The aim of this book is to introduce the reader to the phenomenon of functioning of medieval Prague in the period of its prolonged and dynamic development between the 10th and early 15th century. In those days Prague was one of the largest, and in the 14th century the broadest, urban clusters of central Europe. Being the central point of a kingdom, its history is indivisibly connected with political history and has been the subject of intense historiographic reflections in Latin, Czech and German languages for 900 years. The city was also a major university center where a groundbreaking religious-social movement was born, which changed the face of the country. Prague was also one of the so-called “multi-part towns”, consisting of several municipalities and separate urban complexes. This publication is devoted to those sub-towns of Prague, their inhabitants and the institutions which served them. The events and places not connected directly to the “urban” narration constitute its background, for they are inseparable and significantly influenced the lives of the whole community. When writing about the capital city of the Kingdom of Bohemia it is impossible to abandon the traditional Prague-centric point of view (a view increasingly criticized in historiography), in which the casual chain of events leads to – as opposed to from – the culmination of that history: the martyrdom of John Hus (1415). Not discarding the logic of such division of events, the phenomena connected with Hussitism were treated as a completely new period, while the parallel emergence of a communal republic as contradictory to the hitherto popular model of Prague’s “urbanness”. At the same time, the narration of this book finishes in the early 15th century, with the Decree of Kutná Hora from 1409 serving as a conventional borderline between epochs. In the author’s view this allowed for the conclusion of the narration on the first two fundamental phases of development of the agglomeration: early urban and post-charted. The focus on the history of individual municipalities, their citizens and municipal institutions is intended to capture the local specifics of social development and legal changes. The connecting issues were, relative to the importance of the issue, poorly exposed in the literature, making it particularly difficult to compare with the situation in other cities. Many of the threads in this area required a re-examination of the sources and a thorough presentation of the ongoing scientific debate. A serious, at the same time, limitation was the destruction in 1945 of some of the sources available to former researchers. Meanwhile, in matters of political history, Church history, ideology or art, it was mostly enough to reach already ready-made conclusions, firmly established in historiography.
I dedicate this work to the memory of the distinguished Prague archaeologist Ladislav Hrdlička, who has been this author’s unforgettable first guide to the history of the capital city at the riverbank of Vltava.