When it was incorporated into the Habsburg Monarchy in 1526, the kingdom of Bohemia had included a large swath of German-speaking people in its western region, later to become notorious as the Sudetenland. This territory was economically important and now constituted a natural defensive barrier for any Czech state. Its prosperous population had by 1913 grown to 3 million and had remained ethnically and linguistically German. But never in its history had any of this land belonged to any of the states that were forged into the German Reich in 1871.
