In the 16th century, Pilsen was regarded as a mainstay of Catholicism in Bohemia. From 1578, non-Catholics were forbidden from acquiring citizenship. From 1500 onwards, Germans were only granted access to the judiciary if they were proficient in the Czech language. Four years later, the Jews were forced to leave Pilsen and, for 300 years, were permitted to enter the city during the day only as tolerated guests. A twelve-member council, comprising the mayor and a body of between six and twelve municipal elders, governed local affairs in Pilsen, where a fire in 1507 destroyed almost half of the city’s buildings. In 1532, Emperor Ferdinand I (1503–1564) of Habsburg, King of Bohemia since 1526, made his entry into the city. During the Estates’ Revolt of 1547, Pilsen remained loyal to the Emperor and, as a token of gratitude, was granted the first vote in the Estates’ Curia at the provincial diet. Fearing a plague epidemic in Prague, Emperor Rudolf II (1552–1612) fled to Pilsen in 1599, where he resided for nine months and received diplomatic missions from all over the world. During the Bohemian Estates’ Revolt of 1618–1620, Pilsen sided with the Habsburgs, even though in 1618 an army of the Estates under Count Ernst von Mansfeld (1580–1626) occupied the city for three years following a siege and imposed levies on the citizens. Part of the city’s archive was lost during this period. In 1621, the imperial commander-in-chief, Count Tilly (1559–1632), recaptured Pilsen for the Habsburgs. Repeated quartering of troops in the city, whose fortifications had been reinforced, led to heavy indebtedness. In 1627, although Emperor Ferdinand II remitted part of the debts and designated Pilsen as one of the six royal cities directly subject to the Emperor, Pilsen was unable to benefit from confiscations resulting from the re-Catholicisation of the country. Even after the end of the Thirty Years’ War, Pilsen remained a Catholic stronghold.

The devastating consequences of the Great War, compounded by two plague epidemics (1680, 1714) and a great fire in 1729, hampered the city’s economic recovery, which only began to gain momentum again after 1760, particularly as the city had to accommodate successive occupying forces and pay contributions during the Silesian Wars. On the other hand, the cloth-making trade benefited from orders placed by the various regiments. Following a re-survey of land holdings between 1779 and 1783, Pilsen lost part of its land outside the city walls and, with it, a significant source of revenue. Local government was reformed under enlightened absolutism; in 1734, a renovation commission appointed by the Emperor established an Economic Directorate comprising six members to assist the Council – made up of the city’s elite – and the municipal elders. As part of the Josephine reforms, the inner-city cemeteries were closed down, among other measures, and the Dominican monastery was also dissolved in 1782. The end of the medieval municipal constitution in 1788 marked a turning point. From then on, the city’s affairs were managed by a legally qualified mayor appointed by the government authorities, along with six councillors and other officials paid by the city. The decline in the population was not reversed until the first half of the 19th century, when, under Mayor Martin Kopecký (1828–1850), the medieval city walls were finally demolished – a process that had begun as early as 1795. During the Napoleonic Wars, Russian and French troops occupied the town in turn; from 1825 onwards, Pilsen gained importance as a military base.

During the 1848 Revolution, liberal citizens led by the printer and politician Ignác Schiebl (1823–1901) founded the association ‘Lípa slovanská’ (Slavic Linden), modelled on the Prague example, which campaigned for gender equality between both nationalities in Bohemia, namely Czechs and Germans. Between 1874 and 1878, a men’s prison was built in the then largely undeveloped suburb of Bory; it was regarded as one of the ‘most modern’ in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and accommodated just under 1,000 serious criminals and political prisoners. Among the political prisoners in the 1890s were members of the ‘Omladina’ (Youth) group centred around the politician Alois Rašín (1867–1923) and the poet Stanislav Kostka Neumann (1875–1947). From 1894, the first ‘workers’ association hall’ (Dělnická beseda) in Bohemia bore witness to the growth in numbers and increasing political engagement of the working class (at the Škoda Works alone in 1899: 3,000), who, from the beginning of the 20th century, articulated political demands through strikes.

As the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy became apparent, protests against the catastrophic supply situation broke out, with some 25,000 workers going on strike in Pilsen on 14 October 1918. With the establishment of the First Czechoslovak Republic, a Czech National Council was formed here. Under the Social Democratic mayor Luděk Pik (in office 1919–1938), and partly thanks to the incorporation of neighbouring areas in 1924, Pilsen developed into a modern city with a population of over 108,000, boasting significant buildings such as the MasarykSchool and the ‘skyscraper’ U Trojdohody (The Triple Alliance) by the architect Hanuš Zápal (1885–1964).

As a result of the Great Depression of 1929, the city had over 15,000 unemployed. Following the Munich Agreement of 1938 and the associated territorial cessions, Pilsen became a border town; with the establishment ofthe ‘Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia’, the Wehrmacht also marched into Pilsen on 15 March 1939, which became the seat of a district administrator and several authorities (SA, SS, Gestapo). The Škoda Works were immediately integrated into German armaments production. The occupiers responded ruthlessly to any resistance (including, in 1943, the deportation of more than 500 political prisoners to the Buchenwald concentration camp). The new municipal constitution enacted in 1942, as well as the construction of housing for German settlers, served the policy of Germanisation. The more than 3,000 Jews of Pilsen were marginalised, dispossessed and discriminated against; in early 1942, they were deported in three large transports, first to the Theresienstadt/Terezin ghetto and from there to the extermination camps in the East to be murdered. Between 1942 and 1945, eleven air raids destroyed almost 6,800 buildings and around 70 per cent of the factory buildings.

On 5 May 1945, much like in Prague, an uprising against the German occupiers began. A Revolutionary National Committee (Revoluční Národní výbor) provisionally took power. On 6 May, units of the US Army under General George S. Patton (1885–1945) marched into the city. The arrest of representatives of the German occupying forces was swiftly followed by the violent expulsion of Pilsen’s German population, which was succeeded by systematic resettlement from early August onwards. In the years that followed, the aim was to compensate for the loss of population through an influx of people from the interior of the country and to press ahead with reconstruction. The relocation of the School of Medicine of Charles University to Pilsen also served this purpose. The School of Education followed in 1948, and a university of mechanical and electrical engineering in 1949. The communist takeover in February 1948 was followed by the persecution and imprisonment of political dissidents in Bory Prison, where in 1949 General Heliodor Píka (1897–1949), one of the leaders of the resistance abroad during the Second World War, was executed following a Stalinist show trial. The Škoda Works were symbolically renamed the Lenin Works.

In the early years of New Pilsen, following the relocation of the original town shortly before 1300, the population was dominated by settlers who were presumably of German ethnicity; however, by 1400 the process of Czechisation had led to a balance between the two groups. Germans dominated the town council until 1350; from 1407 onwards, the twelve-member council typically comprised eight to ten Czech names and, correspondingly, two to four German names. By 1419, 80 per cent of the inhabitants are thought to have been Czech. In the late Middle Ages, Pilsen was one of the largest royal towns in Bohemia, alongside Prague and Kuttenberg/Kutná Hora, and had a population of approximately 3,000 at the beginning of the 14th century, to which a further 1,000 people lived outside the city walls. The Hussite Wars, the Thirty Years’ War and the outbreaks of the plague in 1680 and 1714 led to fluctuations in population growth, with the result that Pilsen still had a population of 3,000 at the start of the 18th century. It was not until industrialisation that population growth began, driven primarily by the influx of labour (1843: 8,892; 1910: 80,000 inhabitants), which continued into the 20th century and, after 1949, was also driven by the incorporation of neighbouring areas (1930: 115,000, 1972: 150,000, 1991: 173,008, 2019: 172,441 inhabitants).

Evidence of a Jewish settlement in Pilsen dates back to as early as 1338; in the 15th century, a ghetto was established with two synagogues, a school and a cemetery. In 1504, the expelled Jews settled in Blowitz/Blovice and Kassejowitz/Kasejovice. It was not until 1790 that a Jewish merchant family was again permitted to settle in Pilsen. In 1850, a new synagogue opened, and Pilsen became the seat of the district rabbinate. The boom in the food industry attracted Jewish businesses in the 19th century. In 1870, 1,207 Jews lived in the city; this number rose to 3,517 by 1916. Between 1888 and 1893, the Great Synagogue was built, the second largest in Europe after the one in Budapest. In 1938, 3,200 Jewish citizens lived in Pilsen; they were deported in three transports in January 1942 as part of the so-called ‘Final Solution’ to the Theresienstadt/Terezin ghetto and from there to extermination camps in the East. Only 116 returned in 1945. In 2018, the Jewish community numbered around 100 members.

In 1860, a branch of the Sedlec Ironworks (near Starý Plzenec), owned by Count Ernst von Waldstein-Wartenburg (1821–1904), was established in Pilsen; nine years later, the engineer, who had trained in Prague and Karlsruhe, amongst other places, (later knighted and a member of the Vienna House of Lords and the Bohemian Provincial Assembly) Emil Škoda (1839–1900) – marking the birth of what would later become the Škoda Works, which by 1866 had risen to become the largest arms manufacturer in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (producing, amongst other things, tank turrets and naval guns), maintained a branch in Kyiv for the Russian Empire from 1876 onwards, and operated as a public limited company from 1899. At the outbreak of the First World War, Pilsen had around 100 factories. In 1899, the municipal power station began operations, and an electric tram service was also in operation. In 1910, an airport – the first of its kind in Bohemia – was opened in the Bory district.

Following the founding of Czechoslovakia, a French industrial consortium invested in the Škoda Works, which, with 13,000 employees, was the largest employer and, from 1928, also produced the first electric locomotive. In addition, industrial plant was manufactured, and in 1923 the trademark now known worldwide – the winged arrow in a circle – was entered in the commercial register. In 1925, the Škoda Works took over the vehicle manufacturer Laurin & Klement in Jungbunzlau/Mladá Boleslav.

In 1946, the Škoda Works were nationalised and various divisions were spun off as independent entities. The Pilsen plant, which was primarily geared towards exports to the countries of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), focused on the manufacture of equipment for heavy engineering, public transport and the energy sector. In 1991, VW acquired a 70 per cent stake in Škoda Auto; it acquired the remainder in 2000. The Škoda works in Pilsen themselves were privatised in 1991.

Of the religious buildings at the Old Pilsen Castle and in the Suburbium, only the foundation walls of the Church of the Holy Cross and the pre-Romanesque Ottonian rotunda of St Peter (late 10th century), which is one of the oldest buildings in Bohemia. During the founding of New Pilsen, St Bartholomew’s Church—which had been begun in 1295 as a Gothic building on the Ring—took on the role of a parish church after 1322; it was completed at the end of the 15th century and was last rebuilt in the Neo-Gothic style between 1879 and 1883 by Josef Mocker (1835–1899) and, between 1914 and 1923, by Kamil Hilbert (1869–1933) in the Neo-Gothic style. The three-aisled Archdeacon’s Church (now the bishop’s cathedral), with its 102-metre-high tower—rebuilt following a fire in 1835—dominates the Ring, together with the three-storey Renaissance Town Hall dating from 1558, which was redesigned in 1907–1912 by Jan Koula (1855–1919), dominates the Ring, on which also stands the Plague Column, created in 1681 by Christian Widmann and supplemented with further figures of saints in 1714. The market square and its adjoining alleys are also home to numerous restored Renaissance, Baroque and Empire-style houses, including the Imperial House, which was rebuilt between 1607 and 1609 for Emperor Rudolf II (1552–1612) by Giovanni Maria Filippi (1565–1630). Opposite the late-Gothic water tower lie the meat market stalls, built in 1392. At the south-eastern end of the Old Town stand the Franciscan Monastery (1295) with the three-nave Church of the Assumption, built between the 13th and 16th centuries and redesigned in the Baroque style in 1735 by the Pilsen architect Jakob the Younger Auguston (1735) and the St Barbara’s Chapel, built between 1370 and 1380. Also worthy of note are the Archdeacon’s House on the market square, the twin-towered Baroque Church of St Anne, and the neighbouring Dominican convent (1710–1714), which, following its dissolution in 1782, initially served as a grammar school run by the Premonstratensians and, after alterations in 1805–1809, now serves as a scientific library, are also worthy of note. On the site of the Dominican convent, which was demolished in 1895, stand the Palace of Justice, built between 1899 and 1902, and a prison (now an archive).

To the east of the city centre lies the site of the ‘Prazdroj’ (Urquell) municipal brewery, established in 1842, and to the east of that, the Gambrinus Brewery, founded in 1869. In 1908, the main railway station, with its 36-metre-high dome in the Neo-Renaissance style, was completed by the Pilsen-based construction firm Rudolf Štech. Not far from here stand the Church of the Infant Jesus, built in 1745 to a design by Matthias Andreas Kondela, and the single-nave Gothic cemetery church of St Nicholas (1406–1410; baroquised in 1739–1744), beside which lie, amongst others, the founder of Czech drama, Josef Kajetán Tyl (1808–1856), who wrote the text of today’s Czech national anthem in his play ‘Fidlovačka’, (The Shoemaker’s Feast), which premiered in Prague in 1834, and Emil Ritter von Škoda (1839–1900) are laid to rest.

In 1818, the first theatre performance in the Czech language took place in Pilsen; the play performed was *The Liberation of Pilsen from the Taborites* (*OsvobozeníPlzně od Taboritů*), the original German version of which was written by the author Anton Fischer. In 1832, the first permanent theatre, built in the Neoclassical style by the architect Lorenzo Sacchetti (1759–1836), was opened. This was followed in 1902 by the Grand Theatre, built to a design by Antonín Balšánek (1865–1921); its construction had been made possible by donations from the townspeople since 1899, and it could seat more than 1,000 spectators. From 1912 to 1916, the conductor Václav Talich (1883–1961) worked here; his opera performances were renowned. The Pilsen puppeteer Josef Skupa (1892–1957) created the legendary characters Spejbl (1919) and Hurvínek (1926).

The *Statuta provincilia* by Ernst von Pardubitz (c. 1300–1364), the first Archbishop of Prague, which was written in 1349 and printed anonymously in Pilsen in 1476, is regarded as the oldest Bohemian incunabulum. The Czech translation of Guido de Columna’s *Historia destrucionis Troiae*, which was extremely popular in the late Middle Ages (1210–1287), which was extremely popular in the late Middle Ages, was printed in Pilsen under the title *Trojanská kronika* not in 1468, as had long been assumed, but only between 1484 and 1486, and only three copies survive (two in Prague, one in Vienna). Furthermore, between 1498 and 1511, the printing house of Mikuláš Štětina, who hailed from Upper Hungary (Slovakia), is documented in the city; he printed works in the Czech language. Alongside religious literature, the travelogues of Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512) were published here in 1508 – *Spis o nových zemích. A o novém světě. O němž jsme prvé žádné znalosti neměli* (A Treatise on New Lands. And on the New World. Of which we initially had no knowledge)). Another printing house was run between 1526 and 1530 by Johann (Jan) Pekk, a native of Schwabach who had trained in Nuremberg; he mainly printed theological books, and with his death, book printing in Pilsen came to a standstill for almost two and a half centuries.

Among the best-known Bohemian humanists is the Catholic Kašpar Kropač of Kozince, a native of Pilsen (Cropacius) (1539–1580), a Catholic from Pilsen, who was awarded the honorary title ‘Poeta laureatus’ in Vienna in 1560 and subsequently lived in Prague and Pilsen. His Latin hymns and epigrams were widely circulated.

During the Age of Enlightenment and the Josephine Reforms, book printing experienced a revival in 1787 thanks to Joseph Johann Morgensäuler (1748–1816), who was born in Tyrol and trained as a printer in Prague; he founded a publishing house which later established branches in Klattau/Klatovy and Leipzig. In 1790, Morgensäuler also opened the first lending library in Pilsen. Between 1864 and 1869, the ‘Plzeňské noviny’ (Pilsen Newspaper) was published; subsequently, a Czech press landscape began to take shape (including *Český lev*/*Bohemian Lion*, 1870–1872, *Plzeňské listy*/*Pilsner Blätter* (1891–1911) and the Social Democratic newspaper *Posel lidu* (People’s Messenger, 1892–1894). German-language newspapers included the “Pilsner Bösen Zungen” (1876), but above all the “Pilsner Tagblatt” (1900–1918). Despite growing ethnic and national divisions, bilingualism was very pronounced amongst the inhabitants of Pilsen in the 19th century. The German-language newspaper *Pilsner Bote* (1854–1869) and its successor publications, *Pilsner Reform* (1870–1899) and *Echo aus Pilsen und Westböhmen* (1899–1902) were published at the printing works of the Czech politician Ignác Schiebl (1823–1901), who also served as President of the Pilsen Chamber of Commerce and Industry from 1883.

In Pilsen, from 1873 to 1908, the writer and chronicler of the Bohemian Forest, Karl/Karel Klostermann (1848–1923)—who initially wrote in German but later in Czech, and whose grave is located in the Central Cemetery, taught German and French at the German State Realschule.