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.
PART I
THE STRUCTURE OF POWER
1. DUCAL LORDSHIP
In the story of the first duke Přemysl, as told by Cosmas, the Czechs become dissatisfied with appealing their disputes only to arbiters, however wise, and so choose to subject themselves to a single ruler with the power to enforce decisions. Libuše, a prophetess and their most respected judge, is deemed unsuitable for the task as a woman. She agrees to take a husband, who might become the first Czech duke, yet warns them at length of the risks:
O most pitiable people, who do not know that they live free and that no good man leaves freedom except with death. You flee that freedom not unwillingly and submit your necks voluntarily to unaccustomed servitude. Alas later you will regret it in vain, as the frogs regretted it when the serpent, whom they had made their king, began to kill them. If you do not know what the rights of a duke might be, I will try to tell you in a few words. It is especially easy to appoint a duke, but very difficult to depose one appointed, for he who is now under your power, whether you established him duke or not, when later he is established, you and everything yours will be in his power. In his presence your knees will tremble and your mute tongue stick to a dry palate. Because of great fright you will hardly respond to his voice: “Yes lord, yes lord,” since by his command alone and without your forejudgment he will damn this one and slaughter that one, order these sent to prison and those hung from the gallows. He will make you yourselves and those among you whom he pleases some servants, some peasants, some tributaries, some tax-collectors, some executioners, some heralds, some cooks or bakers or millers. He will establish for himself tribunes, centurions, villagers, farmers of vineyards and fields, reapers of corn, makers of arms, shoemakers of various hides and skins. He will place your sons and daughters among his followers; from even your oxen and horses and mares and cattle he will take, at his pleasure, whichever are best. Everything yours, whatever is better in villages and towns, in fields and meadows and vineyards, he will take away and render for his own use.1
The Czechs persist in the face of this admonition: the new duke, a ploughman named Přemysl, thus gains power directly from those he rules. The legend, in Cosmas’s telling, seeks less to glorify the Přemyslid dynasty than to account for the origins of ducal lordship. In the process, the passage conjures a striking picture of raw power. The considerable disadvantages associated with a monarch are not attributed exclusively to bad rulership or usurpers, but depicted as inherent in ducal authority from the start. The tone of the speech, and the attitude toward power it betrays, belong unmistakably to Cosmas. Yet in attributing these words to a famously discerning seer, he intended them to resonate with his present while simultaneously explaining the past.
The myth of Libuše and Přemysl, or any other consideration of the origins of Přemyslid overlordship, cannot answer questions about the exercise of power in the Czech Lands. Libuše’s speech is not construed, nor surely was it intended by the chronicler, as a depiction of the ruler’s actual rights and privileges. Yet it points in the right direction. We begin therefore, almost as Cosmas did, by taking stock of the resources, rights, and obligations comprising the lordship of the duke of Bohemia. Since the duke was undoubtedly lord of all the Czech lands and inhabitants, far and away the preeminent authority in his territory, we need to consider more closely the foundations for such power. This is to ask institutional questions of a sort, although, since bureaucratic institutions of governance based on written records had not yet been established and law was customary and oral, explicitly institutional or legal methodologies cannot be employed.2 Extant materials remain limited and rarely answer directly the questions put to them, thus also disallowing a quantitative approach.3 Preoccupied with the duke and with political affairs, the authors of extant sources, whether chroniclers describing the notable events of their day or scribes redacting charters, took for granted basic issues of social and political structure. The method applied here endeavors to read between the lines, to look for patterns that manifest across time and varied materials, and to search for the structures behind the deeds the sources recount. Libuše describes ducal power, from its outset and by its very nature, as extensive and invasive, affecting the lives of the duke’s subjects in very tangible ways. This chapter seeks to determine whether it was indeed so, that is, to understand the depth and extent of the duke’s reach.
Understanding the ways in which secular lordship permeated the lives of eleventh- and twelfth-century Czechs requires, in addition, attention to the fundamentals of medieval Czech social structure. Even if power relations were not quite the zero-sum game Cosmas envisioned, Libuše’s admonition serves as a reminder that for one to have, say, the right to judge, others must stand among the judged. Although the focus in this chapter is the duke, the significance and breadth of his rights and assets emerge by comparison with conditions prevailing in Czech society as a whole during this period. Put simply: to determine the degree to which control of land formed a basis for the duke’s power, we must comprehend the nature of landholding generally and among the freemen specifically; to assess the importance of control of castles, we must speculate as to their function; to imagine the duke’s judicial authority, we must know something about the law. For all these issues, and particularly with regard to military service, the duke’s rights must be weighed by their limitations as well as his obligations. How far above or outside the community of the governed this Přemyslid ruler stood becomes clear only by close analysis of the circumstances of broader lay society—though such a picture remains only partial without independent consideration of the Czechs themselves, the subject of Chapter 2.
Land
Material resources largely form the basis of social and political power in any age. The importance of more liquid assets in monetized economies should not be discounted, but real property carried particular value. We begin, therefore, with analysis of the land resources available to the Přemyslid duke of Bohemia. Given the erratic nature of the documentation, including the absence of central administrative records, reconstructing a complete list of the duke’s lands and sources of income is simply impossible.
