Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City

by Peter Demetz

  In 1234, at the age of twenty-three, she entered a convent in the Old Town next to the river, and remained there for almost a half-century (she died in 1282). Anežka had long been an object of dynastic and family politicking, and when she decided to become a bride of Christ she did so on her own terms and with remarkable independence. She wanted her own life in a convent of her own and silently brushed aside the traditional possibility of entering the Benedictine convent of St. George, at the castle. She organized her own hospital in 1233, run by a lay brotherhood later called the Order of the Knights of the Cross with the Red Star (1237), the only monastic order ever to emerge in Prague, and then, when Pope Gregory IX sent her a group of Italian nuns, she founded a convent that she established as a Franciscan cloister, thereby risking a prolonged conflict with the Fratres Minores, who had come to Prague in the 1220s and settled, according to the king’s will, at St. Jacob in the Old Town. On June 11, 1234, after her hair had been shorn and she had given away her riches, she entered this convent herself (seven bishops officiating and the entire royal family being present), and the pope appointed her, hardly a year later, abbess of the new institution. Soon she left the hospital to the Knights of the Cross and by her own example, as the Latin legend of her life tells us, made the new convent a radiant home of Franciscan spirituality and a magnificent monument of early Prague Gothic architecture. Construction probably went on for nearly fifty years; first, art historians assume, came a Church of St. Francis and convents for the sisters; then, after 1240, friaries were built, and, later, the Church of the Redeemer, to serve as a burial place for the dynasty. The early part still reveals the Cistercian-Burgundian legacy of sacred architecture, but the later buildings are closer to the High Gothic of German and French cathedrals.

  “A queen turned servant,” the Latin legend suggests, but Anežka was very much concerned about the rules according to which she and the sisters were to live, and for more than twenty years she corresponded and pleaded with Rome about her Franciscan theory and practice; the letters going back and forth between her and Clara (who had established at San Damiano, in Umbria, the first women’s convent in the spirit of St. Francis—hence the name Poor Clares for the nuns of this new order) amply suggest that the two women strongly supported each other. They both defended a radical view of poverty which the Holy See, for many pragmatic reasons, did not share. Gregory IX did not wish to see the new monastic orders multiply endlessly, each with a different set of rules and rituals, and he believed that it would be economically more feasible if the Poor Clares’ convents shared property rather than depend on the Fratres begging in the streets. Anežka and Clara in unison believed in absolute poverty as a way of pious life; it was precisely her belief in poverty which prompted Anežka early to disaffiliate herself from her hospital, which was substantially endowed by the queen mother. Discussion intensified, busy Franciscans carried letters across the rivers and the Alps, and after Anežka sent him a sketch of her own new rules to be approved Gregory IX did not, in response, even bother to hide his iron fist in a glove of velvet rhetoric: he admonished Anežka to distinguish between zeal and expert knowledge and told her in no uncertain terms to follow in God’s grace the old rule.

  At least he had been willing to listen; Anežka had pleaded for a modification of rules originally written for the sunny hills of Italy, not unheated cloister halls of a Prague winter, and while the pope readily gave permission for his Poor Clares of the north to shorten the times of fasting and wear double tunics, wool stockings, and fur-lined coats, he remained adamant on the central question of the privilege of poverty, which the Curia interpreted as “shared endowment.” Anežka relented for the time being, but as soon as Innocent IV was elected in 1243, Anežka wrote again, though modestly speaking only of modifications; the new pope, addressing her as his “peaceful dove” (columba pacifica: he had a sense of discreet irony), gently asked her to “quit worrying” and “calm down,” and allowed the sisters of the inclement clime to partake of warm food, wine, and eggs. Ultimately, the Roman hierarchy granted the wishes of the Poor Clares; in 1247, the rule of St. Francis was substituted for that of St. Benedict (though shared property was still recommended), and on August 9, 1253, two days before Clara died, Innocent IV confirmed the privilegium pauperitatis as she wanted it to be; the Poor Clares in Umbria and Prague rejoiced that their vision had prevailed.

  One can point out, of course, that Anežka’s convent, the pride of early Gothic Prague, was amply supported by the king and the queen, who were always willing to sell a few villages when architects needed money for expansions and additions (Prague art historians have found the documentary evidence), but it is also true that Anežka, like her friend Clara, also of a noble family, truly lived according to early Franciscan ideals. Her legend, written some fifty years after she died and discovered in 1896 by the scholar Achille Ratti (later Pope Pius XI), praised her simplicity, the humble willingness with which she served the sisters, washed and mended their clothes, lived on a frugal diet of raw onions and fruits with long weeks of fasting, and her joy in the Eucharist. “There she sucked, like a bee, honey from the rock of the sweetest godhead and the oil of compassion from the hardest stone” (ibi sugebat enim ut apicula mel dulcissime divinitatis de petra et condescensionis humanitatis oleum de saxo durissimo).

  Anežka and Clara belonged to those Franciscans who cherished a radical view of evangelical poverty and anticipated the thought and the protest of later church reformers who argued against a church too deeply involved in worldly power and magnificence. Unfortunately, the Poor Clares of Prague did not have a chance to go on living undisturbed by history. During the Hussite revolution in the fifteenth century, the convent, from which the sisters and friars had escaped, was turned into an arsenal (1420), and though Dominicans and Poor Clares returned for a while in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Emperor Joseph II secularized and transformed it, in his own revolution from above, into a place where the Prague poor lived or set up little workshops; the churches and chapels fell apart. Even in our century, the “Na Františku” neighborhood was a picturesque place for the underprivileged and a few imaginative screwballs (all wonderfully portrayed in the writings of Géza Velika, who was born there). Czech archaeologists and art historians fought city planners who wanted to do away with the medieval remnants, as they had in the Jewish Town, and insisted on a judicious restoration, which was completed against many odds in the 1980s. “Anežin Klášter,” St. Anežka’s convent, now serves as a branch of the Czech National Gallery, elegant concerts are performed in its halls, and during the intermissions chic tourists and those Prague citizens who can afford it have drinks at the little bar built into the old cloister wall.

  Anežka, patroness of Bohemia, was canonized in 1990, but neither profane nor sacred history has much to say about her alleged sister Blažena, who, far from Prague, established her own Christian community. One Blažena, or rather Guglielma Boema, appeared with her son in Milan in 1270 and settled there in different neighborhoods until she was given a home in the nearby Cistercian abbey of Chiaravalle. She called herself a widowed daughter of the king of Bohemia, and many people admired her piety, humility, and exemplary other virtues, stayed close to her, and, after she died on August 24, 1292 (only a few months after her sister Anežka), revered her as a saint; the Chiaravalle abbey built an altar and a chapel above her grave, and her followers declared her to be the female incarnation of the Holy Spirit.

  The church was uneasy about the Milan “Guglielmites,” and the Inquisition established only a few decades before to investigate allegations of heresy and improper doctrine or practice—especially in cities—scrutinized the Chiaravalle abbey. It was satisfied with public acts of recantation and contrition, at least at first, but Andrea Saramita, the convent’s business agent, pushed Guglielma’s cause and convinced a Milan priest to go with him to Bohemia to notify the royal family of her demise (in vain, because Bohemia was in political chaos); by 1300, the Milan Inquisition had opened
formal proceedings against the “Guglielmites,” citing Saramita and two women of Milan’s Umiliati lay community (the “Humble Ones”) for heresy—Maifreda da Pirovene (who was to be Guglielma’s spiritual heir and the next incarnation of the Holy Spirit) and Giacobba dei Bassani. (František Palacký, father of Czech historiography, brought back to Prague from a research trip to Italian archives in the 1830s some Latin excerpts of the trial and published them in 1838.) Saramita, probably under torture, ultimately declared that Guglielma herself had believed she incarnated the Holy Spirit; her corpse was disinterred and burned; and Saramita, Maifreda, and Giocobba were sent to the stake. Guglielma/Blažena may have been the first Czech heretic (at least post exhumationem), but there is little evidence that she was remembered by anybody in her nation, proud of its Hussite martyrs and the fires in which they died. In Italy, historians and feminists now continue their research.

  The first-born daughter of King Otakar II, Kunhuta, born in 1265 and named after her mother, was possibly more docile than Anežka or Blažena. When she was eleven years old, she entered the cloister of the Poor Clares but was removed almost immediately because her father engaged her to a son of Rudolf of Hapsburg as part of his tactical arrangements in 1276; as soon as these arrangements were null and void and Otakar took the field against Rudolf, Kunhuta returned to her great-aunt Anežka but not for long, because her brother Václav II married her off to a Polish duke, with whom she had three children. By 1302, she was divorced and finally entered the Benedictine cloister of St. George to serve God and the arts. She was appointed abbess almost immediately, greatly expanded the cloister’s endowment, supported the importation of fine illuminated manuscripts from the scriptoria of Salzburg, Passau, and Bologna, and attracted excellent Czech artists to compose and illuminate manuscripts for her use and that of the sisters. The Dominican priest Kolda of Koldice, of noble Czech birth and a member of the Inquisition, dedicated to her his allegory of the knight-errant (Christ) who succeeds in freeing his love (the soul of man) from captivity; and Beneš, an outstanding artist, illuminated a passion of Christ for Kunhuta that is a work of rare beauty. These earlyfourteenth-century manuscripts were written in Latin, but Kunhuta is perhaps better remembered because of a prayer in Old Czech which signals a new strength in Czech writing, its richness of sacred, lyrical, dramatic, and epic forms fully emerging during the last years of her life (she died in 1321).

  Inserted into a Latin breviary belonging to a lay sister, Máa, the Old Czech prayer was written in the hand of a scribe still active after 1310, and it is now assumed that “Kunhuta’s Prayer,” as the text is called by antiquarians and philologists, was written before the turn of the century to be recited or sung during mass before the Eucharist was celebrated. It is a singular text because the spiritual lyric written in Czech, which was late in joining the liturgical languages of Old Church Slavonic and Latin, here suddenly emerges in a highly formalized structure, with references, terms, and images suggesting a sophisticated way of speaking about communion. “Kunhuta’s Prayer” clearly shows that mystical thoughts about the presence of Christ in bread and wine were not absent in the mind of whoever composed it. The text of the prayer welcomes the coming of the all-powerful king and creator, gives thanks for what he has done for mankind, praises the wondrous change (promna) of Christ’s flesh and blood into bread and wine, and expresses the belief that Christ is completely present in each single piece of the “living and joyous bread.”

  The formal analysis of “Kunhuta’s Prayer” has been much refined, especially by the Czech linguist Pavel Trost, who places the text close to the hymn “Lauda Sion Salvatorem” (“Praise, O Zion, Thy Redeemer”) ascribed to Thomas Aquinas. The mystical core of its argument centers on the One God and the multitudes partaking in communion sub utraque specie (receiving both the bread and the wine), as St. Thomas asserts in his hymn (stanza 7). The prayer suggests that God is all-one in all places; even if the bread is broken into small parts, God is present in all of them, just as we see many rays emanating from one sun (stanza 15); the living bread is given completely and entirely, to the first, second, third, fourth, thousandth, even the last who partakes of the Eucharist:

  God hides in the shape of bread

  you hide your divine light there

  entirely you dwell in the host

  entirely in the heavens you dwell.

  These poetic thoughts of a mystical Czech scribe in Prague were not surpassed for a long time.

  During the thirteenth century, when European life was affected by the great struggle between the Guelf (pro-pope) and Ghibelline (proemperor) factions in Italy and in imperial politics, the Pemyslid court attracted a number of highly qualified refugees from the Ghibelline camp who were allied with the Hohenstaufen emperor. These refugees, well informed about the changing situation in Italy and elsewhere, found protection in Bohemia’s church (surprisingly enough) and came to serve Otakar II and his son in diplomatic missions and perhaps in his chancellery. Henricus de Isernia, the most outstanding among them, must have convinced his Bohemian contemporaries of his excellent erudition; and when Václav II, Otakar’s son, needed a loyal expert to codify a corpus of ordinances pertaining to silver mining, a new industry that had become essential to Bohemia’s economy, he invited another Italian, Gozzi di Orvieto, who seems to have been quietly effective in his job.

  Henricus de Isernia belonged to the southern Italian partisans of the Hohenstaufen imperial interests and, after the fifteen-year-old Conradin Hohenstaufen was put to death in 1268, faced the wrath of the triumphant Charles of Anjou, who ruthlessly persecuted the Italian Ghibellines, Henricus lost his lands near Naples, had to run for his life, and was advised by Neapolitan friends to go across the Alps to Saxony and Prague to mobilize resistance against the French. After staying a while at the court of the Wettin family in Meissen, Henricus by 1270 went to Prague and tried to find a place for himself and to advocate intervention against the French. Historians agree about his considerable rhetorical and literary talents, but they differ about his sincerity and about whether or not he was actually appointed by the king to an important position; for a hundred years now the experts have tossed the question back and forth as to whether he was really one person or two, the second being a less colorful scribe and notary, Henricus Italicus (Jindich Vlašský) by name. One eminent Czech historian believed that Henricus de Isernia was, basically, a windy Neapolitan who tried to insinuate himself everywhere, practicing an elegant rhetorical art far too exquisite for his own good; the German historian Jörg K. Hoensch, in an informed book about Otakar II, recently suggested that Henricus actually was Otakar’s right-hand man in his administrative reform of the realm. At any rate, Henricus’s first protector was Bishop Bruno of Schauenburg, Otakar’s most loyal adviser, and although Henricus complained about being kicked out of the Strahov monastery, he probably moved to the Vyšehrad, where he established a private school of rhetoric, and then back across the river to Prague Castle again; he never lacked intimate knowledge of what was going on politically.

  Henricus’s many elaborate Latin letters and poems, whether penned as stylistic exercises for his tutorials or as official documents, should be read with appropriate caution. He was involved: on one war expedition he rode out with the king and a few bishops and a German poet; in the army camp he joined in a discussion about the Ghibelline-Guelf problem or, in more appropriately metaphorical terms, the question whether the pope was the sun, the emperor the moon, or vice versa. He liked to show off his art of composition: to Princess Kunhuta, the later abbess, he wrote a passionate letter about the beauties of Sicily and southern Italy (alas, she was five years old, and the letter was really addressed to her fiancé, whom he was asking to intervene there), spoke of Otakar as “king of kings,” and, when Otakar found himself politically isolated, issued a kind of Slavic manifesto appealing to the Poles to give military support to Otakar and speaking of the close relationship between the Pemyslid family and the ancient Polish dynasty of the Piasts,
“the consonance of languages,” and the need to band together against the German enemy, who, if he defeated Prague, would almost certainly “force Polish freedom into a stern yoke and present the Polish nation with innumerable iniquities.” This early appeal to Slavic solidarity, a Czech historian remarks, written in the best fioritura style which Henricus had learned at the University of Naples, sounds so convincing that we easily forget that Henricus began his political career in the north trying to enlist German help against the French (and that Otakar himself tried to mobilize at least four German princes against Rudolf of Hapsburg). Yet it seems that his elegant writing style was very much admired by literate people in Prague, and there is evidence to suggest that Magister Bohuslav, the notary in charge of the queen’s office, happily imitated his style and included a few of his pieces in his own collection of formulas to be used in diplomatic correspondence. It is a poetic thought that Henricus de Isernia, whose name disappears from the Prague scene after 1278, may have died loyally with King Otakar on the battlefield, while the other Henricus (Italicus) went on serving Otakar’s son in an official function for years to come.