Hastening Toward Prague. Lisa Wolverton

depicted, and chose to portray himself on coins and seals, bearing a warrior’s lance and shield.⁶⁸ Such ducal imagery is perhaps best represented by the frescoes in the chapel of St. Catherine at Znojmo, built circa 1134 within the vice-duke’s castle.⁶⁹ In the middle two of four painted rows, following a depiction of the messengers’ approach to Přemysl at his plough, appears a series of standing figures, clearly divided into two groups: in the first, the men who represent dukes of Bohemia from the mythic era to Břetislav II wear cloaks, while the rest, apparently Moravian vice-dukes, are pictured only in tunics and leggings.⁷⁰ With distinct facial features and expressions, each of the Přemyslids holds a shield and a lance with a banner, sometimes one in each hand, sometimes both in either the right or the left. The shields and banners are decorated, but no two are the same. Spear, banner, and shield, together with the throne, would remain integral to ducal iconography through the end of the twelfth century. After the permanent elevation to the rank of king, when royal crowns and scepters replaced them, these emblems persisted—into the twentieth century—as the iconographic attributes of Saint Václav, the martyred duke turned warrior-saint.⁷¹

      Cosmas, in the story of Přemysl the Ploughman, describes a change to “princely garb” as part of his assumption of power—noting, however, that his old peasant shoes were kept “still today” as a reminder of the duke’s lowly origins. Indeed, fancy trappings seem not to have been a part of ducal ideology or ceremony.⁷² The Přemyslids portrayed in the chapel at Znojmo wear simple clothing. None but King Vratislav, who wears a large crown and holds a scepter, sports any headgear or other ornament.⁷³ Czech dukes are occasionally depicted on coins and in rare manuscripts wearing a head ornament, whether wreath, helmet, or headband, but no single item appears consistently.⁷⁴ On the vast majority of coins the dukes, including Saint Václav, go bareheaded. Nor is there much evidence of ceremony or rituals indended to remind the Czechs of their duke’s exalted status, though as usual we are at the mercy of laconic sources. Cosmas’s account of the ill-fated colloquium called by Vratislav to force the candidacy of Lanzo as bishop of Prague seems to indicate that no special ceremony, language, or placement set the duke far apart from his men:

      They came to the gate of the guardpost where one goes into Poland and in the place called Dobenina the duke called together the people and the magnates in a mass. With his brothers standing at his right and left, the clergy and comites sitting in a wide circle, and all the warriors standing behind them, the duke called Lanzo and, with him standing in the middle, lauded him and commended him to the people.⁷⁵

      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

Dukes
Bořivoj	(St.) Ludmila
Vratislav I	Drahomiř
Boleslav I	Biagota
Boleslav II	Emma
Oldřich	1) ?
	2) Božena
Břetislav I	Judith of Sweinfurt
Vratislav II	1) ?
	2) Adleyta of Hungary
	3) Svatava of Poland
Břetislav II	Lukarda of Bavaria
Bořivoj II	Gerberga of Austria
Vladislav I	Richeza of Austria
Soběslav I	Adleyta of Hungary
Vladislav II	1) Gertrude, sister of Conrad III 2) Judith of Thuringia
Frederick	Elizabeth of Hungary
Conrad Otto	Helicha
Přemysl Otakar I	1) Adela of Meissen [divorced] 2) Constance of Hungary
Vice-Dukes
Conrad of Brno	Wirpirk
Otto of Olomouc	Eufemia
Vratislav of Brno	Helena of Russia
Conrad of Znojmo	1) Catherine of Hungary 2) ? Maria

TABLE 5. BURIAL PLACES OF PŘEMYSLIDS

Duke	Death	Burial
Bořivoj I	?	?
Spitihněv I	?	?
Vratislav I	?	St. George’s
Václav I (St.)	28 Sep. 929