Czech

The Czechs are a West Slavic people of Bohemia, Moravia and Czech Silesia, whose ancestors settled there in the 500s and 600s, absorbing remaining Celtic and Germanic peoples. Premyslid dukes built Prague Castle around 880 and from 1198 ruled a Bohemian kingdom drawing German settlers from the later 1200s.

In 1337 John the Blind of Luxembourg held the throne; under his son Charles IV, king from 1346 and emperor from 1355, Prague became imperial capital and in 1348 gained the first university north of the Alps. Jan Hus, burned in 1415, reformed Czech spelling and inspired the Hussite movement, whose armies defended the Bohemian Reformation in wars of 1419 to 1434.

The Kralice Bible of 1579 to 1593 fixed the literary language, but after the White Mountain defeat of 1620, Habsburg re-Catholicization and Germanization exiled scholars such as Komensky, and by the 1700s German dominated public life. National revival rebuilt a written standard with Dobrovsky's 1809 grammar and Jungmann's dictionary.