Prague’s history is a sequence of moments when it briefly became the centre of Europe, followed by long periods when it was governed from somewhere else. The buildings record both.
This is the narrative version; the dated one is in the timeline.
The castle on the bluff
A Slavic settlement, then a Přemyslid castle from around 880 above a ford on the Vltava. Wenceslas — the duke of the carol, murdered by his brother in 935 — became the patron saint and the national symbol; his chapel is the finest room in St Vitus Cathedral.
The Přemyslid dynasty ruled Bohemia for four centuries and ran out of male heirs in 1306.
Charles IV
The high point, and the reason so much of the city exists.
Charles of Luxembourg, raised in France, became King of Bohemia in 1346 and Holy Roman Emperor in 1355, and he made Prague his imperial capital. In thirty years he founded Charles University in 1348, the first north of the Alps and east of Paris; laid out the New Town, an enormous planned extension; began St Vitus Cathedral; and built Charles Bridge and Karlštejn.
Prague at his death was one of the largest cities in Europe.
The Hussites
Jan Hus, a preacher and rector of the university, attacked church corruption a century before Luther. He was summoned to the Council of Constance under a safe conduct, tried and burned at the stake in 1415.
Bohemia rose. In 1419 a crowd threw Catholic councillors from the windows of the New Town Hall — the First Defenestration of Prague — and the Hussite Wars followed, in which Czech peasant armies under Jan Žižka repeatedly destroyed the crusading forces sent against them.
The result was a Bohemia that was substantially Protestant a century before the Reformation, and a national memory that Czechs return to constantly.
The Habsburgs and the Second Defenestration
The Habsburgs acquired the Bohemian crown in 1526. Rudolf II moved the imperial court back to Prague in 1583 and turned it into a centre of art, astronomy and alchemy — Tycho Brahe and Kepler both worked here.
In 1618 Protestant nobles threw two imperial governors and a secretary out of a window of Prague Castle. All three survived. This is the Second Defenestration, and it began the Thirty Years’ War.
The Bohemian revolt was crushed at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620. Twenty-seven leaders were executed in the Old Town Square in 1621 — the crosses are in the pavement. Protestantism was suppressed, the nobility was replaced with Catholic loyalists, Czech was displaced by German, and Bohemia was ruled from Vienna for three hundred years.
The baroque city you walk through was built by the winners.
The National Revival
From the late eighteenth century, a movement to restore Czech as a literary language — dictionaries, grammars, histories, and then a theatre. The National Theatre, paid for by public subscription and rebuilt by public subscription after it burned, is the physical form of that argument.
Smetana, Dvořák and later Janáček are part of the same project.
The twentieth century, at speed
1918 — Czechoslovakia is founded from the collapsing empire, with Tomáš Masaryk as president. A functioning democracy and one of the ten most industrialised economies in the world.
1938 — the Munich Agreement hands the Sudetenland to Germany without Czechoslovak participation. 1939 — the rest is occupied.
1942 — Reinhard Heydrich is assassinated in Prague; the reprisals destroy Lidice and Ležáky entirely and kill thousands.
1945 — liberation, and the expulsion of around three million ethnic Germans.
1948 — the communist coup. 1968 — the Prague Spring and the invasion. 1989 — the Velvet Revolution, eleven days, no deaths.
1993 — the Velvet Divorce; Czechia and Slovakia separate peacefully.
2004 — EU accession, and the arrival of the visitor numbers that now define the centre.