Hastening Toward Prague. Lisa Wolverton

offers a thorough revision of the current scholarly literature on Bohemia and Moravia; simultaneously, it introduces medievalists outside the Czech Republic to a little-known but integral area of medieval Catholic Europe. As an analysis of power per se, it tracks the logic of dynamism and evolution within largely unchanging political institutions and social structures, revealing the values and strategies that sustained the Czech Lands as a political community. The components of its political and social landscape were stark, simple, and durable: a throne, located in Prague Castle; the duke and the dynasty who dominated it; a society of property owners undifferentiated by hereditary strata; the incipient Roman church; and recognized natural boundaries. But their interplay was fluid and complex, and bespeaks the maturity, sophistication, and cohesion of a flourishing Czech polity. Action and imagination in the Czech Lands presumed, and at the same time shaped, a coherent political community, insulated but not isolated from the rest of medieval Christendom and transcending particular individuals or institutions. All this belies Bohemia’s, and Moravia’s, implicit status as a “frontier” region on the fringe of western Europe, while providing an extraordinary opportunity to explore the exercise and logic of power, universal issues observed here operating in a specifically medieval context.

      At the outset this project asked several elemental questions: What powers did the duke of Bohemia possess, what was their basis, how were they effected, and how far did they extend? Consideration of the duke’s power raised a number of corollary issues: What was the status of the Christian church and its leaders? What was the nature of the duke’s relationship to the German emperor?¹ Were conditions substantially different in Moravia compared to Bohemia? These historical issues, essentially institutional in character, together with their associated and subordinated questions, still provide the skeletal organization of this book. Early on, however, investigation into ducal power showed that it would be impossible to imagine it, in theory or in practice, without reference to the Czech freemen. They were the duke’s subjects. But they were no less his partners, his warriors, and, in very concrete ways, a significant check upon his power. The goal of the project shifted then to consider not only the foundations and exercise of ducal lordship, but the form and progress of resistance to it. Concurrently, basic issues of “context,” matters of social structure, law, economics, and religious life, invariably involved the duke, and further disclosed the deep interconnection between ruler and ruled. Over time, and under close scrutiny, a linchpin emerged for understanding the structure and development of Czech social and political life in this period: the interdependence of the duke of Bohemia and the freemen, the implicit tension between them, and the resulting balance of power.

      Although the Czech Lands were undoubtedly governed by a single ruler of great might, wealth, and prestige, the concept of community proves pivotal to the study of his power. The duke of Bohemia stood well above and was yet intimately linked to those he governed. He was responsible—and responsive—to his subjects, even as he dominated them. For their part, the freemen maintained close ties to the duke and to Prague, and assured that the duke governed according to their interests by threatening or carrying out deposition and revolt. While the various constellations of freemen, collegial and contentious, shifted constantly, as did the specifics of their concerns, designs, and allegiances, the goal was the same in every instance, namely, the duke’s throne. The Czechs were not always in harmony with their duke or with each other, but whether in uniting or in struggling to determine the occupant of the throne, laymen of diverse status were de facto empowered. Power in the Czech Lands must, therefore, be seen to reside both in the duke’s throne and in the community of those subject to it.

      Themes of power and community together govern the book in its entirety. Power shapes society from its foundations, and is in turn shaped by it. In the Czech case, issues of power dominate all the sources, of whatever medium or genre. Power, vigorously wielded or tacitly acknowledged, is here conceived broadly, as reflected or enshrined in institutions and social structures, and as abstracted in office or ideology. Community is more elusive, but entails coherence among the inhabitants of the Czech Lands, both in deed and in conception, and their active involvement with one another and engagement with the governing authority. Power pervaded society, not only in its divisions, but in the way each related to the other in a constantly moving dynamic of resistance to, and reassertion of, might. Coming to terms with political community, in turn, requires attention to structures that fostered shared identity, developments which tested or sundered it, and symbols and ideals of unity and of joint action. It is precisely by grounding abstract notions of identity and community in the dynamics of the actual exercise of and resistance to power that we begin to understand their influence.² Though their exact relationship is multi-faceted, this book will ultimately argue, power and political community are inseparable.

      The key to both power and community, and the relationship between them, this book shows, lies in analyzing the course of events, the actions of individuals, their aims, methods, and consequences. The progress of politics must be understood primarily as a continuous chain of strategies and counter-strategies. Their particulars serve as much to shape, or constrain, ducal lordship and Czech social structure as they were framed by them. Likewise, symbols of rulership, the cult of saints, and relations with neighboring rulers are all viewed as resources mobilized (sometimes without success) toward particular ends. It was, moreover, the dynamics of power in action that constituted the driving force of change. While the fundamentals of ducal lordship remained unaltered from the eleventh century well into the thirteenth, and individual laymen were only beginning to transform the social structure at the end of the twelfth, the world of the 1070s was quite unlike that of the 1120s, 1150s, or 1180s. And while outside influences may be credited with certain developments, especially in ecclesiastical affairs and imperial politics, the internal political dynamic conditioned their reception and appropriation as they were made to serve strategic needs, interests, and goals specific to Czech society. To decipher the logic driving the interplay between duke and freemen in the Czech Lands, we must reexamine events” in the standard historical narrative in relation to underlying patterns.

      Put simply then, this study describes and defines the balance of power, and then traces the implementation of strategies intended to tip it. The book begins with ducal lordship, describing its basis in rights, resources, and privileges in Chapter 1, and then turns to social structure, elaborating, in Chapter 2, the opportunities and limitations that governed the lives of Czech freemen. It then turns to the complexities of power in action, and ultimately shows how these sometimes antagonistic forces shaped a political dynamic, the balance of power analyzed in Chapter 3. It argues that while the Czech freemen were institutionally disempowered by the duke’s extensive lordship, an unconventional rule of succession within the Přemyslid dynasty enabled them to exert decisive leverage against him. Chapter 4 considers the status of ecclesiastical institutions and their leadership, showing that their ever-increasing resources and protected status as members of the church hierarchy assured their independence, even as bishops, abbots, and other clergy long stood outside the play of politics.

      The book’s second part is entirely devoted to political strategies: the efforts by dukes and freemen to tip the balance of power in their favor. Chapter 5 treats the cult of Saint Václav (“Good King Wenceslas”), the Přemyslid duke murdered by his own brother ca. 929 and hailed soon after as a martyr; he came to be widely invoked and celebrated among the Czechs as their special patron. The dukes capitalized on reverence for Václav by mobilizing his image on coins and seals to suggest a close association between themselves and their holy predecessor and thereby imbue their authority with a Christian sanction. In many ways the core of the book is Chapter 6, which analyzes three intertwining issues bearing on the nature of revolt: magnate uprisings and conflicts over succession to the throne, intradynastic relations, and conditions within Moravia. Here, in an unceasing play of strategies over the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, interdependence is revealed as a dynamic force, rather than a static structure, and the balance one of constant, though never crippling, tension.