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
