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3. INTERDEPENDENCE

The previous chapters took institutional and social-structural approaches to political life in the eleventh- and twelfth-century Czech Lands, focusing on the duke and the freemen respectively. Neither, however, suffices alone to describe the exercise of, or resistance to, power. Having thus laid the groundwork, we turn here to consider relations between the duke and the freemen, that is, between the extensive lordship ascribed to the Přemyslid ruler and the composition of lay society as deduced from the sources. The duke had significant and far-reaching rights over his subjects, although common sense suggests that he required the aid and services of many individuals to govern his realm. Freemen of all levels, for their part, saw in the duke’s service the path to social advancement and greater wealth. All this should be clear enough already. This chapter, however, offers further elaboration of, and somewhat qualifies, the conclusions reached in Chapters 1 and 2. For the freemen, for instance, the social mobility that characterized their lives, in which the duke played a crucial role, was profoundly constrained by violence at his hands. Analysis of lordship in the Czech Lands, meanwhile, requires consideration of succession to the ducal throne at Prague and of the dynasty that dominated it.

The fundamental bases of power for the duke of Bohemia hardly changed from the mid-eleventh to the end of the twelfth century, while the structure of society for freemen at the highest and lowest levels began to be transformed only slowly in the last years of this period. Yet the chronicles, and the coins and charters too in their way, portray a world far from static; each quarter century differed in many respects from the previous or the next. Understanding the consequences of Czech social structure for the duke’s power, and Přemyslid lordship for the fortunes of the freemen, is the foundation for the give-and-take reported in the chronicles and analyzed in Part II. The key, this chapter argues, lies in the interdependence and tense balance between the duke and the freemen. And the ramifications for political affairs were far-reaching. The goal, here and in succeeding chapters, is not merely to make the case for such a model, but to understand and demonstrate how it functioned, how it evolved over the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries and, within it, how the Czechs adapted to—and often instigated—new challenges and opportunities.

Critical Transitions: The Case of 1109

In 1107, Svatopluk successfully unseated his cousin, Duke Bořivoj, and was enthroned duke of Bohemia. A similar attempted overthrow launched the previous summer had narrowly failed, but Bořivoj’s hold on power was already so tenuous that he was unable decisively to defeat Svatopluk, then vice-duke of Olomouc; simply, he did not trust the loyalty of his army to pursue his cousin into Moravia. Once ousted, Bořivoj fled into exile and from there continued to press his claim to rule for the next several years, always unsuccessfully. The instability that immediately followed Svatopluk’s accession, marked by Bořivoj’s ineffectual incursions and the new duke’s own efforts to consolidate power in Bohemia—one way to interpret his massacre of the Vršovici in 1108—had finally begun to settle by summer 1109. The duke thus turned to more routine affairs and joined Henry V on campaign in Poland in September. On the move with his men, he was speared in the back by an assassin, ostensibly at the instigation of one of the surviving members of the Vršovici. In the subsequent several days, the killing of Svatopluk had two political results: first, his younger brother, Otto, was immediately chosen as his successor by the freemen assembled in camp; second, four days later, Vladislav, the younger brother of the ousted Bořivoj, was enthroned. Duke Vladislav I would govern the Czech Lands until his death in 1125.

A close look at Svatopluk’s assassination and its immediate aftermath, as related by Cosmas, is intriguing—and quite illuminating. “As we heard from those telling of it afterwards,” Cosmas says, the assassin was a “warrior sent by John, son of Csta of the Vršovici gens.” When the army began to move at dawn, after the siege of Glogov, this man “spurred his horse, quickly mixed himself into the midst of the army, and with all his strength threw his spear between the duke’s shoulderblades.”¹ For John the motive for the murder seems simply to have been revenge, the act of a single individual with no broader political aims, a member of no live faction. The murder was committed independently of any effort to install a specific pretender or further the political efforts of a particular group of freemen. Nor was there, apparently, a designated “second-in-command” to whom the Czech freemen could automatically turn. The immediate consequence of Svatopluk’s death was disarray. Faced with chaos in one contingent of his army, Henry stepped in—not, as one might expect of an overlord, to name Svatopluk’s successor, but merely to restore order and calm everyone’s nerves. As Cosmas tells it: “With the morning, the king arrived to grieve for his comrade. He granted to all the Czechs present that they should elect as their duke whomever they wanted from the sons of their princes.” The chronicler continues: “Then, as he was mourning, Vacek asked with tears rising to his eyes that they should choose Otto, the brother of the murdered prince, as their duke. The king instantly praised him, and throughout the camp the foolish people cried ‘Kyrie Eleison’ three times.” ²

Otto did not become duke, however, because he was unable to follow his election with enthronement:

Without delay and with only a few knowing, Detrišek, the son of Buša, ran at full speed and at dawn on the fourth day led to Prague Otto, whom Vacek and everyone from Moravia bustled to raise to the summit of the princely seat. Since they tried to bring it about without the consent of the Bohemians and the bishop, their audacity was frustrated, and the oaths given earlier in the midst of council were recited. For when they enthroned Svatopluk as duke, all the Bohemians had confirmed with oaths that after his death Vladislav, if he lived, would be raised to the throne.³

The oaths previously sworn by the Czech freemen to back Vladislav’s accession did not ensure that he would succeed automatically; in this case, as in many subsequent ones, such oaths seem to have had no status either as legally binding or determinative of sucession by custom.⁴ Instead, Bishop Hermann of Prague and Fabian, castellan of Vyšehrad, worked strenuously to persuade the assembled men to treat their oaths as “inviolate.”⁵ Only serious deliberation and the influence of men of rank and acknowledged wisdom secured Vladislav’s accession to the throne in September 1109—and Otto’s defeat.

The story of Czech politics over the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries is one of critical transitions, of accidental and forced turning points, of crises resolved or forestalled. In all of them, as in 1109, the throne and Prague occupied a central place. Questions of succession, and the rebellions that arose when another Přemyslid was deemed more suitable than the reigning duke, emerge as pivotal moments for the configuration of political affairs, alliances, positions. As the chapters in Part II explore more fully, the actions of the duke, the Přemyslids, and the freemen were continually governed by an awareness of the importance of such moments of crisis. The strategizing in which all Czechs engaged at times of obvious political transition was mirrored in moves they made routinely, even if such mundane, perhaps even unspoken, calculations are lost to posterity. In other words, each year from the death of Břetislav I to the second accession and coronation of Přemysl Otakar I—from the mid-eleventh to the end of the twelfth century—was “transitional.” The tension thus generated was neither sporadic nor exceptional but constant—and it constitutes the characteristic dynamic of Czech political life in this period.

From the preceeding chapters, it is relatively easy to comprehend what first Svatopluk and then Vladislav gained, the assets and rights they commanded as duke, as well as what sort of men Vacek or Fabian were and what they stood to achieve in supporting one party or the other. But much that is central to Cosmas’s anecdote has not yet been considered: the norm of succession and relationships within the ruling dynasty, the meaning of rituals and emblems associated with the duke, the stakes for all those involved: dukes, ousted dukes, Moravian vice-dukes, and other Přemyslids; castellans, courtiers, and warriors of all ranks; the bishops and clergy; and the emperor. The place of the church and the emperor will be treated at length, in Chapters 4 and 7 respectively. We turn now, in this chapter, to grasp more comprehensively the lives of rulers, their relatives, and the laymen who surrounded them in all their deeds.

Prague, “Mistress of All Bohemia”

For a Přemyslid pretender—tarrying in exile, say—to become duke, he had to gain control of Prague and be enthroned; reigning dukes facing revolt, for their part, needed to retain Prague at all cost: “amissa Praga, perdita Boemia,” a passing phrase of Gerlach’s says.⁶ In instances of actual siege, “Prague” signifies the castle, a long narrow stretch of walled hilltop on the left bank of the Vltava.⁷ Though small settlements existed below the castle and outside its main entrance at the top (today’s Malá Strana [“Little Side”] and Hradčany), the town of Prague lay primarily on the opposite bank of the river from the castle. There was the market, the Jewish quarter and synagogue, the residential quarter for Germans and other foreign merchants, and an ever-growing number of parish churches.⁸ In the castle lay not only the duke’s palace, but the cathedral, chapter and episcopal residence, as well as the women’s monastery dedicated to St. George. In the Václav legends the chief ducal castle in the early tenth century seems to have been Levý Hradec, on the Vltava several kilometers north of Prague; yet a mere three years after his murder in Stará Boleslav (ca. 929), Boleslav I is said to have translated Václav’s relics to Prague, to the large rotunda church of St. Vitus, which the new saint had himself begun. Whether or not by Boleslav I’s design, Prague emerged early as the political, religious, and economic heart of the duke’s territory. A Jewish traveler writing in Arabic, Ibrahim ibn Ya’qub, portrayed mid-tenth-century Prague as a bustling town, the liveliest in the region: “The city of Prague is built of stone and chalk and is the richest in trade of all these lands. The Russians and the Slavs bring goods there from Cracow; Muslims, Jews and Turks from the land of the Turks also bring goods and market weights; and they carry away slaves, tin, and various kinds of fur. Their country is the best of all those of the Northern peoples, and the richest in provender.”⁹ For all these reasons then, all roads led—as they still do—to Prague.

In Cosmas’s day, the decades around 1100, Prague was an ecclesiastical hub and the site of the cult of Sts. Václav and Adalbert, a wealthy and bustling trading center, the location (probably) of the central mint, and, of course, the regular meeting place for the duke’s court. Cosmas describes it—and Vyšehrad next door—as rich and flourishing. In a dispute between Vratislav II and Conrad of Brno, the latter’s wife is made to exclaim to the duke: “You will never be better enriched nor more esteemed than in the town of Prague and the village of Vyšehrad. There are the Jews fullest of gold and silver, the wealthiest merchants from every nation, the richest money-changers, and the market, in which the abundant spoils far exceed the number of your warriors.”¹⁰ Prague Castle was the site for enthronement, for episcopal elections, and for the celebration of feast days. As such it was the obvious choice for visiting dignitaries and for the ceremonial reception of dukes returning from abroad. On the three occasions when papal legates traveled to Bohemia (in 1073, 1143, and 1197), synods were called at Prague.¹¹ When Vladislav II came back from the Milan campaign of 1158, similarly, Vincent reports: “The king, who was received in the holy city of Prague by the clergy, princes, nobles, and people, returned happily with his men to his land.”¹² Notices of a duke’s arrival in Prague are usually laconic, but a few give some indication of celebration, for instance, when, Soběslav returned “to his sweet metropolis” after the great victory at Chlumec in February 1126.¹³

Without any doubt, Prague was understood to constitute the locus of authority. Succession contests and revolts invariably had Prague as their goal, though battles were as often fought en route as at the castle walls or in their immediate vicinity.¹⁴ As Gerlach says of Frederick: once he secured Barbarossa’s backing to unseat Soběslav II in 1179, he “headed for Prague by the direct route.”¹⁵ Dukes facing rebellion moved swiftly to secure Prague: in 1068, Vratislav rushed there though his deposition was in no way in question; en route to the imperial court in 1109, Vladislav I turned back at Plzeň at word of Bořivoj’s impending move toward Prague; Vladislav II left it in his brother’s secure hands before repairing to the emperor for help in 1142; during the 1180s, Frederick’s wife Elizabeth on two occasions acted to prevent its capture.¹⁶ Meanwhile, pretenders who saw in a sickly duke their chance to succeed lurked in the forests around Prague.¹⁷ Not merely dukes and pretenders ran to Prague in times of impending political turmoil. In 1109, after Otto’s election in camp, he, the rest of the freemen in the army, and all those who had not been on campaign, instinctively converged on Prague within days of Svatopluk’s death. Later that same year, when Bořivoj threatened to invade soon after Vladislav I was enthroned, many men, Cosmas says, “rejoicing in the novelty of things, awaited the ambiguous turn of fate while burning and plundering villages here and there; but others of higher mind and purer loyalty ran to the princely seat in the city of Prague.”¹⁸

Curiae and colloquia, both routine and exceptional, were frequently held at Prague whether convened upon the ruler’s summons or at traditional set times, such as St. Václav’s day. Probably sometimes these were little more than festive displays of ducal munificence and dominance.¹⁹ There is no doubt, however, that matters of vital interest to all freemen were announced, debated, and decided at such gatherings of freemen.²⁰ For instance, the Canon of Vyšehrad noted that all the clergy and the people were already gathered at Prague for the feast of St. Václav, when Soběslav brought before them the matter of episcopal succession.²¹ Likewise, the freemen were convened when Vladislav returned as king from Regensburg to announce his plans for Milan, and there made plain their opposition; so, too, a decade later concerning intervention in a Hungarian succession crisis.²² While the throne and Prague always lay at the center of succession ritual and conflict, neither was requisite for formal gatherings of the Czechs over which the duke presided. Both charters and chroniclers also show that assemblies were held elsewhere as when Vratislav called the Czechs to Dobenina on the Polish border in 1068, when Soběslav I summoned the magnates to Vyšehrad for the trial of plotters in 1130, or when Conrad Otto convened a colloquium at Sazská in 1189.²³ And, in fact, nothing prevented freemen from meeting in the duke’s absence altogether, even assembling as an army—itself not so different from a colloquium.

Nevertheless, in Cosmas’s day, if not long before, Prague had already become the heart of a community. No wonder then that legends linked Prague’s foundation with the first Czech duke. Thus, in Cosmas’s telling, the appointment of a ruler preceded the establishment of Prague as his capital, though not by much.²⁴ The name, location, and status of Prague—“totius Boemie domna”—arose from Libuše’s prophecy, just as Přemysl himself had been chosen. (The Václav legend by Kristián tells a similar story, although there Prague is established before Přemysl is chosen.²⁵) In the Chronica Boemorum version, the pagan seer even predicts its special status as the burial place of two Christian saints, Václav and Adalbert.

Among the first beginnings of the laws, one day the aforesaid lady [Libuše], excited by prophecy, in the presence of her husband Přemysl and other elders of the people, thus foretold: ‘I see a city, whose fame touches the stars, situated in a forest, thirty stades distant from the village where the Vltava ends in streams. From the north the stream Brusnice in a deep valley strongly fortifies the city; from the south a broad, very rocky mountain, called Petřín from ‘petris’ [stones], dominates the place. The mountain in that spot is curved like a dolphin, a sea pig, stretching to the aforesaid stream. When you come to that place, you will find man putting up the doorway of a house in the middle of the forest. And since even a great lord must duck under a humble threshold, from that consequence the city you will build, you shall call “Praha” [from “prah,” “threshold”]. In this city, one day in the future two golden olive-trees will grow up; they will reach the seventh heaven with their tops and glitter throughout the whole world with signs and miracles. All the tribes of the Bohemian land, and other nations too, will worship and adore them, against their enemies and with gifts. One of these will be called Greater Glory, the other Consolation of the Army. More was to be said, if the pestilential and prophetic spirit had not fled from the image of God. Immediately going to the ancient forest and having found the given sign in the said place, they built the city of Prague, mistress of all Bohemia.²⁶

Almost from time immemorial, as Cosmas envisaged it, Prague was the undisputed center of all aspects of Czech life. In political matters, in moments of crisis especially, Prague was principally the location of the ducal throne. In his description of the revolt of 1142, Vincent remarks that Duke Vladislav II deployed troops: “in order to protect the castle and the princely throne, a certain stone one, which even now stands in the castle’s center; for its sake, not only now but from of old, many thousands of warriors have rushed to war.”²⁷ This remark, among so many others, is a striking reminder too that, while undoubtedly the Přemyslids’ dynastic seat (and the bishops’ as well), ultimately Prague was, for all Czechs, their capital.

Violence

While the lives of the Czech freemen always revolved to some degree around Prague, they also remained engaged with their duke for other, more coercive reasons. The chroniclers describe vividly how a whisper from an enemy at court and an irate duke could lead to dire consequences. It was a lesson the slaughtered Vršovici men, women, and children—to take the most dramatic case—learned painfully late.²⁸ Outside this instance the sources, typically, do not describewhat the victims’ families and dependents endured, but undoubtedly their lives were dramatically affected when freemen suffered death, mutilation, exile, imprisonment, or the confiscation of property at the hands of their ruler. The knowledge that the duke, especially an angry one, was inclined to perpetrate, or react with, violence must have generated considerable anxiety among Czech laymen in dealings, routine or extraordinary, with their lord. Here again we recall Libuše’s admonition and her vision of courtiers with trembling knees, mouths too dry to utter more than “yes, lord.”²⁹ Little wonder then that, in 1091, the young men who had sided with his rebellious son opted for exile rather than trusting King Vratislav’s promise of peace: “We fear his friendships more than his enmities,” Cosmas has them declare.³⁰ In the later twelfth century, under Soběslav II, when the summary execution of magnates was less easily practiced, men who deserted the Czech army in Italy still knew better than to present themselves at court.³¹ While we should not take too literally the picture of freemen trembling in the duke’s presence, nor assume that they lived in absolute fear and dread of him, there is ample reason to believe that they could not thwart his will lightly. Both ducal violence and its threat profoundly constrained the actions of the Czech freemen.³²

In many cases, it was surely intended to do so. While dukes were sometimes motivated by fury or revenge and often by specific political agendas, they also aimed broadly to intimidate. For instance:

At Duke Vladislav’s order, all the supporters of Bořivoj were some deprived of sight and some of property, others despoiled of their real goods and the rest—those who were able to escape under cover of darkness—fled to Soběslav, the son of the king [Vratislav], in Poland. Among them, John, son of Csta from the Vršovici gens, was deprived of his sight and his nose at Vacek’s order. Privitan, who was considered senior in Prague Castle, was caught similarly in the same sedition. A huge, mangy dog, drunk on yesterday’s broth, was tied to his shoulders. Seized by the beard, Privitan was dragged three times around the market, with the dog barking and shitting on his bearer, and the herald proclaiming: “This is the sort of honor a man who breaks an oath given to Duke Vladislav will bear.” Then, with everyone in the market watching, his beard was cut on a board and he was sent away toward Poland, into exile.³³

Judicial punishment was always explicitly public during the Middle Ages as a deterrent to future offenders. Yet the public humiliation Privitan suffered, itself patently a kind of violence, seems to have been extrajudicial. While his offense is couched in terms of “sedition,” the crime proclaimed by the herald was betrayal of the duke. For magnates of the highest rank, the line between treason and personal offense was thin, and the penalties swift, severe, and often permanently disabling. And the threat of further violence must have lurked in every such act, whether the smallest personal disgrace or irrevocable death.³⁴ Without any doubt, dukes, magnates, chroniclers, the whole of Czech society knew, consciously or instinctively, this dynamic.

Acts of violence—confiscation of property, the imprisonment, exile, or death of the victims—are attributed to every duke, not merely the “cruel” ones, and occurred in nearly every decade from the mid-eleventh century and throughout the twelfth. Břetislav I ordered the dismemberment of a castellan who deserted his post in the war of 1040; more than century later, in 1174, a castellan named Conrad Sturm, who had acted as guard during his fifteen years in prison, suffered a similar fate at the hands of Sobeslav II.³⁵ These eruptions of violence hardly seem unjustified or surprising, the first plainly constituting wartime treason and the second the sort of personal grudge with which the chronicler would apparently have sympathized if the duke had not also broken an explicit promise to leave his former captor unharmed. By the later twelfth century, the attitude toward such behavior had sufficiently altered that Soběslav II felt compelled to perform public penance for his killing of Conrad Sturm. With this one exception, however, dukes aparently acted without compunction, even with impunity. Nor were isolated individuals the only victims: soon after his enthronement in 1055, Spitihněv expelled all Germans from his realm, and soon thereafter seized and imprisoned all the leading freemen of Moravia at Chrudim; Svatopluk, in 1108, massacred all the Vršovici, together with their women and children; Soběslav I reportedly imprisoned a number of men (multi) in 1128, as did Vladislav II in 1141.³⁶

The violence suffered by Privitan or the Vršovici lay beyond the coercion inherent in all lordship and the exercise of justice. In fact, when described by the chroniclers, Cosmas in particular, such acts are often cast in terms of abuse of lordship and denial of justice. Thus, it was a death sentence imposed without due trial that several magnates fled: “But Smil and Kojata, although they spoke true and just words among the princes, nevertheless, had they not escaped by flight in the night, the duke would have punished them without any hearing as enemies of the res publica.”³⁷ Where “right” and “justice” lay is little in doubt, at least in the chronicler’s view. Cosmas, with his florid style, invariably describes dukes at these moments as valde iratus, thus acting from wrath and without due consideration. The violence reported by chroniclers is always attributed to the duke himself, never the men who must have done the deeds at his command. Although Cosmas claims not to know the reasons for Beneda’s fall from grace, for instance, there is no doubt that personal animus motivated Vratislav to exile and later kill him.³⁸ On one occasion only does Cosmas show magnates urging violence and the duke refusing, in this case to punish a fellow Přemyslid.³⁹

Cosmas says that the massacre of the Vršovici originated in Svatopluk’s hall, with the duke sitting amidst the assembled freemen before an oven at dawn; accusing Mutina and his uncle of attempting to oust him from the throne, and raging against the Vršovici, the duke left the room with a meaningful look and within moments Mutina had lost his head.⁴⁰ In likening Svatopluk’s entrance to “a lion emerging from his cave, standing in the theater ⋯ expecting a meal,” and describing the duke as “burning more with anger than the oven,” there is little doubt about what moral Cosmas intends his readers to take from this characteristically vivid scene. But for us there is another lesson here. The death of Mutina, the rounding up of other leading Vršovici “within the hour,” the apprehension of Božej at his home, and the subsequent execution of men, women, and children associated with this gens throughout Bohemia required more than one hand. In the instant after the accusation was made against him, Mutina could not perhaps have been saved, but had his supporters been more numerous and powerful, those days in 1108 might have turned out very differently. On other occasions, for example at Dobenina in 1068, the duke’s plans were foiled by armed opposition. By contrast, in 1128 or 1141, as at Chrudim in 1055, the duke must simply have had more men willing to do his bidding than enemies to capture. For a duke to commit violence, beyond what he could achieve with his own sword, he needed broad support among other men to carry it out. At the same time, if to act against a duke was to risk execution for treason sine audientia, then surely the freemen’s best protection likewise lay in numbers.

Exile, whether forcible or voluntary, effected the removal of a freeman from the company his fellow Czechs and was therefore a potent political weapon. Less radical than the utter finality of death, exile was a longer-term solution than imprisonment, since a man’s languishing in prison too close to family and friends might inspire them to secure his release. Rather than a legal sentence imposed as punishment, exile is frequently depicted as voluntary and as the only effective means of escaping death at the duke’s hands once such an outcome seemed certain. For example, in Cosmas’s telling, days before Svatopluk ordered the elimination of the Vršovici, Mutina was warned “three times by his friends that, unless he fled, without doubt he would lose either his life or his eyes.”⁴¹ Some Czechs forged new lives abroad but for many exile was a bitter fate, one only a return to the duke’s grace could resolve. Reprieves were occasionally granted out of pity, or through the mediation of third parties. After Otto II’s death at Chlumec in 1126, his son lived in Russian exile until Henry Zdík arranged his return—together with “other princes”—and reinstatement at Olomouc in 1141.⁴² Beneda found it more difficult to find someone to intercede on his behalf with Duke Vratislav and succeeded only with dubious and ultimately fatal results.⁴³ A letter written to the same ruler by an unknown cleric likewise begs forgiveness for some offense of his youth which led to his banishment from Bohemia.⁴⁴ In the twelfth century, nonruling members of the Přemyslid dynasty seem particularly inclined to choose life abroad as an alternative to the myriad disappointments associated with remaining at home—at least until exile too became burdensome and their return could be negotiated. Many of these men faced certain imprisonment in Bohemia. Still, ordinary magnates who flee seem always to have escaped within an inch of their lives. As the Canon of Vyšehrad reports succinctly: “In Lent of that year [1141] many men were hung from the gallows throughout the whole territory of Bohemia, especially on Mt. Šibenice; many among them escaped and fled.”⁴⁵ Ultimately, exile functioned in a threefold fashion: it constituted a highly effective form of political violence by which the duke could paralyze his enemies; like other kinds of ducal violence, it generated by its threat a psychological violence perpetrated against all Czechs; and, simultaneously, for the freemen themselves, it represented the only means of escape from ducal violence, including especially execution.

Although outside the exercise of justice, exile was nevertheless grounded in lordship because it relied on the duke’s control of both his land’s boundaries and the society inside them to be effective—as apparently it was. A series of mountain ranges runs along all borders of the modern Czech Republic, which are little different from those of the medieval territory ruled by the Přemyslid dukes. The mountains are not high ones but low and rounded, encircling the territory;⁴⁶ Bohemia proper, in particular, appears from a satellite perspective like a very large crater. The only frontier not delimited to some degree by mountains is the Austro-Moravian border, where the river Dýje separates an open plain; this line was policed by a string a castles.⁴⁷ The combination of mountains and forests meant that crossing the border was only possible at certain points, which were easily monitored by Czech rulers.⁴⁸ The eleventh- and twelfth-century sources speak frequently of “entrances” or “exits” of the land, often synonymous with “exits” from the forest.⁴⁹ In 1040, Duke Břetislav I defeated a Saxon army at the “entrance” near Chlumec, as his great-grandson Soběslav I would in 1126.⁵⁰ Soběslav II stationed his army at a similar entrance to block the approach of his cousin Frederick.⁵¹ Such tight borders not only served as protection and customs points,⁵² but also facilitated domestic political control. Concerning the Bohemian-Moravian border—internal but as clearly marked, mountainous, and heavily forested as the external frontier—a mid-twelfth-century charter refers to a place “in the forest which lies between the provinces of Čáslav and Brno, in which region live men, who are commonly called stráž [guard] and whose duty it is to guard the road, in order not to allow anyone to travel on it, entering or exiting the land of Bohemia, without the specific command of the prince.”⁵³ This comment strikingly illustrates how coercion reinforced the land’s natural boundaries.

For the duke and for those subject to the throne, Prague was of primary importance. Yet the outer limits of the Czech Lands were no more a matter of mere geography than Prague’s position at the “center” of Bohemia. The territory’s boundaries were defined in part naturally and in part by the long arm of ducal lordship, which touched everyone in the Czech Lands equally (albeit indirectly in Moravia)—often violently. Dukes of Bohemia possessed both the means and the willingness to commit violence, to act beyond the bounds of their customary rights of lordship as part of the exercise of power. In the Czech Lands, violence—sudden, unjustified, and terrifying⁵⁴—did not flare up in times of chaos or merely in the absence of good governance and “peace”; it was, in many ways, endemic. This is not to say that it was institutionalized, nor that—as in a society undergirded by notions of honor and rights of self-help—it governed day-to-day relations between individuals of every rank. It nevertheless shaped Czech political life. While dukes of Bohemia likewise found themselves liable to suffer violence, its threat, and the fear it induced acted most forcefully as a constraint upon the freemen and other Přemyslids.

The duke probably had more carrots to offer the freemen than sticks with which to beat them, but the threat of violence played a signicant role in their relations. Again, one particular incident—among many such—provides a compelling illustration of the way it affected, and was mobilized by, all parties involved in political decisions. In 1158, Vladislav II appealed to the ambitions of younger warriors, offering them rich rewards in order to overcome the opposition of more prominent men to participating in Barbarossa’s Milan campaign.⁵⁵ However, in absolving all freemen from obligatory military service, the newly crowned king declared that those unwilling to join up could remain at home “secure in my peace.” Vincent’s report of Vladislav’s remark intimates that this (and the later expedition to Hungary) lay beyond customary obligations, and the ruler effectively recognized them as such. But the statement attributed to the king does not frame the release in those terms. It was, instead, a clear and simple renunciation of violence: it meant, in the instance it was uttered, that Vladislav would not pursue and punish those who did not muster, that he would not make an effort to enforce his will. Yet if violence threatened in those few crucial moments when Vladislav announced his intentions, it posed a danger to the king no less—more even—than to his warriors.⁵⁶ The astute ruler must have immediately realized, if not foreseen, that widespread opposition to his plans might quickly incite the magnates to rebellion. Thus, in one sentence, a threefold maneuver: defray the tension first by a swift acknowledgement that justice lay on the freemen’s side and simultaneously declare unwillingness to force adherence to his view, then introduce divisions among the objecting freemen by enticing the hesitant with promises of booty. The latter worked both to assure that the campaign to Milan would proceed as planned and to preempt any move toward revolt by drawing lines between the freemen, playing the young against the established toward the king’s own ends. It was a masterful stroke, but one that must not be misconstrued: “peace” was offered not as an act of royal magnanimity, but to safeguard Vladislav’s position on the throne.

Constraints on the Ruler

To ask whether the duke of Bohemia’s power over his land and his subjects was “absolute” is to joust with a strawman, for no medieval ruler’s could be or was ever conceived as such. Yet, given the nature of the sources, we are at a loss to determine the legal or institutional constraints upon the duke’s exercise of his overwhelming lordship. Never is it made explicit what limitations on military obligations freemen could demand, what taxes could be considered unwarranted, what judicial decisions could be contested. Yet the apparent volatility of Czech political life suggests that, whether in these spheres or others, the duke could count on opposition when he stepped out of bounds. Although some abstract understanding of justice or right governance presumably set a standard against which dukes could be judged, the key to resistance against him seems to lie in the give-and-take, the politicking itself. Strikingly, when Přemyslids fought, it was never over land, or money, rights of minting, jurisdiction, or military leadership, but all those things combined: becoming duke.

Becoming Duke

At stake in debates and struggles like those of 1109 was the ducatus, an abstract noun interchangeable with principatus and analogous to episcopatus.⁵⁷ Ducatus itself is never explicitly defined or glossed in any written source, any more than regnum, res publica, or gubernacula, but its meaning is plain enough. It could be used in a territorial sense—the meaning that most readily follows from the English “duchy.” More often it signified ducal rule, lordship, and status.⁵⁸ Ducatus was but one of many ways to convey this. Cosmas’s list of the mythic successors to Přemysl, in which the chronicler flourishes his Latin vocabulary to avoid repetition, demonstrates this quite clearly:

Nezamysl succeeded him in rule [successit in regnum]. When death took him, Mnata secured the princely rods [principales obtinuit fasces]. With him departing this life, Vojn took up the helm [suscepit rerum gubernacula]. After his fate, Vnislav ruled the duchy [rexit ducatum]. When the Fates cut short his life, Krezomysl was placed on the summit of the see [locatur sedis in arce]. Having removed him from our midst, Neklan obtained the throne of the duchy [ducatus potitur solio]. When he left this life, Hostivít succeeded to the throne [throno successi].⁵⁹

Admittedly somewhat fanciful, Cosmas’s language accords with phrases that echo throughout the charters and writings of other, less verbose chroniclers.⁶⁰ Vincent says of the revolt of 1142 that the rebels “said they had chosen badly for themselves a lord who could not guide the helm of so great a duchy,” and so they “elected as duke” another Přemyslid.⁶¹

Ducatus, without any doubt, derived from the ruler’s title, dux. It seems to have been adopted early as a translation for kníže, meaning “prince,” recorded in Old Church Slavonic vitae of Saint Václav (Wenceslas).⁶² The nature and origins of the title were so thoroughly taken for granted by eleventh- and twelfth-century Czechs that no chronicler or scribe bothered to comment upon or account for it. Cosmas’s story of the mythic origins of ducal lordship in no way addresses the title, rank, or office the new lord would occupy. The man on the throne in Prague was also routinely called princeps, although this word could be used in a more general sense.⁶³ While princeps was used freely and indistinguishably from dux in chronicles and charters,⁶⁴ the latter patently constituted a Přemyslid ruler’s “official” title. From the first time a title appeared to modify a duke’s name on a coin, it is dux.⁶⁵ In most documents and on all extant seals, the ruler is styled Dei gratia dux boemorum, sometimes simply dux Boemie. Rex, a title the Czechs knew from neighbors, was fastidiously—and quite consciously—avoided. Monarcha however appears in rare instances; in fact, Cosmas once remarks: “nisi monarchos hunc regat ducatum ⋯”⁶⁶ Without being equivalent to duke, it emphasizes, like the story of Přemysl itself, governance of land and people by a single individual, in this case, addressed as “duke.”

At first and perhaps always at heart, dux was the title of a warlord, indicating someone who led (duxit) the army into battle. This may explain both why this particular Latin word was assigned by outsiders to the chieftains, elders, or leaders of the Slavs they encountered,⁶⁷ and also why it sat well with the Czechs themselves. Accordingly, the duke was routinely depicted, and chose to portray himself on coins and seals, bearing a warrior’s lance and shield.⁶⁸ Such ducal imagery is perhaps best represented by the frescoes in the chapel of St. Catherine at Znojmo, built circa 1134 within the vice-duke’s castle.⁶⁹ In the middle two of four painted rows, following a depiction of the messengers’ approach to Přemysl at his plough, appears a series of standing figures, clearly divided into two groups: in the first, the men who represent dukes of Bohemia from the mythic era to Břetislav II wear cloaks, while the rest, apparently Moravian vice-dukes, are pictured only in tunics and leggings.⁷⁰ With distinct facial features and expressions, each of the Přemyslids holds a shield and a lance with a banner, sometimes one in each hand, sometimes both in either the right or the left. The shields and banners are decorated, but no two are the same. Spear, banner, and shield, together with the throne, would remain integral to ducal iconography through the end of the twelfth century. After the permanent elevation to the rank of king, when royal crowns and scepters replaced them, these emblems persisted—into the twentieth century—as the iconographic attributes of Saint Václav, the martyred duke turned warrior-saint.⁷¹

Cosmas, in the story of Přemysl the Ploughman, describes a change to “princely garb” as part of his assumption of power—noting, however, that his old peasant shoes were kept “still today” as a reminder of the duke’s lowly origins. Indeed, fancy trappings seem not to have been a part of ducal ideology or ceremony.⁷² The Přemyslids portrayed in the chapel at Znojmo wear simple clothing. None but King Vratislav, who wears a large crown and holds a scepter, sports any headgear or other ornament.⁷³ Czech dukes are occasionally depicted on coins and in rare manuscripts wearing a head ornament, whether wreath, helmet, or headband, but no single item appears consistently.⁷⁴ On the vast majority of coins the dukes, including Saint Václav, go bareheaded. Nor is there much evidence of ceremony or rituals indended to remind the Czechs of their duke’s exalted status, though as usual we are at the mercy of laconic sources. Cosmas’s account of the ill-fated colloquium called by Vratislav to force the candidacy of Lanzo as bishop of Prague seems to indicate that no special ceremony, language, or placement set the duke far apart from his men:

They came to the gate of the guardpost where one goes into Poland and in the place called Dobenina the duke called together the people and the magnates in a mass. With his brothers standing at his right and left, the clergy and comites sitting in a wide circle, and all the warriors standing behind them, the duke called Lanzo and, with him standing in the middle, lauded him and commended him to the people.⁷⁵

This combination of formality and informality runs through similar depictions, though none is so clear as this. No insignia marked the duke out from other Přemyslids or the assembled Czech warriors.

Still, all the men of the Přemyslid dynasty seem to have enjoyed a charisma that distinguished them from ordinary Czechs. While never explicitly remarked upon, such charisma manifests itself in two telling ways: first, in all the many struggles over the throne, only Přemyslids ever reigned or were put forward as pretenders;⁷⁶ and second, while none but Přemyslids were called dux, any of them—not merely the one on the throne in Prague—could be described with that title (they appear most often without title or denoted by the generic dominus).⁷⁷ Přemyslids are never called comes, and in charters they are always listed together, and first, among the lay witnesses.⁷⁸ Their difference was reinforced by alternate notions of property, of inheritance, and of intrafamilial relationships, described below. The sense that Přemyslids were unlike other freemen, even those from old and prominent lineages, was maintained, from the time of Břetislav I, by the dynastic custom of marrying women only from foreign nobility or royalty⁷⁹ (Table 4). Otherwise, on the ruler’s own part, little effort seems to have been expended to construct or reinforce dynastic self-consciousness itself; it was apparently taken for granted as customary rather than staunchly asserted or defended by the dukes or their dynasty. Neither dukes nor Přemyslids, for instance, cultivated a specific church or monastery as a dynastic burial site (Table 5). The myths of Libuše and the first duke, Přemysl, from whom the dynasty derives its modern designation, in Cosmas’s telling, concern lordship not lineage. As we shall see in Chapter 5, there are clear political reasons for this and ample evidence of a potent ducal ideology associated instead with the cult of Saint Václav. (Not incidentally, the depiction of dukes and of the legend of Přemysl appears in a chapel at Znojmo, the center of power for one of the Moravian vice-dukes.) The exclusive relationship between the Přemyslids and rulership in the Czech Lands is unmarked, but unmistakable.

TABLE 4. WIVES OF DUKES AND VICE-DUKES

Dukes
Bořivoj	(St.) Ludmila
Vratislav I	Drahomiř
Boleslav I	Biagota
Boleslav II	Emma
Oldřich	1) ?
	2) Božena
Břetislav I	Judith of Sweinfurt
Vratislav II	1) ?
	2) Adleyta of Hungary
	3) Svatava of Poland
Břetislav II	Lukarda of Bavaria
Bořivoj II	Gerberga of Austria
Vladislav I	Richeza of Austria
Soběslav I	Adleyta of Hungary
Vladislav II	1) Gertrude, sister of Conrad III 2) Judith of Thuringia
Frederick	Elizabeth of Hungary
Conrad Otto	Helicha
Přemysl Otakar I	1) Adela of Meissen [divorced] 2) Constance of Hungary
Vice-Dukes
Conrad of Brno	Wirpirk
Otto of Olomouc	Eufemia
Vratislav of Brno	Helena of Russia
Conrad of Znojmo	1) Catherine of Hungary 2) ? Maria

TABLE 5. BURIAL PLACES OF PŘEMYSLIDS

Duke	Death	Burial
Bořivoj I	?	?
Spitihněv I	?	?
Vratislav I	?	St. George’s
Václav I (St.)	28 Sep. 929	St. Vitus Cathedral
Boleslav I	15 July 967	St. George’s?
Boleslav II	7 Feb. 999	?
Boleslav III	1037	?
Jaromír	4 Nov. 1038	?
Oldřich	9 Nov. 1037	?
Břetislav I	10 Jan. 1055	St. Vitus Cathedral
Spitihněv II	28 Jan. 1061	St. Vitus Cathedral
Vratislav II (king)	14 Jan. 1092	? (Vyšehrad?)
Conrad	6 Sep. 1092	?
Břetislav II	22 Dec. 1100	St. Vitus Cathedral
Bořivoj II	2 Feb. 1124	St. Vitus Cathedral
Vladislav I	12 April 1125	Kladruby
Soběslav I	14 Feb. 1140	? (Vyšehrad?)
Vladislav II (king)	8 Jan. 1175	Strahov
Soběslav II	[beg.] 1180	Vyšehrad
Frederick	25 March 1189	St. Vitus Cathedral
Conrad Otto	9 Sept. 1191	Monte Cassino/Prague
Václav II	?	?
Henry (bishop)	15 June 1197	Doksany
Přemysl Otakar I	1232	St. Vitus Cathedral

Enthronement marked the accession of a duke to power.⁸⁰ In all the narrative sources, even the most terse, the verb inthronizare or some other reference to the solium is used to describe a duke’s coming to rule.⁸¹ Though largely taken for granted by the chroniclers, the link between the throne and the assumption of lordship is occasionally spelled out explicitly by them: “he obtained the throne and the ducatus of Bohemia,” as Cosmas remarks simply, or “solemnly enthroned, he took charge (prefecit dominio) of all of Bohemia,” in Gerlach’s words.⁸² Vincent, as noted above, reports that the throne was “a certain stone one” located in Prague castle.⁸³ Of Soběslav II, whose succession dispute with Vladislavand his son Frederick was decided at the imperial court, Gerlach says: “Designated for the paternal duchy, Soběslav sought Prague; there, received splendidly by both the clergy and the people, he was solemnly enthroned according to the custom of the country (iuxta morem patriae), and thereafter reigned happily.”⁸⁴

Two passages from Cosmas are the only extant descriptions of the enthronement ceremony. The fullest depiction comes in his account of Břetislav I’s accession in 1037:

After the funeral rites were completed, [Jaromír] took his nephew Břetislav and led him to the princely seat; and, just as they always do in the election of a duke, they scattered 10,000 coins or more among the people in the chambers of the upper hall, so that they might not crush the duke on his throne but rather chase the scattered coins. Next, when the duke had been placed on the throne and all was silent, Jaromír took the right hand of his nephew and said to the people: “Behold your duke!” And they cried together three times: “Krlešu!” (that is, Kyrie eleison). And again Jaromír spoke to the people: “Approach from the gens Muncia! Approach from the gens Tepca!” and he called by name those who were more powerful in arms, surer in loyalty, stronger in the army, and most prominent in wealth.⁸⁵

Cosmas’s description indicates that seating the new duke ceremonially on the throne—literal enthronement—was framed by presentation and acclamation, and followed by reception of the most important laymen of the realm. The significance of acclamation was illustrated in the description of the ill-fated choice of Otto as duke after Svatopluk’s assassination, when “Kyrie eleison” was cried in camp three times.⁸⁶ Although in 1037, Břetislav I was introduced by his uncle, Cosmas describes the new duke’s approach to the throne in 1092 as led by the bishop of Prague: “Together with the clergy and a magnificent procession, Bishop Cosmas took Duke Břetislav the Younger through the gate of the castle before the church of St. Mary and led him to the throne, where he was enthroned by all the comites and satraps according to the rite of this land.”⁸⁷ Despite the evidence of the bishop’s role as presenter in this description, ecclesiastical participation in enthronement seems to have been minimal. Dukes of Bohemia were not anointed.

It was one thing to be a Přemyslid and quite another to be the duly enthroned dux Boemorum. The duke exercised considerable might based on lordship wielded in his territories, and thus, as ruler, he commanded respect and not a little fear from his subjects. Such reverence was also, in part, earned; once lost, no aura attached to a duke sufficient to protect him from deposition. No ideology served to prop up weak dukes, nor could any special sign endow a measure of the duke’s authority upon his designated successor. Moreover, although dynastic charisma distinguished members of the ruling dynasty from all other Czechs, it could in no way defend dukes against attempts at deposition or bids for succesion made, as they so often were, by their fellow Přemyslids. Within the Přemyslid dynasty, Czech rulers were not, it seems, particularly fussy about their title, although—or perhaps because—there was never any doubt that only one man was indeed the duke of Bohemia. Only by enthronement at Prague could a Přemyslid become duke. The throne at Prague, which only one person could occupy, stood alone as a monumental representation of the duke’s powers.

The Throne

The duke’s lordship over land, access to liquid wealth, control of coinage, and exclusive jurisdiction shaped medieval Czech society and also set him apart, well above all laymen. Some aspects of lordship, especially military service and control of castles, necessarily entailed cooperation from the freemen. But the duke’s dependence upon their support ran deeper than his administrative needs. The story of Otto’s ill-fated “election” as duke, as well as the course of every revolt, emphasize the centrality of the throne, fixed permanently at Prague. For a duke, to lose the throne was to lose everything—no trivial constraint upon his power. The reason is simple: all the duke’s broad rights—to the treasury and mint, and as highest general and judge—pertained to the throne.

That the duke’s vast assets and privileges pertained to his office—to put it in legalistic and admittedly somewhat anachronistic terms—is consistently supported by the sources.⁸⁸ Since the bulk of the evidence is negative, or comes from offhand comments, we might best begin with an anomaly. Two charters issued to the Hospitallers by Vladislav II in the mid-twelfth century describe land as “ad coronam regni mei pertinentem,” “ad coronam meam pertinentem,” and “coronae mee adiacebant.”⁸⁹ Such language appears nowhere else. Reference to a “crown” indicates that the documents were issued after Vladislav’s elevation to the rank of king by Barbarossa in 1158.⁹⁰ Both charters apply to the same ruler and institution; they may reflect the particular influence of the international order or some innovation in political ideology of the king’s. Yet the use of such inherently impersonal words like “pertain” and “adjacent” is not, in fact, unusual. “Adjacent” was employed routinely with regard to village appurtenances, especially forest. “Pertaining,” more tellingly, appears elsewhere to describe land that was not owned by an individual but attached to an office. For instance, two charters recording ducal grants speak of land pertaining to a castle.⁹¹ In Henry Zdík’s charter recording the lands of his see, holdings of various size throughout the diocese are listed according to eight subdivisions: those “pertaining” to the church of Olomouc, to the pre-positura of Saint Václav, and to the churches of Přerov, Kroměříž, Spitihněv, Břeclav, Brno, and Znojmo.⁹² The context of the phrases in the Hospitallers’ charters, where these properties are contrasted with those acquired by other means, indicates that these lands, not purchased, or the proceeds of justice, or relinquished to the duke for some other reason, were essentially inherited. “Pertaining to the crown of my realm,” nonetheless, expresses a conception of the duke’s property that was not patrimonial, but concomitant with lordship.⁹³