The thermal springs are fabled to have been discovered as early as 762, however the first authentic mention of the baths occurred in the 16th century. The settlement was first mentioned about 1158, when Judith of Thuringia, queen consort of King Vladislaus II of Bohemia, founded a convent for Benedictine nuns, which was destroyed in the course of the Hussite Wars. In the late 15th century, queen consort Johana of Rozmital, wife of King George of Poděbrady, had a castle erected on the ruins.
Teplice figures in the history of the Thirty Years' War, when it was a possession of the Protestant Bohemian noble Wilhelm Kinsky, who was assassinated together with Generalissimo Albrecht von Wallenstein at Cheb in 1634. Emperor Ferdinand II thereafter enfeoffed his General Johann von Aldringen, who nevertheless was killed in the same year, and Teplice fell to his sister Anna Maria von Clary-Aldringen. Consequently, and until the expropriation of 1945, Teplitz was the primarily seat of the princely House von Clary und Aldringen.
After a blaze in 1793, large parts of the town were rebuilt in a Neoclassical style. The health resort was a popular venue for wealthy bourgeois like the poet Johann Gottfried Seume, who died on his stay in 1810, or Ludwig van Beethoven, who met here with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1812; as well as for European monarchs. During the Napoleonic War of the Sixth Coalition, Teplice in August 1813 was the site where Emperor Francis I of Austria, Emperor Alexander I of Russia and King Frederick William III of Prussia first signed the triple alliance against Napoleon I of France that led to the coalition victory at the nearby Battle of Kulm.
In 1895 Teplice merged with neighbouring Lázně Šanov (Schönau). With the dissolution of Austria-Hungary after World War I, the predominantly German-speaking population found itself in newly established Czechoslovakia. Right-wing political groups like the German National Socialist Worker's Party
