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

by Peter Demetz

  Whenever dangers ebbed, the conflicts between the Prague moderates and the radicals, allied to Tábor, usually increased. By early 1422, negotiations between the Prague Old Town, mostly moderate if not conservative, and the New Town, mostly radical, were controlled by an administrative group of nineteen men, consisting of many Hussite knights and also Jan Žižka himself. In early March 1422 resistance to Želivský and his faction on the part of the Prague moderates, including the university masters, noticeably stiffened; Master Jakoubek of Stbro himself presented to the Old Town magistrate an accusation making Jan Želivský responsible for much unrest and the spilling of blood. (Somewhat earlier, the radicals had arrested Jan Sádlo, a Hussite military commander of moderate persuasion, allegedly because of dereliction of duty, and put him to death without a trial.) The Old Town aldermen conspired to get rid of Želivský and his supporters once and for all, and invited him and his most important friends to the town hall on March 9 on the pretext that they wanted to hear his advice about the war. They sweetly pretended to listen to his words, but suddenly the doors swung open, the executioner and his men entered, and the radicals were arrested and put in chains. Jan Želivský behaved with great dignity, knelt down and prayed, confessed to a priest, and, at the head of his group, walked to the courtyard, where all nine men (twelve, according to other reports) were immediately beheaded. His followers had gathered at his church, and it was the blood mixed with water flowing from the town hall gutters into the Old Town Square that revealed to the people what had happened.

  Slaughter was answered by slaughter. Surging crowds entered the courtyard and discovered the corpses; and Jan Želivský’s severed head was first shown by one of his men from a manure heap on the square to his raging followers and later, in an expression of savage grief, put onto a dish by a priest and carried through the streets of the towns, while church bells rang alarms. Two aldermen were killed immediately, and after a new radical town government had been established, five or six magistrates were discovered, hiding, and put to death, their dwellings ransacked. Želivský′s followers then turned against the colleges and university, destroyed the masters’ collections of books and much of the university library, and arrested the masters who had not yet escaped. In the traditional ways of the Prague Lumpenproletariat, the mob finally invaded the Jewish Town looking for spoils. The arrested masters were exiled to Hradec Králové, where they were supposed to repent under the guidance of radical priests. Jan Želivský was buried under the pulpit of his Church of St. Mary of the Snows; in the funeral oration, interrupted only by the weeping and the sighing of the congregation, his adlatus Vilém accused Jakoubek of Stbro of being fully responsible for the murder of Želivský.

  In May, the situation changed abruptly again: the radical aldermen handed over the keys and the insignia of Prague to Prince Sigmund Korybut, who arrived in Prague in the name of his uncle, Grand Duke Witold of Lithuania, who had been elected king of Bohemia by moderate Hussites and was shortly to take up the reins of power (actually, he never did), and the moderates, under his protection, proclaimed a time of reconciliation. Radicals and Táborites later attempted a few times, by stealth or by military force, to take the Prague towns again, but they never succeeded, and Prague, throughout the later Hussite wars, remained a moderate town of Utraquist lords, burghers, and university masters longing for peace and, as the conflict dragged on, for a compromise with the church. Today, tourists are reminded of Jan Želivský by a small plaque on the tower of the Old Town city hall, put there by the Stalinist authorities and explaining that he was a “victim of the bourgeoisie.” It is a rather simple view of a radical priest of considerable political and spiritual gifts, and of the vicissitudes of his time.

  Hussites and Jews, and a Coda

  In a world of increasing brutality, the Prague Jews went on living in their own community, blessed with the traditions of internal self-rule; though theoretically the absence of a central authority protecting its financial interests may have contributed to legal uncertainties, the barons and the towns were disinclined for economic reasons to change Jewish policies radically. King Václav IV was called by many of his enemies a “king of Jews,” because he and his middle-class advisers were interested more in successful financial transactions than in endangering an important source of needed cash. But though the king could not be held responsible for the terrible pogrom of 1389, he had listened to the accusations that Prague Jews were blaspheming Christ, and as a result, eighty representatives of the Jewish community were put to death in 1400.

  The people of the Prague reform movement held ambivalent views about Jews; in spite of all the insults they hurled at Jews, the Hussites were awed by the Maccabean nation of the Bible and the fierce morality of their prophets. They did not belligerently intervene in Prague Jewish life, but it is also true that in other Bohemian places, and during armed conflict, Jews were given the choice of accepting Christianity sub utraque specie or dyirig: this happened in Chomutov (Homotau), where Jews preferred to die. Yet it has to be said that during the restive Hussite years, Prague Jewry, as if living on an island of tradition, suffered far less (even when the Prague Lumpenproletariat invaded the Jewish Town in 1420 and 1422) than Jews in Austria, for instance, where the entire Viennese community was killed off or driven into exile, accused by the Austrian authorities of selling weapons to the Hussites raiding Austrian territory.

  In the early years of the Czech reform movement, theologians raised the question of how the coming, or virtual presence, of the Antichrist (a certain sign of the millennium or the fullness of time) related to Jewish history. Mili of Kromž believed that the Antichrist was of Jewish origin and that, after the destruction of the first and second temples, he would build a third temple for the Jews; clearheaded Peter Payne rejected such mystical speculations. Matj of Janov made evil a thoroughly Christian problem, radically severing any link between Jews and the Antichrist; he insisted that the Antichrist was but the totality of all bad Christians wherever they were (one of them being, of course, the highest Antichrist). Others, including Jan Hus himself, believed that in the fullness of time, Jews, who were not at all the people of the Antichrist, would freely convert to Christianity, fervently embrace their new religion, and serve, before the coming of Christ, as an example to others.

  Averse to an economy of credit and money, Hussites were brave moralists rather than theological hairsplitters, and early on they turned their attention to the question of Jewish and Christian usury. Both Nicholas of Dresden, the German Hussite, and his Czech colleague Jakoubek of Stbro wrote pamphlets against usury in 1415. The German radical inveighed against both Jewish and Christian usurers, and he raised his energetic voice against Christian princes who, ultimately, derived substantial income from Jewish taxes and contributions (a point well understood by his contemporaries: King Václav derived one-fifth or perhaps one-fourth of his income from Jewish sources). Jakoubek of Stbro often alluded to St. Thomas Aquinas in suggesting that Christian society carried its own heavy burden of responsibility by forbidding Jews to do anything except lend money for interest. He believed that the practice of lending money in its own way guaranteed the survival of Jewish tradition; if, he believed, Jews would work, as did the Christians, “in the fields, in the forests, on rivers, on crafts, and profane commerce,” they would be easily converted to Christianity; people, he added, were “made for work as flies were made for flying,” and shared labor was essential to end the Jews’ social and religious isolation. Also, he added with a dash of naiveté or cynicism, “if Jews worked more, they would have less time to study the Talmud and, in consequence, would be less qualified to argue against Christian theologians.” Jakoubek was not at all fond of Jews, whom he called “pigeon shit,” making the soil fat but not fertile, or “excrement of the patriarchs,” but he had little sympathy for Christian usurers either, perhaps even less.

  Many Czech historians, among them Prantišek Palacký, justly believed that the Hussite movement was strongest, if not inv
incible, as long as Prague and Tábor lived and fought together, but Palacký was also aware that many Prague citizens, even in times of common campaigns, were uneasy about the alliance with the radicals, who were uncontrollably split into groups and ferocious factions, and were unwilling to consider political and religious solutions to end the splendid isolation of Prague and Bohemia. Jan Želivský, who overreached himself more than once, had uneasily tried to establish a radical stronghold among the moderates, but as soon as his dictatorial power was broken in the Hussite Thermidor of 1422 (the Hussite revolution too devouring its children), Prague preferred the possible election of a king of Polish-Lithuanian origins, joint responsibility for destroying the radical army once and for all (this happened at Lfpany field in 1434), and protracted negotiations with the church at the Council of Basel. It is easier to sympathize, for romantic reasons, with the desperate radicals, who suicidally fought to the bitter end, than with the Prague moderates, who were concerned with the devastation of Bohemia and tired of the ossified liberation theology that had been originally so eager to spread freely the word of God. They wanted to return to the European community rather than see Bohemia turn irrevocably into, to speak in more recent terms, a sullen and sectarian Albania.

  Hussite Prague was a modern laboratory of religious and social ideas and attitudes, as T. G. Masaryk suggested, and a grand theater of European history, like Paris in the 1780s or Petrograd in the 1920s. There were heroes and cowards, barons and radical poor, pious women and men fighting in the field, inventive theologians and brutal iconoclasts, English Wyclifites, German dissidents, French “Picardians.” There was Jan Hus, still strongly hesitant about the more radical beliefs of his followers; his gifted friend Jeroným, the true Renaissance man among the Hussites; studious and politically shrewd Jakoubek; bold and fiery Želivský; harsh Jan Žižka, who saved the Prague towns when the mighty crusaders attacked; and even Peter Chelický, the fiercely independent Christian thinker and pacifist who preferred to live and write in a lonely southern Bohemian village, who had been attracted to the Bethlehem chapel in his young days and may have returned to Prague occasionally to discuss his ideas (later much admired by Tolstoy) with the learned theologians of his age. Some called Prague a New Jerusalem, others a sinful whore of Babylon; and proud of its new political strength, the community unabashedly asked the Venetian Republic to come to its support.

  In the course of events, new administrative structures developed; for a short time, the Old and New Towns united spontaneously, not by decree as had happened under King Charles IV, and essential affairs were decided by direct vote of the “Velká Obec,” the great community, bringing together all residents in open town gathering, foreshadowing the direct democracy of Switzerland or of New England town meetings. Yet it is also true that throughout the 1420s and early 1430s, Prague was a place of iron, alarms, and puritan discipline rather than laughter, playful art, exuberant sympathies, and joy. The Hussites collectively created magnificent songs of piety and war, but they raided and ransacked the royal palaces and destroyed and burned many churches and cloisters (if they did not turn them into arsenals). (On their scorched earth, triumphant Catholics of the seventeenth century built many Baroque marvels.) In an age of ideas tensely watched and of literature subservient to theology and teaching, it was one Master Laurence of Bezová who retained at least a frail trace of an aesthetic, a rhetorical commitment largely absent in the stern writings of his time. He first translated a Latin book on the interpretation of dreams and a popular travelogue for the king; preferring a secular life to the priesthood, he showed himself in his Hussite Chronicle and Victory Song a man of moderate persuasion and unusually sensitive to the human suffering of a fratricidal age. He definitely disliked the radicals and, in turn, was disliked by their later defenders, but he kept his mind open and sober. As one of Prague’s talented and fragile intellectuals in a difficult time, he deserves to be translated and read with patience and care.

  5

  RUDOLF II AND THE REVOLT OF 1618

  Praga Mystica?

  At the turn of the sixteenth century, the parish of St. Apollinaris, on a little hill of the New Town (close to where the medical schools are today), was administered by Jan Bechyka, sub utraque specie. In the last years of his life (he died in 1507), Bechyka, the son of a tailor, composed a little essay in Czech about his hometown; and while he insisted on calling it Praga Mystica, it was actually a highly polemical piece on the local sociology of the Christian religions, full of provocative if partisan insights and earthy views about social life in the age of the Polish kings who ruled Bohemia between 1471 and 1526. He was definitely not a man of mystical feelings, and his first sentence declared that all things should be made clearly known; even Gypsies, he suggested, had after all developed intriguing ways to find out what people wanted to hide in their thoughts. The Gypsies gaze at people’s palms, foreheads, faces, and at their dress and gait, and thus come to know more about the invisible stirrings of their hearts. God the omnipotent reveals to everybody who has eyes to see the invisible city of virtue and sin “in the material and visible architecture and landscape of Prague.” Jan Bechyka, a theological Gypsy, reads the urban topography as a text about its spiritual life. In doing so, he unfortunately also shows the limitations of an Utraquist point of view that was quickly hardening into a new orthodoxy.

  Bechyka looks at Prague’s three towns—Old, New, and Minor—and argues that they form a trinity of communities believing in the essential importance of the Eucharist, and yet it is clear that he much favors the first two because they are both Hussite, solidly middle-class or artisan, well built, and with a historical dignity all their own. He has misgivings about the strongly Catholic and German Minor Town, which has still not been entirely restored after the battles and ravages of the Hussite revolution (besides, there was a new fire as recently as 1503). Later Czech patriots, including the nineteenth-century composer Bedich Smetana, would have been shocked by Bechyka’s deprecation of the Vltava River, which he considers evil and poisonous. It flows from the south—that is, from the pernicious direction of Rome and the pope—and cannot bring anything good, quite apart from the bad habits of the Prague burghers, who, in spite of all city ordinances, throw their refuse into it and infect the water and the clime. Bechyka knows that the city has recently begun to introduce a new system of pipes and water towers to combat epidemic diseases feared by everybody, but, being conservative, he is not fond of newfangled technological developments; besides, he fears that new water taxes will be levied on his parishioners.

  The preacher of St. Apollinaris has many reasons to speak of the Vyšehrad, not too distant from his little church, and Hradany Castle, both marked by the course of history. The Vyšehrad, already in disrepair and once so glorious, has not been demolished by an emperor or the devil but by the very people of Prague, and what is left of it is not pleasing to the eye. There are ruins and some shabby and widely dispersed wooden huts, and a few people, in rags, like peasants in a miserable village, all on the dole—a challenge to Christian charity. Hradany Castle offers at least a sign of hope. Some construction is going on, it is beautiful to look at, “bright, colorful, well built,” and yet since the Polish dynasty has moved its residence away from Prague, it is “empty without a king,” and the rather dubious members of the resident administrative council are not a real substitute for royalty. Devastated churches and monasteries are still to be seen here and there but, unfortunately, many returning monks are again welcomed by the people. Yet Prague citizens overwhelmingly lack religious feeling, have nothing on their minds but shady deals, and are busy filling their insatiable bellies from morning until late at night.

  Bechyka intensely dislikes Prague’s Jews and the Bohemian Brethren. The Brethren live in tightly organized communities, descendants of radical Hussites who, in love with the simple and spiritual life of early Christianity, had congregated in Prague and in the countryside since the 1450s and 1460s. He constantly praises Utraquist tolerance,
but he does not show much willingness to understand Brethren or Jews; in his belligerent statements he relies on the most vulgar arguments against usurers and heretics and uses them interchangeably. Like the Jews, he says, the Brethren, who want to separate themselves from the Catholics and from the Utraquist establishment, are intent upon robbing their fellow Christians (if these last should be ever foolish enough to trust them) of their souls and their spirituality. The Jews live in their own isolation in a corner of the Old Town, and so do the Brethren, at least in their theological introversion; if the Jews are busy devaluating precious coins by diminishing their weight in gold and silver, so do the Brethren devaluate the ideas of faith, charity, and love on a spiritual level: the Jews suck blood, the Brethren the soul. There is a strong note of envy in Bechyka’s diatribe against the Brethren, who, in spite of many royal edicts, steadfastly attract a loyal following from the ranks of theological dissidents, and in their conventicles and schools constitute an intellectual challenge to Utraquists and Catholics alike. Bechyka knows even less about the strong traditions of Prague’s Jewish community, which would flourish in spite of all danger toward the end of the century. He has little sense of the future.

  After the Polish Kings, the Hapsburgs Again

  The last Polish king of Bohemia, Louis, died in the Battle of Mohács in 1526 fighting the Turkish armies, and the Bohemian Estates, the representative parliament, or diet, of barons, knights, and towns, proudly insisting on their power to elect the country’s monarch, were confronted with a wide array of distinguished candidates, including kings and dukes from Bavaria, Saxony, Poland, and France, and a few powerful Czech nobles. After a relatively short discussion, they unanimously elected as king the twenty-four-year-old Ferdinand of Hapsburg, younger brother of Emperor Charles V and husband of King Louis’s sister Anna. Among the candidates, ambitious Ferdinand was closest to imperial power, and the members of the diet may have hoped that they could handle him as long as the Turks continued to put pressure on the Hungarian and Austrian fronts; in 1529, the Turks besieged Vienna for the first time, and indeed the pressure continued for more than a century.