A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [312]
Wenceslas IV was eighteen when he acceded to the throne in 1378 shortly after accompanying his father on the memorable visit to Paris. Although trained in government by his father, well educated and literate in Latin, French, German, and Czech, he lacked the character to dominate his circumstances. Despite his initial efforts to work out a balance of forces, the incessant warring of groups and classes, of towns versus princes, lesser nobles against the greater, Germans against Czechs, leagues against leagues, created a network of dissension that defied sovereignty—and destroyed the sovereign.
A tragic, ruined figure, Wenceslas emerges from the chronicles a kind of Caliban, half clownish, half vicious, a composite of half-truths and legends reflecting the animosities of his various sets of enemies. Because his reign was the source of the Hussite revolt against the Church and of the rising Czech nationalism hostile to the Germans, Wenceslas suffered posthumously from both clerical and German chroniclers. The unfair advantage of the written word triumphs in the end. But even if exaggerated, the stories about Wenceslas are too much of a kind not to represent some body of truth.
Said by his partisans to be good-looking and well-mannered, he appears more generally as a “wild boar” who went on rampages at night with bad companions, burst into burghers’ houses to rape their wives, shut up his own wife in a whorehouse, roasted a cook who served him a burned meal. According to these versions, he was sired by a cobbler, was born ugly and deformed (causing the death of his mother in giving him birth), soiled the baptismal water at his christening, and stained the altar by sweating profusely at his coronation at the age of two—all omens, although probably ex post facto, of an unholy reign. He was happy only when hunting, spending months at a time in the woods and at hunting lodges to the neglect of government, preferring the company of grooms and hunting companions whom he ennobled, to the anger of the barons. His early efforts to uphold justice and achieve order left him frustrated, he only made enemies by favoring one faction over another, his errors of judgment compounded a sense of inadequacy, he became incapable of pursuing a policy with any consistency, fled from his problems, and found refuge from incapacity in hunting and heavy drinking.
While it was common in Germany for a man in any rank of society to drink himself under the table, Wenceslas became a confirmed alcoholic. He grew increasingly irritable and black-tempered and indolent as a sovereign, stayed in Prague to the neglect of the rest of the Empire, and succumbed to fits of savagery in which he was thought sometimes to have “lost command of his reason.” As if reflecting his master, one of the hounds that followed him everywhere was said to have attacked and killed his first wife, Joanna of Bavaria—although according to other sources she died of the plague and left a sorrowing husband too distressed—or possibly too drunk—to attend the funeral. Evidently not as repellent as he was later made out to be, he married a second Bavarian princess, reputedly very beautiful, who was said to have held him in great affection. Not so the Church, whose priests he pilloried, together with their concubines. His reign saw the notorious pogrom of 1389 when a priest leading a procession through the Jewish quarter of Prague on Easter Sunday was stoned by a Jewish child, causing the townspeople to turn out for the slaughter of 3,000