Charles Returns from Paris

JAN 01 1333 · 12:00

Charles IV in 1365, the only known portrait painted in his lifetime, by Andrea di Bonaiuto in Florence. Place: Prague Castle and the Old Town Figures: Charles, margrave of Moravia, future Charles IV · Blanche of Valois, his queen · Pierre de Rosières (the future Clement VI), tutor at the French court He is sent to Paris in 1323, aged seven, by an absentee father and a court that has no place for him. He is baptized Václav, after the Bohemian saint; at confirmation in France he takes the name of his godfather and uncle, Charles IV of France, and is called Charles for the rest of his life. His tutor is the Benedictine Pierre de Rosières, who will become Pope Clement VI and crown him King of the Romans twenty-three years later. He is educated in Latin, French, Italian, and German. He marries Blanche of Valois at fourteen. In 1330 he is sent to govern Luxembourg, then to the Italian campaigns where his father is trying to extract money from Lombardy. By 1333 he is seventeen, scarred from a poisoned dish at Pavia, and is summoned back to a Bohemia that the chroniclers describe as desolata et destructa: ruined and depopulated, its castles pawned, its nobles in open faction.