Prague's Golden Age under Charles IV

In 1348, Charles IV stood at the edge of the Old Town and decided to build an entire city from scratch. Not a neighborhood. A whole city. You're standing in what he called Nové Město, the New Town. This area alone added more space than the Old Town and the castle district combined. Charles had just become Holy Roman Emperor, and he needed his capital to prove it. The scale was insane. New walls stretching for kilometers. Wide streets in a grid pattern. Three massive market squares designed for trade. He wanted it done fast, and he got it. Within 20 years, the population exploded from 40,000 to over 100,000 people. But here's the thing. Charles wasn't just building for show. The same year he founded the New Town, he opened a university. The first in Central Europe. Two years later, construction started on the stone bridge that still carries his name. The man collected holy relics obsessively and turned this place into a pilgrimage destination. Most medieval cities grew slowly over centuries. Charles forced it in one generation. Walk down any wide avenue here and you're inside his master plan. The streets, the spacing, the squares, all mapped out in 1348 by an emperor who thought bigger than anyone before him.