This study’s methodology, like any other, depends heavily upon the written and material remains of the society under examination; they consist of chronicles, charters, coins, seals, saints’ lives, liturgical books, and the rare manuscript illustration. There also exists a number of letters, papal privileges, and an occasional imperial charter. Nearly all of the analyses presented in this book rely heavily upon four consecutive historical narratives and upon a very small group of charters. Neither type of source is comprehensive per se; they have therefore been read from a variety of perspectives for answers to tiny questions as well as larger conceptual ones. Two other source bases, one textual, the other material, are of particular importance to specific lines of inquiry: the tenth-century vitae of Saint Václav and the vast array of silver pennies of varying types issued by the dukes of Bohemia.3 While both the latter receive full treatment in Chapters 5 and 7, the chronicles and charters demand fuller introduction here.
Cosmas, author of the Chronica Boemorum, was the conscious originator of the Czech chronicle tradition.4 Dean of Prague cathedral, he undertook his writing circa 1120 as an octogenarian; in his youth he had studied grammar, he tells us, at Liège. Cosmas’s plan was to tell the history of the Czechs in three books: from mythic times to the accession of Břetislav I in 1055; from 1055 to 1092, when the last of Břetislav’s sons died; and from the subsequent enthronement of Břetislav II until the time of his writing.5 Cosmas indeed completed his history, bringing the narration up to the enthronement of Soběslav I in February 1125, then adding a few retrospective chapters before his own death on 12 October that same year.6 The Chronica Boemorum is a long, rich text, brought to life by the author’s unmistakable voice, his singular style, and his opinion of the deeds he tells. Cosmas’s literary pretensions, manifest through copious classical and biblical citations, vibrant speeches, and dramatic scene-setting, may neither be filtered nor dismissed. There is no way to silence Cosmas the author in order to extract “facts” from his chronicle. Likewise, his “bias” may not be easily categorized and compensated for: a priest writing for a clerical audience, he can nevertheless hardly be characterized as exhibiting a specifically clerical perspective on secular affairs; although living (like other canons of Prague) within the confines of Prague Castle and preoccupied with the deeds of Bohemia’s dukes, he was by no means a court chronicler; and while he offers ample criticism, only lightly veiled, of rulers both dead and alive, he espouses the view of no contemporary political faction, so far as we can determine. Put simply: Cosmas was enormously concerned about the exercise of power and, although to some extent he saw power as inherently corrupting, he clearly also hoped—and argued—for its just exercise.
Cosmas, however much he seems to dominate the pages that follow, is by no means our only narrative source for twelfth-century Bohemia. Two anonymous continuators, one at the collegiate chapter of Vyšehrad and another at the monastery of Sázava, copied Cosmas’s text, made minor additions concerning their own houses, and then, at the same time, carried the chronicle from 1126 to 1142 and 1162, respectively.7 Probably both were inspired to write by the Czechs’ great victory at Chlumec in February 1126, only four months after Cosmas’s death. The chronicle of the Canon of Vyšehrad, while it opens in a distinctly “Cosmovian” style, soon shows the author’s keen interest in astronomical and natural phenomena; after 1130 his reports of events are laconic, and the weather occupies a significant portion of the text. The so-called Monk of Sázava, which I believe actually represents a composite text, is even more terse and makes particular note of monastic affairs at Sázava and other Benedictine houses. A third author, working at Hradiště monastery in Moravia, selected excerpts from these texts to form an annal, which he augmented with bits of his own; as the lone Moravian voice, this short work (usually called the Annals of Hradiště-Opatovice) is especially valuable.8 For the second half of the twelfth century, a separate chronicle was begun by another canon of Prague, named Vincent, devoted to the reign of Vladislav II (1140–73). He carried it with him when he accompanied his bishop on the Milan campaign of 1158, and his account of that expedition fills half of the chronicle. Vincent’s work was continued by a Premonstratensian abbot, Gerlach of Milevsko. Writing in the early thirteenth century about the last quarter of the twelfth, Gerlach was chiefly concerned with the well-being of the Czech church. He also diverts a substantial portion of his text to relate the life and death of Abbot Gottschalk of Želiv, a Premonstratensian from Saxony with whom Gerlach immigrated to Bohemia as a boy.9 We thus have, besides the Chronica Boemorum, four other prose narratives and a set of annalistic notes, each the work of an author of different status and affiliation, each writing in a distinct style with unique perspectives and purposes, though all were clerics.
These texts are crucially supplemented by the corpus of charters surviving from the Czech Lands.10 Very few charters, however, survive or seem ever to have been written: for the period from 1000 to 1198 only seventy-four genuine, original charters, plus twenty-four extant as copies, and an early collection of donation records. Only the barest handful are extant from the eleventh century or from Moravia.11 Of this hundred or so documents, the majority date from the last quarter of the twelfth century, when a burgeoning land market spurred an increased recourse to writing to safeguard transactions for posterity. Yet these same records of donation, sale, or exchange of land indicate that, even circa 1200, oral norms and customary law governed property transfer and the resolution of disputes. For a variety of reasons, therefore, these documents constitute an imperfect source of evidence for the period examined in this book. At the same time, though, they contain valuable information that the narrative sources overlook or take for granted: they show land changing hands, the duke resolving disputes, freemen assembled as witnesses, and canons moving up the ranks of cathedral offices. Fortunately, too, many of the originals that survive from the twelfth century bear contemporary seals.
Any picture of the eleventh- and twelfth-century Czechs must be carefully, and creatively, crafted through a matrix of these texts and archeological remains. It is my intention in this study to treat the extant variety of source materials comprehensively, and thus to 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