Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City (17 page)

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Authors: Peter Demetz

BOOK: Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City
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The days were gone when Arab travelers had noticed the sale of slaves, weapons, and inexpensive leather goods in the shadow of the castie.
Now, the merchants of the Old Town were dealing, on a European scale, with a wide variety of commodities and luxury goods that satisfied local demand as well as customers in Poland, Hungary, and farther east. Wheat and cattle were brought to Prague from nearby (chicken was dutyfree), carp and pike arrived from southern Bohemia, and salted herring from the European north was shipped via the Elbe River. Local peasants offered onions, cabbages, and leeks; saffron was imported from stores in Regensburg, figs and almonds from Venice and the Orient. Bohemian wine was for sale, mostly from north of Prague, but connoisseurs also had their choice of Alsatian, Tyrolean, Frankish, and Italian imports. Beer consumption was, then and now, at a record high (good beer, as a Czech proverb demanded, had to be as “sharp” as horseradish,
pivo jako k
en
), and every burgher jealously guarded his ancient right to brew his own kind; imports were strictly forbidden. Fine cloth from Flanders was considered most valuable, but there were also less expensive textiles from Poland, mostly gray, and other kinds woven at home. Linen came from Bavaria and northern Italy, and there is some evidence for an early taste in buckram and loden.
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.
The hopes of the Bohemians that young John of Luxembourg would come to love his country and his wife, Eliška, of proud P
emysl 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 Starom
stský 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 Jind
ich 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 M
lník. 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 K
ivoklát, 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.” Hrad
any 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 P
emyslid 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 P
emyslid 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.

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