3 The Bohemian Context
Bohemia disappeared from the map in 1918, when it was incorporated
into Czechoslovakia, which a British prime minister later described as ‘a
far away country’ ruled by ‘people of whom we know nothing’.^1 Three
hundred years earlier, in 1618, it was much more familiar to princes
and politicians, as Prague had been the seat of the Holy Roman Emperor
Rudolf II and a centre of European affairs for most of the past forty years.
The modern reader, however, may need a little help with the histori-
cal geography. The western two-thirds of the modern Czech Republic
was then the kingdom of Bohemia, with its capital at Prague and its
second city at Pilsen (Plzen), while the eastern third was the margra-ˇ
vate of Moravia, with its capital at Olmütz (Olomouc) although Brünn
(Brno) was the largest city. The lands of the Bohemian crown, as they
were known, comprised both Bohemia and Moravia, together with the
duchy of Silesia and the margravates of Upper and Lower Lusatia. Silesia
is the south-western part of modern Poland, and its capital was then
Breslau (Wroclaw), while the two sections of Lusatia occupy the corner
of modern Germany east of Dresden, centred on the towns of Bautzen
and Lübben respectively. The association was loose, however, and there
were both ethnic and linguistic differences between the territories, each
of which had an independent administration. Thus the link was princi-
pally the person of the ruling prince, the king of Bohemia, who was also
duke of Silesia and margrave of Moravia and the two Lusatias.
Bohemia’s ambiguous relationship with the Empire goes right back to
the beginning, when Charlemagne extended his Frankish kingdom up
to the boundary of the still-tribal region known as Bohemia in the latter
part of the eighth century. Rather than seeking to incorporate it into his
empire, however, he left it as part of a broad band of tributary territory
to the east, from the Adriatic to the Baltic, although there are differing
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