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

by Peter Demetz

  Charles was crowned in Rome on Easter Day 1355 and left the Eternal City immediately, as he had promised the pope he would. His hasty departure shocked many Italian patriots as an undignified and even dishonorable escape from imperial responsibilities. His Italian joys were not enhanced when, in Pisa, an inimical faction of nobles put the torch to the house where he and the empress rested, and the imperial couple, lightly clad, had to run for their lives before royal soldiers intervened. Petrarch was terribly disappointed (and also knew that Charles had crowned his friend Zanobi da Strada poeta laureatus); writing to the emperor in June 1355, when Charles was still on his way to Prague, he did not mince words. Never in the past had any ruler voluntarily discarded such a great hope, but Charles, unfortunately, had only “his desire for Bohemia” in his mind. His august grandfather and his royal father, “hovering over the summits of the Alps,” would be shocked. Charles simply “lacked will [voluntas deest], the source of all action.”

  In 1356, Petrarch was sent by Milan’s rulers, the Viscontis, who were eager to receive Charles’s support against a group of their enemies, on a diplomatic mission to Prague. (It’s nice to see Petrarch involved with the powerful ancestors of the film director Luchino Visconti.) Petrarch went via Basel, where he had hoped to meet the emperor, and then through the gloomy and dangerous German forests, and was welcomed at Hradany as a peerless guest of honor; had he wanted, he could have stayed in Prague for the rest of his life. He was probably not very successful in his mission (the Viscontis had always been a thorn in the emperor’s side, to say the least), but everybody, including the empress, the archbishop, and especially his fellow poet and fellow bibliophile Johannes, vied for the honor to make his stay in Prague pleasurable. Charles gave him a golden beaker and appointed him comes palatinus (count palatine), a rank which gave him the right to appoint his own notaries and a few other legal privileges; he happily received the appropriate document but refused at first to accept the heavy golden seal, adorned with a panorama of Rome, because he thought it too valuable. He accepted it only later, at the renewed entreaties of the chancellor. As always, Petrarch must have enjoyed his social success among the elite; after returning to Milan, he wrote a polite letter to Amestus, thanking him for all the encouragement he had received in Prague and assuring him that he remembered the civilized pleasures of the king’s metropolis with great affection. Referring to the archbishop’s self-deprecatory remark that he must have felt in Prague “among barbarians,” Petrarch said that the emperor and a few learned men around him were truly worth remembering, “as if they had been born in Attic Athens” (si Athenis Atthicis nati essent). Charles continued to invite the poet to Prague, but he did not accept for a long time, and when he finally did, he was not entirely disconsolate that military complications in northern Italy prevented him from traveling. He met Charles, possibly for the last time, in Udine and in Padua in 1368.

  It is not surprising that, among the intellectual elite of the Prague court, the imperial chancellor Johannes was Petrarch’s most ardent admirer, enamored as he was by manuscripts, translation work, and the resonance of languages. He confirmed in his first letter to Petrarch that he had heard about him from the king’s learned pharmacist Angelo, who had praised the poet’s epic invention, his energy of structuring fiction, and his artful style. Johannes longed for a communication from him, perhaps to begin a lasting friendship, but his first letter to Petrarch, written possibly in the early 1350s, was rather strained, amassing learned images and coming close to being a parody of polite Latin rather than an instance of the new Ciceronian elegance (I suspect that Johannes was actually imitating Cola di Rienzo’s wilder flourishes). Petrarch must have noticed the somewhat provincial effort, but his response was friendly, even playful, and a true example of spare elegance. He was touched by his admirer from Prague. “I noticed,” he wrote, “that my name, however unimportant, already made its way over the summits of the Alps, covered by clouds, and wanders from mouth to mouth, of the most learned people under the Germanic sky. Fame may be something empty and like the wind, and yet it has a certain sweetness which attracts even great minds.”

  Johannes may have met Petrarch in Mantua, but he certainly had his chance in Prague in the summer of 1356, and again in Udine and Padua when Charles went on a second voyage to Rome. Letters were frequent for seven years; Petrarch had sent him a copy of his Bucolicum Carmen (Bucolic Poem) and had promised he would deliver an interpretation personally when he came to Prague again. Disconsolate Johannes urged him “to send his interpretation as quickly as possible,” confessing that he suffered great pains “reading sentences so resounding and such apt metaphors of delicate things” yet not understanding the intentions of the poet’s art. Petrarch certainly had been aware of the gap of learning between northern Italy and Prague, and had touched on it with delicacy, paying a superb compliment to the chancellor. “Born away from the Helicon,” he wrote to Johannes, “and educated in a country which dedicates itself to other [theological?] studies entirely, a country in which classical studies are not only not sought after but generally scorned, you have broken through the dense fog of errors which surround you and you have lifted yourself on the wings of the mind and the helpful pinions of study to the lofty tower of truth … We (let me speak in the name of all excellent people of Italy and Greece, past, present, and future) owe your name constant remembrance and the highest praise of unchanging glory, the more so the less we had hoped, in such times and in such a country, to discover a talent, granted by the muses, of such a kind.” It was surely an homage to all the learned people who were trying to close the gap between the new humanism of Italy and the late medieval court of Prague.

  Charles Builds His Myth

  The essential ideological concept, or useful myth, which Charles used to strengthen his power and the dignity of “the Bohemian crown” (which then comprised Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Upper and Lower Lusatia, Brandenburg, and paternal Luxembourg) was a confluence of the Carolingian tradition, originating in Charlemagne, and that of the Czech Premyslids, protected by St. Václav. The prince had been named Charles in France, but he would have certainly preferred to remain Václav, especially after returning to Bohemia. He was constantly concerned, as ruler, writer, and lord of architects, to keep alive the heritage of his Pemyslid mother and the patron saints of the land; after forty years of more or less Marxist scholarship about Charles, at least in Bohemia, psychoanalysts would be amply rewarded by another look at his mother fixation.

  Charles himself wrote (c. 1358), in stately though certainly not Petrarchan Latin, a legend about Duke Václav and his grandmother Ludmila, and acknowledged that he was reading the past for his own purpose. Using his knowledge of previous Václav legends, from the tenth century to Dean Cosmas and his own time, he returns to the well-known stories and episodes but sets them firmly in a context that legitimizes the author, who also happened to be king of Bohemia. Once again, Charles tells how pious Ludmila was killed by two men in the employ of Václav’s mother, Drahomira. He described Václav’s Christian education and his unique piety, his exhausting deeds of charity offering bread to widows and orphans or buying off the children of slaves, and he writes about the matchless loyalty of his servant Podiven, who on a cold day could warm his feet in Václav’s miraculous footsteps (this is a story retained in the English carol about “Good King Wenceslas”). He also told about Václav’s last hours, strongly resembling Christ’s passion: The duke accepts an invitation from his treacherous brother to an evening meal, prays the night through, and is ambushed in the early morning by Boleslav and his men; when he is only wounded, he offers his body voluntarily to the fatal strike of the sword. The royal author makes his ideological argument at the earliest possible occasion, saying that Ludmila and her husband, Boivoj, were baptized at the Christian court of Prince Svatopluk of Great Moravia by Bishop Methodius, who came to Moravia and Velehrad from Byzantium. In a single paragraph, not exactly historical in all the details, Charles manages to ignore Pe
mysl the plowman (a pagan) and the hex Libussa but directly links the Pemyslids with the advent of Christianity from the Slavic and Byzantine east and extends Prague history far into Great Moravia and the Slavic rites.

  Charles himself must have felt the irony of writing a Latin legend in praise of the Old Slavonic origins of Bohemian Christianity and the Slavic rites; in his historicism engagé, he extended an invitation to Benedictine monks of Slavic origin to settle in Prague and, in opening the view to the southeast, he widened the liturgical and philological erudition of the clergy and renewed the ancient Slavic rites from the time of Bofivoj and Ludmila; even St. Václav, it was thought, was initially educated by a priest of the Slavic mission. Delicate negotiations with the Curia were necessary, but difficulties were avoided by assuming, in Avignon and in Prague, that the learned St. Hieronymus had translated the Bible into Old Church Slavonic (he came from Dalmatia and was believed to be a Slav): the pope’s decree and the king’s order unanimously stated that a new monastery and a new church would be dedicated to St. Hieronymus; Charles, in his document, advanced the current idea that “the Slavic language of the kingdom of Bohemia” had emerged from Old Slavonic and that it was only appropriate to return St. Hieronymus “to his nation and country.” A contemporary chronicle called the new buildings marvels of architecture; the new church, on a terrace above the river and dedicated to the Virgin Mary, was particularly austere, but the cloister was adorned by more than eighty frescoes, scenes from the Old and New Testaments, painted by the king’s most favorite masters who also had worked at his castle at Karlštejn. Most of the Benedictine monks came from Tkon, on the island of Pašman, near Zadar, on the Adriatic, or from Senj, a town on the coast which young Charles had known. These studious Croatians founded a scriptorium to write and copy manuscripts in Latin and in the Glagolica (Old Church Slavonic in its Croatian version), established what one would call today an institute of Slavonic studies (Charles paid for an additional scribe), and celebrated mass according to the Slavic rites. The brothers of the Monastery of the Slavs (“Na Slovanech”) were later in sympathy with the Hussites who celebrated their own services there while destroying other monasteries; in the seventeenth century the buildings were redone in the Baroque style and taken over by Spanish and Bavarian Benedictines. The end came swiftly; the Nazis dissolved the monastery in 1941, and on February 14, 1944, church and monastery were nearly destroyed by an American air raid. Reconstruction began immediately after the war but mostly for secular purposes.

  Charles believed in the power of the word, and had he ruled in later centuries, he would have made ample use of a few court journalists to justify his rule. He prompted a provost of the Prague Cathedral, who had begun to write a chronicle for the bishop, to work for him; and before he died, he employed at least three more chroniclers, learned amateurs as well as professionals, to narrate the story of his reign and its antecedents. Charles’s own writings, whether authentic or merely ascribed to him, show no enthusiasm for the playful refinements of fiction but, rather, a sturdy sense for political necessities and, perhaps, a certain frustration with his chroniclers, who, as hard as they tried, were not up to his lofty aims. Whatever he wrote himself was of ceremonial, legal, and pedagogical relevance, as, for instance, the rules for the coronation of the king and the blessing of the Bohemian queen, compiled from French, German, and Bohemian sources (1347), or the Majestas Carolina (1355), to which he certainly wrote the preface himself. Others were policy statements, even if appearing in the guise of the legend of St. Václav; his autobiography, the only one ever written by a medieval ruler (at least Chapters 1-20), was formally addressed to his sons. His pedagogical bent was even more visible in his later years. Both his Moralitates (Moral Sayings), assembled from snippets of French sources, the Bible, and St. Augustine, and his “Mirror of Princes,” which is actually two letters, occasionally using Petrarch, were lessons about pious living and just ruling dedicated to his sons, who later behaved as if they had never read or pondered his well-intended if diffuse instructions. Charles was a writing king and emperor, and though a little schoolmasterish and without much imagination, he was better qualified than any other ruler in contemporary Europe to discuss matters of the mind.

  The image of Charles as constant do-gooder, friendly and ceremonious, was carefully burnished by his chroniclers, but it does not coincide with the story of his life, especially the early years. He may have written his memoirs not only to educate his sons but also to tell his chroniclers that he could do a far better job than they. In his youth, he fought in many countries, was lightly wounded at least two times, and succeeded in a few hair-raising cinematic escapes. In Pavia, his breakfast was poisoned; in Dalmatian waters, when his ship was to be seized by pirates (or by Venetian allies who mistakenly thought he was an enemy), he had to escape via the ship’s bull’s-eyes into a little boat where he hid under fishing nets before reaching port; in Pisa, the irate opposition tried to burn down the house where he and his wife rested; in Poland, he was almost taken prisoner by a treacherous duke but guessed the intention and commandeered assistance at the right spot and hour. Charles was easily offended in his dignity: once, overhearing members of a Florentine delegation exchanging bantering remarks, which he understood perfectly well, he demanded and received an instant apology; and though he was magnanimous, particularly when it served him in the long run, he was also resolute and vindictive: he had Henry of Carinthia’s bastard son put on the rack and interrogated him while undergoing torture about other members of an anti-Luxembourg opposition; and he certainly did not hesitate to lay waste to castles and fortresses of rebellious barons, Tyrolean or Czech. He wanted to protect the peace of the land; I do not believe he hanged the Czech robber baron Jan Pancé by his own hand, as a contemporary source says, but I do not doubt he gave the order for it coolly and without hesitation.

  It is a modern attitude to separate the public and private life of a medieval emperor; as we try to do so, it is useful to remember that Charles was educated as a boy at the fashionable court of France and spent his formative years as soldier and prince in the liveliest towns of northern Italy. Bohemian writers assume that he was appropriately chaste and saintly, yet in his memoirs he confesses, in somewhat convoluted terms, that he fell victim to the desires of the flesh; he tries to shift responsibility for this to Satan, his father, and his father’s evil advisers, in that order. “The devil,” he writes in Chapter 7 of his memoirs, looking back on pleasant days at Lucca, “instigated evil and perverted people who daily surrounded our father, to lure us from the right path into the snare of misery and lust [libido is his word]; and seduced by perverted people, we were perverted by the perverts.” But he was warned by heaven; on the way to Parma, in Terenzo, near Pontremoli, he had a terrible, unforgettable dream. In his dream, he was watching an army of knights in battle formation; an angel seized him by the hair and dragged him up into the air to behold what was to happen. Another angel descended from heaven with a fiery sword, struck one of the noble knights through the heart and cut off his penis, and the man died in agony.

  At any rate, when Charles returned from France and Italy to Prague, he was something of a dandy sporting the most recent chic. He wore a short jacket that revealed much leg, and this promptly offended the virtuous people among the Prague patriciate. In February 1348, the pope, himself well known for his affair with charming Madame de Turenne and his worldly ways, admonished him in writing to wear longer and wider vestments, as was fitting the dignity of a ruler. More than a hundred years later, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II) remarked in his History of Bohemia that young Charles had his problems with proper attire.

  Charles was always loyal to his four wives, yet each of these marriages, following upon each other in rather hasty sequence, was planned, first by his father and then by Charles himself, to fulfill an important political purpose: to strengthen alliances or territorial interest. The four noblewomen, one from France and three from German-speaking regions, were all the obje
cts of deals, dutiful mothers, and figures of representation. His marriage to Blanche of Valois, the French child bride who bore him a daughter (she, too, was married off to a king), was intended to seal the Luxembourg-France alliance of interest; his marriage to Anna von der Pfalz (of the Palatinate), who gave him a son who died in childhood, was a result of his effort to broaden his base of support among the prince-electors voting for or against the Roman king—a contemporary chronique scandaleuse, of course Italian, notes that Anna was not too bright and, feeling neglected (I believe that), prepared a love potion which nearly killed Charles (sober historians speak of a grave affliction in his nervous system in 1350). He married his third wife, Anna of Schweidnitz, mother of a daughter and of the future King Václav IV, to round out his Silesian territories; and finally, Elisabeth of Pomerania, to break up an anti-Luxembourg coalition. She was a girl of sixteen, tall and feisty when she married him, and upon his suggestion would good-naturedly make a show of her strength for visiting dignitaries, bending horseshoes with her bare hands and tearing up coats of mail. When he died, she walked behind his bier, and she survived him for more than thirty years.