Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City (42 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
10.77Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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.
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 Po
í
, 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 Hrad
any 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 Vltava 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 Janá
ek 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 Hrad
any 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 Hrad
any 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.

Other books

Tangled Roots by Henry, Angela
A World Divided by Marion Zimmer Bradley
The Bad Ones by Stylo Fantome
Last Resort by Richard Dubois
Thrill-Bent by Jan Richman
The Doctor Wore Spurs by Leanne Banks