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Authors: Peter Demetz
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structured. The richest of these Romanesque houses, later ascribed to a clan of the Czech gentry, can still be found atetzová Street. On the north side of the market, closer to the river, Jewish and German merchants were settling in rather close proximity: the Germans before the end of the eleventh century at the Poand around the Church of St. Peter, which they yielded briefly to the Teutonic Knights; and the Jews possibly after fires had destroyed their left-bank neighborhood.
These different settlements were far from constituting a unified city; there was Prague Castle and its suburbium, the Vyšehrad and its vicus , the new market settlement, nearby the Jewish and German neighborhoods, and all around hamlets and villages. In some Hebrew documents the settlements between the two castles at Prague and the Vyšehrad were called Mezigrady (Between-the-Castles), and it was only during the thirteenth century that the name Prague, first reserved for the castle or marketplace below, began to refer to the settlement(s) on the right side of the river too. About 3,500 people lived here on a stretch of land close to the size of Nuremberg, Ghent, or Bruges at that time.
The Rise of a King
The biographer who wants to know more about Pemysl Otakar II, fifth king of Bohemia and the most powerful ruler of the dynasty, hears conflicting voices among his contemporaries and Otakar’s almost condescending silence. He left us not a single line in his own hand, and remains hidden behind the elaborate allusions of Middle High German knightly poems and the rhetorical terms of Latin chronicles or Czech and Styrian texts praising his magnificence or telling us how evil and treacherous he really was. Prince Otakar was born, probably in 1233, at the illustrious
Prague court of his father, King Václav I, and his German mother, Kunigunde, of the noble Hohenstaufen family, granddaughter of an emperor of Byzantium and later closely related through her sisters to the most important European courts, including those of Emperor Otto IV and the king of Castile. Historians have speculated about Otakar’s early training and education; at the Prague court, the king and his nobles were committed to the fashionable ideas of chivalry, horsemanship, the hunt and the joust, but it is also suggested that Otakar, as a second son, was, according to tradition, surely trained for a position in the church, at least as long as his older brother Vladislav lived (he died in 1247). At the cathedral or the collegiate school at the Vyšehrad, he may have acquired a smattering of dynastic history, the beginnings of Christian teachings, and a little Latin. Considering the presence at court of German clerics, ladies-in-waiting to the queen, and itinerant poets, his German may have been passable (though I wonder how he really conversed with his Austrian mistress or the German and Austrian poets who rode with him in his wars).
The writer of the Colmar Chronicles, an account in Latin composed in the late fourteenth century by a scribe in an Alsatian monastery, describes young Otakar as a “handsome youth, of swarthy complexion [ fusco colore ] , middling stature, broad chest, full lips, vivacious and wise,” and a wondrous reflection (especially of the figura mediocriter longa and the pectus magnum ) strikingly illuminates the stone effigy with armor and sword which the artist Peter Parler created in 1373 to adorn Otakar’s tomb in Prague Cathedral (his worried face was disfigured by irate Swedes who tried to rob his grave in 1648). There is something strangely young and tragic about Otakar; he was fifteen when he revolted against his father, thirty when he was at the height of his power, and forty-five when he was killed, almost like a mad dog, on the fields of Dürnkrut and Jedenspeigen.
Young Otakar entered Bohemian political life by committing a few blunders, but he quickly learned from his mistakes. The noble families were once again dissatisfied with King Václav I;
These different settlements were far from constituting a unified city; there was Prague Castle and its suburbium, the Vyšehrad and its vicus , the new market settlement, nearby the Jewish and German neighborhoods, and all around hamlets and villages. In some Hebrew documents the settlements between the two castles at Prague and the Vyšehrad were called Mezigrady (Between-the-Castles), and it was only during the thirteenth century that the name Prague, first reserved for the castle or marketplace below, began to refer to the settlement(s) on the right side of the river too. About 3,500 people lived here on a stretch of land close to the size of Nuremberg, Ghent, or Bruges at that time.
The Rise of a King
The biographer who wants to know more about Pemysl Otakar II, fifth king of Bohemia and the most powerful ruler of the dynasty, hears conflicting voices among his contemporaries and Otakar’s almost condescending silence. He left us not a single line in his own hand, and remains hidden behind the elaborate allusions of Middle High German knightly poems and the rhetorical terms of Latin chronicles or Czech and Styrian texts praising his magnificence or telling us how evil and treacherous he really was. Prince Otakar was born, probably in 1233, at the illustrious
Prague court of his father, King Václav I, and his German mother, Kunigunde, of the noble Hohenstaufen family, granddaughter of an emperor of Byzantium and later closely related through her sisters to the most important European courts, including those of Emperor Otto IV and the king of Castile. Historians have speculated about Otakar’s early training and education; at the Prague court, the king and his nobles were committed to the fashionable ideas of chivalry, horsemanship, the hunt and the joust, but it is also suggested that Otakar, as a second son, was, according to tradition, surely trained for a position in the church, at least as long as his older brother Vladislav lived (he died in 1247). At the cathedral or the collegiate school at the Vyšehrad, he may have acquired a smattering of dynastic history, the beginnings of Christian teachings, and a little Latin. Considering the presence at court of German clerics, ladies-in-waiting to the queen, and itinerant poets, his German may have been passable (though I wonder how he really conversed with his Austrian mistress or the German and Austrian poets who rode with him in his wars).
The writer of the Colmar Chronicles, an account in Latin composed in the late fourteenth century by a scribe in an Alsatian monastery, describes young Otakar as a “handsome youth, of swarthy complexion [ fusco colore ] , middling stature, broad chest, full lips, vivacious and wise,” and a wondrous reflection (especially of the figura mediocriter longa and the pectus magnum ) strikingly illuminates the stone effigy with armor and sword which the artist Peter Parler created in 1373 to adorn Otakar’s tomb in Prague Cathedral (his worried face was disfigured by irate Swedes who tried to rob his grave in 1648). There is something strangely young and tragic about Otakar; he was fifteen when he revolted against his father, thirty when he was at the height of his power, and forty-five when he was killed, almost like a mad dog, on the fields of Dürnkrut and Jedenspeigen.
Young Otakar entered Bohemian political life by committing a few blunders, but he quickly learned from his mistakes. The noble families were once again dissatisfied with King Václav I;
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