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 These effectively construct a predetermined frame of historical reference, complete with its own vocabulary, concepts, source base, and objects of investigation.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 what makes them interesting.
Hybridity emerges with particular salience when issues of power are involved. The structure of power in Bohemia and Moravia deviates from the norm, without constituting an exception to it. Thus it challenges, if sometimes only very subtly, the lessons scholars of medieval politics have learned from other regions. The Přemyslids were a ruling dynasty, recognized as charismatic and patently self-conscious, yet their internal structure was altogether different from a “dynasty” (or Geschlecht) classically defined. The Czechs came late to the use of written records, and yet their coinage, in it use and in its production, was precocious. The duke of Bohemia was, apparently, a vassal of the German emperor, and yet he had no vassals under him. More examples will emerge in the pages that follow. Many characteristics of the Czech polity appear atypical even as they offer up a series of unquestionably familiar scenarios. For this reason, they enable us to anatomize the commonalities underlying all medieval polities. Analyzing a duke made king, and his successor made duke again, or the interplay between the religious and political functions of the cult of Saint Václav, enriches our knowledge of medieval kingship and of “national” or dynastic patron saints, for instance. But at a deeper and more rudimentary level, this procedure yields new concepts and vocabulary (interdependence, leadership, community) with an implicitly universal scope, and therefore determinedly comparative application. The particulars of Czech political culture, by the same token, potentially challenge the meanings ascribed to succession conflict, to political violence, to lordship, to dux or regnum. The Czech case thus points toward novel ways of conceiving the exercise of power in the Middle Ages.
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Very few readers outside the Czech Republic are familiar with events in Bohemia and Moravia during the Middle Ages and the efforts of nearly two centuries of Czech- and German-speaking historians to explain and