Hastening Toward Prague. Lisa Wolverton

The instability that immediately followed Svatopluk’s accession, marked by Bořivoj’s ineffectual incursions and the new duke’s own efforts to consolidate power in Bohemia—one way to interpret his massacre of the Vršovici in 1108—had finally begun to settle by summer 1109. The duke thus turned to more routine affairs and joined Henry V on campaign in Poland in September. On the move with his men, he was speared in the back by an assassin, ostensibly at the instigation of one of the surviving members of the Vršovici. In the subsequent several days, the killing of Svatopluk had two political results: first, his younger brother, Otto, was immediately chosen as his successor by the freemen assembled in camp; second, four days later, Vladislav, the younger brother of the ousted Bořivoj, was enthroned. Duke Vladislav I would govern the Czech Lands until his death in 1125.

      A close look at Svatopluk’s assassination and its immediate aftermath, as related by Cosmas, is intriguing—and quite illuminating. “As we heard from those telling of it afterwards,” Cosmas says, the assassin was a “warrior sent by John, son of Csta of the Vršovici gens.” When the army began to move at dawn, after the siege of Glogov, this man “spurred his horse, quickly mixed himself into the midst of the army, and with all his strength threw his spear between the duke’s shoulderblades.”¹ For John the motive for the murder seems simply to have been revenge, the act of a single individual with no broader political aims, a member of no live faction. The murder was committed independently of any effort to install a specific pretender or further the political efforts of a particular group of freemen. Nor was there, apparently, a designated “second-in-command” to whom the Czech freemen could automatically turn. The immediate consequence of Svatopluk’s death was disarray. Faced with chaos in one contingent of his army, Henry stepped in—not, as one might expect of an overlord, to name Svatopluk’s successor, but merely to restore order and calm everyone’s nerves. As Cosmas tells it: “With the morning, the king arrived to grieve for his comrade. He granted to all the Czechs present that they should elect as their duke whomever they wanted from the sons of their princes.” The chronicler continues: “Then, as he was mourning, Vacek asked with tears rising to his eyes that they should choose Otto, the brother of the murdered prince, as their duke. The king instantly praised him, and throughout the camp the foolish people cried ‘Kyrie Eleison’ three times.” ²

      Otto did not become duke, however, because he was unable to follow his election with enthronement:

      Without delay and with only a few knowing, Detrišek, the son of Buša, ran at full speed and at dawn on the fourth day led to Prague Otto, whom Vacek and everyone from Moravia bustled to raise to the summit of the princely seat. Since they tried to bring it about without the consent of the Bohemians and the bishop, their audacity was frustrated, and the oaths given earlier in the midst of council were recited. For when they enthroned Svatopluk as duke, all the Bohemians had confirmed with oaths that after his death Vladislav, if he lived, would be raised to the throne.³

      The oaths previously sworn by the Czech freemen to back Vladislav’s accession did not ensure that he would succeed automatically; in this case, as in many subsequent ones, such oaths seem to have had no status either as legally binding or determinative of sucession by custom.⁴ Instead, Bishop Hermann of Prague and Fabian, castellan of Vyšehrad, worked strenuously to persuade the assembled men to treat their oaths as “inviolate.”⁵ Only serious deliberation and the influence of men of rank and acknowledged wisdom secured Vladislav’s accession to the throne in September 1109—and Otto’s defeat.

      The story of Czech politics over the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries is one of critical transitions, of accidental and forced turning points, of crises resolved or forestalled. In all of them, as in 1109, the throne and Prague occupied a central place. Questions of succession, and the rebellions that arose when another Přemyslid was deemed more suitable than the reigning duke, emerge as pivotal moments for the configuration of political affairs, alliances, positions. As the chapters in Part II explore more fully, the actions of the duke, the Přemyslids, and the freemen were continually governed by an awareness of the importance of such moments of crisis. The strategizing in which all Czechs engaged at times of obvious political transition was mirrored in moves they made routinely, even if such mundane, perhaps even unspoken, calculations are lost to posterity. In other words, each year from the death of Břetislav I to the second accession and coronation of Přemysl Otakar I—from the mid-eleventh to the end of the twelfth century—was “transitional.” The tension thus generated was neither sporadic nor exceptional but constant—and it constitutes the characteristic dynamic of Czech political life in this period.

      From the preceeding chapters, it is relatively easy to comprehend what first Svatopluk and then Vladislav gained, the assets and rights they commanded as duke, as well as what sort of men Vacek or Fabian were and what they stood to achieve in supporting one party or the other. But much that is central to Cosmas’s anecdote has not yet been considered: the norm of succession and relationships within the ruling dynasty, the meaning of rituals and emblems associated with the duke, the stakes for all those involved: dukes, ousted dukes, Moravian vice-dukes, and other Přemyslids; castellans, courtiers, and warriors of all ranks; the bishops and clergy; and the emperor. The place of the church and the emperor will be treated at length, in Chapters 4 and 7 respectively. We turn now, in this chapter, to grasp more comprehensively the lives of rulers, their relatives, and the laymen who surrounded them in all their deeds.

      Prague, “Mistress of All Bohemia”

      For a Přemyslid pretender—tarrying in exile, say—to become duke, he had to gain control of Prague and be enthroned; reigning dukes facing revolt, for their part, needed to retain Prague at all cost: “amissa Praga, perdita Boemia,” a passing phrase of Gerlach’s says.⁶ In instances of actual siege, “Prague” signifies the castle, a long narrow stretch of walled hilltop on the left bank of the Vltava.⁷ Though small settlements existed below the castle and outside its main entrance at the top (today’s Malá Strana [“Little Side”] and Hradčany), the town of Prague lay primarily on the opposite bank of the river from the castle. There was the market, the Jewish quarter and synagogue, the residential quarter for Germans and other foreign merchants, and an ever-growing number of parish churches.⁸ In the castle lay not only the duke’s palace, but the cathedral, chapter and episcopal residence, as well as the women’s monastery dedicated to St. George. In the Václav legends the chief ducal castle in the early tenth century seems to have been Levý Hradec, on the Vltava several kilometers north of Prague; yet a mere three years after his murder in Stará Boleslav (ca. 929), Boleslav I is said to have translated Václav’s relics to Prague, to the large rotunda church of St. Vitus, which the new saint had himself begun. Whether or not by Boleslav I’s design, Prague emerged early as the political, religious, and economic heart of the duke’s territory. A Jewish traveler writing in Arabic, Ibrahim ibn Ya’qub, portrayed mid-tenth-century Prague as a bustling town, the liveliest in the region: “The city of Prague is built of stone and chalk and is the richest in trade of all these lands. The Russians and the Slavs bring goods there from Cracow; Muslims, Jews and Turks from the land of the Turks also bring goods and market weights; and they carry away slaves, tin, and various kinds of fur. Their country is the best of all those of the Northern peoples, and the richest in provender.”⁹ For all these reasons then, all roads led—as they still do—to Prague.

      In Cosmas’s day, the decades around 1100, Prague was an ecclesiastical hub and the site of the cult of Sts. Václav and Adalbert, a wealthy and bustling trading center, the location (probably) of the central mint, and, of course, the regular meeting place for the duke’s court. Cosmas describes it—and Vyšehrad next door—as rich and flourishing. In a dispute between Vratislav II and Conrad of Brno, the latter’s wife is made to exclaim to the duke: “You will never be better enriched nor more esteemed than in the town of Prague and the village of Vyšehrad. There are the Jews fullest of gold and silver, the wealthiest merchants from every nation, the richest money-changers, and the market, in which the abundant spoils far exceed the number of your warriors.”¹⁰ Prague Castle was the site for