What, apart from blue blood, do Wenceslaus I, Přemysl Otakar II, John of
Luxembourg and Charles IV, the first king of Bohemia to become Holy Roman
Emperor, have in common? Their royal corpses were eviscerated via an
abdominal incision, their body cavities filled with herbs, and then placed
in a tank filled with resin and a mixture of potassium chloride and
sulphate of potash. Until the practice was forbidden in the Czech lands in
the late 18th century, a surprising number of bodies of socially and
politically prominent were anthropogenically mummified