by Peter Demetz
Charles had perhaps witnessed the rights and wrongs of urban planning when in Avignon, a small town that haphazardly altered itself to house the pope, cardinals, and the staff of the Curia (not everybody could afford rooms in Avignon and many people lived in the nearby village of Villeneuve-lez-Avignon or at Carpentras, as for instance Petrarch’s mother), and his Prague project had purpose and amplitude, but the truth is that it was never completely finished during his lifetime. The new space, defined as lying outside the walls of the Old Town, comprised more than three times the space of the Old Town. Great care was taken to integrate all the hamlets and villages there, including Podskali and Zderaz, as well as the extra muros parts of Poí and the Újezd of St. Martin, including the “Jewish Garden,” Prague’s oldest cemetery, and a few Jewish houses nearby. Charles was careful to acquire the necessary real estate by legal measures from the Order of the Knights of the Cross with the Red Star and, in exchange for their compliance, granted important tax reductions to the order and awarded the Prague knights the patronage of the new parish churches to be built. The new town wall, with ramparts and moats, extended for three and a half kilometers from the Boti brook and the Vyšehrad, which formed an element of the new fortification system, in a wide curve north of the Vltava River. The entrance was protected and regulated through a heavily guarded tower and three gates, some of which were strongly fortified too. The entire fortification system was built within two years (1348-50), and Vilém Lorenc, a Czech historian of architecture, has calculated that two hundred masons, three hundred workingmen on the spot, and one hundred thirty in the quarries were needed to do the job, with one hundred carts going back and forth to deliver stone, sand, and water. When the walls were finished, many workingmen were suddenly unemployed, and the ingenious king hired them for further public-works projects, building another wall, this one called the Wall of Hunger, reaching down from Strahov via the Petín Hill to the river, or happily employing them in the cultivation of Prague’s vineyards, which he particularly favored.
New monasteries, parish churches, and markets specializing in particular commodities were to constitute the cores around which wide streets and new housing were planned; the first houses went up on the corner of Wenceslas Square and Jindišská Street, where people today busily shop at the German Quelle department store. A new Carmelite monastery, with its church of St. Mary of the Snows (never finished in its original grand design) and a Benedictine monastery to house Dalmatian monks were started even before the king laid the foundation stone of the fortifications. To the north of the new space the parish church of St. Henry, and to the south that of St. Stephen, were to be located, and Charles took great pride in building the Karlov, a church dedicated to the memory of Charlemagne, to accentuate the continuity of imperial power. The many markets are still fundamental to Prague topography even after six hundred years: the horse market, now Wenceslas Square; the cattle market, now Charles Square, where they also sold fish, wheat, charcoal, and little articles made of wood; on Jená Street, close to the fortified gate, where pigs were for sale; and, even closer to the river, at Podskalf, long the home of proud ferrymen and fishermen, where driftwood from the river was offered for kitchen and heating purposes, virtually a Podskalí monopoly.
In renovating or rebuilding the Vyšehrad to be part of the New Town, Charles demonstrated his piety as well as his ideology of power in showing his veneration for the Pemyslid past and expecting that his successors would follow his example: in his Order of Coronation Procedures he prescribed that any Bohemian king to be crowned had to make a pilgrimage to the Vyšehrad, where Pemysl’s rustic bark shoes and his peasant pouch were preserved, and ostentatiously went on the pilgrimage himself. When Charles began his rule, the fortified Vyšehrad was mostly fallen in desuetude, the former royal palace uninhabitable, its chapel of St. John desolate. (In a gesture of unusual generosity King John donated its ruins to the dean of the chapter to be used as building material, in case they were needed.) Charles decided that the Vyšehrad should be brought to life again; he constructed a new protective wall with fifteen towers, built a new royal palace (later destroyed by the Hussites), and restored the cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul, two naves and a side chapel. Not much of that old glory has survived.
The idea of uniting the Old and New Towns to constitute a strong community, well protected and important in international commerce, may have been on the king’s mind for a long time, but not until 1367 did he give the order that the fortifications dividing the two towns be destroyed (only a few stretches were) and one town be established. It was a useful wish; even after unification, the two towns, different in social structure and distribution of languages, competed fiercely with each other, and after ten years, Charles, who never wanted to waste energy on the irritatingly impossible, ordered the old division to be restored.
It is hard to believe that undertaking to build a new stone bridge across the river, begun in the year of unification, was not part of his original vision of imperial Prague, but the project took a long time, and the bridge was not finished until the turn of the century, many years after his death. Continuities are marked; the old stone bridge (1158—72), named after Queen Judith, the Thuringian wife of King Vladislav II, was damaged beyond repair by ice in early February 1342, and for a while a provisional wooden arrangement had had to serve; the Knights of the Cross with the Red Star, in whose care the bridge was given, collected a fee at the bridge entrances to be used toward the new design. (The pillars of the old bridge can be still seen under the water and in the cellars of a few houses of the Minor Town.) Peter Parler with the occasional assistance of Jan Otlin, a master mason and town councillor of the Minor Town, resolved to build a massive construction much higher than the old bridge and somewhat south of it. The new bridge rested on sixteen pillars without any ornamentation, which was reserved for the bridge towers; there are historians who believe that, ultimately, its most ancient prototype was the bridge built by the Roman legions across the Moselle River at Trier, where, in Charles’s time, his favorite great-uncle Balduin, the archbishop, resided; others assume that it was constructed in imitation of the bridge in Regensburg. Visitors to Prague are not always aware that the rich Baroque statuary was installed on the bridge centuries later, and that it was long called simply the Prague Bridge; it was renamed Charles Bridge only in 1870.
The modern demography of Prague in the second half of the fourteenth century rests on ingenious calculations, and a certain patriotism believing that bigger was better is not always absent. The Caroline metropolis consisted of either four or five administrative entities or towns, depending on the method of counting: the Old Town, topographically including the Jewish Town, administered by its own council of elders; the New Town, including the royal Vyšehrad; the Minor or Lesser Town, which did not have equal legal status with the Old and New Towns; and, probably after the mid-1340s, the small Hradany township near the castle. Estimates vary between V. V. Tomek’s total of 100,000 inhabitants and František Graus’s recent and more modest 30,000—more than respectable if compared with Frankfurt, Nuremberg, or the somewhat smaller Zurich, though greatly overshadowed by Milan (62,000), Paris (80,000), and Venice the Serenissima (90,000 by 1338).
It would be too simple to say that in Caroline Prague the Germans were powerful and rich and the Czechs powerless and poor. It is more probable that more people among the Germans, approximately one-third of the population, were rich and powerful than among Czech speakers. In the Old Town, at any rate, the German patricians held on to power; in the New Town, peopled by a more mobile group and especially by many craftsmen, Czech began to predominate; in the Minor Town, German colonization was progressively balanced by a return of Czechs who were expelled by King Pemysl Otakar; and the small township of Hradany had, for all practical reasons, a majority of Czech speakers, not to mention the villages and hamlets beyond the walls, constituting the heartland of Czech Bohemia. Inevitably, questions of language were particularly acute in the court and in l
egal proceedings, especially in the Old Town; though later chronicles and attentive observers, among them Jan Hus, insisted that King Charles himself had commanded the Old Town councillors to learn Czech so that Czechs could use their mother tongue in court and articulate their statements (aby esky mluvili a žalovali), a royal document to that effect and signed by the king has never been found, and at least one recent Czech historian has suggested that Jan Hus may have had in mind the temporary situation after the unification of the Old and New Towns, when more Czechs appeared among the members of the town council, previously restricted to German patricians. The first urban legal document in Czech dates from December 12, 1370.
Charles Establishes His University
The early plans for the New Town revealed that Charles wanted to establish a university; he spoke of his expectation that a new institution would attract so many students and teachers to the Old Town that a new area to accommodate these people was needed. It was not a new idea in Prague; among the Pemyslids, Václav II had thought about it before the turn of the century, but the Czech nobility, fearing a diminution of its power by clergy, lawyers, and written documents, had blocked his plans. Of the ten institutions of higher learning which the king and Emperor Charles privileged, Prague’s was first and foremost in Central European importance, though Czech and German historians have recently reminded us that Charles was untiring in his efforts to further higher learning not only in Bohemia but also in southern France and northern Italy, where he privileged, among others, the universities of Cividale (1353) and, above all, his beloved Lucca (1369).
The Prague university was authorized on January 26, 1347, by a special bull issued by Charles’s friend and teacher Pope Clement VI, who may have wanted to counteract the rebellious Franciscan theologians gathering in Munich around William of Ockham and gave permission to establish a community of students and scholars in Prague, allowing that a theological faculty be established too. Charles issued his own decrees, the first in Prague on April 7, 1348, establishing a studium generale offering material security to students and teachers (financed by a special tax on the clergy) and protecting educational travel from and to Prague. In another document of June 14, signed at Eisenach, in Thuringia, he, more as Roman king than as Bohemian ruler, explained that he was bound by his high office to care for all subjects in his realm yet, in founding a university in Prague, was prompted by his particular preference for his native Bohemia. Later fierce disputes about whether he founded the university for Germans or Czechs have not taken into account that Clement VI and Charles himself did not think in these nineteenth- or twentieth-century nationalist terms; the pope had asserted that the university, a clerical institution to be directed by the archbishop of Prague, was to serve the inhabitants of Bohemia and its neighboring countries, and the king was much concerned that his loyal Bohemians, fideles nostri regnicole, of whatever language, “who continue to thirst for scholarship, should not be forced to go begging around but should find the tables of plenty ready” in his realm. St. Václav, the patron saint of Bohemia, was to be the patron of the university, and its official seal showed the saint accepting the university charter from the king, humbly kneeling before him.
The university of Prague was to follow the grand examples of Paris and Bologna, both known to Charles, but the royal document of April 1348 revealed in its syntax and imagery that the king’s French secretary had made excellent use of the decrees issued by Emperor Frederick II when establishing the universities of Naples and Salerno. The new professors were all loyal to church and Curia; in many cases, they were teachers in the local Dominican and Augustinian monasteries, renowned for scholarship and piety, and scholars of international experience and repute. Among the early appointees were the Augustinian Mikuláš of Louny and John of Dambach, a Dominican of proven loyalty to the pope and yet personally close to the mystics Meister Eckhart and Johannes Tauler; the theologian Jan Moravec, who had studied at Paris and Oxford; the Franciscan Vojtch of Bluda, certainly of noble and Czech origin, who taught biblical studies; and, among the star appointments, Heinrich Totting of Oyta from Erfurt, who, unfortunately, left soon for Vienna. There were equally remarkable appointments in other fields—e.g., the expert on canon law Buonsignore de Buonsignori from Bologna, or in medicine the Italian Balthasar de Marcellinis. These scholars and scientists were an eminent group, but the initial appointments also show that King Charles, open to intelligence but essentially conservative, and Archbishop Arnestus carefully avoided theologically incorrect choices; they did not dare to consider the colorful bird or the occasional dissident in the cleric’s garb. It is a pity that Charles never considered William of Ockham, whose polemic treatise had called him the pope’s “errand boy,” or, for the faculty of liberal arts, the Roman tribune and archaeologist Cola di Rienzo (instead of imprisoning him), or Petrarch, who would have loved to come as visiting professor with a radically reduced teaching load. Another first-rate candidate would have been the poet Guillaume de Machaut, who also happened to be the most important musician of the age and had served the king’s father long and loyally.
In the beginning, lectures and lessons were offered in monasteries and private homes, the more important ceremonies being held at the archbishop’s residence or the cathedral, and only in 1360 did Arnestus issue a set of regulations more firmly defining an administrative structure. As in other medieval universities, students and teachers were all organized into four “nations,” not according to language but according to the regions of origin along the direction, as it were, of a compass: students and masters all belonged to the Bohemian, Saxon, Polish, or Bavarian “nation.”
In 1366, the king established a college for twelve masters of the liberal arts to reside and work together in a house in the Old Town (originally belonging to a well-to-do Jewish merchant named Lazarus, from whom Charles had repeatedly borrowed money). The Carolinum, the oldest university building still functioning today, was originally the stately home of Johannes Rotlöw, master of the mint, and was given to the university by Charles’s son in 1383; it was combined with other buildings close to the parish church of St. Gallus to form the university’s historical core. In spite of internal tensions (the lawyers broke away in 1372 to create their own institution), the 1370s and 1380s were a lively and productive time for the two hundred docents of different ranks and two thousand students (in the Faculty of Arts). By 1384 the first conflict erupted openly; the Bavarian, Polish, and Saxon “nations” wanted to see their importance reflected in the number of college appointments, and some masters staged their first exodus to Heidelberg and Cologne a few years later, anticipating the momentous and revolutionary events that would transform the university and Prague in only a few decades. King Charles’s universalist concept of higher learning was not to survive him for long.
The King’s Kitchen Cabinet and the Italian Connection: Cola di Rienzo and Francesco Petrarch
Intending to consolidate royal power, Charles wanted to codify the laws of Bohemia formally and in writing, but an assembly of Czech nobles, unimpressed by imperial power, rejected his Majestas Carolina in 1355, and Charles, in one of his shrewdest if not most cynical moments, promptly declared that the sealed codex had been destroyed by fire and did not bind the nobility in any way. Czech barons preferred oral tradition, which, they thought, allowed them more elbow room to handle their affairs than did a written legal code, long researched by the king’s office, and, at least in part, written or edited by the king himself.
The Majestas Carolina, a massive collection of Bohemian laws, was intended to establish a firm process of justice. It did away with trial by hot iron or cold water as being totally unworthy of a Christian kingdom; landowners were forbidden to blind their peasants and to cut off their noses or ears; and women who had been raped were encouraged to proceed to the place where the crime had happened, tear their veil, and publicly accuse the criminal before taking the accusations to the office of the king (the punishment for rape was death). It also interfered with
the joys of playing dice, which, it said, was “apt to leave children impoverished and burdened by heavy shame,” and demanded that all people live virtuously and chastely. Section 50 of the Majestas, if approved, would have been the first ecological law to protect Bohemia’s famous green forests so they would remain “untouched and eternal”; royal power, far from wanting to waste “the beautiful fullness of the forests so much admired by foreigners,” wished to protect timber carefully. It was to be cut only by special authorization, and only dry wood or fallen trees could be legally removed for use or sale.
Charles could rely on a number of Czech nobles loyal to or dependent on him, among them Jan of Michalovice, Jan of Veself, Beneš of Vartemberk, and the brothers Stemberk, but there is little evidence, especially after a short-lived rebellion of the southern Bohemian clan of the Rožmberks (or Rosenbergs) against him, that he surrounded himself with representatives of the nobility as trusted advisers. From time to time he would ask important people for advice (as emperor he also had to consult German and Silesian nobles), but he felt most comfortable with dignitaries of the church. His kitchen cabinet consisted of Archbishop Arnestus (and later his successor, Oko of Vlašim) and the chancellor Johannes Noviforensis (von Neumarkt; in Czech, Jan ze Stedy), bishop of Litomyšl and later of Olomouc. Arnestus and Johannes differed in origin and training, Arnestus coming from a family of the Czech gentry in the northeast of the country and Johannes from the provincial Silesian (or north Bohemian) professional class, yet they both served the king self-effacingly almost as long as they lived.