The origins of Czechoslovakia (Russia — the home front)

Josef Kalvoda

pp. 11-29

in: Norman Stone, Eduard Strouhal (eds), Czechoslovakia, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1989

Abstract

When Czechoslovakia was established in 1918–19, the history of the Czechs and Slovaks went back for over a thousand years, to the Great Moravian Empire. The Magyar invasion (903–7) destroyed it, subjecting the Slovaks to the St Stephen (Hungarian) Crown, so that Slovakia's history evolved along lines different from that of the Czechs, whose own kingdom flourished as part of the Holy Roman Empire,¹ until its mediaeval prosperity and power were broken by the Hussite Wars and the Thirty Years' War. From the fateful Battle of the White Mountain in 1620, the Kingdom of Bohemia was part of the Habsburg Empire until that monarchy's collapse in 1918.²