Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 158 – Prague – The New Rome? Karl IV’s great plans for his capital city, also episode 21 of Season 8 From the Interregnum to the Golden Bull.
“Karl, by the grace of God, King of the Romans, ever august, and King of Bohemia [ ]
We have turned over in careful contemplation, and have been diligently pondering how our hereditary kingdom of Bohemia may flourish in all its beauty, thrive in peace, and not fear the loss of its riches to its enemies, and how the general good and benefit of the said kingdom may prosper, how its’ governance may grow from good to better, and how it could plant a new seed for the faith in god.
To soundly provide for these things, neither sparing our labors nor expenses, we have decided to extend, expand, and newly delineate the city of Prague, recently elevated to metropolitan status at our insistance and request, situated in the midst of the kingdom and in a most fertile place, frequented by peoples from various regions and parts of the world, whose houses and buildings, inhabitants, and the multitude of people surrounding it, as well as the influx of people to it, which no one can count, especially because of the general study that we have decided to establish in the said city, cannot conveniently accommodate.”
So begins the charter that founded one of the Middle Ages most ambitious infrastructure projects, the creation of Prague’s New Town, the third city to be created near the ancient castles of the kings of Bohemia, making the combined city larger in surface area than Cologne, only surpassed by Constantinople and the eternal city. A new Rome was to rise on the shores of the Vitava River, a place adorned with churches and monasteries evoking the holiest places of Christianity and squares on such a monumental scale that reminds one more of the 19th century than the 14th. Prague still today attracts “people to it which no one can count”
This is what we will talk about today. Not just what he built, but why and how….
But before we start let me thank Dana J., Charisse P., James M., Eddie, Henrik R., Thomas H. and Margaret P. who keep this show advertising free by signing up as patrons on patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on historyofthegermans.com/support. If you want to join this gang of generous givers, go there and before you know it, you will find your name read out here too, on top of basking in the soft glow of your fellow listeners gratitude.
And with that – back to the show
Last week was a bit tough, but then the 14th century was a tough time to be alive. But despite all the horrors there were some delightful things happening at the same time. And one of these was the architecture created in that period. It is in the 14th century that the Hanseatic cities reached the peak of their political power, when the spires of churches and city monasteries in Lübeck, Hamburg, Wismar, Riga and Tallin rose to the sky. New cloth halls adorned Ypres, Krakow, Ghent and Brunswick. The celebrated city halls of Stralsund, Bremen and Muenster date back to this period as do the innumerable half-timbered houses you find all across the German lands that shape the idea of the romantic Germany for hundreds of thousands of tourists every year.
But the largest, the most ambitious construction project of the 14th century happened on the eastern edge of the empire. A project on a scale unprecedented since the days of ancient Rome. Prague was to rise from an important city to the largest city in the empire in the span of 2 years. Yes, 2 years or less was the timescale that Karl IV set for the city to be built in his own words “so properly constructed that the houses may be conveniently inhabited and lived in”.
Ah, and then there is the date. The foundation document for Prager Neustadt dates to March 8, 1347, just as the first grain shipments from Caffa enter the port of Messina in Sicily, bringing rats, flees and Yarsinia Pestis, leaving barely 2 years before the disease reaches Prague.
Now before we survey the greatest of Karl’s projects, we need to take a step back to see the broader strategy behind it.
The actual starting gun for the Make Prague Great project had sounded 3 years earlier, in 1344. It was then that Karl, at the time still only the crown prince convinced his friend, the pope Clement VI to raise the status of the bishopric of Prague to an archbishopric.
This does not sound much to modern ears. Has anyone noticed that pope Francis recently raised Las Vegas to an archbishopric? No, me neither. But in the Middle Ages, this was a seminal moment. The church was still by far the superior organisational structure in europe, much more complex and coherent than any state administration. And the boundaries of dioceses had a significant effect on the temporal political structure within it.
Long term listeners may remember episode 14 when we talked about Otto III’s trip to Gniesno in Poland. At that point, in the year 1000, Otto III raised Gniesno to become an archbishopric. From that point forward the Polish church was no longer subject to oversight by the archbishop of Mainz, which meant Poland’s rulers found it somewhat easier to withdraw from the imperial orbit. The same happened in Hungary where Esztergom was founded as an archbishopric in 1001.
Of the three monarchies on the eastern side of the empire only one, Bohemia, remained subject to the archbishopric of Mainz, and was the only one that remained within the political structure that became the Holy Roman Empire. Coincidence, me thinks not.
The creation of a Bohemian archbishopric may have been delayed unduly, but it was a key puzzle piece in the Karl’s creation of what he called “the Crown of Bohemia”, the constitutional construct that he hoped would cement his and his family’s rule of these lands for eternity.
More about that later. First we need a cathedral for the freshly minted archbishop, who also happened to be one of Karl’s closest advisors and confidants, Arnost of Pardubice. On November 21, 1344 work began on St. Vitus cathedral. This cathedral is unique in so many ways, the first of which is its location. I cannot think of any other cathedral that towers over a city, a solid half hour walk uphill from the main square. And that speaks to the role the archbishop of Prague was to assume in the political system of Bohemia.
The Bohemian church had been created by St. Wenceslaus way back in the 10th century. At the time the majority of Bohemians were pagans and it was the ruler’s efforts to convert the population that led to the Christianisation of the country. Hence the bishops were always extremely close to the dukes and later the kings of Bohemia. Their residence and their cathedral was within the precincts of the royal castle, not down in the town with the people. A very different setup to the way bishops operated in the empire, or even France and England. At some point Karl jokingly referred to the archbishop as his personal chaplain.
St. Vitus was hence as much royal chantry as it was the archepiscopal cathedral. To build it, Karl wanted the latest and greatest in cathedral fashion. Hence he appointed Matthias of Arras, a Frenchman who may have been working on some of the great cathedrals of Northern France, in Amiens or Beauvais and had most recently been involved in the construction of the papal palace in Avignon. Matthias was a competent man who designed a layout of the church along classic French lines putting emphasis of proportions and clear, mathematical composition of the whole. Matthias died in 1352 having finished only the easternmost part of the choir. His successors continued with his plan until the arrival of Peter Parler in 1356. Peter Parler was just 23 when he was given the commission to complete St. Vitus cathedral. Having been apprenticed to his father since his youth, he had worked at the church of the Holy Cross in his hometown of Schwäbisch Gmund. Aged 19 he sets off as a journeyman travelling to many of the great construction sites of Europe at the time, the cathedrals of Cologne, Paris, Strasburg and potentially even England. Upon his return he rejoins his father who had been given a huge project, the building of the Frauenkirche in Nurnberg that was to be erected over the ruins of the old synagogue, the destruction of which had triggered the massacres of the Jews in the city as we heard last week. Karl had been closely involved with the Frauenkirche he intended specifically to be used for key imperial ceremonies and events. And that is where he noticed Peter and called him to Prague.
Peter Parler brought a new style to not just St. Vitus cathedral but to many of Karl’s great projects. Peter Parler was both a sculptor and an architect. Once he gets involved in St. Vitus, the cathedral shifts away from the strict lines of Matthias of Arras to a new innovative style that gives it the almost organic qualities that would spread across europe as the late gothic style. This is best exemplified by the new type of vaults he created for the choir of St. Vitus. In a classic gothic church, the groin vaults have single diagonal rips from one pillar to the other. Parler doubled their number creating a set of crossing rips that not only improve structural integrity but also created a sort of net-like pattern. This and the balustrade that he added to the naves as a way to make the upper floors of the cathedral feel as if they were floating above the congregation as a vison of the heavenly Jerusalem were two key elements of the Parler Style. The Parler Style was rapidly adopted first across the empire in Landshut, Nurnberg, Vienna and then throughout the Hanseatic league from where it spread all over Poland, the Low countries and even as far as the cathedral of Seville that features both net vaults and a Parler balustrade.
Peter Parler and his sons and workshop would be leading many of Karl’s projects both in Bohemia as well as across the empire. They have shaped the way Prague looks today and also built St. Stephens in Vienna. They are a big deal.
Within St. Vitus cathedral there is a chapel that was to become the heart of Karl’s concept of the Bohemian crown, the chapel of St. Wenceslaus. This chapel features no just one of the most intricate of Parler Vaults but is also decorated with 1300 semi-precious stones and frescoes depicting the passion of Christ and the life of St. Wenceslaus.
It once held two immensely valuable objects, one of which is still there. The first was a reliquary of St. Wenceslaus in the form of a bust and the second, the crown of St. Wenceslaus. Now I cannot say whether the bones inside the reliquary were indeed those of St. Wenceslaus, but what we know for a fact is that the crown placed there had never been worn by the good king Wenceslaus. Not because he wasn’t a king, but because this crown had been made on Karl’s orders in 1344, the year of Prague’s elevation to an archbishopric.
During Karl’s reign this crown was kept in St. Wenceslaus chapel on the bust of its namesake for most of the year. That was a huge deviation from the normal procedure. Medieval crowns were often kept with the other regalia in a treasury, often a heavily fortified castle. They were the property of the ruler who could take them along for trips and use them as a means of representation whenever he wanted to. The crown of St. Wenceslaus only left the chapel on special occasions and for coronations. It wasn’t the crown of the king, but the crown of a saint the king would occasionally be allowed to borrow. That is actually still the case today. The crown is kept in a chamber next to the chapel locked by seven locks, the keys to which are held by seven dignitaries including the president and the archbishop of Prague and the original is only shown to the public on special occasions.
What was the point of commissioning an extremely expensive crown and then pretend it had been St. Wenceslaus crown all along so that it had to remain with the saints remains?
That brings us back to Karl’s idea on how to solidify his regime in Bohemia. As we talked about in the episode about Karl’s youth, the hold of the Luxemburgs on Bohemia was extremely fragile. Karl’s father spent most of his time outside the kingdom where he was extremely unpopular and had lost the power struggle with the barons. In his autobiography Karl makes a big song and dance about how much the Bohemians loved him, his ability to speak the language, his descent from the ancient Premyslid dynasty etc., etc., But even in the middle ages a spot of linguistics and an eminent mother cannot have been enough, in particular not in a kingdom whose barons and patricians held the reins of power and at least believed they could elect and depose their kings at will.
The more I read about Karl the more I get to admire his political instincts and pragmatism. Because rather than fighting the barons and patricians as his father had done, he tied them into his political structure. He created the crown of St. Wenceslaus as a symbol of the Bohemian Kingdom outside his own person. The crown of Bohemia became more than a physical object, but a symbol that personified the Bohemian lands, its customs and rights and privileges. And Karl poured everything into this concept. In his role as king of the romans he declared the lands of Silesia and some territories west of the Bohemian forest to be not just his personal fiefs, but inseparable parts of the crown of Bohemia. He declared that all the barons and lords were integral to the “universitas regni Bohemia”, of the commonwealth of the crown of Bohemia. And to further elevate the crown as a physical object, he enclosed in it a thorn from the Crown of Thorns. The pope declared the crown a sacred object that conveyed salvation to those who prayed before it.
By creating this object that held all the power in the kingdom, all he then had to do was to make sure that nobody else could take hold of it. And that was via the coronation ceremony. A ceremony he conveniently had designed himself. This involved the usual anointing, seating on the throne and lifting of the crown, but now by a Czech archbishop rather than a German one. But what made it special was that not all the songs were in Latin, nor were they in German, but in Czech. Few things could reassure the Czech-speaking population under pressure from the influx of German speakers since the early 13th century than their king singing the Kyrie Elision in their language.
The crown of Bohemia now had a great resting place in the St. Vitus cathedral that was rising up. But that wasn’t enough splendour for Karl. If he wanted to elevate Bohemia to a kingdom on par with the great monarchies of France and England, he needed a capital. And since he was not just the king of Bohemia but also the elected king of the Romans and hence future emperor, this capital needed to be suitable for such an august monarch.
Hence we find ourselves in March 1347 in a field outside the walls of Prague’s Old Town watching Karl IV laying the first stone in the greatest plan for a city extension of the entire middle Ages. When Charles first arrived in Prague in the 1330s the city comprised about 2.5 square kilometres of build-up space and had roughly 15,000 inhabitants. The city was actually two cities and two royal castles. There was the Mala Strana, the Little Side or Lesser Town in English which had risen up below Prague castle. On the opposite side of the Vitava sat the Old Town. And downriver on the Vitava sat the Vhysegrad, the residence of the early medieval Bohemian rulers.
As we have seen in many other places, most extremely in Gdansk, each of these entities were independent cities with their own councils, markets and city walls.
The New Town that Karl ordered to be built was hence given its own city rights and privileges. In the foundation charter he was generous in his awards, granting the new place the same rights the Old Town had received. The new Town was to get its own city council, its aldermen and city defences. However, as the Old town had lost a lot of its privileges during the reign of King John the Blind, these rights were less extensive than they would be for an imperial or a free city in the empire. He made up for the lack of civil rights by providing generous tax incentives, more than enough to fill the place.
And what a place it was. The Prague New Town comprised 7.5 square kilometres, three times the Old Town and Little Side combined. This new settlement surrounded the Old Town on all three sides, stretching from the old castle of Vhysegrad to the Vitava upriver from the old town. The wall built to protect the settlement was 3.5 km long, 6 to 10 meters high and took less than two years to build. Karl had already bought a lot of plots inside this wall before construction began and now sold these under the condition that the purchaser would begin construction within one month and completes the work within 18 months. With the New Town the population of Prague rose to 40,000 making it the largest city in the German lands alongside Cologne. In terms of surface area it became the third largest after Rome and Constantinople.
But what took peoples breath away both then and today was the monumentality of its market squares. The area today called St. Wenceslaus square that today looks like a classic 19th century avenue built to represent the glory of the nation was then called the Horse market. And it was already 60 metres wide and 750m long, far larger than anything anyone had seen before. Well except for Charles Square which at 80,550 square metres is still one of the largest city squares in the world and definitely the largest medieval square in Europe.
This square-driven megalomania had a clear message. At a time when space inside walled cities was at huge premium and city streets were narrow and bridges built up with houses, a city square large enough to hold 12 simultaneous football matches screamed look at how large a defensive wall I can build. Or more precisely how large a defensive wall the crown of Bohemia can build.
Talking about open spaces, in 1357 construction began on the one bit of Carolinian infrastructure ever visitor to Prague had been on, the Charles Bridge. Despite the tourists and intrusive sellers of pointless titbits and drunk teenagers, this remains my favourite bridge in the world. Two gates at each end, a beautiful view of both sides of the city and its elegant construction tells again of the great skill of Peter Parler and his workshop. And the fact that this bridge had no houses on it when London and Paris only had bridges that looked like the Ponte Vecchio in Florence is just another sign of the immensity of Karl’s project.
The Neustadt filled up rapidly in part with overspill from the Old Town and the Little Side where space had been at a premium. There had also already been some suburbs in what would later become the New Town. But mostly these were new arrivals.
Many were Jewish. As Charles said in his foundation document quote “Considering the weakness of the Jewish people, we take under our special protection all and each Jew, both male and female, sons and daughters, and all their goods, who will come to inhabit the said New City, [ ] commanding all and each justice of the kingdom, especially of our city of Prague, modern and future, to protect and defend the Jews from all disturbance, molestation, and injury.” That is a bit rich given Karl’s involvement in the persecution of the Jews that led to them fleeing east in the first place.
He also invited settlers from the West and East to come to Prague and many did. That is in itself a tremendous achievement given the Plague had just wiped out roughly a third of Europe’s population leaving lots of opportunities for ambitious and mobile men and women to make their fortunes nearer to home.
Another major draw of Prague was that it gradually became a bit of a holy place. Karl had a habit of collecting relics. Maybe not a habit, more of an obsession. He became famous for demanding to cut of bits and pieces of saints whenever he came to visit a monastery or pilgrimage church. Sometimes he paid for the privilege, sometimes he just took the bones. In St. Gall he had the head of one of its saintly abbots sawn off as the holy body refused to separate from its uppermost section. Foreign dignitaries quickly realised that the way to the king of Bohemia’s heart was through dusty bones and holy pieces of cloth. One of those claimed to be the tablecloth used at the Last Supper.
But whilst this all sounds a bit weird, it had a certain logic to it. Relics did provide relief from time spent in purgatory if the sinner prayed next to them. The church provided elaborate tables laying out how many years one gets off for how many Ave Marias in front of which saint’s remains. So bringing a large number of relics to Prague was quite the same as ambitious mayors courting art collectors to place their works into museums they promise to build for them.
Whilst Karl kept many of the relics for himself, he donated even more to various churches on his demesne, in particular in the New Town of Prague. Pilgrims would come to pray in these churches boosting the business of inns and traders of all kinds. Others would decide to live in Prague to be closer to these most effective items of salvation. Charles even obtained a papal charter that gave particular absolution for pilgrims who came to see the great relics contained in the Bohemian crown, the Holy Lance and other holy objects that were paraded through the streets of Prague on certain holy days.
And finally there is another draw, the very first University founded east of the Rhine river. This was again one of Karl’s very first decisions after becoming King of Bohemia, to found a university he named after himself in his typical modesty. As so often in his early years it was his good relationship with Pope Clement VI that made that possible. Clement granted a bull establishing a place of general studies in January 1347. Later historians with an anti-papal bent would insist that the university was founded through a Bohemian royal golden bull in 1348.
In any event, the university began operating around that time, modelled on the University of Paris offering all four faculties, including theology. Students came from the empire and from Bohemia, Moravia, Poland, Hungary and even Scandinavia. But it differed in some significant way from the universities as they existed to date. The university of Prague was founded and maintained by the king of Bohemia. Previous universities had been created by the scholars and teachers who were paid directly by the students. Lecturers in Prague were housed in colleges as had been the case in Oxford and Cambridge, but in Prague the lecturers were paid by the university and hence by the state, a system that would take hold across most of central Europe.
Whilst most of the things we discussed today relate to Karl’s role as king of Bohemia, the University was something different. This foundation was quite explicitly meant to be an institution open to everyone in northern europe, not just Czech speakers. In fact in the early days of the university less than a quarter of students were Czech speaking. That the university was hugely attractive to non-Czechs should not be surprising since for anyone in the empire as well as in Poland and Hungary, Prague was a whole lot closer than Paris, Bologna or Oxford. This issue of language and who the university was for will become an important topic further down the line, so just keep that in mind. But for now what we have is a truly international institution which raised the profile of Prague, the crown of Bohemia and its bearer even further.
When we put it all together, the whole thing begins to make sense. What Karl is attempting here is a redefinition of the Kingdom of Bohemia. A kingdom increasingly detached from the empire, its most senior bishop no longer reporting to a archbishop over in the German lands, a capital massively enlarged with squares on a scale that takes people’s breath away, a centre for pilgrims who find it a new Jerusalem or at least a new Rome and throning above all the cathedral of St. Vitus and within it the crown of St. Wenceslaus the manifestation of this commonwealth.
By 1355 it is clear to see for everyone that Bohemia is flourishing under its new ruler and that it had come together as a kingdom, ruler, nobles, patricians, scholars and artisans all united in one purpose.
And that is when Karl decides that it was time to harvest what he had sowed. This new entity, the crown of Bohemia needed a constitution. Surely he did not use the word constitution in the way we would use it today but he meant something quite similar, a written document that set out explicitly who was to decide what, which rights one had against the state and what the state could to those who failed to obey.
This document he called the Majestas Carolina, I am not sure I can translate that. It opened up with several sections on what to do with heretics, which implies the anti-clerical trends had been boosted by the recent plague. The next section is about preserving the resources of the crown, effectively prohibiting the sale and mortgaging of certain royal estates and cities – so far so uncontroversial by 14th century standards.
What raised eyebrows were the rules about the Landfrieden, the common peace. Bringing peace and protecting travellers had been demanded of rulers since time immemorial but had still failed to materialise. Emperors, kings, dukes, counts and cities across medieval Europe tried and tried to rein in on banditry and feuds, sometime by force, sometime through voluntary agreement, but usually with limited success.
The Majestas Carolina took a straightforward approach. Karl simply banned mot just feuds and banditry it any form of harm done Toni’s subjects. An administrative structure comprised of bureaucrats and lawyers was to enforce this peace and adjudicate the conflicts underlying the feuds. As for the nobility, they were to be co-opted into the royal apparatus, serving the crown of Bohemia by providing advice in the council and military support in war. All power was therefore concentrated in the crown of Bohemia, any rival structure such as voluntary agreements or alliances amongst the barons and/or cities were explicitly prohibited.
That all sounds eminently sensible. Almost word for word exactly as sensible as the Constitutions of Melfi issued more than a hundred years earlier by Frederick II for his kingdom of Sicily. And like the Constitutions of Melfi, it ran into opposition from the barons. For them the Majestas Carolina would have brought an unacceptable loss of power. No longer were they the sole judges in their land. And even worse, once the law was written down, they could no longer make it up as they went along. And let’s not forget, feuds and banditry had become a major source of income for the knights whose revenues from agricultural activity had dried up, now that they had to pay their few remaining peasants more money.
The Majestas Carolina, as sensible a lawbook it was, got shot down by the barons. When Karl called a general assembly in 1355 to pass this shiny capstone of the Bohemian reforms, he faced a hostile crowd. Pragmatic as he was, instead of trying to push and causing a civil war, he just came back to the barons one morning and said that a terrible accident had befallen his project. The one and only copy that some barons had already signed had accidentally fallen into the fire and had burned down. Without the book I am afraid, nobody can sign it. I am sorry to disappoint you all who wanted to commit to the project. It must have been a sign of god that this was not the way forward. So all stays as was. Thanks everyone for coming. See you next year.
And that is what I will say now too, see you next week when we look at Karl’s policy beyond Bohemia, namely his approach to the empire, which may include his second, more successful attempt at passing a constitution. I hope you will tune in again.
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