blend or juxtapose not only the sources but the types of analyses that usually arise out of them. In recent decades high medieval social history has been constructed overwhelmingly on charter evidence and the close analysis of families, landholdings, and relationships with local instititions. By contrast, the cultural and intellectual subfields of medieval history have embraced narrative sources, with primary emphasis on how these texts were written and why. Ecclesiastical materials usually support religious history, except where they serve regional or cultural studies. And coins have normally been relegated to the highly technical realm of numismatics; when integrated at all into medieval studies, they are deployed largely for illustrative purposes. This is to paint the canvas with the broadest of brushstrokes. Yet my point here is a simple one: whether because or in spite of the paucity of sources for the medieval Czech Lands, I have endeavored to draw from all the extant genres and upon a variety of approaches rather than to follow any particular paradigm or methodological approach.
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My work is not the first treatment of Czech politics during this period; still, it attempts to break from all previous historiography on the subject and to offer a comprehensive alternative. Previous historians of the Czech Lands, while writing in a variety of styles and employing diverse methodologies, have invariably adopted a central focus on state and/or nation formation. This is true whether they write narratively or analytically, with or without overtly Marxist concepts, within or outside the Czech national tradition. Each among the half-dozen or so major works operates within a paradigmatic framework governing the analysis of power in society. The most venerable and pervasive of these takes the exploits and vicissitudes of political rulers to stand for the development of a state or nation; Václav Novotný’s magisterial, multivolume narrative, Czech History (České dějiny), exemplifies this approach and remains canonical ninety years after its publication.12 Another, which includes Václav Vaněček and other legal and administrative historians, effaces the dukes and their personalities behind abstract institutions and mechanisms of domination.13 Power, in both these cases, is understood in a straightforwardly top-down fashion. By contrast, two other models embed power in social conflict. Historians of estates politics and protoparliamentarism, most notably Stanisław Russocki, chart the give-and-take between ruler and (noble) representatives of the people, thereby complementing static institutional accounts with an agonistic view of political development.14 Finally, Rostislav Nový offers a Marxian analysis that classically presumes an inherently oppressive relation between ruling classes (ruler, dynasty, and elite strata, lay and clerical) and the rest of the population.15 These four approaches are not mutually exclusive and should not be construed as a comprehensive typology; they appear to varying degrees in different accounts and yet cumulatively reinforce each other.16 All, however, support a teleological, developmental drive toward nation or state, in most cases subsuming the former under the latter.17
A deeper problem than the bias toward teleology is the recurrence of free-floating, reified assumptions which then feed into stock, uninterrogated interpretations. Ubiquitous catchwords carry baggage from other developmental frameworks and ascribe an institutionalized status to what were very fluid and inchoate practices during the Middle Ages. Whether they actually existed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries (as in the case of assemblies of freemen called colloquia) or not (such as the princely retinue or družina), by their very invocation, they create anachronisms by importing further assumptions into the analysis. In the same way, certain citations from the sources (“familia sancti Wenceslai,” “corona Boemiae,” “the bishop is my chaplain”), recycled in the literature, come to carry the weight of the analysis even as they are ripped from context and never reinterpreted by the authors who use them. Downright erroneous conclusions—about the comprehensiveness of administrative districts or the impotence of the church—once smuggled into the historiography, reproduce themselves, without justification, in successive works. These effectively construct a predetermined frame of historical reference, complete with its own vocabulary, concepts, source base, and objects of investigation.
Underlying many of these assumptions, as well as the various state-formation paradigms, is an implicit understanding of what the “prince” ought to be doing, what the “nobility” ought to be doing, and how their interactions fit them into a certain script or onto some normative path of development. By prescribing set roles, however defined, they take an enormous amount for granted and predetermine the answers to the sorts of basic questions with which this examination begins. Neither the duke, the freemen, the church, nor their interaction, I would argue, have ever been studied on their own terms. My account of Czech political development, certainly, stands outside the historiographic tradition of the last century by its refusal to place either state or nation formation at the heart of the analysis. It thus eschews the implicit value judgments these developmental narratives tend to impose upon the eleventh and twelfth centuries. But its lasting contribution, I hope, consists in asking simply: how did the duke, freemen, bishop, or emperor act under particular circumstances and why? The hallmark of the present work, then, is the rigorous rejection of all of these assumptions and methodological crutches, together with a comprehensive rereading of the source material.
Dissecting and reconstructing, rereading, interrogating, and reorienting minute bits of evidence, I have worked from the ground up in an effort to reframe Czech history of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This same project, of evoking a complex society by careful attention to details, was Georges Duby’s in his classic study of the Mâconnais, as well as that of other historians working in other regions with different evidentiary bases. Where Duby and scholars following his example sought to illuminate regional social structures,18 I have tried to understand and elicit political dynamics. The differences between their and my approach to questions of power in the Middle Ages stem from several factors: not only the absence of comparable sources for the Czech Lands but also, and importantly, the undeniable, nearly overwhelming influence of a single autonomous ruler, the duke of Bohemia. Nevertheless, I have also strenuously avoided traditional monarchical paradigms, such as they are: because the Přemyslid dukes simply were not kings, because without real evidence of bureaucracy one cannot speak of the development of an impersonal “state” in the eleventh-and twelfth-century Czech Lands, and, finally, because this would have veered dangerously close to the production of still another national historical narrative. My analysis of power in Bohemia and Moravia instead owes a profound debt to Eleanor Searle’s Predatory Kinship and to William Ian Miller’s work on saga Iceland.19 Searle’s rereading of chronicles to illuminate machinations within a ruling dynasty proves exemplary for understanding the actions of ever-contentious Přemyslids as described by Cosmas and his successors. And Miller’s anthropologically informed analysis of power relations is instrumental for imagining horizontal bonds within a community and for understanding the role of coercion and violence in that cohesion. The hybrid methodology employed here, treating social structures, rulership, dynastic politics, and communal coherence, has nonetheless, I believe, generated a unified thesis.
This book’s analysis is not explicitly comparative; nowhere are the conditions or events described as obtaining in the Czech Lands set in relation to those elsewhere, in England, or Flanders, or Bavaria, or Poland. The book’s emphatic aim, rather, is to treat Bohemia and Moravia on their own terms. As a region long overlooked by medievalists and with an isolated specialist historiography, the Czech Lands deserve no less. The question nevertheless begs answering: what indeed do Bohemia and Moravia have to offer the study of power in the Middle Ages? The response in no way concerns their uniqueness; none of the book’s conclusions seek to establish the Czechs, their duke, or their land as exceptional. Readers familiar with other areas of medieval Europe will find much here that resonates with the world they know, as well as much that seems anomalous. The points of similarity between the Czech Lands and other parts of Christendom chiefly arise from the fact that, by the later eleventh century, the Czechs had been in contact with their neighbors to the west for centuries, and they had also long since espoused Catholic Christianity. Yet their particular geographic position, the mountains and forest that made Bohemia so easy to defend, safeguarded their autonomous political development. The Czechs’ hybrid position securely within, yet on the margins of, medieval Christendom is precisely
