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

by Peter Demetz

  The rising political importance of the Pemyslid dynasty in an uncertain age of fierce conflicts between partisans of the empire and those loyal to the papacy, as well as the German presence at the Prague court and in Bohemia’s church hierarchy, attracted many German poets who hoped to make a living in Prague entertaining the elite and proclaiming royal views in didactic stanzas, songs, and epic narratives. Elsewhere, the poetry of high chivalry was beginning slowly to wither away; after the demise of Duke Leopold VI in 1230, the court of Vienna offered little support to the gifted singers who had once found it a splendid haven. By 1240, writers began to flock to Prague, and there—though they were not masters of the first rank, as Walther von der Vogelweide, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Gottfried von Strassburg had been—they sustained a late flowering of chivalric literature. The number of poets who lived at the Prague court to write in the service of the king was smaller than that of itinerant writers who visited at least for a time. The Tyrolean Friedrich von Sonnenburg may have been in Prague in 1250 and then again in 1271, when he joined Otakar’s expedition against Hungary. The Tannhäuser, too, on his far-flung journeys through Europe, may have briefly stayed in Prague, which he described as being located close to the Woltach (Vltava) River, and Ulrich von dem Türlin in the 1260s dedicated an epic narrative to Otakar, perhaps in the service of the Carinthian estates. Others, including Heinrich der Klausner, Heinrich von Freiberg, and Heinrich von Meissen (called Frauenlob), were probably welcome guests at the court of Otakar’s son Václav II, to whom three fine love poems are ascribed. After Václav II’s death in 1305—a moment nearly coincident with the strong emergence of vernacular Czech writing, including the Czech Alexandreis and the chronicle of the so-called Dalimil—Prague ceased to be a gathering place for itinerant German poets, and by the time of Emperor Charles IV of the Luxembourgs in the late fourteenth century, the situation had changed substantially.

  The first important poet writing in German (or, rather, an artful and literary Middle High German, not really spoken by anybody) to take up residence in Prague had been Reinmar von Zweter, of middle-class, not noble, origin. He said himself that he was born in the Rhineland, grew up in Austria, and chose to live in Bohemia (Bêheim hân ich mir erkorn), not because of the land but because of the king—yet, he added, both king and country were good. Whether he came from Vienna or from serving imperial interests elsewhere seems less clear than that he lived in Prague for four or five years (1237-41). He had put great hopes in King Václav I, praising him as the sun that illuminates the day, but there was trouble from the beginning, and Prague’s Czech nobles and German clerics were possibly less than enchanted by the itinerant artist who used German and earlier had defended the emperor against the pope. He may have been caught between his pro-imperial past and a Bohemian king who was usually of the anti-imperial party except when he was neutral or wavered for reasons of expediency; using an erudite chess image, Reinmar said that he just held on to the king after losing the knights and the rooks. But then, in growing anger, he turned against his false friends at court, accused them of wickedness, double-talk (hinderrede), or simple lying, and left for western Germany, where he died in 1260.

  Reinmar von Zweter writes as an upright and honest man who feels disturbed by the decay of chivalric norms, defined by the golden measure and by polite circumspection. He condemns the new brutal way of jousting which makes the noble ladies pale of cheek because they fear their knights being in mortal danger, castigates gambling and (whether or not the poem was written in Prague) heavy drinking that makes people deaf and dumb. He does not beg, as itinerant singers do, but rather works with the art of the gentle hint, suggesting that it is essential to knights and kings to have milte (munificence)—yet again, stressing balances, Reinmar believes that true milte does not mean wasting what is precious but knowing true value, keeping and giving. There is little laughter in his serious, sometimes pedantic admonitions and he became melancholy. In his last elegy, he asks the restless World what reward to expect of her in the hour of death, and he has her respond, “Let go!” (Ich waene, ez ist niht anders wan “lâ varn”!). This is his most impressive poem, and it is not surprising that later Meistersänger listed him among the twelve great masters of their craft.

  Another master, Sigehêr, may have come from southern Germany, as the Bavarian-Austrian coloring of his idiom suggests, and he was of middle-class origins too, speaking ironically about riding through the forest on a horse when he felt especially happy. He was in Prague by 1252, served Václav I and his son, and probably left Prague again by 1256, later acquiring land at Mezzotedesco in the southern Tyrol. He is a more lively and erudite writer than Reinmar (who had left Prague before Sigehêr arrived); he tested new patterns, including political messages shaped as prayers or sayings of the prophetess Sibylla, and he often wished to appeal to connoisseurs by strings of literary allusions. His praise of King “Watzlab” sparkles with biblical references, and he writes that the king was crowned by Solomon the Wise and King Arthur of the Round Table, paragons of chivalry. Sigehêr rode with King Otakar against the Prussians in 1254—55 and made the young king’s first and rather modest military undertaking into a melodramatic event, as if Christianity itself was at stake: the din of the battle rages, the Prussians advance, and Otakar’s army must fight as valiantly as the crusaders in the other Holy Land: “If Otakar does not win, we are all lost!” He compares Otakar to noble Alexander, the famous and just conqueror (as other poets did), and yet he also tells the story of King Belshazzar of Babylon, who does not want to see the writing on the wall and provokes God to punish him for his lawless pride (unrecht hðhvart). Scholars still argue as to whether Sigehêr changed his mind about Otakar, whom he once praised so lavishly.

  The first native Bohemian writer of the German tongue, residing at the Prague court from the early 1270s to the end of the century, was Ulrich von Etzenbach. His literary language uses elements suggesting that he came from the north of the country: he says that he was born in the Land of the Lion (Otakar’s sign), and when the archbishop of Salzburg invited him to join his illustrious court he gracefully declined, adding that he would not leave the lion and, turning to his king, reminded him that now was the time to recognize his true merits and show a “munificent hand.” Ulrich knew a good deal of Latin, which he often parodied, and showed a respectable knowledge of his literary predecessors and contemporaries, from Homer (he is the first writer in German to mention him) to Wolfram von Eschenbach, whom he follows poetically, and from Reinmar von Zweter to Ulrich von dem Türlin, who may have introduced him to the court “ze Prâge,” in the good town. He arrived by 1270 and spent nearly thirty years writing epic narratives in the service of the kings Otakar and Václav II; for a while he was close to the nobleman Boreš of Riesenburk, rich and civilized enough to employ an aging poet who was not averse to writing in favor of a political arrangement based on balances of interest, of king, and of responsible nobility. Etzenbach was of middle-class origin, mocked his own lack of martial courage, and confessed that he favored a good glass of wine and the groaning board, above all juicy roasts and, in true Bohemian fashion, well-prepared gense (geese).

  Ulrich von Etzenbach’s epic poem (more than 28,000 verses) about the life and death of Alexander anticipates the glory of King Otakar. It combines, as in a coat of many colors, numerous and often divergent narrative traditions, religious, historical, adventurous, and, on occasion, a little salacious, to praise Otakar’s rising power. Ulrich began to write his Alexander about 1270, but work seems to have come to a halt when Otakar II died in 1278, and recent scholarship assumes that he continued to write, perhaps with a new accent on plot and adventure, when Václav, Otakar’s son, became king in 1283. Ulrich rededicated the narrative to the new ruler and possibly finished it in the late 1280s, when he began to write another epic in praise of Václav II and his Hapsburg wife. He constantly compares Otakar to Alexander, ascribes Otakar’s silver lion to the standards of Alexander, and, rather unhistorically, descr
ibes how Alexander defended his frontiers against the Hungarians. Both Alexander and Otakar show milte, êre (honor), and wirde (dignity) in the highest perfection; it speaks for Ulrich’s honesty that he remarks that Alexander-Otakar has courage and magnanimity rather than learning—“von der lernunge was er mager” (“he had a certain dearth of learning”). These serious matters are, fortunately, counteracted by interesting descriptions of feasts and festivals, of encounters with monsters and dwarfs, and of the rituals of courtly love; even heroic Alexander feels enamored by charming Queen Candacis, to whom he writes a love letter comme il faut.

  We are also entertained by a daring story about Candacis, who, acting on a wager, efficiently demonstrates that even a famous scholar (in another version, Aristotle) will pay homage, to say the least, to her charms. She puts on a little chemise (ein cleinez hemde, v. 23447), wades through the morning dew (in front of the window of the scholar, who tries to keep his eyes on his books), and lifts her little nothing away from her knees (daz hemdel sie ze berge zôch, v. 23461); the scene ends with the scholar, who stops reading, on all fours and Candacis riding on his back. Elsewhere, Ulrich creates an interpretative problem by lifting, from one of his Latin sources, the almost Faustian story of Alexander trying to explore the heavens and the deep sea: Alexander binds himself to eagles who carry him beyond the clouds, and, to continue his research, constructs a diving bell made of glass, oil, brick, and cotton and submerges himself in the sea, where he watches strange animals fighting each other (he also suffers a severe case of the bends when he comes up). These actions show him to be a man of unmâze (lack of measure), and it is difficult to believe that contemporary listeners, especially after Otakar’s death, would not have heard a note of caution, even if Ulrich was more intent on telling an interesting story than in judging his fallen hero morally.

  After protracted years of anarchy, the long-postponed coronation of Václav II and his wife, Guta (Czech Jitka), announced, on the sunny day of June 2, 1297, the consolidation of Bohemia in the hands of Otakar’s son and his Austrian wife. It was a rare moment of hope for the people in the Prague towns, and Peter von Zittau, a German Cistercian and great territorial patriot, enthusiastically describes in his chronicle the cathedral rites and the public festivities as events that he happily witnessed himself. Two archbishops, those of Mainz and Magdeburg, and seven bishops assisted at the main altar, dukes and princes from all neighboring countries made their ceremonial appearance, and for the elite an elevated wooden banquet hall, richly adorned with tapestries and wall hangings, was erected between the Petín Hill and the river. On the right bank, wine for everybody in the town flowed from special fountains, and so many people thronged through the streets, the chronicler remarks, that Prague seemed smaller and the streets more narrow than ever. There were public dances—alas, the Czechs on one side of the square and the Germans on the other—and musicians performed on lutes, fifes, drums, kithars, and trumpets. Here, a sportive group of men, all naked, ran a race; there, boxing matches were held; one “jumped in the air,” another “walked on his hands,” and another “recited poems.” Of course, there were many thieves in the crowd, the writer admits, but everybody went home “with a happy heart.”

  It is said that King Václav, whose unfortunate wife suddenly died three weeks after the coronation, wrote German poems in the intimate tradition of the chivalric love ritual (three of which have been preserved). The royal poet was well informed about his predecessors and contemporaries, and he handled the traditional possibilities with unusual lucidity and artistic finesse. He is an ingenious traditionalist: “Like a rose thirsting for sweet dew,” the beloved offers her lips to him and yet, in melancholy joy, “he did not pluck the rose though it would have been in his power.” In a winter poem, the cold and the stillness of forests and meadows invite him “to the better joys” of a lively flirt, “playful glances which prompt mouth to mouth.” In his Alba, the traditional song of love and the break of day, Václav ironically, if not skeptically, goes a step beyond tradition: the morning dawns, and the watchman, who usually warns the lovers loyally of the end of night, offers a pompous speech about night and day, turns out to be a mercurial fellow who blackmails the lady, who must pay him off richly before she can return to bed and “to the friend of her delights.” We have entered a modern world in which protection for love must be bought, and the royal poet assures his listeners that he does not write of fiction but speaks from his own experience.

  “ … My kingdom stands on brittle glass”

  Many historians have asked why King Pemysl Otakar II did not use the conflict between the Curia and the Hohenstaufen imperial power—a conflict which dominated the last half of the thirteenth century and led to continuing conflict and division—to push his claim for the crown of the Roman king and emperor more energetically; it is possible that his ambition, more secret than revealed, prompted him to look to the Curia first and foremost. He grievously underrated the power of the German prince-electors whom he considered, of course, unequal to him, the mighty king of Bohemia. At the beginning of his reign, Otakar supported the candidacy of Wilhelm of Holland, who was also backed by a league of Rhenish towns, but by 1254 his own chances were propitious: the German princes were not unwilling to consider him, the rich son of a Hohenstaufen princess, secret negotiations were held, and Wilhelm of Holland suggested his willingness to withdraw his candidacy if paid off sufficiently. Otakar, who did not want to offend the Curia, was ready to become a candidate himself, but Pope Alexander IV, newly elected, did not appreciate the idea; Otakar submitted to his decision and lost a unique chance.

  By 1272 and the death of another contender, Richard of Cornwall, the field was wide open again. In Prague, court poets and Henricus de Isernia were vying to praise the emperor Otakar poetically; Otakar himself, unfortunately, relied on the reports of his diplomatic emissaries, who were far too inclined to read the signs in his favor. He certainly put his Italians to work; Jacopo Robba, son of a Ghibelline exile at the court of Prague, reported wrongly that the pope was ready to accept a Bohemian candidate if the princes elected him; Federigo Spigri, another of Otakar’s diplomatic messengers, was to sound out Charles of Anjou, ever close to the Curia; and the indefatigable Henricus de Isernia, possibly on the pretext of his brother’s demise, ventured as far as Bologna but had reason to fear the Anjou soldiers there and went back to the Hungarian front to report to Otakar what he had seen and heard. Otakar failed to deal with the German prince-electors, most of whom did not favor him because he was too powerful. For some time, they discussed a Bavarian candidacy and, finally, in 1273 unanimously voted for shrewd Rudolf of Hapsburg, who had patched together his lands in the Swiss and Alsatian regions along the upper Rhine. Otakar, fighting in Hungary, was informed, and with good reasons protested the unacceptable election procedures; the unanimous vote had been achieved by disregarding Bishop Berthold of Bamberg, who represented the Bohemian vote and whose ballot had been divided between two other princes. Otakar’s adviser, Bruno, in December 1273 submitted a memorandum to the Curia outlining Otakar’s great merits in defending Christendom in the north and the east, but this did not find much sympathy; impatient Pope Gregory X, who wanted to end the imperial interregnum, accepted the election of Rudolf in September 1274, but Otakar continued to insist on the illegitimacy of the results. Nonetheless, Rudolf, crowned Roman king without delay, demanded that Otakar return all lands acquired by his armies and administrators. By 1275 they were set on a course of inevitable collision, and it was prolonged only a little by a war in 1276 and tactical compromises the following year.

  In terms of physical and military power, Rudolf’s forces were no match for those of the king of Bohemia, but he skillfully negotiated with the Hungarians, fomented anti-Bohemian opposition in the Austrian lands, and was well informed about the Czech fronde against Otakar; Rudolf was also able to rely on the families of Styrian nobles whose relatives had been held or killed in the dungeons of Prague. In early 1276, Otakar, on his part, w
ho had now for three years refused to recognize Rudolf’s royal rank, arranged a festive meeting of his Austrian allies in Prague, including delegates of the Viennese patriciate loyal to him (Vienna’s Lumpenproletariat was incited against him by mendicant friars). Later that year, his armies began to march, first as if seeking an engagement on the western frontiers of Bohemia but then going on to the Danube and Vienna, where they came to a diplomatic halt. Vienna was held by forces loyal to Otakar, and Rudolf, on the plain outside the gates, was waiting for Hungarian help. The short war ended when many noble Czech clans revolted against Otakar at home. He was forced to negotiate and to accept the harsh condition of returning to the empire all the lands he had acquired after 1250 and receiving, in turn, inherited Bohemia and Moravia as fief from the emperor (to make his point, the legend asserts, Rudolf accepted Otakar’s formal obeisance in a shabby leather doublet). Yet sporadic fighting continued in the provinces before Bohemian garrisons were completely withdrawn and prisoners exchanged; Otakar, unwilling to accept his utter humiliation, used the time to sign additional peace protocols, to retaliate against the Czech nobles at home (Boreš of Riesenburk was put to death, and Záviš escaped to Rudolf’s camp), and to prepare for the ultimate battle.

  On St. Rufus Day, August 26, 1278, Otakar and Rudolf confronted each other on the plains of Dürnkrut and Jedenspeigen, on the Moravian-Austrian border. Later schoolbooks suggested that it was a confrontation between Czechs and the father of the Austrian monarchy, but it was in fact a fierce, short clash between armies of many nations. Poles, Silesians, Brandenburgians, Thuringians, Saxons from Meissen, and Bavarians were fighting with Otakar’s Czechs and Moravians against a strong Hungarian army, mostly Cumans (with their famous horses and deadly arrows), supporting Rudolf’s Austrians. Otakar’s men shouted “Praha!” and the others “Rome and Christ!” including the Cumans, who were not yet Christians. In the opening engagement, the Czechs and Moravians fighting against Cuman light cavalry were unable to hold their ground; in the second engagement King Otakar himself rode with his heavily armed knights against the Austrians, who began to retreat (this encounter was entirely a matter of Germans versus Austrians). Rudolf, more patient, gave orders that Otakar’s forces be attacked by a special group of armored knights whom he had hidden in ambush against all the rules of chivalric warfare (he had considerable difficulties finding a willing commander for that particular group). These horsemen attacked the Bohemian flank, split its ranks in two, and when Otakar’s Poles and Silesians could not intervene, the Bohemian forces were overwhelmed by confusion. Many tried to save their lives by escaping to the vineyards or by retreating across the Morava River, but their king went on fighting “almost alone,” until, trying to escape, he was brutally killed by personal enemies—possibly by one Offo, sole heir to Siegfried of Mehrenburg, who had been murdered in a Prague prison, or, as later pro-Austrian chroniclers insisted, by the Moravian noble Milota of Ddic. Roving camp followers, Cumans or others, robbed the dead king of his armor and clothes and mutilated his corpse, which was later brought to a monastery and ultimately to Prague, to be interred in St. Virus Cathedral in 1296. When his tomb was opened in 1976 by a team of scientists, they found traces of the blow that had killed him still visible on his skull.