Přemyslid dukes turned Bohemia into an imperial electorate
Bohemia’s kingdom, ancestor of the Czech Republic, sat inside the Holy Roman Empire with its king among the prince-electors. Přemysl Ottokar I raised the duchy to kingdom in 1198; Luxembourg, Jagiellon, and Habsburg dynasties followed until Czechoslovak independence after World War I.
A few earlier Bohemian rulers, Vratislaus II and Vladislaus II, held a personal royal title in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but the hereditary kingdom dates from 1198. That year Přemysl Ottokar I backed Philip of Swabia against Otto IV for the imperial throne and was recognised as king in return. Otto IV and Pope Innocent III accepted his status in 1204, and Frederick II's Golden Bull of Sicily confirmed it in 1212. Under those terms the Bohemian king owed the empire nothing beyond attending imperial councils, and the emperor lost the right to approve each new ruler or name the bishop of Prague. Charles IV strengthened that independence further with his own golden bull in 1356.
The thirteenth century was the Přemyslids' most dynamic period. Frederick II was absorbed in Mediterranean affairs, the Great Interregnum of 1254 to 1273 hobbled imperial power, and the Mongol invasions distracted Hungary and Poland. Ottokar's daughter Agnes, later a saint, refused to marry the emperor and in 1233 founded the Knights of the Cross with the Red Star, Bohemia's first homegrown military order.
Bohemia was an imperial state and its king one of the electors. The Bohemian Crown at times also took in Moravia, Silesia, Lusatia and slices of Saxony, Brandenburg and Bavaria. After the Přemyslids came the Luxembourgs, the Jagiellonians and, from 1526, the Habsburgs. Several Bohemian kings became emperor, and Prague served as the imperial seat in the late fourteenth century and again around 1600.
Language tracked politics. Czech dominated the Diet and nobility until 1627, when the Bohemian Revolt was crushed; German was then made equal and eventually took over until the nineteenth-century Czech National Revival. The kingdom passed into the Austrian Empire shortly before 1806 and into Austria-Hungary from 1867, keeping its name as a crown land. After the Central Powers lost the First World War, it became the heart of the new Czechoslovak Republic.
Source: Kingdom of Bohemia
