Free Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City by Peter Demetz

and after the Curia denied his request that his children born to Agnes be legitimized, the idea emerged to divorce Margarete, who had been unable to bear him an heir, and to contract a Bohemian-Hungarian marriage to strengthen the peace. This was all done rather speedily; a group of clerics investigated Margarete’s past and conveniently discovered that she had, as a widow, entered a Dominican convent in Trier, taking an oath of chastity which invalidated her marriage to Otakar; Otakar married young Kunhuta, granddaughter of King Béla, strikingly beautiful and rich, intelligent, and, possibly, a spoiled brat. On October 18, 1261, Margarete quietly left Prague Castle for a silent old age in Austria, and on December 23, just two months later, Otakar, now twenty-eight, and sixteen-year-old Kunhuta were ceremoniously welcomed to Prague Castle by the archbishop of Mainz, six bishops, and Otakar’s princely in-laws from Brandenburg and Poland. After the couple had been crowned in the cathedral, a magnificent feast was prepared, with music, dancing, and rich gifts for the guests, who dined at long wooden tables in a hall constructed for the purpose on Letná Hill.
    The archbishop of Mainz had some qualms about the coronation of Kunhuta, not mentioned in the pope’s permission, but Otakar’s gift, including a hundred measures of gold for his archdiocese and four measures of silver for the adornment of Mainz Cathedral, made him change his mind. There may have been some talk in the wings, for the cleric writing about these affairs in the Annales Otakariani was caught between his loyalty to the dynasty and his feeling for the aging former queen. He tried to explain to himself why she had left and sadly remarked, “God knows the reason.” Later chronicles, especially those on the Austrian side, suggest that Otakar succumbed to the evil charms of power-hungry Kunhuta; it is true that she was more independent than most, established her own office with a chancellor in charge, and, after Otakar had been killed, married Záviš of Falkenštejn, his archenemy, a leader of Prague’s internal
opposition to the king, who ruled the country for a time and was put to death by a pro-Hapsburg faction in 1290.
    Otakar never won epic battles, but he was accomplished in turning even military half-measures to his political advantage, and in the 1260s and early 1270s he strengthened his power by military expeditions, skillful politicking, and fiduciary arrangements in a way that astonished European observers. By invitation and marriage he had become duke of Austria, and after his expeditions against the Hungarians, he held on to Styria and the land down to Pordenone, north of Venice, until 1276 and acquired Carinthia by bequest (paying off his cousin Philip, the eternal bane of his life, with an empty title and more persuasive subsidies). He ruled Carniola, a region then including Slovene Ljubljana, asserted his power in the patriarchy of Aquileja, an old bishopric (in the northern Italian province of Udine), and prompted other important towns of the Adriatic region to seek his royal protection. Bohemia nearly touched the sea, though not as literally as in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and rhetorically gifted contemporaries, at least those in the chronicles, praised his realm extending from “sea to sea” and were able to imagine Pemyslid standards fluttering on the shores of the Baltic and close to the Adriatic. It was a kingdom, a modern Czech historian suggests, that anticipated the contours of the later Austrian monarchy of many nations, and it was ironic that it was to be destroyed by Otakar’s enemy Rudolf of Hapsburg, who, in turn, left it to his heirs to build the realm anew, to be ruled later from Vienna rather than Prague.
    Otakar’s authority was based on personal power and on shifting local alliances at home and abroad; his tendency to centralize administrative decisions alienated many Czech nobles, especially in the south of