The Lands of the Weceslav Crown

Abstract

The country around the Bohemian Basin and its adjacent mountain ranges to the south, west and north, which today constitutes the Czech Republic, is part of the diverse ethnic, cultural and religious landscape so characteristic of eastern-central, eastern and south-eastern Europe. Archaeological evidence has shown that Celtic tribes had lived here in the first two centuries before the Common Era — in fact the name Bohemia stems from the Celtic — to be followed by Germanic tribes who arrived in the third century ce and then moved eastward as part of the general European migration in the middle of the first millennium ce. Their place was taken by western Slavonic tribes in the sixth and seventh centuries. Bohemian princes are listed among those obliged to pay tribute to Charlemagne, the Carolingian founder of the Frankish Empire, for the first time in 805/806, and his successor in the eastern part of the Empire, Ludwig the German, laid claim to Moravia in 846. The ninth century also saw the region’s conversions to western Christendom; in fact, one of the first Christian dukes, Wenceslas, the founder of the Přemislyden dynasty that was to rule Bohemia and Moravia until the beginning of the fourteenth century, was declared a martyr and a saint after his younger brother Boleslaw assassinated him in 935. The latter’s rule lasted until 972 ce but his murdered brother became a Christian hero and the patron of the realm.