What a window of opportunity for the Austrian Habsburgs! That Ferdinand I of Habsburg also happened to be the late Ludwig Jagellons brotherinlaw helped his claim to the Bohemain and Hungarian thrones In Bohemia the weakened central authority did too At first Ferdinand made concessions to the everpowerful Estates Soon however he began systematically to weaken the authority of the regional nobility and towns His attempts to increase the central power of the Crown naturally met with the opposition of the Estates and the whole situation culminated in an unsuccesful rebellion of the Estates in 1547 

The Estates failure was Ferdinands gain He used this victory to increase royal authority and to weaken the position of the Estates and the towns even more He also invited the Jesuits to come to the Czech lands though they never held any inquisitions here and generally did not meddle in public affairs Ostensibly fighting to maintain freedom of religion in the Czech lands against the resolutely Catholic policies of Ferdinand the Estates struggled to regain their former power and influence 

These conflicts simmered under the surface of things as the Renaissance swept through the Czech lands 

 Ferdinand was succeeded by Maxmilian II who was succeeded by Rudolf II After assuming the Austrian throne the Habsburg ruler and patron of the arts and sciences Rudolf II 15761611  moved his court from Vienna to Prague  making him the last crowned King of Bohemia to live at Prague Castle Rudolf II was a real character He had a pet lion he collected great art  including works by Da Vinci Michaelangelo and Rafael  he supported scientists such as Tycho de Brahe Johannes Kepler  as well as artists like Spranger and Von Aachen and he was a personal friend of the legendary Prague Jewish leader Rabbi Loew It is said that he also financed the work of any number of quack alchemists on his invitation John Dee and Edward Kelley spent time in Prague and that he was a little soft in the head Its possible that the Legend of Faust who lived in Prague originated at this time of scientific exploration 

 The architectural style of the time was Baroque which  like Rudolf II himself  was round and robust flamboyant and a little gaudy Baroque buildings like the Loreto and St Nicholas Church in Lesser Town Square are massive and grand The statues that top them appear so heavy that they seem likely to fall and crush innocent passersby 

 Rudolf II who suffered periods of dementia because of his acute case of syphilis was forced by his family to resign in 1611 He had been forced during his reign to concede religious freedom to the Czech Protestants and when his brother and successor Matthias tried to rescind them mounting political tensions led the Czech Estates to rebel against the Habsburgs once again 

They began their rebellion in grand Czech style with the Second Defenestration of Prague in 1618 In this second defenestration two vice regents of the Austrian monarch and some governors of the Czech lands were thrown out of a tower window at Prague Castle They were not killed however as they fell onto a pile of garbage mostly straw which had accumulated in the castle moat So it can be said that they at least the nonAustrian of the throwees were the worlds first bouncing Czechs To add insult to injury or perhaps insult to insult? the Bohemian diet of the Estates then elected Frederick V of the Palatinate also known as Frederick Faltz or as the Winter King as their ruler thinking that his fatherinlaw  the English King James I  would come to their aid They could not have been more wrong 

 This rebellion of the Czech Estates was particularly unsuccessful It culminated in the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620 in which the Estates were incontrovertibly defeated by the Habsburgs They had been successful only in sparking the Thirty Years War which was to devastate much of Europe Incidentally the thenmercenary laterphilosopher Rene Descartes fought at the Battle of the White Mountain on the side of the Habsburgs 

Well the Habsburgs quite understandably did not appreciate these disturbances which were emanating from the northern reaches of their empire But the methods that they used to subdue the protestant Estates after the Battle of the White Mountain were extraordinarily harsh 

First they executed 27 nobles  leaders of the Estates who had fought on the losing side against the Habsburgs at the Battle of the White Mountain  in Pragues Old Town Square in May 1621 Some of the heads of the decapitated leaders of the rebellion were then hung strategically around Prague  for instance on the Old Town bridge tower of the Charles Bridge  to serve as an ominous reminder to the people of Who was Boss It is said that every year at the exact hour and on the exact day that they were killed the ghosts of the 27 wronglyexecuted nobles can be seen haunting the spot where they lost their heads The place today is marked by 27 crosses in the cobblestones of Old Town Square next to the Astronomical Clock The heads hung there for 11 long and lonely years before finally being taken down and given a proper burial by the Saxons who occupied Prague in 1632 in the course of the Thirty Years War 

The Thirty Years War which had begun in Prague ended there too In 1648 the Swedes had succeeded in capturing the Lesser Quarter and plundering it and Prague Castle carrying off many valuable artworks which decorate Swedish castles and palaces to this day They were defeated by a ragtag force of Czech university students and residents of Pragues Jewish town on the Charles Bridge in the last battle of the Thirty Years War It is said that the Swedes were beseeched to come by the exiled Protestant leader Comenius Jan Amos Komensky  he had wanted them to come to the aid of the bynow utterly defeated Protestant forces but by the end of the war it was already too late 

As a result of all this tumult the Czech lands lost the power to elect their own rulers and the Czech crown was made hereditary for Habsburg rulers The Habsburgs banned all religions other than Catholicism The property of Protestant members of the nobility was confiscated and handed out to loyal Catholics 

Those Czech Protestants who werent already in exile were forced to convert to Catholocism Only a very few had the courage to continue to practice their religion in secret 



The population of the country had been halved by the sundry aftermath of the Battle of the White Mountain and as fewer people also means fewer people paying tax taxes were raised 

 Things were pretty bad all around The rich got richer the poor got poorer and the economy went into a deep recession Luckily it was high time for the Enlightenment to make an entrance The administrative reforms of Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II did much to alleviate the situation 

These two rulers reduced the privileges of the now allCatholic nobility who are also  perhaps to confuse us all  known as the Estates as the formerly Protestant nobility had also been called They expelled the Jesuits in 1773 and they attempted to end social oppression by abolishing serfdom in 1781 In the same year they issued the Edict of Tolerance which permitted the free exercise of religion and the secularization of education science and art Pragues Jewish town is called Josefov to this day in honor of Josef II 

The Industrial Revolution as most revolutions do started off small at the end of the 18th century and then really picked up steam  so to speak  in the 19th century It was to have a monumental impact on the Czech lands 

The first factories in the Austrian Empire were built in the mountainous border regions of the Czech lands where there was no shortage of water power from rushing streams and rivers to run them While it did not take long for steam power to be harnessed the industrial boundaries had been drawn and these regions remain predominantly industrial to this day 

Railway lines were laid in the Czech lands by Jan Perner  who met his death when he hit his head against a pole while leaning out of the window of a moving train  an activity which has been forbidden in this country since the Czech railway pioneers tragic accident  Trams mostly constructed by the Czech Thomas Edison Frantisek Krizik began to carry people around on their errands in and between major towns in those days tram lines connected the cities of Bratislava Budapest and Vienna to each other  about a onehour ride It was at this time too that Gregor Mendel  was conducting his famous experiments on hereditary with peas in a monastery in Moravia and that Jan Evangelista Purkyne peered into his microscope one day to discover a cell looking back at him he was the first person to recognize it as such 

 The major architectural styles of the time were Classicist and Empire both of which used classical Greek and Roman motifs in a balanced and simple design Two buildings which are closely associated with Mozarts stay in Prague in the late 18th century are excellent examples of these styles: the Estates Theatre in which Mozart conducted the premier of Don Giovanni is Classicist and the Bertramka villa where he stayed with the Dusek family is one of the purest examples of Empire that exists in the Czech Republic But we digress 

 Industrialization was not the only big change taking place in the Austrian Empire at this time The Czech nation like most of the others under Austrian rule was also going through political and cultural changes leading to demands for greater autonomy and self determination for the different nations under Austrian rule 

In this country the push for autonomy was known as the Czech National Revival movement Narodni obrozeni The dominant political leaders of the movement  Frantisek Palacky Frantisek Ladislav Rieger and Karel Havlicek Borovsky  were liberals This meant that they wanted reforms within the Austrian monarchy but did not want independence for the Czech lands This brought them into conflict with the democrats who were republican and fiercely antiMonarchy 

But the Czech National Revival movement almost had more to do with culture than with politics Frantisek Palacky and Karel Havlicek Borovsky who are mentioned above for their political efforts were both writers Czech Literature enjoyed a Golden Age during the Czech National Revival as the Czech language  which had all but died out under Habsburg rule  was rediscovered Other notable writers of the time include Bozena Nemcova Karel Hynek Macha who published the epic lyrical poem Maj then died of pneumonia he caught while fighting a fire one month before he was to be married and Josef Jungmann  who put together the first modern Czech dictionary 

Many popular books retelling the old Czech legends of Libuse and Sarka and Bivoj and Bruncvik were published at this time and some of the leaders of the Czech National Revival even falsified ancient 13th century texts of these legends which they claimed to have found in a cave somewhere Perhaps the only authority in the movement who publicly denied the authenticity of the texts was a young university professor by name of Tomas Garrigue Masaryk and he was passionately detested by the other leaders for doing so  

But we digress yet again France had its infamous revolution in 1848 In the same year in the Czech lands the feudal system was abolished leading to waves of emigration much of it to the New World  particularly to the United States In June 1848 a PanSlavic Congress convened in Prague to consider possible ways of convincing the Habsburgs to transform their empire into a federative state of equal nations something like a United States of Austria Suddenly the discussions were interrupted by an aimless rebellion inspired by the French Revolution and including dramatic baracades in the streets which was led by bored students and the most radical of the radical democrats 

The rebellion was effortlessly put down by the local Austrian leader Prince Windischgratz  who declared martial law and on June 16 1848 even bombarded Prague from Petrin Hill In this way both the revolt and the PanSlavic congress both came to a premature end leaving the question of the future shape of the Austrian Empire utterly unresolved In a strange aside to this episode Prince Windischgratzs wife lost her life in all this commotion  shot through a window while she was in her apartment To this day nobody knows who did the shooting or why 

Scared by both the French Revolution and the summer rebellion in Prague Austria introduced something akin to martial law in the whole of the Empire to discourage republican efforts at independence Autonomy movements throughout the Austrian Empire were suppressed But as revolutionary movements have a tendency of doing this one did not die down; it just sat around simmering below the ostensibly calm surface of things Tensions did not decrease On the contrary 

The Austrian Empire of the time was massive and contained the territories of many modernday countries Most of these nationalities were clamoring for autonomy 

In the 1860s this pressure led the Habsburgs to transform the Austrian Empire into the dualist AustroHungarian constitutional monarchy This was just hunkeydorey by the Hungarians but was not exactly appreciated by most of the other ethnic nations within what was now the AustroHungarian Empire 

The Czechs were united in their opposition to the new dual system but they were divided among themselves as to what they wanted to do about it These divisions grew deeper as the 19th century progressed 

There were a number of rival political factions: the Czech National Party split into two camps: the conservative Old Czechs and the liberal Young Czechs; the Czech Social Democratic Party founded in 1878; the progressives who favored the policies of Tomas Masaryk; the Agrarian party; the Christian Socialists; the National Socialists; and the Radical Progressives 

The majority of the Czech political parties supported a program calling for the restoration of the Czech state in its historical borders  but within the framework of the Austrian Empire Again each party had a different idea of exactly how this goal should be accomplished