Kingdom of Bohemia

A kingdom inside the Holy Roman Empire whose king was one of the seven who elected the emperor, and which twice set Europe on fire over religion. The Premyslid dukes were raised to hereditary kings in 1198, and under Ottokar II in the thirteenth century Bohemia ran from Silesia to the Adriatic and was rich enough on Kutna Hora silver to make its king a candidate for the imperial crown. He was passed over and killed at Marchfeld by the Habsburg who got it. Under the Luxembourg dynasty Prague became an imperial capital: Charles IV, king of Bohemia and emperor, founded the first university in central Europe there in 1348. His son's reign produced Jan Hus, burned at Constance in 1415 despite a safe conduct, and the Hussite wars that followed were the first time an army of peasants and townsmen with war-wagons destroyed crusading knights repeatedly for fifteen years. The estates elected Frederick of the Palatinate in 1619 in place of the Habsburg claimant, and the Thirty Years' War began with that choice. Defeat at the White Mountain in 1620 ended Bohemian religious liberty and elective kingship together: twenty-seven leaders were executed in Prague, the nobility was replaced wholesale, and the crown became hereditary in the Habsburg line. The kingdom survived as a title inside Austria until 1918. Bohemia's wealth was mineral before it was industrial. The silver of Kutna Hora paid for the Prague groschen, a coin accepted across central Europe for two centuries, and the mines were regulated by a royal code that other states copied. Its position also made it unusual constitutionally: the estates elected the king, the crown lands included Moravia, Silesia and Lusatia, and the Bohemian vote in the imperial election gave a Slavic-speaking kingdom a permanent say in who ruled Germany. The nineteenth century turned the same territory into the industrial core of the Habsburg monarchy, and the national revival that grew alongside the factories produced the state that replaced the kingdom in 1918.

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