Jan Jesensky was a nobleman and the rector of the Charles University, based in Prague. In the year 1620, Jesensky and twenty-six other men took part in an uprising, the Protestant faction opposing the rule of the Habsburg monarchy, which was Catholic. The fighting came to a grinding, defeated halt at the now-famous Battle of Bila Hora (White Mountain) that same year.
Execution Day
The following year, on June 21, Jesensky and the other twenty-six men were sent to the scaffold for their actions. The executions were performed on Prague's Old Town Square. They began at 5 a.m. and continued until 9 a.m. Three of the men were hanged; the rest were beheaded.
Jesensky was among those beheaded, which was fortunate for him. The executioner, Jan Mydlar, sympathized with those about to be executed, and for those who died by the sword, Mydlar used razor-sharp instruments, striking so swiftly and cleanly that an English spectator later wrote that "...their heads appeared to have been blown from their shoulders..."
Jesensky, a highly-educated man, was a member of a noble family, as were many of his friends and compatriots who died with him on that day. He had attempted to raise the standard of learning at the Charles University, and was well-known for his skills as an orator. As a gruesome lesson to the crowd, Mydlar opened Jesensky's mouth and hacked out his tongue, before beheading him. After all the executions had been performed, Jesensky's body suffered an additional indignity: It was quartered, and the pieces were taken outside the city gate and impaled on spikes, along the road leading to the city of Kutna Hora.
The Aftermath
Jesensky's head, with his tongue nailed to the side of it, was placed in an iron basket that was then hung on one of the towers of Prague's famous Charles Bridge, along with the heads of eleven of his fellow-sufferers. It wasn't taken down for approximately twenty years, when it was buried, along with the ten other heads (one head, that of Count Slik, had been reclaimed by his widow after remaining on the bridge for a year), underneath the floor of Tyn Cathedral, which faces the former execution site.
Jesensky was a friend of Tycho Brahe, who is also buried beneath the floor of Tyn Cathedral. As a dreadfully ironic side note to Jesensky's life and death, he was the first person to hold a public autopsy in the Czech Lands, in 1600. One of the people present was none other than Jan Mydlar, the executioner who, twenty-one years later, would find himself torturing, beheading, and mutilating his former professor.
Magic Prague, by Angelo Maria Ripellino
Erin Naillon - I am deeply interested in the supernatural, as well as history (especially women's history) and true crime. The paranormal has always ...
Join the Conversation