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July 26, 2006
Theocracy, A Changing World Today?
Ask again. My penning of Maddalena’s sequel, the second volume of The Golden Tripolis trilogy, is constantly interrupted by refreshing my mind and rechecking the copious literature on the subject.
The life and reign of the saturnine Habsburg Emperor Rudolf II, the hero's master in Bartholomaeus, book two, is endlessly fascinating. Diagnosed as schizophrenic by modern researchers--after all his great-grandmother Juana the Mad was truly loco, and his grandfather Charles V was more than melancholy--his reign was like no other. After Rudolf moved the seat of his empire from Vienna to Prague--I too would be terrified if the Turks were constantly knocking on my city gates--he surrounded himself by artists, charlatans, and good-for nothings to create an imaginary world of power to which he could retreat from the real, threatening one.
The event described below belongs to a passage of Bohemian history for the third volume, the beginning of the Thirty Years' War, when the tension between the Prague Protestants and Catholics turned into open war. Twenty-seven protesting heads of Czech nobles, knights, and middle-class citizens rolled one way or another, so that the pope could order the churches of Rome to peal for another Catholic victory over a Christian brother-infidel, the spreading of a much hated Protestant faction in Europe.
On June 21, 1621, the executioner Jan Mydlar, himself a Protestant, labored for four hours with four swords to decapitate twenty-four notables, foolishly hoping for clemency. Fatigued from the task, he decided to hang the remaining three, one from the gallows in the center of the Old Town square, and the others from a beam jutting out from a Town Hall window. Jan Jessenius, the learned rector of the Protestant Charles University in Prague, had his tongue first torn out, and then nailed to his decapitated head. Others had the honor of having their right hand cut and then reattached in a similar manner.
Twelve heads in iron baskets faced the Moldau from the stone bridge, now called Charles Bridge, six facing the castle of the ruling Catholic Habsburg, the other in the direction of the Catholic Church of the Holy Saviour. Many of the bodies have been quartered and thus impaled on iron posts around town. Except for the skull of one nobleman, Count Slik, returned to the family for burial, the heads rotted in their baskets for a decade.
What a bloody reminder of the supremacy of the Habsburgs, and the Roman Catholic Church!
The victims' crimes? Fighting for religious freedom and national identity. When I think about the current conflict between Israel and the Middle East, I wonder where is the root, its beginning, and is there hope for an end? In five-hundred years, perhaps?
And don’t tell me that I am a pessimist!
Posted by Eva Siroka at July 26, 2006 03:32 PM