Brno

Brno grew near the meeting of the Svitava and the Svratka in southern Moravia and is first named in the chronicle of Cosmas in 1091. In the eleventh century a Přemyslid prince ruled here, one of the three centres of Moravia beside Olomouc and Znojmo, and the princes struck the earliest Brno denarii. King Wenceslaus I gave the town its rights in 1243, and in the middle of the century Špilberk Castle was begun. In 1324 Queen Elizabeth Richeza founded the church of the Assumption in Old Brno, where she was later buried. From the middle of the fourteenth century to the start of the fifteenth the Luxembourg margraves of Moravia held court here. The last of them, Jobst, was elected King of the Romans in the autumn of 1410 and died at Špilberk early the next year; he lies in the church of Saint Thomas, which his father founded.

Brno shared the margraves' court, the Moravian diet and the land court with Olomouc, and in 1348 the Land Court and the land registers were set up in both towns at once. The city withstood Hussite sieges in 1428 and 1430.

In the Thirty Years' War a royal tribunal was established in Brno in 1636, and in 1641 Ferdinand III ordered the diet, the court and the land registers moved from Olomouc to Brno for good. In 1645 Jean-Louis Raduit de Souches held the town against a Swedish siege. Joseph II finally confirmed Brno as capital of Moravia in 1782. Špilberk became a Baroque fortress, a bishopric was created in 1777, and in 1805 Napoleon occupied the city while the Battle of Austerlitz was fought nearby.