Prague

The city's great age came under the house of Luxembourg. In 1344 Prague became an archbishopric and work began on the Gothic cathedral of St Vitus inside the castle; Charles IV then made it the capital of the Empire, founding Charles University, laying out a New Town beside the Old, and spanning the Vltava with the stone bridge that later took his name. The same city bred the challenge to the Church. Jan Hus preached reform in the Bethlehem Chapel, and after his burning at Konstanz in 1415 Prague rose in revolt, throwing the councillors from the windows of the New Town Hall in 1419; a year later Jan Žižka's Hussites beat Emperor Sigismund's crusaders on Vítkov Hill above the city.

Under the Habsburgs Rudolf II made Prague his residence and filled the castle with astronomers, alchemists and painters, Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler among them. That second golden age ended with another defenestration in 1618, which opened the Thirty Years' War. Two years later the king chosen by the Bohemian estates, Frederick V of the Palatinate, was routed at White Mountain outside the city, and in 1621 twenty-seven leaders of the revolt were executed in Old Town Square. Forced back to Catholicism and plundered by Saxons and Swedes, Prague fell from some 60,000 inhabitants to 20,000. It recovered slowly, its skyline remade with Baroque churches and noble palaces, and in 1784 Joseph II merged its four towns into a single city.