Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City (18 page)

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Authors: Peter Demetz

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Since 973, Prague’s bishops had been subordinated to the archbishopric of Mainz, in Germany, and in the spring of 1343 Charles went to the pope in Avignon together with his father to negotiate a possible change, well aware that the kingdom of Bohemia was the last in Central Europe without its own archbishop; he also assumed that a more powerful church organization would strengthen his hand against pressure from the barons. The political circumstances were favorable; the incumbent archbishop of Mainz was a partisan of the excommunicated emperor Ludwig of Bavaria, who had refused to acknowledge the Avignon Curia. On April 30, 1344, the pope issued a bull in which he made the new Prague archbishop independent of Mainz and directly subservient to the Curia, and in some detail suggested the reasons for his decision, among them the geographical distances involved, the days of travel, the difference of languages, and the increasing number of Christians and churches in Bohemia. On the same day, Bishop Arnestus (Arnošt) of Pardubice was appointed archbishop of Prague, and when Charles and King John returned, he was ceremoniously invested with the symbols of his new office on November 21; King John and his son together laid the foundation stone of the new cathedral that was to celebrate the independence of Prague. About the same time, the Prague burgrave, possibly following Charles’s wishes, incorporated the houses grouped near the castle around its own rink, or square, and the parish church of St. Benedict into the little township of Hrad
any. Now its resident nobles, clergymen, craftsmen, and working people were directly dependent on the court.
After Bo
ivoj’s chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary, the Romanesque basilica, and Duke Václav’s rotunda, the new cathedral was the fourth church on Hrad
any Hill to attest, by the will of the ruler, to the strength of the Christian tradition in Bohemia. The chief architect of the cathedral was Matthias of Arras, in northern France, who when he arrived in Prague decided on a conservative, if not a little antiquated, structure of High Gothic perfection. It was a project on a grand scale: Matthias, and the men of his construction lodge, together, possibly, with the occasional assistance of his compatriot Jean Deschamps, worked for eight years and completed before Matthias died in 1352 the eastern part
of the ambit, eight chapels, with the appropriate supports outside, many pillars of the main nave, and a wall rising to the triforium—all in a linear and somewhat abstract style that Charles may have admired when he lived in France.
In the mid-1350s, Charles appointed as his new architect Peter Parler, born in Cologne, where his father had been among the builders of the cathedral, and this was a first-rate choice. Of the 180 men whom Peter Parler employed in his Prague lodge of builders, twenty-five were Czechs and a few others came from Flanders, Poland, and Hungary; though Parler (the name suggests that he had been a speaker of a lodge, or chief apprentice) may have been a complicated character, involved in a few shady deals and dubious marriages, he was an innovative artist and craftsman of lively imagination, and his clan of sons, nephews, brothers, and grandsons continued to build in his “beautiful style,” as it was called in Prague and all over Central Europe even long after he had died in 1399.
Peter Parler did not continue the academic and recurrent patterns of the older design but worked with flying ribs, pendant keystones, and innovative net vaults, derived, as some experts believe, from English cathedrals. He was not averse to returning to earlier elements of Cistercian-Burgundian Gothic style or even to an occasional Romanesque quotation, consonant with the king’s historical interests. In his commitment to sparse linearity, Matthias had suppressed ornamentation, but Parler and his gifted collaborators created, on consoles and gargoyles, many grotesque figures and masks, among them Socrates, or the devil violently tearing Judas Iscariot’s soul from his mouth, and worked with painters and sculptors (Parler was a master sculptor himself). Many historians agree that Charles probably had a word to say about the construction of the new chapel in honor of Duke Václav, protecting the remains of Bohemia’s patron saint. It was to be a “church within the church,” and its square shape, radically at odds with the assumptions of the surrounding space, and its fine encrustations of gold and precious stones, which related to earlier Venetian and Byzantine art, expressed, on their own mystical terms, the vision of a “New Jerusalem,” as ecstatically described in Revelation 21: 16—19: “foursquare, its length as large as the breadth … the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass. And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all manners of precious stones.” Similar ideas in Charles’s mind possibly determined the location of the tombs of past rulers and queens; the portrait busts of Charles, his four wives, his ecclesiastical friends, and the artisans on the lower triforium; and the images of Christ (exactly above the bust of Charles), Mary, and the patron saints on
the highest level. Down in the earth, the past; somewhat higher, the presence of the king and his court; and up on high, the realm of eternity.
In building the castle of Karlštejn, southwest of Prague on a steep hill close to the Berounka River, the emperor had all the authority to insist on his personal preferences in architecture and the arts. It is not known who was in charge of construction, which took place in 1348—67, but it was evidently an architect well aware of French and Italian practices, and the structure and interior of the castle may have been closer to the emperor’s curiously mixed, conservatively inclined tastes than any other of his many castles and fortresses; even the residence he built in Brandenburg in the last years of his life was but a pale reflection of the Bohemian exemplar. German and Czech historians have argued whether he wanted his own Montsalvach of the Holy Grail, or a sturdy fortress to protect the imperial and royal crown jewels that were symbolic of his power, or both. Strategically of little importance (though long besieged by the Hussites in a later epoch), austere and strangely impressive, the castle rises dramatically, especially when seen from the Berlin—Prague express train winding its way through the meager forests. Its clean walls and thick towers ascend in virtual terraces of meaning, from the terrestrial (the halls of the staff) to the space of political power (the king’s reception rooms on the second level) and, ultimately, on the highest stratum of the highest tower, the chapel of the Holy Cross, again encrusted with gold and precious stones, a mystical Jerusalem of prayer and meditation. There were other chapels, among them Charles’s small private oratory, later called St. Catherine’s Chapel. Charles employed some of the most important jewelers and painters of his time, local and foreign, among them Tommaso da Modena and Master Theodorik (later much admired by the German romantic writer Friedrich Schlegel), an early expressionist and chief of the Prague guild of artists, to create frescoes and panels, showing the ancestors of the dynasty, beginning with Noah, and the heavens rich with angels, saints, and patrons. The Gothic art of the west and the iconic traditions of the east, possibly transmitted from Venice and Dalmatia, live here in magnificent unison; as in the St. Wenceslas Chapel in the cathedral, the idea of political power and the meditation of transcendence, whence all power comes, are one.
Young Charles did not reveal much of his plans for Prague as long as his
been crowned Roman king and king of Bohemia, in that order and in record time, he began to issue in quick sequence the first documents announcing the great changes to come. He acted almost like a newly elected American president who, as soon as he arrives in the White House, wants to convince the electorate that he means business. Matthias of Arras had begun on the cathedral two years before King John’s death, but then, between April 1347 and April 1348, Charles initiated the construction of Karlštejn Castle, founded a vast New Town, and established Prague University, not to speak of legislative projects and the reorganization of the clergy undertaken by his loyal archbishop. On April 3, 1347, he signed a document at K
ivoklát Castle saying that “after mature consideration” and “bowing to the advice and the will of the burgomaster, the town council, and the entire community,” he planned to build a New Town adjacent to the Old Town to increase “their honor, freedom, well-being, joy and protect them against all violent conflict.” On March 8, 1348, in an exquisitely formulated royal letter he defined the fundamental intentions of the project and the procedures to be followed. Among the foremost worries that burdened his soul, he declared, was the great and essential question how to make certain that Bohemia, his hereditary kingdom, would flourish beautifully in every respect (
ex omni pulchritudine vireat
), constantly enjoy ample peace, increase its riches, and be secure against all attacks by enemies. People who moved into the space of the New Town, an additional ordinance asserted, would enjoy freedom from taxation for twelve years, provided that they finished their houses eighteen months after the building start, and used materials resistant to fire. Christians as well as Jews, given special protection by the king, were invited to come and to settle. The Christians came, mostly artisans from the Old Town, but the Jews, who may have heard the brutal stories of how Charles had handled Jewish property in pogrom-ridden Germany, preferred to stay together in the old Jewish Community close to the river, as before.
Charles had perhaps witnessed the rights and wrongs of urban planning when in Avignon, a small town that haphazardly altered itself to house the pope, cardinals, and the staff of the Curia (not everybody could afford rooms in Avignon and many people lived in the nearby village of Villeneuve-lez-Avignon or at Carpentras, as for instance Petrarch’s mother), and his Prague project had purpose and amplitude, but the truth is that it was never completely finished during his lifetime. The new space, defined as lying outside the walls of the Old Town, comprised more than three times the space of the Old Town. Great care was taken
to integrate all the hamlets and villages there, including Podskali and Zderaz, as well as the
extra muros
parts of Po
í
and the Újezd of St. Martin, including the “Jewish Garden,” Prague’s oldest cemetery, and a few Jewish houses nearby. Charles was careful to acquire the necessary real estate by legal measures from the Order of the Knights of the Cross with the Red Star and, in exchange for their compliance, granted important tax reductions to the order and awarded the Prague knights the patronage of the new parish churches to be built. The new town wall, with ramparts and moats, extended for three and a half kilometers from the Boti
brook and the Vyšehrad, which formed an element of the new fortification system, in a wide curve north of the Vltava River. The entrance was protected and regulated through a heavily guarded tower and three gates, some of which were strongly fortified too. The entire fortification system was built within two years (1348-50), and Vilém Lorenc, a Czech historian of architecture, has calculated that two hundred masons, three hundred workingmen on the spot, and one hundred thirty in the quarries were needed to do the job, with one hundred carts going back and forth to deliver stone, sand, and water. When the walls were finished, many workingmen were suddenly unemployed, and the ingenious king hired them for further public-works projects, building another wall, this one called the Wall of Hunger, reaching down from Strahov via the Pet
ín Hill to the river, or happily employing them in the cultivation of Prague’s vineyards, which he particularly favored.
New monasteries, parish churches, and markets specializing in particular commodities were to constitute the cores around which wide streets and new housing were planned; the first houses went up on the corner of Wenceslas Square and Jind
išská Street, where people today busily shop at the German Quelle department store. A new Carmelite monastery, with its church of St. Mary of the Snows (never finished in its original grand design) and a Benedictine monastery to house Dalmatian monks were started even before the king laid the foundation stone of the fortifications. To the north of the new space the parish church of St. Henry, and to the south that of St. Stephen, were to be located, and Charles took great pride in building the Karlov, a church dedicated to the memory of Charlemagne, to accentuate the continuity of imperial power. The many markets are still fundamental to Prague topography even after six hundred years: the horse market, now Wenceslas Square; the cattle market, now Charles Square, where they also sold fish, wheat, charcoal, and little articles made of wood; on Je
ná Street, close to the fortified gate, where pigs were for sale; and, even
closer to the river, at Podskalf, long the home of proud ferrymen and fishermen, where driftwood from the river was offered for kitchen and heating purposes, virtually a Podskalí monopoly.
In renovating or rebuilding the Vyšehrad to be part of the New Town, Charles demonstrated his piety as well as his ideology of power in showing his veneration for the P
emyslid past and expecting that his successors would follow his example: in his Order of Coronation Procedures he prescribed that any Bohemian king to be crowned had to make a pilgrimage to the Vyšehrad, where P
emysl’s rustic bark shoes and his peasant pouch were preserved, and ostentatiously went on the pilgrimage himself. When Charles began his rule, the fortified Vyšehrad was mostly fallen in desuetude, the former royal palace uninhabitable, its chapel of St. John desolate. (In a gesture of unusual generosity King John donated its ruins to the dean of the chapter to be used as building material, in case they were needed.) Charles decided that the Vyšehrad should be brought to life again; he constructed a new protective wall with fifteen towers, built a new royal palace (later destroyed by the Hussites), and restored the cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul, two naves and a side chapel. Not much of that old glory has survived.

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