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

by Peter Demetz

  The writer of the Colmar Chronicles, an account in Latin composed in the late fourteenth century by a scribe in an Alsatian monastery, describes young Otakar as a “handsome youth, of swarthy complexion [fusco colore], middling stature, broad chest, full lips, vivacious and wise,” and a wondrous reflection (especially of the figura mediocriter longa and the pectus magnum) strikingly illuminates the stone effigy with armor and sword which the artist Peter Parler created in 1373 to adorn Otakar’s tomb in Prague Cathedral (his worried face was disfigured by irate Swedes who tried to rob his grave in 1648). There is something strangely young and tragic about Otakar; he was fifteen when he revolted against his father, thirty when he was at the height of his power, and forty-five when he was killed, almost like a mad dog, on the fields of Dürnkrut and Jedenspeigen.

  Young Otakar entered Bohemian political life by committing a few blunders, but he quickly learned from his mistakes. The noble families were once again dissatisfied with King Václav I; the landed barons felt endangered by his policies, which favored the new towns and a growing money economy. Otakar did not lead the revolt against his father, but was talked into it when it became surprisingly successful at first; and the king, a seasoned diplomat, hesitated in his responses. In July 1248, Otakar, clearly manipulated by his older friends, was proclaimed rex iuvenis Boemorum at Prague Castle while his father gathered his forces in the northeast of Bohemia. But the youthful rex and the rebels underrated the power of the Roman Curia; the pope intervened, the Prague clerics’ support for the revolt faded, and when the wily older king captured the right bank in a surprise maneuver, it was necessary to negotiate. The king took his time, and after some tactical compromises, he imprisoned Otakar for a few days and put two leaders of the revolt to death, one beheaded and the other broken on the wheel, without trial or investigation. In the meantime, the crown prince had died, and the king restored Otakar to the dignity of margrave of Moravia, though with his few privileges diminished and under close supervision.

  The first lesson which Otakar learned—perhaps too well, as a Czech historian suggests—was that he had to work with the Curia, not against it. He took his oath of loyalty to the church seriously; two Bohemian crusades against the Prussians on the shores of the Baltic (where he participated in establishing the royal fort of Königsberg, first mentioned in 1256) were certainly undertaken with a view to the Curia, as was his sudden turn away from the Baltic exploits when it became clear that Rome did not have much interest in supporting his plan to make his Moravian bishop responsible for the spiritual administration of the new lands and souls. The other lesson, which he learned not well enough, was to deal adroitly and circumspectly with the great feudal families of Bohemia and elsewhere. Whenever they disputed his royal prerogatives, he was not ready to forgive easily, and more than a trace of impatience and cruelty in his decisions can be found in his tempestuous dealings with the restive nobles, who were to take their bloody revenge.

  Young Otakar demonstrated admirable skill and courage, and as margrave of Moravia asserted a Pemyslid presence in Austria, which was on the brink of anarchy after the death of the Babenberg duke Frederick in 1246. The emperor had tried to appoint administrators there, but they could not function, and in 1251 Otakar, who had systematically cultivated close contacts with many Austrian noble families (much to the ire of the suspicious Hungarians and Bavarians), was invited by a gathering of these Austrians to accept the dignity of dux Austriae, and he took up residence in Vienna. For political reasons it was suggested that he marry Margarete of Babenberg, heiress to the Austrian lands (the bridegroom was nineteen years old and she, once married to King Henry VII [1211-42], a widow in her mid-forties). This mariage de raison was quickly concluded with the approval of the church hierarchy, and Margarete moved to Prague Castle; this did not prevent Otakar from loving young Agnes, of the noble Austrian Kuenring family (he had a son and two daughters with her), and contemporaries recall her as a young woman with hair cropped like a boy’s (she must have looked like Jean Seberg in Au bout de souffle). In fighting his enemies Otakar showed himself more tenacious than brilliant as a strategist; against the Bavarians he suffered a deplorable defeat at Mühldorf in 1257 because a retreat was badly planned and many heavily armed knights drowned in the Inn River; and in 1260 he turned the battle of Groissenbrunn against the Hungarians (during which he had some difficulties fighting the legendarily ferocious nomad horsemen of the steppe, the Cumans) into a massive defeat of the Hungarian king Béla.

  When Otakar wanted to consolidate his realm, he had to ask himself who was to inherit it, and after the Curia denied his request that his children born to Agnes be legitimized, the idea emerged to divorce Margarete, who had been unable to bear him an heir, and to contract a Bohemian-Hungarian marriage to strengthen the peace. This was all done rather speedily; a group of clerics investigated Margarete’s past and conveniently discovered that she had, as a widow, entered a Dominican convent in Trier, taking an oath of chastity which invalidated her marriage to Otakar; Otakar married young Kunhuta, granddaughter of King Béla, strikingly beautiful and rich, intelligent, and, possibly, a spoiled brat. On October 18, 1261, Margarete quietly left Prague Castle for a silent old age in Austria, and on December 23, just two months later, Otakar, now twenty-eight, and sixteen-year-old Kunhuta were ceremoniously welcomed to Prague Castle by the archbishop of Mainz, six bishops, and Otakar’s princely in-laws from Brandenburg and Poland. After the couple had been crowned in the cathedral, a magnificent feast was prepared, with music, dancing, and rich gifts for the guests, who dined at long wooden tables in a hall constructed for the purpose on Letná Hill.

  The archbishop of Mainz had some qualms about the coronation of Kunhuta, not mentioned in the pope’s permission, but Otakar’s gift, including a hundred measures of gold for his archdiocese and four measures of silver for the adornment of Mainz Cathedral, made him change his mind. There may have been some talk in the wings, for the cleric writing about these affairs in the Annales Otakariani was caught between his loyalty to the dynasty and his feeling for the aging former queen. He tried to explain to himself why she had left and sadly remarked, “God knows the reason.” Later chronicles, especially those on the Austrian side, suggest that Otakar succumbed to the evil charms of power-hungry Kunhuta; it is true that she was more independent than most, established her own office with a chancellor in charge, and, after Otakar had been killed, married Záviš of Falkenštejn, his archenemy, a leader of Prague’s internal opposition to the king, who ruled the country for a time and was put to death by a pro-Hapsburg faction in 1290.

  Otakar never won epic battles, but he was accomplished in turning even military half-measures to his political advantage, and in the 1260s and early 1270s he strengthened his power by military expeditions, skillful politicking, and fiduciary arrangements in a way that astonished European observers. By invitation and marriage he had become duke of Austria, and after his expeditions against the Hungarians, he held on to Styria and the land down to Pordenone, north of Venice, until 1276 and acquired Carinthia by bequest (paying off his cousin Philip, the eternal bane of his life, with an empty title and more persuasive subsidies). He ruled Carniola, a region then including Slovene Ljubljana, asserted his power in the patriarchy of Aquileja, an old bishopric (in the northern Italian province of Udine), and prompted other important towns of the Adriatic region to seek his royal protection. Bohemia nearly touched the sea, though not as literally as in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and rhetorically gifted contemporaries, at least those in the chronicles, praised his realm extending from “sea to sea” and were able to imagine Pemyslid standards fluttering on the shores of the Baltic and close to the Adriatic. It was a kingdom, a modern Czech historian suggests, that anticipated the contours of the later Austrian monarchy of many nations, and it was ironic that it was to be destroyed by Otakar’s enemy Rudolf of Hapsburg, who, in turn, left it to his heirs to build the realm anew, to be ruled later from Vienna rather than Prague.

 
; Otakar’s authority was based on personal power and on shifting local alliances at home and abroad; his tendency to centralize administrative decisions alienated many Czech nobles, especially in the south of the country, and many powerful Austrians feared loss of their prerogatives to Otakar’s administrators. The Styrian noble Siegfried von Mahrenberg, whom Otakar suspected of disloyalty, was seized, dragged to Bohemia, held in a Prague Castle dungeon, and killed there, provoking his relatives to seek their revenge. Otakar had considerable support in the Bohemian towns and in Vienna but many enemies among Czech and Moravian nobles, as, for instance, Záviš of Palkenštejn and Boreš of Riesenburk; though it is true that many noble Austrian families were loyal to him, especially the Kuenrings (declared to be robber barons by later Austrian historians), it was symptomatic that when he faced ruin, members of the Vienna town patriciate led by Paltram vor dem Freithof conspired to defend him and had to run for their lives when Rudolf of Hapsburg finally and triumphantly entered the city in 1276.

  A wise Czech historian has suggested that Otakar’s achievements as reformer of the law, innovative administrator, and chivalric protector of law and order were far more important than his ephemeral military exploits. Otakar’s administrative and legal initiatives quickened rather than triggered historical developments that had emerged during the rule of his immediate predecessors. These developments included the shift from a feudal to a money economy; internal colonization, with Czech farmers fanning out to grounds never tilled before; and the arrival, in significant numbers, of German farmers, artisans, and merchants, invited by monasteries and by royal power to cultivate new lands and establish new towns to increase the tax base. A chronicle tells us how Otakar withdrew one day to study the corpus of Bohemian and other laws, to identify bad rules, do away with useless decrees, and “transform bad habits into better ones.” The presence at his court of Italian notaries and legal experts would suggest that he wanted to follow the splendid administrative example of Emperor Frederick II, without challenging the church, of course, or, at any rate, to apply in his realm administrative and legal norms that had been useful elsewhere—as, for instance, the ones concerning Jews which Otakar lifted, without many changes, from legal documents of the Babenberg duke Frederick the Belligerent. Pemysl Otakar II was unable to protect Prague against recurrent floods, fires, and miserable winters of rising food prices, but he kept away foreign invaders, who respectfully called him rex ferreus, the iron king; disciplined predatory nobles; shielded burghers and farmers from exploitation; and made valiant attempts to stabilize the currency and the marketplace by controlling weights and measures. He was the richest ruler in Central Europe, and his income from taxes, regalia, and the newly organized Bohemian silver mines was apparently close to one hundred thousand measures of silver per year.

  In spite of his innovative administrative ideas, Otakar followed the traditions of early medieval princes in conducting his royal business, and spent much time on horseback, riding with his retinue of knights and notaries and sometimes with the queen, from castle to castle and from town to town rather than luxuriating in his Prague residence. He ruled from Prague but he governed on the spot, be it at his favorite Bohemian castle of Zvikov or in Vienna or Graz. Yet it is clear that he, being of a pious bent of mind, insisted on regularly spending Christmas and Easter, and the feasts of the Bohemian saints, at his Prague castle. His architectural plans were based on strategic and administrative considerations rather than aesthetic or antiquarian ideas, in a style perhaps more characteristic of Charles IV one hundred years later: at a time when Mongol invasions threatened from the east, massive defense systems of walls, moats, and towers were essential to defend towns; and Otakar not only enlarged the royal residence at the castle but built up the Hradany fortifications. He continued the initiatives of his father, who, by 1231, had begun to surround the settlements on the right riverbank with defensive walls and high towers, though they excluded a few neighborhoods (for example, the old German neighborhood at St. Peter) and cut others in half, the church within the wall and the others outside. About 1235 Otakar’s father had invited South German colonists to establish an autonomous little settlement, under the supervision of Eberhard, master of the royal mint, around the Church of St. Gallus near the core of the right-bank settlement; King Pemysl Otakar II suddenly one day in the spring of 1257 expelled the inhabitants of most of the suburbium under the castle and dispersed them in neighboring hamlets while North German colonists were invited to take their place; he surrounded their new settlement with a system of walls and moats. In the late 1270s, then, the Prague region consisted, apart from many hamlets and villages, of this strongly fortified New Town (later it was called the Minor Town, or Malá Strana) in the shadow of the castle; the Old Town on the opposite side of the river, which included the Jewish community and the German neighborhood of St. Gallus (the still older German settlement at St. Peter remaining extra muros); the Vyšehrad, with its own suburb; and Prague Castle itself, made impregnable by the king who was to die luckless on the plains of the Moravian-Austrian border.

  The Early Jewish Community and the Prague Tosafists

  Traveling Jewish merchants were doing business in the Prague and Bohemian regions in the ninth and tenth centuries—coming and going in caravans, selling spices, silk, and other luxury goods to barons, clerics of the upper hierarchy, and the court, and exporting from the Slavic east slaves, weapons, leather goods, and beeswax to Mediterranean and Oriental countries. The most reliable evidence concerning the business activities of Jewish merchants, preeminent among their competitors, can be found in a document called the “Raffelstetten Customs Ordinance” of about 905, which regulated traffic between eastern Franconia, Bohemia, and the greater Moravian realm. In the Prague region, Jewish families may have settled in different spots on both sides of the river in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries; legal documents issued (c. 1080) by Vratislav II guaranteed judicial privileges to resident Italians and Germans, and to Jews as well, and they were confirmed by Sobslav II nearly a hundred years later. Dean Cosmas mentions a rich Jew named Podiva, who bought himself a castle, but he does not say whether he did so before or after becoming a Christian; he also reports that in 1091 the noble Wirpirk, wife of the Pemyslid Prince Konrad of Brno (Brünn) in Moravia, in a dramatic scene told the duke of Prague to desist from attacking and plundering Moravia—it was entirely unnecessary, she suggested, because he could find all the gold he needed in the treasuries of Prague Jews and other merchants; their property was his anyway, and she gave him, in case he did not know, the address of these merchants at the vicus Vyšegradensis, a Jewish neighborhood close to Vyšehrad Castle.

  Life abruptly changed for the Jews of Central Europe, not only those in the Prague region, when a ragtag army of crusaders, perhaps twenty thousand strong, ready to start a war against the infidels right then and there, in the year 1096 marched from northern France through Germany and Bohemia, plundering (with the enthusiastic help of the townsfolk), setting fire to Jewish neighborhoods, baptizing by force and killing those who resisted. At Mainz a thousand Jews were killed, it is said, and in Prague, while the duke was absent in Poland, the bishop tried to prevent the worst and told the crusaders that they were committing a sin in the eyes of God. Two years later, in 1098, the Jews wanted to leave, and provoked the duke’s ire because they tried to take their belongings with them; and for many years, as Cosmas attests, the church authorities were disturbed because Jews baptized by force loyally returned to the beliefs and laws of their forefathers.

  The Jewish community of Prague is possibly younger than that of Cologne (which goes back to Roman times), Mainz (first mentioned in 900), or Regensburg (981), but older than the Jewish communities of Frankfurt, Vienna, and Berlin, the last for long nothing more than a Slavic fishing village. In discussion of the early topography of what became Prague, a certain dearth of historical evidence, especially for the earlier centuries, combines with wishful thinking; it cannot be otherwise. Thus most his
torians assume that groups of Jewish families congregated in two or three different neighborhoods. Originally, Prague Jews lived and moved freely among their fellow citizens, and built dwellings close to the trade routes, on the left bank under the castle, and, as Wirpirk’s speech confirmed, on the right bank at the vicus Vyšegradensis; a third group, it is suggested, was settled by 1067 at St. Martin’s Újezd, a narrow thoroughfare in a rather swampy spot near today’s Charvátova and Spálená streets on the right bank; south of this small settlement the Jewish Garden, the oldest cemetery, was located. Tradition has it that the earliest Jews in Prague settled on the left bank; the Sázava chronicler reports that their synagogue (close to a place where later the Knights of St. John settled) burned down in 1142, when the Moravians once again attacked the Prague Pemyslids, and it is believed that they consequently decided, as did so many people at that time, to move across the river. A “Jewish Town” began to take shape on the right bank, rapidly growing with the arrival of Jewish families from southern Germany, following the eastward movement of German colonization or, after the bloody pogroms of 1096, wanting to go further east on their own.