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The story
Early history
The Brno Basin has been inhabited since prehistoric times, as evidenced by a 2024 discovery of mammoth bones and prehistoric tools dating back 15,000 years. This aligns with the region's rich Paleolithic history, which includes nearby sites Dolní Věstonice and Švédův stůl with traces of Neanderthal activity.
The city's direct precursor was Staré Zámky, a fortified Great Moravian hillfort near Brno-Líšeň inhabited from the Neolithic Age until the early 11th century. Serving as a strategic hub connecting the empire's center with regional ironworks, the settlement was destroyed by a catastrophic fire around the turn of the 10th century and its remnants are now a protected monument.
Middle Ages
In the early 11th century, Brno was established as the seat of a non-ruling prince from the House of Přemyslid, and it became one of the centres of Moravia, along with Olomouc and Znojmo. Brno was first mentioned in Cosmas' Chronica Boemorum, dating to 1091, when King Vratislaus II besieged his brother, Conrad, at Brno castle. In the mid-11th century, Moravia was divided into three separate territories. Each had its own ruler, who came from the Přemyslids dynasty but was independent of the other two, and subordinate to the Bohemian ruler in Prague. The seats of these rulers and thus the "capitals" of these three territories were the castles and towns of Brno, Olomouc, and Znojmo. In the late 12th century, Moravia began to reunify, forming the Margraviate of Moravia. From then until the middle of the 17th century, political power was divided between Brno and Olomouc, with Znojmo playing a tertiary role. Olomouc had a larger population than Brno and was also the seat of the Diocese of Olomouc, the sole bishopric in Moravia until 1777. The Moravian Diet, the Moravian Land Tables, and the Moravian Land Court convened in both cities. These assemblies made political, legal, and financial decisions.
Before the 13th century, there were virtually no Germans living in the Czech lands. Bohemia and Moravia-Silesia were inhabited by an essentially all-Slavic population. In 1243, the separate settlements that made up Brno were consolidated into a single fortified settlement and granted a royal city charter by King Wenceslaus I of Bohemia. As was common throughout Central and Eastern Europe at the time, the royal city charter was closely tied to the arrival of German settlers and other migrants.
Around the turn of the 13th century, merchants on the main market, now known as Zelný trh, one of Brno's oldest squares, began building cellars to store food, wine, and beer. Although these vaults initially supported only local commerce, they became a vital part of the city's infrastructure and served as temporary shelters in wartime. They expanded over time, particularly in the Baroque period, and are now known as Labyrinth Under the Vegetable Market (Czech: Labyrint pod Zelným trhem). In 1324, Queen Elisabeth Richeza of Poland built the Basilica of the Assumption of Our Lady, where she is now buried, along with a Cistercian convent, which later became an Augustinian Abbey.
From the mid-14th century to the early 15th century, during the rule of the Moravian branch of the Luxembourg dynasty, Špilberk Castle served as the official seat of the Moravian margraves. One of them, Jobst of Moravia, was elected the King of the Romans. The Margraviate of Moravia was reunited under the Bohemian crown after his death. During the Hussite Wars, Brno was besieged by the Hussites twice, in 1428 and in 1430. Both attempts to conquer the city were unsuccessful.
17th and 18th centuries
In 1641, during the Thirty Years' War, the Holy Roman Emperor and the margrave of Moravia, Ferdinand III, ordered the permanent relocation of the Diet, the Land Court, and the Land Tables from Olomouc to Brno, as Collegium Nordicum had made Olomouc the primary target of the Swedish armies. In 1642, Olomouc surrendered to the Swedish Army, which occupied it for eight years. Brno, under the leadership of Jean-Louis Raduit de Souches, successfully resisted the siege of Brno in 1645, the only Moravian city that succeeded in defending itself from the Swedes, who were commanded by Field Marshal Lennart Torstensson. Brno subsequently served as the sole capital of the Margraviate of Moravia.
After the conclusion of the Thirty Years' War in 1648, Brno retained its status as the sole capital of the region. That was later confirmed by the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II in 1782, and again in 1849 by the Moravian constitution.[1] Today, the Moravian Land Tables are stored in the Moravian Regional Archive and are designated as a national cultural heritage site of the Czech Republic. During the 17th century, Špilberk Castle was rebuilt as a massive baroque citadel. Brno was besieged by the Prussian Army led by Frederick the Great during the War of the Austrian Succession in 1742, but the siege was ultimately unsuccessful. In 1777, the bishopric of Brno was established by Pope Pius VI, with Mathias Franz Graf von Chorinsky Freiherr von Ledske as its first bishop.
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During the 18th century, Brno experienced a significant textile industry boom, resulting in the rapid expansion of its suburbs and earning it the nickname "Moravian Manchester". Brno flourished economically through the end of the 19th century. The city infrastructure, including sewer and water supply systems, was improved, and the fortifications around Špilberk Castle were reinforced. Rapid industrialisation brought about poor housing and working conditions for factory workers. Child labour, tuberculosis, inhumanely long shifts, and unequal relations between employees and employers were commonplace.
19th century
In December 1805, the Battle of Austerlitz was fought near the city; the battle is also known as the "Battle of the Three Emperors". Although Brno itself was not directly involved in the battle, the city was under French occupation, which conferred significant hardship on the local population. In the wake of the hostilities, there was a devastating typhoid fever outbreak due to the mild winter temperatures that year. The French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte stayed in Brno from 20 November to 12 December 1805. The French returned in 1809 and occupied the city for four months after the Battle of Znaim. Napoleon ordered the fortification around Špilberk Castle dismantled and leveled, and the Castle lost its military significance as a fortress. These events are the theme of re-enactments that attract an international audience every year.
In 1839, the first train arrived in Brno from Vienna via the Emperor Ferdinand Northern Railway. That marked the beginning of rail transport in the Czech Republic and Austria. Between 1859 and 1864, city fortifications were almost completely removed. In 1869, a horsecar service began operating in Brno, marking it the first tram service in what would later become the Czech Republic. Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian monk and geneticist, conducted groundbreaking genetics experiments with pea plants at St. Thomas's Abbey in Brno during the 1850s. The monastery served as a local hub for education, culture, and the arts, with a well-stocked library and other amenities. Mendel's work was not recognized during his lifetime, and he abandoned it after he was elected abbot of the monastery in 1868. Brno is home to Mendel University, which has been located there since the mid-1990s, when the former University of Agriculture, the nation's oldest agricultural school, was renamed in his honour.
Tomáš Masaryk, the first president and founding father of Czechoslovakia, attended a German-language grammar school (German: Deutsches Ober-Gymnasium) in Brno between 1865 and 1869. His school served as a military hospital during the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, which led to the creation of the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary. Although no major conflict took place in Brno during the war, the Prussian Army occupied the city following the Battle of Königgrätz. Several days later, a cholera epidemic that claimed the lives of more than 1,400 residents broke out. Masaryk later became a proponent of a second Czech university, alongside Charles University, which was established in Brno in 1919 and named after him. The Masaryk Circuit and Masarykova Street, connecting Liberty Square and the train station, are also named in his honour.
Leoš Janáček, ranked among most-performed opera composers in the world, accepted a chorister scholarship at St. Thomas's Abbey in 1865. He would spend the rest of his life in Brno, except for the period between 1872 and 1881 when he pursued advanced musical studies in Prague, Vienna, and Leipzig. He founded the Brno Organ School, which is now part of the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts (JAMU), upon his return in 1881. Janáček had a profound impact on Brno and its cultural life. His legacy helped transform the city into a major cultural hub. Owing to his significance to Brno's history, several places and institutions have been named in his honour. In addition to JAMU, there is also the Janáček Theatre, an opera house and the largest of the three theatres belonging to the National Theatre Brno.
20th century and Greater Brno
At the start of the 20th century, roughly two-thirds of Brno's residents spoke German, but its suburbs and neighbouring towns were predominantly Czech-speaking. Everyday life in the city was bilingual. The local German dialect, known as Brünnerisch, incorporated elements from both languages. The end of World War I brought about the partition of Austria-Hungary, and more than three million Germans found themselves separated from Austria and under Czech control. After the Czechoslovak Republic was proclaimed on 28 October 1918, the Sudeten Germans asserted their right to self-determination and peacefully opposed the Czech military taking control of their homeland. Fighting broke out sporadically, resulting in casualties. Moravia contained patches of "landlocked" German territory to the north and south. German-language islands and towns inhabited by German-speaking populations, surrounded by Czech speakers, were common, just as in Brno.
Until 1918, the city of Brno was significantly smaller, and in administrative terms, it consisted only of the city centre. In 1919, two neighboring towns, Královo Pole and Husovice, along with 21 other surrounding municipalities, were annexed by Brno, creating Greater Brno (Czech: Velké Brno) in an effort to dilute the German-speaking population majority, which comprised approximately 55,000 residents, by adding Czech speakers from the city's vicinity. A significant portion of the German-speaking population was Jewish, comprising nearly 12,000 individuals, including several of the city's better-known personalities, who made a substantial contribution to the city's cultural life. Greater Brno was almost seven times larger in area, with a population of about 222,000 – before that, Brno proper had about 130,000 inhabitants.
The size of Brno's German population was virtually unchanged in the 1930 census, the last census before the war, when 200,000 residents declared Czech nationality, and approximately 52,000 identified as German. Both groups included Jewish citizens. Although Czechoslovakia experienced a peaceful and prosperous decade during the 1920s, ethnic tensions escalated in the 1930s following the onset of the Great Depression. Hitler's rise to power further inflamed the situation — particularly when the Sudeten German Party became the second-largest party in Czechoslovakia, and it became known that the party received financial support from Berlin. During the interwar period, Brno served as the capital of the administrative region of Moravia (Czech: Země Moravská) from 1921 to 1928, and as the capital of Moravia-Silesia (Czech: Země Moravskoslezská) from 1928 to 1948. The city emerged as the preeminent site of modernist architecture during this period.
World War II
During the German occupation of the Czech lands between 1939 and 1945, all Czech universities were closed by the Nazis, including those in Brno. The Faculty of Law became the local headquarters of the Gestapo, and the Nazis used the Kounic Residence Hall at Masaryk University as a political prison for anti-fascists. Along with the firing range in Kobylisy, the Kounic dormitories were the most frequently used execution grounds in the Protectorate. About 35,000 Czechs and some American and British POWs were imprisoned and tortured there; about 800 civilians were executed or died. The executions were public. The Nazis also operated a subcamp of the Auschwitz concentration camp, which mainly held Polish prisoners, an internment camp for Romani people in the city, and a forced labour "re-education" camp in the present-day district of Dvorska.
Between 1941 and 1942, transports from Brno deported 10,081 Jews to the Theresienstadt (Terezín) concentration camp. At least another 960 people, mostly of mixed ancestry, followed in 1943 and 1944. From Terezín, many of them were sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, the Minsk Ghetto, Rejowiec, and other ghettos and concentration camps. Although Terezín was not an extermination camp, 995 deportees from Brno perished there. Only 1,033 people out of over 11,000 returned after the war. In 1944 and 1945, the city centre and several industrial facilities, such as the Československá zbrojovka small arms factory and the Flugmotorenwerke Zweigwerk aircraft engine factory, were targeted by Allied bombing raids.
Air strikes and artillery fire killed some 1,200 people and destroyed 1,278 buildings. More than 12,000 buildings, or about half of the city's building stock, were damaged. In the wake of the occupation by the Red Army on 26 April 1945 and the end of the war, President Edvard Beneš arrived in Brno and delivered a speech demanding the expulsion of Germans. Subsequently, beginning on 31 May 1945, remaining German inhabitants, comprising over 20,000 individuals, were marched 64 kilometres (40 miles) to the Austrian border. According to testimony collected by German sources, about 5,200 of them died during the march. Later Czech estimates put the death toll at about 1,700, with most of the fatalities attributed to an epidemic of shigellosis. In 2015, seventy years after the end of World War II, the city council issued a formal apology and expressed regret about the expulsion of German residents. The event is commemorated every year.
Communist Era and post-1989 transformation
Shortly after the communist coup d'état in 1948, the new regime abolished the traditional system of regional governance in an effort to centralise power in Prague, effectively ending Brno's role as the capital of Moravia. Moravia was divided into administrative districts, with Brno becoming the administrative centre of what is now the South Moravian Region. Throughout the Communist Era, Brno's economy relied on heavy manufacturing and machine-building. Large prefab concrete housing estates (paneláks) were constructed during the 1960s and 1970s in Bohunice, Líšeň, Bystrc, and Vinohrady. Many historic buildings fell into disrepair or were demolished as part of urban redevelopment.
Following the Velvet Revolution of 1989, Brno's economy underwent a substantial transformation. Its workforce transitioned from heavy manufacturing to services and light industry, and Brno emerged as an information technology and research hub of the Czech Republic. New industrial parks, such as CTPark Brno in Černovická terasa, were developed on the city's outskirts. Today, the wider Brno region is a global centre for electron microscopy and cybersecurity development. The city has also experienced a considerable cultural renaissance and historical renewal.
From Wikipedia’s article on Brno, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5