by Peter Demetz
Arnestus was trained internationally; after attending the cathedral, school in Prague, he was sent to Padua and Bologna to take up canon law and studied there for fourteen years before he was recalled to be dean of the cathedral and, soon, bishop and archbishop and the young king’s counselor and friend. Among his contemporaries, Arnestus was most active, as diplomat, special ambassador, occasional commander of royal troops, and in formulating and executing his king’s policy. As a young man, he recalled later in life, he was once disturbed by the vision of the Virgin Mary turning away from him, and he certainly worked hard to do penance. He was a first-rate manager, establishing exact lists of benefices and consecrated priests, and holding regular synods in order to keep in touch with the provinces, praising or harshly exhorting members of the hierarchy if necessary. Yet he was not a single-minded bureaucrat but a cultivated reader and writer, and patron of the arts. He was a protector of young clerics, whom he sent to study abroad with good stipends, and particularly committed to protect and favor the Augustinians involved in the Devotio Moderna of introspection, spiritual exploration, and religious feeling.
Somewhat younger than Arnestus, Johannes had been first a parish priest and then made his way up quickly as the king’s scribe, notary, court chaplain, and bishop; by 1353 he was protonotary, the first among the notaries in the king’s office, and only a year later became the king’s chief of office and chancellor to supervise all the king’s correspondence. Within a few years, he was traveling to foreign countries for the first time, accompanying Charles to Italy; if he lacked cosmopolitan polish, he amply made up for it by literary talent and eagerness to learn. As anybody else in his position would have done, he collected the best sample letters originating in his office, but he is better known for his important German translations of Latin texts, including “The Soliloquy of a Soul with God” (considered in his time to have been written by St. Augustine himself), a collection of letters about St. Hieronymus (equally spurious), and a remarkable collection of prayers which had an impact on contemporary German prose writing. He knew the German “Lay of the Nibelungs,” which was not exactly required reading for the Prague clergy, and was famous for his collections of books, including, possibly, a copy of Dante’s Latin works and, as a gift from Petrarch, an edition of Virgil’s eclogues. German scholars once overrated Johannes’s impact on German writing and believed that he was responsible for a particular brand of Carolinian early humanism, yet even after a more critical generation of younger philologists have shattered many of these illusions, Johannes remains a lively and vulnerable figure, eager to absorb whatever he could from his Italian friends and correspondents. The king’s efficient chancellor may also have been a timid poet of the German tongue.
Charles liked to work with well-trained and efficient people of patience and experience and was not fond of enthusiasts or dreamers; to dream, in political matters, was utterly beyond his calculating mind, especially if the dreams touched on relations with the Avignon Curia, which were complicated and pushed him to a participation in Italian affairs that, after his early experiences, he wanted to avoid. His encounter in Prague with Cola di Rienzo—the famous figure made tribune of Rome by the will of its people, self-appointed herald of great changes in church, empire, and the world, an inspired lover of the idea of renascent Rome unifying noble Italy—was not so clean-cut as the chroniclers sometimes described, for they more easily sympathized with the king than with his strange visitor. Charles did not need di Rienzo to achieve any of his plans (though it was possible to use him as a pawn in negotiating with the pope), but his Italian visitor, and later prisoner, in conversations and letters uttered statements about the necessary transformation of the church which in a different idiom resounded in Prague’s chapels and streets even before Charles had died; they rang in his son’s ears and eventually made Prague, at the time of the Hussite movement, the first scene of a European reformation. It is altogether a different matter that Cola di Rienzo, a theatrical character of high enthusiasm and quick depressions, reinterpreted some of these statements when he found himself in danger of being tried by the Inquisition. For him, Rome was more valuable than a fine point of scholastic theology and ultimately and for all practical purposes he recanted and returned to Rome in the service of the pope whom he had so bitterly attacked.
Charles must have been astonished by this articulate visitor, admitted to his presence by the good offices of the royal pharmacist Angelo in the early summer of 1350, who presented himself after a long journey from the Italian south as the bearer of prophetic messages. He told King Charles about his short but glorious days as tribune of Rome, his escape (after a half-baked putsch by the nobles) to caves in the Apennines, where he dwelled among Franciscan hermits of radical views, and being sent out to the world again by Frater Angelus de Monte Vulcani to present to Charles precious prophecies and tell him that God himself had chosen Charles and “an angelic pope” (certainly not the one residing in Avignon) to undertake a “universal reformation” (reformatio universalis). The time of the return of the Holy Ghost was close (quod tempus instat, in quo spiritus Sancti tempus ingreditur), and di Rienzo, his precursor, offered Charles his support for going to Italy to restore Rome to its ancient glory.
Charles perhaps enjoyed di Rienzo’s presence; eager to hear more about Italian developments, he invited him for two more conversations, the gist of which di Rienzo summarized in a letter in late July. Yet Charles, a loyal son of the church, was also disturbed by the dire prophecies, so strongly opposed to the present Curia, and by the idea of the imminent coming of the Holy Spirit. Charles asked di Rienzo to repeat his statements to a gathering of dignitaries, including the archbishop; the visitor was promptly taken into custody by the church authorities, held first in Prague and later in the archbishop’s residence of Roudnice. He was treated with respect; unlike his servants, he was given wine, since he did not develop a taste for Prague beer; and he untiringly continued to write letters and memoranda to the king, the archbishop, the chancellor, and his Roman friends, to whom he had promised to return in mid-September at the latest.
In his messages to Italy, di Rienzo sounded of good hope, but toward the end of summer he began to feel less certain about the future; the Bohemian authorities did not seem willing to let him go. He was not aware that his detention had been speedily reported to the pope, and the Holy Father had written three return letters to Prague expressing his satisfaction that the “son of Belial” and potential heretic was in loyal hands. Di Rienzo’s first two letters to the king—serenissime Cesar Auguste—combine a good deal of undiminished pride with an increasing feeling of frustration, fleeting perhaps but noticeable. There are many reasons, he argues, why the king should order his release: the “fear of shame,” which he, a true Christian (fidelis Christianus), fears more than death; the harm that his protracted stay in Prague would cause the noble people in Rome and Italy, who want to continue fighting tyrants, thieves, and traitors; and, last but not least, his health, which suffers in the constricted space and needs to be nourished by free air (more than a poetic image, for he suffered from epilepsy). He wanted to act as a kind of political St. Francis and, to add weight to his entreaties, revealed to Charles the great secret of his birth: he was, he said, the natural son of Emperor Henry VII and a hospitable Roman woman (ipsa natura … me natum esse fecit … gloriose memoriae quondam imperatori Heinrici). Charles, his close relative by blood, should consider his noble record, described in considerable detail, including the battles against soldiers of the Roman nobility, and the ceremonial embassies from all over the world that had honored him; even the sultan of Cairo, di Rienzo added, had lived in fear of him.
The king’s written answer shifted the debate to religious grounds, using an ample number of biblical quotations (in the style of his teacher Pierre of Fécamp) and revealing a good deal of royal irony. Charles had much to say about Christian charity, but when all was said and done he did not give an inch to di Rienzo’s wishes. Charles would have no
thing to do with prophecies (fantastica, he called them), current among spiritualist monks who believed they were extremely knowledgeable in intellectual matters though they had built their edifices on the pillars of pride and vanity; and he especially turned, with some irritation, to predictions concerning the pope and the return of the Holy Ghost to institute a new age. These were completely erroneous and opposed to the truth of the church, he wrote, and it was incorrect to believe that the Holy Ghost had absented himself after he had shown his presence to the apostles and other loyal Christians at Pentecost. As for the great secret of di Rienzo’s imperial origins, the king was ready to leave the matter to God (deo relinquimus), for, he added, “we only know that we are all created by God, being Adam’s sons, and made of the mire of the earth (limo terrae), to which we all return ultimately.” (He possibly knew that di Rienzo was the son of a tavern keeper and a washerwoman.) Charles distinctly refused to discuss the political implications; if di Rienzo’s long absence from Rome set back his cause, that was to be deplored, but God’s law was higher than the affairs of Italy and Rome, and it was less dangerous to risk difficulties here on earth than eternal punishment.
Charles, as it turned out, was not satisfied with this one written answer, and in late 1351 he prevailed on his prisoner to write a letter to Italy in his name and communicating his ideas. Di Rienzo’s admirer Petrarch, the great and famous poet, had also written to Charles asking him to intervene in Italian affairs, and Charles, being ironic or spiteful or both, now asked di Rienzo (possibly using Johannes, who was always enchanted by good letter writing, as intermediary) to formulate a brief message denying Petrarch’s request. The notion was perhaps that the most efficient way to impress his ideas on his Roman prisoner was to ask him to express them himself, in his best style and worthy of Petrarch, and perhaps poor di Rienzo hoped to derive advantage from an involuntary stint as the king’s secretary.
He wanted, above all, a fair hearing; and even before he was shifted in September from his Prague prison to the archbishop’s residence at Roudnice, where he was held in a prison “of three rooms,” he wrote two apologies for his life and ideas, one directed to the archbishop and another one to the king. These longish texts are marvels of discursive energy, precise allusions to a wide array of theological and classical readings, and a courageous resolution to continue his fight. Still unfazed, he told the archbishop that the pope was a private person who could sin and accused the Avignon Curia of dishonesty with the Christian flocks given to its care. Playing on the image of sheep and rapacious wolves, he made the Curia responsible for the tyranny of the Italian nobles, the anarchy in Naples and Rome, and the corruption of justice; it was high time to take the bloody sword from the hands of the pope and return it to those of the king and emperor, where it belonged.
In his treatise addressed to Charles, di Rienzo was no less afraid to take on theological matters, and he demonstrated that he was a fine attorney for his beliefs. Charles had appealed to Christian charity, and di Rienzo (presumably his uncle) promptly addressed him with the informal tu, saying that he was following the laws of love, which were desirous of singularity; after all, he wrote, “we even address God who rules us all in the same way … and so did the Roman orators when addressing Roman caesars.” Invalidating a possible accusation of heresy as if in passing, he also declared that he firmly believed that the Holy Ghost was always active and present, coming and breathing every day; and he taught Charles an admirable lesson in charity, telling him about the humility, poverty, and self-denial of the Franciscan spirituals whom the king had accused of pride and vanity. There was more of the Christian heritage alive in the monks’ Apennine caves than in all the glories of Avignon.
Unfortunately, di Rienzo was a volatile man easily fired by enthusiasm and also quickly disconcerted, and as his imprisonment dragged on into its second year and the archbishop’s responses to his letters continued curt and impatient, he proposed that he was willing to go to Avignon, which he knew well, and stand trial there, no matter what the outcome. For some time, Charles had actually played a cat-and-mouse game with his irritated friend Pope Clement VI (I’ll give you the heretic, and you set the date of my imperial coronation, finally), but then the Curia increased the pressures and Charles finally agreed to deliver his prisoner to the pope—though not without hedging and a few tactical delays, because Charles knew that Clement VI was mortally ill and might die before too much harm was done to di Rienzo. The papal decree excommunicating Cola di Rienzo was read in the churches, and the pope sent the bishop of Spoleto to Prague to read it at St. Vitus Cathedral and take the prisoner away to Avignon. There he was held for another year, recanted (also in a letter to the Prague archbishop, which makes depressing reading), and then, in one of the melodramatic reversals so characteristic of his life, was freed by Pope Innocent VI after the death of his predecessor, and sent to Rome to make it safe for the Avignon hierarchy. Di Rienzo executed a number of noble enemies without hearings or trials, but he was unable to restore his old popularity among the Romans, and when a street demonstration against a newly imposed tax got out of hand, he was brutally murdered by the mob (October 8, 1354), his nearly severed head dangling from his lacerated body. He was hung by his feet (as was Mussolini, another reckless populist, in Milan in 1945), and the Roman Jews were ordered to burn his remains on a stake of thistles and thorns (always a connoisseur of spectacles and emblems, he would have been pleased by the symbolic detail). It is not known whether Charles gave a thought to Cola di Rienzo when he traveled through Italy to be crowned emperor in Rome the following spring.
The king’s encounter with Francesco Petrarch, the most renowned man of letters of his age, was a matter of prestige, high decorum, diplomacy, and a little literature. Petrarch, too, dreamed of a renovatio Romae, a rejuvenation of Rome, but in literary and historical terms, and he did not conflate his classical utopia with religious ideas on the brink of heresy, as Cola di Rienzo did. Charles, more than willing to entertain a defender of the imperial idea so long as this did not offend the pope, was eager to attract the poet to Prague. If older interpretations of Petrarch’s sonnet 238 are legitimate, the Bohemian regent and the Italian poet may have met, or at least observed each other from afar, as early as 1346, in Avignon, for the sonnet describes a festive dance, bringing together many beautiful girls—of course, Petrarch singles out Laura, “real natura, angelico intelleto,” of regal nature, angelic intellect—and when Charles enters, “his sound discernment quickly saw/among so many faces the most perfect” (fra tanti et sì bei volti il più perf etto): Laura’s, as it could not be otherwise. The prince politely approaches Laura “and with kindly expression he kissed her eyes and brow.” All the ladies are happy because they consider, or so the poem suggests, that the kisses are compliments to the entire assembly; only the poet, watching from afar, feels a twinge of jealousy and envy (“me empiè d‘invidia l’atto dolce et strano”). It is a lovely court scene, but the poet never mentioned it later to King Charles and there is little evidence that Charles ever read Italian sonnets, though he could have done so easily.
Petrarch attached his hopes for the rejuvenation of the ancient empire of the Romans variously to the Anjou family and to Cola di Rienzo, whose excesses he viewed with increasing misgivings, and, after a brief visit to desolate Rome, he addressed a stately letter to King Charles urging him to action; in the initial paragraph, he tells him he will spare him flattery and, rather, present lamentations. He entreats Charles not to waste time in superfluous negotiations and to use the time that flies; “what was achieved in the course of many centuries was often destroyed in a single day.” Charles should not be distracted by the political problems of Germany or by his love for his sweet Bohemia but hurry to act in Italy, “which has never welcomed with greater joy the coming of a foreign ruler”; after all, he had been educated in Italy and would bring balm to heal its wounds.
In Prague, Charles must have been overwhelmed, or amused, by Petrarch’s power of words; he did not
immediately dictate an answer, as was his habit, but thought it best to employ his prisoner Cola di Rienzo, ideally qualified to couch a negative answer in an impressive idiom perhaps equal to Petrarch’s; it is one of the many ironies of this particular exchange that the king’s letter was not delivered to Petrarch until two years later (the poet had changed addresses too often) and he never suspected who had actually written the artful communication. Charles, relying on di Rienzo’s fioritura, praises Petrarch’s letter, adorned by laurel, for its manly courage and compassion but does not hesitate to describe Italian conditions in strong language—“justice sold into the brothel of miserliness” (ad avaricie lupanar prostituta iustitia, a master touch by di Rienzo)—and, sighing audibly and referring to a Horatian image, to say that it was more difficult to raise a sunken ship than to restore its sails and ropes. Charles had no quarrel about the glory that was Rome, yet the past was past and the present was different. It was necessary to consider past and present in order to restore honor by honest means; everything had to be tried first before the iron was applied (omnia nam prius temptanda quam ferrum), as surgeons and emperors knew. Never was Charles closer to defining the first principle of his diplomacy.
When Petrarch learned that Charles was to cross the Alps to go to Rome to be crowned emperor, he felt immensely encouraged in his hopes. In a new letter, he welcomed Charles descending the Alpine passes, not only for himself but in the name of Italy and Rome; Italy, he wrote, always considered Charles an Italian, wherever he was born, and it was not important whence he came but what he wanted to do. Charles and his retinue settled for a while in Mantua before proceeding south, and by special messenger he invited Petrarch to join him privately as “a friend of peace,” not necessarily as a diplomat in the service of the archbishop of Milan, to avoid complications. Petrarch, braving one of the coldest winters ever “the roads were not so much earth as steel and diamonds”—arrived at Mantua on December 15, 1354, and stayed there for more than two weeks. We know a good deal about his conversations with the king because he reported about them to his friends; while Charles could not be “more cordial and humane,” he clearly skirted the question of his political intentions in Italy and elsewhere, and was not averse to “descending to an everyday level” or kidding (longis iocosisque sermonibus protracta altercatio). He asked Petrarch to tell the story of his life, and Charles also wanted to know about work in progress, in particular the book De viris illustribus (On Famous Men), perhaps in the hope of being included in it. Petrarch, on his part, avoiding a precise answer to the implied question, told him he would receive such a book if he were to join illustrious men not so much “by meaningless diadems” but rather by deeds and by “nobility of spirit.” Petrarch also gave Charles a few ancient coins with the image of Caesar Augustus, challenging him symbolically; but when Charles invited the poet to go with him to Rome, politely suggesting that he wanted to see the Eternal City through his eyes, Petrarch declined. There was a later occasion to accompany Charles from Milan, where he had been crowned king of Italy, farther south, but Petrarch stopped at Piacenza and did not ride further.