A Mad Emperor

If genius to madness is allied, the same may be said of eccentricity,

and certainly Wenceslas, Emperor of Germany and King of Bohemia, had an

eccentricity that approached the vagaries of the insane. The oldest son

of Charles IV., he was brought up in pomp and luxury, and was so

addicted to sensual gratification that he left the empire largely to

take care of itself, while he gave his time to the pleasures of the

bottle and the chase. Born to the throne, he was crowned King of Bohemia

when but three years of age, was elected King of the Romans at fifteen,

and two years afterwards, in 1378, became Emperor of Germany, when still

but a boy, with regard for nothing but riot and rude frolic.



So far as affairs of state were concerned, the volatile youth either

totally neglected them or treated them with a ridicule that was worse

than neglect. Drunk two-thirds of his time, he now dismissed the most

serious matters with a rude jest, now met his councillors with brutal

fits of rage. The Germans deemed him a fool, and were not far amiss in

their opinion; but as he did not meddle with them, except in holding an

occasional useless diet at Nuremberg, they did not meddle with him. The

Bohemians, among whom he lived, his residence being at Prague, found his

rule much more of a burden. They were exposed to his savage caprices,

and regarded him as a brutal and senseless tyrant.



That there was method in his madness the following anecdote will

sufficiently show. Former kings had invested the Bohemian nobles with

possessions which he, moved by cupidity, determined to have back. This

is the method he took to obtain them. All the nobles of the land were

invited to meet him at Willamow, where he received them in a black tent,

which opened on one side into a white, and on the other into a red one.

Into this tent of ominous hue the waiting nobles were admitted, one at a

time, and were here received by the emperor, who peremptorily bade them

declare what lands they held as gifts from the crown.



Those who gave the information asked, and agreed to cede these lands

back to the crown, were led into the white tent, where an ample feast

awaited them. Those who refused were dismissed with frowns into the red

tent, where they found awaiting them the headsman's fatal block and axe.

The hapless guests were instantly seized and beheaded.



This ghastly jest, if such it may be considered, proceeded for some time

before the nobles still waiting learned what was going on. When at

length a whisper of the frightful mystery of the red tent was borne to

their ears, there were no longer any candidates for its favors. The

emperor found them eagerly willing to give up the ceded lands, and all

that remained found their way to the white tent and the feast.



The emperor's next act of arbitrary tyranny was directed against the

Jews. One of that people had ridiculed the sacrament, in consequence of

which three thousand Jews of Prague were massacred by the populace of

that city. Wenceslas, instead of punishing the murderers, as justice

would seem to have demanded, solaced his easy conscience by punishing

the victims, declaring all debts owed by Christians to Jews to be null

and void.



His next act of injustice and cruelty was perpetrated in 1393, and arose

from a dispute between the crown and the church. One of the royal

chamberlains had caused two priests to be executed on the accusation of

committing a flagrant crime. This action was resented by the Archbishop

of Prague, who declared that it was an encroachment upon the prerogative

of the church, which alone had the right to punish an ecclesiastic. He,

therefore, excommunicated the chamberlain.



This action of the daring churchman threw the emperor into such a

paroxysm of rage that the archbishop, knowing well the man he had to

deal with, took to flight, saving his neck at the expense of his

dignity. The furious Wenceslas, finding that the chief offender had

escaped, vented his wrath on the subordinates, several of whom were

seized. One of them, the dean, moved by indignation, dealt the emperor

so heavy a blow on the head with his sword-knot as to bring the blood.

It does not appear that he was made to suffer for his boldness, but two

of the lower ecclesiastics, John of Nepomuk and Puchnik, were put to

the rack to make them confess facts learned by them in the confessional.

They persistently refused to answer. Wenceslas, infuriated by their

obstinacy, himself seized a torch and applied it to their limbs to make

them speak. They were still silent. The affair ended in his ordering

John of Nepomuk to be flung headlong, during the night, from the great

bridge over the Moldau into the stream. A statue now marks the spot

where this act of tyranny was performed.



The final result of the emperor's cruelty was one which he could not

have foreseen. He had made a saint of Nepomuk. The church, appreciating

the courageous devotion of the murdered ecclesiastic to his duty in

keeping inviolate the secrets of the confessional, canonized him as a

martyr, and made him the patron saint of Bohemia.



Puchnik escaped with his life, and eventually with more than his life.

The tyrant's wrath was followed by remorse,--a feeling, apparently,

which rarely troubled his soul,--and he sought to atone for his cruelty

to one churchman by loading the other with benefits. But his mad fury

changed to as mad a benevolence, and he managed to make a jest of his

gratuity. Puchnik was led into the royal treasury, and the emperor

himself, thrusting his royal hands into his hoards of gold, filled the

pockets, and even the boots, of the late sufferer with the precious

coin. This done, Puchnik attempted to depart, but in vain. He found

himself nailed to the floor, so weighed down with gold that he was

unable to stir. Before he could move he had to disgorge much of his

new-gained wealth, a proceeding to which churchmen in that age do not

seem to have been greatly given. Doubtless the remorseful Wenceslas

beheld this process with a grim smile of royal humor on his lips.



The emperor had a brother, Sigismund by name, a man not of any high

degree of wisdom, but devoid of his wild and immoderate temper.

Brandenburg was his inheritance, though he had married the daughter of

the King of Hungary and Poland, and hoped to succeed to those countries.

There was a third brother, John, surnamed "Von Goerlitz." Sigismund was

by no means blind to his brother's folly, or to the ruin in which it

threatened to involve his family and his own future prospects. This last

exploit stirred him to action. Concerting with some other princes of the

empire, he suddenly seized Wenceslas, carried him to Austria, and

imprisoned him in the castle of Wiltberg, in that country.



A fair disposal, this, of a man who was scarcely fit to run at large,

most reasonable persons would say; but all did not think so. John von

Goerlitz, the younger brother of the emperor, fearing public scandal from

such a transaction, induced the princes who held him to set him free. It

proved a fatal display of kindness and family affection for himself. The

imperial captive was no sooner free than, concealing the wrath which he

felt at his incarceration, he invited to a banquet certain Bohemian

nobles who had aided in it. They came, trusting to the fact that the

tiger's claws seemed sheathed. They had no sooner arrived than the claws

were displayed. They were all seized, by the emperor's order, and

beheaded. Then the dissimulating madman turned on his benevolent brother

John, who had taken control of affairs in Bohemia during his

imprisonment, and poisoned him. It was a new proof of the old adage, it

is never safe to warm a frozen adder.



The restoration of Wenceslas was followed by other acts of folly. In the

following year, 1395, he sold to John Galcazzo Visconti, of Milan, the

dignity of a duke in Lombardy, a transaction which exposed him to

general contempt. At a later date he visited Paris, and here, in a

drunken frolic, he played into the hands of the King of France by ceding

Genoa to that country, and by recognizing the antipope at Avignon,

instead of Boniface IX. at Rome. These acts filled the cup of his folly.

The princes of the empire resolved to depose him. A council was called,

before which he was cited to appear. He refused to come, and was

formally deposed, Rupert, of the Palatinate, being elected in his stead.

Ten years afterwards, in 1410, Rupert died, and Sigismund became Emperor

of Germany.



Meanwhile, Wenceslas remained King of Bohemia, in spite of his brother

Sigismund, who sought to oust him from this throne also. He took him

prisoner, indeed, but trusted him to the Austrians, who at once set him

free, and the Bohemians replaced him on the throne. Some years

afterwards, war continuing, Wenceslas sought to get rid of his brother

Sigismund in the same manner as he had disposed of his brother John, by

poison. He was successful in having it administered to Sigismund and his

ally, Albert of Austria, in their camp before Zuaym. Albert died, but

Sigismund was saved by a rude treatment which seems to have been in

vogue in that day. He was suspended by the feet for twenty-four hours,

so that the poison ran out of his mouth.



The later events in the life of Wenceslas have to do with the most

famous era in the history of Bohemia, the reformation in that country,

and the stories of John Huss and Ziska. The fate of Huss is well known.

Summoned before the council at Constance, and promised a safe-conduct by

the Emperor Sigismund, he went, only to find the emperor faithless to

his word and himself condemned and burnt as a heretic. This base act of

treachery was destined to bring a bloody retribution. It infuriated the

reformers in Bohemia, who, after brooding for several years over their

wrongs, broke out into an insurrection of revenge.



The leader of this outbreak was an officer of experience, named John

Ziska, a man who had lost one eye in childhood, and who bitterly hated

the priesthood for a wrong done to one of his sisters. The martyrdom of

Huss threw him into such deep and silent dejection, that one day the

king, in whose court he was, asked him why he was so sad.



"Huss is burnt, and we have not yet avenged him," replied Ziska.



"I can do nothing in that direction," said Wenceslas; adding,

carelessly, "you might attempt it yourself."



This was spoken as a jest, but Ziska took it in deadly earnest. He,

aided by his friends, roused the people, greatly to the alarm of the

king, who ordered the citizens to bring their arms to the royal castle

of Wisherad, which commanded the city of Prague.



Ziska heard the command, and obeyed it in his own way. The arms were

brought, but they came in the hands of the citizens, who marched in long

files to the fortress, and drew themselves up before the king, Ziska at

their head.



"My gracious and mighty sovereign, here we are," said the bold leader;

"we await your commands; against what enemy are we to fight?"



Wenceslas looked at those dense groups of armed and resolute men, and

concluded that his purpose of disarming them would not work. Assuming a

cheerful countenance, he bade them return home and keep the peace. They

obeyed, so far as returning home was concerned. In other matters they

had learned their power, and were bent on exerting it.



Nicolas of Hussinez, Huss's former lord, and Ziska's seconder in this

outbreak, was banished from the city by the king. He went, but took

forty thousand men with him, who assembled on a mountain which was

afterwards known by the biblical name of Mount Tabor. Here several

hundred tables were spread for the celebration of the Lord's Supper,

July 22, 1419.



Wenceslas, in attempting to put a summary end to the disturbance in the

city, quickly made bad worse. He deposed the Hussite city council in the

Neustadt, the locality of greatest disturbance, and replaced it by a new

one in his own interests. This action filled Prague with indignation,

which was redoubled when the new council sent two clamorous Hussites to

prison. On the 30th of July Ziska led a strong body of his partisans

through the streets to the council-house, and sternly demanded that the

prisoners should be set free.



The councillors hesitated,--a fatal hesitation. A stone was flung from

one of the windows. Instantly the mob stormed the building, rushed into

the council-room, and seized the councillors, thirteen of whom, Germans

by birth, were flung out of the windows. They were received on the pikes

of the furious mob below, and the whole of them murdered.



This act of violence was quickly followed by others. The dwelling of a

priest, supposed to have been that of the seducer of Ziska's sister, was

destroyed and its owner hanged; the Carthusian monks were dragged

through the streets, crowned with thorns, and other outrages perpetrated

against the opponents of the party of reform.



A few days afterwards the career of Wenceslas, once Emperor of Germany,

now King of Bohemia, came to an abrupt end. On August 16 he suddenly

died,--by apoplexy, say some historians, while others say that he was

suffocated in his palace by his own attendants. The latter would seem a

fitting end for a man whose life had been marked by so many acts of

tyrannous violence, some of them little short of insanity.



Whatever its cause, his death removed the last restraint from the mob.

On the following day every church and monastery in Prague was assailed

and plundered, their pictures were destroyed, and the robes of the

priests were converted into flags and dresses. Many of these buildings

are said to have been splendidly decorated, and the royal palace, which

was also destroyed, had been adorned by Wenceslas and his father with

the richest treasures of art. We are told that on the walls of a garden

belonging to the palace the whole of the Bible was written. While the

work of destruction went on, a priest formed an altar in the street of

three tubs, covered by a broad table-top, from which all day long he

dispensed the sacrament in both forms.



The excesses of this outbreak soon frightened the wealthier citizens,

who dreaded an assault upon their wealth, and, in company with Sophia,

the widow of Wenceslas, they sent a deputation to the emperor, asking

him to make peace. He replied by swearing to take a fearful revenge on

the insurgents. The insurrection continued, despite this action of the

nobles and the threats of the emperor. Ziska, finding the citizens too

moderate, invited into the city the peasants, who were armed with

flails, and committed many excesses.



Forced by the moderate party to leave the city, Ziska led his new

adherents to Mount Tabor, which he fortified and prepared to defend.

They called themselves the "people of God," and styled their Catholic

opponents "Moabites," "Amalekites," etc., declaring that it was their

duty to extirpate them. Their leader entitled himself "John Ziska, of

the cup, captain, in the hope of God, of the Taborites."



But having brought the story of the Emperor Wenceslas to an end, we must

stop at this point. The after-life of John Ziska was of such stir and

interest, and so filled with striking events, that we shall deal with it

by itself, in a sequel to the present story.