Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City (20 page)

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Authors: Peter Demetz

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Intending to consolidate royal power, Charles wanted to codify the laws of Bohemia formally and in writing, but an assembly of Czech nobles, unimpressed by imperial power, rejected his
Majestas Carolina
in 1355, and Charles, in one of his shrewdest if not most cynical moments, promptly
declared that the sealed codex had been destroyed by fire and did not bind the nobility in any way. Czech barons preferred oral tradition, which, they thought, allowed them more elbow room to handle their affairs than did a written legal code, long researched by the king’s office, and, at least in part, written or edited by the king himself.
The
Majestas Carolina
, a massive collection of Bohemian laws, was intended to establish a firm process of justice. It did away with trial by hot iron or cold water as being totally unworthy of a Christian kingdom; landowners were forbidden to blind their peasants and to cut off their noses or ears; and women who had been raped were encouraged to proceed to the place where the crime had happened, tear their veil, and publicly accuse the criminal before taking the accusations to the office of the king (the punishment for rape was death). It also interfered with the joys of playing dice, which, it said, was “apt to leave children impoverished and burdened by heavy shame,” and demanded that all people live virtuously and chastely. Section 50 of the
Majestas
, if approved, would have been the first ecological law to protect Bohemia’s famous green forests so they would remain “untouched and eternal”; royal power, far from wanting to waste “the beautiful fullness of the forests so much admired by foreigners,” wished to protect timber carefully. It was to be cut only by special authorization, and only dry wood or fallen trees could be legally removed for use or sale.
Charles could rely on a number of Czech nobles loyal to or dependent on him, among them Jan of Michalovice, Jan of Veself, Beneš of Vartemberk, and the brothers Stemberk, but there is little evidence, especially after a short-lived rebellion of the southern Bohemian clan of the Rožmberks (or Rosenbergs) against him, that he surrounded himself with representatives of the nobility as trusted advisers. From time to time he would ask important people for advice (as emperor he also had to consult German and Silesian nobles), but he felt most comfortable with dignitaries of the church. His kitchen cabinet consisted of Archbishop Arnestus (and later his successor, O
ko of Vlašim) and the chancellor Johannes Noviforensis (von Neumarkt; in Czech, Jan ze St
edy), bishop of Litomyšl and later of Olomouc. Arnestus and Johannes differed in origin and training, Arnestus coming from a family of the Czech gentry in the northeast of the country and Johannes from the provincial Silesian (or north Bohemian) professional class, yet they both served the king self-effacingly almost as long as they lived.
Arnestus was trained internationally; after attending the cathedral, school in Prague, he was sent to Padua and Bologna to take up canon
law and studied there for fourteen years before he was recalled to be dean of the cathedral and, soon, bishop and archbishop and the young king’s counselor and friend. Among his contemporaries, Arnestus was most active, as diplomat, special ambassador, occasional commander of royal troops, and in formulating and executing his king’s policy. As a young man, he recalled later in life, he was once disturbed by the vision of the Virgin Mary turning away from him, and he certainly worked hard to do penance. He was a first-rate manager, establishing exact lists of benefices and consecrated priests, and holding regular synods in order to keep in touch with the provinces, praising or harshly exhorting members of the hierarchy if necessary. Yet he was not a single-minded bureaucrat but a cultivated reader and writer, and patron of the arts. He was a protector of young clerics, whom he sent to study abroad with good stipends, and particularly committed to protect and favor the Augustinians involved in the
Devotio Moderna
of introspection, spiritual exploration, and religious feeling.
Somewhat younger than Arnestus, Johannes had been first a parish priest and then made his way up quickly as the king’s scribe, notary, court chaplain, and bishop; by 1353 he was protonotary, the first among the notaries in the king’s office, and only a year later became the king’s chief of office and chancellor to supervise all the king’s correspondence. Within a few years, he was traveling to foreign countries for the first time, accompanying Charles to Italy; if he lacked cosmopolitan polish, he amply made up for it by literary talent and eagerness to learn. As anybody else in his position would have done, he collected the best sample letters originating in his office, but he is better known for his important German translations of Latin texts, including “The Soliloquy of a Soul with God” (considered in his time to have been written by St. Augustine himself), a collection of letters about St. Hieronymus (equally spurious), and a remarkable collection of prayers which had an impact on contemporary German prose writing. He knew the German “Lay of the Nibelungs,” which was not exactly required reading for the Prague clergy, and was famous for his collections of books, including, possibly, a copy of Dante’s Latin works and, as a gift from Petrarch, an edition of Virgil’s eclogues. German scholars once overrated Johannes’s impact on German writing and believed that he was responsible for a particular brand of Carolinian early humanism, yet even after a more critical generation of younger philologists have shattered many of these illusions, Johannes remains a lively and vulnerable figure, eager to absorb whatever he could from his Italian friends and correspondents. The king’s
efficient chancellor may also have been a timid poet of the German tongue.
 
Charles liked to work with well-trained and efficient people of patience and experience and was not fond of enthusiasts or dreamers; to dream, in political matters, was utterly beyond his calculating mind, especially if the dreams touched on relations with the Avignon Curia, which were complicated and pushed him to a participation in Italian affairs that, after his early experiences, he wanted to avoid. His encounter in Prague with Cola di Rienzo—the famous figure made tribune of Rome by the will of its people, self-appointed herald of great changes in church, empire, and the world, an inspired lover of the idea of renascent Rome unifying noble Italy—was not so clean-cut as the chroniclers sometimes described, for they more easily sympathized with the king than with his strange visitor. Charles did not need di Rienzo to achieve any of his plans (though it was possible to use him as a pawn in negotiating with the pope), but his Italian visitor, and later prisoner, in conversations and letters uttered statements about the necessary transformation of the church which in a different idiom resounded in Prague’s chapels and streets even before Charles had died; they rang in his son’s ears and eventually made Prague, at the time of the Hussite movement, the first scene of a European reformation. It is altogether a different matter that Cola di Rienzo, a theatrical character of high enthusiasm and quick depressions, reinterpreted some of these statements when he found himself in danger of being tried by the Inquisition. For him, Rome was more valuable than a fine point of scholastic theology and ultimately and for all practical purposes he recanted and returned to Rome in the service of the pope whom he had so bitterly attacked.
Charles must have been astonished by this articulate visitor, admitted to his presence by the good offices of the royal pharmacist Angelo in the early summer of 1350, who presented himself after a long journey from the Italian south as the bearer of prophetic messages. He told King Charles about his short but glorious days as tribune of Rome, his escape (after a half-baked putsch by the nobles) to caves in the Apennines, where he dwelled among Franciscan hermits of radical views, and being sent out to the world again by Frater Angelus de Monte Vulcani to present to Charles precious prophecies and tell him that God himself had chosen Charles and “an angelic pope” (certainly not the one residing in Avignon) to undertake a “universal reformation” (
reformatio universalis).
The time of the return of the Holy Ghost was close (
quod tempus instat, in quo spiritus
Sancti tempus ingreditur),
and di Rienzo, his precursor, offered Charles his support for going to Italy to restore Rome to its ancient glory.
Charles perhaps enjoyed di Rienzo’s presence; eager to hear more about Italian developments, he invited him for two more conversations, the gist of which di Rienzo summarized in a letter in late July. Yet Charles, a loyal son of the church, was also disturbed by the dire prophecies, so strongly opposed to the present Curia, and by the idea of the imminent coming of the Holy Spirit. Charles asked di Rienzo to repeat his statements to a gathering of dignitaries, including the archbishop; the visitor was promptly taken into custody by the church authorities, held first in Prague and later in the archbishop’s residence of Roudnice. He was treated with respect; unlike his servants, he was given wine, since he did not develop a taste for Prague beer; and he untiringly continued to write letters and memoranda to the king, the archbishop, the chancellor, and his Roman friends, to whom he had promised to return in mid-September at the latest.
In his messages to Italy, di Rienzo sounded of good hope, but toward the end of summer he began to feel less certain about the future; the Bohemian authorities did not seem willing to let him go. He was not aware that his detention had been speedily reported to the pope, and the Holy Father had written three return letters to Prague expressing his satisfaction that the “son of Belial” and potential heretic was in loyal hands. Di Rienzo’s first two letters to the king—
serenissime Cesar Auguste—
combine a good deal of undiminished pride with an increasing feeling of frustration, fleeting perhaps but noticeable. There are many reasons, he argues, why the king should order his release: the “fear of shame,” which he, a true Christian
(fidelis Christianus),
fears more than death; the harm that his protracted stay in Prague would cause the noble people in Rome and Italy, who want to continue fighting tyrants, thieves, and traitors; and, last but not least, his health, which suffers in the constricted space and needs to be nourished by free air (more than a poetic image, for he suffered from epilepsy). He wanted to act as a kind of political St. Francis and, to add weight to his entreaties, revealed to Charles the great secret of his birth: he was, he said, the natural son of Emperor Henry VII and a hospitable Roman woman (
ipsa natura … me natum esse fecit … gloriose memoriae quondam imperatori Heinrici).
Charles, his close relative by blood, should consider his noble record, described in considerable detail, including the battles against soldiers of the Roman nobility, and the ceremonial embassies from all over the world that had honored him; even the sultan of Cairo, di Rienzo added, had lived in fear of him.
The king’s written answer shifted the debate to religious grounds, using an ample number of biblical quotations (in the style of his teacher Pierre of Fécamp) and revealing a good deal of royal irony. Charles had much to say about Christian charity, but when all was said and done he did not give an inch to di Rienzo’s wishes. Charles would have nothing to do with prophecies
(fantastica,
he called them), current among spiritualist monks who believed they were extremely knowledgeable in intellectual matters though they had built their edifices on the pillars of pride and vanity; and he especially turned, with some irritation, to predictions concerning the pope and the return of the Holy Ghost to institute a new age. These were completely erroneous and opposed to the truth of the church, he wrote, and it was incorrect to believe that the Holy Ghost had absented himself after he had shown his presence to the apostles and other loyal Christians at Pentecost. As for the great secret of di Rienzo’s imperial origins, the king was ready to leave the matter to God (
deo relinquimus),
for, he added, “we only know that we are all created by God, being Adam’s sons, and made of the mire of the earth (
limo terrae),
to which we all return ultimately.” (He possibly knew that di Rienzo was the son of a tavern keeper and a washerwoman.) Charles distinctly refused to discuss the political implications; if di Rienzo’s long absence from Rome set back his cause, that was to be deplored, but God’s law was higher than the affairs of Italy and Rome, and it was less dangerous to risk difficulties here on earth than eternal punishment.

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