The Prague Valley has been inhabited since at least 6000 BC, according to archeological evidence. Germanic and Celtic tribes established permanent farming communities by around 4000 BC. Slavic people arrived around the turn of the millennium, and by the 600 AD had settled opposite sides of a particularly appealing stretch of the Vltava River. They successfully defended the land now known as Bohemia for generations. By the 9th century it had been conquered by the Great Moravian Empire. The short-lived empire introduced the locals to Christianity, but it was 'Good King Wenceslas' of Christmas-carol fame, who was actually a Duke, who made it the state religion of Bohemia in the 930s. He remains the patron saint of the Czech Republic. It was under the rule of Charles IV who ruled from 1346 to 1378 that Prague truly came into its own, becoming one of the continent's largest and most prosperous cities, acquiring its fine Gothic face and landmark buildings like Charles University, Charles Bridge and St Vitus Cathedral.

Jan Hus, who attended Charles University in the late 1380s, rallied popular support for the Church-reform movement. When he was burned at the stake in 1415, the people were roused enough to hurl various Catholic officials from the upper stories of Prague's New Town Hall, introducing the word 'defenestration', meaning literally, to toss someone out a window, into the popular political lexicon. While the 1526 ascent of the Catholic Hapsburg family to power in the region cooled things off for a few decades, a second round of defenestrations in 1618 made it clear that the matter was not quite settled.

In fact, these defenestrations were once of the starts of the Thirty Years War. The war devastated Central Europe and killed a quarter of Bohemia. Dreams of Czech independence were squelched for centuries, despite various revolts and agitations. Finally, in the wake of World War I, a new nation called Czechoslovakia was created out of the ashes of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. The new nation suffered under first Nazi and then communist rule. A reformist government was crushed by a Soviet led invasion in 1968. Finally, Czechoslovakia was liberated, along with the rest of Eastern Europe, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The Czech Republic and Slovakia had an amicable divorce in 1993. Despite disastrous floods in 2002, Prague, like many of the capitals of the former Warsaw Pact, is enjoying a revival as it rejoins European civilization.