Charles IV rebuilt Prague on the model of Paris and gave it a university
Born Wenceslaus in Prague in 1316, the future Emperor Charles IV spent seven boyhood years at the French court and took his new name from his great-uncle, the king of France. Back home he remade Prague after Paris, founded Central Europe's first university there in 1348, and presided over what Czechs remember as Bohemia's golden age.
He was the son of John of Bohemia, of the House of Luxembourg, and Elizabeth, sister of the last male Přemyslid king, and he always stressed his Czech ancestry, which included two saints. He spoke Latin, Czech, German, French and Italian. As a teenager in Tuscany he founded the fortress town of Montecarlo, Mount Charles, near Lucca, and from 1333 he governed Bohemia for his often absent, failing-sighted father.
His rise to the imperial throne began awkwardly. Elected King of the Romans on 11 July 1346 through his father's alliance with Pope Clement VI, he was mocked as the priests' king and faced a rival emperor, Louis IV. The next month his father died fighting at Crécy on the losing French side, and Charles fled the field wounded. His prospects brightened when Louis died after a stroke on a bear hunt in October 1347, and by 1349 he was undisputed ruler.
In Prague he built the New Town, and his university trained the lawyers and officials who made the city Central Europe's intellectual hub. In 1354 he crossed the Alps without an army, took the Lombard crown in Milan, and was crowned emperor in Rome in April 1355, staying only hours and abandoning imperial claims in Italy, to the scorn of the poet Petrarch. His Golden Bull of 1356 fixed the rules for electing future kings and held for roughly four centuries.
Coronation at Arles in 1365 made him the last emperor crowned king of Burgundy and the crowned ruler of every kingdom in the empire. He expanded Bohemian lands by purchase, marriage and, in Brandenburg, war, ordering a survey of the new territory whose 1375 Landbuch is the first record of many villages. Troubled by gout, he died in Prague in 1378.
Source: Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor
