Plzeň

Plzeň took its place in 1295, when Wenceslaus II moved the town from the old settlement below the Přemyslid hillfort to the confluence of the Mže and the Radbuza, on the road from Prague to Bavaria. Water was plentiful there, and the new town soon became the third largest and most important in Bohemia, after Prague and Kutná Hora. The church of Saint Bartholomew rose in the middle of the square, with friaries by the walls.

When the Hussite wars broke out, the radical priest Václav Koranda held great influence in the town, but in 1420 he and Jan Žižka left for Tábor and Plzeň became the bastion of the Catholic side. It withstood three Hussite sieges, one by Žižka and two by Prokop the Great. From 1467 the Prague chapter sat in Plzeň, and the town was a cradle of Czech printing, its first press working until 1533. Fire destroyed two thirds of the town in 1507. Emperor Rudolf II made Plzeň his capital for nine months in 1599 and 1600, fleeing plague in Prague, and in 1618 the army of the Bohemian estates under Mansfeld took the town.