Not all Prague walls were built because of harsh war or constant fear of a dangerous enemy. The most famous massive fortification wall, which still climbs steeply up the slope over the top of the Lesser Town’s Petřín Hill to this day, has its original origins in ordinary and pure mercy. It was ordered to be built during the fourteenth century by the most beloved in the pantheon of Czech rulers, the wise Emperor Charles IV. During those times, the Czech landscape was struck by a very bad and long year of crop failure. The grain withered in the fields, the orchards dried up, and poverty began to slowly sneak across the country accompanied by terrible and constant hunger. Common people on the estates had nothing to put in their mouths, and a wave of people begging for bread pressed the Emperor from all corners of the land.
Charles IV was a powerful emperor, endowed with a great treasury, but he didn’t want to just simply support the poor people who paid taxes by merely handing out gold coins. He knew very well that honest work born out of necessity gladdens the most, and giving things to people humiliatingly for free is not beneficial to morale. Therefore, he devised a great nationwide plan in which every citizen as well as the royal city could find benefit. He commanded all the unemployed artisans from Prague and farmers suffering from their devastated and barren fields to gather below the hill near Újezd. He ruled that, for the safety of the future part of the expanding city and the Lesser Town, they would build a new magnificent and massive fortification above the river over the steep Petřín slopes. Abundant numbers of all the men suddenly gained employment.
Work on the massive stone wall then truly started in an enormous hustle soon after. Masons transported heavy marlstone blocks, porters panted heavily on the steep slopes with baskets of coarse sand, and bricklayers continuously linked them carefully with unyielding mortar. Throughout the entire construction period, royal officials daily paid out silver groschens, for which the hungry and exhausted families could finally honestly buy the deeply scarce food, flour, and fatty roasted meals again. The people from all around the wide region were thus saved from the ugliest and deadliest poverty. The people spontaneously and out of deep respect began to nickname the entire long fortification the “Hunger Wall,” for the massive and satisfying project drove hunger from every cottage.
According to numerous very interesting records, moreover, the monarch himself preferred to visit the construction personally in detail to praise it with silver and small gifts without entourages. He regularly set out from the castle courtyard to the bricklayers in a light, simple coarse robe; sometimes he even personally brought the people in the heat and exhaustion small biscuit treats from baskets or loaves of bread to drink with for the satisfied hunger for encouragement. To this day, the crenellated and thick stone wall in the fortifications reminds all passing generations not only of the great visions and the expansion of medieval Prague at the time, but also of the ruler’s paternal help to his own devoted, ordinary, mediated people.