Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City (23 page)
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Authors: Peter Demetz
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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.
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 objects 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.
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.
Many historians have noted that Charles was a passionate collector of relics; it is difficult to separate in this craving for these objects an archaic kind of religiosity, strangely contrasting with the predominant Augustinian piety of his friends, from a ruler’s public interest in surrounding himself with signs of power. A splinter of the Cross and of the lance that wounded Christ had long been among the royal and imperial treasures, but Charles, especially after he became Holy Roman Emperor, developed an ingenious way of pressing, or rather blackmailing, monasteries and friendly allies to contribute to his collection; he had his relics often enshrined in precious vessels of high aesthetic perfection made by the best goldsmiths of Prague. Among the objects of veneration, he acquired part of the whip used in the passion of Christ, two thorns from his crown (donated by the French dauphin), part of the Christ child’s swaddling clothes, the bones of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (compliments of the emperor of Byzantium), Aaron’s staff, the tablecloth used at the Last Supper (from the riches of the Hungarian king), a joint of St. Nicholas’s finger, a few drops of the milk from the bosom of the Virgin Mary, one of Mary Magdalene’s breasts, and a wooden board from St. Václav’s bier. The first catalogue of this collection was compiled only in the eighteenth century; it showed that Charles, otherwise totally pragmatic and a master of financial calculations, in his own way anticipated the later obsessions of Emperor Rudolf II of Prague, who was famous for gathering strange and ghastly items in his seventeenth-century Baroque
Wunderkammer.
Wunderkammer.
Bohemian chroniclers closely noted the pomp and circumstance of grand events but did not want to write about their personal impressions except in the appropriate clichés; the only snapshot of Charles, as it were, is found in the chronicle of one Matteo Villani, who possibly had a chance to observe Charles on his trip to Rome. What he says does not conflict with difficult evidence of “portrait” paintings or the bust on the Prague triforium, as far as these works of art aim at individuality at all. Charles’s
eyes were large and dark, his nose delicate, his hair full (he developed a bald spot later), and though he was of more than average height, he seemed short because, if not a hunchback, he craned his head forward (one of his neck vertebrae had been wounded or dislocated by an arrow on the battlefield). He avoided eye contact, it is said, was usually restless and tired, and when receiving someone in audience, he looked into the distance and kept busy by carving wood with a little knife, responding to the visitor quickly and affably but without much warmth. In his later years, he probably did not like people at all.
eyes were large and dark, his nose delicate, his hair full (he developed a bald spot later), and though he was of more than average height, he seemed short because, if not a hunchback, he craned his head forward (one of his neck vertebrae had been wounded or dislocated by an arrow on the battlefield). He avoided eye contact, it is said, was usually restless and tired, and when receiving someone in audience, he looked into the distance and kept busy by carving wood with a little knife, responding to the visitor quickly and affably but without much warmth. In his later years, he probably did not like people at all.
In Prague, the Bohemian metropolis of the Holy Roman Empire, literary tastes and preferences changed during the years of Charles’s reign, and the predominant Latin and German of Otakar’s time had to compete with a rich Czech literature of many genres, and with sacred scholarship in Hebrew which flourished in the Jewish Town. Charles, who in many of his political and commercial intentions, especially his interest in opening a trade route from Venice via Prague to the northern cities of the Hanseatic League, anticipated many needs of the future, was as a writer a man of the past. Perhaps he was more comfortable with the idioms of architecture and painting, from Peter Parler to Master Theodorik; in his own writings, even in his autobiography, his Latin was definitely medieval compared with that of Petrarch or his own chancellor Johannes, and his choices, or rather nonchoices, of writers to support at his court merely confirm his conservative taste. He invited the Croatian monks to carry on their study of Old Church Slavonic from a combination of antiquarian and ideological interests; in spite of the efforts of Czech philologists to show that the father of the “fatherland” supported native writing in Czech, the evidence is a little thin. His choice of a German poet to be close to his court in the 1350s was less than inspired, and the German poem written by the Saxon Heinrich von Mügeln in praise of his imperial lord has more erudition than life. Mügeln’s “The Virgin’s Wreath” (“Der Meide Kranz”), dedicated to Charles in the mid-1350s, is far less attractive than the French poem “Le Jugement dou roy de Behaigne” (“The Judgment of the King of Bohemia”) written in the early 1340s by King John’s loyal secretary Guillaume de Machaut. These poems make both exhilarating and depressing reading because they so amply confirm the traditional
clichés about French artistic finesse and German seriousness, devoid of charm.
clichés about French artistic finesse and German seriousness, devoid of charm.
Both poems are expanded arguments, the French submitted to John of Luxembourg, the German to Charles; the king, after listening to his assembled councillors, was supposed to resolve the problem wisely. In Machaut’s poem, a noble lady and a melancholy knight by chance meet in a lovely garden, and the question arises who suffers more—the knight whose ladylove has turned away from him to favor somebody else or the bereaved lady whose friend has died. The poet overhears their conversation and suggests they proceed to the nearby castle where the king of Bohemia happens to hold court. After the king has listened to an elaborate presentation of pro and con in the company of his advisers, all virtues incarnate, he decides that it is the knight who suffers more because the lady, in her bereavement, may be consoled by God. After the argument is decided, he invites the parties to stay, wash their hands, and sit down to a festive dinner. All is
courtoisie
in pastel colors, made lively by a few original strokes (the lady’s little dog bites into the knight’s coat) and much lyrical finery.
courtoisie
in pastel colors, made lively by a few original strokes (the lady’s little dog bites into the knight’s coat) and much lyrical finery.
In Heinrich von Mügeln’s poem the problem is the pedagogical curriculum and the value of scholarly disciplines (a question certainly of interest to Charles, who had just founded a university), but the procedure is strictly didactic and allegorical: after the liberal arts, all incarnating a central idea, have presented their arguments to the emperor, surrounded by his councillors, once again virtues incarnate, he decides with the support of the German poet that the wreath of excellence goes to theology—and, in another part of the poem, theology immediately demonstrates her acumen by affirming the predominance of virtue over all things natural. One can understand why Charles did not want to continue employing Machaut, who had loyally served his father for more than twenty years (and even paid Charles a few compliments in his last epic poem, “The Conquest of Alexandria”), and yet his support for Heinrich von Mügeln does not show much appreciation of the literary arts, considering the French alternative. Machaut was much admired by Chaucer and Froissart, but Heinrich von Mügeln has disappeared into the dictionaries of medieval writing, perhaps deservedly so.
It is difficult to say why the court did not show any interest in a contemporary Czech writer who wrote the life of St. Catherine. He was Prague’s most gifted poet of the mid-1300s, and it is more than probable that he wrote his legend about St. Catherine to attract Charles’s attention; the emperor had always believed that his first military victory in the Italian
fields was miraculously won by St. Catherine. The writer may have been a priest, knowing a good deal about his predecessors’ writing in Latin; and he was fully conversant with the European conventions of courtly love poetry, especially the many stories about Tristan and Isolde. Written for the Czech educated elite, his poem in rhymed verse makes Catherine, the daughter of a good pagan king, a true human being. She is rich, bright, and beautiful, resolutely declines to marry any prince or king not worthy of her, but is instructed and humbled by a wise hermit who tells her about Christ, the glorious king. In a dream vision she lovingly espouses him in a heavenly castle much adorned with gold and precious stones (strictly according to Revelation 21, which also informed the architecture of St. Václav’s Chapel at Prague Cathedral and the Chapel of the Holy Cross in the highest tower of Karlštejn). Christ, the bridegroom, and Catherine, the bride, woo each other in songs of lyrical power previously unknown in Czech tradition. After she has convinced fifty of the most learned pagan scholars of the truth of Christianity (she has also read a good deal of St. Thomas Aquinas), the evil emperor Maxentius confronts her with the alternative either to become his son’s wife and to honor the pagan gods or to suffer a terrible death. The poet devotes great care to describing the instruments of torture; a grinding mechanism of four giant wheels studded with nails is fortunately destroyed by a divine thunderstorm, but the whips are no less terrible, furnished as they are with little hooks that rip into her flesh. Religious joys are contaminated with sadistic perturbations: the emperor’s wife, who had been charmed by Catherine, was hanged on iron hooks piercing her breasts; and after Catherine is whipped, her body mysteriously shows six symbolic colors, the white of her skin, the blue of her lacerations, the red of her blood, the green of shame, the black of the torn flesh, and the gold of her hair spread over her tortured body. Even Karásek of Lvovice, the most daring writer of
fin de siècle
Czech decadence and an expert in tortured ecstasies, at least on the printed page, never wrote such a scene.
fields was miraculously won by St. Catherine. The writer may have been a priest, knowing a good deal about his predecessors’ writing in Latin; and he was fully conversant with the European conventions of courtly love poetry, especially the many stories about Tristan and Isolde. Written for the Czech educated elite, his poem in rhymed verse makes Catherine, the daughter of a good pagan king, a true human being. She is rich, bright, and beautiful, resolutely declines to marry any prince or king not worthy of her, but is instructed and humbled by a wise hermit who tells her about Christ, the glorious king. In a dream vision she lovingly espouses him in a heavenly castle much adorned with gold and precious stones (strictly according to Revelation 21, which also informed the architecture of St. Václav’s Chapel at Prague Cathedral and the Chapel of the Holy Cross in the highest tower of Karlštejn). Christ, the bridegroom, and Catherine, the bride, woo each other in songs of lyrical power previously unknown in Czech tradition. After she has convinced fifty of the most learned pagan scholars of the truth of Christianity (she has also read a good deal of St. Thomas Aquinas), the evil emperor Maxentius confronts her with the alternative either to become his son’s wife and to honor the pagan gods or to suffer a terrible death. The poet devotes great care to describing the instruments of torture; a grinding mechanism of four giant wheels studded with nails is fortunately destroyed by a divine thunderstorm, but the whips are no less terrible, furnished as they are with little hooks that rip into her flesh. Religious joys are contaminated with sadistic perturbations: the emperor’s wife, who had been charmed by Catherine, was hanged on iron hooks piercing her breasts; and after Catherine is whipped, her body mysteriously shows six symbolic colors, the white of her skin, the blue of her lacerations, the red of her blood, the green of shame, the black of the torn flesh, and the gold of her hair spread over her tortured body. Even Karásek of Lvovice, the most daring writer of
fin de siècle
Czech decadence and an expert in tortured ecstasies, at least on the printed page, never wrote such a scene.
It was the new university, rather than the court, which substantially transformed Carolinian literature by bringing together in Prague an international community of scholars, old and young, and educated a new generation of teachers, authors, and native readers. Magister Claretus compiled a number of Latin-Czech glossaries, or rather dictionaries, according to fields of study and interest—theology, botany, zoology, astronomy. They alternate Latin and Czech terms in the rhythmical structure of rhymed hexameters functioning as efficient mnemonic devices (today they resemble samples of concrete poetry). At the end of each
section, Claretus usually suggests a source or a collaborator who helped with the materials; in the concluding section 46 of the glossary, listing church holidays, he remarks that he received help from “Carolus King and Emperor,” just as he concluded the section on ecclesiastical terms with a reference to Archbishop Arnestus; it would be nice to believe that the verse about the philologically inclined emperor was more than a fine compliment.
section, Claretus usually suggests a source or a collaborator who helped with the materials; in the concluding section 46 of the glossary, listing church holidays, he remarks that he received help from “Carolus King and Emperor,” just as he concluded the section on ecclesiastical terms with a reference to Archbishop Arnestus; it would be nice to believe that the verse about the philologically inclined emperor was more than a fine compliment.
Older German scholarship long believed that a new and early humanism emerged from the literary predilections of the Carolinian court, but it is perhaps more appropriate to ask whether another new humanism could not be heard in the writings of the urban clergy, of the lowest ranks, and the university students, well traveled and knowledgeable, and much given to parody, ironic self-deprecation, obscenity, and satire, radically undermining tradition. Even in religious poems, the perspective becomes more urban—God is seen, in pious allegories, as a merchant of pots and a furrier—and students were surely the authors and singers of macaronic verses alternating lines of Czech and Latin, their most explosive effects achieved by surprising rhymes in the two languages, of poems ridiculing brute peasants, and of the self-ironic “Lay of Merry Misery,” in which hungry, poorly dressed students greet the cold winter and dream of rich, hot dishes, and lots of cabbage, which will never be served to them.
Prague life of mid-century even invaded the Easter play
The Three Marys,
which had been performed in Latin for a long time at the Abbey of St. George; in the nearly autonomous scene about the “Merchant of Ointments” (
Masti
ká
)
,
it subverts religious tradition, and with a great deal of scatological immediacy. The scene may imitate similar texts of Austrian or French Easter plays, but we are present at the Prague market, hear irreverent Czech spoken by students, customers, and merchants, with a few Latin and German lines thrown in for comic effect. The merchant anticipates Svejk, though he sells strange concoctions rather than dogs with falsified pedigrees, yet most of his work is done by his clever and loquacious Rubín, certainly a student with a part-time job, and a kid named Postrpalk; the merchant’s wife has a difficult time making herself heard among so many men. Restless Rubin works as the merchant’s barker but constantly runs away to join the crowds; he sets up the stand and praises the all-powerful ointments, one made of the fat of gnats and another one by a monk fornicating with a nun in an outhouse (it gives marvelous erections). The merchant expects good business when the three Marys appear, but they resolutely refuse to buy mere cosmetics and ask, in Latin and in Czech, for oils to anoint Christ in his grave. To demonstrate
the efficiency of the ointments, Rubín suddenly appears with a Prague Jew named Abraham carrying his dead son Isaac in his arms. When the merchant pours some of his oils on the corpse, Isaac is suddenly alive and well, and he congratulates the merchant on knowing where to apply the mixture (others, it seems, had aimed at his head rather than his derrière). This comic scene of Isaac’s resurrection shows little sympathy for Jews, but it parodies the idea of Christ’s resurrection; the merchant’s wife, enraged by the low price quoted by her husband to the pious ladies, simply calls them floozies who want a cheap deal. We are far from the Augustinian piety of the elite and the efforts of the court to emulate Petrarch’s finesse.
The Three Marys,
which had been performed in Latin for a long time at the Abbey of St. George; in the nearly autonomous scene about the “Merchant of Ointments” (
Masti
ká),
it subverts religious tradition, and with a great deal of scatological immediacy. The scene may imitate similar texts of Austrian or French Easter plays, but we are present at the Prague market, hear irreverent Czech spoken by students, customers, and merchants, with a few Latin and German lines thrown in for comic effect. The merchant anticipates Svejk, though he sells strange concoctions rather than dogs with falsified pedigrees, yet most of his work is done by his clever and loquacious Rubín, certainly a student with a part-time job, and a kid named Postrpalk; the merchant’s wife has a difficult time making herself heard among so many men. Restless Rubin works as the merchant’s barker but constantly runs away to join the crowds; he sets up the stand and praises the all-powerful ointments, one made of the fat of gnats and another one by a monk fornicating with a nun in an outhouse (it gives marvelous erections). The merchant expects good business when the three Marys appear, but they resolutely refuse to buy mere cosmetics and ask, in Latin and in Czech, for oils to anoint Christ in his grave. To demonstrate
the efficiency of the ointments, Rubín suddenly appears with a Prague Jew named Abraham carrying his dead son Isaac in his arms. When the merchant pours some of his oils on the corpse, Isaac is suddenly alive and well, and he congratulates the merchant on knowing where to apply the mixture (others, it seems, had aimed at his head rather than his derrière). This comic scene of Isaac’s resurrection shows little sympathy for Jews, but it parodies the idea of Christ’s resurrection; the merchant’s wife, enraged by the low price quoted by her husband to the pious ladies, simply calls them floozies who want a cheap deal. We are far from the Augustinian piety of the elite and the efforts of the court to emulate Petrarch’s finesse.
Among the Czech satires of the later fourteenth century, “The Groom and the Student” (“Podkoní a žák”) shrewdly views social experience from an ironic point of view. It is, again, a late medieval disputation, or rather a parody of one, and it has moved from the castle or formal garden to a Prague tavern, full of lively conversation and the smell of beer (in our own age, Bohumil Hrabal will still be sitting there to write his gossipy novels). A lazy guest hears a horse groom and a student boasting about their stations in life while actually revealing their everyday misery, the student dressed in shabby gray, with a green cape, a shoulder bag for his books and bread, and a few writing tablets behind his belt, and the groom, not so young anymore, in a courtly but decrepit jacket and elegant stockings full of holes. The groom believes that life at court is the best, and whoever tastes of it will never want anything else—yet he has also to admit that he has been a horse groom for seven years and now hopes to become an archer, mostly because he expects a handsome new outfit to go with the promotion. The student argues that life at court is fine for barons and the rich but not for the poor, and he extols the freedom of university life, though he confesses that he often has to make do with water for a drink—of course, it is good for the brain. Increasingly challenged and irate, the groom condescendingly asserts that students support their freedom by house-to-house begging, but the student, the more articulate of the two, responds with a rich story of how he is usually welcomed on his journeys by big-breasted peasant women eager to fulfill all his wishes, or at least to find a fresh egg for the hungry scholar in the straw of the henhouse, and then plays a trump card by proclaiming to the groom that students become priests, prelates, and bishops who eat hotcakes, so well prepared in Prague. Words do not suffice to resolve the argument, and the two comrades fight it out with their fists, while the fellow who has been quietly drinking at their table goes home for a good
night’s sleep. In five hundred lines or less, this text shows us glimpses of the plebeian underbelly of royal Prague, and historians are right when they relate these satires to the social and political restlessness articulated, within a generation, in the radical demands of the Hussite revolution.
night’s sleep. In five hundred lines or less, this text shows us glimpses of the plebeian underbelly of royal Prague, and historians are right when they relate these satires to the social and political restlessness articulated, within a generation, in the radical demands of the Hussite revolution.
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