4.8. 1306 Murder of King Wenceslas III.

During the hot afternoon of August 4, 1306, a vicious assassin stabbed King Wenceslas III three times while he was staying in the house of the Dean of Olomouc, Budislav. To this day it is still unknown who carried out the deed and for what reason.

In the spring of 1306 Vladislav Lokytek besieged Kraków and the Bohemian dominion in Poland began to shake at its foundations. In this situation, Wenceslas III summoned the provincial cash to Olomouc, from where his army was to move to Teschen and head to war. Wenceslas III was aware that he was facing a strong opponent. He therefore left nothing to chance.

During his absence, he entrusted Henry of Carinthia with the administration of Bohemia and Moravia, who put his own warriors at the disposal of the Bohemian king. "In case the Bohemian king should perish in the battle with the Poles, the Duke of Carinthia, as provincial governor and Wenceslaus'vagr to claim the vacant Czech throne," writes Vladimír Liška in his book The Greatest Mysteries of Czech History.

At the turn of July and August, Václav III went to Olomouc. It was there that he gathered the Czech and Moravian nobility for the upcoming war campaign. However, the Czech lords were rather sluggish about this expedition, each war cost a lot of money and they did not want to dig deep into their pockets.

The king, however, said that they had received enough property from him, and now it was time to repay the favour he had previously shown them. At the same time he let it be known that on his return from the Polish campaign he would have all new possessions examined records of the noblemen's acquired estates, and he would demand some of his gifts back from the nobles. He was said to have even prepared a list of those he wanted to accuse of treason to the royal majesty and of corruption, with Peter Angel at the top of the list.

"Some historians are inclined to this conclusion, and believe that the initiators of the assassination of Wenceslas III were the king's agents. They were Czech nobles who feared the sanctions they were facing from the king," Liška adds.

What actually happened on 4 August 1306 in the house of the Olomouc dean Budislav is still unknown. "During the hot afternoon of that day, a vicious murderer stabbed the king three times. Immediately after the murder, the guards in the courtyard beat a knight, Konrad of Botenstein, to death without being questioned, but even contemporaries expressed doubts as to whether it was really he who had done the killing. The Zbraslav chronicler explicitly states - Whether it was he or another who was guilty, I do not know...," writes Jan Bauer in his book Revolutionary Events in Czech History.

Vladimír Liška, Největší záhady českých dějin, Jan Bauer, Převratné události v českých dějinách, www.wikipedia.org