“Si vous êtes amenés à choisir un nouveau roi, je vous conseille de ne pas traverser les forêts à la recherche des bois tortueux.” The image of John the Blind in Bohemian medieval sources
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Epic poets and chroniclers writing in Middle French made the Count of Luxembourg and King of Bohemia, known as John the Blind, the incarnation of the ideal of the knightly king. On the other hand, the picture offered in Latin and Czech sources written in Bohemia in the fourteenth century is much darker. The king was reproached for his German sympathies to the detriment of the local nobility and the Czech language, both of which were central to the ideal of the good king as it was then being constructed in Bohemia. Above all, he was accused of embezzling the kingdom’s money to finance useless military expeditions, tournaments, and trips abroad. John would only come to Bohemia to collect funds before leaving for his beloved Luxembourg. The willful blindness of the authors of the sources written in fourteenth-century Bohemia, who refuse to understand that King John also had duties in Luxembourg and the Empire, is the reason for the persistent label of “foreign king” that sticks to John the Blind in later sources, in the collective memory, and, until recently, in Czech historiography.
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