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

by Peter Demetz

  Many stories were told over the centuries about the enraged king and the archbishop’s lawyer, especially during the age of the Baroque when the long process of sanctification was going on. Johann of Pomuk was certainly not Queen Sophia’s friendly confessor, as was suggested in 1471 by Jan Žídek, a Catholic writer of Jewish origin; it was not his wife’s bedroom secrets that King Václav IV wanted to know, but the archbishop’s political plans. Johann of Pomuk was tortured and died silently, a martyr of loyalty to his legal office, not to the holy vows of a priest hearing a woman’s confession. There is nothing Baroque about his life. Johann of Pomuk was of German origin (his father, Wölfflin, was in the service of the Cistercian monastery of Pomuk, in southwestern Bohemia), and after studying in Prague and Bologna, where he was elected rector and received his doctorate in 1387, he was well qualified as a legal expert and “imperial notary”; he wrote in a wonderfully calligraphic hand. Steadily acquiring benefices and advancements, he held a minor post at Prague Cathedral, was appointed parish priest of St. Gallus, in the Old Town, the richest and most conservative congregation of the Prague German patriciate, and later, by exchange of benefices, became canon at the Vyšehrad. By 1389, he was vicar-general in the archbishop’s office, responsible for all financial and legal matters, and was also involved in supervising the mores of the Prague clergy and investigating preachers accused of heresy and their local supporters and friends. He was, to judge from his benefices and a comfortable piece of Prague real estate which he acquired, not a man of high spiritual intensity, as the archbishop was, but an erudite and loyal lawyer who went about his daily business quietly and punctiliously. He was killed at a moment when the king could not lay hands on the archbishop himself, who escaped to one of his castles most distant from Prague. Jan of Jenštejn, that melancholy and elusive archbishop, may have been (almost) destined to suffer the fate of Thomas à Becket, but it was Johann of Pomuk who died in his stead.

  The Advance of the Religious Reformers

  Václav IV was not fond of Hradany Castle, where his father had resided, and construction of a new residence went on at a slow pace. In 1383 Václav IV shifted his residence to the King’s Court, a fortified place at the Old Town near the walls, and had two gates opened through the fortifications for easier access to the New Town. The kings of Bohemia were to reside there for a hundred years; Vladislav II, of the Polish Jagiello dynasty, in 1475 asked the Czech architect Matj Rejsek to build an adjacent New Tower (now called Prašná Brána, or Powder Tower) for reasons of security before deciding eight years later to move back up to Hradany to be better able to defend the royal residence. The King’s Court later became an army barracks and then, at the beginning of the twentieth century, gave way to a mansion for the Prague municipality (Representaní dm, or “Repre” for short), built in a graceful Art Nouveau style. Václav IV also disliked his father’s ornate Karlštejn and, declaring his independence, built himself a hunting castle at Toník; he did not do much, if anything, to support new architecture or contemporary painters who, perhaps on the archbishop’s insistence, excelled in creating late Gothic Madonnas in the “beautiful style.”

  During the reign of King Václav IV, the question of Czech or German predominance in the Old Town, the most important urban corporation among the towns of Bohemia, for the first time makes political sense—if romantic, or rather metaphysical, notions of nationalities are avoided. We have to accept the limitations of a sober historical analysis based on the count of Czech- or German-sounding names in public documents and also allow for the assumption that many Prague inhabitants then would have found it hard to say whether they considered themselves Czech or German in the modern sense. Over the course of the fourteenth century, the Old Town German patricians tended slowly to disappear from the scene, though it would be wrong to say that poor Czech artisans immediately took their place. The Czech scholar Jaroslav Mezník, who has calculated population changes from lists of taxes and real estate ownership, has shown that of twenty-eight families highly visible in 1325 only four were left a century later. The newcomers were not necessarily Czech; among craftsmen and artisans, those working with metal and wood, furriers, glove and saddle makers were usually German, clothes cutters and purveyors of food mostly Czech.

  On the eve of the Hussite revolution, national clusters distinctly appear on a map of the Old Town: Germans are solidly concentrated around the Old Town Square and the St. Gallus parish and radiate in entire blocks of housing to Celetná Street and to the east and northeast. In a few adjacent quarters, Germans and Czechs are still in balance. Czechs are strongly, if not absolutely, predominant toward the periphery—in the northwest, close to the Jewish Town, and in the southwest, where friends of religious reform resided.

  Many reasons have been advanced for the withering away of Prague’s medieval German patriciate, and the least melodramatic may be closest to the historical circumstances. In business, the old families avoided spectacular risks and preferred stable returns; they began to buy property in the countryside and became landowners, joining the (mostly Czech) rural gentry; or, because of their learning and experience, they were appointed to high positions at the royal or imperial court and were gradually absorbed into the bureaucracy. In their stead, other German families, from Nuremberg and elsewhere, came to Prague, attracted by its commercial opportunities (perhaps more tempting under Charles IV than under his erratic son). Of course, town councils were shaped by the king, who held the undisputed power of appointment; it is possible that Charles strengthened the Czech element when, in 1350, he briefly appointed a majority of guild representatives to the Old Town council (he soon restored the patriciate to power, however) or when, in 1367, he tried to unite the Old with the New Town, in which the Czech element was traditionally very strong. In January 1408 the king appointed, for the first time, an Old Town council with a distinct Czech majority; a year later the predominance of the Bohemian “nation” was decreed at the university; but within five years Germans were prevailing again, which they continued to do until the Hussites profoundly changed all Prague life—religious, social, and national.

  Among Prague intellectuals and burghers who longed for a reform of the church, Czech interests, as distinct from the universalist and transnational Caroline ideas, came increasingly to life, but the language of reform changed to the Czech vernacular slowly (even Jan Hus, who preached in Czech, wrote his notes in Latin). After the death of Mili of Kromíž and the closing of his New Jerusalem, which had brought together repentant women and socially committed young priests and preachers, the reform movement went into organizational decline, for it lacked a firm local center in Prague. Its ideas and claims, however, were strengthened and refined by two thoughtful men, the learned Matj of Janov and the solitary Tomáš of Štítný.

  Matj was born into a gentry family in southern Bohemia, and like other penniless and brilliant young men, he thought of a comfortable career in the church, which richly rewarded its own. He went to Paris in 1375, received his M.A. after three years, and continued, for nearly six more years, to read for the difficult doctorate of theology. The politics of the schism interfered: at least initially, the University of Paris preferred the Avignon pope, but most Bohemian members of the English “nation” at the Sorbonne (to which Matj paradoxically belonged) were loyal to Rome, since not supporting the Roman hierarchy would have spoiled their chances for an appointment in Bohemia. Of course, Matj returned from Paris to Prague via Rome, where he had a chance to acquire a “letter of grace” from the pope, promising a future appointment. When he came to Prague in October 1381, he was appointed to a titular canonry of the cathedral (with no income), made a meager living by occasionally preaching and hearing confession, by the grace of the archbishop, but he felt frustrated. When, in 1388, he was appointed to a poor little parish in a village on the road from Prague to Mlník, his great hopes for preferment were utterly shattered, and he underwent a spiritual crisis as intense as Mili’s before him, though for different reasons.


  Turning his early foolish aspirations against himself, Matj began to believe that his failure to be appointed to a comfortable living corresponding to his talents and dignity was a divine sign telling him to choose the path of Christ, of evangelical truth and simplicity. He wrote that it was not an easy question “whether to go after benefices and offices or whether instead to bear the poverty and reproaches suffered by Jesus Christ.” His eyes sharpened by lack of success, he turned against prelates and “great canons,” castigating their “systematic vanity, their great discrepancy from the virtue and truth of Jesus and from his words and deeds, which they zealously praised with their mouths alone.” If Konrad Waldhauser had been an effective preacher and Mili the practical visionary, Matj was the learned theologian of the growing reform movement in Bohemia, still untouched by the ideas of John Wyclif, later important to the Hussites; and it is probably necessary to distinguish between what he himself wrote and what his willful assistants, Ondej and Jakub, preached (in Czech) when they served at the church of St. Nicholas as guests of the Old Town parish.

  Matj was well known for asking the pious to come to mass frequently, if not daily, and he did not hesitate to express doubts about venerating pictures, relics of the saints, or miracles caused by material things. However, the Prague synod of 1388 ruled (following the advice of the masters of the university) that frequent communion was in error (once a month was enough) and decreed that images should be venerated as they had always been; a year later, the synod of 1389 ordered Matj and his two assistants to appear before a clerical assembly gathered at the cathedral. Jakub was forbidden to preach for ten years, but Matj, who submitted to the better judgment of the Holy Church, was let go more lightly (six months) and was given the friendly advice to concentrate on his job at his little village parish rather than hang around in Prague. Yet he did not change his mind; and in his learned Latin volumes he condemned the church, involved in worldly affairs, as the mulier fornicaria, and extolled a poor and simple Church of Christ, free of ceremonies, mandates, decrees, and rules. It is not surprising that the archbishop’s office kept a close eye on Matj: shortly before he died in 1393, he was asked to deliver two books, one in Latin and one in vulgari Boemico, or Czech, to the hands of the archbishop’s lawyer and adviser Johann of Pomuk, the future victim of royal revenge. F. M. Bartoš, most knowledgeable in Hussite affairs, believes that the Latin manuscript was the Regulae veteris et novi testamenti, Matj’s thoughts about the interpretation of the Bible (Matj assured the office he had not yet corrected them), and the other part of a Czech translation of the Bible to which Matj substantially contributed. It is a speculative but impressive idea.

  Tomáš of Štítný, son of a country squire in southeastern Bohemia, was not particularly radical in his religious reflections, but he was the first layman to write about matters Christian and moral in Czech, feeling responsible for the education of his five children and his neighbors who were unable to read Latin. He must have been one of the earliest students at the University of Prague, but he did not seek or receive a degree, and returned to his father’s fortified tower to marry, to raise children, and to work the land. He did not bury himself in the countryside, though, for he occasionally traveled to Prague, where he listened to Waldhauser, Mili, and possibly Matj of Janov. Tomáš may not have changed the canon of accepted ideas, but he single-handedly created a Czech philosophical syntax, making it possible to write in Czech about matters long reserved to the university masters using Latin. After his wife died, he took care of his aging sisters and then in 1381 left for Prague to be close to the scene of religious reform and to live with his oldest daughter, Anežka, who had gathered a group of women trying to live in the Christian spirit. By that time, he was an old man, and he died before revolution erupted in the Prague streets.

  Czech historiography, after a long period of considerable isolation, has yet to deal with the record of the medieval Prague communities of pious women who deeply sympathized, to say the least, with the efforts of the time to emulate the life of the early Christians. In their ranks, Czech names of the gentry predominate, and among the first was Tomáš of Štítný’s daughter Anežka. Before 1401 she had bought part of a house in the Czech section of the Old Town, not far away from New Jerusalem, and resided there with her friends Ludmila and Catherine; after a number of property deals, the new co-owner of the house, a noblewoman named Stežka of Cejkovice, provided shelter for five more young women. Another pious noblewoman, Petra of ían, bought a house in 1410 and lived there together with her friends Markéta of Peruc and Dra of Bethlehem for nine years, praying, attending Czech sermons, and doing good deeds. Such small communities were established elsewhere in Prague too; Catherine Kaplerova of Sulevice, a rich widow, set up a fund to pay for a Czech preacher at St. Vitus Cathedral, and she invited to her comfortable house at Hradany Square twelve virgins and widows who were willing to leave the temptations of the world and to serve God. The historian V. V. Tomek believed that at least seven other communities of a similar kind were established near various Prague parish churches. Enemies of the reform movement suspected these spontaneously created associations of heresy, called the women begutae, to suggest a link to the heretic Beguines of Flanders, and were quick to demonize or ridicule them. In a satirical street ballad of the time, we are told the story of a Czech beguta who lured a young man, eager for Christian instruction, to her room, showed him two pear-shaped chapters of the Bible, and more, and soon he and she were singing a Te Deum laudamus (We praise thee, O Lord) in unison.

  Mili’s New Jerusalem and its small seminary of young clerics had been the first institution created by Prague Christians for a pristine faith of love; when it was closed by royal decree, its lay congregation may first have thought of legal proceedings to repossess the buildings but ultimately decided to create another institution. We do not know exactly who took charge, but it was possibly the theologian Vojtch Rakv of Ježov, who later became the first Czech rector of the University of Paris. Adalbertus Ranconis de Ericinio, to use his Latin name, was in many ways the éminence grise of the Prague reform movement, and it was possibly he who brought about an effective coalition of interested people, the commercial middle classes, and the court. In any event the Prague synod of 1389, the one which humiliated Matj of Janov, seems to have resolved to build a new house of God in which these reform intentions would be continued by young Czech preachers: within three years (1391-94) a new chapel called Bethlehem was constructed not very far from Mili’s place in the Old Town Czech neighborhood. Leading Czech businessmen and courtiers worked together to organize the project: the merchant Kíž provided the building lot, a former malt house, and a good deal of money; others, including the cloth cutter Machuta (once investigated by the Inquisition), pitched in. Among the people influential at court, Johannes of Mühlheim was won over to the cause by his wife, Anna, of a Czech baronial family, and contributed considerable prestige and diplomatic skills. It was he who signed the document legally establishing the new chapel; it claimed that the word of God, publicly proclaimed, was foremost in shaping the church and all its members; without God’s word, “we would be like Sodom and Gomorrah.” Yet a trace of the old was still part of the new, for the merchant Kíž was proud to present to the new institution the bones of a child allegedly killed by King Herod, though such a dubious relic may not have pleased the new congregation’s preachers.

  This Bethlehem chapel was a large, stern lecture hall, possibly with a low ceiling crossed by strong wooden beams, and a modest pulpit to be entered from the priest’s apartment on the upper floor of an adjacent building. Contemporary reports suggest that three thousand listeners flocked to the services, but the number may be hyperbolic. The chapel was certainly built in deliberate contrast with Prague’s rich parish churches; its present form, a mid-twentieth-century reconstruction impressively combining architectural erudition and historical imagination (only a few remnants of the original walls, hidden in nineteenth-century apartment houses, could be used), sug
gests the noble simplicity and the aesthetic space of the original; the reconstructed gables curiously resemble those of the Old New Synagogue in the Jewish Town.