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Europe · High and late Middle Ages

Kingdom of Bohemia

1198–1918

1198–1918. Ottokar I secured the royal title in 1198 (recognized by Otto IV and Pope Innocent III in 1204), confirmed hereditarily by the Golden Bull of Sicily (26 September 1212, issued at Basel), issued by Frederick II, which fixed Bohemia's exceptional status within the Holy Roman Empire and made its king an Elector.

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Existed
1198–1918
Shown on the map
1202–1452, 1459–1528 (2 periods)
Peak area
168k km²
Region
Europe

Overview

1198–1918. Ottokar I secured the royal title in 1198 (recognized by Otto IV and Pope Innocent III in 1204), confirmed hereditarily by the Golden Bull of Sicily (26 September 1212, issued at Basel), issued by Frederick II, which fixed Bohemia's exceptional status within the Holy Roman Empire and made its king an Elector. Ottokar II "the Iron and Golden King" (r. 1253–1278) built a great Central European realm reaching the Adriatic before dying at the Battle on the Marchfeld (1278) against Rudolf of Habsburg. Under the Luxembourg Charles IV (r. 1346–1378; Holy Roman Emperor from 1355), Prague became the imperial capital, gaining Central Europe's first university (1348), the new town, and the Charles Bridge; his Golden Bull of 1356 codified imperial elections. The Hussite Wars (1419–1434) followed the burning of Jan Hus (6 July 1415) and the First Defenestration of Prague (1419); the Hussites repelled multiple crusades. The Habsburgs acquired the crown in 1526; the Second Defenestration of Prague (1618) launched the Bohemian Revolt and the Thirty Years' War, crushed at the Battle of White Mountain (8 November 1620), after which Bohemia was re-Catholicized (Ferdinand II's 1624 patent allowed only Catholicism) and subordinated to Habsburg absolutism.

Common questions

What was the Kingdom of Bohemia?
1198–1918. Ottokar I secured the royal title in 1198 (recognized by Otto IV and Pope Innocent III in 1204), confirmed hereditarily by the Golden Bull of Sicily (26 September 1212, issued at Basel), issued by Frederick II, which fixed Bohemia's exceptional status within the Holy Roman Empire and made its king an Elector.
When did the Kingdom of Bohemia exist?
The Kingdom of Bohemia existed 1198–1918. On this map it is drawn 1202–1452, 1459–1528.
How large was the Kingdom of Bohemia?
At its greatest extent drawn on this map, the Kingdom of Bohemia covered about 168,000 km². That is the largest area the border data gives it across the years it is drawn, not necessarily its greatest extent in history.

Sources

This compendium cites its sources once for the whole document rather than per territory. Its bibliography names the English Wikipedia articles for each territory as the primary basis, with Encyclopædia Britannica, the World History Encyclopedia, academic works (John Fine on the Balkans, Halperin and Martin on Muscovy, Rady and Veszprémy on Hungary) and, for a few entries, the medieval Livonian Chronicle of Henry itself. The article this entry is anchored on:

This entry was last updated .

This entry was researched and drafted with AI from the sources above, and has not been reviewed by a historian. How entries are made

Text available under CC BY-SA 4.0: reuse it with a credit to The World Through Time and a link to this page. Passages drawing on the Wikipedia articles listed above are also licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 by their contributors.

Border geometry for the map itself comes from Cliopatria v0.12 (Seshat Global History Databank, CC-BY-4.0).

Around the same time

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