Hastening Toward Prague. Lisa Wolverton

      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

TABLE 5. BURIAL PLACES OF PŘEMYSLIDS

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