart

84. 1 The Consequences of the Munich Agreement on the Divided Territory

85. 2 The Second Republic

86. 3 The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia

87. 4 Anti-Nazi Resistance at Home and Abroad

88. 5 Czech Culture during the War

89. 6 The Final Stage of the War and the Restoration of Czechoslovakia

90. XVII. Czechoslovakia between Two Totalitarian Systems (1945–1948)
Jiří Kocian

91. 1 Post-war Changes

92. 2 Life in Post-war Czechoslovakia

93. 3 The Struggle to Maintain Democracy in Czechoslovakia

94. XVIII. The Establishment and First Crisis of the Communist Regime in Czechoslovakia (1948–1958)
Jiří Pernes

95. 1 The Coup d’état of February 1948

96. 2 Fundamental Changes in the Political and Economic Nature of the Country

97. 3 First Crisis of the Communist Regime and Its Resolution

98. XIX. Communist Czechoslovakia on a Journey from a Consolidation of Totalitarianism towards a Liberalization of the Regime (1959–1967)
Jiří Pernes

99. 1 The Consolidation of the Totalitarian Regime in the Late 1950s

100. 2 Attempts to Reform the Economy and Liberalization of the Regime in the Mid-1960s

101. XX. The Half-Life: the Communist Regime’s Greatest Crisis (1967–1971)
Oldřich Tůma

102. 1 The Prague Spring

103. 2 The August Invasion and Its Consequences

104. 3 The Restoration of Order

105. XXI. The Second Consolidation of the Communist Regime and the Descent into Collapse (1972–1989)
Oldřich Tůma

106. 1 The Normalization Regime

107. 2 A New Type of Anti-regime Opposition

108. 3 Degeneration and Collapse

109. XXII. Czechoslovakia’s Return to Democracy (1989–1992)
Jiří Suk

110. 1 The Velvet Revolution

111. 2 Political Development in the Period of Transition (January–June 1990)

112. 3 The 1990 Parliamentary Elections. Seeking a Solution to the Czech-Slovak Question. The Principal Problems of the Renewed Democracy (June 1990–June 1992)

113. 4 Parliamentary Elections 1992. The New Division of Power and the End of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic (July–December 1992)

114. XXIII. Czech Republic 1993–2004
Tomáš Zahradníček

115. 1 Building on the Czechoslovak Traditions

116. 2 The Main Features of Domestic Political Development

117. 3 Economic Reforms and Disputes over their Evaluation

118. 4 Society in Transformation

119. 5 Attempts at New International Involvement

120. List of Abbreviations

121. List of Illustrations, Tables and Maps

122. Czech Republic, State Representatives

123. Frequently Used Geographical Names

124. Territorial Development of the Czech Lands (Maps)

Introduction to the second edition

At the beginning of May 2004, the Czech Republic joined the European Union. The histories of the individual states in this community are both perceived and known to varying degrees. When the European past is narrated, a small number of states dominate, either because of the extraordinary culture they produced or the power that they wielded; while the others are either occasionally remarked upon or completely overlooked. Nearly every child in primary school knows at least something about the former, while the latter remain vague or utterly unknown even to most educated people. The former are usually and automatically perceived as the axes of any framework of a common European history, while generally speaking even renowned experts have little to say about the latter. To this group belong mainly those states that seem at first glance “young”, including the new members of the European Union. Little is known of them, and thus these countries have no choice but to strive to show that they too have indisputably belonged to Europe for a very long time. Some of these countries at least have the advantage of a name that has not changed for centuries: Poland and Malta, to give two instances, have held the same appellation for over a thousand years and thus they are generally identifiable.

Czechia (Česko) however does not have that advantage. Although the historical lands which constitute it – that is, Bohemia (Čechy), Moravia (Morava) and the southern part of Silesia (Slezsko) – have belonged together for many centuries now, the framework of their state has changed many times in that period. Sometimes the change was profound, on other occasions it was only formal; but each change destabilized these countries in the eyes of Europe. After Great Moravia (Velká Morava; 9th century) there came the Bohemian Principality (České knížectví) whose ruler occasionally donned a royal crown (9th to 12th centuries); and the Bohemian Kingdom (České království; from the end of the 12th century), which in the 14th century spread its territory to the north and took the title of the Crown of the Bohemian Kingdom (Koruna Království českého) or the Bohemian Crown (Česká koruna). In 1526 this state, made up of five crown lands, entered a confederation with the lands of Austria and Hungary, becoming one of the three main parts of the Habsburg Monarchy. After an unsuccessful attempt to re-arrange Europe on the basis of the Estates, in which the Bohemian Confederation was to have a firm place (1619–1620), the Habsburg conception of Central Europe was established. The Czech state was ever more firmly bound to the Viennese governing centre, until the year 1804 when it almost dissolved into the Austrian Empire in the long process of centralization. After the dualistic transformation of the Habsburg monarchy into Austro-Hungary in 1867, Bohemia, Moravia and Czech (at that time Austrian) Silesia became part of the western half of the monarchy, named Cisleithania (Předlitavsko).

Austro-Hungary was defeated in World War I, with Czechoslovaks participating politically and militarily in anti-Habsburg resistance. This enabled the establishment of the independent Czechoslovak Republic (Republika československá), which in the years 1918–1938 became an active element in the system of European states. The Munich Agreement of 29 September 1938 limited this independent state to the reduced Czecho-Slovakia (Česko-Slovensko), which under the pressure of Nazi Germany collapsed with the creation of the Slovak Republic (14 March 1939). The remainder of Bohemian and Moravian territory was occupied by the German army on 15 March 1939, and the following day the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (Protektorát Čechy a Morava; in German, Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren) was established. After liberation by the Soviet and American armies at the beginning of May 1945, the restored Czechoslovak Republic (Československá republika) emerged. As a consequence of a Communist putsch in February 1948, it became one of the satellites of the Soviet Union and in 1960 changed its name to the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (Československá socialistická republika). The federalization of this state led at the beginning of 1969 to the administrative unification of the Czech Lands under the name the Czech Socialist Republic (Česká socialistická republika). The fall of the Communist regime in November 1989 brought several smaller changes to the country’s name: it was now the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic (Česká a Slovenská Federativní Republika), which at the close of 1992 was divided into two independent states through agreement between Czech and Slovak political representatives. On 1 January 1993, our overview of Czech history ends with the birth of the independent Czech Republic (Česká republika).

These regular transformations of the state’s framework paradoxically had little impact on historical Czech territory. The Czech Republic occupies more or less the same tract of land as the territory ruled by the Bohemian princes roughly one thousand years before. It was then, as it is today, inhabited by Slavs who from ancient times took the common appellation of Czechs (Češi) and who – in view of the traditions of the historical lands – sometimes refer to themselves as Czechs, Moravians (Moravané) and Silesians (Slezané). However, important national minorities also lived on this territory, helping to create the history of this space – mainly Germans, Poles and Jews, and in the modern era Romanies and Slovaks. National minorities represent fully fledged subjects of the history of this space, just as all the inhabitants of all the historical lands (including those who for longer periods in the past belonged to the territorially expanded Czech state). This given state of affairs, like the integral connection of Czech history with that of Europe, was crucial to the preparation of this book.

Those who initiated and organized the work, like the authors of individual chapters, are members of two institutes of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic – the Institute of History, which is concerned with the period from the beginning of the Middle Ages to World War II, and the Institute of Contemporary History, which concentrates on research from the 1940s to the contemporary period. The authors are for the most part also lecturers at Charles University in Prague, and in some cases at Masaryk University in Brno. Thanks to this, they were able to exploit their pedagogical experience with university students in drawing up the individual chapters, and so present a text which would have been impossible without the close co-operation of the institutes of the Academy with the foremost Czech universities. The aim of such a large collective of authors was not to continue long-standing, endless debates about the sense, interpretation and periodization of the events of this country’s past, but to present a domestic readership, as well as readerships in several foreign languages, with an overview of Czech history that was as factually accurate and as cogent as possible. They concentrated on the development of the state and the inhabitants with special emphasis on social, cultural and political metamorphoses, as well as religious and national aspects.

Prior to the first edition of the Czech version of this book (2008), there were no single-volume comprehensive histories of the Czech Lands available for the public. Even worse was the absence of a similar work for foreign readers until the extended English version of this book was published (2009). While all our neighbours have already published such works in the main languages, Czech historical writing has lagged behind. It was this gap that motivated our work and in this volume we thus attempted to summarize and present the fruits of recent research on Czech history for a wider public. Given the ever increasing distance from events in modern history that the older generation still remembers, it was possible to supplement this volume with text from the early years of the third millennium.

Since a publication of this kind cannot present all the information that might be expected, we placed especial emphasis on the bibliographies, both to this introduction and the individual chapters. These are not merely lists of all the important works, but a selection of mainly book-length publications that offer syntheses and other approaches, and we combined works that are now classics of the genre as well as more recent research. Apart from major monographs and studies, we also draw attention to books that, while maintaining a reliable standard of expertise, are also accessible to a wider readership thanks to the style in which they were written. Readers, encouraged to study Czech history more deeply as a result of our overview, should find sufficient sources in these bibliographies for their further explorations.

Jaroslav Pánek – Oldřich Tůma

General Bibliography

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I. Territorial Development and the Transformation of Landscape

Bohemian crown lands on the map by Franz Johann Joseph von Reilly from the year 1791. Viennese cartographer F. J. J. Reilly produced the 1:2000000 scale map of the Bohemian crown lands for the atlas Schauplatz der fünf Theile der Welt. The map shows not only Bohemia, Moravia, but also the whole of Silesia, whose major part belonged to Prussia from 1742, and Upper and Lower Lusatia, ceded to Saxony in 1635. The title of the map is adorned with a Rococo cartouche, copperplate.

1 The Formation of the Geographical Core of the Czech State

A range of lands or regions – in various modes of dependence, both closer and looser or in the form of personal union – have been connected with the geographic core of the Czech state in the course of the preceding centuries. However, during the thousand years of its history, not only did the boundaries of the state, lands, regions, local and other forms of administration change, but so too did the terms and names which expressed Czech statehood. The original political designation of individual state entities are recorded in maps and written sources – above all in Czech, Latin and German. Deeds and bills from the Middle Ages, and documents from the Modern Era capture the transformations and variations of the political and geographical nomenclature.

The geo-political and military-strategic significance of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia has always been influenced by its “classic position in the heart of Europe”. From prehistoric times, the Czech Lands have been distant from the economic, cultural and, later, political centres, even though an important trade route crossed the territory of today’s Moravia and Slovakia (the Amber Road which joined the Mediterranean region with the Baltic coast). Protected by mountains at its border, in the notional centre of the continent, with no marine harbours and without access to the large waterways (excepting the Elbe which rises here and the Danube nearby), without extensive fertile lowlands, the Czech Lands remained for centuries rather at the margins of the great political, economic and social processes of Europe. For the most part these were manifest in the Czech Lands after something of a delay and often less intensely.

František Palacký, the most important Czech historian of the 19th century, in the introduction to The History of the Czech Nation in Bohemia and Moravia, cogently expressed the mutual bonds of natural conditions and developmental opportunities of both the society and, to an extent, the geo-political standing of the Czech Lands, mostly Bohemia, within the European framework: “Nature itself, having completed and formed Bohemia as a particular unit, thus predetermined the main character of Czech history… Distance from the sea, lack of great navigable lakes and rivers in the land, and that very wreath of border mountains which obstructs commerce and connection with the rest of Europe: these factors isolated Bohemia, and this lack of natural routes into the country was only compensated when artificial ones were carved out later.”

An aerial view of the Říp Mountain from a distance

The Czech state, its core and borders, were formed from the beginning of the 10th to the beginning of the 11th centuries. However, before this, there were two attempts to constitute a state in the Czech basin and the Moravian valleys: Samo’s realm and Mojmír’s Great Moravian Empire. The Frankish merchant Samo, leader of the rebellious Slavs against the Avars in the first half of the 7th century, created a strong tribal union of Slavs after a series of victories over the Avars in Central Europe around the year 623 or 624. It is not possible to determine the exact territorial extent of the union, named Samo’s Realm (Sámova říše), due to the lack of written information and archaeological sources. As the experts differ, we can only demarcate Samo’s tribal union vaguely. Its centre was most likely located in Moravia. Members of the union included Slavic tribes in Bohemia, Serbs of Prince Dervan, along the Elbe (Polabian) and the Saale rivers, northwest of Bohemia, and perhaps even part of Carinthia, also inhabited by Slavs. The borders of the tribal union were not stable, but changed in response to the political situation of the moment in Central Europe. Samo’s realm joined in common battle against the Avars and later against the Frankish king Dagobert I. After Samo’s death around 658 the historical sources are silent on the subject of the continuity or dissolution of the realm, and we can neither assert nor rule out the possibility of further political events in the former centre of Samo’s realm during the 8th century.

In the first half of the 9th century, we know of another power centre that began to form on our territory in southern Moravia around Valy near Mikulčice and Staré Město near Uherské Hradiště, and in Slovakia in the environs of Nitra. With the connection of the two regions by Mojmír I after Pribina was run out of the Nitra region around 833–836, the core of what would become Great Moravia (Velká Morava) was formed, including the settled territory of the Moravian valleys and the Nitra region. Its southern border reached into today’s Austria in the area to the south-west of the confluence of the rivers Morava and Dyje (Thaya).

The Great Moravian Empire reached its utmost territorial and political extent in the era of Prince Svatopluk. Most probably after 883, Svatopluk expanded his influence to Bohemia, as well as to the Serbian tribes settled along the river Saale and apparently in the years 874–880 encroached upon the region of the Silesian tribes around the upper Oder and Vistula. In the years 883–884 Svatopluk took control of Pannonia; in the east his power probably reached as far as the upper Tisza after fighting in the years 880–882. Although the Great Moravian Empire was more powerful and its political system firmer than Samo’s tribal union, the demarcation of Great Moravia’s border remains a theoretical construct, founded as in the case of Samo’s empire, upon available archaeological and written sources. It is not possible to draw on a map with any degree of exactitude those regions which are presumed to have formed part of the empire.

By the beginning of the 10th century after the fall of the Great Moravian Empire, the centre of political life shifted to Bohemia, where the Czech state (Český stát) began to form through the expansion of the Central Bohemian Přemyslid domain. Boleslav I began the unification process after 935 and to the end of the 10th century the Přemyslids controlled the entire territory of Bohemia including the eastern Bohemian domain of the Slavníkovecs. Under Boleslav’s governance there were also territorial conquests among his princes: in northern Moravia, to the Váh region, Silesia, Lesser Poland (the Cracow region), Sandomierz and further east to Červonograd. It seems that the Piasts pushed the Přemyslids back to Bohemia by the end of the 980s, and in the years 1003–1004, the Polish prince Bolesław the Brave controlled Bohemia. Only in 1019 did the Přemyslid Oldřich win Moravia back (that is, mostly the northern part of the country), joining it to the Bohemian principality and entrusting its administration to his son Břetislav. The territorial core of the Czech state, which was strongly influenced by natural conditions, had been formed for the centuries ahead.

The natural barrier, protecting the inhabitants of the Czech Lands and its seats, was created by a mountain zone covered by impassable woods, and with a notional border running through its middle. In the territories unprotected by mountains with dense forests, a natural border was lacking and it was mainly the south-eastern border of Bohemia and the southern border of Moravia that changed most often, and differ most from the present state.

In the time of Břetislav’s reign in the years 1035–1055, Kłodzko (presumably from the 10th century), the regions of Zittau, Weitra and Zagost were part of Bohemia; however the regions of Cheb, Aš, Nová Bystřice and Landštejn did not belong to it. In southern Moravia the border with Austria was further south, and only about half-way through the 11th century did it settle on the river Dyje. In north Moravia, Břetislav conquered the territory around Hradec nad Moravicí and thus laid the foundations of the future region of Opava. Beyond the Moravian Pass, he penetrated to the rivers Ostravice and Pszczyna. For a short period after his invasion of Poland in 1039 he controlled Silesia, the Cracow region and part of Greater Poland, including Gniezno and Poznań; but he had to give up this conquered territory over time. The Přemyslid princes gained several further lands during the 11th and 12th centuries for a transition period: in the years 1075–1076, the Dohna region; in the years 1076, 1085 and 1158 (to 1256) the Bautzen region; and from Hungary in 12th century on the right bank of the Olšava and Morava south of Uherský Brod in the direction of Hodonín. They forfeited the Sušice region (1124–1265) and part of the Weitra region (1179 saw the loss of territory in the regions of Vitoraz-Weitra; in 1186 the region to the west of Weitra was made over in fief to the line of Kuenrings).

By the end of the 12th century, the integrity of the Czech state was profoundly disturbed by the dissensions of the Přemyslids. Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa made over Moravia to Conrad Otto in 1182 as an imperial appanage and declared it a free margraviate independent of Bohemia. In 1187 Barbarossa also raised the Prague bishopric to the level of imperial principality. However after the death of the Bohemian prince Frederick (Bedřich) in 1189, when the Moravian Margrave, Conrad Otto ascended to the prince’s throne in Prague, the Czech Lands were again unified. The independence of the Prague bishopric came to an end in 1193, since at that time Bishop Jindřich Břetislav from the Přemyslid line became Bohemian prince.

The territory of the Czech state was further enlarged in the second half of the 13th century and the beginning of the 14th during the reigns of Přemysl Otakar II, Wenceslas II (Václav) and Wenceslas III. The expansionist policies of Přemysl Otakar II, motivated by the desire to strengthen his family and the ruler’s power, turned to the south. In 1251, Přemysl Otakar II took Upper and Lower Austria, Styria (to 1254, and again to 1260), in 1253 Pitten and 1269 Carinthia, Carniola and most of Friuli (1270). To the west of Bohemia he gained the Cheb region for ten years (1266–1276). However he had to give up all these territories to Rudolf I of Habsburg in 1276. In 1256 the Bautzen region was yielded to Brandenburg; in contrast however the Sušice region was returned to Bohemia in 1265. Kłodzko briefly became part of the Piast region of Wrocław in 1278.

Wenceslas II, with his desire for greater power, turned his interests to the north-east and south-east. In 1290 he regained Kłodzko and in the years 1289–1292, gradually, the regions of Bytom, Opole, Těšín and Cracow; in 1291 also the western part of Cheb. In 1296 however he definitively lost the remainder of the Weitra region, over which Rudolf I of Habsburg gained control. As Polish king Wenceslas II extended his lands to Greater Poland (1300–1306), for his son, later Wenceslas III, he accepted the Hungarian crown in 1301. The emergent Přemyslid confederation which, in 1305 at the beginning of Wenceslas III’s reign, was still made up of the Czech Lands, Poland and part of Hungary, collapsed with the death of the last Přemyslid in 1306.

In the 10th century the establishment of secular power together with the guarantee of the material and social standing of the ruler and his retinue led to the division of the country into two smaller appanages (úděl; in Latin documents “pars”), administrated by members of the ruler’s line. These were not administratively independent territories, and in Bohemia, unlike Moravia, their sizes were not fixed and they were not heritable. For instance from the 10th century and the beginning of the 11th, we know of the appanage belonging to Wenceslas’s brother, Boleslav, in Stará Boleslav; also to Boleslav III in Žatec or to Jaromír and Oldřich in the Kouřim region. In the 1030s, Jaromír had land in the Plzeň region, and in the beginning of the 13th century also in the regions of Chrudim and Čáslav. Hradec Králové and Kłodzko are also mentioned.

After Prince Oldřich took control of Moravia, the first appanage was established; during the reign of Vratislav II two (of Olomouc and Brno); and by the end of the 11th century, three appanages (of Olomouc, Brno and Znojmo). The Moravian appanages were politically and territorially more stable than those of Bohemia. The Olomouc appanage possessed the castle network of Olomouc, Přerov, Spytihněv, Břeclav and Hradec nad Moravicí; the Brno appanage only the castle network of Brno; the Znojmo appanage of Znojmo and Bítov. The appanages ceased to administrate the regions half-way through the 12th century. In Moravia, they came to an end in 1197; in Bohemia only at the beginning of the 13th century. One of the reasons for the disappearance of these appanages was the extinction of the Děpoltic line, the last auxiliary branch of the Přemyslids, in 1223, and the coronation of Wenceslas I as the younger king in 1228.

Along with the appanages, there was also a castle administration in Bohemia and Moravia, or, in other words, a castle system. In the Bohemian crown lands of the early Middle Ages, the castle system formed the foundation of state power and administration. Executive functions and, gradually, those connected with tax were taken over by castles; presumably by the end of the 10th century, by the year 993, there is proof of the existence of castle provinces belonging to some of the new Přemyslid castles, for instance in the regions of Bílina, Děčín and Litoměřice. At the close of the 10th century among the administrative castles were Mělník, Kouřim, Čáslav, Mladá Boleslav, Žatec, Litoměřice, Bílina and Děčín; by the end of the 11th century also Chrudim and Hradec (Králové). Gradually castles that had been established earlier but in more remote places were joined with the administrative castles which were located in old settled territory, the fertile lowlands. Among the former there was above all Plzeň (Stará Plzeň or Starý Plzenec), and by the end of the 11th century and the beginning of the 12th, Sedlec, Prácheň, Netolice, Doudleby, Chýnov and perhaps Bechyně. About mid-way through the 12th century the castle of Vraclav near Vysoké Mýto, founded by Břetislav I, became the centre of the castle province; in Moravia the castles of Olomouc, Přerov, Brno, Spytihněv, Břeclav, Bítov, Hradec nad Moravicí and Znojmo were of administrative level. The castle system, which created the basis of the state administration in Bohemia and Moravia from mid-way through the 11th century, began to fall apart in the second half of the 13th century during the rule of Přemysl Otakar II. Only at the end of the 14th century and the beginning of the 15th was the function of the castle network taken over by the regions (kraj). What were originally tax regions gradually turned into multifunctional administrative units.

2 The Bohemian Crown Lands

The next significant territorial transformations of the Czech state are connected with Luxemburg dynasty on the Bohemian throne, and mainly the dynastic policies of Charles IV. John of Luxemburg regained the Bautzen region in 1319; for helping the Roman King Ludwig of Bavaria the Cheb region also in 1322; and the purchase of the Görlitz region in 1329 (all of upper Lusatia – this name began to be used for the Bautzen and Görlitz regions from the 15th century – was added in 1363). The regions of Aš and Selb were integrated into the Cheb region in 1331. Among John of Luxemburg’s significant successes in the area of foreign military activities was the addition of Upper and part of Lower Silesia in the years 1327–1335. The jural relationship of the Silesian principalities and Moravian enclaves in Silesia to the Bohemian crown lands developed and metamorphosed in the following centuries. The Czech state inherited Luxemburg itself through the father of John of Luxemburg, Henry VII.

During the rule of Charles IV, and then continuously from the 15th century, the terms Bohemian crown lands (země Koruny české), the Crown of the Bohemian Kingdom (Koruna českého království), Corona regni Bohemiae, or in short, the Bohemian Crown (Koruna česká) began to be used. Already on May 19, 1329, John of Luxemburg employed this general designation of the state for the group of lands under his rule. From 1348 Charles IV used this designation for both the original territory of the Czech Lands as well the added lands and foreign fiefs. The crown of St Wenceslas became the symbol for all the territories which made up the Czech state under one ruler. The basis of this territorial complex was the Bohemian kingdom; other territorial units began to be commonly referred to as auxiliary or incorporated lands. Charles IV, whose territorial gains were facilitated above all by his marriage policy, joined two further Silesian principalities to the Czech state, Świdnica (1353, through marriage; 1368 through inheritance) and Jawor (1368), Lower Lusatia (1368), and Brandenburg, which he purchased in 1373. In 1353 he gained the greater part of the Upper Palatinate, and two years later he definitively added it to the Czech state. At the same time through purchases and liens of castle, domains and towns in Vogtland, Meissen, Thuringia, Mecklenburg and Upper Palatinate, he created a dense network of foreign fiefs (in Latin called feuda extra curtem). He built a systematic zone of fiefs in Bavaria which linked to fiefs in the Upper Palatinate. In the 18th century, František Martin Pelc, historian and representative of the Enlightenment and national awakening, designated the Czech territory of the Upper Palatinate in the time of Charles as New Bohemia (Nové Čechy).

Near the end of his life, Charles IV in 1377 arranged the administration of territories of the Bohemian crown lands in such a way that the unity of the Crown would be maintained after his death. Wenceslas IV however was unable to hold together the crown lands he inherited from his father. In 1401 he lost the Upper Palatinate. In 1402 the Margrave of Meissen gained Dohna as fief. The same year Sigismund ceded the territory of Neumark to the Teutonic Knights, and part of Brandenburg from the 1140s; in 1415 he gave Brandenburg in lien to the Hohenzollerns and in 1423 Moravia also in lien to his son-in-law Albrecht of Austria (to 1437). The territory of Cheb was gradually reduced, almost to its present extent. During the Hussite wars the following areas were given in lien to the Meissen margraves: around Most (1423–1456), Duchcov (1423–1450) and Osek (1423–1450). In the 1420s the border between Bohemia and Zittau assumed its final form, the latter definitively merging with Upper Lusatia.

From the beginning of the 14th century, regions gradually emerged in the Bohemian crown lands which were autonomous in their administration and economy. By the beginning of the 15th century, Bohemia was divided into twelve regions: of Bechyně, Boleslav, Čáslav, Hradec, Chrudim, Kouřim (Prague), Litoměřice, Plzeň, Prácheň, Rakovník, Slaný and Žatec. However, because of the frequent transformations of the territorial extent of the peripheral domains, their borders were not fixed. No natural formation of regions took place in Moravia during the Middle Ages.

Neither the emergence of important Central European units of power – Great Moravia in the 9th century, and the Czech state in the 10th century – nor the numbering of the Bohemian crown lands with the great powers of Europe in the time of Přemysl Otakar II, and more significantly in the time of Charles IV in the 14th century, promoted Central Europe to the level of geo-political centre of the continent. Nevertheless, the Czech state was always an important crossroads of cultural currents, political interests and conflicts.

From the end of the 15th century and in the course of the 16th, the uneven development of European economics affected the Bohemian crown lands. The great geographical discoveries brought with them, among other things, the shift of commercial centres from southern Europe to its western coast. New trade routes crossed the world, the influx of American silver and a range of other political and economic aspects together with the continental position of the Bohemian crown lands unfavourably influenced relations with the more advanced European states.

In the 15th century, the territorial extent of the Czech state partially changed, mainly due to the personal unions. Under Sigismund (Zikmund) of Luxemburg, a personal union was established between the Bohemian crown and Hungary (1436–1437); under Albrecht of Habsburg (of Austria, r. 1437–1439) and Ladislav Posthumous (r. 1453–1457) between Hungary and the Austrian lands; under the Jagiellons Vladislav II and Louis (Ludvík) again with Hungary (1490–1526). George of Poděbrady (Jiří z Poděbrad) regained some foreign fiefs, and also in 1462 Lower Lusatia, which had been given in lien in 1445 to the margraves of Brandenburg, although with the territory around Cottbus and Picń. The territories of the regions of Opava and Krnov were gradually disengaged from Moravia, drawing closer to the Silesian principalities. In 1468, George was forced to transfer the rule of Moravia, both Lusatias and Silesia to Mátyás Corvinus, just as Vladislav of Jagiellon had to during the years 1471–1490 (according to the Olomouc agreement for the years 1478–1490). Only after Mátyás’s death were the Bohemian crown lands integrated within the framework of the personal union of the Jagiellons (1490–1526).

The number of regions was increased to fourteen after the Hussite wars under the rule of George of Poděbrady (Podbrdy broke away from the Rakovník region; the Vltava region from that of Bechyně), and it remained thus to the beginning of the 18th century. From the outset, the towns of Prague formed a special administrative unit outside the framework of the regions. The regions which were referred to as outer – Cheb, Kłodzko, Loket and Trutnov – established according to fief law, had at the same time exceptional jural standing. The Trutnov region was administratively joined to that of Hradec mid-way through the 16th century. Under the Turkish threat in the 16th century, four regions – Brno, Hradiště, Nový Jičín and Olomouc – were established as defensive units in Moravia in 1529. In 1569 their number was fixed at five – Brno, Hradiště, Jihlava, Olomouc and Znojmo. The largest, the Olomouc region, was divided in 1735 into the Kolštejn-Třebová and Přerov-Bruntál districts.

The emergence of the Czech-Austrian-Hungarian confederation under the Habsburgs in 1526 entailed the integration of the Bohemian crown lands into the multinational Habsburg monarchy for a period of four centuries. In the time of the early Modern Era – the 16th–18th centuries – the tempo of economic growth in various parts of Europe diverged further. A network of commerce and transportation, enabling dynamic economic relations between the Mediterranean, Western Europe and the Baltic, as well as other continents, created the great harbours, river transport and a relatively dense network of overland routes. The location of the Bohemian crown lands in the continental interior again enabled connection with the economic activities of the Low Lands, England, France and, in Germany, above all the lower Rhineland. The Bohemian crown lands were reliant on commercial dry-land conveyance or on the waterways of the Elbe or Danube. Despite the considerable efforts of the Austrian state to implement mercantile ideas, principles and reforms to cathect the economy of the monarchy, the Bohemian crown lands, dependent for the most part on domestic circumstances, lagged behind the countries of Western Europe as these latter developed quickly.

There were significant territorial losses in 1635 when both Upper and Lower Lusatia were lost to Saxony (given in lien before that in 1623). Further changes to the territorial extent of the Czech state date from 1742: after defeat in the Silesian wars, Maria Theresia gave Prussia Kłodzko in its entirety (measuring about 1635 km^2), Lower Silesia and part of Upper Silesia, Opole, Racibórz with Bytom, Pszczyna and, from Bohumín, territory on the right bank of the Olše river (Olza in Polish) measuring roughly 35,000 km^2. The remaining part of Silesia, Těšín, part of the regions of Opava, Krnov, Nisa, began to be designated as Czech (or Austrian) Silesia. To 1815, all foreign fiefs were gradually lost (the last in 1815: Marktredwitz [Ředvicko] to Bavaria).

Administrative reforms of 1714 reduced the regions in Bohemia to twelve. The regions of Vltava and Podbrdy were merged with that of Beroun; Slaný was joined to that of Rakovník. The Cheb region merged with Žatec and Loket, whose privileged standing was gradually pared back after the Thirty Years’ War. Bohemia was divided into the regions of Bechyně, Beroun, Boleslav, Čáslav, Hradec, Chrudim, Kouřim, Litoměřice, Plzeň, Prácheň, Rakovník and Žatec, from 1714.

There was a further change in 1751 when the four largest regions were divided (Žatec into that of Žatec and Loket, Plzeň into Plzeň and Klatovy, Bechyně into Tábor and Budějovice, and Hradec into Hradec and Bydžov) to ensure that all regions were of the same size. New regions from the outset were designated as sections (podíl), but in the same year they then became regions. The sixteen Bohemian regions lasted for an entire century. In Moravia a sixth Moravian region was established from the Přerov-Bruntál district of the Olomouc region – that of Přerov. The independent territorial-administrative development of Silesia, mainly along the Moravian border, ended in 1742 when only part of Silesia, referred to as Czech (or Austrian) Silesia, remained within the Habsburg monarchy. It was divided into the principalities of Krnov, Nisa, Opava and Těšín. Regions were created in Silesia only in 1783 when the regions of Opava and Těšín were established.

In the 19th century, the entire economic life of Europe, as well as many countries beyond, was influenced by the Industrial Revolution. It came in phases from England through France and the western part of Germany to Central and Eastern Europe, and this meant that the Bohemian crown lands, because of their geographical position, felt its effects only after the more advanced European states. Begun in England at the close of the 18th century, the process of urbanization, linked with the quick growth of the towns, with the development of the industrial agglomerations and growing sections (podíl) of the population in towns, affected the Bohemian crown lands more markedly only a century later – in the last decades of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Inside the Habsburg monarchy however, the territorially stable Bohemian crown lands held an important position in relation to the greater part of the lands in the confederation as an industrially developed region. There were no further large territorial changes to the Czech state until the emergence of Czechoslovakia in 1918. The collapse of Austro-Hungary marked the end of the jural existence of the macro-region of the Bohemian crown lands.

After the abolishment of serfdom in 1848, along with the patrimonial offices, the territorial division of the Czech Lands changed once again. With effect from 1850, seven regions were established in Bohemia: of Budějovice, Česká Lípa, Cheb, Jičín, Pardubice, Plzeň and Prague. The regions were further divided into political districts (okres). The new reform of 1855, divided Bohemia into thirteen smaller regions: of Boleslav, Budějovice, Čáslav, Hradec, Cheb, Chrudim, Jičín, Litoměřice, Písek, Plzeň, Prague, Tábor and Žatec. The capital city of Prague retained its administrative independence.

After administrative reform, Moravia was divided into two regions with effect from 1850 (of Brno and Olomouc, and political districts); from 1855 to 1868 into six regions (of Brno, Znojmo, Jihlava, Olomouc, Uherské Hradiště, and Nový Jičín). Silesia was to be one region with political districts from 1850; it was briefly joined with Moravia in the years 1860–1861.

1862 witnessed the abolishment of the regional executives in Bohemia, and for Moravia and Silesia in 1860, but they retained some of their powers to 1868. In the further administrative reforms of 1868, the regions were not restored, and the regional executives were abolished; after almost five centuries, the regional system ceased to exist. Political districts remained, although their number changed.

3 Czechoslovakia in Central Europe

The establishment of Czechoslovakia in 1918 fulfilled Czechs’ and Slovaks’ aim of independence. The post-war arrangement of Europe however held many risks, which climaxed in a further military conflict, and, after 1945, in the division of the European continent into new spheres of political interest.

Czechoslovak Republic on a 1935 map

During World War I, the Czech resistance both at home and abroad anticipated the creation of the Czechoslovak state. Ideas concerning the territorial extent of the future state were first expressed by Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk in London in 1916, and he sent his outline on the map of Europe for further negotiation to the United States of America. He integrated Bohemia, Moravia and Czech Silesia with their borders of that time, along with Slovakia as the northern area of Hungary, settled for the most part by Slovak nationals; also Vitoraz, Valtice and the southern part of Kłodzko, part of Lusatia, inhabited by the Lusatian Serbs (approximately according the Sorbian-speaking borders from the end of the 19th century) and Racibórz. At the same time he proposed the creation of a corridor in today’s Burgenland between the Czechoslovak state and the southern Slav territories. At the margin of the map Masaryk noted: “Corridor connecting Bohemia with Serbo-Croatia. Established by numerous Croatian colonies, in the south Slovenes. It would either belong in its entirety to Serbia, or in part to Hungary, in part to Serbia.” Even before the establishment of Czechoslovakia, the Commission of Czechoslovakian Affairs in Paris prepared further variants of the territorial extent of the future republic. Some of these included the possibilities of connecting Kłodzko, Racibórz and the region of Lusatian Serbia, as well as the course of the border between Hungary and Slovakia.

After World War I, the legal form of the new state, the Republic of Czechoslovakia (Republika československá), was fixed in the series of agreements called the Paris Peace Conference. There were peace agreements with Germany made on June 28, 1919 in Versailles, with Austria in Saint-Germain on September 10, 1919 and with Hungary in Trianon on June 4, 1920. The settlement of the Czechoslovak state borders however took until 1924. The demands of Czechoslovakia with respect to the recognition of its state borders proposed during the war, were presented by Edvard Beneš to the session of the peace conference on February 6, 1919. A conclusive resolution was approved by the Council on April 4, 1919, and it integrated them into the three treaties of the Paris Peace Conference. The basis of the republic became the historical territory of the Czech Lands, and, with smaller changes, the old land borders of Bohemia, Moravia and Czech Silesia, and furthermore the territories of the former Upper Hungary (Horní Uhry). With no reservations, the regions of Hlučín, Valtice (known as the Moravian-Dyje triangle) and part of Vitoraz (the upper reaches of the Lužnice river). The region of Těšín and, in Slovakia, the northern border with Poland in the areas of the Spiš and Orava was the subject of further negotiation. Czechoslovakia disputed the Těšín region with Poland, and this was concluded through arbitrage of the involved powers in Spa on June 10, 1920. According to this, the state border led along the river Olše, so the eastern part of the Těšín region, including most of the town of Těšín, fell to Poland, while the western part of what was once the Těšín principality, with the smaller part of the town (now Český Těšín), became part of Czechoslovakia.

The northern border of Slovakia (Slovensko) was essentially the northern border of the former Hungary, that is, Transleithania; border arrangements above all concerned the ceding of part of the territory of Poland in the regions of Spiš and Orava and went on till 1924. The southern, Slovak-Hungarian border had to be jurally determined by the Treaty of Trianon of June 4, 1920 because of the absence of a historical border. In the framework of the peace negotiations, Czechoslovakia gained the disputed territory of the Veľký Žitný island and smaller territory near Bratislava on the right bank of the Danube, named Petržalka. In the years 1922 and 1924, it ceded the territory around Suny, Somoskö and Somosköújfalu. This left a population of almost half a million ethnic Hungarians in Slovakia, mainly in the south.

Through the Treaty of Saint-Germain in 1919, Subcarpathian Ruthenia (Podkarpatská Rus), for centuries part of Hungary, became part of the Czechoslovak Republic. This union was preceded by the negotiation of several groups of the political representatives of the Ruthenian population in the USA and Subcarpathian Ruthenia, who in May 1919 definitively expressed their agreement to joining Czechoslovakia.

The founding of Czechoslovakia on October 28, 1918 considerably aggravated the Sudeten Germans living mainly in the border areas of the new state. A group of German deputies from the Czech Lands requested the establishment of an autonomous province, Deutschböhmen, within the framework of the Habsburg monarchy. (They made this request in connection with the negotiation of the Czech declaration (Tříkrálová deklarace) in the Imperial Council of January 1918.) On October 29, 1918 the province of Deutschböhmen was declared a part of the new Austrian state, Deutsch Österreich (German Austria), which included territory from Aš and Cheb through the regions of Most and Liberec to the Orlice Mountains, with its administrative centre in Liberec. Immediately after this on October 30, 1918, the province of Sudetenland was established on the territory of northern Moravia and Czech Silesia, with its centre in Opava. Finally on November 3, 1918 two further provinces were established, Böhmerwaldgau in the area of Český Les and the Bohemian Forest (Šumava), with its centres in Vimperk and Český Krumlov, and Deutschsüdmähren in southern Moravia with its centre in Znojmo. Apart from the four provinces, the towns of Brno, Olomouc and Jihlava (all with a strong German minority) were meant to be attached to Austria. However the attempt to strip away these provinces, created approximately in the space of the territories that would be occupied after the Munich agreement in 1938, was unsuccessful. After the failure of negotiations between the Czechoslovak government and representatives of the provinces, the territory of the provinces was occupied by Czechoslovak military units. In 1919 the Treaty of Saint-Germain brought to a close the attempts of the Sudeten Germans to break away.

In the years 1920–1928, the new state was divided into five administrative entities, called lands (země): Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia. The individual lands were made up of political districts (in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia) and in Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia into districts called župas. Although the Župa Act of February 29, 1920 (in force from January 1, 1923) introduced župa system on the entire territory of Czechoslovakia, it was only brought into effect in Slovakia, where six new župas were established, two towns with controlled municipal councils and districts. In the Czech Lands, the original pre-war division of political districts remained in force; in Subcarpathian Ruthenia the old Hungarian župa system. According to the Political Administration Act of 1927, the new territorial division came into force on December 1, 1928, and this determined the Czech Land (Země Česká), by the joining of Moravia and Silesia into the Moravian-Silesian Land (Země Moravskoslezská), the Slovak Land (Země Slovenská; in Slovak, Krajina Slovenská, Slovenská krajina), and Subcarpathian Ruthenian Land (Země Podkarpatoruská). The župa system was abolished and replaced by political districts throughout Czechoslovakia.

The end of the twenty-year existence of the Czechoslovak Republic began with the Munich Agreement of September 29, and its acceptance on September 30, 1938. Czechoslovakia was forced to cede the border territories, what were referred to as Sudeten areas, about 28,000 km^2 in extent, in the days October 1–10, 1938. It also ceded about two-thirds of the Těšín region, and smaller territories in Slovakia to Poland in the period November 2–30, 1938; furthermore, and in accordance to Viennese arbitrage of November 2 it was to cede border territories of southern Slovakia and part of Subcarpathian Ruthenia to Hungary in the period November 5–10, 1939. The extent of the ceded territories in the space of the Czech Lands almost equalled the extent of the provinces of Deutschböhmen, Sudetenland, Böhmerwaldgau and Deutschsüdmähren, as they were declared after the establishment of Czechoslovakia in autumn 1918 when those areas attempted to join Austria.

Most of the occupied territory of the Czech Lands became a special župa, Sudetenland, with its centre in Liberec. The southern areas of Bohemia, Moravia and in Slovakia in the area of Petržalka and Devín belonged the imperial župas Oberdonau and Niederdonau. The ceded territories made up about 29% of the original extent of the Czechoslovak state – of nearly 141,000 km^2 there remained only about 99,000 km^2. On October 6, 1938, Slovakia gained full autonomy with its own government; and on October 11, 1938 Subcarpathian Ruthenia likewise. The autonomy of the two lands was approved by the House of Deputies on November 19, 1938, and they also changed the official title of the state, the so-called second republic, to Czecho-Slovakia (Česko-Slovensko).

With the establishment of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (Protektorát Čechy a Morava) on March 16, 1939 after the German occupation of the Second Republic on March 15, 1939, Czechoslovakia was definitively abolished. The German occupation was preceded by the break away of Slovakia and the establishment of the Slovak State (Slovenský štát) on March 14, 1939; Subcarpathian Ruthenia was occupied by Hungary by March 18, 1939.

The Munich Agreement and the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Nazi Germany on March 15, 1939 also brought a fundamental change to the territorial division of the state. The ceded territories were gradually subordinated to the German imperial administration. The border areas of southern Bohemia, southern Moravia and Hlučín were joined to the existent administrative units in neighbouring land, to župas (Oberdonau, Niederdonau and Oberschlesien). From the rest of the ceded territories the so-called Reichsgau Sudetenland was created (Imperial Sudetenland župa), which was divided into fifty-three rural districts (Landkreise) and five town districts. The town districts (Stadtkreise) were Liberec, Ústí nad Labem, Cheb, Karlovy Vary and Opava.

On the territory of the Protectorate the original political districts remained, designated as “autonomous”, and newly established oberlandräte. Established in the course of the first year of the occupation’s administration, the oberlandräte were directly subordinate to the Reichsprotektor. Their number changed during World War II; after the administrative reform of Reinhard Heydrich there were seven oberlandräte, and after September 1, 1944, there were six.

Even during World War II, the Czechoslovak President-in-Exile Edvard Beneš considered several variants of the future borders of post-war Czechoslovakia. His ideas evidently originated in the period before the Munich Agreement, and then during the existence of the Second Republic. The extant sketch of the Czech Lands by Jaroslav Drábek from January 1939 contains three areas in western and northern Bohemia, and in Silesia with about 900,000 inhabitants of German nationality, which Beneš was thinking of ceding to Germany, along with three small territories in southern Bohemia and southern Moravia. The new map of May 1941 moreover captures the areas of southern Slovakia – these were meant to be ceded to Hungary. The territory meant to be ceded in southern Bohemia and southern Moravia was, pace Drábek’s sketch, greatly expanded. As compensation, Beneš demanded part of Kłodzko along its historical south-western borders.

So, as the political and military situation in Europe changed, so too did Beneš’s decisions concerning the presumed Czechoslovak territories. In February 1945, the new proposal of border arrangements almost corresponded with pre-Munich borders, but without the regions of Aš, and without the Šluknov and Frýdlant Hook, and with a demand for part of the territory of Kłodzko. Diplomatic negotiations in the years 1945–1946 demanding the joining of Kłodzko in its entirety to Czechoslovakia, as in the peace conference of 1919, met with failure because of Czechoslovak-Polish relations of the time.

After World War II, Czechoslovakia was restored to its pre-Munich borders, without Subcarpathian Ruthenia, which, in accordance with agreements between the Czechoslovak Republic and the USSR, became part of the Soviet Union – the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The state borders between Czechoslovakia the Soviet Union led along the former land border of Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia with smaller changes in the area of Čop. Czechoslovakia ceded the iron centre of Čop to the Soviet Union, thirteen municipalities to the north and in 1946 regained the cadastral territory of Lekárt (from 1948 Lekárovce). In 1947, Czechoslovakia received three municipalities from Hungary on the right bank of the Danube – Jarovce, Rusovce, Čunovo and part of the municipality of Rajka, which are today part of Bratislava. In 1959, small adjustments were made to the border with Poland to the benefit of both states. The new name of the republic from 1960, Czecho-Slovak Socialist Republic (Československá socialistická republika), brought no change to the territorial extent of the state, and neither did the establishment of the Czechoslovak Republic (Československá republika) by constitutional law on March 6, 1990 nor the Czechoslovak Federal Republic (Československá federativní republika) on March 29, 1990 nor the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic (Česká a Slovenská Federativní Republika) on April 20, 1990.

The territorial division of the restored Czechoslovakia was based on the state of affairs up to September 29, 1939, without Subcarpathian Ruthenia. Three Lands (Země) – Bohemia, Moravia-Silesia and Slovakia – were divided into districts according to the Decree of the President of the Republic on October 27, 1945. From January 1, 1949, when the Regions Act came into effect, nineteen regions were established, divided into districts (of Prague, Ústí nad Labem, Karlovy Vary, Plzeň, České Budějovice, Jihlava, Pardubice, Hradec Králové, Liberec, Brno, Gottwaldov, Ostrava, Olomouc, Bratislava, Nitra, Žilina, Banská Bystrica, Košice and Prešov). In 1960 new territorial divisions were created with ten regions: Central Bohemia, Eastern Bohemia, Northern Bohemia, Western Bohemia, Southern Bohemia, Northern Moravia, Southern Moravia, Western Slovakia, Central Slovakia and Eastern Slovakia. The capital city of Prague gained the status of region. The Federalization of the Republic Act of October 27, 1968 (which came into effect on January 1, 1969) did not change the number of regions. In 1990, the national regional councils were abolished.

4 The Czech Republic in the Heart of Europe

With the division of the Czechoslovak state on January 1, 1993 into two independent states – the Czech Republic and Slovak Republic – the Czech Republic’s extent returned to that of Břetislav’s medieval principality. After many transformations, the Czech Republic (Česká republika), in its position and the demarcation of its borders, reminds us of the Czech Lands in the time of Břetislav’s rule after 1035, when the first political crisis of the Přemyslid principality of that time ended, and its territory stabilized. The agreement about the demarcation of the borders between the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic was signed on January 4, 1996.

The new Czech Republic was divided into seventy-five districts (okres) in the years 1993–1995; from January 1, 1996, this number rose to seventy-six. On January 1, 2000 constitutional law concerning the establishment of higher territorial autonomous entities came into effect, and this restored the regional system, and demarcating the extent of the fourteen new regions (kraj): of Prague, Central Bohemia, Liberec, Ústí, Karlovy Vary, Plzeň, Southern Bohemia, Pardubice, Hradec Králové, Moravia-Silesia, Vysočina, Southern Moravia, Olomouc and Zlín (this nomenclature valid from 2001). By January 1, 2003 the district offices were abolished and in their place commissioned municipalities were established.

The geographical position of the Czech Republic has not changed. In contemporary advanced society, the significance of the position of the Czech Lands is apparently smaller than in the past; nevertheless even after important changes during the 1980s and ’90s, Central Europe remains a sensitive gold-leaf indicator of European stability, and the geopolitical aspect continues to shape the relations between European states and lands.

5 Metamorphoses of the Landscape

By the term “landscape” we understand a naturally or artificially defined part of the earth’s surface whose elements are pedogenic rocks, land, skies, water, flora, fauna and mankind. Landscape, mainly the cultural landscape, in which to a considerable degree the activities of human society have participated, has changed dramatically in the Czech Lands in the course of the centuries, influenced by both natural conditions and mankind. The Czech landscape has its own dynamic. Over decades and centuries there have been changes caused by natural processes and human activity in the landscape; it also has its own ecological stability. In Central Europe the ecological stability of the landscape is defined by a relatively dense amount of forests, meadows, pasturage, tillage and built-up areas.

The historical landscape, or landscape as memory, is often talked of in connection with historical development. The historical landscape is every landscape of the past, but at the same time, in the sense of landscape as memory, the exceptional parts of past landscapes, where the preserved signs of human activity are singular and unique. The attribute “historical” is thus given by the object of study, i.e., landscape existing in the past (as opposed to the contemporary cultural landscape), preserved traces – remnants of landscape elements – which helped create this landscape (and today document it), and historical information concerning the landscape. The significance of the phrase “landscape as memory” expresses a group of specific, identifiable relicts of the historical landscape, significant because they preserve the cultural heritage of the country. Here we always mean the cultural landscape, which is what mankind has helped create. Historical approaches discern in the landscape more a space for the realization of life and ideas of society, and the projection of the values of human civilizations.

The form of the historical landscape from various periods, in the contemporary cultural landscape, is preserved to a certain degree in both larger and smaller traces, some of which are hidden while others are easily apparent. Traces of the historical landscape (as distinct from natural influences) capture many political, economic, social and cultural events. The greater the distance in the past, the fewer the traces. In some cases, mainly when the landscape has been greatly damaged, the traces of human activity of even recent decades disappear.

6 Landscape of the Czech Lands in the Neolithic Age and Early Medieval Colonization

To the end of the Mesolithic Age, people hardly affected nature at all; they were an integral part of it. In the Neolithic Age however, the warm, moist Atlantic climate contributed to the creation of favourable conditions for the emergence of agriculture and permanent human settlements. In the Neolithic period, about 5000 BCE, the cultural landscape began to form on the territory of the Czech Republic in the space of today’s central and north-western Bohemia, and south-western Moravia with permanent settlement and cultivated chernozem land to a height of 300 m above sea-level. Neolithic man cultivated land was not forested, and at the same time gradually transformed forest into agricultural land. The process of the separation of man from nature had begun, along with his active participation in the transformations of landscape.

At the beginning of the millennium, the climate was exceptionally favourable, warmer and humid, and this peaked in the 13th century and the first half of the 14th. Up to the 12th century, the Czech Lands were almost completely covered by predominantly broadleaf forests, surrounding small tracts of initially sparsely populated unforested lowlands. Mountains with primeval forests made a natural border of the Czech state, apart from the border regions of southern Moravia, the division between forest and the cultivated landscape was less obvious than it is today.

From the 11th century and especially from the second half of the 12th, with the growth of settlement caused by the internal and later external colonization, people penetrated to the higher, forested areas, and the unforested tracts gradually began to expand. Settlement gradually moved from the lowlands in the catchment area of the central and lower Elbe, the lower Ohře and lower Vltava, from the valleys of the rivers Morava, Svitava, Svratka and Dyje to the higher, more remote areas. The colonization movement was directed towards the forested areas, first to a height of 300 m above sea-level and later 500 m. New colonies with enclosed structures in fields, interrupted by smaller broadleaf forests, imprinted a new character on the landscape. From the first half of the 13th century, towns were founded in the Czech Lands, climaxing in the second half of the 13th century. The number of inhabitants rose, agriculture and crafts advanced, and the German settlers brought new legal norms to the land. By the close of the 14th century, settlement was almost complete, with the exception of those areas that were difficult to access. The process of gradual deforestation of the landscape was mitigated by the dilapidation and extinction of some settlements as a consequence of war, famine and plague, as well as natural disasters.

Prague in the Schedel Chronicle in 1493, a veduta dating from 1492

Waterways in the lowlands of the Elbe, the lower Vltava and Ohře, and the Moravian valleys constantly changed their beds and meandered. Influenced by erosion, spring floods and severe summer rains, these rivers formed numerous distributaries, pools and wetlands. Sluiced farmlands, timber and, in the summer, cereals and hay were swept along the original bed and the strong current created a new one. With the development of medieval river navigation and timber rafting, mainly on the Vltava and Elbe, fairly intense water-engineering activity began in the Czech Lands (weirs were built, river-beds were adjusted). The first artificial reservoirs – ponds – were established by the damming of streams and smaller rivers, probably from as early as the 13th century. The demand for fish grew (this was due among other factors to their higher consumption in times of fast). For instance the monastery in Louka near Znojmo obtained a decree permitting it to build ponds from as early as 1227, and there is mention of ponds in the founding document of the monastery of Zlatá Koruna in 1263.

By the passes (through border forests) important strategic and commercial land routes entered Bohemia and Moravia. They aimed above all for Prague, Brno and Olomouc and connected the Czech Lands with Europe. The network of land routes gradually branched out, becoming denser, and some changed according to the accessibility of the terrain as well as with the establishment of new economic and commercial centres. Land routes homed in on Prague from all sides. From the north, there were roads from Zittau, Chlumec (Serbian) and Most; from the west the Via Magna and from Domažlice. From the south-west, there was the well-known Gold Road, also named the Via Aurea, from Austria the Austrian road. From Prague to the east, there were the main routes to Poland (the Kłodzko road, or Silesian, the Polish or the Náchod road); to the south-east to Brno, named the Trstená road; and through Jihlava, the Habry road. From Moravia, there were further land routes to Vienna, Hungary and Poland.

In some areas the earth’s surface was affected by the mining of minerals – before the first half of the 13th century, prosperous silver mines were opened near Jihlava and Německý (now Havlíčkův) Brod; in the last decade of the 13th century, rich silver lodes were discovered at the newly founded Kutná Hora. The Czech-Moravian highlands became the main production area of silver, even though silver mines were to be found also at Stříbro, Příbram and in Moravia at Jeseníky. Apart from silver, gold, copper and pewter was also mined.

In the Bohemian crown lands, the cultural landscape took on a new appearance towards the end of the 13th century. This was due to three basic types of settlement: villages, towns and aristocratic seats (castles, forts and monasteries), as well as a fairly stabilized communication network. Generally speaking, this state of affairs persisted to the Modern Era.

7 The Great Transformations of the Landscape in the Early Modern Era

In the course of the 16th century, in many places the landscape of the Bohemian crown lands took on a new character. Large systems of ponds were established; mining of high-grade ores penetrated the mountain regions; rich broadleaf forests in some areas thinned out or vanished completely. As soon as some of the terrible consequences of the Thirty Years’ War were removed in the second half of the 17th century, the process of transforming the landscape continued. To a certain degree this was affected by political and economic changes, new intellectual currents (for instance mercantilism, and the advancement of science and technology). In the 18th century, these changes affected most the economic state of forestry and waterways, along with agricultural production; a century later they also impacted on the mining of minerals and the construction of new transport routes.

One of the prospering branches of the economy became fisheries on large aristocratic farmsteads towards the end of the 15th century and into the 16th. The greatest and most important pond basins in the Bohemian crown lands were established in the areas of Pardubice, Poděbrady and Třeboň. In Pardubice, the level territory of the Pernštejn domain, kept extremely wet by the meandering Elbe, had good conditions for the construction of a pond system. The ponds were linked by two long artificial canals – the Opatovice canal, built from the end of the 15th century to 1513, and Počaply canal of the same period. Together with the Golden Canal and New River in Třeboň, and the Sány Canal and the New Canal in Poděbrady, these artificial canals were an index of how advanced water construction was. The important Czech pisciculturist and knight, Kunát of Dobřenice, worked in the service of the Pernštejns, and Štěpánek Netolický was one of his students. The Pardubice pond system was completed half way through the 15th century. Now there was hardly any further space to be found in the landscape for new water reservoirs. In the environs of Pardubice and the Mount Kunětice, there were about 230, of which the largest was some hundred hectares (the largest pond in Pardubice, Čeperka, measured about 1,000 hectares, constructed in 1491–1496, submerged several villages).

The Poděbrady region, much flooded and soaked by the waters of the Elbe, the Cidlina and the Mrlina, was originally one of the less fertile, marshy areas. At the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries, a system of ponds was established here, and this was connected to the rivers Cidlina, Mrlina and the canals of Sány and the New Canal. The Sány canal channelled water to the pond of Blato near the village of Pátek, which was about 990 hectares in size. (This pond no longer exists.)

In Třeboň, the Lužnice river brought a large amount of surface water which was used to construct a further water system in Bohemia. In the 16th century a grand plan for a giant pond system was put into effect by Štěpánek Netolický, who was active in southern Bohemia in the first third of the 16th century. Jakub Krčín of Jelčany and Sedlčany, continued Netolický’s work in the period 1560–1580. The Golden Canal, over 45 km in length, constituted the axis of the pond system. In the second half of the 16th century, Jakub Krčín established the monumental ponds of Rožmberk measuring about 1,060 hectares: Svět (earlier named Nevděk), and an artificial canal New River (Nová Řeka), connecting Nežárka river with the Lužnice. While Netolický’s ponds were for the most part small and shallow, though excellent for fish-farming, Krčín built deeper water reservoirs over larger areas, and with lower yields.

Czech lands on the map by Charles Hubert Alexis Jaillot dating from 1695

During the 16th century, ponds were established even in less advantageous areas. The territory of south-western, southern and south-eastern Bohemia was interlaced with water systems, which began in the regions of Blato, Lnáře and Rožmitál, and continued across the areas of Písek, Vodňany, Strakonice and Netolice, Budějovice, Nový Hrad, Třeboň, Soběslav and Nová Bystřice to that of Jindřichův Hradec. Other smaller areas with ponds were to be found in western Bohemia in the areas of Klatovy and Rokycany, near Bor at Tachov, near Nýřany, Jesenice, Planá and Teplá. In northern Bohemia, pond management was successful in the region of Most and around Doksy in central Bohemia at Žebrák, Mýto, Konopiště, Neveklov, Sedlčany and in the Kouřim region. In eastern Bohemia the pond area began in the regions of Mladá Boleslav and Jičín, continuing across the regions of Městec Králové, Poděbrady, Pardubice to Hradec Králové. The total number of ponds in Bohemia in the 16th century is estimated at 78,000 with an area of about 120,000 hectares, i.e., probably two thirds more than at present.

In northern and central Moravia large systems were established in the Šumperk region, around Uničov, Tovačov and Kroměříž. Further ponds were established in southern Moravia in the region of Mikulov and Hodonín – Kobylí, Čejč pond, Nesyt, and in the region of Znojmo on the river Jevišovka. On the Czech-Moravian highlands Velké Dářko was built, and a number of smaller pond areas existed near Hlinsko, Polná, north-west of Jihlava and between Humpolec and Lipnice.

Despite the decline of pond-building, caused by the fall in prices of fish and the gradual transformation of husbandry, the pond system persisted into the second half of the 18th century almost unchanged (the Josephine Land Register states that around 1788 there were in total 76,815 hectares of ponds in Bohemia). From the end of the 18th century, the number of ponds began to fall. The growing need for agricultural land contributed to their elimination, the intensification of cereal-farming and pasturage, and later, mainly around Pardubice and Poděbrady, the cultivation of new crops – sugar beet. Arable land on the tracts of former large ponds of Blato and Čeperka (of Poděbrady and Pardubice) are crossed today by reclamation canals; in many places in this area new water reservoirs were established – flooded mine shafts of sand quarries. The least affected in this respect were the southern Bohemian ponds: the lower quality of the agricultural land there saved them from widespread eradication.

The 16th century is connected in the Bohemian crown lands also with the development of mining, above all after the discovery of silver lodes in Jáchymov. In the region of the Ore Mountains (Krušné Hory), apart from silver, high-grade ores such as copper, led, iron, pewter, tungsten and molybdenum were mined, as in the regions of the Giant Mountains (Krkonoše) and Jeseníky. In the Bohemian Forest (Šumava) region, from the 16th century iron ore was extracted until it was exhausted in the second half of the 17th century. The development of this mining of minerals and the smelting associated with it was a great strain on forest management. To a considerable degree, forests in central Bohemia near the regions of Slaný, Kladno and Sázava, as well as in the regions of the Elbe in Chlumec, in southern Bohemia in the region of Český Krumlov and Netolice. Also the woods near the border, the Bohemian Forest, the Ore Mountains the Giant Mountains and the Orlice Mountains met the same fate. Groups of forests with their own forestry management were set up to service the high consumption of wood fuel and charcoal in mining and smelting. For instance, wood was freighted from Přísečnice to the mines at Jáchymov; to Kutná Hora from Trutnov and Rychnov; to Rudolfov from Hluboká.

By the end of the 17th century and in the first half of the 18th century, mining was revived, and glassmaking and ironworks began to enjoy a boom. This branch of the economy required even greater amounts of wood for its operation, whether timber or charcoal. There was intensive felling of forest growth, many forests thinned out, many clearings spread and the production of timber fell. Oaks and firs vanished from the forests; hornbeams, aspens, birch and pine began to dominate. Because of the lack of usable timber it was necessary to plant trees that grew quickly – above all pine, spruce, larch, poplar, maple and ash. In many places, a conifer monoculture replaced the broadleaf forests (the former were mainly of spruce and pine as they were more resistant to forest pests). In reserves or mountain forests the first forestry plans appeared which fixed the provisions and permissible annual lumber quotas. Pasture, burgeoning above all in the mountain regions, contributed to the gradual devastation of the forests.

In the 17th century, rivers were increasingly made navigable. Water was for man from the beginning of his existence a source of livelihood. It brought comestibles; a sufficiency of water meant a good crop, while drought meant poverty and famine. The great waterways were transport arteries to remote lands; they created borders between territorial units; and in times of danger they were natural obstacles in the way of the enemy. The chroniclers wrote of the most important Bohemian and Moravian rivers; the oldest official sources and local histories mention them; land surveyors and cartographers drew their courses. In the first half of the 17th century, the Abbot of Strahov, Kryšpín Fuk, personally oversaw the work on the Vltava to make it navigable in the Svatojánské currents, and made a number of detailed manuscript maps of the Vltava. At the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries, Lothar Vogemonte undertook a systematic investigation of the network of watercourses, especially of the Vltava, the Morava and the Oder. He was the author of proposals to make further rivers navigable and the construction of canals as one way to encourage the economy of the Habsburg monarchy.

Water management continued mainly with the work of making the Vltava navigable. The implementation of scientific ideas in water engineering was promoted by for instance Jan Ferdinand Schor, who in 1726–1729 constructed engineering works which were unique for their time, i.e., the boat storage ponds on the Vltava at Županovice and at Modřany. In the second half of the 18th century because of the construction of the military fortresses in Hradec Králové and Terezín, technically difficult adjustments were carried out on the Ohře, Elbe and Orlice, shifting their courses. The construction of a fortress at Hradec Králové began in 1766. It required extensive regulation of the Elbe and Orlice, the straightening of their courses, the filling in of their distributaries and the building of systems of sluice-gates to allow the level of both rivers to rise and flood the fields in front of the fortress. The fortress of Terezín, founded in 1780 to support the defensive capabilities of military transfers across the Lužice Mountains, and the protection of the Elbe waterway, was founded on the left bank of the Ohře in the place of the villages of Německé Kopisty and Travčice. The Ohře river, about 4 km distant from its debouchure in the Elbe, was divided into two channels, of which the western, so-called the New Ohře (Nová Ohře) became the main riverbed, and the original, Old Ohře (Stará Ohře), the side channel. Water management work, changing the appearance and direction of waterways of the Bohemian crown lands, continued through the 19th century.

The structure of the main dry-land routes did not change considerably up to the first half of the 18th century, and basically followed the directions of the old land routes. With the increased importance of a high-quality communication network for the economy, transport and posts, as well as for strategic purposes, it became clear that communications would have to be re-constructed, and this was done first with the six main land roads – to Linz, Zittau, Vienna, Nuremberg, Leipzig and Silesia. Building adjustments also affected the Gold Road. However, the Silesian wars and the Seven Years’ War considerably exhausted the Habsburg finances, and it was not until the end of the 18th century was there interest again in improving the state of land communication.

After the second half of the 18th century, the number of inhabitants of the Bohemian crown lands rose. In order to secure them sustenance it was necessary to increase agricultural productivity, and one way was to extend the arable lands. The transformation of woodland into tillage continued, necessitating the removal of common pasturage, the elimination of vineyards and even the drainage and elimination of ponds to the mid-19th century (though some of these were restored later in the 19th century). To the end of the 18th century the three-field fallowing method of crop rotation with cereals dominated. Only with the gradual changeover to the alternating method, the introduction of new crops (mainly clover, lucerne, potatoes, turnip, later sugar beet) and more plentiful manuring by natural and artificial fertilizers led to the improvement of yields in the course of the 19th century. It also resulted in a change in rotational patterns and the extent and structure of the available tilth.

One specific manifestation of the creation of cultural landscape in the Bohemian crown lands in the 18th century was what is referred to as “Czech Baroque Landscape” – an organized landscape, economically purposeful and also aesthetic, expressing the harmonic connection of man and nature. The Baroque landscape was employed economically – new crops were introduced, ponds were drained in order to gain new arable land, or deforestation took place to service glassworks, smelting and mining enterprises. Nevertheless the Baroque landscape was extremely aesthetic, and filled with the harmonic relations and ideas of Baroque man. Its traces are preserved in the Bohemian landscape to this day and offer the opportunity of an intense encounter with the spirit and heritage of the Baroque landscape.

The Baroque landscape is characterized by undulant terrain with a mosaic of smaller fields, a dense network of roads and paths, alleys lined by trees, sacral village architecture dominated by Baroque churches, smaller architecture in the open landscape (wayside shrines, crosses, chapels) and aesthetic re-arrangements of the landscape – Baroque gardens and the landscape parks of castle buildings. Three of the most important examples of landscaping are, first, the castle and baths at Kuks between Dvůr Králové and Jaroměř from the end of the 17th century and beginning of the 18th, built in the eastern Bohemian domain of Count František Antonín Špork; second, Wallenstein’s early Baroque demesne; and third, the Schlick Baroque demesne in the Jičín region. However these Baroque landscaped gardens have not been preserved in their entirety.

8 Landscape in the Time of Industrialization, Urbanization and the Rise of Transport

In the 19th century the landscape changed at an even faster rate. The managed renewal of forestry continued apace, mitigating to a greater degree the long-term affects of the lumber industry. The systematic afforestation of clearings and the more frequent use of coal instead of charcoal, especially in connection with the introduction of steam engine in production and transport: these two factors contributed to the partial improvement of the critical state of the forests. In the lower regions, oak, hornbeam, birch, alders and aspens predominated, but continuous broadleaf growths disappeared. They were replaced by conifers, mostly pine, spruce and larch, for instance in the areas of Zbraslav, Mladá Boleslav and Litomyšl. Flood-plain forests in the catchment areas of the Morava, Dyje, Elbe and lower Ohře retained their specific composition. In the submontane and montane areas, with less lumber activity, the original woods grew, untouched by spruce monocultures, apart from spruce firs, beech, maple, ash, pine, and in the Jeseníky region larch also.

The Forestry Act of 1852 introduced state supervision of forest management and forbade the reduction of forest lands. Together with the support of cultural organizations (for instance the Bohemian Forestry Units or the Moravian Forestry Society), new progressive silvicultural technologies were gradually implemented. There was extensive education on the subject and the next generation of experts was trained. Apart from the economic importance of forestry, its functions both as a crucial element of the landscape and for recreation were also recognized.

With the gradual shift from the fallowing system to that of alternation of agricultural management, and the domestication of new agricultural crops, areas of specific agricultural production began to be established in Bohemian crown lands. Up to the mid-19th century, cereal production was one of these (the Elbe region, the lower Ohře, the Lower Moravian valley, as well as that of the Dyje and Svratka), hops another (the regions of Žatec, Rakovník and Louny) and viticulture (south Moravia, around Prague and Mělník). Towards the close of the century, beet production was added to these (in the regions of Hradec Králové, Pardubice, Kolín, Prague, Mělník and Litoměřice), cereal and potato production (above all the Bohemian-Moravian highlands) and fodder crops (the submontane area of the border mountain zones). The Všetaty, Brno and Znojmo regions and the area around Prague were designated for the cultivation of vegetables. The use of the available land and its structure changed – during the first half of the 19th century, the extent of agricultural land was still expanding by about 10%. In the second half of the 19th century, the tracts of agricultural land remained almost unchanged; however the acreage of arable land, garden, orchards and vineyards expanded at the expense of pasturage and meadows.

In order to improve the state of forestry and agriculture, much land reclamation took place in the Bohemian crown lands from the mid-19th century (and mainly towards its close). This activity contributed to the more intensive use and cultivation of plots and affected the value of the soil. The work was connected with the adjustment of waterways and served as protection against the effects of natural disasters – strong gales, torrents and floods. Land reclamation also changed the extensive drainage and irrigation of the subterranean water.

The Lanna firm above all devoted itself to systematic water management, even throughout the 19th century, in connection with the development of timber rafting. Up to the mid-19th century, it carried out important adjustments to the upper flows of the Lužnice, Nežárka, Blanice, Malše and Otava. There was also work on the Vltava and Elbe, with extensive regulation of its bed from 1819. The bed of the river between Kolín and Poděbrady was adjusted, beyond Nymburk, between Brandýs nad Labem and Kostelec nad Labem, and at the confluence of the Elbe and Vltava, where the main and auxiliary channels of both rivers were intertwined in a complex way before they were regularized. From the 1880s, Lanna made the Vltava in Prague navigable. It reconstructed the solid weirs, and built moving weirs beneath Prague, which were meant to facilitate the passage of timber along the bed. They built wharfs in Holešovice and in Smíchov; the wharf at Karlín was restored. The river was embanked by the first quay. In Bohemia and Moravia many projects to connect river flows were revived – for instance, the Danube-Oder canal, the Danube-Vltava canal, the connection of the Danube-Oder canal with the river Vistula and the canal from Přerov to Pardubice, to join the Danube-Oder canal with the Elbe. However these were never realized. The idea of the Vltava-Danube canal was definitively shelved with the construction of horse-drawn rail from České Budějovice to Linz in the years 1825–1832.

From 1896, the Board for the Canalization of the Elbe and Vltava planned and organized canal construction in the Bohemian crown lands. The first large-scale construction program of waterways, mainly of the Elbe, Vltava and Oder, was enabled by the Waterways Act of 1901; in 1903 the Land Regulation Board was set up. Regulatory interventions also meant the partial restriction of destructive floods which repeatedly filled the flood-plains of streams and rivers, changing their banks and their currents, and swept away islands or created new ones.

At the beginning of the 20th century, locks were built at Klecany, Libčice, Troja, Mirovice and Vraňany nad Vltavou with a canal to the sluice gate in Hořín near Mělník. On the Elbe locks were built at Dolní Beřkovice, at Roudnice, Litoměřice and Lovosice before World War I; the first dams were built on the Chrudimka near Hamry and on the Doubravka near Pařížov. In Moravia, the Land Board looked after the adjustment of rivers, and oversaw the regulation of the Morava, Bečva and Ostravice rivers and the planning of dam-systems.

Nevertheless, most of the rivers in the Bohemian crown lands were still not navigable at the beginning of the 20th century. Steam-boats were in operation only on the Vltava and the Elbe from Štěchovice through Prague and Mělník to Děčín, and then along the Elbe. Boats without steam could pass on the Vltava from České Budějovice to Mělník; on the Elbe along the current of the river from Obříství. The Vltava above České Budějovice through Prague to Mělník was made navigable for regular timber rafting, and from there on along the Elbe to the border of the country, as well as the larger tributaries of the Vltava, i.e., the central and lower Otava, Nežárka, Lužnice, Sázava and the lower flow of the Stropnice. The Elbe from Hradec Králové to Mělník, and the central and lower flows of the Morava and Bečva, were navigable for timber only in some seasons when the water level was high enough.

In the 19th century, the face of the landscape was marked by the mining of minerals and its expansion was accompanied by the advancement of mine surveying and cartography. The areas of the Berounka river, especially in the regions of Beroun and Rokycany, were among the most important for the mining of iron ore in the Czech interior; from the 1840s the Nučice region and, in the Bohemian-Moravian highlands, the region of Žďár. With the progress of industry, other minerals were increasingly used. Graphite was mined in southern Bohemia; bismuth, nickel, cobalt, arsenic and lead mainly in the Ore Mountains. Coal mines were opened mainly in the region of Ostrava, Kladno and near Nýřany. In the second half of the 19th century, brown coal began to be mined in below the Ore Mountains (in the regions of Most, Chomutov and Teplice); while uranium was extracted at Jáchymov. The long-term boom of coal mining soon caused the devastation of the landscape in the immediate proximity of the coal mining district. Nevertheless at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, interest increased in the re-cultivation of the undermined territories (the brown-coal mines especially negatively marked the character of the landscape below the Ore Mountains at that time).

The fundamental transformations of the transport network in the Bohemian crown lands were connected with the economic development of society, with the process of the Industrial Revolution and with general technological progress. After 1804 road engineering saw the introduction of a new system of “voluntary competition”, which divided authorities and subjects into domains. The authority paid the expense for walled road construction – for instance, ditches, bridges and protective walls, and subjects within a radius of two miles of these shared in the construction through road subject labour (transport of materials and work). The more expensive projects were paid by the state from the transport fund and the Road Directorate oversaw the construction work. Up to the 1840s, the construction of a network of main imperial roads was completed, and the quality and density of regional communications improved. In Moravia and Silesia, however, voluntary competition did not work out: to the mid-19th century the road network advanced slowly. From the mid 1860s, the network of state roads was made even denser by district and municipal roads. They linked the regions with the railways – the main transport arteries of the country.

Rail, the new transport phenomenon, imprinted itself upon the landscape in the second half of the 19th century (the foundations of the rail network were laid in the period 1850–1880). It enabled more people to be transported faster over greater distances, not to mention materials and industrial products, thus connecting Czech commerce with foreign markets, influencing the quick growth of towns, and affecting the geographic locations of economic activities and accessed less developed regions. Among the oldest lines were the Northern Line of Emperor Ferdinand from Vienna to Břeclav and Brno from 1839 (continuing to Přerov, Olomouc, 1841 and Opava, 1855), and from Olomouc to Prague (1845), from Brno to Česká Třebová (1849), from Prague to Ústí nad Labem (1850) and from Ústí nad Labem to Dresden (1851). By the mid-1870s, the construction of the main lines was completed. Railways did not cover the Bohemian crown lands evenly: the lines were concentrated in northern, north-western and eastern Bohemia and northern Moravia in that time. This corresponded to the location of important economic regions, predominantly the coal, engineering, textile and sugar-refining industries. The least dense rail network was to be found in southern and south-eastern Bohemia and southern Moravia, i.e., agricultural areas for the most part. However, new routes, serving rail, water and road transport, took into consideration natural conditions in each region.

Up to the mid-19th century, mankind co-operated with nature to a certain degree, as yet unable to damage it significantly through its activities. Only with the onslaught of the Industrial Revolution, accompanied by large-scale encroachments on the landscape, did a new phase of its development begin after many centuries. The construction of railways, progressive mining of minerals (mainly black and brown coal), and the process of urbanization, left patent and permanent traces of human activity on the landscape. In north-western and northern Bohemia and in northern Moravia, industrial, urbanized areas sprang up connected with a new type of agriculture in the countryside, which lasted up to the mid-20th century.

9 The Landscape in Conflict with Modern Society

In the 20th century the development of the Czech landscape was linked more closely than in previous periods with political events, technological progress and the newest methods of management. Society tried to shape the modern geographic environment according to its ideas and requirements.

After 1918, the participation of man in the shaping of the landscape grew, both in positive and negative respects. The systematic electrification of rural areas began in Czechoslovakia, and this was dependent on the construction of power stations and pylons. Intense reclamation work – drainage of marshes and the cultivation of infertile and devastated lands – improved almost a quarter of a million hectares in the Czech Lands alone. The regulation of waterways continued. Among the most important areas of agricultural production was beet-farming on the Bohemian stretch of the Elbe, and in Moravia in the regions of Prostějov, Kroměříž and Kojetín; cereals (as much as 60% of arable land here was sown with cereals), and cereal and potato farming, mainly in the Bohemian-Moravian highlands. Hops, fruit, vegetables, flowers and medicinal herbs, and vines to a lesser degree, were cultivated. In the mountain regions where fodder was produced, sheep-dairy farming as a form of Alpine management. The Forestry Protection Act of 1918 helped improve the state of the forests (in the Czech Lands conifers predominated). The reconstruction of the transport system focussed on the support of routes to sea ports and on securing the transport connections of Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia with other parts of the Republic. In both countries the forest areas were also made accessible by the construction of forest routes.

During World War II, the domestic population was evacuated in many places in the Czech Lands. The space that was freed up in the areas of Sedlčany, Benešov, Neveklov, Milovice, Vyškov, the Drahany highlands, Jihlava and Brdy to the extent of about half a million hectares served to establish military training camps or the settlement of German immigrants. Military operations and air bombardment of military factories at the end of World War II led to the devastation of the landscape, not to mention loss of life and property. For instance, industries in Prague, Plzeň, Záluží near Most, in Moravia the engineering centre in Brno and nearby manufacturing in Zlín and the Ostrava area were all hit.

Agricultural collectivization after 1949 strongly affected the landscape of post-war Czechoslovakia. With the ploughing away of the balks, the elimination of many tracks and the integration of fields and meadows, more extensive plots were established. The structure of settlement changed. A considerable number of people moved to the towns and smaller towns. Extensive urbanized territories around the large industrial centres sprang up: Prague and its environs, north-western Bohemia, the regions of Plzeň, Liberec, Hradec Králové and Pardubice; in Moravia the regions of Brno, Olomouc and Ostrava; in Slovakia the regions of Bratislava, Trnava, Nitra, Košice and Prešov. In the rural municipalities the share of non-agricultural land grew. The construction of new high-ways, dam reservoirs and entire water-management systems left their mark upon the landscape. But it was mainly the reconstruction of Czechoslovak industry (with the economic orientation on mining and smelting, engineering and extensive agriculture with high energy consumption and the use of poor quality raw materials) which posed the greatest threat to the landscape, disrupting its balance and ability to regulate itself. Urbanization, industrialization and the building of communications together with farmers’ improper methods of working the land led to the uninterrupted reduction of available land. Surface mining of brown coal in northern Bohemia, where whole mountain-tops and hillsides were mined away, the flooding of abandoned mines and the elimination of residences, transformed part of the landscape into a wasteland which can be re-cultivated only with great difficulty. The higher production of sulphuric acid due to the burning of brown coal and other emissions contributed to the pollution of the air, water and land, and the damage to forestry. The landscape was also destroyed in those places where the Soviet army resided in 1968–1991.

In the last decade of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st it is already possible to see many beneficial activities of society in the landscape. Extensive re-cultivation of regions and micro regions is taking place where the mining of some minerals has ended. All eyes are on the protection and creation of the landscape, sustainable development of the landscape, landscape-planning and the creation of urbanized spaces in the landscape. Landscape, the form of which man’s activities have helped create in the Czech Lands from the Neolithic Age for seven millennia, is an integral part of the life and development of society. The transformations of the landscape are, to a greater or lesser degree, preserved in its present appearance, that is assuming that the ecological stability was not markedly disturbed or if the identity of the landscape was not lost. Those elements of the landscape that have been preserved, or the remnants of human activity, create the memory of the landscape, reminding us of society’s roots in nature and express the mutual relationship of both the phenomena which make history.

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II. Prehistory and Beginnings of Slavic Settlement (to the 8th Century)

Picture of a stone throne documenting the Indo-European ritual of enthroning of the ruler. The image represents a medieval throne belonging to the O’Neills of Clannaboy in Ireland.

1 The Significance of the Neolithic Revolution

If history is that part of the past that has some significant relationship to the present, then for the Czech Lands this surely begins in the period that archaeologists refer to as Neolithic. It is the time of the first farmers, men who were no longer only parasites on nature and the environment in general, but actively created it. Their work was the cultural landscape which in its fundamental outlines remains with us to this day. Their work was also foundational because despite the many transformations – of the economy, of settlement, of ethnicity – there is an indisputable continuity to be found in the prehistoric period of the Czech Lands to the Neolithic Age (of course not an ethnic continuity, but a continuity in patterns of settlement, and to a degree the economy also).

The Czech Neolithic Age is dated, according to the most recent findings, in the period between 6000–5500 to 4000 BCE. The first farmers came from the “fertile crescent” in the Near East. However they penetrated to our territory in a kind of intermediary phase in their movement, created by the Balkan-Ukrainian Neolithic circle. From there they spread mainly along the enormous flow of the Danube as far as eastern France, but also to the north, up to the Baltic. Their culture (characterized by what is called Linear Pottery) then developed a range of local variations. The finest of these was the culture of what is called Moravian Painted Pottery (4700–3700 BCE), which emerged from north-western Hungary. Its main features were superbly painted pottery, exuberant statuettes of female deities typical of the matrilineal cults of ancient farmers, as well as numerous annular cult objects.

At the turn of the 4th and 3rd millennia, a fundamental transformation took place mainly due to the appearance of metal-processing (copper was first) and also to agriculture, which was improved immeasurably by the implementation of tillage. At the same time, fundamental ethnic changes took place. Although in these troubled times the old ethnic group of the first farmers still survived, a new people emerged from very distant regions. The most significant of these was a mounted people with battle axes and cups decorated with the print of a comb, or cord. In the Czech Lands this culture is called the culture of Comb Ceramics, 2900–2800–2600 BCE, elsewhere it is referred to as Battle Axe culture. These warriors occupied the vast territory between the Volga and the Rhine. There is little doubt that, ethnically, they were Indo-Europeans. But at the same time, a pedestrian archer people with marvellously decorated bell-like cups (2700–2400 BCE) spread from somewhere on the Pyrenean peninsula to the Carpathian basin; these were definitely not Indo-European.

The cultural synthesis of these two currents most likely took place on Czech territory, and from this emerged the distinctive Únětice culture (2400–1550 BCE), which occupied Central Europe in its entirety – Germany, Poland, Austria and Slovakia. There is no doubt that the Indo-Europeans were the bearers of this, with their typical social organization of the “triple people” – kings, warriors and priests – even though in Únětice culture itself we see only a distinctive class of chieftains – “king-rexes” (the Indo-European word for “king” was reg).

Únětice culture (named after Únětice near Prague) was the first culture of the Bronze Age, a culture of farmers and metallurgists. It gained knowledge of bronze processing from the Near East and the eastern Mediterranean. In the civilizational context, it was a kind of distant northern outpost of advanced Aegean civilization. Some time in the period 1550–1200 BCE, the centre of gravity moved to Moravia, where the central Danubian Barrow culture emerged (it was named after its burial-mounds), and from where it consequently spread. Another barrow culture appeared in south-western Bohemia and in Bavaria. In the course of the Bronze Age, two areas of culture become apparent: the culture of the western barrow culture and that of eastern “Lusatia”. It seems that this division was the basis of the ethnogenesis of various groups of Indo-Europeans; to the east, of Veneti, an extinct people about whom little is known, and to the west, in the territory from the Rhineland to western Bohemia, originally Italics and Celts. After the exit of Italics to Italy, the Celtic ethnogenesis took place in the area where the barrow culture had been.

2 Celts in the Czech Lands

Nothing fundamental changed even with the onset of the Iron Age (what is referred to as Hallstatt Civilization; 750–400/300 BCE). The processing of iron spread and the cultural influence of the Mediterranean grew significantly, from which standpoint Central Europe was still a little known barbaric region. In society, mounted warriors evidently rose beside chieftain-kings, whose characteristic feature was the carriages. A stunning site of findings from that time (c. 500 BCE), the cave of Býčí Skála in Moravský kras (not far from Brno), has still to be decoded. Here under a layer of boulders and gravel, forty skeletons were discovered, mainly of young girls, who had neither been sacrificed nor died violent deaths. The discovery of the objects was extremely valuable: not for any treasure found, but because of the metal workshop and provisions that were present. It could not have been a residence because the cave was almost inaccessible. The mystery of the site remains unresolved. The place belonged to the “Veneti”. A similarly important “Celtic” locality was Závist near Prague from the second half of the 5th century. Here an extensive holy place was established on a large artificial plateau (“nemeton”) – evidently along Mediterranean, Etruscan or Greek lines.

The huge Celtic expansion to Italy and across the Carpathian basin in the Balkans in the 4th century BCE brought with it the thorough-going Celticization of the Czech Lands. An advance culture developed, characteristic of which was the “town” oppidum and unfortified commercial emporia, as well specialized “industrial zones”, bartering and coin-minting. After a certain time, the tribe of Boii (whose name – Boiohaemum – has stuck to this day) took control of Bohemia, while the tribe of the Volcae-Tectosages resided in Moravia. The population of the Celts in the area was constantly augmented with the arrival of Celtic groups from the west, mainly from France and Switzerland. (This was why the conquest of Gaul by Caesar in 58–51 BCE, interrupting contacts with the west, initiated the decline of the Bohemian and Moravian Celts.) Towards the end of what is called La Tène period (500–0 BCE), the civilization of oppida died out and Bohemian and Moravian Celts disappeared. They neither left the country nor were they expulsed or subjugated by the newly arrived Germans: they evidently died out as an ethnicity together with their political organization and culture.

Marlstone head of a Celtic hero found in Mšecké Žehrovice

However the tradition of Celtic La Tène civilization continued. Not in its “high” expressions but rather in simple everyday manifestations, and all the more markedly for that. Although the oppida (the best known are Hradiště above Závist near Prague and Stradonice near Beroun) died out, the tradition of settlement, and perhaps even production and commerce with the emporia and “industrial” zones (mainly iron) survived the political and economic transformation of the following centuries. La Tène was a civilization based on iron in the fullest sense of the word. Iron instruments produced in large quantities, with the most recent technology, were “standardized” and optimalized; in many cases the standard of design that was reached then has not been outstripped.

At the beginning of the Common Era, the border of the Roman Empire moved as far as the Danube and came closer to the northern Barbarians. After the following centuries, to the fall of the Empire, the life of the Barbarian societies to the north of the border was defined by multifaceted relations to the Roman Empire. The Celts were replaced in Bohemia and Moravia by the much more primitive Germans. The Marcomanni occupied Bohemia, led by King Marobudus, while Moravia, along with part of Slovakia, was held by the Quadi under King Tudrus. Marobudus soon subjugated the Quadi and began to build his great realm, which provoked the justified fears of the Romans. However he was deposed in the year 19 by the magnate Catualda, who soon after met the same fate in 21. The Romans transferred Marobud’s and Catualda’s armies to the dependent Quadi kingdom of Vannia, with which they maintained amicable relations at the time. Only in the years 166–180 did the great Marcomanni wars take place, which peaked with the expeditions to the north from the border to the Barbarian territory and in connection with this to the establishment of foot-holds on German territory. Several Roman infantry camps and permanent garrisons were discovered in south Moravia, the most noteworthy of which was Mušov, where the X. legion from Vindobona (Vienna) was located, with a number of first-class Roman findings. Not far from there the richly equipped grave of a German king was recently found – this dated from the time of the Marcomanni wars and evidently he was in some way dependent on the Romans.

3 The Transmigration of Nations

At the beginning of the first millennium, the centre of culture and power in our part of the world was the still wealthy and, in relative terms, peaceful Roman Empire, arranged around the Mediterranean. Beyond its borders, in Europe beyond the Rhine and Danube, poor tribes of Barbarians lived, attempting to plunder the Romans’ wealth. From the 3rd century, it was ever more expensive to defend against these, and developing towns were impoverished under the pressure of taxes; markets went into decline and rural areas became self-sufficient. The urban civilization of antiquity, founded on market economics, was coming to an end and changing into a civilization of farmers. The self-possession and confidence of citizens, the belief in reason and in the municipality was transformed into uncertainty and restlessness; people no longer depended on philosophy but searched for consolation in various eastern religions which promised redemption or salvation. Among these, the teachings of the small Jewish sect of Jesus of Nazareth, who was meant to become the Saviour of his faithful, eventually came out on top. Christianity spread quickly among the urban population. It was organized and formed its church. Eventually Constantine the Great (r. 306–337 CE) transformed it from a persecuted anti-state religion to the de facto established Church.

It was intended to consolidate the Empire, but it was too late for that. The Barbarian masses beyond the Danube and Rhine were on the move after 375, pushed from the east by the itinerant Huns, and fell upon the Empire, not it would seem in order to destroy it but rather to settle there as “allies” (federati). The western part of the Empire with its centre in Rome could not withstand this pressure and collapsed into a number of smaller states founded on its territory by German marauders. Only the eastern part, with its centre in Constantinople (Byzantium) remained. Far beyond these German tribes, somewhere in the expansive regions of the central Dnieper, a new Slavic-speaking people emerged at some stage during the 2nd to 4th centuries. The Romans knew nothing of them and neither does modern research have any clear ideas about their origins. All that can be said is that archaeologists are researching the existence of the oldest Slavic settlements from the end of the 5th century in the Ukraine and confirm that about the year 530 masses of Slavic marauders appeared at the border of Byzantium on the Lower Danube. The Slavic transmigration had begun, and in a relatively short period (from the 6th to 7th centuries) it poured into the greater part of Central and Eastern Europe and the entire Balkans.

The population reserves of the German transmigration were at that time exhausted and the area between the Rhine and Volga was an uninhabited waste land. Similarly, on the territory of what would become the Czech Lands there remained only a scattering of Germans. Most of them probably left Bohemia around the year 530, and some would have participated in the origin of the tribe of Bavarians, giving them their name (Baiuwarii – “men from the land of Baia-Boiohama”), and in western Moravia some of the Lombards settled, who at that time owned Lower Austria and western Hungary. When a strong current of settlers came from the Ukraine making across the Cracow region and the Moravian Pass to the rich south some time soon after 530, they found free territory only in that stretch of land beside the mountains, from the Carpathians to the Sudets, the Giant Mountains (Krkonoše) and the Ore Mountains (Krušné Hory). The Carpathian basin was occupied in the east by the German Gepids and in the west the Lombards. It was impossible to penetrate to the wealth of Italy and the Balkans. The Slavs had already come up against the Lombards in Italy, and some of them thus made for Bohemia, and from there along the Elbe to the later Serb territory between the Saale and Elbe. In 547 all these new settlers presumably received a pledge from the Gepids of safe passage across their territory, and for several years they mercilessly looted the Byzantine territory in the western Balkans. The Gepids however joined in war with the Lombards and the passage to the Balkans was closed to these Slavs. The last expedition took place in 551.

The Lombards eventually called upon the itinerant Avars, recently arrived from Central Asia, for assistance against the Gepids in 567. Although they defeated the Gepids with their help, they themselves preferred to leave for Italy, leaving the Carpathian basin to the Avars. However together with the Avars, further Slavs came from the east and these were the military allies of the Avars. They were also farmers, and because they were subjects of the Avars, they were responsible for provisioning them. At the turn of the 6th and 7th centuries there were so many of them in the Carpathian basin that they had to migrate from there. In only a few years the military groups of settlers occupied Carinthia, Croatia, southern Serbia, Moravia and western Slovakia, Bohemia, and from there Serbia between the Saale and Elbe. They mixed with the older Slavic population here, and perhaps with the remnants of the Germans, arranging their internal relations so that they joined with the large tribes. In Bohemia the tribe of Czechs emerged, and in Moravia the Moravians.

From the start the Avars supported the conquests of their Slavs, but would not tolerate their independence. When the Avars suffered a heavy defeat in 626 in their campaign against Constantinople, the Slavs, who had just organized themselves in new tribes in the occupied territories, rose up against them. The nucleus of the rising was made up of Moravians, who were joined by the Czechs and probably the Carinthians. Later the Serbs from between the Saale and Elbe joined the confederation. The leaders of the tribes elected a foreigner as leader, the Frankish merchant Samo, evidently to ensure that no one tribe dominated in the confederation. The weakened Avars were unable to suppress Samo’s rebellion, and when the Merovingian king Dagobert I made his claims on Samo’s territory, the latter was also able to resist successfully. In 631, in a battle lasting three days beneath the castle at Wogastisburg (perhaps somewhere in north-western Bohemian, in recent times thought to be at the summit of Rubín near Podbořany), he repulsed the attack of the main body of Dagobert’s army, which was making across Bohemia for southern Moravia, where Samo’s domain was most likely located. After Samo’s death (658/659) the confederation fell apart and the tribes became independent.

In continental trans-Alpine Europe from about the Bronze Age, a particular type of agriculture was established which ensured the survival of people despite the fluctuations of nature. Farmers tilled land in plots almost the size of small gardens, which provided them with relatively large returns of valuable foodstuffs (for instance pulses); they also collected forest fruits and hunted. When there were fewer people, they could plough the fields lying fallow and sow grain on them. Work productivity was of course low: peasants had to do much work to gain a small amount of provisions. Economic growth was slow, and so people embarked on uncertain migrations in pursuit of better livelihoods. After this transmigration of nations there remained overgrown islands of original agricultural land in a sea of forests covering Central Europe.

The Slavs settled there. They were few and territory was plenteous. They could thus plough tracts of fertile fallow lands and sow wheat and rye on them, neither of which had to be laboriously weeded and tended. They killed off most of the cattle which they brought from the old country and began to breed pigs which grazed in the oak forests untended and did not require much work. Of course the yields were small: 2–4 grains from each planted, but they did not have to work so much on the fields, thus productivity rose markedly. Although they production techniques were primitive, it was easy work carried out on large tracts, so that soon they had at least twice what they had before, and it is not to be wondered that they quickly began to multiply.

They lived scattered in small settlements of about 7–10 square half-buried sod cabins with an oven in the corner. They kept cereals and other items in holes in the ground. There were no other structures in the village. (The present type of village emerged only during the transformations of the 13th century.) For many years now the lands of the colonies had not been been commonage: individual families (not lines) owned them freely and privately. This ownership and freedom was protected by the tribe which had been established not through some organic growth, but through the “political” decision of all free men, owners of the village (dědina). This was because a miscellaneous group made up of remnants of the old tribes (in Bohemia for instance the Czechs, Doudlebs and probably Croatians) had come to the new settlements, and they were joined by the older settlers and perhaps also some Germans. It was necessary to unify all these and create a community which, first, would empower judicial assemblies; second, organize defence (mainly against the Avars) and conquest; third, arrange publicly beneficial works such as the establishment of roads and bridges; fourth, construct and man the border regions; and, fifth, perhaps as early as this time, but certainly from the 8th century, build typical Slavic castles of wood and earth. The assembly of all free men, the diet of the tribe, decided these issues.

The diets met at regular intervals dictated by the phases of the moon. At first one diet was enough for the tribe, but later when the tribe grew and occupied an extensive territory, diets were established for individual territories. Common matters were decided by the central diet. The diet normally elected a prince from the better and highborn families; he was above all a military commander and presumably also had responsibility for the victims sacrificed to the gods who guaranteed pieces and good crops. The main god was the pan-Slavic Perun (“Parom” is to this day a curse in Slovakia), the ruler of thunder, who resided in the heavens. His opposite, hiding beneath the ground and in the waters, was Veles; the female deity was Mokoš. The tribe was the frame for the lives of all its people, their home and “nation”, guarantor of their ownership and freedom.

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III. Great Moravia and the Beginnings of the State (9th and 10th Centuries)

Image of an Avar warrior with a captive, wrought into a golden jug no. 2 from the treasure found in Nagyszentmiklós.

1 Beginnings of Great Moravia

After the death of Samo, the important events of the Czech Lands are veiled in darkness. But Europe at this time was undergoing fundamental transformations. Thus at the turn of the 8th and 9th centuries Moravian and Bohemian Slavs found themselves in a completely different situation. Their relative prosperity led to a marked growth in their numbers and to the widespread planting of new farm lands; they grew in both economic and military terms. Throughout the Central Danube basin during the 8th century many princes emerged, settling with their followers in newly built castles. In each tribe there was a whole range of princely families which both intermarried and married far beyond the tribe. However they did not rule over clearly demarcated territories, rather they formed part of a tribe. The power of the Slav princes also grew because the heretofore strong Avar rule was weakened by internal differences. However a new potent neighbour emerged in the Empire of Charlemagne.

In the second half of the 8th century the Empire of the Franks, ruled now by the Carolingians, became the most powerful empire in Europe. Even the popes resident in Rome sought its protection, which in 800 CE resulted in the coronation by the Pope of the Frankish king, Charlemagne, as Emperor of the western part of the Roman Empire. Thus began the co-operation and competition of the two supranational powers and authorities of Western Christianity, which lasted throughout the Middle Ages. Charlemagne’s empire, after its division in 843, laid the foundations for the arrangement of nations and states in Europe which has persisted to this day. To the east, on the Elbe, the Saale, the Bohemian Forest (or Šumava) and on the plains of Central Danube basin, in the Eastern Alps to the Adriatic, Charlemagne’s empire clashed with the Slavic tribes. From this encounter, Central Europe emerged as an area defined by its position between western and eastern Europe.

Charlemagne, in protracted and repeated battles, subjugated Saxony, annexed Bavaria and clashed with the Avars. In order to secure the new border from the Baltic to the Adriatic, he created a chain of dependent Slavic tribes. In 805 it was the turn of the Czechs. Charlemagne’s troops invaded the “Czech plain” in the Ohře (Eger) region, and laid unsuccessful siege to Canburg Castle. Although Lech, an important Czech leader, fell in battle, the Franks were not victorious. Their campaign had to be repeated the following year and the Czechs, having suffered the repeated devastation of their lands, submitted and swore to pay tributes to the Empire. The Moravians in similar fashion recognized Frankish formal sovereignty some time in this period.

A disc featuring a falconer from Staré Město near Uherské Hradiště, 9th century

Cast silver cross with crucified Jesus, found in Mikulčice

A solidus of the Byzantine Emperor Michael III, found in a grave in Mikulčice. It was inserted in a dead person’s mouth.

In the years 791–805 Charlemagne was able to destroy the Avars with surprising ease. However it was not Charlemagne who reaped the fruits of this victory, but the Slavic princes in that area, who invaded the Avars and collected much booty in the form of people, livestock and valuables. The Moravian princes who resided in castles on the Morava river, and in Mikulčice, Uherské Hradiště and Olomouc mainly gained the most. It strengthened their standing to such an extent that they were able to attempt to take power in the tribe and establish a state of the kind they had seen in the Frankish Empire. The princes began to build stone churches and to establish priests there from Bavaria, Northern Italy and from Byzantine Dalmatia. At their head stood Mojmír I (r. c. 830–846), who not only succeeded in breaking the power of tribal institutions, but also in pushing through the “official” baptism “of all Moravians”, which was carried out by the Bishop of Passau in Bavaria (831).

Under the leadership of Mojmír, the Moravians expanded into the Avar territory of south-west Slovakia and also into the region of Slavic Nitra north of there. Pribina, probably a Moravian, became prince in Nitra, and he had promised to embrace Christianity and also build his church, but he came into conflict with Mojmír and was expelled from the land some time in the years 833–836. After many adventures and wanderings, he eventually wound up as a Frankish vassal at Balaton, where he built up his own principality about his new castle Blatnohrad-Mosaburg.

The Empire of the Franks was at this time even further weakened by internal disputes, and thus it lost control of the Bohemians and seemingly also of the Moravians. However when these struggles ended with the division of the Empire in the Treaty of Verdun in 843, the energetic Louis the German received the newly emerged eastern Germanic sector. He immediately proceeded to renew the authority of the Empire among the tribes on the eastern border. As early as 844 he prepared an offensive against the Polabian Slavs and there was little doubt that the Bohemians would be next. Surmising that Christianity might provide them with defence, as it had the Moravians, in 845 they sent fourteen of their princes to Louis the Great in Regensburg to be christened. Louis, surprised by this, agreed. However the Bohemians were bitterly disappointed the next year. Louis attacked Moravia in 846, regardless of the fact that they were Christians, and deposed Mojmír I, who was replaced by his nephew Rostislav (r. 846–869). The disappointed and insulted Bohemians rejected Christianity, which had proved to be no protection, and fell upon Louis’s troops returning from Moravia. From that time they continued to revolt against the Empire and also remained allies with the Moravians.

Rostislav used his good relationship with Louis the German to consolidate his rule and mainly to build up the structures of the state. We know little of this, except that he understood the importance to the state of an independent ecclesiastical institution. The Pope was required to establish this and it was subordinate to him alone; bishoprics were subordinate to an archbishop in the Empire. But this was a long way off. First it was necessary to unify and arrange ecclesiastical instruction and practice in the land and above all acquire a sufficient number of educated priests. Thus Rostislav turned to the Pope in 861 with a request for a teacher to whom these very tasks could be entrusted. Receiving no answer, he then requested a teacher from Byzantine.

Emperor Michael III and Patriarch Photios chose two brothers for this task – Constantine and Methodius. Although Greeks, they were from Salonica where Slavic was in everyday use, so they knew this language well. Constantine carried out the task conscientiously and during his time with Methodius in Moravia in the years 863–867 he trained a large number of priests. Their education was facilitated by the use of their native tongue. There was nothing particularly unusual about this – similar attempts to raise the status of vernacular tongues were under way in the same period in the Empire of Louis the German. Constantine however created a special alphabet to accommodate the speech sounds of the Slavic language, i.e., Glagolitic. Most importantly, the brothers began to use Slavic in the liturgy, that is, during the celebration of mass, in a period when only Latin or Greek was permitted. This led to differences with native clerics who were subordinate to the Bishop of Passau.

The disputes ended when Constantine and Methodius declared their task complete in 867 and set out for Constantinople. With them they brought their disciples who they wished to have ordained. On their way they stopped at Pribina’s principality, which at that time was governed by his son Kocel, and there they won his admiration and friendship. While waiting in Venice for the ship that would take them to Constantinople, they heard that Emperor Michael III had been murdered and Patriarch Photios removed, and so in fact they had no-one to return to. This is why they gratefully accepted an invitation to Rome from Pope Nicholas I. Before they reached the city, Nicholas died; however his successor Hadrian II received them with the same favour. Constantine secured the ordination of his students as well as the acceptance of his methods of instruction, i.e., above all his alphabet, if not the liturgy in the Slavic language. Constantine, now ailing, and having fulfilled his task, entered a Greek monastery in Rome, dying on February 14, 869. The brothers’ mission was to end there and Methodius awaited the fate of an emigrant.

We are unsure why, but in the spring of 869 Methodius became a key player in the political machinations which the Papacy was engaged in with the Patriarchate in Constantinople concerning claims to the northern Balkans (old Roman Illyria) and in which the Bulgar khan Boris was involved (he was at that time in the process of being received into Christianity and was balancing between Rome and Constantinople). Whether it originated with the Pope, or with Methodius himself (though it was unlikely to have been Kocel, and certainly not Rostislav, who knew nothing of these matters), the idea emerged to renew the old Roman archbishopric in Sirmium (Sremska Mitrovica near Belgrade). However, at this time, it was held by the Bulgars who had not yet decided for ecclesiastical obedience to Rome. The true seat was then to have become Blatnohrad, which however was not located in Illyria, but in Old Pannonia. Methodius thus became Archbishop of Sirmium with its seat in Pannonia. He truly did wish to settle in Blatnohrad, but this meant that he would encroach upon the rights of the Frankish church in Pannonia, which had gained the territory with the agreement of the Pope after the defeat of the Avars. This did not seemingly refer to Moravia, which in any case had other worries.

The dispute between Rostislav and Louis the Great came to a point in 864, when Louis besieged Rostislav in Děvín (near Bratislava) and forced him into subjection. But he refused to give in, allying himself with neighbouring tribes, above all the Bohemians and Serbs, who together successfully resisted the Empire. However, they weakened from within. From at least the year 867, Rostislav’s nephew Svatopluk became the governor of one administrative territory of the Great Moravian state, and he soon tried to instigate his own policies there. We are not sure where Svatopluk’s territory exactly lay, but it was probably in Nitra. In 869, Louis the German, with a combined attack on Serbia, the Bohemia, Moravia and Svatopluk’s territory, attempted to defeat Rostislav. In military terms it was, in the end, something of a fiasco, but the Bohemians and Svatopluk above all brokered a separate armistice. With Svatopluk’s independent activity, Great Moravia thus fell apart. Although Rostislav attempted to deceive and murder Svatopluk, he himself fell into a trap, and Svatopluk handed him over to the Empire. Louis the German had him tried, blinded and imprisoned in a monastery, where Rostislav most likely died soon after. Svatopluk however did not succeed him as governor, because Louis’s son Carloman attacked Moravia and occupied it, encountering no resistance. He had Svatopluk imprisoned in 870 and the Moravians, who supposed that he had died, rose up and proved their allegiance to Mojmír’s line by electing as their prince Slavomír, Rostislav’s relation (regardless of the fact that he was an ordained priest). It seemed to Carloman that the situation would calm down if he placed Svatopluk at the head of the army which was to pacify Moravia. However when the troops besieged “Rostislav’s old town”, the castle of Valy at Mikulčice, Svatopluk crossed over to the side of the besieged and together they beat back the Frankish troops.

In the following two years, together with the Czechs and Serbs, Svatopluk resisted all the Empire’s attempts at subjugation. However, he did not try to exploit his victory and wisely made peace with Louis the German in Forchheim in 874. He swore allegiance to him and an annual payment in exchange for Louis leaving him freedom in his dealings.

2 Great Moravia between Byzantium and the Empire of the Franks

Relations with the Empire settled down after the peace made at Forchheim in 874, and Svatopluk systematically took advantage of this situation to make widespread military expeditions. At some stage in the period 874–880 he attacked the Vistulans in southern Poland (in the greater Cracow area), capturing the local prince and sending him to be christened in Moravia. It was merely one of the wars with “pagans” which he was engaged upon at that time. The hardest was clearly the struggle for eastern Slovakia and the watershed of the upper Tisza around the year 880. Svatopluk forced the local tribe, or tribes, to accept Christianity. An extremely large struggle took place in the years 882 and 883 for Frankish Pannonia; however we do not know if he annexed it to his territory. He exploited the emergent enmity for the Empire in order to occupy Bohemia, which the Empire considered its subject land. Again, he used the policy of Christianization; in 883 he had one of the Bohemian princes, Přemysl Bořivoj, christened, and he placed him at the head of the other Bohemian princes as his second-in-command.

Together with the Bohemians he most likely took control of Serbia. Whether and how he took power in Silesia and in Lusatia we do not know. Nevertheless by the year 880, a great empire had emerged, far surpassing the territory of Moravia. A significant role was played by the Christianizing of the subjugated tribes. At first there were difficulties with this policy. In 871 he expelled the Bavarian priests from the land and the Moravian church once again suffered from a lack of priests. He thus turned, like Rostislav before him, to Rome. Here John VIII drew attention to the fact that somewhere in Swabia an archbishop who had once sojourned in Moravia was imprisoned. It was Methodius, who had been captured by the Franks in Blatnohrad (Moosburg, today Zalavár) and sentenced by the Bavarian bishops for illegally seizing their territory in Pannonia. He had vainly attempted to defend himself by claiming he had been entrusted with the task by the Pope; the bishops were able to present evidence that the Pope had endorsed their possession of Pannonia much earlier. He ended up imprisoned in a monastery in Swabia (most likely Ellwangen) and tried without success to send secret messengers with complaints to Rome, where the plan to establish the Pannonian-Sirmian archbishopric had already been abandoned.

Only in 872 when Svatopluk asked John VIII to resolve ecclesiastical relations in Moravia, did the Pope take up the cause of Methodius and work for his release. Some time in the year 873 Methodius was in Moravia, not however as the Archbishop of Moravia, but of Sirmium, which he had never seen, and Pannonia, which he was not permitted to enter, even though he tried to function as Bishop of Pannonia from Moravia. In Moravia Svatopluk made priests and churches subordinate to him “on all castles”, that is, the entire Moravian church. This, however, did not mean the whole people, many of whom were to a degree still pagan, not only in outlying rural areas, but also in part in the castle centres. In Mikulčice, only 500 m from the main basilica, there stood a pagan sacrificial site that was in constant use throughout the whole time that Methodius was there. We do not know if the state was forced to make some kind of compromise and if the church went along with this.

Methodius did not fight the pagans, or at least not to the best of our knowledge. However he was engaged in constant conflicts with local priests and did not get on well with the ruler. The cause of this was, once again, the Slavonic liturgy. Although Methodius, when released, had promised the Pope that he would relinquish it, he did not keep this promise and thus gave his opponents an opportunity to accuse him of breaking with orthodoxy. At the heart of these conflicts was Methodius’s claim on Pannonia which he had not given up, and which was repellent to the Bavarian clergy, and the claim of the Bishop of Passau on Moravia. The deepest cause however was the profound differences between – in Methodius’s view the primitive, though, in Central European terms, more germane – practice of Western Christianity, and the resilient Byzantine orthodoxy, which he would not and could not adjust to suit the barbarians.

When Christianity became the established religion in the Roman Empire in the fourth century, court theologians justified the Emperor’s rule of the Church by saying that he had personal responsibility for the salvation of his subjects, and that thus his measures were not merely administrative and political actions, but directly served God’s plan. Also following from this was the idea that only those loyal to the Emperor could be saved. This however turned out to be an illusion in the Western Empire: the Empire fell apart and demonstrated that it was not a decisive agent in God’s plan for the salvation of humanity. Western theologians, above all St Augustine, thus proclaimed that the state and earthly powers are of no significance in God’s plan, designating responsibility for salvation to each human individual with free will. Later this emphasis on free individuals became the basis of western Christianity, including its political culture. Even when the Church co-operated with the state, it maintained its distance from the latter. In the eastern part of the Empire, in Byzantium, things did not move in this direction: the older view of the role of the Emperor and the state was strengthened. Thus Byzantium did not even attempt to send a mission to the barbarians. After all, only those who were loyal to Caesar and also sufficiently cultured (i.e., shared the Hellenic culture of the Empire) could be saved.

Of course, Constantine and Methodius, the educated sons of a lower imperial clerk, shared these opinions. However, when Methodius was confronted with the task of professionally preparing priests to serve a state of unknown Slavic barbarians, he was able to rise above usual prejudices to such an extent when he justified his attempt with the profoundly humanistic idea of the equality of all nations before God (even those of the barbarians), an idea which had its roots in early Christianity. In his view, this could be achieved by means of the transmission of Christian education in their own language. The spreading of Christianity thus would also be the spreading of education. This was an exceptional approach in Byzantium, where no-one bothered about the barbarians, as well as in the west where Christianization was for the most part a practical business of introducing “Christian morality”. Constantine held a deep conviction that the Word stored in books could elevate people and should be made available to all, and this is a timeless and universal message, valid even now.

On the other hand, Constantine and Methodius’s values were typical of Byzantine education insofar as they understood their idea as orthodoxy and as they declared their opponents heretics for holding to the widespread teaching that mass could be served only in the three holy tongues – Hebrew, Greek and Latin. They conducted a bitter struggle about the serving of mass in the Slavic tongue, which of course complicated their mission greatly. There were no objections to orthography in vernaculars – the Church of the Eastern Franks had already made such an attempt.

These arguments were not of much importance to Svatopluk, and in fact along with his princes he favoured the Latin mass. He required Methodius above all so that he could implement Rostislav’s old plan of establishing an independent archbishopric in Moravia. Thus Methodius, as already noted, was not the Archbishop of Moravia: his archdiocese was in Pannonia. Svatopluk achieved this in 880 with a deft diplomatic manoeuvre, as he handed over his lands to St Peter, the patron saint of the Papacy, extricating himself thus from the bonds upon earthly rulers, freeing himself above all from the Empire. Great Moravia thus became a full and equal member of the family of European Christian states. To consolidate this position for the future, it had its own archbishopric, answerable only to the Pope. Methodius became the Archbishop of Moravia and received a subordinate bishop with a seat in Nitra. The Pope’s permission to use the Slavonic liturgy in addition to the Latin was also a personal victory for Methodius.

At the same time, this was the beginning of Methodius’s defeat. Latin priests in Nitra, with Bishop Wiching at their head, were not to be reconciled with this new state of affairs and brought the conflict before the Pope. In 884 this dispute with Wiching went so far that Methodius excommunicated him. Stephen V, who Svatopluk designated as judge in the matter, decided in the end against Methodius and the Slavonic liturgy. While acknowledging the usefulness of Slavonic orthography, he forbade its use in the liturgy. Methodius was unable to appeal the decision as he died on 6 April 885. Svatopluk, tired of the arguments of his priest, which brought only difficulties, resolved the matter by releasing all priests in his empire who kept the Slavonic liturgy. Most of them made their way to Bulgaria, where the Old Slavonic orthography was preserved and by that means transmitted from there to Russia. Croatia became the second centre of Church Slavonic.

The political power of the Papacy in this time weakened and Svatopluk thus gradually returned to the old policy of settlement with Kingdom of the Eastern Franks. In 890, he agreed with King Arnulf that the latter would acknowledge Svatopluk’s conquest (mainly his occupation of Bohemia), and that Svatopluk would remain loyal to him. But Arnulf did not intend to hold to this and he attempted (in the years 892 and 893) to establish military domination. Although Svatopluk was able to withstand this easily, he died in 894 and this event was a greater threat to his realm than foreign armies.

It turned out that the state had been held together more by Svatopluk’s strong personality that any functioning institutions. Mojmír II (r. 894–906), on his accession to his father’s throne, met with great difficulties. There was strong opposition in support of his younger brother; dependent tribes also tried to break away; and of course the threat of the Eastern Franks. Although Mojmír was unable to prevent the breakaway of the Czechs (895) and the Serbs (897), he launched a promising campaign to regain them. The Magyar army, which appeared in 896 in the Carpathian basin, driven from its settlements on the steppe of southern Russia by the Pechenegs, became his allies and assigned him to camps near the Tisza. He eventually succeeded in implementing Rostislav’s and Svatopluk’s old plan, when Pope John IX in 898 named a new archbishop and ordained four further bishops. Their names are not known to us and we do not know where they resided; we only know that they were Latin bishops.

All seemed to be going well. Mojmír was able to rid himself of the troublesome Magyars who, bribed by Arnulf with large sums in 898, left for Italy to fight against his opponent Berengar. But then Arnulf suddenly died in the year 899 and the Magyars returned and occupied Pannonia in 900. It was clear that they were dangerous. For this reason Mojmír agreed in 901 with the Bavarians on a joint effort against the Magyars, who in the mean time had brought their people into the country (up to this they had remained beyond the Carpathians) and began taking control. In the year 906, they struck against Moravia and most likely in a single great battle (perhaps somewhere in the area of the Slovak stretch of the Danube) they broke Mojmír’s army and slaughtered many of his magnates. Perhaps it was here also that Mojmír himself fell. The Bavarians recovered only in the following year; their great campaign was however defeated utterly on 4 August 907 near Bratislava. The fall of Great Moravia was thus confirmed. Everything went, all that had made it a state: ruler, princes and magnates, many of whom fled to neighbouring countries. Of the entire Moravian territory, the Magyars occupied only the southern parts of Slovakia; normal life continued in Moravia despite the frequent ravages and regardless of the Magyars. The state structures however were completely destroyed, presumably because the disintegration of the state was accelerated by the pagan uprising. Along with the Moravians’ state, the Moravians themselves as an ethnicity died out. Today’s ethnic group, Moravian and also Slovak, emerged much later with no direct connection with these old Moravians.

* * *

The rise and fall of the Moravian state, with its population growth and relative agricultural prosperity, enabled the maintenance of a substantial fighting force, magnates and other inhabitants of castle towns. The axis of the settlement were the valleys with great rivers and the most fertile lands (which were, however, difficult to plough). Lands with softer soil were in short supply, which necessitated more intense tillage with better implements. For this reason the iron plough prevailed and iron instruments also. The production of iron significantly rose. Iron, in the form of axe-shaped talents, also became a substitute form of specie, alongside fine woven linen scarves (the Czech word to pay, platit, thus comes from the word for linen, plátno). A brisk business was done in the markets, and the most important market went on for three days, and took place monthly in Svatopluk’s seat (evidently in Mikulčice). This contributed also to the development of crafts for the market and also for princes and magnates.

At first glance, the emergence of the state did not have a profound effect on Moravian tribal society, but it did change its foundations. Outside this society, there were only slaves and chattels: the personal freedom of the Moravians remained intact. On the one hand each prince merely levied taxes and duties, and on the other relieved them of part of their executive power over shared concerns. However, given that the ruler took part of his usufruct from their villages and that he forced them to this, it meant that he infringed some of their proprietorial rights and restricted their freedoms. Because the princes stripped the tribal diet of its powers, ordinary Moravians could not defend themselves against these restrictions or decide otherwise about them. The extent of Moravia was thus ensured by this involuntary loss of freedom and restriction of Moravians’ property rights.

The emergence of the state also impacted upon its organization. Those princes who joined together to rule the tribe ruled the state. Together with the ruler, they decided on all matters of state and they also had the main share in its administration. Apart from the princes, there was a class of rich magnates, resident not only in castle towns, where we find their courts and churches, but also in the countryside. However they did not have any large farmsteads on which to base their power: rather they lived on state pensions. The core of the state was formed by a group of castle towns in southern Moravia, Nitra being the important centre of these connected territories. Smaller marginal territorial units were connected to this core, administrated by the magistrates of the ruler, and called by the title of župa, originally an Avar word. The ruler’s representative was one of these magistrates, most likely called a duke. The main task of the territorial administration was the collection of taxes. The castles were also the centres of ecclesiastical administration. During the rules of Mojmír and Rostislav this administration was answerable to the Bishop of Passau, who established in Moravia his archipresbytery (office of the bishop’s representative). During Svatopluk’s rule, ecclesiastical administration was transferred to Methodius.

State finances served above all to build up a large state retinue, a well armed and well trained professional army, which was fed, armed and maintained by the ruler. This was made up of the armoured equestrian core of the army, supplemented by infantry regiments of normal Moravians. The castle towns served most of the needs of the army (one specialized base of the standing army was Pohansko Castle near Břeclav). It is however possible that Svatopluk already had begun to assign individual settlements the responsibilities attendant on the army’s needs, establishing what could be called a service organization, which became known later in the Přemyslid state.

3 Political Unification of the Czech Lands

The collapse of Great Moravia after 906 was only one part of the general collapse of Charlemagne’s organization of Europe. The constant forays of Magyars and Normans from Scandinavia were only an external cause. The method of government itself had caved in, which had been inherited from the Late Roman Empire and which granted the state, with the Emperor at its head, the right to rule the lives of all his subjects. Among those were the members of an emergent aristocracy. They were state magistrates and lived above all from their share of the finances collected by the state. In the west, in France, the collapse of the state led to almost complete lawlessness, from which the rule of former magistrates, who “privatized” what remained of the state, slowly emerged. Later in Germany, power was concentrated around the duchies which had come from the tribes of Bavaria, Saxony, Swabia and the Franks. These joined in a loose arrangement with a king at its head, from which emerged the empire of the Ottonian dynasty.

Bohemia entered this crucial time as a tribe, but soon there were relatively strong princedoms within it. While the rich and powerful Moravian princes joined together and created a state as early as the beginning of the 9th century, in Bohemia they were as yet too weak. They closed themselves off with their retinues in the new castles and gradually built up their position in the surrounding territories. Within the tribe princedoms thus emerged, but these princes were not untrammelled governors since the people still had some measure of democratic, tribal freedom. Thus no principality could prevail over another: the princes always negotiated in matters of Bohemian interest as one, and also collectively commanded the Bohemian army.

The Bohemians supported Great Moravia in their fight with the Kingdom of the Eastern Franks. However during the rule of Svatopluk this alliance segued into dependence, which was sealed by the Moravian ruler in about 883 with the violent annexation of Bohemia. He was unable to rule them directly as he did not have sufficient warriors, so he chose Bořivoj I, of the Přemyslids, as ruler of the Central Bohemian principality (from 872–889). He had him christened probably by 883 by Methodius and made him his deputy in Bohemia, with the other princes subordinate to him. Bořivoj resided in Levý Hradec, where he also had the first church built in Bohemia. The diet of princes however did not approve of its superior’s daring manoeuvre and removed him from his position. Bořivoj had to flee to Moravia, returning the following year with Svatopluk’s army. In order to confirm his victory over his people’s paganism and the tribal structures, he first constructed the Church of the Virgin Mary on the site which was both the old sacrificial field and the site of the princes’ diet. Some time later in this place his son Spytihněv had a new castle built – Prague. None of this would have been possible without the example and support of Great Moravia. The emergent Czech state, in the newly founded Prague, was linked directly to the statehood of Great Moravia.

Levý Hradec, the first Christian church in Bohemia

In 895, the Bohemians threw off the rule of Great Moravia and joined with the Kingdom of the Eastern Franks. The Přemyslids however maintained their position among the Bohemian princes (in the words of the Frankish annals, duces Boemanorum). Bořivoj’s son, Spytihněv I (894–915) consolidated his inherited statelet by building a chain of castles, centres of “state” and ecclesiastical administration on the pattern of Great Moravia. He subordinated his principality to the Bavarian bishopric in Regensburg, which then set up its archipresbytery. The other Bohemian princes evidently formally recognized his government, while maintaining their own independence. During the rule of Vratislav I (r. 915–921) and Wenceslas (Václav; r. 921–935), the grandson of Bořivoj, Bohemia was constituted of state-organized Central Bohemia and loosely dependent principalities, living in tribal conditions and paganism. The Přemyslids depended upon Bavaria, the core of the decaying Kingdom of the Eastern Franks, competing under the governance of Duke Arnulf with Saxony, whose duke, Henry I (r. 919–936), became king in 919. Fearing Saxony, the Bohemians fully supported Arnulf. However, in 921, he unexpectedly closed an agreement with Henry I, and recognized his sovereignty.

Vratislav had just died in Prague and since Wenceslas had not yet come of age his mother Drahomíra ruled in his name. She refused Arnulf’s decision to recognize the sovereignty of Henry I, but Ludmila, Bořivoj’s widow, opposed her; Ludmila was supported in this by Bavarian princes active in Prague. The dispute came to a head in 921 when Drahomíra had Ludmila murdered and expelled the Bavarian princes from the country. However, the following year Arnulf, with military aid, forced her to recognize his alliance with Henry I and receive the expelled princes once again. Among those very princes Ludmila gained the reputation of saint. Wenceslas, although he fully supported co-operation with Western Christendom, also hesitated in a similar fashion, and was cautious in his relations with aggressive Saxony. Although in 929 he was forced by the combined armies of Henry and Arnulf to give his allegiance to Henry’s kingdom and pay a tribute as a mark of this, they granted him a standing similar to that of the other dukes of Henry’s kingdom.

It was thus necessary to decide whether, with Bavaria, to join in the emergent super-national empire (the German nation did not yet exist) or to go the way of full or limited independence. The disparate, half statist, half Christian gathering of principalities which made up Bohemia at that time could not assert itself. In any case it was necessary to remove the other non-Přemyslid principalities by force, build a unified state administration and gain the means to create an army capable of resisting the powerful neighbour. Wenceslas was against such a risky undertaking, proposed by his brother Boleslav. The disputes ended on September 28, 935 with Boleslav’s murder of his brother in the castle of Stará Boleslav.

The tragedy of Stará Boleslav meant the end of the process of the emergence of the Czech state, begun by Bořivoj I. Boleslav I (r. 935–972) more than succeeded in building a unified state. Although some Bohemian princes looked to Henry’s successor Otto I for support, he was able to destroy all the principalities. He build new castles all over Bohemia in which his magistrates resided and where there were also churches. A large unified state administration thus emerged and concomitantly the whole country, if only in formal terms, was finally baptized. Boleslav made all freemen liable to a tax called the peace tax, i.e., a payment for the prince’s protection and more generally for his administration of public matters. It was paid in part in silver coins (denars brought by merchants), in part in the local substitute specie, fine-woven scarves, which were ten to a denar. Soon after, before 965, Boleslav then began to mint his own denar coins, after the Bavarian fashion.

Murder of St. Wenceslas in the Wolfenbüttel Manuscript of the Gumpold Legend, early 11th century.

From the taxes and contributions of the people collected in the castle, Boleslav now had the means to build a large retinue. He succeeded in gathering several thousand excellently armed and trained warriors, a number that was prodigious for that time. There was further revenue especially from considerable international trade. It was at this time, in the second decade of the 10th century, that the large trade road moved from the Danube to Prague. This led from the Cordovan caliphate in what is today Spain, through France, Mainz and Regensburg to Prague, and from there through Silesia, then Moravia to Cracow and from there on to Kiev to the market of the Khazars on the lower Volga, which was in turn connected to the Middle East and China. Merchants paid ten percent of the value of their goods for protection, and so Boleslav attempted to gain control over as much of the road as he could.

All this, however, was not sufficient for the upkeep of the army and retinue; booty and tributes from subjugated lands were necessary, and to a degree the army had to maintain itself. Conquests were thus of crucial importance to Boleslav’s state. His army conquered Silesia, the northern part of Moravia along with regions of the Slovak Váh river and Cracow, to the Bug and Styr rivers, where the borders of the Czech state met with Kievan Russia. Thus there emerged a kingdom reminiscent of Svatopluk’s with its centre in Bohemia and with subordinate territories governed evidently by garrisons in the main castles, such as Wrocław, Olomouc and Cracow.

Up to the mid-10th century, this formation was not threatened from without. The entire territory between the Elbe and the Bug was settled by tribes that were weaker; although the Magyars undertook raids throughout Europe, they did not thus fundamentally threaten the unity and stability of the states there. The single serious force was the emergent kingdom of Otto I, whose enmity Boleslav had incurred from the first moments of his rule. For fourteen years he fought with Otto I and only in 950 did he subjugate himself to him, recognizing Otto’s sovereignty, and like Wenceslas agreeing to pay him tribute. In fact he favoured the policy for which he killed his brother. He acknowledged that the new Czech state could not exist beside a powerful neighbour, even after regularizing relations with it. The fundamental difference was however that Bohemia in those fourteen years became a strong state, in no danger of disappearing into the other kingdom.

The situation became complicated very soon. Otto I, with Boleslav’s assistance, defeated the Magyars in a battle on the Lech river near Augsburg and definitively brought an end to their incursions. The Magyars were forced to begin to build their own state. At the same time, in the region of Poznań and Gniezno in Greater Poland, another state began to form under the Piast dynasty. A serious competitor for the Czech state and kingdom thus emerged. In 963 Mieszko I clashed with the margraves of Otto I on the Oder, who governed the subjugated territories of the Polabian Slavs, and joined in alliance with Otto. He also joined in alliance with Bohemia, and sealed this in 965 through marriage with Doubrava, the sister of Boleslav I. Thus the division of spheres of influence was established, albeit at the expense of the Polabian Slavs.

Part of the agreement was that Mieszko would be baptized. This was done with the participation of the Bohemian church and in 968 the first bishop was appointed to his land. Mieszko thus all at once gained more than Boleslav, whose territory was still subject to the bishopric in Regensburg. Thus, through his sister Mlada in Rome and in person with Otto, who in the meantime had become Emperor (962), he negotiated bishoprics for Prague and Moravia. He evidently justified his request with reference to the fact that the Moravian bishopric (and archbishopric) already existed and need only be renewed. However he did not live to see the results, dying in 972. Agreement between the Pope and the Emperor on the Prague and Moravian bishoprics (with its seat in Olomouc) was reached in 973 by his son Boleslav II (r. 972–999). In 976 the first Prague bishop, Thietmar of Saxony (Dětmar), was ordained, in addition to an unknown Moravian bishop.

After Thietmar’s death in 982 Vojtěch (later known as St Adalbert), the son of Prince Slavník, was elected Bishop of Prague. Since Slavník was allied with the Přemyslids, Boleslav I entrusted him with the administration of Libice, and thus also Boleslav II gave priority to a native son over foreigners when filling the post of bishop. The new bishop felt himself to be a prince in the same way that bishops in Otto’s kingdom were, and attempted to enjoy the same rights. He minted his own specie according to their example and attempted above all to reform long-standing, lax ecclesiastical practices (which had originated to an extent in Great Moravia) along the lines of reforming demands made at that time in the Empire. He suppressed the sale of Christian prisoners to pagans, as well as to Jewish and Arab merchants; he opposed polygamy, the marriage of priests and the unconscientious establishment of feast days. However he met resistance, mainly from the magnates, who had enriched themselves by trading in slaves, and alienated the princes and their ruler himself. The disputes went so far that Adalbert eventually had to resign his office and in 988 left for Rome, where he entered a monastery.

4 The Crisis of 1000 and Its Resolution

Some time before the year 990, Mieszko I suddenly attacked and conquered Silesia and Cracow; Boleslav II never succeeded in winning back these territories. To consolidate the victory, Mieszko I dedicated his lands to St Peter in 990, and thus positioned them directly under the protection of the Papacy. This however involved Adalbert in complex issues, as Silesia and greater Cracow were in part his diocese, and he had to canonically agree to any changes. The Pope evidently applied pressure and Adalbert eventually agreed. From the Bohemian point of view he thus became a traitor. Boleslav II however despite this recalled Adalbert, conceded to his demands and set up the first Benedictine monastery in Bohemia in 993 in Břevnov near Prague.

The cessation of conquests and losses of rich territories provoked alarm among the magnates, and tension rose in the country; this was accompanied by disputes with the bishop and his brother, Soběslav, in Libice. In 994 Adalbert once again left the land for his monastery in Rome. Immediately after this in 995, Boleslav’s regiments attacked Libice and murdered Adalbert’s brothers resident there at the time. In Rome Adalbert met with the young Otto III (r. 983–1002) on the occasion of the Emperor’s coronation. He talked long with the Emperor of plans for the renewal of the Western Empire in close political and ideological co-operation with the Papacy. The Empire had already been reinstated by Otto I in 962, but in practical terms it meant only the “German” empire. Otto III was thinking about an empire that was in fact Roman, and recognized throughout the West. Adalbert proposed that the Emperor would look for recognition among the rulers of the new Christian states in Central Europe, Bohemia, Poland and Hungary.

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