To put this multicultural patchwork into historical context, we pick up the history of Bohemia with the fall of the great king Ottokar II and the rise of King Charles IV, who left humanity an indelible architectural and cultural legacy (that is still enjoyed by millions to this day), both in Prague and other parts of Bohemia, before returning to the gathering storm of ethnic nationalism and its consequences.
BOHEMIA’S GREATEST KINGS
Ottokar II presided over a revolution in agricultural production and land use. This coupled with the dramatic expansion of Bohemia’s territories enabled Ottokar to encourage the immigration of German farmers and merchants from other parts of the empire to make better use of the land, and to help establish new towns, all of which helped raise greater tax revenues. German miners and mining engineers played a key role in developing silver mining at Iglau (Jihlava) and Kuttenberg (Kutna Hora). German settlements in Prague in the neighbourhood of St Peter and around the Church of St Gallus date back to his reign. Despite the fact that his policies made him the richest and most powerful ruler in Central Europe, many Czech historians are critical of the encouragement he gave to Germans and Jews from other parts of the empire to settle in Bohemia and Moravia. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the crown lands of Bohemia, skilled farmers and labourers were in scarce supply. Nobles and kings in territories all over the empire competed with one another to entice farmers with particular skills and experience of arable farming to move to their territories with tempting offers of land. The same was true for skilled labourers in areas such as textiles, glass production or mining. The influx of German settlers was therefore far from a colonial conquest and more of an economic migration.(13)
The turning point in Ottokar’s reign came with the election of the Habsburg ruler Rudolf I as Holy Roman Emperor. The German princes had elected Rudolf precisely because they viewed Ottokar as having grown too powerful. Ottokar II refused to recognise the election or authority of Rudolf I as Holy Roman Emperor — an act of defiance which was to have dire consequences. The German princes and electors closed ranks, secured the Pope’s excommunication of Ottokar and imposed a Reichsacht (imperial ban) on him, which meant he lost the right to all his crown possessions. In an age where Christian faith and religious practice were paramount, being excommunicated was tantamount to proclaiming a death sentence on any ruler. The Bohemian nobility abandoned him. Ottokar eventually recanted and recognised Rudolf’s election but only to buy himself enough time to settle the conflict on the battlefield. He underestimated Rudolf, who allied himself with the Hungarians (who had been defeated by Ottokar in 1260). Then, with his Austrian forces, the German princes and the Hungarians, Rudolf destroyed Ottokar’s army at the Battles of Dürnkrut and Jedenspeigen in 1278. Ottokar was killed in combat and subsequently Rudolf I became the first Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia.
After Ottokar’s death, Bohemia went through a terrible period of foreign invasions, in which Czech barons played their part. They used the weakened power of the crown and foreign invasions to seize more land, power and property for themselves. In a similar way to the Scottish nobility in the time of William Wallace, they divided their loyalties depending on where their own best interests lay, questioning whether they should further the interests of an independent Bohemia, or strengthen their own power and wealth by playing a part on the greater stage of the empire. Whilst the Czech nobility pondered their options, the German community took action. Their wealth and power had grown considerably during this period, and increased further during the unstable rule of another of Ottokar’s successors: Henry of Carinthia, the King of Poland and Bohemia from 1307–10. Many of Prague’s German-speaking patricians married into the poorer Czech noble families. This increasingly led to the Germanisation of the nobility in Bohemia and Moravia. To reassert their influence over the kingdom, the Czech nobility fought to put a member of the ancient Czech Premsylid dynasty back on the throne. They persuaded King Henry to marry off his son, John of Luxemburg, to Princess Eliska (Elisabeth) of the Premsylid line.
While they succeeded in their matchmaking, their hopes were soon dashed when the young King Johnxl showed more interest in milking his new kingdom for all it was worth as opposed to re-establishing a strong Premsylid dynasty. The people lived in hope that John and Eliska’s son would prove a more promising heir. Originally christened Vaclav (Wenzel), Charles’s father, John I, and grandfather, Heinrich VII — King of the Germans and Holy Roman Emperor — were both of the western German House of Luxemburg. Charles owed his Czech roots to his mother Elisabeth’s Premsylid lineage. Elisabeth’s father was Wenceslas I, King of Bohemia and her mother was Judith of Habsburg. During his extensive period of education in France, Vaclav adopted the name Charles (Karl) and later became Charles IV, Count of Luxemburg, Margrave of Brandenburg, King of Bohemia, King of the Germans and Holy Roman Emperor; gaining these titles between July 1346–July 1349. Those familiar with Prague will know that Charles’s name remains synonymous with many of its most enduring monuments.
Charles made Prague the centre of the Holy Roman Empire and lost no time in making his mark on the empire itself. His reforms were amongst the most enduring of all the emperors of the early Middle Ages. He showed what a pragmatist and realist he was by granting the strongest rulers within the empire greater autonomy by establishing a quasi-federal system. The document confirming his reforms was stamped with such an impressive golden seal that the document was named after it, becoming known as ‘The Golden Bull’ of 1356; a document seen by some German historians as the first quasi-German ‘constitution’. The changes made by Charles recognised the fact that no emperor could rule the empire alone without the support of its most powerful princes. He also established a college of electors to elect the emperor in the same way each pope was elected by his cardinals. The electors were given total autonomy within their own kingdoms, and Charles freed them from their remaining financial obligations to the emperor. This also gave them greater power to raise taxes within their provinces. The Golden Bull also forbade the future division of an elector’s territory through inheritance by more than one heir. Therefore, neither the electors’ lands, nor their votes, could be subdivided in the future, securing the stability of the electoral process. The seven electors chosen were the Archbishops of Mainz, Cologne and Trier, as well as the King of Bohemia (the only elector allowed the privilege of terming himself ‘king’ of his personal dominions), the Duke of the Rhineland Palatinate, Lord of Saxony and Margrave of Brandenburg.
Charles IV’s House of Luxemburg had a long established rivalry with the House of Habsburg, whom he specifically excluded from the college of electors. The procedures, venues and ceremonies enshrined by The Golden Bull for the election and coronation of the Holy Roman Emperors lasted 450 years. Charles oversaw a great flowering of Bohemian culture that brought Europe’s best architects and builders to the region. The most famous of these was Peter Parler from Germany. He was given the royal prerogative to build a new chapel at Prague’s cathedral for Bohemia’s patron saint, St Wenceslas. Charles also commissioned the building of Karlstein castle, near Prague, and a residence at Tangermuende in Brandenburg, which remain lasting legacies to his patronage. The establishment of Prague’s new town (Novo Mesto) also saw the influx of more German traders and merchants. Prague soon overtook Cologne as the largest city north of the Alps.(14)
As King of Bohemia, Charles personally ruled over an area encompassing Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Upper and Lower Lusatia, Brandenburg and Luxemburg. Charles continued the exploitation of the Jews and alternated between policies of tolerance and persecution. In each case, he would benefit, either by extorting higher taxes from them, or by expropriating their property following pogroms against them. The empire defined its Jews as Camerknechte, which when roughly translated means ‘servants of the imperial chamber’. In practice this meant they were servants of the imperial finance office. They were legally defined as the ruler’s personal property, not people but things,
for the Emperor to use as he pleased. Charles benefited from pogroms in southern Germany, offering Prague as a safe haven. However, this did not prevent a massive pogrom in Prague eleven years after Charles’s death in 1389, which led to the murder of 3,000 Jews in the old town.(15) Charles IV remains a disputed figure. Czechs have claimed him as the Father of Bohemia for founding the first university in the empire, the Charles University in Prague, in 1348, and for wanting all the sons of the electors to learn Czech as well as German. German historians attribute him with the founding of the first German-speaking university in the establishment of the Charles University, and praise him for uniting the empire and all its dominions to an extent that had not been seen since the time of Otto the Great and Frederick Barbarossa.(16)
Charles had envisioned a bilingual multicultural empire with Bohemia at its heart, attracting the best and most talented artists, painters, builders, professors and sculptors from across Europe. Forty years after his death, however, that vision began to tear itself apart. The old enmities between the Luxemburg, Wittelsbach and Habsburg dynasties broke out again, battling for control of the empire. The Hussite rebellions marked the first major reverse of the influx of German settlers from other parts of the empire, and their prominence at the court and within the nobility. The Czech priest, philosopher and reformer Jan Hus was influenced by John Wycliffe’s bitingly critical writings against the Catholic Church, which Hus had ample opportunity to read in his job as a copyist. Wycliffe’s writings underscored disputes which ran throughout Europe about the power of the estates verses the crown, the freedom of religious practice and faith, equality between priests and lay people, and wider questions of equality before the law in general.(17) Wycliffe translated the four gospels of the New Testament into English, and associates completed his work making the Bible available in the English vernacular, with the first editions appearing between 1382–84. These copies soon spread across Europe, igniting debate at many theological schools and centres of learning, including the Charles University in Prague.
Records show that by 1419 virtually every church service in Prague was held in the Czech language with the Kelch (Hussite) communion. The largely (but by no means exclusively) Catholic German community and their bishops had been forced to flee and their property was expropriated when the Hussite movement advanced through the country.(18) Jan Hus had railed against the Vatican’s selling of indulgences, a cause that Martin Luther also took up a century later. The Vatican burned Hus at the stake for daring to question their right to merchandise religion. Four years later, Hus’s supporters, led by Jan Želivský, committed the first of Prague’s notorious ‘defenestrations’ on 30th July 1419 by storming the town hall. They proceeded to throw the fourteen Catholic municipal bureaucrats and the town mayor out of a 70-foot high window, where they landed on lances that had been positioned below. A bloody rebellion and uprising followed. Jan Zizka’s forces terrorised much of Bohemia with a ‘convert or die’ missionary zeal, which applied to Czech Catholics as much as it did to the Germans or Jews.(19) From that point on, Bohemia and Moravia became a bastion of Hussite Protestantism until the Battle of White Mountain in 1620.
Hus primarily condemned the Roman Church’s love of indulgences and the money it raised to fund the Vatican’s philanthropic and military ambitions. However, the origins of the Hussite rebellion ran deeper; beginning with a conflict between peasantry and feudal nobility, rooted in confessional conflict, this was a precursor to the coming reformation and religious wars that scarred Europe for the next two and a half centuries. Over time, the rebellion took on ethnic dimensions. Most Czechs supported the Hussite rebellion and the ideas of Jan Hus (who became known as a Czech folk hero), whilst the German-speaking communities largely supported the Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Emperor, as ‘Defender of the Faith’. In the nineteenth century, the ethnic nature of the rebellion gained even greater prominence, irrespective of the fact that Hus professed himself to ‘prefer reformed Germans to dyed-in-the-wool Czech Catholics.’(20) Historians often talk of a monumental rift between Czech and German communities occurring as early as 1409, somewhat prematurely. The German Hussites were certainly in the minority, but there was no shortage of German converts to Hussitism in Bohemia. The German Hussites from the Black Rose movement and their sympathisers carried the faith beyond Bohemia’s borders under the banner of ‘Waldensian fundamentalism’. There was no shortage of German martyrs both in and beyond Bohemia, who died for their faith.(21) Hus’s ideas of following Christ rather than the rituals, ceremonies and vagaries of the Roman Catholic Church would also find great resonance during the German Reformation.
From 1409–36, the Hussite revolution fought off five crusades from the west to remain a de facto independent republic within the confines of the Holy Roman Empire. Hussitism received formal recognition of its triumph within the Bohemian kingdom in 1436, with the agreements of Iglau and Basel. These led to large-scale expropriation of the property and lands of the Catholic Church, establishing a new class in power in Bohemia.xli
RETURN OF THE HABSBURGS
After another period of religious strife, internal dissent and foreign rule, in 1529 the Bohemian Estates elected a twenty-four-year-old Austrian, Ferdinand von Habsburg, to the throne. Born in Spain to an Austrian father and Spanish mother, he was the younger brother of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Although the Habsburgs had fleetingly held the throne of Bohemia before (during Rudolf I’s reign and again in 1306–07, 1437–39 and 1453–57), Ferdinand was the first in what was to become a long succession of Habsburgs to rule the kingdom of Bohemia. While he reaffirmed the Basel Agreements that had been negotiated between the Catholics and Hussites in 1436, giving them equal rights in Bohemia, in practice he began the process of trying to reinstate Catholicism throughout the kingdom.
Whenever the Turkish menace to the empire receded, as it did in 1545, Ferdinand sided with his father, Emperor Charles V, joining him in his war against the Protestant German princes and fighting any part of the empire where ‘heretics’ still held sway. A policy continued to a greater or lesser extent by his successors, which was to cost the empire dear.
By 1575, Bohemia was once again centre stage, with Prague positioned as the empire’s pre-eminent city and de facto capital during the reign of Rudolf II. Rudolf was the product of the Habsburg monarchy of his day; an excellent linguist, he spoke Spanish, German, French, Latin, Italian and a little Czech. He was also a pragmatist, believing in ‘procrastination diminishing the possibilities for open conflict’(23) and was also one of Bohemia’s greatest patrons of the arts, amassing many valuable artifacts in his Wunderkammer (Chamber of Wonders). He assembled many of Europe’s great painters, goldsmiths, scientists and alchemists at his ‘mystical’ court in Prague. This period was also one of the highest points of Jewish culture in the city’s history, with Rudolf’s reconfirmation of Jewish privileges.xlii However, Prague’s moment of glory as the cultural centre and capital of the Holy Roman Empire was short-lived. When Rudolf died in 1612, Matthias — the new Habsburg King of Bohemia — moved the court back to Vienna where it remained until the break-up of the Habsburg Empire after the First World War. Any pretence of the continued tolerance towards the special religious status of the Kingdom of Bohemia and the rights of its Estates ended with the death of Matthias in 1619. His successor, Emperor Ferdinand II vowed to return all his provinces to Catholicism. Shortly thereafter, further dynastic, feudal and confessional issues boiled over into a full-blown war at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620, where the Emperor’s most successful military commander, General Tilly, defeated the Bohemian Estates. Ferdinand’s victory was swiftly followed by the expropriation of the Bohemian Protestant Estates and the total revocation of the concessions that were made to the Hussites at Basel two centuries earlier. Subsequently, their land was handed over to Austrian and Spanish Habsburg Catholic loyalists.
Czech historians frequently regard 1620 as the final death of the Czech nobility, their protestant faith
and the nominal independence the kingdom had enjoyed since 1409. The Battle of White Mountain is regarded as a foreign occupation, another chapter in the ever-increasing Austrian-Germanisation of the lands of Bohemia and Moravia. Officially the Czech and German languages may have retained parity, but in practice, German was the lingua franca of both the Holy Roman Empire and the multiethnic lands of all Habsburg’s Austrian dominions. This ethnocentric view of history in the early 1600s is however yet another example of historians writing history with the benefit of hindsight and glossing over the more complex realities of the time. It was after all a German Bohemian nobleman, Graf Heinrich Matthias von Thurn, who led the revolt of the Bohemian nobility against the encroachment of the Habsburgs upon the long-standing liberties of the Bohemian crown lands. It was Graf von Thurn who organised the second defenestration of Prague in May 1618, when the Bohemian nobility broke into the royal quarters of the Prague castle and threw the Catholic Emperor’s governors out of the window, deposing (the Habsburg) Ferdinand II from the Bohemian and Moravian throne. An act which had consequences across the empire, setting a light under the tinderwood of numerous other Catholic/Protestant conflicts and the act which most historians denote as the starting point for the Thirty Years War, described in more detail in an earlier chapter. But the greatest irony ignored by those historians who have tried to paint the uprising as a pitched battle between a Protestant Czech nobility and a Catholic German Habsburg emperor was that the Bohemian and largely Czech nobility elected a German Protestant prince, Prince Friedrich of Pfalz, as their new king.
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