Czechia

From Great Moravia and the crown of Saint Wenceslas to the heart of Europe, by way of Hus, White Mountain and two peaceful revolutions.

The history of the Czech lands runs from the Slavic state of Great Moravia, where Saints Cyril and Methodius first brought Christianity and a written Slavic liturgy in the ninth century, to the modern republic at the centre of the European Union. The Premyslid dukes and their patron Saint Wenceslas forged a duchy that became the Kingdom of Bohemia, which reached its zenith under Charles IV, who made Prague an imperial capital and founded central Europe's first university in 1348. Bohemia produced one of Europe's earliest religious reformations under Jan Hus, whose burning in 1415 set off the Hussite Wars; two centuries later the Defenestration of Prague in 1618 helped ignite the Thirty Years' War, and defeat at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620 brought three centuries of Habsburg and Catholic domination. A nineteenth-century National Revival rebuilt the Czech language and nation, and in 1918 the multi-ethnic state of Czechoslovakia was founded under Tomas Garrigue Masaryk. That state was dismembered by the Munich Agreement of 1938 and occupied by Nazi Germany; after the war some three million Sudeten Germans were expelled, a communist coup followed in 1948, the Prague Spring of 1968 was crushed by Warsaw Pact tanks, and the Velvet Revolution of 1989 restored democracy. On 1 January 1993 Czechoslovakia divided peacefully into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and the new state joined NATO in 1999 and the European Union in 2004.