Charles IV’s death in 1378 coincided with the onset of the Great Schism when three Popes vied for control over Christendom. The resulting scandal only served to exacerbate tensions between clergy and laity which had long been smouldering beneath the surface. The reformist teachings of the English theologian John Wycliffe were brought to Prague with the active encouragement of Charles’ daughter, Anne of Bohemia, who had married King Richard II of England in 1382. Wycliffe’s views were also supported in part by Jan Hus, a professor at Prague University and, from 1402, a renowned preacher at the newly-founded Bethlehem Chapel. It was in the austere setting of this barn-like building, designed to contrast with the Gothic excesses of the surrounding churches, that Hus called for a return to basic Christian precepts and values, for the redistribution of the church’s secular wealth and for greater weight to be placed on the authority of the scriptures. Nationalist tensions between Czechs and Germans at the university added fuel to the developing crisis, which rapidly spun out of control under the feeble rule of Wenceslas IV. The selling of indulgences (a form of pardon for sins that had been committed) provoked ever fiercer denunciations from Hus and his supporters and led ultimately to his excommunication. In 1415, having received a safe-conduct from the Emperor Sigismund, Hus and a group of companions set out for the Swiss city of Constance where a Council of the Church had promised him a hearing. It was a trap — he was immediately arrested, summarily tried and on 6 July burnt at the stake.
In Bohemia this act of treachery provoked a situation bordering on civil war. In 1419 one of Hus’s champions, a fellow-preacher named Jan Zelivsky, led the poorer inhabitants of the New Town in an attack on the Town Hall, during which a number of councillors were hurled from the chamber windows in an incident which later became known as the First Defenestration of Prague.
The next provocation came from the Church. In 1420 Pope Martin V proclaimed a crusade against the heretics, a call which was widely and bloodily taken up. The Hussites, under their one-eyed general, the resourceful Jan Zifka, assembled their forces east of Prague, where they successfully overcame Sigismund’s army at the battle of Vitkov (now the suburb of Zifkov). In the general confusion which preceded the battle, much of the Maid Strana was destroyed. The war dragged on for the next twenty years, with the Imperial side repeatedly offering tactical concessions which were subsequently withdrawn. When George of Podebrady assumed the throne in 1458, he supported the reformers and an uneasy truce prevailed.
The period of dynastic conflict which followed George’s death in 1471 led ultimately to the accession of Ferdinand I, brother of the German Emperor, and 400 years of Habsburg rule ensued.
Germans, Jesuits and the Thirty Years War
Ferdinand lost no time in establishing a presence in the Bohemian capital. He invited the most imaginative Italian designers and architects of the day to build the summer palace in the gardens immediately north of the walls of Prague Castle. The palace is known as the Belvedere and was for his wife Anna. Much more significant, however, was his decision in 1556 to invite the Jesuits, shock troops of the Counter-Reformation, to begin proselytising among the heretical inhabitants of the city. Over the next century and a half they acquired vast amounts of property in the Old Town, much of which was demolished to make way for the grim, fortress-like Clementinum, conceived as an intellectual and moral bastion of Catholicism. Religious conflict was always at the root of the Empire’s problems and nowhere more so than in Bohemia. In May 1618, incensed by the behaviour of the Emperor’s Catholic officials, representatives of the Protestant nobility led a march on Hradaany, in the course of which three prominent courtiers were pushed from a window in the castle (the Second Defenestration of Prague). This seemingly innocuous incident ushered in one of the most brutal periods of modern European history, the Thirty Years War. Bohemia was ravaged and Prague saw some of the worst excesses. In 1620 the Emperor’s Catholic forces routed his opponents at the battle of the White Mountain, now the Prague suburb of Bfevnov. The Imperial troops were let loose on the city and wholesale executions followed. Among those singled out for special punishment were the 27 Protestant noblemen adjudged to have been leaders of the revolt, who were publicly executed in Old Town Square.
By the end of the war in 1648 the Habsburgs were back in the saddle. Austrian rule was repressive and Bohemia was reduced to the status of provincial backwater. Power was exercised from Vienna, the estates of Protestant noblemen were confiscated and redistributed among foreigners, and the indigenous culture was suppressed by a policy of Germanisation. In Prague the final triumph of Catholicism was domination by the Jesuits. Work on the Clementinum continued throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. But their greatest imprint was made on the Lesser Quarter. The Jesuits had already acquired the medieval church of St Nicholas in 1625. Fifty years later a vast site in the middle of the square was cleared in order to make way for a school and college. Finally, in the early decades of the 18th century, the old church itself was demolished and replaced by the magnificent, late baroque monument which still stands sentinel over the district today. By this time, however, the Jesuits’ days were numbered. The Enlightenment brought with it the notion of religious tolerance and, in 1773, that most intolerant of orders was abolished and their property confiscated.