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

fortifications. He continued the initiatives of his father, who, by 1231, had begun to surround the settlements on the right riverbank with defensive walls and high towers, though they excluded a few neighborhoods (for example, the old German neighborhood at St. Peter) and cut others in half, the church within the wall and the others outside. About 1235 Otakar’s father had invited South German colonists to establish an autonomous little settlement, under the supervision of Eberhard, master of the royal mint, around the Church of St. Gallus near the core of the right-bank settlement; King Pemysl Otakar II suddenly one day in the spring of 1257 expelled the inhabitants of most of the suburbium under the castle and dispersed them in neighboring hamlets while North German colonists were invited to take their place; he surrounded their new settlement with a system of walls and moats. In the late 1270s, then, the Prague region consisted, apart from many hamlets and villages, of this strongly fortified New Town (later it was called the Minor Town, or Malá Strana) in the shadow of the castle; the Old Town on the opposite side of the river, which included the Jewish community and the German neighborhood of St. Gallus (the still older German settlement at St. Peter remaining extra muros); the Vyšehrad, with its own suburb; and Prague Castle itself, made impregnable by the king who was to die luckless on the plains of the Moravian-Austrian border.
    The Early Jewish Community and the Prague Tosafists
    Traveling Jewish merchants were doing business in the Prague and Bohemian regions in the ninth and tenth centuries—coming and going in caravans, selling spices, silk, and other luxury goods to barons, clerics of the upper hierarchy, and the court, and exporting from the Slavic east slaves, weapons, leather goods, and beeswax to Mediterranean and Oriental countries. The most reliable evidence concerning the business activities of Jewish merchants, preeminent among their competitors, can be found in a document called the “Raffelstetten Customs Ordinance” of about 905, which regulated traffic between eastern Franconia, Bohemia, and the greater Moravian realm. In the Prague region, Jewish families may have settled in different spots on both sides of the river in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries; legal documents issued (c. 1080) by Vratislav II
guaranteed judicial privileges to resident Italians and Germans, and to Jews as well, and they were confirmed by Sobslav II nearly a hundred years later. Dean Cosmas mentions a rich Jew named Podiva, who bought himself a castle, but he does not say whether he did so before or after becoming a Christian; he also reports that in 1091 the noble Wirpirk, wife of the Pemyslid Prince Konrad of Brno (Brünn) in Moravia, in a dramatic scene told the duke of Prague to desist from attacking and plundering Moravia—it was entirely unnecessary, she suggested, because he could find all the gold he needed in the treasuries of Prague Jews and other merchants; their property was his anyway, and she gave him, in case he did not know, the address of these merchants at the vicus Vyšegradensis, a Jewish neighborhood close to Vyšehrad Castle.
    Life abruptly changed for the Jews of Central Europe, not only those in the Prague region, when a ragtag army of crusaders, perhaps twenty thousand strong, ready to start a war against the infidels right then and there, in the year 1096 marched from northern France through Germany and Bohemia, plundering (with the enthusiastic help of the townsfolk), setting fire to Jewish neighborhoods, baptizing by force and killing those who resisted. At Mainz a thousand Jews were killed, it is said, and in Prague, while the duke was absent in Poland, the bishop tried to prevent the worst and told the crusaders that they were committing a sin in the eyes of God. Two years later, in 1098, the Jews wanted to leave, and provoked the duke’s ire because they tried to take their