Prague

The Bethlehem Chapel in Prague was built for preaching in Czech, and Jan Hus preached there from 1402 to a congregation of ordinary townspeople. His programme was moral before it was doctrinal: clergy should be poor, benefices should not be sold, and a priest in mortal sin has no business ministering. Behind it lay the writings of John Wyclif, circulating in Bohemia through the university, and behind that a national grievance about German dominance in church and university appointments.

He was excommunicated, went on preaching, and accepted a safe conduct to the Council of Constance in 1414 to defend himself. He was arrested, tried and burned in July 1415, and his ashes were thrown in the Rhine so that nothing would remain to venerate.

Bohemia rose. The distinguishing practice of the movement was giving the cup as well as the bread to the laity, which the council had explicitly forbidden, and the chalice became its emblem, painted on shields and banners. Its programme was set out as the Four Articles of Prague, and the wars that followed saw a small kingdom defeat repeated crusades. A compromise permitted communion in both kinds in Bohemia, and a separate church survived there for two centuries, a full hundred years before Luther. It was ended by force after the defeat at White Mountain in 1620, and the reimposition of Catholicism drove the Unity of the Brethren into exile, from where it grew into the Moravian Church.

Prague's Jewish quarter holds the Old New Synagogue, built around 1270 and in use ever since, which makes it the oldest active synagogue in Europe, and a cemetery where restricted ground forced burials to be layered over each other twelve deep. The community's history includes the Easter pogrom of 1389, in which much of it was killed, and long periods of relative security under emperors who valued its taxes and its printers.

Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the Maharal, was its most famous rabbi in the sixteenth century, a scholar of law and of the inner meaning of the tradition who wrote on education and on the relation of Israel to the nations. The golem legend attached to his name much later, in the nineteenth century, and there is no sign of it in his own writings or in his contemporaries: the story is a modern creation grown from earlier and vaguer traditions about the animation of a figure of clay, and it now overshadows a substantial body of thought.

At the same period Rudolf II moved the imperial court to Prague and filled it with astronomers, alchemists and collectors. Tycho Brahe brought his observations there and Johannes Kepler inherited them, working out from the orbit of Mars that planetary paths are ellipses. John Dee and Edward Kelley came seeking patronage for their conversations with angels and were eventually expelled. The court paid for it all, and it left the city with a reputation for the occult that its tourist trade has never let go.