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
