by Peter Demetz
King and town council were unanimous in wanting Prague’s townspeople to be peaceful and prosperous, at least in theory; in 1287, a renewed royal ordinance made it illegal to carry arms day or night (unless certain financial preconditions were fulfilled), and illegal to hide knives in shoes or stockings (if you were caught repeatedly, your hand was pierced and you were expelled from town). In the evening, and after the bell of the town judge had rung thrice, everybody was to carry a light in the dark streets; if you were discovered without one, you had to pay a fine or go to prison for a week (first offense). Kaprova Street, where Franz Kafka was born more than five hundred years later, was the first street to be paved, and in 1339 King John turned over the royal fees earned from the import of wine to pay for the paving of others as well. By 1335, the first public bath is mentioned in the Old Town, though history does not disclose what really went on there; five years later the town council awarded a public-works contract to one Heinrich Nithart to clean the streets for a year. It must have been an execrable job to do. A much later Prague anecdote records that an Italian artist by the name of Giovanni Spinelli was convicted of spilling blood in church (during mass, he attacked his girlfriend with a knife) but agreed that his original prison punishment be commuted to a sentence of cleaning Prague streets for three years with his own hands; the story does not reveal whether he regretted his choice.
Prince václav or, Rather, Charles
The hopes of the Bohemians that young John of Luxembourg would come to love his country and his wife, Eliška, of proud Pemysl origins, were soon disappointed. After raising conflicts with nearly everybody, including the church hierarchy and the Old Town patricians, young King John, intelligent, adventurous, and impatient, roamed around Europe, returning to Prague only to squeeze the burghers for money or to arrange knightly jousts. (Once he fell off his horse, to the great glee of the vulgares, into the splattering dirt of Staromstský Square.) His son Václav, the third child after two sisters, was born on May 14, 1316, and, as crown prince, almost immediately became a pawn in the conflicts between his father, Queen Eliška, an energetic and self-willed woman, and a changing coalition of the king’s adversaries, which occasionally even united the Olbrams and the Wölflins. After a wobbly agreement was signed between the king and the opposition (ably led by the Czech noble Jindich of Lipa), the barons persuaded the king that he should do without the advice of their enemy the queen; John, suspecting, possibly not without some justification, a revolt in support of the queen and his son, took by force the fortress of Loket (in German, Elbogen), where mother and child dwelled. He held his three-year-old son in a dungeon there, “a little light coming in from a hole in the ceiling,” and sent his wife off to the town of Mlník. After a new reconciliation and a new revolt, she, disconsolate and tubercular, escaped to Bavaria in 1322; her son Václav never saw her again. Fearing that the opposition would gather around his son, in 1323 King John sent Prince Václav from the castle of Kivoklát, where he had kept him far from Prague, directly to the court of France to be educated there at a useful distance from Bohemia. When Václav returned to Bohemia after more than eleven years, matured by political and military experience in Italy and elsewhere, he solemnly prayed at the grave of his mother, buried at the Cistercian abbey of Zbraslav, just south of Prague, before he, on October 30, 1333, proceeded to the capital.
In France, Václav accepted the name of Charles from the French king, lived at the court, both at St.-Germain-en-Laye and in Paris, and, as a boy, was married to Blanche of Valois; three marriages, all equally diplomatic, were to follow. It is a matter of dispute whether he attended the University of Paris and how much he learned there; both the Austrian historian Heinrich Friedjung and his Czech colleague Josef Susta seem rather skeptical about his systematic training. His early education had been supervised by Jean and Huetus de Viviers, and in his memoirs Charles writes himself that he learned to read reciting the Hours of the Virgin Mary, repeating these prayers daily. After 1325, his education was supervised by the distinguished diplomat and theologian Pierre de Rosières of the monastery of Fécamp, who was to become his adviser and friend, and later Pope Clement VI of Avignon. Charles notes in his memoirs, written of course many years after the event, that he was greatly moved by one of Pierre’s sermons on Ash Wednesday, preached in the presence of the French king, admiring its “beauty of language and art of rhetoric”; he asked himself what it was that made this man of the church radiate such illuminating grace. It was a nice way for an emperor to pay a compliment to a pope.
After seven years in France, Charles was sent to Luxembourg, possibly because King John did not want him in Bohemia, and was involved for three years in his father’s northern Italian battles and affairs, during which the prince, emerging from boyhood, began to think and act for himself. Brescia, Parma, Cremona, Pavia, Modena, Lucca, and many other northern Italian towns had been willing to accept King John’s “protection” (it cost them a good deal of money), but others, such as mighty Florence and haughty Milan, did not. Representing his father on the spot and often condescending to the role of a royal condottiere, Charles had a good deal of trouble. Once, in Pavia, he was nearly poisoned by a Milanese agent (three nobles in his retinue died, and he escaped only because he did not eat the poisoned breakfast before going to communion), and at the castle of San Felice near Modena he had to fight the armies of the cities revolting against King John’s signoria, his first, and tough, battle. The horse was killed under him, and just when he thought that all was lost, the Mantuan enemy gave up and left Charles victorious in the field; he ascribed this first great military victory to St. Catherine and later built many shrines to her.
Of the Italian towns given to his care, he liked Lucca most (a lifelong affection), established a princely chancellery there, obviously enjoyed the company of the local young maidens, or donzelle (repentance came later), and called a little fortified settlement nearby San Carlo. Ultimately he decided entirely on his own (his memoirs are rather terse about these matters) to disengage himself once and for all from his father’s hapless Italian adventures and simply to return to Bohemia, as margrave of Moravia at least, and, somewhat against all expectations, to restore royal power, sadly abused. It was certainly not a return in triumph; he did not encounter in his homeland anyone he would know, “neither father, nor mother, nor sisters, nor any other acquaintances.” Hradany Castle lay in ruins, and he had to take lodgings in the Old Town house “U Štupart,” which belonged to his mother, and later in the household of the Prague burgrave. But he was serious in his intentions, which the Czech barons and his father did not yet entirely grasp, and soon invited his French wife, Blanche, to join him. After she arrived in Prague in June 1334, she showed good sense by sending home her French and Luxembourg retinue and by trying to learn the local languages (quite in contrast to King John’s second wife, a Bourbon, who came to Prague and kept her elegant French retinue, making herself vastly unpopular with the locals, high and low).
King John was disturbed by the success of his son, who began patiently to define his position among the baronial factions, favored the important monasteries and royal towns as bases of his power, and repossessed, by ingenious financial transactions, royal property his father had liberally pawned. In a few years King John limited his son’s mandate to Moravia again and sent him off, as he had done before, to fight and negotiate elsewhere. After six years the king (who was rapidly going blind) relented once again, the Bohemian nobles confirmed Charles as his future successor, and by 1342 father and son had signed a contract about transferring rule to the younger man, who was to pay 5,000 measures of silver each year to his own father. It may have been symbolic that at the famous Battle of Crécy in 1346, blind King John died with the flower of French chivalry in front of the English positions defended by efficient longbowmen (though he was not chained to two other knights to find his way, as the poet Froissart suggested), while his son, also fighting with the French, was only slightly wounded in a skirmish of the rear guard
the next day. Unwavering in his French orientation and shrewd in his dealings with the Avignon papacy, by mid-century, without waging a major war, King Charles was to achieve what the Pemyslid kings had merely dreamed of: he was elected Roman king twice, in 1346 by five out of seven votes, and, after Ludwig of Bavaria conveniently killed himself by falling off his horse or having a stroke, unanimously three years later. He was crowned king of Bohemia in 1347, and not wanting to meddle in Italian affairs, he was also crowned king of Italy in Milan in 1355; two months later, together with his new wife, Anna von der Pfalz, he became emperor of the Holy Realm, in Rome, on April 5. Roman dreamers and Italian patriots urged him again and again to renew the glory of ancient Rome and the true capital of the Christian world, but he had set his mind on Bohemia, kingdom of his Pemyslid mother, and before he died in 1378, he had made Eliška’s town, Prague, a wondrous heart of European power, religious feeling, creativity, and erudition. Or so it seemed.
King Charles, Father of His Motherland
Since 973, Prague’s bishops had been subordinated to the archbishopric of Mainz, in Germany, and in the spring of 1343 Charles went to the pope in Avignon together with his father to negotiate a possible change, well aware that the kingdom of Bohemia was the last in Central Europe without its own archbishop; he also assumed that a more powerful church organization would strengthen his hand against pressure from the barons. The political circumstances were favorable; the incumbent archbishop of Mainz was a partisan of the excommunicated emperor Ludwig of Bavaria, who had refused to acknowledge the Avignon Curia. On April 30, 1344, the pope issued a bull in which he made the new Prague archbishop independent of Mainz and directly subservient to the Curia, and in some detail suggested the reasons for his decision, among them the geographical distances involved, the days of travel, the difference of languages, and the increasing number of Christians and churches in Bohemia. On the same day, Bishop Arnestus (Arnošt) of Pardubice was appointed archbishop of Prague, and when Charles and King John returned, he was ceremoniously invested with the symbols of his new office on November 21; King John and his son together laid the foundation stone of the new cathedral that was to celebrate the independence of Prague. About the same time, the Prague burgrave, possibly following Charles’s wishes, incorporated the houses grouped near the castle around its own rink, or square, and the parish church of St. Benedict into the little township of Hradany. Now its resident nobles, clergymen, craftsmen, and working people were directly dependent on the court.
After Boivoj’s chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary, the Romanesque basilica, and Duke Václav’s rotunda, the new cathedral was the fourth church on Hradany Hill to attest, by the will of the ruler, to the strength of the Christian tradition in Bohemia. The chief architect of the cathedral was Matthias of Arras, in northern France, who when he arrived in Prague decided on a conservative, if not a little antiquated, structure of High Gothic perfection. It was a project on a grand scale: Matthias, and the men of his construction lodge, together, possibly, with the occasional assistance of his compatriot Jean Deschamps, worked for eight years and completed before Matthias died in 1352 the eastern part of the ambit, eight chapels, with the appropriate supports outside, many pillars of the main nave, and a wall rising to the triforium—all in a linear and somewhat abstract style that Charles may have admired when he lived in France.
In the mid-1350s, Charles appointed as his new architect Peter Parler, born in Cologne, where his father had been among the builders of the cathedral, and this was a first-rate choice. Of the 180 men whom Peter Parler employed in his Prague lodge of builders, twenty-five were Czechs and a few others came from Flanders, Poland, and Hungary; though Parler (the name suggests that he had been a speaker of a lodge, or chief apprentice) may have been a complicated character, involved in a few shady deals and dubious marriages, he was an innovative artist and craftsman of lively imagination, and his clan of sons, nephews, brothers, and grandsons continued to build in his “beautiful style,” as it was called in Prague and all over Central Europe even long after he had died in 1399.
Peter Parler did not continue the academic and recurrent patterns of the older design but worked with flying ribs, pendant keystones, and innovative net vaults, derived, as some experts believe, from English cathedrals. He was not averse to returning to earlier elements of Cistercian-Burgundian Gothic style or even to an occasional Romanesque quotation, consonant with the king’s historical interests. In his commitment to sparse linearity, Matthias had suppressed ornamentation, but Parler and his gifted collaborators created, on consoles and gargoyles, many grotesque figures and masks, among them Socrates, or the devil violently tearing Judas Iscariot’s soul from his mouth, and worked with painters and sculptors (Parler was a master sculptor himself). Many historians agree that Charles probably had a word to say about the construction of the new chapel in honor of Duke Václav, protecting the remains of Bohemia’s patron saint. It was to be a “church within the church,” and its square shape, radically at odds with the assumptions of the surrounding space, and its fine encrustations of gold and precious stones, which related to earlier Venetian and Byzantine art, expressed, on their own mystical terms, the vision of a “New Jerusalem,” as ecstatically described in Revelation 21: 16—19: “foursquare, its length as large as the breadth … the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass. And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all manners of precious stones.” Similar ideas in Charles’s mind possibly determined the location of the tombs of past rulers and queens; the portrait busts of Charles, his four wives, his ecclesiastical friends, and the artisans on the lower triforium; and the images of Christ (exactly above the bust of Charles), Mary, and the patron saints on the highest level. Down in the earth, the past; somewhat higher, the presence of the king and his court; and up on high, the realm of eternity.
In building the castle of Karlštejn, southwest of Prague on a steep hill close to the Berounka River, the emperor had all the authority to insist on his personal preferences in architecture and the arts. It is not known who was in charge of construction, which took place in 1348—67, but it was evidently an architect well aware of French and Italian practices, and the structure and interior of the castle may have been closer to the emperor’s curiously mixed, conservatively inclined tastes than any other of his many castles and fortresses; even the residence he built in Brandenburg in the last years of his life was but a pale reflection of the Bohemian exemplar. German and Czech historians have argued whether he wanted his own Montsalvach of the Holy Grail, or a sturdy fortress to protect the imperial and royal crown jewels that were symbolic of his power, or both. Strategically of little importance (though long besieged by the Hussites in a later epoch), austere and strangely impressive, the castle rises dramatically, especially when seen from the Berlin—Prague express train winding its way through the meager forests. Its clean walls and thick towers ascend in virtual terraces of meaning, from the terrestrial (the halls of the staff) to the space of political power (the king’s reception rooms on the second level) and, ultimately, on the highest stratum of the highest tower, the chapel of the Holy Cross, again encrusted with gold and precious stones, a mystical Jerusalem of prayer and meditation. There were other chapels, among them Charles’s small private oratory, later called St. Catherine’s Chapel. Charles employed some of the most important jewelers and painters of his time, local and foreign, among them Tommaso da Modena and Master Theodorik (later much admired by the German romantic writer Friedrich Schlegel), an early expressionist and chief of the Prague guild of artists, to create frescoes and panels, showing the ancestors of the dynasty, beginning with Noah, and the heavens rich with angels, saints, and patrons. The Gothic art of the west and the iconic traditions of the east, possibly transmitted from Venice and Dalmatia, live here in magnificent unison; as in the St. Wenceslas Chapel in the cathedral, the idea of political power and the meditation of transcendence, whence all power comes, are one.
The Founding of the Ne
w Town
Young Charles did not reveal much of his plans for Prague as long as his been crowned Roman king and king of Bohemia, in that order and in record time, he began to issue in quick sequence the first documents announcing the great changes to come. He acted almost like a newly elected American president who, as soon as he arrives in the White House, wants to convince the electorate that he means business. Matthias of Arras had begun on the cathedral two years before King John’s death, but then, between April 1347 and April 1348, Charles initiated the construction of Karlštejn Castle, founded a vast New Town, and established Prague University, not to speak of legislative projects and the reorganization of the clergy undertaken by his loyal archbishop. On April 3, 1347, he signed a document at Kivoklát Castle saying that “after mature consideration” and “bowing to the advice and the will of the burgomaster, the town council, and the entire community,” he planned to build a New Town adjacent to the Old Town to increase “their honor, freedom, well-being, joy and protect them against all violent conflict.” On March 8, 1348, in an exquisitely formulated royal letter he defined the fundamental intentions of the project and the procedures to be followed. Among the foremost worries that burdened his soul, he declared, was the great and essential question how to make certain that Bohemia, his hereditary kingdom, would flourish beautifully in every respect (ex omni pulchritudine vireat), constantly enjoy ample peace, increase its riches, and be secure against all attacks by enemies. People who moved into the space of the New Town, an additional ordinance asserted, would enjoy freedom from taxation for twelve years, provided that they finished their houses eighteen months after the building start, and used materials resistant to fire. Christians as well as Jews, given special protection by the king, were invited to come and to settle. The Christians came, mostly artisans from the Old Town, but the Jews, who may have heard the brutal stories of how Charles had handled Jewish property in pogrom-ridden Germany, preferred to stay together in the old Jewish Community close to the river, as before.
