Read Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City for Free Online Page A

Prague does not lack a touch of Virgil, provided by the learned chronicler—“Behold, I see a great city whose fame will touch the stars” ( “urbem conspicio, fama que sydera tanget,” I , 7 ; Aeneid , I, 287: “ … famam qui terminet astris” )—and her topography of
the future castle has remarkable precision. On the west bank of the Vltava River, there is a place protected by the Brusnice brook on the north, while on the south a rocky hill, the Petn, rises above the land and spins around, as if it were a dolphin, turning toward the brook. That is the place where a man hewing a threshold ( prah ) will be found and the castle of Praga should be built. Paradoxically, Lubossa, the pagan phitonissa, continues her prediction by saying that from that castle, one day, two golden olive trees will grow: St. Wenceslas and St. Vojtch, the famous missionary and first Czech bishop of Prague (she hides the names in a riddle), who will illuminate the entire world by their wonders and miracles. Cosmas enhances the paradox by saying that she would have continued to speak if the hellish spirit of prophecy ( spiritus pestilens et prophetans, I,9) had not left her body, created by God.
    Even in our century of suspicion, old romantic ideas about Lubossa have surprisingly survived, and the cultural policies of the Communist Party insisted that Dean Cosmas carefully preserved the oral traditions of the toiling masses. More independent scholars, who were averse to simplistic, linear, and strictly national ideas of transmitting narratives, were long unable to publish their arguments. After emigrating to West Germany in 1968, the Czech scholar Vladimír Karbusický, with great learning and astonishing tenacity, radically affected, if not destroyed, the ancient dreams about the simple folk and what they told the scribe Cosmas. Karbusický’s hypothesis, fully informed by international scholarship, does away with the strictly Czech qualities of the early stories and shows that they consist of wandering motifs well known from the sagas of other peoples. From the romantic debris a new image of Cosmas emerges—a cosmopolitan littérateur easily conversant with the literary canon of his time who takes his cue from the wandering singers, artists, “kitharists” (about whom he speaks himself), and joculatores gathered at the contemporary Prague court; the scene shifts from the wretched huts of the illiterate peasants to the court of duke and king, as a splendid place for transmitting what the poets recite; art combines with art, and Cosmas reflects the consciousness of the feudal elite.
    In such a view, even Lubossa and Pemysl are deprived of their strongly national character (after all, the plowman as ruler appears in the traditions of many societies, including that of Rome, Hungary, and the Goths); Cosmas particularly is seen to have strengthened and at the same time undermined fictive Lubossa by relating her narrative to that of the historical Mathilda of Toscana (1046-1115), a remarkable woman of his own time, who by her diplomatic negotiations between pope and emperor
adversely affected Czech dynastic interests, then allied to the emperor. Both Lubossa and Mathilda were women of extraordinary power, both of them ruled and judged, and both, provoking the male world by their energy and competence, invited courtly Klatsch and revealing anecdotes which gave a chance to men of lesser power to take their revenge; it is, indeed, difficult to ignore that, in the entire Chronica Boëmorum, they are the only women about whom Cosmas tells risqué stories. Disorderly Lubossa arguing a legal case from her unmade bed has her counterpart, and not only structurally, in Mathilda, who, at forty-four years of age, marries a seventeen-year-old duke and has great trouble, on her wedding night, in arousing the appetites of the suddenly impotent young man. Cosmas coyly regrets that he has to tell the story, and yet he comes up with a good deal of lip-smacking