Free Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City by John Banville Page B

out of the ordinary, so why has the image of myself walking there lodged so stubbornly in my recollection?
     Was it that the fresh-cut white stone paving flags and bags of mortar stacked against the east wall of the cathedral reminded
     me of Sudek's great series of photographs of St Vitus's under reconstruction in the 1920s? I do not know, just as I cannot
     say for certain what is the true length of the coastline of Europe. All I know is that I can see myself there, can see the
     silver-and-pearl light of afternoon, the gleam on the cobbles, that Japanese man frowning at his map, a grubby dog trotting
     past on its way to something important. These are the things we remember. It is as if we were to focus our cameras on the
     great sights and the snaps when developed all came out with nothing in them save undistinguished but maniacally detailed foregrounds.
    If Prague is not place, is it people, then? Not the great sights but the great figures? The Emperor Charles IV (1316-78) in
     1355 made Prague the capital of the Holy Roman Empire, the 'Rome of the North', thus initiating the city's Golden Age, attracting
     artists and scholars from all over Europe, including the poet Petrarch. Charles, son of John of Luxembourg, the blind soldier
     who died at the Battle of Crecy - a blind soldier? - was elected King of Germany in 1347 and crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1355. He proceeded to shift power away from Italy and
     the papacy, and built his empire on the core of Bohemia and Moravia. His 'Golden Bull' of 1356 formed a new constitution for
     the empire, set out the procedures for imperial elections and the rights of the seven electors, declaring their domains indivisible.
     Prague expanded under Charles's rule; the horse and cattle markets, today's Wen­ceslas and Charles Squares, were incorporated
     into the New Town, work began on St Vitus's Cathedral, and the first university in central Europe was instituted. Charles
     was an extraordinarily liberal and enlightened ruler, highly intelligent and richly cultured, a vivid historical mover and
     achiever. Yet I cannot see him. The image I have of him is of one of those statues that are carried aloft in religious processions,
     gilded and impassive and mechanically nodding. Far more real to me is his blind old dad, lover of jousts and military adventuring,
     last seen hacking sightlessly all round him with his great-sword on the field at Crecy.
    The single historical figure who most epitomises old Prague is the Emperor Rudolf II. This melancholy madman, gull of all
     manner of mountebanks and charlatans but also a patient patron of the astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, was born
     in 1552 into one of the more complicated Habsburg lines. His father, the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II, son of the Emperor
     Ferdinand I and Emperor Charles V's brother, married Charles's daughter Maria. All right, all right, let us put it another
     way. Rudolf's father was Emperor Maximilian II. Maximilian was the son of Emperor Ferdinand I, who was brother to Emperor
     Charles V, founder of the Habsburg dynasty - the daddy of them all, as one might say. Maximilian married his cousin Maria,
     daughter of Charles V. As the attentive reader will already have spotted, this of course meant that Rudolf was by double lineage
     the great-grandson of Joanna the Mad! 13 No wonder there were blemishes in Rudolf's psychological profile. Still, what family does not have its own version of Mad
     Joanna, squawking and jumping up and down on her perch somewhere amid the denser foliage of the family tree?
    At the age of eleven, on the insistence of his mother, the mournful Maria, Rudolf was packed off from the relative liberality
     of his father Max­imilian's court at Vienna to live in the household of the Spanish King Philip II, his mother's brother,
     there to be taught some of the harsher realities of life as a Catholic monarch in a Europe facing into the horrors of the
     Counter-Reformation. During the