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The “Good King” (actually a prince) was the second Christian ruler of Czech lands, succeeding his grandfather Bořivoj. Wenceslas solidified ties with Rome and with German merchants. Murdered by his brother in 935, he was later canonized.

Grandson of an emperor and son of a Přemyslid princess, Charles could hardly help rising to both the Roman and Bohemian thrones in 1333. Prague became the seat of imperial power under his reign, as well as an archbishopric and the home of central Europe’s first university.

After the Church Council at Constance burned Catholic reformer Jan Hus at the stake in 1415 (see Jan Hus Memorial), his followers literally beat their ploughshares into swords and rebelled against both church and crown. The resulting animosity between Protestant Czechs and German Catholics would rage for centuries.

The melancholy emperor (1576–1611) was not much good as a statesman and was under threat from his ambitious brother, Matthias, but he was a liberal benefactor of the arts and sciences. Among his achievements were the support of Johannes Kepler’s studies of planetary motion. He also promoted religious freedom.

The Protestant nobility and the emperor continued to provoke each other until hostilities broke into open war. Imperial forces devastated the Czechs in the first battle of the Thirty Years’ War in 1620. Czech lands were re-Catholicized, but resentment against Vienna and Rome continued to smoulder.

While World War I raged, National Revival leaders such as Tomáš Masaryk turned to the United States for support for an independent Czechoslovakia. As the war drew to a close in 1918, the republic of Czechoslovakia was born.

The First Republic had barely stretched its legs when the Munich Agreement of 1938 gave Czech lands to Nazi Germany. Nearly 80,000 Czechs died in the Holocaust (see The Jews in Prague). After the war, the nation exacted revenge by expelling its German citizens.

Grateful to the Red Army for liberating Prague in 1945, Czechoslovakia gave Soviet Communism the benefit of the doubt in the February 1948 elections.

In 1968 First Secretary Alexandr Dubček introduced economic and social reforms that did not sit well with Moscow. Warsaw-Pact tanks rolled through Prague streets killing more than 100 protestors.

After 10 days of mass protests in 1989, the Communist government bowed to the population’s indignation. Czechs proudly recall that not a window was broken during the revolt.