George of Poděbrady Elected King

JAN 01 1458 · 12:00

The Bohemian estates elect George of Poděbrady king at the Old Town Hall, 2 March 1458: the only Hussite to wear the crown. Place: Old Town Hall, Staroměstské náměstí, Prague Figures: Jiří z Poděbrad (George of Poděbrady), regent of Bohemia · Jan Rokycana, Utraquist archbishop-elect · the Czech Diet George of Poděbrady was fourteen years old at Lipany, fighting on the Utraquist league side that broke the radicals. He has spent the twenty-four years since rising through the Utraquist nobility: regent of Bohemia from 1452, effective ruler under the boy-king Ladislaus Posthumous, manager of a country that has been ungovernable for a generation. Ladislaus dies in Prague on 23 November 1457, seventeen years old, almost certainly of either leukemia or bubonic plague (the modern skeletal examination ruled out poison; the contemporary rumor is wrong). The Diet meets in the Old Town Hall, the same hall whose Astronomical Clock has been counting four kinds of hour for forty-seven years. On March 2, 1458, after eight ballots, the lords elect George of Poděbrady king of Bohemia. The Catholic lords vote for him too, holding their noses; the Utraquists shout for him; a Catholic peasant girl, the chronicler Eschenloer notes with some bewilderment, is present at the coronation. An Utraquist priest celebrates the mass. The communion is offered in both kinds and in one.