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

by Peter Demetz

  The economic boom of the mid-1600s also attracted a new generation of merchants who were able to continue the fragile traditions of the Italian import-export business, which had been interrupted by the Hussite revolution. Some of the merchants too came from northern Italy—for instance, Federico Troilo, from Trento, and Pietro Olgiato, from Como—but there was at least one from distant Naples; others had earlier established branches at Nuremberg (as the Beccaris had done) and opened offices in Prague as well. Another group of Italian merchants, of Jewish origin, threatened by new persecution in northern Italy, left Milan and Verona and settled in the Prague Jewish Town.

  Italian commerce certainly made life more pleasant for those who could afford imported commodities. Silk and lace, olives and wine, the more refined kinds of candy and other foods were now available to Prague customers; ingenious merchants like Ercole da Nova of Mantua specialized in dealing with rich aristocratic customers and extended ready credit, if it was needed, to powerful families. Czech Protestants were not particularly pleased by Catholic immigrants (who were accused of most crimes in the book, as the Roma are in Prague today), but the court and the barons were delighted by the welcome and proficient services of experts in savoir faire—tailors, hatters, cooks, carpenters, tennis and dance instructors, butlers, and footmen. The guardian of the royal lions, kept in a grove near the castle, came from Ferrara, and for many generations all the Prague chimney sweeps were Italians. But for a cup of real coffee, Prague connoisseurs had to turn to Georgios Deodatus, from Damascus, who, clad in an Arab burnoose, walked through the city streets offering hot coffee, and it is to his never-ending fame that he bought himself a house on Karlova Street in the Old Town and established the first coffeehouse there in 1713—exactly at the moment when Prague was visited (for the last time) by the plague, which killed thirteen thousand people.

  Organized Italian community life was, for a considerable period, under the protection of Prague’s Jesuits. An Italian preacher was appointed as early as 1569, and members of the community gathered for church services at the Italian (vlašská) chapel, at first a rather unassuming place at the Clementinum. In 1593 the Italian brotherhood of the Ascension of the Virgin Mary was organized under the supervision of one Father Biaggio Montagnini (undoubtedly S. J.) at the chapel. The brotherhood was quite modern and efficient; its table of organization comprised a rector, usually a well-known architect or merchant, and an administrative committee of assistants, secretaries, and financial experts. By 1590, construction had been initiated on a new, more representative chapel, oval-shaped and architecturally much advanced; it was consecrated (though much had still to be done pn it) on August 9, 1600, in the presence of the papal nuncio and the ambassadors of all Catholic nations accredited to Rudolf’s court. In the same year, the congregation resolved to build its own hospital (it was to be open to Utraquists too), and after the builders had acquired a garden and a few surrounding houses, as a special favor from nearby Strahov Monastery, an orphanage and a cemetery were also established and a hospital church built during the restive years 1611-17 (the building materials were donated to the congregation by Emperor Matthias himself). After the triumph of the Catholic cause, a modest Italian school was opened in 1622, and, somewhat later, Giovanni Domenico Barifis, among the most important Prague architects of the time, in his last will and testament left one of his houses in the St. Castallus parish to the Italian community to serve as trattoria and social club “for all times.”

  In the eighteenth century, when Ignacio Giovanni Nepomuceno Palliardi constructed a number of buildings in the late Baroque style, Italians came to contribute to Prague’s cultural life in yet another way: as the theater slowly shifted from the court and the town palaces of nobles to public institutions, Italian professionals—organizers of stylish entertainments, impresarios, painters of stage scenery, conductors and singers—were on hand to give the theater, old and new, experience, splendor, quality, and cohesion. Two months after regular lamps were installed in the way leading from Hradany Castle down Neruda Street (as it is called today) to the Old Town, and after Charles VI was crowned king of Bohemia in 1723, the festive opera Costanza e Fortezza (Constancy and Courage) was performed near the castle on an open-air stage; its elaborate arrangements of scenes, costumes, and special effects were designed by Giuseppe Galli di Bibbiena, and for nearly a century Italian opera directors skillfully served changing patrons, including Counts Sporck, Thun, and Nostitz, and the Bohemian Estates. When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte, his gifted and adventurous librettist, came to Prague they came to a place well known for the enthusiasm for the theater of its nobles and educated middle classes, only too proud to compete with imperial Vienna.

  It is curious to note how the Italians who contributed so much to Bohemian’s artistic life survived in later literary images. Once more, the cliché triumphs, and what remained of all these architects, musicians, and opera singers was but the Italian flunky or bureaucrat chasing blondes and gaining access to important people. A professional Italian manservant employed by a local noblemen in Božena Nmcová′s The Grandmother (1855), the first novel of the modern Czech prose tradition, rather indiscriminately harasses the Czech village girls (totally unaware that the Bohemian flirting code differs from the Tuscan one), and the young men terribly humiliate him by dunking his naked feet in stinking pitch. Unfortunately, he has the ear of the castle steward and can, and does, create real trouble for the upright lads defending village innocence. In The Trial, written in 1914-15, Kafka confronts his K. at least with the Italian painter Titorelli, rather eclectic in his art, as the name implies, and yet an important character because he has good connections among judges (needless to say that he happens to be protected in his atelier by a gang of lascivious Prague Lolitas). In Kafka’s The Castle, we are told the tragic story of Amalia, who has rejected the offensive advances of the castle bureaucrat Sortini (not to be confused with his colleague Sordini with a d), a powerful and cunning donnaiuolo but also a distant cousin to the Italian lackey in Nmcová’s novel, which, as Max Brod often assured us, Kafka sincerely admired. Unfortunately, the bureaucrat Sortini is beyond revenge.

  A Third-Rate Place: War and Peace in the Provinces

  After the Thirty Years’ War, the cosmopolitan and imperial glories of Emperor Rudolf’s years were gone forever, and Prague became a wounded, impoverished, and provincial town that lost many and attracted few. In the last years before the Protestant revolt in 1618, the Prague towns may together have held 50,000 people, but a generation later, in 1650, only 26,000 were left, including the people of the Vyšehrad and the Jewish Town, and only by 1705 did the number of inhabitants slowly climb to 40,000. Most were Catholic (though a few Evangelicals may have continued to meet clandestinely), and Jews constituted almost one-quarter of the total. Emperor Matthias had moved the court to Vienna again in 1612, and with it went the papal nuncios and accredited ambassadors, the imperial civil servants, and the ambitious young people eager to make a career; Czech sociologists have shown that the number of persons admitted to Prague citizenship distinctly declined during the war—though it is easy to assume that, after the devastations in the countryside and the Saxon and Swedish invasions, the towns were full of vagrants, invalids, beggars, and marauders not appearing on the tax lists. Most Czechs dwelt, even after the emigration of the Evangelicals, in the New Town; the Old Town was half Czech, half German; most foreign residents lived in the Minor Town and on Hradany Hill, clinging, as it were, to the echoes of the court and the embassies. Among European cities at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Prague was in serious danger of becoming a third-rate place, with little to offer.

  After the peace treaties had been signed in 1648, the Hapsburg emperor officially and by decree magnanimously forgave the Prague towns for their participation in the revolt of 1618 (they had, after all, fought valiantly against the Swedes), and to symbolize the final triumph of the Counter-Reformation and the Hapsburg dynasty, a Baroque column dedicated to the
Virgin Mary was erected on the Old Town Square. (It was destroyed by a patriotic mob in the fall of 1918, and Ladislav Šaloun’s massive monument to Hus and his followers now dominates the square without Catholic competition.) Emperors and kings visited when it was convenient, but they also continued to chip away at the privileges of Prague’s towns and the Bohemian Estates; in 1624 a Bohemian chancellery was established in Vienna, which in Prague was represented by a governor and later a gubernium; as time went on and Hapsburg centralism intensified, this Bohemian chancellery was combined with its Austrian counterpart, only to yield, in due course, to a central Viennese office that transmitted decrees to Prague—it was so unwieldy, of course, that it had to be separated into three branches, dealing with military, financial, and administrative affairs. As energetic reform proceeded, mostly for military reasons after the loss of Silesia to the Prussians, the Estates were asked to agree on a tax budget for ten years in advance to make military planning easier; in contrast to the Hungarian nobles, who proudly defended their privileges, the Bohemians yielded, grumbling but without much fuss. They even lost the right to initiate meetings without approval from Vienna, and Emperor Joseph II, who declined to be crowned king of Bohemia, cynically remarked that the Bohemian Estates merely performed “peasant dances on an operatic stage.”

  The invasion by the Saxons in 1631 and the Swedish attacks on Prague in 1639 and 1648 had demonstrated that its old town walls, going back to Charles IV, were now insufficient in the new warfare dominated by artillery, and over seventy-five years (1645-1720) a new state-of-theart fortification system was constructed beyond the fourteenth-century walls. Military experts and civil architects, among them again members of the Luragho and Bossi families, built a new network of walls, with forty bastions and eleven gates that opened in the morning and closed at night; high on the ancient Vyšehrad cliff, the old buildings were razed again (with the exception of three churches), and architects constructed a Baroque citadel and arsenal to take command of Prague’s entire range of defenses. Yet the new system was not invulnerable; mid-eighteenth-century Prague was twice occupied by enemies of the Hapsburgs and barely escaped a third occupation by the victory of the Austrians on a nearby battlefield.

  When Empress Maria Theresa assumed the reins of power in 1740, an alliance of her enemies was ready to divide her empire, and among other lands at stake was Silesia, for four hundred years a province of the Bohemian crown. Fierce battles were fought in Silesia, where Frederick and the Prussians triumphed; and in November 1741, their Bavarian, French, and Saxon allies moved on Prague, defended by a garrison of 5,000 men, including a student battalion. Sweeping down from the White Mountain once again, the French pretended that the incisive attack would concentrate on the Strahov Gate; the defenders promptly fell into this trap; the Bavarians and Saxons opened the Bruska Gate, marched into the city, and forced the Austrian commander in chief to surrender on November 26. Bavaria’s prince-elector, Karl Albrecht, had his moment of triumph when the majority of the Bohemian Estates, in their own act of revolt against Vienna’s centralization, paid homage to him, declaring him Charles III, king of Bohemia; the French occupation force of 10,000 (later 20,000) was besieged by an Austrian army appearing somewhat late on the scene. Meanwhile, the French army devastated Bevnov Monastery as thoroughly as any Hussite army might have done, and Praguers had to share the vicissitudes of a prolonged siege, typhoid fever, dysentery, and nightly alarms. Ultimately, the Austrians were successful on the western front, and the French marshal Charles Duke of Belle-Isle and his force abandoned the city almost secretly at dawn on January 2, 1743, leaving their sick and wounded in the town hospitals but taking a number of prominent hostages to ensure the safety of the French left behind.

  In the summer of 1744, Frederick of Prussia, who had entered into a new alliance with Bavaria against the Hapsburgs, marched his armies through northern Bohemia; the Prussian siege of Prague began on November 1, 1744. General Schwerin, famous for his exploits, commanded the Prussian force; the Austrian army was busy on the Rhine, and Prague was defended by 2,000 men, including the indefatigable students. Prussian artillery stationed on the hills wreaked much havoc; after two weeks of the bombardment the Prague commander signed a surrender, and King Frederick and his generals rode into the city. Frederick stayed but a single day (he was not impressed by its historical charms), and a small occupying force was put in place, commanded by Christoph von Einsiedel. (A later member of his family was a Wehrmacht general who, after the Battle of Stalingrad, worked closely with the Soviets against Hitler’s regime.) The town was pillaged by the Prussian soldiers, then had to pay high war contributions and deliver horses and food to them; the occupiers felt unsafe, possibly because they overrated Prague’s spirit of resistance. By the end of November, Austrians again fought Prussians on Bohemian fields, and Einsiedel had to leave Prague, planning his departure with Prussian meticulousness: before leaving he took the last cash from the town coffers. Following the French example, he thought of making a quiet exit through the Charles Gate, but the Austrian vanguard was close and Hungarian hussars suddenly turned on the departing Prussians in the street, with the Prague militia, emboldened by the regular army, joining in. In a moment without law and order, Prague’s mobs once again invaded the Jewish Town, plundered and killed, leaving thirteen dead and three hundred wounded. Prague mobs never lacked poisonous reasons for invading the Jewish Town: it was rumored that the Jews had a secret understanding with the Prussians, and Maria Theresa herself took note and sent a decree from Vienna to expel all Jews from Prague.

  Few Bohemians may have known that Prussia’s war against Austria, renewed for a third time in 1756, was but part of a world conflict that also involved Britain, Frederick’s friends, Russia, and France, which was now allied to Austria. Against all assumptions of international law, Frederick in a preemptive strike occupied neutral Saxony, whence he marched an army of 100,000 to Prague. The Prussians entrenched themselves in a wide angle around the city, but the adamant Austrians engaged the Prussians in heavy battle at Štrbohol, a village near Prague, in May 1757. Both armies suffered grievous losses, General Schwerin was killed, and the Austrians sought protection in Prague to organize and provide for the many wounded. The Prussians took Žižka’s Hill, of Hussite glory, but the Austrians stubbornly defended Letná Hill, strongly fortified. During May, both armies prepared for the final assault, the Prague commanding officer turned down a demand to surrender, and on Whitsuntide Prussian artillery began firing a shattering barrage to weaken the defenders; they continued to fire relentlessly for several days. On June 18, another Austrian army, commanded by General Gideon Ernst Laudon, victoriously fought a Prussian force at Kolin, not far from Prague to the northeast; the siege had to be abandoned, and Praguers had a chance to take care of the wounded and the sick (nine hundred houses had been destroyed). More than a hundred years later, in 1866, Prussian forces occupied Prague for a second time, and then the Wehrmacht came, unopposed, in March 1939.

  The Age of Reforms: Mother and Son

  Whether Empress Maria Theresa, the only queen of Bohemia who was willing and able to take her responsibilities seriously, was as popular in Prague as she was in the Austrian crown lands remains an open question, and it is easy to see that many of her Prague contemporaries had ample reason to feel rather ambivalent about her—nobles, Jews, and the nascent bourgeoisie, whether Czech- or German-speaking. Pride of family and person were essential to her; as true Magna Mater Austriaca, she had sixteen children (ten of whom survived), and honestly loved her husband, Francis Stephen of Lothringia, a noted ladies’ man and financial genius, working mostly for his own pocket. Later nationalists among the many societies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had few arguments to advance against her personally. The dynasty was her nation; she corresponded with her children in French; as for her German, she spoke it with the sophistication of a plebeian Vienna wet nurse, as a popular ditty of her time suggested, and wrote the language of Klopstock and Lessing quirkily and acc
ording to French syntactical rules (only Frederick of Prussia’s German was worse, but he was, after all, a French writer of note). The trouble was that she had reasons to like Hungarians more than Bohemians; when Frederick struck against her in December 1740, she presented herself, not yet twenty-four years old, to the gathering of the Hungarian Estates at Poszóny (Bratislava), in a first-rate public relations performance, as a hapless woman and unfortunate mother, with a few Magyar ribbons added. Enthusiastically, and in official Latin, they responded to her pleas and promised an army immediately. The Poszóny melodrama strongly differs from the events in Prague when it was occupied by her enemies only a month later: a majority of the Bohemian Estates paid homage to Karl Albrecht of Bavaria as their new king (he was not actually anointed but he received Duke Václav’s sword from the hand of the archbishop). After the occupation force was gone and Maria Theresa came to Prague and was legitimately crowned queen of Bohemia at St. Vitus Cathedral on May 12, 1743 (not as regina but as rex femina), she had considerable difficulties in forgiving the treacherous Estates, but she at least banished the archbishop.