sonal expression of plays, lyric poetry, and
novels.
SEEALSO: Dante Alighieri; Florence; hu-
manism; Petrarch
Bohemia ............................................
Kingdom of central Europe and a leading
northern center of literature and scholar-
ship during the Renaissance. The name of
Bohemia comes from the Boii, a tribe of
Celts that inhabited this region in the time
of the Roman Empire. After the fall of the
western Roman Empire in the fifth cen-
tury, Bohemia was settled by Slavs from
the east. The Przemyslid dynasty estab-
lished itself with the reign of King Bole-
slav I in the ninth century, when the
people of Bohemia converted to Christian-
ity. From about this time, the kings of Bo-
hemia were subject to the ultimate author-
ity of the Holy Roman emperor, a fact that
led to a number of religious and political
conflicts during the Renaissance.
After the invasion of the Mongols in
the thirteenth century, the western and
northern borderlands of Bohemia were
settled by large numbers of Germans. In
1310, King John I established the Luxem-
bourg dynasty. Bohemia became an im-
portant center of learning in the middle of
the fourteenth century with the founding
of the University of Prague during the
reign of Charles IV. Charles ascended to
the throne of the Holy Roman Empire and
brought Bohemia its greatest success, con-
trolling several regions of Germany, the
duchy of Luxembourg, Moravia to the east,
and Silesia in what is now southern Po-
land.
Bohemia’s tradition of scholarship and
religious tolerance was put to the test early
in the fifteenth century, when Jan Hus, the
rector of the University of Prague, began
expounding a doctrine of defiance of the
Catholic authorities. Invited to the Coun-
cil of Constance, Hus was taken prisoner,
tried, and burned at the stake for his he-
retical views, a punishment that was car-
ried out on the orders of Emperor
Sigismund. The death of Jan Hus inspired
a violent rebellion in Bohemia, known as
the Hussite Wars, and also served as an in-
spiration to the Protestant movement of
Martin Luther in sixteenth-century Ger-
many. Although the anti-Catholic forces
were eventually defeated, Bohemia decreed
freedom of religion within its borders in a
document known as the Basel Compact.
In 1526 with the death of King Louis
in battle against the Turks, Bohemia was
joined to the Habsburg Empire of Austria
under its new king, the Habsburg mon-
arch Ferdinand I. The Catholic emperors,
as kings of Bohemia, often found them-
selves at odds with their subjects over reli-
gious doctrine. One such conflict between
King Ferdinand II and the Protestants of
Bohemia touched off the Thirty Years’ War
that would devastate central Europe from
1618 until 1648.
Bohemia was a nation quite open to
the new artistic and intellectual move-
ments of the Renaissance. Printing presses
arrived in Prague, the Bohemian capital,
by the 1470s, helping disseminate essays
and poetry in Latin and scholarly works in
the Czech language. Bohemian translators
rendered ancient Latin and Greek texts, as
well as the works of contemporary Renais-
sance authors such as Martin Luther and
Erasmus, into the Czech language. The his-
torian Daniel Veleslavina published works
of history, travel, and geography; other
scholarly works covered law, medicine, and
botany; the astronomers Johannes Kepler
and Tycho Brahe both lived and worked at
the court of Rudolf II in Prague. More dar-Bohemia