History of Prague

Several thousand years ago, trade routes connecting southern and northern Europe passed through this area, following the course of the river.

He and his wife Ludmila (who became a patron saint of Bohemia after her death) were baptised by Metodej, who (together with his brother Cyril) brought orthodox Christianity and a new alphabet called Glagolitic script to Moravia in 863 which would later be suppressed by the latin Franks.

[citation needed] By the early 10th century, the area around and below Prague Castle had developed into an important trading centre, where merchants from all over Europe gathered.

In 965, an Arab merchant and traveller, called Ibrahim ibn Ya'qub wrote: "Prague is built from stone and lime, and it has the biggest trade centre.

"[citation needed] The Duchy earned a signficiant income from the Prague slave trade, trafficking Pagan Slavs, termed as saqaliba, to slavery in al-Andalus in the 10th- and 11th-centuries.

In 1212, Bohemia became a hereditary kingdom when Prince Přemysl Otakar I rose to the title of King by inheritance from Frederick II (Emperor from 1215), which was legalised in the document called the "Golden Bull of Sicily".

Rudolf Habsburg was a weak ruler which was the primary reason the electors chose him, so they could keep their power and land they acquired from the Great Interregnum (1250–73).

During the reign of King Wenceslas IV—Václav IV—(1378–1419), Master Jan Hus, a preacher and the university's rector, held his sermons in Prague in the Bethlehem Chapel, speaking in Czech to enlarge as much as possible the diffusion of his ideas about the reformation of the church.

His execution in 1415 in Constance (accused of heresy) led four years later to the Hussite Wars (following the defenestration, when the people rebelled under the command of the Prague priest Jan Želivský and threw the city's councillors from the New Town Hall).

In 1420, peasant rebels, led by the famous general Jan Žižka, along with Hussite troops, defeated Sigismund (Zikmund, son of Charles IV) in the Battle of Vítkov Mountain.

The husband of Sigismund's daughter Elizabeth, Albert II, Duke of Austria, became the Bohemian king for two years (until his death).

When he died at 17 years old, the nobleman George of Poděbrady, former adviser of Ladislaus, was chosen as the Bohemian king both by the Catholics and by the Utraquist Hussites.

Emperor Rudolf II lived in Prague Castle, where he held his bizarre courts of astrologers, magicians and other strange figures.

But it was a prosperous period for the city; famous people living there included the astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, the painters Giuseppe Arcimboldo, B. Spranger, Hans von Aachen, J. Heintz and others.

In 1609, under the influence of the Protestant Estates, Rudolf II (a devout Catholic), issued an "Imperial Charter of the Emperor" in which he legalised extensive religious freedoms unparalleled in the Europe of that period.

After the Peace of Westphalia, Ferdinand II moved the court to Vienna, and Prague began a steady decline which reduced the population from the 60,000 it had had in the years before the war to 20,000.

The expulsion of Jews from Prague by Maria Theresa of Austria in 1745 based on their alleged collaboration with the Prussian army was a severe blow to the flourishing Jewish community.

Many of these were rich merchants who, together with noblemen, enriched the city with a host of palaces, churches and gardens, creating a Baroque style renowned throughout the world.

The Industrial Revolution had a strong effect in Prague, as factories could take advantage of the coal mines and ironworks of the nearby region.

Ferdinand (related also to Jagellon, Luxemburg and Premyslovec Dynasties) was married to Sophie von Chotek from a Czech aristocratic family.

As a result, the German minority along with the German-speaking Jewish community remained mainly in the central, ancient parts of city, while the Czechs had a near-absolute majority in the fast-growing suburbs of Prague.

From 1939, when the country was occupied by Nazi Germany, and during World War II, most Jews either fled the city or were killed in the Holocaust.

Most of the Jews living in Prague after the war emigrated during the years of Communism, particularly after the communist coup, the establishment of Israel in 1948, and the Soviet invasion in 1968.

Prague was a target of several allied bombings, the deadliest one occurring on February 14, 1945, when large parts of the city centre were destroyed, leaving over 700 people dead and nearly 1200 injured.

General Eisenhower requested the Soviet Chief of Staff to permit them to press forward, but was informed that American help was not needed (a prior agreement from the Yalta Conference was that Bohemia would be liberated by the Red Army).

German occupation caused the death of 77,297 Czechoslovak Jews, whose names are inscribed on walls of the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague.

German-speaking Prague citizens were gathered brutally and expelled from their home city, similar to the expulsions carried out all over Czechoslovakia and Eastern Europe.

This spurred the new secretary of the Communist Party, Alexander Dubček to proclaim a new phase in the city's and country's life, beginning the short-lived season of "socialism with a human face".

The Soviet Union and the rest of the Warsaw Pact, except for Romania, reacted, occupying Czechoslovakia and the capital in August 1968, suppressing any attempt at innovation under the treads of their tanks.

The coal burnt during the communist period was a major source of air pollution that corroded and spotted building façades, giving Prague the look of a dark, dirty city.