Sacred Prague
Saints, churches, monasteries, religious history. Hus, the bishopric, baroque counter-reformation.
Part of Prague's story
21 moments in this segment.
- — The Martyrdom of Saint Wenceslas. Folio 18v of the Wolfenbüttel Codex (before 1006), illuminating Gumpold's Legend of Saint Wenceslas. Place: The church door at Stará Boleslav, on the Elbe north of Prague Figures: Václav I (Saint Wenceslas), duke of Bohemia · Boleslav I, his younger brother · Drahomíra, their mother · the assassins Tira, Česta, and Hněvsa Václav has been raised by his grandmother Ludmila and educated, by the standards of a tenth-century Bohemian court, well. He reads Latin and Slavonic. He founds the rotunda of Saint Vitus on the castle hill (the small predecessor of every later cathedral on the same spot) and imports relics from Saxony to consecrate it. He pays tribute to Henry the Fowler at Worms in 929 (some chronicles say 935) to keep the Saxons off his borders, and is given an arm of Saint Vitus in return. He is, by all accounts, devout and conciliatory. Both qualities have their enemies. His younger brother Boleslav has been given the appanage of the Elbe lands, with a seat at Stará Boleslav. He keeps a war-band. He is older, in a sense his brother is not. He resents the tribute, the Saxon connection, and the priests.
- — The Martyrdom of Saint Adalbert. Mihály Kovács, Saint Adalbert (1855), oil on canvas; the bishop who walked unarmed into the Prussian marshes. Place: The Sambian coast, eastern Baltic (pagan Prussia) Figures: Vojtěch (Adalbert), second bishop of Prague · Bolesław I Chrobry of Poland, his patron and sponsor · Radim Gaudentius, his half-brother and companion · the Sambian Prussians, his killers Vojtěch is from the Slavník clan, the Přemyslids' last domestic rival, lords of Libice on the Elbe. He is educated at Magdeburg under the same Adalbert who confirms him, and takes the master's name. He is consecrated second bishop of Prague in 982 at the age of twenty-six. The diocese disappoints him. The priests are married, the laity is half-pagan, the duke (Boleslav II) tolerates Jewish slave-traders in the lower town. He leaves twice. Both times the pope sends him back. In 995 the Přemyslids slaughter most of the Slavník family at Libice while Vojtěch is in Rome. He does not return to Prague. He goes north instead, to Bolesław Chrobry of Poland, who has cause to support any enemy of the duke at Prague Castle and the piety to mean it. Bolesław outfits him for a mission to the heathen Prussians of the Baltic.
- — The Translation of Adalbert's Relics. Břetislav I in the Romanesque Znojmo rotunda fresco cycle (1134), the duke who carried Adalbert's bones home. Place: Gniezno, then the Saint Vitus rotunda at Prague Castle Figures: Břetislav I, duke of Bohemia · Severus, bishop of Prague · Mieszko II Lambert of Poland (lately deceased) · the body of Saint Adalbert, contested Poland is in collapse. Mieszko II is dead, the pagan reaction has burned monasteries, and the Czech duke Břetislav I sees his moment. In the summer of 1039 he marches north, sacks Poznań, takes Gniezno, and goes straight to the archbishop's church to collect the relics of Saint Adalbert. Bishop Severus stands beside him. The Czech party fasts for three days first, to be worthy of the body they are about to seize. Cosmas, who is delighted to tell this story eighty years later, does not call it a theft. He calls it a translation. They take Adalbert. They also take the bodies of the Five Martyred Brothers (Italian and Polish hermits killed in 1003), the relics of Adalbert's half-brother Gaudentius, and a great deal of ecclesiastical plate. The reliquaries are loaded onto wagons. The party turns home.
- — Libuše Prophesies the City. Josef Mathauser, Libuše Prophesies the Glory of Prague; the canonical 19th c. image of the city's founding myth. Place: The rock of Vyšehrad, above the Vltava Figures: Libuše, daughter of Krok, judge and seeress · Přemysl the Ploughman, her chosen husband · Cosmas of Prague, the chronicler who writes it down two centuries later The story belongs to Cosmas of Prague, dean of the cathedral chapter, who writes it down around 1119 in the first book of his Chronica Boemorum. By his own admission he is committing peasant memory to Latin. Libuše is the youngest of three daughters of the judge Krok. She judges in his place. The men of the tribe come to resent a woman's verdicts and demand a duke. She climbs the rock of Vyšehrad on the right bank of the Vltava and falls into prophecy. She sees a fortress whose glory will touch the stars. She instructs her envoys to follow her horse, which will lead them to a ploughman at his furrow. They find Přemysl in the fields at Stadice. He unyokes his oxen, eats bread from his ploughshare, and rides back with them to be made duke.
- — The Polish Crown of Wenceslas II. Wenceslas II enthroned, miniature from the Codex Manesse (c. 1305-1340); king of Bohemia and now of Poland. Place: Cathedral of Gniezno Figures: Wenceslas II, king of Bohemia and now Poland · Archbishop Jakub Świnka of Gniezno, who crowns him · Władysław the Elbow-High, dispossessed and exiled · the Cistercians of Zbraslav, the king's monastery near Prague Wenceslas II is twenty-nine. He has rebuilt his father's kingdom (the part of it that did not go to Vienna in 1278) and added to it. He mints the Prague groschen, the silver coin that becomes Central Europe's currency for the next two centuries, struck from the new silver of Kutná Hora. He founds the Cistercian monastery of Zbraslav, where he means to be buried. He inherits, in 1296, a claim to the Polish throne by his betrothal to Richeza, daughter of the murdered Przemysł II. In 1300 the Polish nobles invite him to make the claim good. He marches in unopposed. Władysław the Elbow-High, his rival, flees south. Archbishop Jakub Świnka, who has the right to crown a king of Poland and the only one to do so, crowns Wenceslas at Gniezno cathedral. The act restores the Polish crown, vacant since 1296. It also unites Bohemia and Poland under one sovereign for the first time.
- — The Decree of Kutná Hora. 18 January 1409, which gave the Czech nation three votes at the university to the foreigners' one. Place: The royal mining town of Kutná Hora, sixty-five kilometers east of Prague Figures: Wenceslas IV, king · Jan Hus, master of arts and preacher at the Bethlehem Chapel · Jeroným of Prague, ally of Hus · the four nationes of the Charles University: Bohemian, Bavarian, Polish, Saxon Charles's foundation of 1348 gave the university four nationes, each with one vote in matters of governance, doctrinal positions, and the election of the rector. The four nations are notional rather than ethnic: Bohemian (in practice Czech-speaking and Polish-speaking masters of Slavic origin), Bavarian, Polish (mostly Silesian Germans), and Saxon. Three of the four nations are by 1409 effectively German-speaking. On any disputed question (the philosophy of Wycliffe, the policy of the Pisan council, the orthodoxy of Hus's preaching at the Bethlehem Chapel), the Germans outvote the Bohemians three to one. Wenceslas IV needs the university to back his support for the Council of Pisa, which is trying to end the Schism by deposing both rival popes. The German nations support neither pope's deposition. Hus and the Bohemian nation support Pisa. The king finds himself outvoted in his own foundation.
- — Jan Hus Burned at Konstanz. Jan Hus at the Council of Konstanz, refusing to recant, in Václav Brožík's monumental canvas of 1883. Place: A meadow outside the walls of Konstanz, on the German shore of the Bodensee Figures: Jan Hus, priest, magister, sometime rector of the Charles University · Sigismund of Luxembourg, King of the Romans (Charles's younger son) · the assembled fathers of the Council of Konstanz · Jeroným of Prague, who will follow him to the stake a year later Hus has been preaching at the Bethlehem Chapel in the Old Town for thirteen years, in Czech, to standing crowds of two thousand. He preaches communion under both kinds, vernacular scripture, the Wycliffite position that the church is the body of the predestined and the pope is not necessarily its head. He has been excommunicated three times. He has refused to recant. In 1414 the Council of Konstanz convenes, the largest church gathering of the Middle Ages, to end the Schism and reform the church. Sigismund of Luxembourg, Charles's younger son and now King of the Romans, presides. He issues Hus a safe-conduct, salvus conductus, an imperial guarantee of free travel to and from the council. Hus arrives in Konstanz on November 3, 1414. He is arrested on November 28 and held in the Dominican prison on an island in the lake. The council declares the safe-conduct void on the ground that no temporal prince may extend protection to a heretic against the church. Sigismund, who could have insisted, does not.
- — The Battle of Vítkov Hill. Žižka's outnumbered Hussites break Sigismund's crusader cavalry on the slopes of Vítkov, 14 July 1420. Place: Vítkov Hill, east of the New Town walls Figures: Jan Žižka of Trocnov, Hussite hejtman (one-eyed) · Sigismund of Luxembourg, King of the Romans · the Prague militia · the first anti-Hussite crusade Pope Martin V proclaims a crusade against the Hussite heretics in March 1420. Sigismund of Luxembourg, brother of the dead Wenceslas IV and the man who let Hus burn at Konstanz five years before, arrives at the head of an imperial host. Estimates run from twenty thousand to over a hundred thousand depending on the chronicler's loyalty; the modern guess is around thirty thousand mixed German, Hungarian, and Bohemian Catholic troops. By mid-July they are encamped on the heights above Prague, ready to relieve the loyalist garrison still holding the Castle and Vyšehrad. Jan Žižka, by now hejtman of the radical Tábor brotherhood, has fortified Vítkov, the long whaleback ridge east of the New Town. The position guards the road by which supplies enter Hussite Prague from the east. If Sigismund takes the hill, the city starves. Žižka has lost one eye long before, in private war; he will lose the second in 1421 at the siege of Rábí. He has perhaps nine thousand men, most of them peasants, women among them, armed with flails, pikes, hooks, and the war wagons (vozová hradba) that he has turned from a transport into a tactic.
- — Sigismund Crowned King of Bohemia. Sigismund of Luxembourg, crowned King of Bohemia in St Vitus on 28 July 1420 over a city that refused to recognise him. Place: Cathedral of Saint Vitus, Prague Castle Figures: Sigismund of Luxembourg, King of the Romans · Konrad of Vechta, archbishop of Prague (Catholic, briefly) · the loyalist garrison of Hradčany Two weeks after the rout at Vítkov, with the New Town in Hussite hands and the city refusing his entry through any open gate, Sigismund has himself crowned King of Bohemia in St Vitus. The cathedral is still half-finished; Petr Parléř's choir has stood since the 1380s, but the nave is unroofed and the south tower bare. Archbishop Konrad of Vechta places the Crown of Saint Wenceslas on Sigismund's head. The congregation is small: the Catholic garrison of the Castle, a few loyalist nobles, the foreign envoys still in Sigismund's camp. Outside the cathedral, three quarters of Prague holds the chalice. The coronation is legal under Bohemian custom (Sigismund is Wenceslas IV's brother and named heir; the rites are observed; the regalia are present). It is also, in practical terms, theatre.
- — The Battle of Lipany. Utraquist and Catholic nobles destroy the radical Taborite and Orphan field armies at Lipany, 30 May 1434. Place: Open ground near the village of Lipany, east of Český Brod, thirty miles east of Prague Figures: Prokop the Bald (Prokop Holý), captain of the Taborites · Prokůpek, captain of the Orphans · Diviš Bořek of Miletínek, commander of the Utraquist-Catholic league Fifteen years of war have changed the country. The Utraquist nobility (moderate, in possession of seized church lands, increasingly willing to deal with Sigismund) finds itself permanently in the field beside the Taborite and Orphan field armies, whose raids have grown into a way of life. By 1434 the moderates have decided that the radicals must be broken before a settlement with Rome is possible. They make common cause with the Catholic Bohemian lords. The Prague Utraquists send their militia. On May 30 the two Hussite field armies, perhaps ten thousand men, encamp in a wagon-fortress on the slope above Lipany. The league army of around twenty-five thousand draws up against them. Prokop has the better position; he has Žižka's tactics; he has done this before.
- — George of Poděbrady Elected King. 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.
- — Vladislaus II Jagiellon Crowned. Folio of the Filipec Pontifical used at the coronation of Vladislaus II Jagiellon in St Vitus, 22 August 1471. Place: Cathedral of Saint Vitus, Prague Castle Figures: Vladislaus II Jagiellon, son of King Casimir IV of Poland · Beneš of Veitmile, administrator of the see (the archbishopric still vacant) · the Czech Diet (Utraquist majority) George of Poděbrady dies in March 1471. He has spent his last years arranging the succession in a way calculated to preserve the kingdom's confessional settlement: not his own sons, who could not hold the country, but a foreign prince capable of standing up to Matthias Corvinus and willing to swear to the Compactata. The Czech Diet, on his recommendation, offers the crown to Vladislaus, the fifteen-year-old eldest son of Casimir IV of Poland. Vladislaus is crowned in St Vitus on August 22, 1471. He is reasonable, slow, deeply Catholic by personal inclination, and, in office, scrupulously protective of the Utraquist settlement he has sworn to defend. The chroniclers call him král Dobře, King Bene, after his habit of agreeing to whatever was put before him with the Czech word dobře: very well. The historians are kinder; he keeps the peace for forty-five years between two confessions that elsewhere in Europe are about to start murdering each other in earnest.
- — Vladislav Hall Completed. Benedikt Ried's late-Gothic ribbed vault soars over the Vladislav Hall, completed 1502, the largest secular hall in central Europe. Place: Royal palace, Prague Castle Figures: Benedikt Ried of Piesting, royal architect · Vladislaus II Jagiellon, patron · the masons of the Prague lodge Benedikt Ried begins work on the royal palace at Prague Castle in 1493, replacing the burned-out hall of the old Přemyslid residence. He finishes the throne room nine years later, in 1502. The Vladislav Hall is sixty-two meters long, sixteen wide, thirteen high, and supports a single unbroken vault across the entire span. There are no internal columns. The five double bays are spanned by intersecting ribs that branch, curl, and return on themselves in patterns that have nothing to do with the structural geometry beneath. The ribs are decoration. The vault is held up by the wall buttresses, in a way that the vaults of Beauvais and Cologne, with their forests of soaring shafts, do not need to pretend. The windows are something else entirely. Tall, rectangular, framed by pilasters and pediments, they are the earliest Renaissance windows in Central Europe, set into a thoroughly Gothic stone shell. Ried has clearly seen Italian work, or seen drawings of it. He grafts the new ornament onto the old structure with the deliberate confidence of someone who does not believe the two are incompatible.
- — Jesuits Arrive at the Klementinum. The Klementinum from Mariánské náměstí. The Jesuit complex grew on the site of the former Dominican house of St Clement after Ferdinand I summoned the Society of Jesus to Prague in 1556. Place: Former Dominican house of St Clement, Old Town Figures: Ferdinand I, who summons them · Petr Canisius, Jesuit provincial · twelve fathers led by Ursmar Goisson Ferdinand I has decided that Bohemia, more than half Utraquist and a great deal of it openly Lutheran, requires a discipline. He writes to Ignatius of Loyola in Rome. The general sends Petr Canisius north with twelve fathers. They cross into the city on 18 April 1556 and take possession on 21 April of the abandoned Dominican house at St Clement on the riverbank, vacant since the Hussite Wars. Within a year they open a school. Within five years it has two hundred pupils, including sons of Protestant nobles who want the Latin. The Society's pedagogical genius (free, rigorous, theatrical) is the wedge that will split the next generation of the Bohemian elite from their parents' confession.
- — Tycho Brahe Arrives in Prague. Tycho Brahe, Imperial Mathematician from 1599. The brass prosthetic nose, replacing the one he lost in a 1566 duel, is visible in most portraits. Place: Benátky nad Jizerou (briefly), then the Curtius house in Hradčany Figures: Tycho Brahe, Imperial Mathematician · Rudolf II, patron · Franz Tengnagel, son-in-law and assistant Tycho Brahe is fifty-two, the greatest observational astronomer alive, and recently homeless. He has lost Uraniborg, the island observatory on Hven that the late King Frederick II of Denmark built for him, to the new King Christian IV, who does not see why one nobleman should hold a quarter of the royal budget. Tycho leaves with his data, his prosthetic nose (long described as silver and gold, but 2012 chemical analysis showed it was brass; replacement for the original lost in a 1566 duel over a mathematical formula), and three wagonloads of brass instruments. Rudolf II, who collects everything else extraordinary, collects Tycho. He grants him the castle at Benátky nad Jizerou, fifty kilometers northeast of Prague, with an income of three thousand florins and the title Caesarean Mathematician. The instruments are installed by autumn.
- — The Letter of Majesty. Rudolf II's Letter of Majesty, 9 July 1609. The single document by which the Habsburg crown conceded religious liberty to the Bohemian Estates. Torn up by Ferdinand II after White Mountain. Place: Prague Castle Figures: Rudolf II, signing under duress · Matthias, his brother, the rival · Václav Budovec of Budov, Protestant Estates leader By 1609 Rudolf II is a paranoid recluse at the castle, increasingly displaced by his ambitious younger brother Matthias, who has already seized Hungary, Austria, and Moravia. Rudolf has only Bohemia left, and Bohemia is restive: the Protestant Estates (Utraquists, Lutherans, the Bohemian Brethren) want their religious freedoms in writing. The Estates assemble in Prague in May. They draw up a document. They mass armed retainers in the streets. Rudolf, who has stalled for eight months, signs on 9 July. The Majestätsbrief, the Letter of Majesty, guarantees Protestants the right to build churches on royal and noble lands, run their own consistory, and operate the lower university. A defensor of twenty-four men is to enforce it.
- — The Battle of White Mountain. Pieter Snayers, The Battle of White Mountain. The Catholic League and Imperial forces under Tilly and Bucquoy break the Bohemian army in under two hours on the chalky plateau west of Prague. Place: Bílá hora, the chalk plateau west of Prague Figures: Christian of Anhalt, Protestant commander · Maximilian I of Bavaria, Catholic League · Johann Tserclaes, Count of Tilly · Frederick V, the Winter King, dining at the castle when it began The Protestant army of the Bohemian Estates and Frederick V (Elector Palatine, elected king of Bohemia in November 1619 in defiance of the Habsburgs) takes the ridge of the White Mountain on the morning of 8 November 1620. Christian of Anhalt commands twenty-one thousand men, ill-paid, mostly Bohemian and German Protestant, with some Hungarian and Dutch contingents. They have built a thin earthwork. They expect the Catholic army to assault uphill. Tilly and Maximilian arrive with twenty-five thousand men of the Catholic League and the imperial army, well-paid and recently confessed. Around midday Maximilian, against Tilly's caution, orders the attack. The Bohemian center collapses in the first volley. The Hungarian cavalry flees. The Moravian infantry, alone, stands and is annihilated. The battle lasts under two hours.
- — The Twenty-Seven Executions. Contemporary 1621 broadsheet engraving of the executions of the twenty-seven leaders of the Bohemian Revolt on Old Town Square, the scaffold, the rows of waiting condemned, and Mydlář the executioner at work. Place: Old Town Square, before the Town Hall Figures: Jan Mydlář, executioner · Jan Jessenius, rector of Charles University · Václav Budovec of Budov, Protestant elder · Kryštof Harant of Polžice, composer, courtier, and traveler The verdicts of the Extraordinary Tribunal are read in late April 1621. Twenty-seven directors of the Bohemian Revolt are condemned: twenty-four nobles (Lutheran, Utraquist, Brethren) and three burghers of the Old Town. They are held in the White Tower of the castle through May while their estates are inventoried. On the morning of 21 June, the scaffold is built on the Old Town Square in front of the Town Hall, draped in black. The first prisoner is brought out at five a.m. Cannon are positioned at every street into the square. Jesuit fathers offer last rites; some are accepted. The crowd is silent. The executioner Jan Mydlář, who keeps a careful diary, will use four different swords across the four hours; he replaces each as it dulls.
- — The Crypt of Saints Cyril and Methodius. The Orthodox church of Saints Cyril and Methodius on Resslova street, with the paratroopers' memorial set into the facade beside the crypt window scarred by the 18 June 1942 siege. Place: Orthodox church of Saints Cyril and Methodius, Resslova street, New Town Figures: Gabčík, Kubiš, Valčík, Švarc, Hrubý, Bublík, Opálka (the seven) · Bishop Gorazd · Karel Čurda, the traitor · 750 SS surrounding the church Karel Čurda, a fellow Czech paratrooper from Operation Out Distance, hiding with his mother in Trhová Kamenice, walks into Gestapo headquarters at the Petschek Palace on June 16 and offers names for a million Reichsmarks. He gives them the Moravec family flat in Žižkov, where Anthropoid has been sheltered. The Gestapo raids the Moravecs at dawn on June 17. Marie Moravcová bites a cyanide capsule. Her seventeen-year-old son Ata, after a day of torture (including being shown his mother's severed head in a fish tank), reveals the church. Bishop Gorazd of the Czechoslovak Orthodox Church, with the priests Vladimír Petřek and Václav Čikl and the church chairman Jan Sonnevend, has hidden the paratroopers in the crypt for three weeks. The subject dates from 1942; this photograph was taken in 2008.
- — The Hus Monument unveiled. The Jan Hus Memorial on Old Town Square, Šaloun's bronze group Place: Old Town Square, in front of Týn Church Figures: Ladislav Šaloun, sculptor · Antonín Pfeiffer, architect of the base · the silent crowd · the Austrian authorities, preferring no ceremony Ladislav Šaloun wins the commission in 1900, the year after Masaryk's intervention in the Hilsner affair has made the Hus anniversary into politics. The funding is raised by public subscription across fifteen years. The monument is twenty-five meters wide and ten meters high at its tallest figure: a standing Hus at the center, robe falling vertically, gaze level. Around the base, three groups in bronze: Hussite warriors on the left, exiles after White Mountain on the right, a young mother holding her child at the front. An inscription on the base reads Milujte se, pravdy každému přejte. It is in the secessionist mode, monumental and asymmetrical, far from the academic neoclassicism the Austrian establishment prefers. The bronze is cast in Prague. By the summer of 1915, the Habsburg empire is at war and Bohemia is restive; Czech regiments are surrendering to Russians in batches. The subject dates from 1915; this photograph was taken in 2008.
- — Storm Boris and the Held River. The Vltava through Prague, held within the post-2002 flood defenses during the 2024 Storm Boris event. Place: Karlín, Holešovice, Troja; Vltava embankment Figures: Storm Boris, low-pressure system · Bohuslav Svoboda, Mayor of Prague · Petr Fiala, Prime Minister A slow-moving Genoese cyclone stalls over Central Europe for four days in mid-September. Parts of Moravia and Silesia (Opava, Krnov, Ostrava) receive a month's rain in 48 hours; Polish Kłodzko and Austrian Lower Austria suffer the worst flooding since 1997. The Vltava swells, but Prague braces. On the night of 14 September, the Prague mobile flood barriers go up at Karlín, Holešovice, and Malá Strana. The Vltava peaks at 1,700 cubic meters per second on 16 September — well below the 2002 peak of 5,300 cubic meters per second (see [[prague-2000-floods]]). Metro stays open. The Zoo evacuates ungulates as a precaution, this time successfully.
