Bohemia, from the earliest times to the fall of national independence in 1620 / With a short summary of later events

by C. Edmund Maurice

How much the sense of equality before the law grew under this administration may be illustrated by the following instance. A servant has brought an action against a fellow-servant for wounding him; while at the same time a master brings an action against the same defendant for debt. The question arises which of these shall be heard first. The jury decide that “since the body of a man is more precious than money,” the defendant should answer for his violence to the man whom he has wounded, before he answers to the master for his debt. More bold still was the assertion of the rights of the citizens to hold the nobles responsible to the city tribunals for lands held within the city. And while they held their own against the nobles outside, the popular magistrates increased their authority within the city. The power of regulating trade, which in England was seized by the Guilds, was, in the Moravian towns, at once taken into the hands of the civic authorities; and thus those conflicts, which Mrs. Green has described as prevailing in so many English towns, between the magistrates and the leaders of the trades, never assume such prominence in the history of Brünn and Olmütz.

Nor was it only in their immediate security for liberty and good government that these civic rights were of advantage to Bohemia and Moravia. Questions were forced upon the practical consideration of the jurors, the very discussion of which formed an important element in political education. Thus the treatment by the jurors of the questions of the value of torture, and ordeal by battle, as methods of discovering truth, show how experience was already preparing the way for the overthrow of abuses, which were yet too strongly supported by popular prejudice to be removed at once. The steady growth of these liberties, which had received so powerful an impulse from the needs produced by the Tartar invasion, was still further promoted by Pr̆emysl Ottakar II., and became in his hands part of a complete scheme for humbling the power of the nobility.

Wenceslaus, in spite of some fine qualities, had been a self-indulgent and pleasure-seeking man; and he had, like some of his predecessors, mortgaged many of the royal lands and castles to the nobles. This had naturally increased their power, and had enabled them to organise those insurrections against the king in which they had at first succeeded in involving his son. But even while he was still Margrave of Moravia, young Pr̆emysl Ottakar had broken loose from these influences; and by various economies and convenient pecuniary transactions he had succeeded in raising money enough to purchase back the lands from the nobles, compelling them, sometimes against their will, to surrender their mortgages. He also forced them to break down those castles which had been great causes of disorder and weakness in the country. Nor did he fail to strengthen his cause by alliance with the clergy.

Ever since the quarrel between Frederick II. and Wenceslaus, that King had been a devoted champion of the Pope; and in the growing weakness of the Empire, the Pope became more and more the one great Power to which a rising and ambitious king could appeal. Ottakar II. became distinguished as a friend of the Church, not only by his strong support of the Papal power, but by his endowment and development of the monasteries. In this, indeed, he was carrying on that revival of Bohemian life which Wenceslaus had begun after the repulse of the Tartars. But it was evident that these ecclesiastical exemptions must sometimes come into collision with those civic liberties of which we have spoken.

This contradiction was evidently felt by Ottakar; and it showed itself in three different ways. The freedom of trade, which, under certain limitations, was so welcome to the towns, was by no means in accordance with the claims of the abbots. They wished that certain occupations should be carried on under their control; and not that there should be any exchange of the articles connected with those occupations. Thus we find in some of the grants to the monasteries that, while the monks and their dependants are relieved from certain forms of taxation, the exemption is specially limited to those who are not engaged in trade. Secondly, there was an obvious risk of a conflict of authority between the monastic tribunals and those of the city. Thirdly, the records of Brünn, and of its imitators, show that the growing ideas of equality before the law did not always seem to the citizens quite consistent with the privileges claimed by the clergy. Nor must it be supposed that charters to monasteries and charters to towns represented, in the same degree, the ordinary idea of human liberty. The dependants of the abbot were as much at his mercy as those of any feudal lord; and though it might be an advantage for them to escape from the oppressions of the Z̆upani, it was not always certain that the abbot would be a gentler master.

That Ottakar felt the difficulty of this conflict, and desired to compromise between the interests of these rivals for his favour, is strikingly illustrated by the two cases of Hradiste and Litomys̆l. In the former case, Ottakar was particularly anxious to secure the good will of the citizens, because he looked upon their town as a possible bulwark against Hungarian invasion; but the neighbouring convent of Vilegrad feared that the grant of liberties to Hradiste would interfere with the privileges of their convent. The compromise to which Ottakar was forced seems a considerable surrender to ecclesiastical pretensions. The townsmen were to settle in one particular island, for which they were to pay rent to the monastery. The monastery was to retain all its former rights over waters, fisheries, mills, meadows, woods, and corn-fields; and, though the town was to hold a market two days a week, the profit of that market was to go on one day to the king, and on another to the monastery; and, above all, the judge of the town was to be appointed by the monastery. But in this decree there is a provision which seems to suggest how even such a compromise might work for freedom. The common rights in pasture held previously by the townsmen are to be shared with the dependants of the monastery; but the dependants of the monastery in their turn are to share their common rights with the citizens of the town. Thus there would naturally grow up a combination among the dependants of the monasteries, like those unions which, in England, gave such trouble to the abbots of St. Albans and Dunstable.

In the case of Litomys̆l the grants to the monastery and those given to the town are so entangled that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the benefits received by the respective recipients of the royal favour; and, in this case, Ottakar seems to have cut the knot by raising Litomys̆l to the ordinary position of a royal town, and thereby emancipating it from the control of the monastery. Ottakar indeed had one sure protection against any possible offence which the Church might fear from the growth of civic liberty. Bruno, Bishop of Olmütz, was his right-hand man in this as in other parts of his work. Himself a German by birth, he warmly encouraged the introduction of German town rights into the cities of Moravia; while, on the other hand, he always succeeded, until the final catastrophe of Ottakar’s life, in strengthening the good understanding between the Pope and the King of Bohemia.

Thus there were now growing up in Bohemia the elements of internal liberty, under the patronage of a king strong and wise enough to hold his own against the nobles. Had Ottakar been content to remain King of Bohemia alone, the effect of his reign on his country might have been permanently beneficial. But it is now necessary to speak of that career of conquest and aggression which raised up against him so many enemies, and which at last put into the hands of his most dangerous rival the weapon by which king and country were alike overthrown.

However evil were the final results of his aggressions, it must be owned that there was a certain plausibility in the justification offered by Ottakar for each of his conquests. To begin with the first and most important of them, the conquest of Austria. The Babenbergers had been undoubtedly troublesome neighbours to the Dukes of Bohemia; and Frederick the Quarrelsome, the last of the line, had been also so oppressive to his subjects that they had appealed to the Emperor to choose them a new duke. On this occasion the King of Bohemia had been one of those to whom the enforcement of the ban of the Empire had been entrusted. When, then, on the death of Frederick the Quarrelsome, the land seemed likely to fall into the hands of the Emperor, or to be torn in pieces by rival claimants, Wenceslaus and Ottakar may have naturally considered it a matter of self-defence to establish their rule, and with it some kind of order, in the lands of so near a neighbour; and they were further encouraged in their attempt by the approval of Pope Innocent IV.

But the latter phases of the conquest are perhaps less excusable, and even somewhat discreditable to Wenceslaus and his son. The Austrian nobles, on the death of the Emperor Frederick had resolved to choose the Margrave of Meissen as their duke, and to send representatives to invite him to accept the ducal crown. On their way through Bohemia, Wenceslaus invited them to a banquet, and tried to cajole them into choosing his son as their duke. The messengers, alarmed and taken by surprise, declared that they had no authority to accept this proposal. Wenceslaus, thereupon, uttered such threats, that the Austrians considered it dangerous to continue their journey; and they returned to their country to reconsider the question.