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

by Peter Demetz

  Charles’s policies concerning the Jews of his realms have been much discussed by Czech and German scholars, and after abundant evidence has been sifted, it is fair to say that the king of Bohemia benevolently protected his Prague camerknechte and those in most other communities of his native kingdom. He made certain that his Prague Jews enjoyed more than thirty years of peace and prosperity, but he also revealed his financial appetite, to say the least, when he failed to protect the Jews in Germany and squeezed them for money, alive or dead, and occasionally just waited in the wings to cash in on a pogrom (foreseen or even organized with his connivance). His statement that his camerknechte were “to serve the needs of the ruler when occasion warranted” sounds tolerant enough under late medieval conditions; and though he, at times, formally addressed the Jews as his “libe [dear] camerknechte,” preferably when imposing new taxes on them, he showed his cold-blooded indifference to human suffering in his financial dealings at the start of his reign when a wave of pogroms was sweeping through Germany in 1348-50 (Prague was spared at that time). Jewish servitude was materially expressed by an ever increasing annual contribution paid to the emperor; Charles, usually strapped for funds, made his income from real or potential Jewish taxes into an instrument of his policies, using it to buy off the towns and territorial princes he needed as allies There were other sources of Jewish income: as soon as the smoke cleared over a destroyed Jewish community and the burned corpses (in some southwestern German towns Jews were burned alive in their little wooden houses), the emperor fought with the German towns for his part of what was left of the Judenerbe, or Jewish property.

  The king’s record in the German pogrom years of 1348-50, closely studied by younger scholars of the former German Democratic Republic and by František Graus, shows a good deal of financial tenacity and few of the Christian virtues which Charles so praised in his own writings. His involvement in the Nuremberg pogrom of December 5, 1349, in which nearly six hundred Jews were killed and their community destroyed, strikes me as particularly disgusting. When pogroms began to sweep through Germany from the southwest in 1348, Charles was very much concerned with what was to be done with Jewish property left in the ashes, and named his favorite great-uncle, the archbishop of Trier, as chief administrator of all possessions belonging to Jews “who were and are yet to be killed in Alsatia,” insisting that everything belonged to the camer (the king’s chamber); he assured the bishops of Bamberg and Würzburg that he, the king, would not dispose of Jewish property without their consent “in case the Jews of their district would be harmed.“In the spring and summer of 1349, Charles began to distribute the property of the Nuremberg Jews, anticipating their possible persecution; on April 6, he gave Arnold of Senckendorf a few Jewish houses “in case the owners would be killed or left town,” then transferred ownership of the best Jewish houses to the margrave of Brandenburg, assuming that “the Jews there were to be killed [nu nehst werden geslagen] shortly,” and finally offered the town council on November 16 the right to tear down the synagogue and a few other buildings to build a new church on the cleared square. In early December the pogrom really occurred as planned by the town council, and Charles, in a letter to the monastery of Waldhausen, had the blasphemous temerity to call it a fateful event sent by God himself.

  The Easter pogrom of 1389 in Prague was triggered, eleven years after Charles’s death, by an incident, variously described by contemporary reports, in the narrow streets of the Jewish Town. According to a rather dubious story, considering the location of a church within the Jewish quarter, a priest carrying the Host to a sick or dying man was stopped by Jewish adults and children, who badly abused him. Other chroniclers say that the Jews tried to stone the priest; a third narrative suggests that a Jew threw a little stone at the monstrance (da wart von einem Juden ein klein steinchen geworfen auf die monstrancie). In the subsequent brawl, the Jews responsible were brought to the town hall to be punished, and fanatical preachers all over town called upon the crowds to revenge the blasphemy lest they be punished by God himself within a year. Inflamed by the sermons, people began to gather, arming themselves and eager to march through the Jewish streets. The council of the Old Town, well aware of the property rights of King Václav IV as the lord of his camerknechte, immediately mobilized the privileged citizens to come to town hall to prevent the worst, but in the meantime a man named Ješko emerged as the leader of the people, telling them it would be better to kill all the Jews than to be punished by God. Jews were killed by swords and clubs, fires set to the houses, and those found alive pushed back into the conflagration; only a few children and women were brought to the town hall for Christian baptism by force, as a Latin narrative says. The next morning, the town council met again, ruling that all Jewish property must, under penalty of death, be brought to the town hall for the king, but it did not do anything to punish the people who had broken the laws of the town and of the king. On the third day, three thousand corpses were buried (people feared a pestilence); and since people were digging in the ruins for hidden treasures, the town council had the gates of the Jewish district closed and sealed.

  The events of this terrible day were described in a Latin Passio Judaeorum Pragensium (Passion of the Prague Jews) by a cleric erudite enough to parody the gospels of Matthew and John (the manuscript was published only in 1877). The writer pretended to feel for the Jews but actually gloated over what had been done to them, unsparing in his details of blood and gore, and of how, when everything was over, curious crowds, including thieves and prostitutes, came to see the corpses lying in the streets.

  Yet the victims continued to speak, and the renowned Prague rabbi and poet Avigdor ben Isaac Kara, some years later, wrote an elegy that revealed what had happened from the inside, as it were. This learned poet and richly gifted author, whose father had died in the flames, had a clear view of both the political circumstances after Charles’s death and the breakdown of authority in Prague. “The order of the world fell apart,” he wrote. “Innocence was destroyed by malice for, ach, the power of the state was broken and the royal scepter lost its radiance.” He had been enchanted with “magnificent Prague,” but he writes of the “muffled and spectral whisper in the streets,” “the ghastly gatherings” of the Christians with their arms, axes, and hatchets, “as if they wanted to cut down a forest.” Unlike the Christian chroniclers, Avigdor ben Isaac Kara dwells on the courage of the Jews who, like the members of the rabbinate, killed themselves and their families rather than submit to baptism, and he gives an unforgettable account of the brutal plundering of the two synagogues (“Get the gold!” the killers screamed), of the dead, and, finally, of the cemeteries where the graves were opened for spoil. All the Jews killed “were robbed of their garments, and in the dirt of the streets the bloody corpses of babies, men young and old, boys and virgins, were wildly heaped together.” When Rabbi Avigdor ben Isaac Kara died in 1439, he was buried at the Jewish cemetery; for centuries his elegy for the dead of 1389 was read in the Prague synagogues on the Day of Atonement. The prayer concluding his text must have resounded with particular urgency far beyond the Middle Ages: “Now … Father of us all, it is time to proclaim that the killings must come to an end! Say it now that not a single one will be added to the terrible number of victims anymore! Long enough were they killed and choked to death to the world’s derision, long enough!”

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  THE HUSSITE REVOLUTION: 1415-22

  The King and the Vicar-General

  The wise rabbi Avigdor ben Isaac Kara deplored the radically weakened royal power during the reign of Václav IV, and many contemporaries and later historians share his views. Charles’s son Václav assumed power when he was seventeen years old, and it is far more difficult to be fair to him than to his father; contemporary chronicles are sparse, and many later voices speak against him in strange unison—Hussite adversaries, Catholic defenders of the Holy Church, and older German chroniclers who as early as 1400 took their cue from the German princes who had declared hi
m too lazy to run the affairs of Germany. He has come down to us as an irascible if not perverse monster, even though the Prague folk, sympathizing with his fight against the feudal barons, obviously enjoyed stories about his nightly roaming about town, part Harun al-Rashid, part bon vivant. We are told of his rough jokes, his skirt chasing, and many writers like to tell the famous story describing how Susanna, a lovely masseuse, rescued him from the ire of the barons by rowing him in a little boat across the Vltava River. Many people believed that his first wife, a Bavarian princess, was torn to pieces by one of his huge mastiffs when she rose from her bed one night suddenly to avail herself of the Gothic amenities (in fact she probably died of the plague).

  King Václav IV had been spoiled by his father, who in his old age was obsessed by the question of succession and dragged his son along on his travels as heir presumptive to whom ceremonious admiration and homage were due. Prince Václav never soldiered in the field as did his father, and though he spoke Czech and German, possibly learned a little Latin, and may have known a smattering of other languages, he was not particularly interested in literary matters, either privately or at court. Friendly observers describe him, at least in his early years, as a handsome and witty conversationalist, but, as time went on, he withdrew from his royal duties to the hunt in the forests near Prague, carousing with his buddies and often drinking himself into a stupor. (When he was to meet the French king, a festive luncheon had to be postponed for three days because he had to sleep off the results of the first welcome party.) The Czech historian Zdenk Fiala suggested that Václav lived under the illusion that the administrative machinery of the state would go on working by itself as it had under his father’s eyes; and when he ran up against the harsh demands of changing political situations, the enmity of the German princes, and the mutinous barons at home, he was unwilling or unable to cope and slowly drifted along, helplessly and violently, rather than use his considerable intelligence.

  Unfortunately, Václav found himself in an uncertain world split by the schism of the church, which ever since 1378 had been divided over two competing popes, Urban VI of Rome, who was supported by the Bohemian hierarchy, and Clement VII of Avignon, who had friends and allies in France and among the German princes. Václav, as young king of Bohemia and the German Reich, showed a great willingness to deal with his tasks; he went to Germany often, as was his duty, intervened in Rhenish affairs, and successfully married off his sister Anne to Richard II of England in 1382. The marriage, incidentally, made it easier for Bohemian students and masters to study at Oxford and bring back to Bohemia the writings and ideas of John Wyclif, who in that same year was declared a heretic, or in doctrinal error, by the church. Yet Václav’s royal energies soon lagged; he lingered, procrastinated, lacked the will to make decisions, and by his absences from Germany provoked the princes. After repeated ultimatums, they declared him “totally unfit” to continue as Roman king. In a dubious procedure, they formally deposed him and elected Ruprecht of the Palatinate in his place, the result being that Europe now had two popes and the Reich virtually two monarchs, Vaclav forever postponing a journey to Rome, where he might have been crowned emperor nonetheless, under reduced circumstances, as it were, by Pope Urban VI or his successor.

  At home Václav IV had to contend with Bohemia’s powerful barons, who soon sensed his weakness and rebelled against his arbitrary ways and his habit of surrounding himself with favored advisers from the town and gentry. These favorites were quick to claim special prerogatives; they pushed aside the great traditional clans and squeezed the country, the towns, and especially the Jews for ever increasing tributes and taxes. One of these, Sigmund Huler, possibly from a family of German textile merchants from Cheb (Eger), actually ran the financial affairs of the kingdom for many years until it was discovered that he had cleverly put a good deal of money in his own pockets, and the king himself in 1405 sentenced him to death. The baronial opposition, mostly consisting of rich southern Bohemian families who traditionally fought the powers in Prague, established an alliance with the king’s restive relatives, including Jošt of Moravia, a serious and effective administrator, and Václav’s half brother Sigismund, later emperor, and they imprisoned Václav twice, once in Prague and once in Vienna, while pushing for a settlement of their claims. Four of the king’s favorites were murdered in cold blood at Karlštejn, and in the sumer of 1401 the barons joined forces with the Saxon duke Wilhelm of Meissen, whose German armies, plundering and burning, invaded Bohemia and laid siege to Prague Castle.

  Charles IV had marvelously succeeded in keeping the barons at bay, at least after the abortive revolt of the southern Bohemian Rožmberks in 1355, by appointing them to high formal offices, as tradition required, while building up his own royal towns and constantly strengthening a loyal church hierarchy. His son was ill advised to challenge Jan of Jenštejn, the third archbishop of Prague and the highest representative of the church in Bohemia. It was clearly a question of predominance, real or imagined, and the dispute was made more corrosive and brutal by the king’s irresponsibility, to say the least, and by Jenštejn’s rather exalted opinions of his indubitable intellectual gifts and ecclesiastical power. The king and the archbishop had originally worked closely together, but the trouble was that the archbishop was too sensitive to defend himself energetically against the king, preferring to write exquisite Latin poems or a melancholy autobiographical essay, “On Escaping the World”; it is possible that the king and his advisers intentionally provoked him to exaggerated reactions. Jenštejn was a rich youth from an important family in Prague, extremely well connected, and had been a leisurely student at the universities of Padua, Bologna, Montpellier, and Paris, where he declined a teaching position because he did not see himself as teacher or scholar. Rather suddenly he rose in the church to become bishop of Meissen, then archbishop of Prague and king’s chancellor, quickly combining in one person the functions that, in the age of Charles IV, had been held by Arnestus of Pardubice and Johannes Noviforensis. He possessed all the intellectual qualifications to check the king’s imperiousness and to return a degree of dignity to Bohemian affairs, yet after a grave illness, he underwent great emotional change, turned away from the stage of the world to the inner fire of the “modern devotion,” favored the meditative orders of the Augustinians and Carthusians, left his loyal servants to taste the ire of the king, lived in seclusion, mostly away from Prague, and died, lonely, in a Roman monastery in 1396.

  The consequences of the king’s conflicts with the archbishop were felt for centuries, not because of the power play involved (it was washed away shortly by the Hussite revolution), but because the king was responsible for the death of the vicar-general Johann of Pomuk, canonized by Pope Benedict XIII on March 19, 1729, and one of the martyr patrons of Bohemia. The sordid and confused story about St. John of Nepomuk (as he was later called) combines cynical intrigues in high places with royal brutality and Jenštejn’s melancholy inactivity at the wrong time, all in the chiaroscuro of a dark torture cellar and the searing flames of the hangman’s torch.

  In 1392, when the archbishop sought to discipline one of the king’s relatives, Václav IV was deeply offended and, wanting to provoke him, had Jan ch, a royal favorite, build a dam on the Elbe River on a spot of land belonging to the archbishop (effectively denying him the payments he had received from passing ships); when the archbishop complained, King Václav IV invited him to one of his castles to talk over matters in a leisurely fashion, while in the meantime ordering ch’s men to devastate the archbishop’s estate. A wise judge restored Jenštejn’s shipping rights, but matters went from bad to worse when the king conspired to weaken the archbishop’s power by trying to establish a new bishopric in western Bohemia, centered on the monastery of Kladruby. The archbishop and his vicar, the legal expert in matters of the Prague hierarchy, in a quick countermove appointed a new abbot of Kladruby who was loyal to the church, and made it impossible to chip away at the jurisdiction of Bohemia’s metropolitan. The king had
one of his fits of rage, immediately left his hunting lodge, and rode to Prague to take revenge on the archbishop, who may have been, unsuspectingly, manipulated by his own church dignitaries inimical to the throne.

  On March 20, 1393, another meeting of the king and the archbishop, and their retinues, was scheduled for further discussion at the monastery of the Knights of St. John, in the Minor Town, but the king, who had begun to drink early that day, was in no mood for prolonged negotiations. He screamed at the archbishop and his officials, including the vicar, Johann of Pomuk, and two officials named Nicholas Puchnfk and Václav Knobloch, and commanded the royal guards to arrest all four. In the sudden confusion, the archbishop escaped (he may have been saved by his own men or by reluctant soldiers of the king), and the three remaining prisoners were first dragged up to the cathedral close, where the furious king demanded to hear more about the archbishop’s intentions, and later marched down from Hradany to the Old Town, to the town judge’s prison at the corner of Rytíská Street and the Mstek. The king may have hoped that his men would arrest the archbishop (all Vltava ships were checked); when evening came he called for the hangman and had the three prisoners put on the rack. Ultimately, the hangman applied a burning torch to the men, especially their hips and sides, and the king, it is said, took the torch from his hand to continue the torture. Then suddenly he became aware of what he was doing, relented, and gave the order to free the prisoners; a public notary was called, and Nicholas Puchník and Václav Knobloch had to sign a promise that they would never talk about their experience. But it was too late for middle-aged Johann of Pomuk; he expired while being taken from the rack, and his corpse was carried by the hangman and his assistants through the dark Old Town and thrown from the stone bridge into the Vltava River, at about nine in the evening. The heavens remained silent, Vít Vlnas quietly remarks in his recent and finely researched story of Johann of Pomuk and his later cult, and the corpse of the tortured vicar-general was found in the river a few weeks later.