Lands of the Bohemian Crown

Lands of the Bohemian Crown
Hugo Gerhard Ströhl: coat of arms of the Bohemian crown lands (until 1635), clockwise from left above: (checked) Eagle of Moravia, Piast Eagle of Silesia, Ox of Lower Lusatia, Eagle of Upper Silesia, Wall of Upper Lusatia, en surtout Bohemian Lion, upon Crown of Saint Wenceslas, garlanded by lime
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v · Czech: země Koruny české; German: Böhmische Kronländer; Latin: Corona regni Bohemiae), also called the Lands of the Crown of Saint Wenceslas (země Koruny svatováclavské) or simply the Bohemian Crown (Koruna česká) or Czech Crown lands (České korunní země), refers to the area connected by feudal relations under the joint rule of the Bohemian kings. Therefore the term does not refer to the physical crown worn by the Bohemian rulers - the Crown of Saint Wenceslas - but to the Bohemian state itself.

The Bohemian crown was neither a personal union nor a federation of equal members. Rather, the Kingdom of Bohemia had a higher status than the other incorporated constituent countries. Beside the Bohemian crown, there were no common state institutions.

History

In the 10th and 11th century Bohemia proper, the March of Moravia and Kladsko were consolidated under the dukes of the ruling Přemyslid dynasty, whose scion Ottokar I gained the hereditary royal title in 1198 from the German (anti-)king Philip of Swabia. The regality was ultimately confirmed by King Frederick II in the 1212 Golden Bull of Sicily. King Ottokar's II plans to turn Bohemia into the leading Estate of the Holy Roman Empire were aborted by his rival Rudolph of Habsburg at the 1278 Battle on the Marchfeld.

Holy Roman Empire 1273–1378
  Lands of House of Luxembourg

The House of Luxembourg, Bohemian kings upon the extinction of the Přemyslids in 1306, again significantly enlarged the Bohemian lands: King John the Blind vassalized most Polish Piast dukes of Silesia, his suzerainty was acknowledged by the Polish king Casimir III the Great in the 1335 Treaty of Trentschin. He also achieved the enfeoffment with the Upper Lusatian lands of Bautzen (1319) and Görlitz (1329) by the German king Louis IV.

King John's eldest son Charles IV was elected King of the Romans in 1346 and succeeded his father as King of Bohemia in the same year. The Luxembourg dynasty reached its high point, when Charles was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1355. By his Imperial authority he decreed that the united Bohemian lands should endure regardless of dynastic developments, even if the Luxembourgs should die out. In 1367 he purchased Lower Lusatia from his stepson Margrave Otto V of Brandenburg. Beside their home County of Luxembourg itself, the dynasty held further non-contiguous Imperial fiefs in the Low Countries, such as the duchies of Brabant and Limburg, acquired through marriage by Charles' younger half-brother Wenceslaus of Luxembourg in 1355 as well as the Margraviate of Brandenburg purchased in 1373. As both the King of Bohemia and the Margrave of Brandenburg had been designated Prince-electors in the Golden Bull of 1356, the Luxembourgs held two votes in the electoral college, securing the succession of Charles's son Wenceslaus in 1376.

With King Wenceslaus, the decline of the Luxembourg dynasty began. He himself was deposed as King of the Romans in 1400; Brabant, Limburg (in 1406) and even Luxembourg itself (in 1411) were ceded to the French House of Valois-Burgundy, while Brandenburg passed to the House of Hohenzollern in 1415. Nevertheless the joint rule of the Bohemian Lands outlived the Hussite Wars and the extinction of the Luxembourg male line upon the death of Emperor Sigismund in 1437.

Vladislas II of the Jagiellon dynasty, son of the Polish king Casimir IV, was designated King of Bohemia in 1471, while the crown lands of Moravia, Silesia and the Lusatias were occupied by rivaling King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary. In 1479 both kings signed the Treaty of Olomouc, whereby the unity of the Bohemian crown lands was officially retained unchanged and the monarchs appointed each other as sole heir. Upon the death of King Matthias in 1490, Vladislas ruled the Bohemian crown lands and the Kingdom of Hungary in personal union.

When Vladislas' only son Louis was killed at the Battle of Mohács in 1526, a convention of Bohemian nobles elected his brother-in-law, the Habsburg archduke Ferdinand I of Austria, new king of the Bohemian crown lands. Together with the Austrian "hereditary lands" and the Hungarian kingdom they formed the Habsburg Monarchy, which in the following centuries grew out of the Holy Roman Empire into a separate European power. Attempts by the Bohemian Protestant estates to build up an autonomous confederation dashed at the 1620 Battle of White Mountain, whereafter the administration was centralised at Vienna. Moreover the Habsburg rulers lost the Lusatias to the Electorate of Saxony in the 1635 Peace of Prague and also most of Silesia with Kladsko to King Frederick II of Prussia in the 1742 Treaty of Breslau.

In the modern era, the remaining crown lands of Bohemia, Moravia and Austrian Silesia became constituent parts of the Austrian Empire in 1804 and the Cisleithanian half of Austria-Hungary in 1867. After World War I and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, these became the historic regions usually referred to as the Czech lands forming the Czech Republic. Austrian Silesia with the Hlučín Region is today known as Czech Silesia, with the exception of eastern Cieszyn Silesia which passed to the Second Polish Republic in 1920.

Administrative division

Lands of the Bohemian Crown until 1635. (Including internal partition.) A map by Josef Pekař, 1921

Kraje of Bohemia

Kraje of Moravia   

Silesian duchies   

Lusatias

See also


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