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

the country, and many powerful Austrians feared loss of their prerogatives to Otakar’s administrators. The Styrian noble Siegfried von Mahrenberg, whom Otakar suspected of disloyalty, was seized, dragged to Bohemia, held in a Prague Castle dungeon, and killed there, provoking his relatives to seek their revenge. Otakar had considerable support in the Bohemian towns and in Vienna but many enemies among Czech and Moravian nobles, as, for instance, Záviš of Palkenštejn and Boreš of Riesenburk; though it is true that many noble Austrian families were loyal to him, especially the Kuenrings (declared to be robber barons by later Austrian historians), it was symptomatic that when he faced ruin, members of the Vienna town patriciate led by Paltram vor dem Freithof conspired to defend him and had to run for their lives when Rudolf of Hapsburg finally and triumphantly entered the city in 1276.
    A wise Czech historian has suggested that Otakar’s achievements as reformer of the law, innovative administrator, and chivalric protector of law and order were far more important than his ephemeral military exploits. Otakar’s administrative and legal initiatives quickened rather than triggered historical developments that had emerged during the rule of his immediate predecessors. These developments included the shift from a feudal to a money economy; internal colonization, with Czech farmers fanning out to grounds never tilled before; and the arrival, in significant numbers, of German farmers, artisans, and merchants, invited by monasteries and by royal power to cultivate new lands and establish new towns to increase the tax base. A chronicle tells us how Otakar withdrew one day to study the corpus of Bohemian and other laws, to identify bad rules, do away with useless decrees, and “transform bad habits into better ones.” The presence at his court of Italian notaries and legal experts would suggest that he wanted to follow the splendid administrative example of Emperor Frederick II, without challenging the church, of course, or, at any rate, to apply in his realm administrative and legal norms that had been useful elsewhere—as, for instance, the ones concerning Jews which Otakar lifted, without many changes, from legal documents of the Babenberg duke Frederick the Belligerent. Pemysl Otakar II was unable to protect Prague against recurrent floods, fires, and miserable winters of rising food prices, but he kept away foreign invaders, who respectfully called him rex ferreus, the iron king; disciplined predatory nobles; shielded burghers and farmers from exploitation; and made valiant attempts to stabilize the currency and the marketplace by controlling weights and measures. He was the richest ruler in Central Europe, and his income from taxes, regalia, and the newly organized Bohemian silver mines was apparently close to one hundred thousand measures of silver per year.
    In spite of his innovative administrative ideas, Otakar followed the traditions of early medieval princes in conducting his royal business, and spent much time on horseback, riding with his retinue of knights and notaries and sometimes with the queen, from castle to castle and from town to town rather than luxuriating in his Prague residence. He ruled from Prague but he governed on the spot, be it at his favorite Bohemian castle of Zvikov or in Vienna or Graz. Yet it is clear that he, being of a pious bent of mind, insisted on regularly spending Christmas and Easter, and the feasts of the Bohemian saints, at his Prague castle. His architectural plans were based on strategic and administrative considerations rather than aesthetic or antiquarian ideas, in a style perhaps more characteristic of Charles IV one hundred years later: at a time when Mongol
invasions threatened from the east, massive defense systems of walls, moats, and towers were essential to defend towns; and Otakar not only enlarged the royal residence at the castle but built up the Hradany