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

by Peter Demetz

  Otakar II has been strangely absent from the historical imagination of his own people, and his life has not challenged important Czech playwrights and poets, many of whom prefer the condottiere and traitor Záviš of Falkenštejn: Václav Vlek’s professorial Otakar (1865) is not exactly an impressive piece. Once again, the Viennese Franz Grillparzer, that untiring student of Bohemian history, after studying the (mostly Austrian) sources wrote König Ottokars Glück und Ende (1825, The Fortune and Fall of King Otakar). In Grillparzer’s view, Otakar is a kind of Czech Richard III, especially in his conflict with Rudolf (Richmond), or, in the reverse image, like Napoleon, who divorced Josephine in order to marry the Austrian princess Marie Louise. The enlightened antinationalist Grillparzer came to regret that he had ever written this play, which brought out “the patriotic swine,” he said, and mobilized Metternich’s police, who insisted that the play fomented unwelcome nationalist conflict. Grillparzer clearly preferred sober Rudolf, characterized as a modest empereur bourgeois liked especially by Viennese artisans (among whom we find a child named Kathi Fröhlich, with compliments to Grillparzer’s lifelong fiancée), but the play itself sides with Otakar, proud, ambitious, condescending (he treats the lord mayor of Prague like a personal valet), though, in a last monologue and prayer, Otakar is fully aware of his transgressions against the people: “I threw them away by thousands at a time, / to satisfy a folly, please a whim / as one would scatter refuse from a door” (v.2846— 48). The playwright ends the tragedy with a patriotic “Hapsburg forever!” yet after the Hapsburgs are gone, it is the defeated and saturnine Otakar who continues to trouble our imagination.

  Only Dante, like Grillparzer in his magnificent fifth act, moved away from national feelings. In his Purgatorio, canto 7:91—102, he boldly sees Ottacchero and Rodolfo together, in the chorus of souls heavy with earthly burdens and trying to rise to spiritual incandescence. Here the defeated Otakar, who ruled the country “where the waters spring to be carried by the Molta [Moldau] to the Albia [Elbe],” in a moving and thoughtful gesture seems to comfort victorious Rudolf ( … che nella vista lui conforta). Rodolfo does not even care to sing with the rest.

  In the wake of the Battle of Dürnkrut, many chronicles tried to account for the fate of the great king; Austrians and Styrians usually take Rudolf’s side (especially Otacher oûz der Geul’s influential Styrian narrative in verse) and Bohemians the king’s, but there are notable exceptions to the rule. Abbot Otto, a German and Bohemian patriot, as well as the Austrian Heinrich von Heimburg, have pro-Otakarian views, and even in the Latin Colmar Chronicles, not exactly favorable to Otakar, a moving German elegy on his death is inserted to praise his knightly virtues: “ez weinet milt und êre / den küng ûz Bêheimlant” (“munificence and honor weep over the king of Bohemia”). The traditional Czech viewpoint, which is strongly critical of Otakar, was expressed early in the so-called Dalimil Chronicle of c. 1315, which lauded young Otakar but strongly argued against him, enemy of Czech barons and friend of the Germans, for he was willing to give villages and towns to the Germans and to build protective palisades around these settlements. Otakar was like a beautiful flower, a “rose in the meadow” (“jako róži prosted /úky”), but later alienated himself from his own people in his “irrational pride,” and suppressed the gentry and nobles; even such an honest man as Záviš, Dalimil says, had to seek protection abroad.

  Dalimil’s view prevailed in many variations in the ideological arsenal of later Czech nationalism and contributed to the essential ambivalence about Otakar (German nationalists of the nineteenth century on their part suggested that the Czech king had fought against the German Reich). The truth is that Czechs have long lacked a clear consciousness of the continuities of their own state, because modern definitions of what it means to be Czech were formed when “the state” was a foreign monarchy and the heroes and heroines of the Czech imagination were, above all, simple people, rebels and heretics persecuted by the foreign state, not the crowned heads of an ancient dynasty. Czech historical consciousness is deeply populist, and it does not really care for kings, lost in the dust and din of battles past.

  Even František Palacký (1798—1876), in his dignified and thoughtful analysis, written toward the end of his life, confirms rather than argues against the traditional ambivalence toward the most powerful Czech in Bohemian history. He calls Otakar “an outstanding and particular personality,” speaks of his ideas and actions as shaping the Czech destiny, and valiantly defends him against the accusation of being an apostate to his nation (unfortunately, he quotes Henricus de Isernia’s Slavic manifesto, which is dubious evidence). Clearly Otakar’s invitation to German settlers is foremost in his mind, and he tries to distinguish, as his most enlightened compatriots did later, between two kinds of German, the aggressive and those more peacefully concerned with Bildung and economic progress; he says that Otakar was inviting people ready to earn an honest living. Yet Palacký also asserts that Otakar, eager to open new sources of hard cash, invited too many Germans and did not think about the future of his nation. He goes out of his way to describe Otakar’s sense of fairness and justice but ultimately suggests in almost metaphysical terms that Otakar’s death was a tragic punishment for his sins against his own nation.

  From another point of view, freed of the burdens of nineteenth-century nationalism, one could argue that Otakar was the first Prague king who protected the working people and the merchants of whatever nation against rapacious barons of whatever society, and who created an urban conglomerate that gathered together communities of Czechs, Germans, Jews, and Italians—people who were to live, work, and create together, or at least next to each other, peacefully for centuries. It is a pity that Václav Havel, in his inaugural speech upon assuming the presidency of the Czech Republic in 1993, did not list Otakar among the great Czechs from St. Wenceslas to Charles IV and from Jan Hus to T. G. Masaryk and the philosopher Jan Patoka. In his own hometown, King Pfemysl Otakar II, the only Shakespearean character of Czech history and the founder of Prague as a European city, has become nearly invisible.

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  THE CAROLINIAN MOMENT: CHARLES IV AND HIS AGE

  Burghers, Markets, and Cobbled Streets

  After the death of King Pemysl) Otakar in 1278, and then again in 1306 after young Václav III, the last Pemyslid king, was for cryptic reasons murdered by an unknown killer, Prague went through terrible years of invasions and foreign occupations, anarchy and revolt, plunder, hunger, and pestilence. To bury the many corpses, big ditches were hastily dug near many parish churches, and near St. Peter’s two thousand bodies were thrown into a single ditch; rumors told of a physician who was buried alive and survived, chewing on the flesh of the corpses, until he was saved by the astonished people. Hunger drove people to brutal murder; a needy widow, we are told, lured a well-dressed boy to her hovel by showing him a green apple, and killed him to sell his fine clothes at the market. In the village of Obora, near the town gates, a hungry mother and her son murdered a beggar woman for a few slivers of bread, but when the son dragged the corpse away, he was arrested and immediately hanged, while his mother escaped.

  Yet there were glorious moments of peace, and by the turn of the fourteenth century, an emerging Old Town patriciate, really the first wave of Prague’s rising bourgeoisie of German origin, began to define its social interests and to enter the larger field of Bohemian politics, demanding, with all due respect and occasionally with economic and political pressure, its share of power. Patriotic schoolbooks usually dwell on the horrors of the Brandenburg invasion of 1278—80 and the undisputed greed of Otto of Brandenburg, who, after having bravely supported his brother-in-law King Pfemysl Otakar in the field, briefly held Otakar’s son to negotiate a good ransom at the Bezdz fortress in northern Bohemia and later in Spandau, near Berlin. Much less is said, however, about the rapacious Czech barons who used that propitious moment to seize unprotected lands of the king and of the monasteries. In 1280, the Brandenburg garrison at Prague Castle was besieg
ed by a combined force of Czech nobles and Prague burghers, and a year later a gathering of Czech nobles, eminent church dignitaries, and representatives of the royal towns agreed to restore order together and to create a council of regents until the boy king Václav II, Otakar’s son, would return to Prague, which he did in 1283.

  The Prague Old Town patriciate in its struggles relied on its increasing wealth, derived from far-flung commerce, interests in Bohemia’s silver mines, and local real estate. By the late thirteenth century the legal institutions of the Old Town government were firmly in the hands of these patrician families, and they held on to power for nearly a hundred years. From their ranks were appointed the town judge, as the king’s legal representative (who actually bought the job at a high price), and members of the town council; only in the most important matters did they consult with a group of privileged citizens, and it was up to the council what advice to seek and when. The king took his time in granting the town council the privilege of employing a scribe; the councillors first submitted their humble petition to have one in 1296, but it was not granted until much later. Among the first known town scribes was Master Peter, who had studied in Italy and lived, to judge from his meager income, on bread and air. In the fall of 1310, in spite of all upheavals, the keeping of an Old Town Book was initiated, and regulations, ordinances, commodity prices, and important town events were faithfully recorded forthwith. His Royal Grace was equally slow in permitting the council to conduct business in a town hall, and for a long time the councillors met in their homes. It was only under the rule of the Luxembourgs that they were allowed to buy a house (1338) on the Old Town Square to use as town hall (the institution has not moved from the spot since). In time, the community developed its own bureaucracy of tax collectors, supervisors of foreign merchants (two as early as 1304), guards of towers and gates, servants of the town judge, constables, as well as a torturer and a hangman. One begins to think of Kafka early on.

  Prague’s most prominent patrician families, surrounded by bevies of clients and dependent craftsmen, can be first identified during the last decades of the thirteenth century, where their names appear on the list of town judges and town councillors year after year for a long time. Burghers were those in the legal sense who owned houses in the Old Town (never mind the obligatory capital to be eligible for appointment on the town council). The oldest and more prominent of these were the Wölflins, or Wölfels, patrons of the parish church of St. Gallus; among the younger sons, Franz Wölflin was well known as financier to King John of Luxembourg, who never tired of selling a castle or an official job to a German patrician, much to the disgust of Czech nobles. If the Wölflins were the old Prague Capulets, the Olbrams (the name was derived from that of Wolfram, the patriarch’s oldest son) were the Montagues, patrons of the parish of St. Nicholas. At times, the Wölflins, favoring Henry of Carinthia as king, and the Olbrams, preferring a Hapsburg candidate on the Bohemian throne, violently opposed each other in matters of grand politics, but more often they loyally served on the town council together. There were other important families too, including the Stucks, the Fridingers, the Rokyzans, the von Steins, and, somewhat later, the Tafelrungs, Geunahers, and Tausendmarks. Václav Vladivoj Tomek, a conservative Czech historian of the nineteenth century who kept close tabs on these clans, believes that only the families of junoš and Kokot (von den Hähnen) may have been of Czech origin.

  It was during the unstable rule of Henry of Carinthia, king of Bohemia and Poland (1307-10), that Prague’s German patricians, in alliance with their rich colleagues of the Kutná Hora silver mines, made their first move to force the Czech nobles actually running Bohemia to share some power with them. Jakob Wölflin and Nikolaus Tausendmark, of Prague, together with Peregrin Pusch and his men of Kutná Hora, in 1309 ambushed a group of important Czech nobles and forced them to agree that the merchants would have a voice in the future of the country; the burghers’ and merchants’ sons were to be permitted to marry daughters of the nobility; brides and bridegrooms (average age, two or three) were selected immediately and brides delivered to their patrician future in-laws for an upright bourgeois education.

  Once again, foreign troops intervened in a situation close to civil war, in which Prague’s poorest people, who were Czech, sympathized with the Czech nobles rather than with the German patriciate, however progressive these latter may seem to us. It was agreed to send an embassy to King Henry to ask that his young son, John of Luxembourg, marry Eliška of the Pemyslids and become Bohemia’s future king. The delegation comprised three representatives of the Czech nobility, three distinguished Cistercian abbots, and citizens from Prague and Kutná Hora. More important, the Prague burghers allied themselves with a pro-Luxembourg faction of Czech nobles to deliver the Old Town to John, who was approaching with his mostly German army; and when church bells sounded the alarm on December 3, 1310, Prague’s burghers, including the nonpatrician butchers, rose in arms and opened, or rather hacked to pieces, a strategically important gate to let in Prince John; King Henry and his brutal Meissen allies left Hradany by the back door. John of Luxembourg, interested in cash rather early on, immediately demanded a payment of 720 measures of silver to cover the expenses of his coronation, including new jewels. He was, at least, amenable to business, confirmed the rights of Prague’s burghers to hold property, and magnanimously transferred to them the excise duties imposed on foreign merchants (the money had to be used to pay for the expenses of the embassy inviting John to come to Prague). But by the summer of 1319, Prague’s German patriciate, like the Czech nobles earlier, tired of empty Luxembourg promises and unpaid bills. The people rose in open revolt against the king, who promptly threatened to occupy the Old Town; an uneasy peace ensued.

  Prague’s artisans and craftsmen, many of them Czech, had reasons to band together to define and defend their particular interests even before the end of the thirteenth century, as craftsmen did elsewhere in Europe. It is believed that artisans formed their organizations for religious and economic reasons; the “brotherhoods” of men working at the same craft collectively participated in religious and festive processions (also providing an early kind of insurance group), but guilds also organized production, set prices, and protected their members against unfair and foreign competition. In developing social conflicts it was a fundamental question whether the authorities, town council or king, would allow artisans to group in mere folkloric brotherhoods or in guilds that were established on the basis of legal statutes. By 1318, the tailors of the Old Town were the first group in Prague allowed to constitute a guild, and they were followed by the goldsmiths (1324), harness makers (1328), butchers (1339), millers (1340), and others. Below these organized artisans were a rather motley, poor group, easily excited and often surprisingly loyal to the king, who eked out dubious livings—among them day laborers from the Czech countryside, impoverished craftsmen, tradespeople, apprentices, servants of many kinds, horse grooms, prostitutes, and beggars. Some historians have said that at least half of Prague’s population belonged to this sector, which long lacked any consciousness of its potential strength.

  The days were gone when Arab travelers had noticed the sale of slaves, weapons, and inexpensive leather goods in the shadow of the castie. Now, the merchants of the Old Town were dealing, on a European scale, with a wide variety of commodities and luxury goods that satisfied local demand as well as customers in Poland, Hungary, and farther east. Wheat and cattle were brought to Prague from nearby (chicken was dutyfree), carp and pike arrived from southern Bohemia, and salted herring from the European north was shipped via the Elbe River. Local peasants offered onions, cabbages, and leeks; saffron was imported from stores in Regensburg, figs and almonds from Venice and the Orient. Bohemian wine was for sale, mostly from north of Prague, but connoisseurs also had their choice of Alsatian, Tyrolean, Frankish, and Italian imports. Beer consumption was, then and now, at a record high (good beer, as a Czech proverb demanded, had to be as “sharp” as horseradish, pivo jako ken),
and every burgher jealously guarded his ancient right to brew his own kind; imports were strictly forbidden. Fine cloth from Flanders was considered most valuable, but there were also less expensive textiles from Poland, mostly gray, and other kinds woven at home. Linen came from Bavaria and northern Italy, and there is some evidence for an early taste in buckram and loden.