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Updated: May 26, 2025
After Bohemia lost her independence at the battle of the White Mountain in 1620, she became the prey of Austrian barbarity. The Habsburgs have done their best to extirpate the Czech heretics and abolish and destroy the Bohemian Constitution. With Bohemia's loss of independence her contact with Poland also ceased.
Everything then went as merrily as that marriage-bell which, apparently, is the only one absent in Bohemia's gay chimes.
This church has indeed a somewhat neglected look: its quaint pointed steeple rises almost apologetically above some scrubby trees, and hardly ventures to o'ertop the grimy houses, that close it round. Nevertheless this ancient church should have reason to hold high its head, for Bohemia's great King and Father built it and dedicated it to a carefully selected saint, to wit St. Stephen. St.
Look at those figures that rise above the heads of their fellows in the shadowy pageant of Bohemia's capital, at those whose vision carried well beyond the narrow frontiers of their country and the limitations of their age. Ottokar II and Charles IV, George Podiebrad and Waldstein, all these saw the inner meaning of Libuša's prophecy: "I see a grand city, the fame of which reaches to the skies."
When news of his death came to Prague the bells of one hundred churches tolled out on that 26th of August, the Feast of St. Rufus, a day destined to be of ill-omen to Bohemia's Kings. The shadow of the hand of Habsburg hung darkly over the southern frontiers of Bohemia. Rudolph, the first Habsburg Emperor, began the famous tactics of his house, gaining power by matrimonial alliances.
This happened in 1342, six years before Bohemia's adventurous King had died in the King of England's tent on the battlefield of Crecy. The object of the monarch's generosity was the monastery of Emaus.
This filled Bohemia's German neighbours with unholy joy and brought the distracted country more and more under Teuton domination, so much so that Frederick Barbarossa thought fit to summon one or other pretender and a bunch of obstreperous Bohemian nobles to appear before him at the Imperial Court at Ratisbon, in order that he might exercise the right he had assumed of settling the affairs of the Přemysl dynasty.
No doubt Prague would have been a more suitable setting for this function, but Ottokar had so timed his arrangements as to come in for a double event, for Philip of Suabia with assistance from Bohemia's ruler, secured the German crown at the same time.
This seems to have given the flamboyant Greeks the impression that Bohemia's King had become a vassal of their Emperor; they were disillusioned some years later when Vladislav assisted Stephen III on to the throne of Hungary against the Emperor Emanuel's choice.
Benes; "we must wait patiently till it occurs to the Poles that a close brotherly relationship between the two countries is better than suspicion and jealousy." "Why do you not take the step yourself?" "It would be suspected of having some hidden motive, or we should be thought to be in terrible need of Poland's help," said Bohemia's minister.
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