Hastening Toward Prague. Lisa Wolverton

Sežima we find in Soběslav II’s documents (cf. Table 2) or whether this is the nephew of Vitek listed in C323. As he appears as pincerna here, my hunch would be the former but there is no way to be certain.

      d. On the assumption that Slavibor is not the same as Slajbor, this is his only appearance.

      e. There are two men named Hermann in this list. I am assuming that one is probably this Hermann, the son of Marquard and brother of Záviše.

      f. Two men named Budivoj appear in the document. The subsequent three documents concern the same Budivoj, brother of Ben, but whether he is the same as Budivoj here is uncertain.

      g. In CDB no. 342 Kuno’s wife Agnes makes a donation to Plasy for his soul, so wemay assume he was dead by 1193.

      The witness lists paint pictures simultaneously of constant change and of continuity. If titles were provided more often, the impression of frequent shuffling would probably be even stronger. On the other hand, if we could be more certain of blood or affinal relationships the continuity might be more striking. One thing is certain: all the men depicted here constitute a minute percentage of population, however calculated, and therefore represent an elite. Sufficient overlap exists to reassure us that the evidence from the two very different genres, charter and chronicle, indeed represents the same society. Yet the number of men who appear as witnesses, court officers and castellans even, but absent from the chronicles, and the occasional reverse case, serve chiefly as a reminder of how far beyond our view the lives of the Czech freemen are. And whether named in chronicles or charters, they are a motley crowd. Certainly—most obviously in the first half of the twelfth century but surely before and after that time—the freemen were sometimes divided into one or more factions. Unfortunately, as we will see in Chapter 6, the chroniclers rarely give any indication what characterized these groups, their size or motivation. No wonder, then, that the chroniclers so often refer to the Czech freemen collectively, in loosely defined groupings, rather than as individuals or specific lineages.

      Social Mobility and Shared Interests

      The analysis of the Czech magnates presented so far has made no mention of the so-called družina, or ducal retinue. This omission has already been noted and explained; yet, given its central place in current scholarship, it seems important to revisit the model and to juxtapose it with the evidence just presented. Studies of the early and high medieval Czech Lands have universally presumed that the retinue of faithful followers formed the fundamental unit of social and political organization. Small retinues, they argue, evolved into a “state” družina centered on the duke, a political elite from whom the duke selected castellans and court officers and upon whom he relied for counsel.⁸⁶ Assuming a družina institutionalized at any social level or stage of development is unjustified, however. Certainly contemporaries knew who was allied with whom, who was dependent upon whom, who could be expected to fight for whom, but we have no evidence that this was conceived in terms of membership in a družina. Did one formally enter or exit? Were there conditions of membership? Did a magnate have authority over his družina? Was its leader their lord? No evidence provides answers to these questions. At the highest level, the družina model has the disadvantage of positing the družina’s abject dependence upon the duke, a circumstance not supported by the sources, without offering analytical precision in a broader interpretive scheme. It offers no insight into the workings of the duke’s court nor to the role of castellans, and one can only guess whether or how the court or castellans are to be included in a model družina. The witness lists themselves give no impression of a družina, either ducal or “state,” precisely because of the fluidity and stability they simultaneously reflect. Undoubtedly there were rich magnates whose favor with the duke was uncertain, lesser men who ranked high in his favor, great men who were powerful by virtue of both, and lower-ranking men who had little to gain or lose either way. Since these people can be fit into a družina model only awkwardly, in place of the družina I would suggest two fundamental characteristics that governed relations among freemen, as well as the political and social circumstances of individuals in the eleventh and twelfth centuries: social mobility and shared interests.

      Analysis of status and of the circle at court showed the potential for social mobility among Czechs at all levels of society, both elite and servile. Even the slim evidence concerning the poorest folk shows them moving not only into but out of servitude, whether release was gained by purchase or through another’s munificence. A few, admittedly exceptional, “rustics” like Vacek achieved the highest ranks. Having led rescuers to Duke Jaromír, half-dead after the Vršovici attack on him, a servus named Hovora was proclaimed “noble” and granted the office of hunter at Zbečno, which, Cosmas says, his decendents held from that time (ca. 999) to his own.⁸⁷ Hunter at the duke’s chief hunting residence was a lesser if privileged post; Hovora’s case is thus a reminder that ducal service offered opportunities not only at the superior level of chamberlain and castellan. Men like Hovora or Vacek—or Zderad, villicus and counselor to King Vratislav—must have been powerful exemplars to other ambitious freemen of their day. By the same token, the men at the very top were vulnerable, liable to a decline in prestige with the rise of another favorite or more serious losses if forced into exile by the duke’s anger.⁸⁸

      In the Czech Lands, however, neither poverty and disgrace nor wealth and prominence were altogether heritable from one generation to the next. Office-holding at court and as castellan must have been lucrative according to the responsibilities of the position but rarely were such appointments permanent, much less hereditary. The same may have been true of the wide array of lesser posts; perhaps Hovora’s case was legendary because such heritability was exceptional. Property, on the other hand, was owned in perpetuity by all freemen and their heirs. These persons owned land varying in quantity and quality, and their holdings were quite dispersed. Certain families—through wealth, birth, prowess, prestige—were probably prominent across generations, and perhaps there was an accepted and acknowledged, if fluid, ranking of men and families among the magnates. Nevertheless, vast potential for mobility was imbedded in the structure of property ownership: if partible inheritance was practiced, rich men could quickly find their lands divided among a number of heirs; since land could be freely bought or sold, anyone could put liquid assets to the purpose of increasing or consolidating his lands. Although almost no women appear in the sources, except for duchesses,⁸⁹ in the day-to-day business of life in the medieval Czech Lands, freemen married the daughters and sisters of other freemen, thereby—probably deliberately—forging alliances.⁹⁰ If daughters were given dowries, good marriages must have constituted one way for prominent or wealthy families to remain so, and for low-ranking, upwardly mobile men to augment the land the duke might give them. Of course, as happens everywhere in every age, some men must sometimes have squandered their fortunes, ruined their names, fallen from grace, while others made good marriages, managed their property well, and profited from service to the duke. With heritable landowning, rich men probably had the advantage in perpetuating and increasing their holdings but because all freemen were able to own land and expected to bear arms, there existed no rigidly defined elite or lower strata. Social mobility, both upward and downward, must be assumed as a fundamental characteristic of Czech society of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

      While there probably remained a large class of unfree peasants and artisans, the middling group of freemen might range from craftsmen to farmers owning small plots, to magnates with several villages or vast lands, and upward to the most important men of the realm. These men owned lands in a society in which this was the chief form of land tenure at all levels, they performed military service with all other freemen simply as the duke’s subjects, and owed no special obligations contingent upon their landholding. None, even the elite of the elite, were able to control castles independently of the duke at any time in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Since immunity was only granted exceptionally late to a few ecclesiastical institutions, there is little reason to doubt that all Czechs paid annual tribute and various tolls to the duke, were summoned to military service and related labor duties, and were equally subject to ducal jurisdiction. People at every level transacted business through the medium of the duke’s pennies; only in