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 was a death sentence imposed without due trial that several magnates fled: “But Smil and Kojata, although they spoke true and just words among the princes, nevertheless, had they not escaped by flight in the night, the duke would have punished them without any hearing as enemies of the res publica.”37 Where “right” and “justice” lay is little in doubt, at least in the chronicler’s view. Cosmas, with his florid style, invariably describes dukes at these moments as valde iratus, thus acting from wrath and without due consideration. The violence reported by chroniclers is always attributed to the duke himself, never the men who must have done the deeds at his command. Although Cosmas claims not to know the reasons for Beneda’s fall from grace, for instance, there is no doubt that personal animus motivated Vratislav to exile and later kill him.38 On one occasion only does Cosmas show magnates urging violence and the duke refusing, in this case to punish a fellow Přemyslid.39
Cosmas says that the massacre of the Vršovici originated in Svatopluk’s hall, with the duke sitting amidst the assembled freemen before an oven at dawn; accusing Mutina and his uncle of attempting to oust him from the throne, and raging against the Vršovici, the duke left the room with a meaningful look and within moments Mutina had lost his head.40 In likening Svatopluk’s entrance to “a lion emerging from his cave, standing in the theater ⋯ expecting a meal,” and describing the duke as “burning more with anger than the oven,” there is little doubt about what moral Cosmas intends his readers to take from this characteristically vivid scene. But for us there is another lesson here. The death of Mutina, the rounding up of other leading Vršovici “within the hour,” the apprehension of Božej at his home, and the subsequent execution of men, women, and children associated with this gens throughout Bohemia required more than one hand. In the instant after the accusation was made against him, Mutina could not perhaps have been saved, but had his supporters been more numerous and powerful, those days in 1108 might have turned out very differently. On other occasions, for example at Dobenina in 1068, the duke’s plans were foiled by armed opposition. By contrast, in 1128 or 1141, as at Chrudim in 1055, the duke must simply have had more men willing to do his bidding than enemies to capture. For a duke to commit violence, beyond what he could achieve with his own sword, he needed broad support among other men to carry it out. At the same time, if to act against a duke was to risk execution for treason sine audientia, then surely the freemen’s best protection likewise lay in numbers.
Exile, whether forcible or voluntary, effected the removal of a freeman from the company his fellow Czechs and was therefore a potent political weapon. Less radical than the utter finality of death, exile was a longer-term solution than imprisonment, since a man’s languishing in prison too close to family and friends might inspire them to secure his release. Rather than a legal sentence imposed as punishment, exile is frequently depicted as voluntary and as the only effective means of escaping death at the duke’s hands once such an outcome seemed certain. For example, in Cosmas’s telling, days before Svatopluk ordered the elimination of the Vršovici, Mutina was warned “three times by his friends that, unless he fled, without doubt he would lose either his life or his eyes.”41 Some Czechs forged new lives abroad but for many exile was a bitter fate, one only a return to the duke’s grace could resolve. Reprieves were occasionally granted out of pity, or through the mediation of third parties. After Otto II’s death at Chlumec in 1126, his son lived in Russian exile until Henry Zdík arranged his return—together with “other princes”—and reinstatement at Olomouc in 1141.42 Beneda found it more difficult to find someone to intercede on his behalf with Duke Vratislav and succeeded only with dubious and ultimately fatal results.43 A letter written to the same ruler by an unknown cleric likewise begs forgiveness for some offense of his youth which led to his banishment from Bohemia.44 In the twelfth century, nonruling members of the Přemyslid dynasty seem particularly inclined to choose life abroad as an alternative to the myriad disappointments associated with remaining at home—at least until exile too became burdensome and their return could be negotiated. Many of these men faced certain imprisonment in Bohemia. Still, ordinary magnates who flee seem always to have escaped within an inch of their lives. As the Canon of Vyšehrad reports succinctly: “In Lent of that year [1141] many men were hung from the gallows throughout the whole territory of Bohemia, especially on Mt. Šibenice; many among them escaped and fled.”45 Ultimately, exile functioned in a threefold fashion: it constituted a highly effective form of political violence by which the duke could paralyze his enemies; like other kinds of ducal violence, it generated by its threat a psychological violence perpetrated against all Czechs; and, simultaneously, for the freemen themselves, it represented the only means of escape from ducal violence, including especially execution.
Although outside the exercise of justice, exile was nevertheless grounded in lordship because it relied on the duke’s control of both his land’s boundaries and the society inside them to be effective—as apparently it was. A series of mountain ranges runs along all borders of the modern Czech Republic, which are little different from those of the medieval territory ruled by the Přemyslid dukes. The mountains are not high ones but low and rounded, encircling the territory;46 Bohemia proper, in particular, appears from a satellite perspective like a very large crater. The only frontier not delimited to some degree by mountains is the Austro-Moravian border, where the river Dýje separates an open plain; this line was policed by a string a castles.47 The combination of mountains and forests meant that crossing the border was only possible at certain points, which were easily monitored by Czech rulers.48 The eleventh- and