Czech lands

• 1. Introduction

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  The Czech lands sit at the heart of Europe, and for centuries their fate was shaped by kings, emperors, and wars that drew and redrew the map of an entire continent. Three historical regions make up this territory: Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia. Together they formed the Czech part of Czechoslovakia in 1919, and on the 1st of January 1993 they became the Czech Republic.

  But the story behind that tidy modern boundary is anything but tidy. It runs from Celtic tribes who occupied Bohemia before the common era, through a dynasty called the Přemyslids who carved out a duchy in the shadow of Hungarian invasions, to a Holy Roman Emperor who tried to bind these lands together by law. It passes through a war over Silesia that cost the Habsburg queen Maria Theresa most of that region in 1742, and through a peace treaty that handed two entire territories to a neighboring electorate. What held all of this together, and what eventually fell away, is a question about geography, law, language, and the particular way empires are built and lost.

• 2. The Naming Problem

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  Czech has a word for Bohemia proper: Čechy. But the adjective český means both "Bohemian" and "Czech" at the same time, which has created real confusion about what, exactly, the phrase "Czech lands" refers to. The official non-auxiliary term in Czech geographical terminology for the present-day territory of Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia is Česko. That word is documented as far back as 1704, though at that time it described only Bohemia, not the broader combination of three lands.

  During the period of the First and Second Czechoslovak Republics, the same three regions were frequently called the Historical lands, particularly when mentioned alongside Slovakia. The distinction mattered because Slovakia occupied a different legal position: it had never been an autonomous historical region within the Kingdom of Hungary the way Bohemia had been within the Bohemian Crown. The naming question was not merely academic; it tracked which territories carried formal historical status and which did not.

• 3. Deep Roots

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  Celtic people known as the Boii settled Bohemia from the 5th century BC until the 2nd century AD. Germanic tribes followed them: the Marcomanni, the Quadi, the Lombards, and others, before those groups moved westward during the Migration Period. At the opening of the 5th century, the population fell sharply, and mythology preserves the name of a chieftain called Čech as a founding figure.

  The first Western Slavs arrived in the second half of the 6th century. As the Great Moravian realm declined under Hungarian invasions in the 9th and 10th centuries, the Czech Přemyslid dynasty established the Duchy of Bohemia. Backed by the East Frankish kings, they overcame resistance from the Bohemian nobility and pushed their authority eastward over neighboring Moravia. Silesia, the region north of the Sudetes mountain range, followed a different path: the Polish Piast dynasty had governed it from the 10th century onward, and its eventual shift into the Bohemian orbit would take another three centuries.

• 4. Building the Bohemian Crown

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  In 1198, Duke Ottokar I of Bohemia received the royal title from the German anti-king Philip of Swabia. His Kingdom of Bohemia absorbed the Margraviate of Moravia, which had been established in 1182, along with Kłodzko Land, later called the County of Kladsko. German colonists, who had already been living in Prague since the early 12th century, were invited by the king to settle the mountainous border areas during the Ostsiedlung from the second half of the 13th century onward.

  The Silesian Piast princes had grown distant from the fragmenting Kingdom of Poland. When the House of Luxembourg took the Bohemian crown in 1310, nearly all Silesian dukes pledged allegiance to King John the Blind. By 1335 the Polish king Casimir III the Great formally renounced Silesia through the Treaty of Trentschin. King John had also acquired the lands of Bautzen and Görlitz, later called Upper Lusatia, in 1319 and 1329.

  His son Charles IV, who became King of the Romans in 1346, incorporated the Silesian and Lusatian estates into the Bohemian Crown and upon his coronation as Holy Roman Emperor confirmed that these lands were indivisible from and affiliated with the Holy Roman Empire. In 1367, Charles IV purchased the former March of Lusatia, or Lower Lusatia, in the northwest. The Bohemian Crown at its fullest extent was a construction that stretched from Prague Castle north to the Lusatian border.

• 5. Losses and Boundaries

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  Two events between the 17th and 18th centuries stripped the Bohemian Crown of its outermost territories and left a boundary close to the one the Czech Republic holds today. The first was the Thirty Years' War. Its settlement, the Peace of Prague, transferred both Lusatias to the Electorate of Saxony in 1635, ending more than three centuries of Bohemian rule over those lands.

  The second was the First Silesian War of 1742, part of the broader War of the Austrian Succession. Prussian king Frederick the Great conquered the bulk of Silesia, and the Habsburg queen Maria Theresa lost it. After that defeat, the remaining lands of the Bohemian Crown, Bohemia itself, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia, were more or less coterminous with the territory of the modern Czech Republic. Emperor Charles IV's 14th-century legal framework had imagined a larger domain; by the mid-18th century, history had compressed it to a smaller one.

  The House of Habsburg had taken the Bohemian crown in 1526, and from that point the Bohemian crown lands were folded into a larger structure alongside the Kingdom of Hungary and the Austrian hereditary lands. That Habsburg monarchy held together until its collapse in 1918, after which the Czech and Slovak lands were reorganized into Czechoslovakia.

• 6. The Arms They Carry

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  The coat of arms of the Czech Republic contains within it the arms of all three constituent lands: Bohemia proper, Moravia, and Czech Silesia. Bohemia's arms descended from those of the Kingdom of Bohemia; Moravia's came from the Moravian margraviate. Czech Silesia's arms originated as the heraldic symbol for the whole historical region of Silesia, much of which now lies within Poland. Those arms on the modern Czech shield are a quiet record of a territorial history that the borders themselves can no longer fully contain.