Bohemia still carries the name of Celts who left it two thousand years ago
The heart of the Czech Republic is named after a Celtic tribe, the Boii, who were beaten by Rome in northern Italy and later drifted away. Roman writers called their old homeland Boiohaemum. Germanic, Slavic and Habsburg rulers came and went, but the Celtic label stuck.
Bohemia is the largest and westernmost historical region of the Czech Republic, covering 52,065 square kilometres and home to about 6.9 million of the country's 10.9 million people. Ranges including the Giant Mountains, the Ore Mountains and the Bohemian Forest mark most of its edges, with Austria to the south, Bavaria to the west, Saxony to the north and Moravia to the east. The Czech constitution still names it in its preamble, even though modern administrative regions ignore the old borders.
Its name reaches back to the second century BC. Romans defeated the Boii at Placentia in 194 BC and at Mutina a year later, and many of the tribe retreated across the Alps. Tacitus, writing at the end of the first century AD, is the earliest author to mention Boiohaemum. Neighbouring Bavaria owes its name to the same people. When the Boii and Helvetii moved on, Germanic-speaking Suebic peoples filled the thinly settled land; the Marcomanni under their king Marobodus used its forests and mountains as natural defences and in the second century fought Marcus Aurelius.
Slavs arrived in the sixth or seventh century, and the Czech name Čechy comes from them. Christianity appeared early in the 9th century, when Bohemia belonged to Great Moravia under Svatopluk I, but took hold fully only a century or two later. After Great Moravia fragmented under Magyar raids, the native Přemyslid dynasty ruled for several hundred years, leaning on Frankish and later German emperors. Following the victory over the Magyars at Lechfeld in 955, Boleslaus I was granted Moravia by Otto the Great.
Kingship came in stages. Vratislav II used the royal title in 1085 and Vladislaus II in 1158, yet their heirs went back to being dukes; only under Ottokar I, from 1198, did the crown become hereditary. His grandson Ottokar II briefly ruled lands stretching over modern Austria and Slovenia. After the Mongol invasion of 1241, the court encouraged large-scale German settlement, mainly along the northern, western and southern borders.
Source: Bohemia
