Czech history: from a Hussite country to the least religious in Europe

Who lived in the Czech lands first

The record of settlement here is very long. A simple chopper dated to around 800,000 BC was found at Red Hill in Brno, stone tools roughly 120,000 years old came out of the Kůlna Cave in central Moravia, and a Neanderthal skeleton was recovered from a layer at the same site about 50,000 years old. The Gravettian sites at Dolní Věstonice, Pavlov and Předmostí make south Moravia a principal archaeological area for the period; the ceramic Venus of Dolní Věstonice, made between 29,000 and 25,000 BC, came from that group.

The first inhabitants known by name were Celts. The Boii, who arrived during the fifth century BC, gave the western land its Latin name Boiohaemum, the land of the Boii, which became Bohemia and eventually became the English name for the whole country. Germanic tribes pushed the Celts out before the first century AD. The Marcomanni fought Rome across south Moravia for two centuries, and a Roman winter camp near Mušov was built to hold around 20,000 soldiers.

Slavic tribes moved in from the east during the sixth century AD, displaced by Langobards and Thuringians and immediately in conflict with the Avars. In 623 they revolted, and the Frankish merchant Samo, who had joined them, was made their ruler. His realm held off Dagobert I at the Battle of Wogastisburg in 631 and dissolved when he died. Great Moravia followed in the 830s, centred on Moravia and what is now western Slovakia. Rastislav invited Cyril and Methodius from Thessaloniki in 863, and the Glagolitic alphabet they devised was the first script written for a Slavic language. Magyar raids brought Great Moravia down at the start of the tenth century.

How Bohemia became a kingdom and kept it

Bořivoj, the first Přemyslid known by name, moved his seat to Prague Castle in 880. His son Spytihněv used the collapse of Great Moravia to swear allegiance to the East Frankish king Arnulf of Carinthia in 895, and the duchy that grew from that decision spent the next nine centuries attached to what became the Holy Roman Empire. Wenceslaus, later canonised, ruled from 921 and was murdered by his brother Boleslaus I, who took Moravia, Silesia and the country around Kraków. The Bishopric of Prague was founded in 973, subordinate to Mainz. In 1002 Bohemia formally became part of the Empire.

The royal title arrived in stages. Ottokar I held it from 1198, and in 1212 he extracted the Golden Bull of Sicily from Emperor Frederick II, confirming royal status for himself and his descendants. His reign also opened German settlement of the Bohemian periphery, which over the following centuries changed the language map of the country in ways that mattered enormously in the twentieth. The Mongols raided Moravia in the 1240s and were beaten at Olomouc. Huge silver deposits found at Kutná Hora at the end of the thirteenth century paid for the Prague groschen, a coin that circulated across central Europe.

Dynasties ran out with unusual regularity, and each time the estates or a marriage treaty supplied a new one from outside.

Wenceslaus III, the last male Přemyslid of the main line, was murdered by unknown assassins at Olomouc in 1306. Louis II, the last Jagiellon, drowned retreating from the Battle of Mohács in 1526, and the Lands of the Bohemian Crown passed by prior treaty to his brother-in-law Ferdinand I of Habsburg. Neither succession was fought over on Czech soil, and both handed the country to a court that sat somewhere else.

Why Prague became the capital of an empire

Charles IV had run the administration of the Czech lands since 1333, because his father John of Luxembourg was blind, permanently abroad and unpopular with the Czech nobility. In 1346 Pope Clement VI declared the sitting emperor a heretic and demanded a fresh election; Charles was the papal candidate and was crowned King of the Romans at Bonn that November, weeks before his father died at Crécy. He then did something none of his predecessors had done, which was to live in Prague.

The results were structural. He laid out the New Town, founded the University of Prague in 1348, the first university north of the Alps and east of Paris, and raised Prague to an archbishopric of its own rather than a dependency of Mainz. He was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Rome in 1355 and ruled as emperor for more than twenty years from a Bohemian capital.

The most durable act was legal rather than architectural. Charles established the Lands of the Bohemian Crown, Corona regni Bohemiae, which made the core territories the property of the Bohemian monarchy itself rather than of a king or a dynasty. That mattered because kings and dynasties kept being replaced and the crown lands did not. The Bohemian ruler also held one of the electoral votes of the Holy Roman Empire, a position the country kept until the Empire dissolved in 1806.

His son Wenceslaus IV inherited none of the competence. The torture and murder of the vicar-general John of Nepomuk in 1393 provoked a noble rebellion, Wenceslaus was imprisoned twice, and in 1400 he was deposed as Holy Roman Emperor for failing to settle the Papal Schism. He surrendered the imperial title to his brother Sigismund and kept Bohemia, which turned out to be the more combustible half.

What the Hussites won and then lost

Church reform in Bohemia was already under way in the late fourteenth century. Sigismund called the Council of Constance in 1414 to end the schism, and it also condemned the teaching of Jan Hus, rector of the University of Prague. Hus refused to retract and was burnt alive in 1415.

What followed was not a persecution but a war his side won. The Hussite Wars ran from 1419 to 1434. Jan Žižka, a commander with no aristocratic standing, took Kutná Hora on 21 December 1421 and is still honoured as a national hero. Between 1419 and 1434 the Hussites defeated five separate crusades organised against them by Sigismund. The fighting ended at Lipany in 1434 when the moderate Utraquists changed sides and allied with Rome; Utraquism was then accepted as a distinct form of Christianity permitted in Bohemia, and the remaining Hussite groups were banned. For the next two centuries roughly 90% of the population of Bohemia and Moravia were reckoned Hussites.

A second strand went further. The pacifist thinker Petr Chelčický inspired the Moravian Brethren, who by the middle of the fifteenth century had separated from the Roman church altogether.

The political settlement held for over a century. The estates elected George of Poděbrady king in 1458, and his attempt to keep peace between Catholics and Hussites earned him the name King of two peoples; it also earned him excommunication in 1466 and a Hungarian invasion. In 1485, at the Peace of Kutná Hora, Vladislaus II confirmed the right of every Bohemian nobleman and commoner to adhere to either Hussitism or Catholicism. Bohemia had a legally guaranteed choice of confession more than sixty years before the Peace of Augsburg gave the German princes theirs.

Habsburg pressure began immediately after 1526. Ferdinand I punished the estates for refusing to campaign against Protestant Saxony, curtailed the privileges of the towns, and invited the Jesuits to Prague in 1556 to begin recatholicisation. It went slowly, and it went backwards under his successors: Maximilian II approved the Czech Confession, a document confirming religious freedom for non-Utraquist Protestants as well, and reaffirmed the Statuta Judaeorum protecting Jews in the crown lands. Rudolf II moved the royal court to Prague in 1583 and signed the Letter of Majesty guaranteeing religious liberty in 1609.

How White Mountain reversed a country's religion

Ferdinand II was confirmed as successor only after promising to respect the Letter of Majesty. A year after his coronation he banned the building of Protestant churches on royal land. The Protestant nobility read that as a breach of the guarantee, threw the royal governors out of a window of Prague Castle in 1618, and elected Frederick V of the Palatinate king in place of the Habsburgs. That defenestration is the conventional start of the Thirty Years' War.

The revolt was settled quickly. Spanish forces in the Netherlands kept the Protestant Union from joining it, and on 8 November 1620 the army of the Catholic League under Tilly routed the Bohemian forces at White Mountain, a low plateau west of Prague, in about an hour. Prague fell at once.

The reckoning was systematic rather than punitive. Twenty-seven leaders of the revolt were publicly beheaded in 1621. The estates of everyone who had supported them were confiscated and sold to loyal nobles, frequently foreigners with no connection to the country. Protestant nobles and townsmen were given the choice of converting to Catholicism or leaving. Every Christian confession except Catholicism was prohibited outright. Constitutional rule in Bohemia ended, and the authoritarian arrangement that replaced it lasted until the reconstruction of central Europe after the First World War.

Across the Thirty Years' War as a whole, the population of the Czech lands fell by about a third through expulsion, fighting, disease and famine. Czech historians call the period from 1620 to the late eighteenth century Temno, the Darkness. It is also, awkwardly, the period of the country's Baroque, and the two readings of it have never been reconciled: the same decades produced the emigration of the Protestant intelligentsia and the churches that are now the country's best-known buildings.

Why Czech had to be rebuilt as a language

Because the elite that had spoken Czech was gone, replaced by an imported and German-speaking one, the language survived mainly in the countryside and had to be reconstructed as a literary and scientific medium from there. That work took a century.

The pressure got worse first. Joseph II, ruling alone from 1780, abolished serfdom, issued a Patent of Toleration restoring some religious freedom, and dissolved every monastic order not engaged in education, healthcare or science; the same centralising instinct led him to push German across all his territories as the single language of administration. Maria Theresa had already lost Silesia to Prussia in the 1740s, which ended the territorial unity of the Lands of the Bohemian Crown. When the Holy Roman Empire dissolved in 1806, Bohemia lost its electoral vote and its own representation in the Imperial Diet, and the crown lands became simply provinces of the Austrian Empire.

The Czech National Revival was the answer, and it was carried by writers rather than by politicians, because there was no Czech political representation to carry it. The linguists Josef Dobrovský and Josef Jungmann rebuilt the vocabulary, the historian and politician František Palacký supplied the national narrative, and the writer Božena Němcová and the journalist Karel Havlíček Borovský supplied the readership. The movement first peaked in the revolutions of 1848, when Prague demanded liberal reform and autonomy for the Bohemian Crown inside the Austrian Empire and was suppressed.

The following two decades made the Czech position worse in a very particular way. After Austria lost to Prussia in 1866, the Hungarians forced the Compromise of 1867 and got half the monarchy. Czech representatives who expected a comparable settlement were left out, and the Czech lands stayed under direct Austrian control until 1918. Meanwhile the same territory was industrialising fast, and the population of the industrial centres doubled or tripled within a few decades at the end of the nineteenth century.

By 1914 many Czech nationalists treated the war as an opening. Desertion among Czech conscripts was common, Czechoslovak Legions formed to fight alongside the Entente, and in the Cleveland Agreement of 1915 Czech and Slovak representatives abroad declared the goal of a common state. When the war ended in 1918, the Kingdom of Bohemia, which had existed in law since 1212, ceased to exist.

How Czechoslovakia was dismantled and put back together

The republic was declared in October 1918, and it was the only country in central and eastern Europe to remain a parliamentary democracy for the whole of the interwar period. It was also a state whose borders had been drawn around historic crown lands rather than around a language. In 1920 its territory held large populations who were neither Czech nor Slovak: Germans made up 22.95% of the whole, Hungarians 5.47% and Ruthenians 3.39%. The German-speaking share was concentrated in the borderlands, which is also where the mountains and the fortifications were.

What the Munich Agreement settled

On 30 September 1938 Germany, Britain, France and Italy agreed that Germany should annex the Sudetenland, the German-speaking districts of northern and western Bohemia and northern Moravia that had been incorporated into Czechoslovakia in 1918 and 1919. Czechoslovakia was neither a signatory nor consulted, and the objections it raised were ignored. Its western allies had been the foundation of its foreign policy for twenty years, and the loss of the borderlands left what remained indefensible.

The rump Second Republic lasted about half a year. Slovakia declared independence as a German client state on 14 March 1939, German troops entered Bohemia and Moravia the following day, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was proclaimed.

How the Protectorate governed the Czech lands

The Protectorate was annexed directly to the Reich under a Reich Protector, with its own president and prime minister subordinated to him. Because prewar Czechoslovakia was heavily industrialised, it became a major centre of German military production. Generalplan Ost provided for the extermination, expulsion, Germanisation or enslavement of most or all Czechs. Repression sharpened after Czech resistance fighters assassinated Reinhard Heydrich in 1942.

Around 118,310 people defined as Jews lived in the Protectorate after the breakup of Czechoslovakia, and roughly 26,000 managed to emigrate before 1941. Between 24 November 1941 and 15 April 1945 German authorities deported between 73,608 and 73,958 Protectorate Jews to the camp-ghetto at Terezín, north of Prague, and the large majority of the Protectorate's Jewish population was murdered.

German occupation ended on 9 May 1945 with the Prague uprising and the arrival of Soviet and American armies. What followed was the last of the removals: almost all of the country's German speakers were expelled, first in local violence and then through the organised transfer confirmed at Potsdam by the Soviet Union, the United States and Britain. Within seven years the country had lost its borderlands, most of its Jewish population and the whole of the German-speaking population that had lived there since the thirteenth century.

How communist rule ended and the country split

The Communist Party seized power by coup in February 1948, and Klement Gottwald became the first communist president. Industry was nationalised and farms collectivised on the Soviet model, and Czechoslovakia became part of the Eastern Bloc. The attempt to reform the system during the Prague Spring of 1968 was ended by the invasion of Warsaw Pact armies, and party rule continued until the Velvet Revolution of November 1989 brought it down. Václav Havel, one of the leaders of the dissent, became the first president of the restored democracy.

The split with Slovakia was settled by negotiation at the end of 1992 rather than by a vote. Czechoslovakia was dissolved on 31 December 1992 and the Czech Republic began on 1 January 1993. It joined the United Nations on 19 January 1993, NATO on 12 March 1999, the European Union on 1 May 2004 and the Schengen Area on 21 December 2007, and held its first direct presidential election in 2013. The Czech short name Česko was adopted in 1993; the government directed the use of Czechia as the official English short name in 2016.

The country's religion moved as far as its borders did, and faster. Catholicism was compulsory from 1620 and normal until living memory: more than 90% of Czechs identified as Christians in the first half of the twentieth century. Three censuses since the end of communist rule record what happened next.

In the 2011 census 34% of the population stated they had no religion and a further 45% declined to answer the question. Pew Research, surveying eighteen countries in central and eastern Europe in 2015 and 2016, found 72% of Czech adults calling themselves atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular, and Czechia was the only country in that survey where most adults were religiously unaffiliated.

Making the country Catholic in 1620 took an army, a scaffold and a confiscation of nearly every large estate in Bohemia. Emptying the churches again took four centuries and no instrument of state at all. What the two have in common is the outcome that runs through the whole record: the territory stays, and what is inside it is replaced.