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

by Peter Demetz

  Earlier in the century, the Prague church hierarchy had had a rather ambivalent attitude toward the Inquisition, not because it wished to side with the heretics, but rather because it felt that this new institution interfered with Bohemia’s own administrative habits. It is possible that the emperor’s and archbishop’s official insistence that heresy in Bohemia must be eradicated mercilessly was both a sincere expression of their orthodoxy and an effort not to allow the flying courts of the papal Inquisition (surprisingly, often manned by Bohemians) to meddle too heavily in the affairs of the Bohemian church. Fourteen heretics were burned at the stake in Prague in 1315, mostly peasants and craftsmen from Lower Austria who had been brought to Prague to be sentenced; as soon as Jan of Dražice, bishop of Prague, was himself called to Rome to answer an accusation of being too lenient about heresy, the Curia established a permanent court of Inquisition housed in the Old Town. It was mostly concerned with the infiltration of heretic ideas across the Austrian frontiers that might affect German settlers in southern Bohemia (many were held in Prague because the southern Bohemian prisons were overcrowded). Citizens of Prague were more directly concerned with the exemption from the rule of secular law of all priests, whether worthy or not, and the affair of the priest Martin taught the town a serious lesson. Martin, a priest at the cathedral, was a professional thief and when he was caught, the town handed him over to the archbishop, who did not take legal action; when, in an economically depressed year (1361), Martin organized a gang of thieves and holdup men, the town councillors caught him again, put him into a sack, and had him drowned in the Vltava River. The emperor, doing business in Nuremberg at the time, was irate and declared that he would not set foot in Prague again until the culprits were punished; the town judge and councillors immediately lost their jobs, and the archbishop sentenced them to deliver two eternal lights to the cathedral and seven thousand measures of wheat to his office, whence he distributed it to the poor. Judge and councillors were expelled from Prague forthwith, and when they were allowed to return later they died early deaths, or so it is said.

  The church was the richest institution in Prague, owned more land, not to speak of Prague property, than the Bohemian nobles, and was the most attractive employer for the poor, ambitious, young, and educated; even Jan Hus, martyr of the Hussite revolution, said that “as a little scholar” (žáek) he had wanted to become a priest because he hoped for a good roof over his head, a cassock, and the respect of the people. The trouble was that there were too many young clerics and too few benefices; the situation was complicated by the tradition of awarding more than one benefice, or paid position, to a well-connected person who then appointed an easily cowed substitute (there were so many applicants) to fulfill the duties at the altar, or elsewhere. Conditions were particularly bad toward the end of the century; in 1395 there were 980 new clerics but only 204 benefices; in 1399, 1224 against 110, and in 1404, 1,386 young people for 220 positions. The clerical proletariat was on the increase, and those who enjoyed a benefice and their hangers-on were not particularly prompted to be stern examples of ascetic living. The archbishop had to tell the clergy over and over again what its way of life should be, and he often appointed clerical correctores to investigate and to punish undisciplined priests. From his irate letters to the bishops, it is evident that many among the Bohemian and Prague clergy were too merry for their own good; spent their time in the taverns drinking heavily, carrying arms, throwing dice, making obscene and “clownish” speeches; dishonored virgins; and committed all kinds of indecencies that asked for immediate arrest and punishment by the ecclesiastical authorities.

  The renowned preachers of the 1360s and 1370s, who called for a new purity of Christian living and condemned the role of money in religious experience, were greatly admired as long as they turned to the townspeople, but they inevitably ran into trouble as soon as they touched on the sensitive question of buying and selling benefices and indulgences. Konrad Waldhauser and Mili of Kromíž, the most famous of these, held on to the truth of the church, yet they were both accused of heresy and were forced to defend themselves before the archbishop or to travel to Rome. Konrad was called Waldhauser because he came to Prague, at the emperor’s invitation, from the Augustinian monastery of Waldhaus, in Upper Austria; he preached in German at the Church of St. Gallus and, with ever increasing success, at the Týn Church (he had to speak on the town square just outside, because the sizable church was too small for his audiences, which included the Empress Elizabeth and, it is said, a few Jews from the neighborhood). Patrician ladies took off their high and costly veils and gave away their expensive dresses to indicate their new humility. Mendicants and nuns, whom Waldhauser accused of making money too easily (especially the Dominican nuns of St. Anne, who sold places in their institution to the pious daughters of rich parents), by 1363 united against him and compiled an eighteen-point accusation that was transmitted to the archbishop and a papal delegate, dwelling in Prague. Waldhauser was honest, sober, far from a mystical visionary, and he loved a good fight, particularly with Dominicans, but he never suffered because he had friends in high places, including Pope Urban V, King Charles, and the archbishop (who usually told him that the mendicants were outside his jurisdiction), as well as among the eager students.

  Waldhauser’s friend and disciple, the Moravian Mili of Kromêíž, was a practical mystic (rare in Prague), precariously hanging on to the accepted truth of the church and yet constantly accused of heresy by his enemies in the mendicant orders. He quickly advanced to notary in the emperor’s office and later to a high position at the cathedral. He was among Waldhauser’s most impressionable listeners, but suddenly, in 1363, he gave up his cathedral benefice and decided, against the friendly protests of the patient archbishop, to become a simple country priest and preacher. He trained first for six months in the Bohemian provinces and returned to Prague to preach to audiences at the Malá Strana and in the Old Town, initially with limited success, for many laughed at his broad Moravian dialect, but he soon convinced even the most skeptical among his listeners by his fierce earnestness and personal commitment. He was a driven man, given to self-torture, as were so many mystics of his time. He wore a hair shirt under his habit, refused (after a journey to Rome, where Dominicans briefly imprisoned him) to drink wine or to eat meat and fish, preferring instead a steady diet of peas and beans, declined to bathe (when his habit needed cleaning, his friends had to tear it off his body), slept on a wooden board, and often heard the voice of the Holy Spirit telling him what to do and what to say. In Prague, he was difficult to avoid. Speaking for two or three hours in sequence once or twice a day, he was eager to reach all Prague audiences; he preached in Czech at St. Aegid’s, in Latin to students and the learned at St. Nicholas, and, after he had brushed up his grammar, in German to the patriciate, at the Týn Church.

  Mili preached against pride and luxury, against the dubious fiscal interests of the mendicant friars, and he felt increasingly attracted by the prophecies of the Book of Daniel, which he studied, it is reported, with the help of Jewish scholars. He was obsessed with the idea of the coming of the satanic Antichrist, predicted for the mid-1360s; and during a sermon in 1366 when the emperor himself was present, he pointed his finger at him, telling the people that Charles was the true incarnation of the Antichrist, as prophesied by the Bible. Charles nobly ignored the pious provocation, though the archbishop thought he had to incarcerate Mili at least briefly. Mili was lucky to have friends in Prague, Rome, and Avignon; when he was later called to respond to another catalogue of heresies, he was saved by the shared efforts of the Prague archbishop and one Cardinal Grimaldi, the pope’s brother.

  Mili’s ambitious public project to gather penitent Prague prostitutes in a new Christian community of prayer, communion, and useful work met with an ambivalent response. In 1372 he acquired a vacant house, formerly a well-known place of ill repute run by Madame Keruš Hoffarth (in German, “pride”), who in turn had sold an adjacent building to Prague’s ex
ecutioner (the house was particularly functional because it had a convenient back door opening into the darkness of the small Old Town streets). Mili changed its name from sinful “Venice” to “New Jerusalem,” adhering to the emperor’s favorite passage in Revelation 21, and offered a home and a Christian haven to Madame Hoffarth’s girls and their colleagues. It is said that about eight hundred women went through his New Jerusalem before they either married, were taken home by their parents, or ran away to other brothels (Mili followed them and tried to bring them back). His well-administered project did not long survive him; right after he died, the emperor, uneasy in these matters, dissolved the institution and offered the building to the Cistercians, who made it a college for its novices attending the university (1374). The chroniclers unfortunately do not say anything about what happened to the poor women affected by the emperor’s action.

  During these uneasy times of religious conflict and increasing social tension, two works of art, one in German and the other in Czech, were created; each in its own distinctive way constituted the highest literary achievement of Prague’s Caroline century. They suggest, perhaps with a little delay, the best of an age in which certainties of belief gave way to rising doubt and, looking back to ecclesiastic circumstances and the courtly heritage, show that art can emerge from the study of the educated scribe and the erudite scholar. The Bohemian German Johannes of Tepl, who died as scribe of the New Town of Prague, wrote his Plowman from Bohemia (Der Ackermann aus Böhmen, 1400) at about the same time as the still unidentified Czech author wrote his Tkadleek (The Weaver,1407); past disputes about the chronology of the texts, trying to derive nationalist profit from discovering which came first, long obfuscated the far more important discussion of their literary value. It is possible to assume that both these texts, the most admirable results of a late medieval German-Czech symbiosis, compete to rewrite an older model, perhaps Latin or Old French. This is the working hypothesis by which the American scholar Antonín Hrubý (originally from Prague) accounts for long stretches of textual resemblances, shared images, and analogous references to the authorities, Aristotle among them. Both the Plowman (his plow is the pen, he says) and the Weaver (weaving texts) have suffered grievous losses. The German writer has lost his beloved wife, Margarete, and his Czech colleague his fair Adlika, who turned away from him to favor somebody else. It is as if the protagonists of Machaut’s Old French poem “The Judgment of the King of Bohemia” reemerged in a German and a Czech transformation, the plowman arguing against Death himself, and the weaver against Misfortune (Neštstí), both of whom have destroyed their bliss.

  In Johannes of Tepl’s disputation, man against death, the most provocative sequences are those in which the plowman defends the radiant dignity of his wife, and of all other people, against current ideas of Death, who sees on earth but filth and inevitable putrefaction. Death sings stern songs of condemnation; man is “but a barrel of muck, full of worms, a privy [ein stankhaus], a disgusting slop pail”; he has “nine holes in his body, and out of them all comes loathsome and unclean filth.“The plowman extols human beings as God’s finest handiwork and enthusiastically praises the earthy virtues of the senses:”in the eyeballs there is sight, the most trustworthy tool, … in the ear there is hearing that reaches out into the distance, … in the nose there is the sense of smell that goes in and out through the openings, skillfully adapted for the easy acceptance of all pleasurable and delightful perfumes.“Yet, ultimately, these intimations of Renaissance transports are silenced by medieval anxiety: between man and death, God is the highest judge, and he accords praise to the plowman for arguing so valiantly, but victory to death, as it cannot be otherwise.

  The author of The Weaver had been trained at the University of Prague (he says himself that he is Czech in his head but, as far as his feet are concerned, he is from everywhere) and handles his quotations more carefully and ostentatiously than his German colleague, demonstrating that Johannes’s alleged quotation of Plato really comes from Aristotle. Earlier critics have suggested that Johannes of Tepl is more sincere because he really did lose his wife, while the weaver indulges in a witty and somewhat loquacious exercise, nearly four times longer than the plowman’s text. But sincerity of feeling was never a full guarantee of literary quality, and the weaver has his own excellence in the innovative force of his argument, the amplifications of the inherited trial formula, and in the surprising richness of his language (soon to be impoverished by the polemical writing of the coming revolution). The weaver may or may not have lost his Adlika, his lovely pernikáka (gingerbread maker), but his work of art, which gathers for the last time the surfeit of older Czech, offers lasting enjoyments.

  The Carolinian Jewish Town and the Massacre of 1389

  During the reign of King Charles the Jewish Town, the core of which was called inter Iudeaos in old documents, was not yet a ghetto (a term that derived from Venice’s borghetto, a Jewish district, much later). Originally, there had been two settlements closely surrounding the Old School and the Old New one, separated by the Church of the Holy Spirit, its parish, and possibly a small Benedictine convent, established in 1346; another church, that of St. Valentin’s, was located close by, and a third one, All Saints, lay almost within its invisible boundary. There were still clusters of Jewish houses elsewhere—a few perhaps in the Minor Town and, though the Jews did not accept the king’s invitation to settle in the New Town and enjoy its privileges, the cluster of almost a dozen houses near Prague’s oldest Jewish cemetery, which served the Jewish communities of Bohemia for nearly two hundred and fifty years; by 1481, six of the families had left, and nine years later all were gone.

  The boundaries of the Jewish Town were rather porous; in some places Jewish and Christian houses constituted a mixed neighborhood, especially if the king had intervened and allotted a Jewish building to a Christian institution (as King Charles did with Lazar’s house, later bought back by Jews) or given it to a favorite for excellent services, as King Václav II did when he gave the house of Michael the Jew to his court secretary and in 1404 another one to a gifted artist who illuminated rare manuscripts for his pleasure. There were no massive walls separating the Jewish district from the Old Town, whose own fortification occasionally ran parallel to the Jewish houses, especially near the river, but the Jewish quarter’s densely built wooden dwellings, an easy prey to devastating conflagrations, constituted a souk-like district. It could be entered by any of six gates, one close to St. Valentin’s near the Vltava ferry, and the others at nearly regular intervals. But the walls did not protect the Jewish settlement when mobs came to rob and kill in 1389.

  During the fourteenth century, the chances for Prague Jews to continue in their traditional and various ways of doing business were slowly reduced by the growing competition of Christian capitalists. The German burghers of the Old Town had seized the initiative in long-distance commerce, originally a Jewish sphere of interest; and even in the credit business, Christians circumventing church prohibitions against usury invaded Jewish economic territory. The rich were few and far between in the Jewish Town, though together they possibly commanded more cash than anybody else in Bohemia. Merchants changed currency, lent money, accepted pawns, bought and sold secondhand wares; other Jews, jealously watched by the Christian guilds, tried to shift to crafts, working on their own as tailors, goldsmiths, and later as belt makers and glaziers. A happy few were employed in community jobs, as, for instance, the shammash, or janitor of the synagogue, the shulklopper who announced when it was time to go and pray, the mokel, or circumciser, and the shochet, or butcher working according to prescribed rules. By legal definition, and by the consensus of church and empire, Jews were held in “servitude.” Church doctrine held that the eternal servitude of the Jews was symbolic penitence for Christ’s suffering on the cross, though Jews were also, according to Augustinian thought, necessary witness to the truth of Christianity. The Holy Roman Empire secularized this metaphysical idea and declared that the Jews were camerknecht
e, servants of the imperial chamber or, to call a spade a spade, of the imperial finance office; they were the ruler’s personal property, not persons but things, and ruled by the law of objects. Emperor Ludwig of Bavaria spoke of his Jews as belonging “as they do, to the crown and the empire with their body and property, and he could do, act, and proceed with them as he wants and sees fit.” Charles may have been an enemy of the Bavarian, but his ideas did not at all differ from Ludwig’s concept of the camerknechte.

  Among the many Jewish scholars of Prague in this time, Jom Tov Lipmann-Mülhausen was long remembered as thinker, interpreter of the Bible, and keen polemicist. He probably came from Alsatia but spent his most productive years in Prague and by 1407 was appointed iudex iudaeorum , judge of the Jews, in the self-administration of the community. Long before the august Rabbi Loew, he was the first philosopher of Prague’s Jewish scholars exploring metaphysical questions of faith and free will, but it was always difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile his defense of the rationalist Moses Maimonides, whose ideas he tried to spread as far as he possibly could, with his interest in the Spanish Kabbalah, of the Gerona school, and with his studies in the form and meaning of the letters of the alphabet, as shown in his Sefer-Alpha-Beta, of essential importance to writers of sacred scrolls. To his contemporaries and those of the following generation, Jews and Christians, Jom Tov Lipmann-Mülhausen was well known as an energetic polemicist, defending Judaism against apostasy and demonstrating the insufficiency, as far as language and history were concerned, of Christian knowledge of Hebrew sources. His arguments were particularly efficient because he knew Latin and had studied the New Testament and the early church fathers. As a member of the rabbinical court and as a judge, Lipmann-Mülhausen was loyally committed to Prague’s Jewish community, but he also traveled widely to study and supervise rabbinical rules and practices, and he headed the council of Ashkenazi Jewry in Erfurt in 1440.