Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City (19 page)

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Authors: Peter Demetz

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The idea of uniting the Old and New Towns to constitute a strong community, well protected and important in international commerce, may have been on the king’s mind for a long time, but not until 1367 did he give the order that the fortifications dividing the two towns be destroyed (only a few stretches were) and
one
town be established. It was a useful wish; even after unification, the two towns, different in social structure and distribution of languages, competed fiercely with each other, and after ten years, Charles, who never wanted to waste energy on the irritatingly impossible, ordered the old division to be restored.
It is hard to believe that undertaking to build a new stone bridge across the river, begun in the year of unification, was not part of his original vision of imperial Prague, but the project took a long time, and the bridge was not finished until the turn of the century, many years after his death. Continuities are marked; the old stone bridge (1158—72), named after Queen Judith, the Thuringian wife of King Vladislav II, was damaged beyond repair by ice in early February 1342, and for a while a provisional wooden arrangement had had to serve; the Knights of the Cross with the Red Star, in whose care the bridge was given, collected a fee at the bridge entrances to be used toward the new design. (The pillars of the old bridge can be still seen under the water and in the cellars of a
few houses of the Minor Town.) Peter Parler with the occasional assistance of Jan Otlin, a master mason and town councillor of the Minor Town, resolved to build a massive construction much higher than the old bridge and somewhat south of it. The new bridge rested on sixteen pillars without any ornamentation, which was reserved for the bridge towers; there are historians who believe that, ultimately, its most ancient prototype was the bridge built by the Roman legions across the Moselle River at Trier, where, in Charles’s time, his favorite great-uncle Balduin, the archbishop, resided; others assume that it was constructed in imitation of the bridge in Regensburg. Visitors to Prague are not always aware that the rich Baroque statuary was installed on the bridge centuries later, and that it was long called simply the Prague Bridge; it was renamed Charles Bridge only in 1870.
The modern demography of Prague in the second half of the fourteenth century rests on ingenious calculations, and a certain patriotism believing that bigger was better is not always absent. The Caroline metropolis consisted of either four or five administrative entities or towns, depending on the method of counting: the Old Town, topographically including the Jewish Town, administered by its own council of elders; the New Town, including the royal Vyšehrad; the Minor or Lesser Town, which did not have equal legal status with the Old and New Towns; and, probably after the mid-1340s, the small Hrad
any township near the castle. Estimates vary between V. V. Tomek’s total of 100,000 inhabitants and František Graus’s recent and more modest 30,000—more than respectable if compared with Frankfurt, Nuremberg, or the somewhat smaller Zurich, though greatly overshadowed by Milan (62,000), Paris (80,000), and Venice the
Serenissima
(90,000 by 1338).
It would be too simple to say that in Caroline Prague the Germans were powerful and rich and the Czechs powerless and poor. It is more probable that more people among the Germans, approximately one-third of the population, were rich and powerful than among Czech speakers. In the Old Town, at any rate, the German patricians held on to power; in the New Town, peopled by a more mobile group and especially by many craftsmen, Czech began to predominate; in the Minor Town, German colonization was progressively balanced by a return of Czechs who were expelled by King P
emysl Otakar; and the small township of Hrad
any had, for all practical reasons, a majority of Czech speakers, not to mention the villages and hamlets beyond the walls, constituting the heartland of Czech Bohemia. Inevitably, questions of language were particularly acute in the court and in legal proceedings, especially in the Old Town; though
later chronicles and attentive observers, among them Jan Hus, insisted that King Charles himself had commanded the Old Town councillors to learn Czech so that Czechs could use their mother tongue in court and articulate their statements (
aby
esky mluvili a žalovali
), a royal document to that effect and signed by the king has never been found, and at least one recent Czech historian has suggested that Jan Hus may have had in mind the temporary situation after the unification of the Old and New Towns, when more Czechs appeared among the members of the town council, previously restricted to German patricians. The first urban legal document in Czech dates from December 12, 1370.
The early plans for the New Town revealed that Charles wanted to establish a university; he spoke of his expectation that a new institution would attract so many students and teachers to the Old Town that a new area to accommodate these people was needed. It was not a new idea in Prague; among the P
emyslids, Václav II had thought about it before the turn of the century, but the Czech nobility, fearing a diminution of its power by clergy, lawyers, and written documents, had blocked his plans. Of the ten institutions of higher learning which the king and Emperor Charles privileged, Prague’s was first and foremost in Central European importance, though Czech and German historians have recently reminded us that Charles was untiring in his efforts to further higher learning not only in Bohemia but also in southern France and northern Italy, where he privileged, among others, the universities of Cividale (1353) and, above all, his beloved Lucca (1369).
The Prague university was authorized on January 26, 1347, by a special bull issued by Charles’s friend and teacher Pope Clement VI, who may have wanted to counteract the rebellious Franciscan theologians gathering in Munich around William of Ockham and gave permission to establish a community of students and scholars in Prague, allowing that a theological faculty be established too. Charles issued his own decrees, the first in Prague on April 7, 1348, establishing a
studium
generale
offering material security to students and teachers (financed by a special tax on the clergy) and protecting educational travel from and to Prague. In another document of June 14, signed at Eisenach, in Thuringia, he, more as Roman king than as Bohemian ruler, explained that he was bound by his high office to care for all subjects in his realm yet, in founding a university
in Prague, was prompted by his particular preference for his native Bohemia. Later fierce disputes about whether he founded the university for Germans or Czechs have not taken into account that Clement VI and Charles himself did not think in these nineteenth- or twentieth-century nationalist terms; the pope had asserted that the university, a clerical institution to be directed by the archbishop of Prague, was to serve the inhabitants of Bohemia and its neighboring countries, and the king was much concerned that his loyal Bohemians,
fideles nostri regnicole,
of whatever language, “who continue to thirst for scholarship, should not be forced to go begging around but should find the tables of plenty ready” in his realm. St. Václav, the patron saint of Bohemia, was to be the patron of the university, and its official seal showed the saint accepting the university charter from the king, humbly kneeling before him.
The university of Prague was to follow the grand examples of Paris and Bologna, both known to Charles, but the royal document of April 1348 revealed in its syntax and imagery that the king’s French secretary had made excellent use of the decrees issued by Emperor Frederick II when establishing the universities of Naples and Salerno. The new professors were all loyal to church and Curia; in many cases, they were teachers in the local Dominican and Augustinian monasteries, renowned for scholarship and piety, and scholars of international experience and repute. Among the early appointees were the Augustinian Mikuláš of Louny and John of Dambach, a Dominican of proven loyalty to the pope and yet personally close to the mystics Meister Eckhart and Johannes Tauler; the theologian Jan Moravec, who had studied at Paris and Oxford; the Franciscan Vojt
ch of Bluda, certainly of noble and Czech origin, who taught biblical studies; and, among the star appointments, Heinrich Totting of Oyta from Erfurt, who, unfortunately, left soon for Vienna. There were equally remarkable appointments in other fields—e.g., the expert on canon law Buonsignore de Buonsignori from Bologna, or in medicine the Italian Balthasar de Marcellinis. These scholars and scientists were an eminent group, but the initial appointments also show that King Charles, open to intelligence but essentially conservative, and Archbishop Arnestus carefully avoided theologically incorrect choices; they did not dare to consider the colorful bird or the occasional dissident in the cleric’s garb. It is a pity that Charles never considered William of Ockham, whose polemic treatise had called him the pope’s “errand boy,” or, for the faculty of liberal arts, the Roman tribune and archaeologist Cola di Rienzo (instead of imprisoning him), or Petrarch, who would have loved to come as visiting professor with a radically reduced
teaching load. Another first-rate candidate would have been the poet Guillaume de Machaut, who also happened to be the most important musician of the age and had served the king’s father long and loyally.
In the beginning, lectures and lessons were offered in monasteries and private homes, the more important ceremonies being held at the archbishop’s residence or the cathedral, and only in 1360 did Arnestus issue a set of regulations more firmly defining an administrative structure. As in other medieval universities, students and teachers were all organized into four “nations,” not according to language but according to the regions of origin along the direction, as it were, of a compass: students and masters all belonged to the Bohemian, Saxon, Polish, or Bavarian “nation.”
In 1366, the king established a college for twelve masters of the liberal arts to reside and work together in a house in the Old Town (originally belonging to a well-to-do Jewish merchant named Lazarus, from whom Charles had repeatedly borrowed money). The Carolinum, the oldest university building still functioning today, was originally the stately home of Johannes Rotlöw, master of the mint, and was given to the university by Charles’s son in 1383; it was combined with other buildings close to the parish church of St. Gallus to form the university’s historical core. In spite of internal tensions (the lawyers broke away in 1372 to create their own institution), the 1370s and 1380s were a lively and productive time for the two hundred docents of different ranks and two thousand students (in the Faculty of Arts). By 1384 the first conflict erupted openly; the Bavarian, Polish, and Saxon “nations” wanted to see their importance reflected in the number of college appointments, and some masters staged their first exodus to Heidelberg and Cologne a few years later, anticipating the momentous and revolutionary events that would transform the university and Prague in only a few decades. King Charles’s universalist concept of higher learning was not to survive him for long.

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