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INTRODUCTION

This book has two purposes: to study society and politics in the Czech Lands between roughly 1050 and 1200, and to reexamine the nature of power in the High Middle Ages generally. In the former guise, it offers a thorough revision of the current scholarly literature on Bohemia and Moravia; simultaneously, it introduces medievalists outside the Czech Republic to a little-known but integral area of medieval Catholic Europe. As an analysis of power per se, it tracks the logic of dynamism and evolution within largely unchanging political institutions and social structures, revealing the values and strategies that sustained the Czech Lands as a political community. The components of its political and social landscape were stark, simple, and durable: a throne, located in Prague Castle; the duke and the dynasty who dominated it; a society of property owners undifferentiated by hereditary strata; the incipient Roman church; and recognized natural boundaries. But their interplay was fluid and complex, and bespeaks the maturity, sophistication, and cohesion of a flourishing Czech polity. Action and imagination in the Czech Lands presumed, and at the same time shaped, a coherent political community, insulated but not isolated from the rest of medieval Christendom and transcending particular individuals or institutions. All this belies Bohemia’s, and Moravia’s, implicit status as a “frontier” region on the fringe of western Europe, while providing an extraordinary opportunity to explore the exercise and logic of power, universal issues observed here operating in a specifically medieval context.

At the outset this project asked several elemental questions: What powers did the duke of Bohemia possess, what was their basis, how were they effected, and how far did they extend? Consideration of the duke’s power raised a number of corollary issues: What was the status of the Christian church and its leaders? What was the nature of the duke’s relationship to the German emperor?¹ Were conditions substantially different in Moravia compared to Bohemia? These historical issues, essentially institutional in character, together with their associated and subordinated questions, still provide the skeletal organization of this book. Early on, however, investigation into ducal power showed that it would be impossible to imagine it, in theory or in practice, without reference to the Czech freemen. They were the duke’s subjects. But they were no less his partners, his warriors, and, in very concrete ways, a significant check upon his power. The goal of the project shifted then to consider not only the foundations and exercise of ducal lordship, but the form and progress of resistance to it. Concurrently, basic issues of “context,” matters of social structure, law, economics, and religious life, invariably involved the duke, and further disclosed the deep interconnection between ruler and ruled. Over time, and under close scrutiny, a linchpin emerged for understanding the structure and development of Czech social and political life in this period: the interdependence of the duke of Bohemia and the freemen, the implicit tension between them, and the resulting balance of power.

Although the Czech Lands were undoubtedly governed by a single ruler of great might, wealth, and prestige, the concept of community proves pivotal to the study of his power. The duke of Bohemia stood well above and was yet intimately linked to those he governed. He was responsible—and responsive—to his subjects, even as he dominated them. For their part, the freemen maintained close ties to the duke and to Prague, and assured that the duke governed according to their interests by threatening or carrying out deposition and revolt. While the various constellations of freemen, collegial and contentious, shifted constantly, as did the specifics of their concerns, designs, and allegiances, the goal was the same in every instance, namely, the duke’s throne. The Czechs were not always in harmony with their duke or with each other, but whether in uniting or in struggling to determine the occupant of the throne, laymen of diverse status were de facto empowered. Power in the Czech Lands must, therefore, be seen to reside both in the duke’s throne and in the community of those subject to it.

Themes of power and community together govern the book in its entirety. Power shapes society from its foundations, and is in turn shaped by it. In the Czech case, issues of power dominate all the sources, of whatever medium or genre. Power, vigorously wielded or tacitly acknowledged, is here conceived broadly, as reflected or enshrined in institutions and social structures, and as abstracted in office or ideology. Community is more elusive, but entails coherence among the inhabitants of the Czech Lands, both in deed and in conception, and their active involvement with one another and engagement with the governing authority. Power pervaded society, not only in its divisions, but in the way each related to the other in a constantly moving dynamic of resistance to, and reassertion of, might. Coming to terms with political community, in turn, requires attention to structures that fostered shared identity, developments which tested or sundered it, and symbols and ideals of unity and of joint action. It is precisely by grounding abstract notions of identity and community in the dynamics of the actual exercise of and resistance to power that we begin to understand their influence.² Though their exact relationship is multi-faceted, this book will ultimately argue, power and political community are inseparable.

The key to both power and community, and the relationship between them, this book shows, lies in analyzing the course of events, the actions of individuals, their aims, methods, and consequences. The progress of politics must be understood primarily as a continuous chain of strategies and counter-strategies. Their particulars serve as much to shape, or constrain, ducal lordship and Czech social structure as they were framed by them. Likewise, symbols of rulership, the cult of saints, and relations with neighboring rulers are all viewed as resources mobilized (sometimes without success) toward particular ends. It was, moreover, the dynamics of power in action that constituted the driving force of change. While the fundamentals of ducal lordship remained unaltered from the eleventh century well into the thirteenth, and individual laymen were only beginning to transform the social structure at the end of the twelfth, the world of the 1070s was quite unlike that of the 1120s, 1150s, or 1180s. And while outside influences may be credited with certain developments, especially in ecclesiastical affairs and imperial politics, the internal political dynamic conditioned their reception and appropriation as they were made to serve strategic needs, interests, and goals specific to Czech society. To decipher the logic driving the interplay between duke and freemen in the Czech Lands, we must reexamine events” in the standard historical narrative in relation to underlying patterns.

Put simply then, this study describes and defines the balance of power, and then traces the implementation of strategies intended to tip it. The book begins with ducal lordship, describing its basis in rights, resources, and privileges in Chapter 1, and then turns to social structure, elaborating, in Chapter 2, the opportunities and limitations that governed the lives of Czech freemen. It then turns to the complexities of power in action, and ultimately shows how these sometimes antagonistic forces shaped a political dynamic, the balance of power analyzed in Chapter 3. It argues that while the Czech freemen were institutionally disempowered by the duke’s extensive lordship, an unconventional rule of succession within the Přemyslid dynasty enabled them to exert decisive leverage against him. Chapter 4 considers the status of ecclesiastical institutions and their leadership, showing that their ever-increasing resources and protected status as members of the church hierarchy assured their independence, even as bishops, abbots, and other clergy long stood outside the play of politics.

The book’s second part is entirely devoted to political strategies: the efforts by dukes and freemen to tip the balance of power in their favor. Chapter 5 treats the cult of Saint Václav (“Good King Wenceslas”), the Přemyslid duke murdered by his own brother ca. 929 and hailed soon after as a martyr; he came to be widely invoked and celebrated among the Czechs as their special patron. The dukes capitalized on reverence for Václav by mobilizing his image on coins and seals to suggest a close association between themselves and their holy predecessor and thereby imbue their authority with a Christian sanction. In many ways the core of the book is Chapter 6, which analyzes three intertwining issues bearing on the nature of revolt: magnate uprisings and conflicts over succession to the throne, intradynastic relations, and conditions within Moravia. Here, in an unceasing play of strategies over the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, interdependence is revealed as a dynamic force, rather than a static structure, and the balance one of constant, though never crippling, tension. Chapter 7 explores the alliance between the duke of Bohemia, who governed the Czech Lands autonomously, and the German emperor, who had no power over internal Czech affairs but was recognized as a superior authority. It argues that the duke manipulated his imperial connections to gain specific advantages vis-à-vis the Czech freemen at home; these met with limited success and ushered in some unforeseen complications, but ultimately led to the permanent elevation of the dukes of Bohemia to the rank of kings after 1198.

This study’s methodology, like any other, depends heavily upon the written and material remains of the society under examination; they consist of chronicles, charters, coins, seals, saints’ lives, liturgical books, and the rare manuscript illustration. There also exists a number of letters, papal privileges, and an occasional imperial charter. Nearly all of the analyses presented in this book rely heavily upon four consecutive historical narratives and upon a very small group of charters. Neither type of source is comprehensive per se; they have therefore been read from a variety of perspectives for answers to tiny questions as well as larger conceptual ones. Two other source bases, one textual, the other material, are of particular importance to specific lines of inquiry: the tenth-century vitae of Saint Václav and the vast array of silver pennies of varying types issued by the dukes of Bohemia.³ While both the latter receive full treatment in Chapters 5 and 7, the chronicles and charters demand fuller introduction here.

Cosmas, author of the Chronica Boemorum, was the conscious originator of the Czech chronicle tradition.⁴ Dean of Prague cathedral, he undertook his writing circa 1120 as an octogenarian; in his youth he had studied grammar, he tells us, at Liège. Cosmas’s plan was to tell the history of the Czechs in three books: from mythic times to the accession of Břetislav I in 1055; from 1055 to 1092, when the last of Břetislav’s sons died; and from the subsequent enthronement of Břetislav II until the time of his writing.⁵ Cosmas indeed completed his history, bringing the narration up to the enthronement of Soběslav I in February 1125, then adding a few retrospective chapters before his own death on 12 October that same year.⁶ The Chronica Boemorum is a long, rich text, brought to life by the author’s unmistakable voice, his singular style, and his opinion of the deeds he tells. Cosmas’s literary pretensions, manifest through copious classical and biblical citations, vibrant speeches, and dramatic scene-setting, may neither be filtered nor dismissed. There is no way to silence Cosmas the author in order to extract “facts” from his chronicle. Likewise, his “bias” may not be easily categorized and compensated for: a priest writing for a clerical audience, he can nevertheless hardly be characterized as exhibiting a specifically clerical perspective on secular affairs; although living (like other canons of Prague) within the confines of Prague Castle and preoccupied with the deeds of Bohemia’s dukes, he was by no means a court chronicler; and while he offers ample criticism, only lightly veiled, of rulers both dead and alive, he espouses the view of no contemporary political faction, so far as we can determine. Put simply: Cosmas was enormously concerned about the exercise of power and, although to some extent he saw power as inherently corrupting, he clearly also hoped—and argued—for its just exercise.

Cosmas, however much he seems to dominate the pages that follow, is by no means our only narrative source for twelfth-century Bohemia. Two anonymous continuators, one at the collegiate chapter of Vyšehrad and another at the monastery of Sázava, copied Cosmas’s text, made minor additions concerning their own houses, and then, at the same time, carried the chronicle from 1126 to 1142 and 1162, respectively.⁷ Probably both were inspired to write by the Czechs’ great victory at Chlumec in February 1126, only four months after Cosmas’s death. The chronicle of the Canon of Vyšehrad, while it opens in a distinctly “Cosmovian” style, soon shows the author’s keen interest in astronomical and natural phenomena; after 1130 his reports of events are laconic, and the weather occupies a significant portion of the text. The so-called Monk of Sázava, which I believe actually represents a composite text, is even more terse and makes particular note of monastic affairs at Sázava and other Benedictine houses. A third author, working at Hradiště monastery in Moravia, selected excerpts from these texts to form an annal, which he augmented with bits of his own; as the lone Moravian voice, this short work (usually called the Annals of Hradiště-Opatovice) is especially valuable.⁸ For the second half of the twelfth century, a separate chronicle was begun by another canon of Prague, named Vincent, devoted to the reign of Vladislav II (1140–73). He carried it with him when he accompanied his bishop on the Milan campaign of 1158, and his account of that expedition fills half of the chronicle. Vincent’s work was continued by a Premonstratensian abbot, Gerlach of Milevsko. Writing in the early thirteenth century about the last quarter of the twelfth, Gerlach was chiefly concerned with the well-being of the Czech church. He also diverts a substantial portion of his text to relate the life and death of Abbot Gottschalk of Želiv, a Premonstratensian from Saxony with whom Gerlach immigrated to Bohemia as a boy.⁹ We thus have, besides the Chronica Boemorum, four other prose narratives and a set of annalistic notes, each the work of an author of different status and affiliation, each writing in a distinct style with unique perspectives and purposes, though all were clerics.

These texts are crucially supplemented by the corpus of charters surviving from the Czech Lands.¹⁰ Very few charters, however, survive or seem ever to have been written: for the period from 1000 to 1198 only seventy-four genuine, original charters, plus twenty-four extant as copies, and an early collection of donation records. Only the barest handful are extant from the eleventh century or from Moravia.¹¹ Of this hundred or so documents, the majority date from the last quarter of the twelfth century, when a burgeoning land market spurred an increased recourse to writing to safeguard transactions for posterity. Yet these same records of donation, sale, or exchange of land indicate that, even circa 1200, oral norms and customary law governed property transfer and the resolution of disputes. For a variety of reasons, therefore, these documents constitute an imperfect source of evidence for the period examined in this book. At the same time, though, they contain valuable information that the narrative sources overlook or take for granted: they show land changing hands, the duke resolving disputes, freemen assembled as witnesses, and canons moving up the ranks of cathedral offices. Fortunately, too, many of the originals that survive from the twelfth century bear contemporary seals.

Any picture of the eleventh- and twelfth-century Czechs must be carefully, and creatively, crafted through a matrix of these texts and archeological remains. It is my intention in this study to treat the extant variety of source materials comprehensively, and thus to blend or juxtapose not only the sources but the types of analyses that usually arise out of them. In recent decades high medieval social history has been constructed overwhelmingly on charter evidence and the close analysis of families, landholdings, and relationships with local instititions. By contrast, the cultural and intellectual subfields of medieval history have embraced narrative sources, with primary emphasis on how these texts were written and why. Ecclesiastical materials usually support religious history, except where they serve regional or cultural studies. And coins have normally been relegated to the highly technical realm of numismatics; when integrated at all into medieval studies, they are deployed largely for illustrative purposes. This is to paint the canvas with the broadest of brushstrokes. Yet my point here is a simple one: whether because or in spite of the paucity of sources for the medieval Czech Lands, I have endeavored to draw from all the extant genres and upon a variety of approaches rather than to follow any particular paradigm or methodological approach.

* * *

My work is not the first treatment of Czech politics during this period; still, it attempts to break from all previous historiography on the subject and to offer a comprehensive alternative. Previous historians of the Czech Lands, while writing in a variety of styles and employing diverse methodologies, have invariably adopted a central focus on state and/or nation formation. This is true whether they write narratively or analytically, with or without overtly Marxist concepts, within or outside the Czech national tradition. Each among the half-dozen or so major works operates within a paradigmatic framework governing the analysis of power in society. The most venerable and pervasive of these takes the exploits and vicissitudes of political rulers to stand for the development of a state or nation; Václav Novotný’s magisterial, multivolume narrative, Czech History (České dějiny), exemplifies this approach and remains canonical ninety years after its publication.¹² Another, which includes Václav Vaněček and other legal and administrative historians, effaces the dukes and their personalities behind abstract institutions and mechanisms of domination.¹³ Power, in both these cases, is understood in a straightforwardly top-down fashion. By contrast, two other models embed power in social conflict. Historians of estates politics and protoparliamentarism, most notably Stanisław Russocki, chart the give-and-take between ruler and (noble) representatives of the people, thereby complementing static institutional accounts with an agonistic view of political development.¹⁴ Finally, Rostislav Nový offers a Marxian analysis that classically presumes an inherently oppressive relation between ruling classes (ruler, dynasty, and elite strata, lay and clerical) and the rest of the population.¹⁵ These four approaches are not mutually exclusive and should not be construed as a comprehensive typology; they appear to varying degrees in different accounts and yet cumulatively reinforce each other.¹⁶ All, however, support a teleological, developmental drive toward nation or state, in most cases subsuming the former under the latter.¹⁷

A deeper problem than the bias toward teleology is the recurrence of free-floating, reified assumptions which then feed into stock, uninterrogated interpretations. Ubiquitous catchwords carry baggage from other developmental frameworks and ascribe an institutionalized status to what were very fluid and inchoate practices during the Middle Ages. Whether they actually existed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries (as in the case of assemblies of freemen called colloquia) or not (such as the princely retinue or družina), by their very invocation, they create anachronisms by importing further assumptions into the analysis. In the same way, certain citations from the sources (“familia sancti Wenceslai,” “corona Boemiae,” “the bishop is my chaplain”), recycled in the literature, come to carry the weight of the analysis even as they are ripped from context and never reinterpreted by the authors who use them. Downright erroneous conclusions—about the comprehensiveness of administrative districts or the impotence of the church—once smuggled into the historiography, reproduce themselves, without justification, in successive works. These effectively construct a predetermined frame of historical reference, complete with its own vocabulary, concepts, source base, and objects of investigation.

Underlying many of these assumptions, as well as the various state-formation paradigms, is an implicit understanding of what the “prince” ought to be doing, what the “nobility” ought to be doing, and how their interactions fit them into a certain script or onto some normative path of development. By prescribing set roles, however defined, they take an enormous amount for granted and predetermine the answers to the sorts of basic questions with which this examination begins. Neither the duke, the freemen, the church, nor their interaction, I would argue, have ever been studied on their own terms. My account of Czech political development, certainly, stands outside the historiographic tradition of the last century by its refusal to place either state or nation formation at the heart of the analysis. It thus eschews the implicit value judgments these developmental narratives tend to impose upon the eleventh and twelfth centuries. But its lasting contribution, I hope, consists in asking simply: how did the duke, freemen, bishop, or emperor act under particular circumstances and why? The hallmark of the present work, then, is the rigorous rejection of all of these assumptions and methodological crutches, together with a comprehensive rereading of the source material.

Dissecting and reconstructing, rereading, interrogating, and reorienting minute bits of evidence, I have worked from the ground up in an effort to reframe Czech history of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This same project, of evoking a complex society by careful attention to details, was Georges Duby’s in his classic study of the Mâconnais, as well as that of other historians working in other regions with different evidentiary bases. Where Duby and scholars following his example sought to illuminate regional social structures,¹⁸ I have tried to understand and elicit political dynamics. The differences between their and my approach to questions of power in the Middle Ages stem from several factors: not only the absence of comparable sources for the Czech Lands but also, and importantly, the undeniable, nearly overwhelming influence of a single autonomous ruler, the duke of Bohemia. Nevertheless, I have also strenuously avoided traditional monarchical paradigms, such as they are: because the Přemyslid dukes simply were not kings, because without real evidence of bureaucracy one cannot speak of the development of an impersonal “state” in the eleventh-and twelfth-century Czech Lands, and, finally, because this would have veered dangerously close to the production of still another national historical narrative. My analysis of power in Bohemia and Moravia instead owes a profound debt to Eleanor Searle’s Predatory Kinship and to William Ian Miller’s work on saga Iceland.¹⁹ Searle’s rereading of chronicles to illuminate machinations within a ruling dynasty proves exemplary for understanding the actions of ever-contentious Přemyslids as described by Cosmas and his successors. And Miller’s anthropologically informed analysis of power relations is instrumental for imagining horizontal bonds within a community and for understanding the role of coercion and violence in that cohesion. The hybrid methodology employed here, treating social structures, rulership, dynastic politics, and communal coherence, has nonetheless, I believe, generated a unified thesis.

This book’s analysis is not explicitly comparative; nowhere are the conditions or events described as obtaining in the Czech Lands set in relation to those elsewhere, in England, or Flanders, or Bavaria, or Poland. The book’s emphatic aim, rather, is to treat Bohemia and Moravia on their own terms. As a region long overlooked by medievalists and with an isolated specialist historiography, the Czech Lands deserve no less. The question nevertheless begs answering: what indeed do Bohemia and Moravia have to offer the study of power in the Middle Ages? The response in no way concerns their uniqueness; none of the book’s conclusions seek to establish the Czechs, their duke, or their land as exceptional. Readers familiar with other areas of medieval Europe will find much here that resonates with the world they know, as well as much that seems anomalous. The points of similarity between the Czech Lands and other parts of Christendom chiefly arise from the fact that, by the later eleventh century, the Czechs had been in contact with their neighbors to the west for centuries, and they had also long since espoused Catholic Christianity. Yet their particular geographic position, the mountains and forest that made Bohemia so easy to defend, safeguarded their autonomous political development. The Czechs’ hybrid position securely within, yet on the margins of, medieval Christendom is precisely what makes them interesting.

Hybridity emerges with particular salience when issues of power are involved. The structure of power in Bohemia and Moravia deviates from the norm, without constituting an exception to it. Thus it challenges, if sometimes only very subtly, the lessons scholars of medieval politics have learned from other regions. The Přemyslids were a ruling dynasty, recognized as charismatic and patently self-conscious, yet their internal structure was altogether different from a “dynasty” (or Geschlecht) classically defined. The Czechs came late to the use of written records, and yet their coinage, in it use and in its production, was precocious. The duke of Bohemia was, apparently, a vassal of the German emperor, and yet he had no vassals under him. More examples will emerge in the pages that follow. Many characteristics of the Czech polity appear atypical even as they offer up a series of unquestionably familiar scenarios. For this reason, they enable us to anatomize the commonalities underlying all medieval polities. Analyzing a duke made king, and his successor made duke again, or the interplay between the religious and political functions of the cult of Saint Václav, enriches our knowledge of medieval kingship and of “national” or dynastic patron saints, for instance. But at a deeper and more rudimentary level, this procedure yields new concepts and vocabulary (interdependence, leadership, community) with an implicitly universal scope, and therefore determinedly comparative application. The particulars of Czech political culture, by the same token, potentially challenge the meanings ascribed to succession conflict, to political violence, to lordship, to dux or regnum. The Czech case thus points toward novel ways of conceiving the exercise of power in the Middle Ages.

* * *

Very few readers outside the Czech Republic are familiar with events in Bohemia and Moravia during the Middle Ages and the efforts of nearly two centuries of Czech- and German-speaking historians to explain and interpret them. This book is not a survey, an introduction to Bohemia,²⁰ nor does it offer a narrative account of Czech history. Some analyses deal explicitly with change over time, most notably the chapters of Part II, but only as they affect or shed light upon the matter at hand, the exercise of power. It may, unfortunately, be disorienting to follow the analysis without some familiar points of reference to serve as guideposts. Readers should have frequent recourse to the list of dukes provided here (Table 1), the genealogical chart of Přemyslid men in Figure 1 and the list of bishops of Prague and Olomouc in Chapter 4, Table 6. As further orientation, the paragraphs that follow provide a cursory overview of the 150 years discussed in succeeding chapters.

This study takes as its rough starting point the end of the reign of Duke Břetislav I. The four decades after his death in 1055 were dominated by his five sons: Spitihněv, duke from 1055–61; Vratislav, duke from 1061–92 and king after 1086; Conrad, vice-duke of Brno and duke of Bohemia for less than a year in 1092; Jaromír, bishop of Prague from 1068 to 1090; and Otto, vice-duke of Olomouc. Spitihněv died relatively young, leaving his four brothers locked in mutual fear and antagonism for the next thirty years. Otherwise this period is most notable for developments in ecclesiastical affairs: the establishment of a bishopric in Moravia, at Olomouc; the fight over the Catholic Slavonic liturgy at the Benedictine monastery of Sázava; the first recorded visit of papal delegates; and a general intensification of contacts with the papacy. These activities, together with a host of others both known and unknown to us, furthered and substantially completed the Christianization of Czech society in this period. Vratislav’s reign also witnessed new, closer connections to the German emperor, as both the duke and Bishop Jaromír allied themselves with Henry IV in the civil wars that rocked the Empire. As a reward for his staunch military support, Henry crowned Vratislav king in 1086.

TABLE 1. DUKES OF BOHEMIA

Duke	Reign
Břetislav I	1037–55
Spitihněv	1055–61
Vratislav	1061–92, king after 1086
Conrad	1092
Břetislav II	1092–1100
Bořivoj	1100–1107; 1117–20
Svatopluk	1107–9
Vladislav I	1109–17; 1120–25
Soběslav I	1125–40
Vladislav II	1140–73, king after 1158
Soběslav II	1173–78
Frederick	1173; 1178–89
Conrad Otto	1189–91
Václav	1192
Přemysl Otakar	1193; 1198–1232 as king
(Bishop) Henry	1193–97
Vladislav Henry	1197

The deaths of Vratislav and Conrad, both in 1092, marked the end of one generation of Přemyslids; the next generation, comprising Břetislav I’s eleven grandsons, created a situation considerably more complicated. This period began peaceably enough with the accession to power of Vratislav’s eldest son, Břetislav II. But a series of assassinations, succession conflicts, and attempts at deposition ensued after Břetislav’s murder in 1100. In essence, only the enthronement of Soběslav I and his subsequent victory in February 1126 over Otto II of Olomouc, the only other living Přemyslid of his generation, brought the dynastic strife to an end. Cosmas, in Book III of the Chronica Boemorum, describes in detail the intense jockeying between freemen around the duke and various Přemyslid pretenders of this period. Its most spectacular result, perhaps, hardly concerned the throne at all: the widespread massacre of a broad kin-group (perhaps) called the Vršovici, ordered by Duke Svatopluk (1107–9) in 1108. On the whole, however, these were not decades of chaos. Outside specific instances of conflict, in preparations for and actually fighting on the battlefield, life in the Czech Lands went on as usual. The reigns of Vladislav I (1109–25) and Soběslav I (1125–40), in particular, were long, relatively quiet ones.

Vladislav II succeeded his uncle, Soběslav, in 1140. Almost immediately thereafter, in 1142, he successfully defended his hold on power against a massive revolt of senior freemen and Přemyslids; in his camp were his brothers, Theobald and Henry, a substantial number of younger magnates, and the German ruler, Conrad III. Together with the powerful, activist, Premonstratensian bishop of Olomouc, Henry Zdík (1126–50), Vladislav supported a renaissance in monastic life: many new monasteries were established throughout Bohemia and Moravia, including convents for women as well as houses for Cistercians, Premonstratensians, and Hospitallers. Both Henry Zdík and Bishop Daniel of Prague (1148–67) assiduously cultivated contacts in the Empire and in Rome; they were frequent travelers, the former even preaching to the pagan Prussians and the latter serving as imperial diplomatic envoy. Perhaps the most noteworthy pair of events of the twelfth century came at the midpoint of Vladislav’s long rule: his elevation to the rank of king in 1158 and the participation of a Czech army in Barbarossa’s war against Milan. The king’s last years were spent trying to secure the succession of his eldest son Frederick, in whose favor he abdicated in 1173.

Vladislav’s reign, first as duke and then as king of Bohemia, hardly passed free of dynastic tension. His efforts to contain it were largely successful so long as he ruled, but they erupted dramatically upon his abdication. Some Přemyslids and freemen demanded the release of his cousin Soběslav, the son of Soběslav I, incarcerated for fifteen years. With the backing of the Czech freemen and Barbarossa’s intervention, Frederick was passed over and Soběslav enthroned. Vladislav II ended his days in exile. After four years, however, Soběslav II proved unpopular (though the chronicler, Gerlach, would extol him as a defender of the poor and of the church), and Frederick was able to regain the throne. Duke Frederick seems to have been a weak, inept, and rather corrupt ruler; although aided by his capable wife, Elizabeth, he barely managed to stave off a pair of serious challenges to his power before dying a natural death in 1189.

A motley assortment of Přemyslids were alive at the time of Frederick’s death: the younger brother of Soběslav II, Václav; his own brothers, Vladislav and Přemysl; his cousins, Theobald and Bishop Henry of Prague; plus Conrad Otto and the minor sons of Otto III in Moravia. Conrad Otto, who governed the combined appanages of Moravia during most of Frederick’s reign and was his chief rival, must have been recognized as the senior Přemyslid in 1189: he succeeded to the throne apparently without contest and then died on campaign in Italy two years later. The 1190s then witnessed a series of short ducal reigns, as various Přemyslids made bids for, or were ousted from, the throne. The longest-ruling was, remarkably, Bishop Henry—who seized the throne from his young cousin Přemysl in 1193 and ruled jointly as duke of Bohemia and bishop of Prague for four years, before his death in 1197. Vladislav succeded him but almost immediately faced a challenge from Přemysl. The two brothers agreed, before battle ensued, to divide the Czech Lands between them: Přemysl thus became duke of Bohemia and Vladislav margrave of Moravia. (Both subsequently adopted double names: Přemysl Otakar and Vladislav Henry.) That same year, in the midst of an imperial civil conflict, Přemysl was crowned king. Because the Czech Lands would be ruled by kings, rather than dukes, in the centuries after 1198, this seemed a fitting closing date for this study.