What's in a Prague street name

Originally published on X on 8 November 2023.

Jan IV. z Dražic was born into a noble family around 1260.

Jan II (died 1236) and Jan III (died 1278) were bishops in Prague, so you might already have guessed what Jan IV ultimately became.

After his investiture by King Wenceslas II, he was ordained as Bishop of Prague on 10 December 1301. The bishop’s court was located where the square is now.

In 1310, Jan supported the election of another Jan/John (namely of Luxembourg) as King of Bohemia.

While the 1310s would involve a lot of close cooperation with the King, they also involved a lot of hostility from the nobility, as he objected to the Inquisition and its treatment of Dominican monks.

One Heinrich von Schönburg, who had been removed by Jan, went blabbing to Pope John XXII, who suspended him in 1318 and forced him to leave Prague.

Having been found innocent in 1326, he wouldn’t return to Bohemia until 1329, when he was about seventy years old.

Once back in Bohemia, he focused on church reform and developing the episcopal city of Roudnice nad Labem.

Roudnice also had a bridge named after him, but it was destroyed during the Thirty Years War. Here are its remnants, photographed in 1906.

He also saw to the reconstruction of St. Giles’ Church in Prague’s Old Town (coming up in about fifty posts’ time?).

Jan died in 1343 and was buried at St Vitus’ Cathedral.

If you like excellent candelabra – and you should – there’s one right here.