Czech Republic

The Kingdom of Bohemia, with Moravia, lay outside the Roman limes apart from a short-lived frontier camp in southern Moravia, so it has no provincial building inscriptions and its transactional record begins in the middle ages — and begins in silver. The Kutná Hora mines made Bohemia the silver power of central Europe, and from 1300 the Prague groschen, struck from that silver and counted sixty to the kopa or weighed against the Prague mark of 253.14 grams, circulated far beyond the kingdom; in 1520 the mines at Jáchymov produced the large silver piece that gave Europe the word thaler and eventually dollar. Bohemian sums are therefore usually stated in an actual circulating coin whose weight and assay have been measured from hoards, which puts them unusually close to metal. The archives match the coinage: the weekly building accounts of St Vitus Cathedral for 1372 to 1378, kept by a canon of the metropolitan chapter, survive as one of the fullest medieval records anywhere of what a cathedral lodge paid its master, its carvers and its stonecutters, week by week and job by job.

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Master Peter Parler Paid Fifteen Threescore of Groschen for the Tomb of King Přemysl Otakar I 1377

In 1377 the canon keeping the accounts of the St Vitus works at Prague Castle noted that, on the Emperor Charles IV’s own order, he had had the tomb made for Přemysl Otakar I, king of Bohemia, and had paid master Peter fifteen threescore of groschen — 900 Prague groschen, reckoned by the scholar who publishes it as roughly a rank-and-file stonemason’s earnings for a whole year. Czech scholarship reads the magister Petrus of these accounts as Peter Parler, the cathedral’s master of works, who designed and carved the recumbent royal effigy and its tumba; the payment itself is not in dispute, only the identification. The sum bundles design, carving and setting in place, and it is one of only a handful of entries in the accounts that pay for sculpture rather than for rough building. It was made in silver groschen, so the gold figure comes through the contemporary rate of eighteen groschen to the ducat; converting instead by the coin’s measured silver content implies a bimetallic ratio of about twelve to one, which corroborates it.

~172.6g

Weekly building accounts of the St Vitus fabric, Prague Castle, 1377, edited in Neuwirth, Josef. Die Wochenrechnungen und der Betrieb des Prager Dombaues in den Jahren 1372–1378. (Prague, 1890), pp. 324 and 498; Ottová, Michaela. “Petr Parléř a sochaři svatovítské hutě.” Zprávy památkové péče 84:3 (2024), 294–302; Hána, Jiří. “České mincovnictví za Václava IV.” Česká numismatická společnost.