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

by Peter Demetz

  Born in Spain of an Austrian father and a Spanish mother, Ferdinand was more Spanish than Austrian, vivacious, intelligent, and well educated; and people in Prague, where he was to reside for twenty years before shifting his court to Vienna, gladly noted that he understood Czech, though he usually answered Czech questions in Latin or German. In the first years of his reign, the Bohemian Estates underrated his outstanding political skills, his artful ways of hiding his iron fist in a glove of fine velvet (at least as long as Bohemian funds were needed to fight the Turks), and his ability to bear long grudges, finely honed by a spirit of revenge. Hapsburgs had fleetingly appeared on the throne of Bohemia before—in 1306, 1437—39, and 1453—but Ferdinand established himself as the first in a long succession of Hapsburg kings who energetically pursued absolutist policies, issued increasingly from Vienna, against the Bohemian nobility, the Prague towns, and the guilds.

  The towns of Prague had been run for some years by a conservative coalition of Catholics and Utraquists, but the opposition—consisting of the Bohemian Brethren, who had completely broken with the church, and, beginning in 1521, German and Czech Lutherans—was gaining in strength; and ancient fires of religious dissent were smoldering in the memory of the people as well as new Reformation ideas. Only a short time after the election of the new monarch, three Praguers, among them a woman “called Martha,” from Poí, were taken by the executioner beyond the Prague gates to be burned at the stake for heretical beliefs. Martha had publicly declared that Jesus Christ in his true substance and nature was indeed sitting in heaven on God’s right, as Christian religion asserts, but also that he was not to be found in the Eucharist and only mad people believed otherwise. She seemed to mix radical Wyclifism with the ideas of the early Anabaptists (dissenters favoring adult baptism). Many women had fought in the Hussite ranks of old, but she was the first woman rebel theologian, courageously defending her ideas against all the refined arguments advanced by the masters who visited her in prison; when a Utraquist scholar threateningly told her to get herself a white shirt and to prepare for death, she quietly asked for a coat and said she was ready to die immediately.

  The town authorities were so angered by her “masculine” reasoning, as the chronicle puts it, that she had to languish in prison for fifty weeks before she was handed over to the executioner, and his assistants explained to the crowds that she had not only denied Christ’s presence in the Eucharist but also received a second baptism by a heretic who had used a rough-hewn wooden vessel in the shape of a chalice. Going to her death through the Prague streets on December 4, 1527, she did not deny the accusations but turned to the people and told them not to believe the priests—“these liars, impostors, loafers, sodomites, ruffians, and seducers”—and said that if she had accepted a second baptism, she had done so because the power of the first had been destroyed by the vices of the priest. When, passing by a church, she was asked by the town judge to kneel down and pray, she did so, turning her eyes to heaven and her backside, demonstratively, to the church. A short time later, Martha died in the flames, and the executioner put her wooden chalice in the fire too.

  Ferdinand 1, who began the re-Catholicization of Bohemia, was a pioneer patron of Renaissance art and architecture. The summer palace which he built for his beloved wife, Anna, was not Prague’s first Renaissance project (that was a small southwest wing of Hradany Castle, built by Benedikt Rieth under the Polish kings), but, rising on Letná Hill (on the west bank) and surrounded by formal gardens, it was a widely visible instance of the new art, foreign and strange on the crowded and dark medieval scene. Queen Anna’s pleasure castle, later often called Belvedere, finished only in 1563, was spacious and airy, with loggias open to sunlight and sky; it enormously pleased the eye with its noble horizontal lines, harmoniously shaped green copper roof, and figural reliefs celebrating the heroines and heroes of ancient mythology. Privileged Prague residents had access to the pleasure gardens (which had been paid for by Jewish contributions) and to nearby greenhouses, where figs, oranges, and lemons grew. The Arcadian simplicity of the summer palace does not reveal the fierce intrigues among architects and master masons—among them Giovanni Spazio, Paolo della Stella, Giovanni Mario Aostalli, Hans Tirol, and Bonifaz Wohlmut—for royal favors and for financial support from the buildings committee of the Bohemian Estates, concerned with every groschen spent. The charm of the building persists, oblivious to the fate of the queen and to the conflicts among Italians, Bavarians, Czechs, and Austrians who collaborated and fought to create its sober grace.

  As long as the Turks attacked in the southeast, Ferdinand I was careful to deal ceremoniously with the Estates, for they were paying nearly two-thirds of the war costs. He reconfirmed the Basel Agreements, which had been negotiated between the Catholics and Hussites in 1436, giving them equal rights in determining liturgical practices in their Bohemian churches, for both Catholics and Utraquists were long supportive of his policies; but increasingly he interpreted these old agreements to exclude all other religious groups, including reform-minded Utraquists, Bohemian Brethren, and Lutherans, from legal participation in Bohemia’s religious and political life. In Ferdinand’s push for autocratic power and administrative centralization, advanced by his new offices in Vienna and his appointees in Prague, political and religious issues were far more important than questions of language or nationality; when in 1528 he removed Jan Pašek, the self-willed Prague mayor, from office so as to appoint functionaries more subservient to the crown, refused legal recognition to the Brethren, and successfully counteracted an ingenious Lutheran drive to gain hold of the Utraquist church council, he was set on a collision course with the Estates, who now defended their ancient prerogatives, and with the Prague towns, which were unwilling to submit to a king who proclaimed that he disliked “all these new things” causing so many conflicts.

  The Estates and the Prague towns had to learn the hard way that their fortunes depended increasingly on the international situation. In 1545, Ferdinand I concluded a kind of armistice with the Turkish sultan, and he felt free, as did his brother the emperor, to turn his attention to Central Europe and to join the war against the Protestant German princes, above all the elector of Saxony, Johann Friedrich. The trouble was that when, on January 12, 1547, the king demanded a mobilization of troops to operate not only within but beyond Bohemia’s frontiers with Saxony, irritation and resistance in Prague quickly changed into open revolt. The opposition promptly declared the order illegal, and after the Prague towns had formally protested it, their representatives, together with the nobility, began to assemble in Prague to articulate the legal basis for resisting royal interference in matters traditionally reserved to the Estates. Prague citizens and guild masters calling for an immediate restoration of the great town meetings (the Velká Obec of Hussite tradition) were joined by many nobles, mostly Lutheran or leaning to the Bohemian Brethren. On March 17, a meeting was convened at the university more than three hundred strong (though comprising only one-sixth of the Estates’ legitimate representatives) to discuss shared ideas and action to be taken. Conventional in its outlook and oriented toward the past, the final resolution was, nevertheless, an incisive rebuke of the king’s idea of centralized personal power. The meeting appointed an executive committee, mobilized its own army to march against the enemies of the country (it strongly implied that these were the royal armies operating on the Bohemian-Saxon borders), appointed a Lutheran commander in chief (who later paid dearly for his inefficiency), and established contact with King Ferdinand’s Saxon enemies. Unfortunately, the opposition did not do much more.

  When King Ferdinand defeated the German princes at Mühlberg in April and captured the elector of Saxony, most Bohemian nobles quickly submitted again and did not join the Prague towns in their last, desperate attempt to defy him. When royal mercenaries occupied Hradcany Castle and the Minor Town, Prague troops crossed the bridge to fight them and artillery pieces were hauled out of arsenals to be fired from the right bank of the Vltav
a against the royal position on the other side. Yet the king would not get involved in a battle for Prague and refused permission to his generals to counterattack. They did not have to: the town magistrates, afraid of royal retribution, did not want to go on fighting, and the towns capitulated on July 7, to await the punishment to be meted out by royal power.

  The Czech historian Josef Janáek suggests that Ferdinand I had watched the humiliation of the Flemish town of Ghent, which had revolted against the imperial government and had been punished by Charles V with executions and expropriations, and when he arrived in Prague he was ready to follow suit and take his revenge in a theatrical performance of justice, or rather in a series of show trials, to use the modern term. In July and August 1547, he presided over four trials in the Vladislav Hall at Hradany Castle, sitting on a wooden platform among a hastily convened group of assessors, including the bishop of Olomouc and a few Silesian and Lusatian nobles. Acting both as chief prosecutor (the accused were not allowed to respond to the accusations) and as high judge, who handed down the sentences, the king considered first the citizens of Prague, whom he regarded as the principal offenders, and only after he had done with them did he try the members of their executive committee, elected in March, and the nobles involved in the revolt. All in all, sixteen barons, nineteen knights, and twenty-eight representatives of the towns were put on trial and ten sentences of death were pronounced; ultimately, the executioner beheaded only four on Hradany Square. A few of the accused had escaped, among them Albin Schlick, of a distinguished German Lutheran family, and since the king did not want to alienate the powerful and well-connected noble families, the four put to death were mostly second-stringers of the gentry or middle classes, including a royal agent who had been remiss in his duties. The king was far less forgiving toward the towns and guilds; many Prague citizens were publicly whipped and exiled; privileges and prerogatives were declared invalid; all weapons, whether in private or in public possession, had to be handed over to the royal army; and country property owned by citizens of the Prague towns was forfeited to the king. (The king made a good deal of money from these confiscations and penalties, as well as a newly imposed permanent beer tax.) The nobles of the opposition were badly wounded but not totally defeated, but the towns of Prague, which together had emerged from the age of the Hussite revolution as a virtually independent city-republic, lost their prerogatives forever, never to be restored to their old glory.

  Though involved in war against the Turks again in the 1550s, Ferdinand I felt strong enough to persecute the religious groups that had been active in opposition to him, and he resolved to reinvigorate Bohemian Catholicism. The Lutherans once again had to seek the protection of the Utraquists, whose practices were sanctioned by law, and the king’s renewal of the 1508 mandate against the Bohemian Brethren, as well as the arrest of their bishop, Jan Augusta, forced them to leave Prague and Bohemia en masse and to settle in Moravia, rapidly becoming a haven for Jews and Christian dissidents. Ferdinand invited members of the new Jesuit order to Prague, and in April 1556, a group of twelve (mostly Flemish) Jesuits under the guidance of their director, Ursman Guisson, settled in the once Dominican monastery of St. Clemens, in the Old Town. Within six years they had been granted a royal privilege to expand their excellent school—which, ironically, was often attended by sons of the Protestant elite—into a full-fledged Collegium Clementinum, which began to compete with the Utraquist old university, or Collegium Carolinum. Prague had been without an archbishop since the Hussite revolution, when the last incumbent, the Westphalian Konrad of Vechta, had joined the Utraquists in 1421; the pope now appointed Antonn Brus of Mohelnice, Czech grand master of the Order of the Knights of the Cross with the Red Star, though he had long favored the chalice and the importance of Czech, much to the displeasure of Rome.

  Once he had defeated the uprising of the Prague towns and the Protestant Estates, Ferdinand I left Bohemian affairs in the hands of his second son, Ferdinand, who settled at Hradany Castle as royal governor for seventeen years before he shifted his residence and his famous art collection to Amras Castle, near Innsbruck, in the Tyrol. He was there to see to it that Vienna’s orders were implemented in Prague, but, excluded as he was from accession to the throne, he was not particularly eager to commit himself to far-reaching quarrels and was not averse to fulfilling the wishes of the Estates—the exception being Jewish policies, since the Estates rigidly opposed Jewish business while the royal governor was far more tolerant for economic reasons. Archduke Ferdinand was internationally known for his secret marriage to beautiful Philippine Welser, daughter of the famous Augsburg banker and one of the richest capitalists in Europe; though she disliked gloomy Hradany and preferred to live at Kivoklát Castle in the romantic forests (in 1834 extolled by the Czech poet Karel Hynek Mácha), her husband, who spoke fluent Czech and had access to Welser money, was gratefully remembered for releasing from prison the bishop of the Bohemian Brethren and for his intelligent interest in international art and local Czech painting. He had to have his castle and his hunting lodge too: Hvézda, or Villa Star, was built in 1555-65 in the royal game park near Prague according to his ideas by the Italians Giovanni Mario Aostalli and Giovanni Lucchese, with local supervision provided by Hans Tirol and Bonifaz Wohlmut. Hvêzda (much admired by the French surrealist André Breton) was designed in the shape of a six-pointed star lacking any outside adornment, but in the true mannerist way it surprises and astonishes the visitor with its surfeit of elaborate stuccos (by Antonio Brocco and collaborators), a magnificent vault rising from the central rotunda, and complex subsidiary spaces on all sides; the ascetic outside reveals nothing of the inside, precious and rich.

  When Maximilian II was crowned king of Bohemia in 1562, two years before his father died, Protestants in Prague and elsewhere had high hopes and dared to breathe more easily. He had been educated in Vienna in the Spanish way, but it was known that he sympathized with the Protestant cause and was, perhaps, a Protestant at heart (his father had to remind him that Protestants were excluded from access to the throne). Maximilian II, an avid art collector, mostly resided in Vienna, but he learned his Czech too; when a delegation of Brethren appeared before him in Vienna and discussed their grievances in German, he told them that German, on that occasion, was not needed. He declared in 1575 in rather general terms that he would fully respect the “Bohemian Confession,” a religious protocol compiled by all Protestant groups, but later he reneged on his promise. It has always been difficult to say whether he had a bland or an enigmatic mind, but when he lay in agony he refused to confess or accept the sacraments of the Catholic Church. His funeral in Prague on March 22, 1577, was suddenly disrupted by the panic fear that Catholics and Protestants were ready to kill each other in the streets. The cortege barely made it to St. Vitus Cathedral.

  Rudolf in Ascendance

  Many historians have loyally worked to establish a sober and balanced account of the achievements of Emperor Rudolf II, but the legends prevail. He has come down to us with the image of a royal Faust or as the mad alchemist on the Bohemian throne; historians are first to admit that his commitment to the arts and his wide philosophical and scientific concerns make him particularly dear to poets, novelists, and expressionist film producers—the legend of “magic Prague,” prepared by English, German, and American writers on their grand tours in the nineteenth century, richly cultivated by Czech and German writers of the fin de siècle, and later renewed first by French surrealists and then by Czech dissidents under neo-Stalinist rule, largely rests on diffuse clichés about Rudolf’s life and his court. The difficulties of penetrating his mind are forbidding; as ruler, he intended to do good, rarely succeeded, and, ultimately, madly destroyed himself, yet there must be some reason why he invited to Hradany so many excellent painters, artists, musicians, and scientists, and why, being a devout Catholic, he welcomed at his court Francesco Pucci, a heretic who roamed all over Europe, Jacobus Palaeologus, a former Dominican, and, above all, Giordano Bruno—all
later burned by the Inquisition.

  Rudolf, son of Maximilian II and his Spanish wife, Maria (whose mother had died stark mad), did not enjoy a carefree youth. When he was eleven years old, he was sent, together with his brother Ernst, to the Hapsburg court in Madrid to receive his education there (a triumph for his mother and the Spanish faction at the Vienna court). He stayed in Madrid until he was nearly twenty, receiving an excellent training in languages and rhetoric from his mostly Spanish tutors. His household, which may have comprised close to one hundred persons, was supervised by the Austrian noble Adam of Dietrichstein, who wrote glowing letters home to Vienna—one argument he made for keeping Rudolf in Madrid was that he would be in line for the Spanish throne if Prince Don Carlos, who showed signs of mental instability, or so they said, would be unable to reign. For years Maximilian tried to get his son home, and in 1571 he finally succeeded; in a magnificent arrangement, Rudolf and his entourage were brought to Genoa by a flotilla commanded by Don Juan of Austria, who had just smashed the Turkish forces at the celebrated Battle of Lepanto in October, and from Genoa he wended his way home to Vienna. It was not an easy time for Rudolf; his father, hesitant in religious policies and trying to avoid open conflict, and his fiery mother, deeply committed to the Catholic cause, were at odds; he may have rightly felt that he was repeatedly sent to Prague to discuss matters of taxation with the recalcitrant Estates because his father wanted to avoid an outright confrontation with these powers and was using his son as a cover-up in his policy of procrastination. A compromise was reached when Maximilian came to Prague himself and the Estates accepted Rudolf as king of Bohemia. He was crowned on September 22, 1575, at the cathedral, a festive but not particularly glorious affair for either Catholics or Protestants, both well aware of undignified deals and broken promises.