Holy Roman Empire & Royal Town Network

Frankish/Carolingian power and the Holy Roman imperial order in Central Europe.

1 chapter

800 - 1295

Přemyslid dynastic expansion and monastic foundations drove the Christianization and settlement of western Bohemia from the 9th century onward. Prince Vladislav I founded Kladruby Monastery in 1115 as a Benedictine house, and the nobleman Hroznata established Teplá Abbey in 1193 with Premonstratensian monks from Strahov. These monasteries became the region's first centers of literacy, agriculture, and spiritual authority — the Romanesque church at Teplá is one of the oldest standing churches in Bohemia. The Přemyslid kings also formalized the Chodové border-guard system, granting free farmers along the Bavarian frontier the privilege of armed border patrol in exchange for personal freedom and direct royal subordination. Stand in the Romanesque nave at Teplá and you stand where monks first imposed the Latin liturgical calendar on a landscape that would, for centuries, also sustain pre-Christian seasonal rituals at its margins.

1419 - 1471

The Hussite Revolution shattered western Bohemia's monastic network and turned its frontier towns into battlegrounds. Hussite forces burned Kladruby Monastery in 1421, destroying its movable art and scattering its community — the scars of that destruction are still visible in the rebuilt fabric. But at Domažlice in 1431, Hussite defenders routed a crusading army — a battle still celebrated in Chodsko memory. The Chodové, loyal to their royal privileges, navigated between Hussite and Catholic forces while maintaining their border-guard role. The war remade the religious landscape: monastic lands were seized, pilgrimage traditions disrupted, and Catholic authority dramatically weakened — a rupture whose memory the Counter-Reformation would later attempt to overwrite through architecture and ritual. At Bečov, the castle changed hands during the upheaval, acquiring new defensive features.

1471 - 1618

The Jagiellonian and early Habsburg rulers reintegrated western Bohemia into a centralizing kingdom while the Reformation and Counter-Reformation began pulling communities in opposite directions. Plzeň's Cathedral of St. Bartholomew received its towering spire (completed c. 1525), making it the tallest church in Bohemia and a visual assertion of Catholic continuity. Loket Castle passed to the Šlik family, who added Renaissance modifications to the Gothic stronghold. The Chodové received their final royal privileges in 1612, just six years before the system would be upended by the Thirty Years' War. German colonization of the borderlands accelerated, creating bilingual towns where Czech and German communities lived side by side — a coexistence that the national narratives of later centuries would either romanticize or deny.

1618 - 1740

The Catholic victory in the Thirty Years' War transformed western Bohemia through a deliberate program of Counter-Reformation memory assertion. The Jesuits arrived in Klatovy (1656–76), building their church and catacombs as instruments of re-Catholicization — the mummified bodies in the crypt were visible proof that the Catholic dead were sanctified. At Kladruby, Jan Blažej Santini-Aichel rebuilt the conventual church (1712–26) in his signature Baroque-Gothic fusion: Gothic forms claimed continuity with the pre-Hussite medieval church, while Baroque dynamism asserted Counter-Reformation authority. The Plague Column on Plzeň's Republic Square (1681) proclaimed divine intercession. And on Veselá hora near Domažlice, a chapel built in 1685 anchored the svatovavřinecká pouť — the St. Lawrence pilgrimage that would become the region's most important annual ritual, surviving even communist attempts to suppress it. The Chodové lost their privileges; Jan Sladký Kozina was executed in Plzeň in 1695 after leading the Chod uprising against the Lamminger nobles. Read the architecture: Baroque vaults over Gothic foundations, pilgrimage chapels on signal hills — the landscape itself was rewritten to assert that the Catholic past had never been broken.