Introduction

The Kingdom of Bohemia was part of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. On the eve of the Black Death, it comprised the regions of Bohemia and Moravia, representing roughly the territory of the present-day Czech Republic, and Upper and Lower Silesia (which today belong to Poland), and, in addition, two small areas in the west that gave it a sort of long territorial nose protruding into Germany almost all the way to Nuremberg.

At the time, it was a quite prosperous country with the city of Prague at its administrative and political centre. The relative prosperity was not least derived from a large mining industry, especially silver mines. In the high Middle Ages and still into the fourteenth century, there was a steady stream of German settlers who contributed to a rapid growth in agricultural and urban production. This stimulated the growth of towns and the integration of the country in an elementary market economy that was among the most advanced in Central and Eastern Europe at the time of the Black Death.

In the words of Hoensch: ‘there was a rapid development of a dense network of new towns. Older settlements situated, e.g., at crossroads, fords and other strategically important places and secured by fortifications grew briskly as places of trade and craft production.’ By the time of the Black Death, the Kingdom had been successfully integrated in the European networks of long-distance trade. This view is confirmed by Pounds who, in his standard work on European economic history in the Middle Ages, underscores the economically developed character of these countries: ‘Bohemia, Moravia and Austria […] were relatively developed. They tended to approximate the Western European model.’ In the countryside, the peasantry would have to acquire necessities they could not produce themselves, like salt for preservation of meat and butter for later consumption, and iron for tools. This need could only be met by a relatively fine-meshed commercial network in which small traders would play a major part.

The population of the Kingdom of Bohemia has been estimated at 1.5 million in around 1300, of which about one-sixth were Germans. In the following decades, Lower Silesia and the two small areas in the west were added to the Kingdom.