Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City (27 page)

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

Authors: Peter Demetz

BOOK: Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City
8.33Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
THE HUSSITE REVOLUTION: 1415-22
The wise rabbi Avigdor ben Isaac Kara deplored the radically weakened royal power during the reign of Václav IV, and many contemporaries and later historians share his views. Charles’s son Václav assumed power when he was seventeen years old, and it is far more difficult to be fair to him than to his father; contemporary chronicles are sparse, and many later voices speak against him in strange unison—Hussite adversaries, Catholic defenders of the Holy Church, and older German chroniclers who as early as 1400 took their cue from the German princes who had declared him too lazy to run the affairs of Germany. He has come down to us as an irascible if not perverse monster, even though the Prague folk, sympathizing with his fight against the feudal barons, obviously enjoyed stories about his nightly roaming about town, part Harun al-Rashid, part bon vivant. We are told of his rough jokes, his skirt chasing, and many writers like to tell the famous story describing how Susanna, a lovely masseuse, rescued him from the ire of the barons by rowing him in a little boat across the Vltava River. Many people believed that his first wife, a Bavarian princess, was torn to pieces by one of his huge mastiffs when she rose from her bed one night suddenly to avail herself of the Gothic amenities (in fact she probably died of the plague).
King Václav IV had been spoiled by his father, who in his old age was obsessed by the question of succession and dragged his son along on his travels as heir presumptive to whom ceremonious admiration and homage were due. Prince Václav never soldiered in the field as did his father, and though he spoke Czech and German, possibly learned a little
Latin, and may have known a smattering of other languages, he was not particularly interested in literary matters, either privately or at court. Friendly observers describe him, at least in his early years, as a handsome and witty conversationalist, but, as time went on, he withdrew from his royal duties to the hunt in the forests near Prague, carousing with his buddies and often drinking himself into a stupor. (When he was to meet the French king, a festive luncheon had to be postponed for three days because he had to sleep off the results of the first welcome party.) The Czech historian Zden
k Fiala suggested that Václav lived under the illusion that the administrative machinery of the state would go on working by itself as it had under his father’s eyes; and when he ran up against the harsh demands of changing political situations, the enmity of the German princes, and the mutinous barons at home, he was unwilling or unable to cope and slowly drifted along, helplessly and violently, rather than use his considerable intelligence.
Unfortunately, Václav found himself in an uncertain world split by the schism of the church, which ever since 1378 had been divided over two competing popes, Urban VI of Rome, who was supported by the Bohemian hierarchy, and Clement VII of Avignon, who had friends and allies in France and among the German princes. Václav, as young king of Bohemia and the German Reich, showed a great willingness to deal with his tasks; he went to Germany often, as was his duty, intervened in Rhenish affairs, and successfully married off his sister Anne to Richard II of England in 1382. The marriage, incidentally, made it easier for Bohemian students and masters to study at Oxford and bring back to Bohemia the writings and ideas of John Wyclif, who in that same year was declared a heretic, or in doctrinal error, by the church. Yet Václav’s royal energies soon lagged; he lingered, procrastinated, lacked the will to make decisions, and by his absences from Germany provoked the princes. After repeated ultimatums, they declared him “totally unfit” to continue as Roman king. In a dubious procedure, they formally deposed him and elected Ruprecht of the Palatinate in his place, the result being that Europe now had two popes and the Reich virtually two monarchs, Vaclav forever postponing a journey to Rome, where he might have been crowned emperor nonetheless, under reduced circumstances, as it were, by Pope Urban VI or his successor.
At home Václav IV had to contend with Bohemia’s powerful barons, who soon sensed his weakness and rebelled against his arbitrary ways and his habit of surrounding himself with favored advisers from the town and gentry. These favorites were quick to claim special prerogatives; they
pushed aside the great traditional clans and squeezed the country, the towns, and especially the Jews for ever increasing tributes and taxes. One of these, Sigmund Huler, possibly from a family of German textile merchants from Cheb (Eger), actually ran the financial affairs of the kingdom for many years until it was discovered that he had cleverly put a good deal of money in his own pockets, and the king himself in 1405 sentenced him to death. The baronial opposition, mostly consisting of rich southern Bohemian families who traditionally fought the powers in Prague, established an alliance with the king’s restive relatives, including Jošt of Moravia, a serious and effective administrator, and Václav’s half brother Sigismund, later emperor, and they imprisoned Václav twice, once in Prague and once in Vienna, while pushing for a settlement of their claims. Four of the king’s favorites were murdered in cold blood at Karlštejn, and in the sumer of 1401 the barons joined forces with the Saxon duke Wilhelm of Meissen, whose German armies, plundering and burning, invaded Bohemia and laid siege to Prague Castle.
Charles IV had marvelously succeeded in keeping the barons at bay, at least after the abortive revolt of the southern Bohemian Rožmberks in 1355, by appointing them to high formal offices, as tradition required, while building up his own royal towns and constantly strengthening a loyal church hierarchy. His son was ill advised to challenge Jan of Jenštejn, the third archbishop of Prague and the highest representative of the church in Bohemia. It was clearly a question of predominance, real or imagined, and the dispute was made more corrosive and brutal by the king’s irresponsibility, to say the least, and by Jenštejn’s rather exalted opinions of his indubitable intellectual gifts and ecclesiastical power. The king and the archbishop had originally worked closely together, but the trouble was that the archbishop was too sensitive to defend himself energetically against the king, preferring to write exquisite Latin poems or a melancholy autobiographical essay, “On Escaping the World”; it is possible that the king and his advisers intentionally provoked him to exaggerated reactions. Jenštejn was a rich youth from an important family in Prague, extremely well connected, and had been a leisurely student at the universities of Padua, Bologna, Montpellier, and Paris, where he declined a teaching position because he did not see himself as teacher or scholar. Rather suddenly he rose in the church to become bishop of Meissen, then archbishop of Prague and king’s chancellor, quickly combining in one person the functions that, in the age of Charles IV, had been held by Arnestus of Pardubice and Johannes Noviforensis. He possessed all the intellectual qualifications to check the king’s imperiousness and to return
a degree of dignity to Bohemian affairs, yet after a grave illness, he underwent great emotional change, turned away from the stage of the world to the inner fire of the “modern devotion,” favored the meditative orders of the Augustinians and Carthusians, left his loyal servants to taste the ire of the king, lived in seclusion, mostly away from Prague, and died, lonely, in a Roman monastery in 1396.
 
The consequences of the king’s conflicts with the archbishop were felt for centuries, not because of the power play involved (it was washed away shortly by the Hussite revolution), but because the king was responsible for the death of the vicar-general Johann of Pomuk, canonized by Pope Benedict XIII on March 19, 1729, and one of the martyr patrons of Bohemia. The sordid and confused story about St. John of Nepomuk (as he was later called) combines cynical intrigues in high places with royal brutality and Jenštejn’s melancholy inactivity at the wrong time, all in the chiaroscuro of a dark torture cellar and the searing flames of the hangman’s torch.
In 1392, when the archbishop sought to discipline one of the king’s relatives, Václav IV was deeply offended and, wanting to provoke him, had Jan
ch, a royal favorite, build a dam on the Elbe River on a spot of land belonging to the archbishop (effectively denying him the payments he had received from passing ships); when the archbishop complained, King Václav IV invited him to one of his castles to talk over matters in a leisurely fashion, while in the meantime ordering
ch’s men to devastate the archbishop’s estate. A wise judge restored Jenštejn’s shipping rights, but matters went from bad to worse when the king conspired to weaken the archbishop’s power by trying to establish a new bishopric in western Bohemia, centered on the monastery of Kladruby. The archbishop and his vicar, the legal expert in matters of the Prague hierarchy, in a quick countermove appointed a new abbot of Kladruby who was loyal to the church, and made it impossible to chip away at the jurisdiction of Bohemia’s metropolitan. The king had one of his fits of rage, immediately left his hunting lodge, and rode to Prague to take revenge on the archbishop, who may have been, unsuspectingly, manipulated by his own church dignitaries inimical to the throne.

Other books

Festive in Death by J. D. Robb
The Genius Factory by David Plotz
The Lovebird by Natalie Brown
The Battle for Christmas by Stephen Nissenbaum
Trying to Float by Nicolaia Rips