Hastening Toward Prague. Lisa Wolverton

STRUCTURE OF POWER

      1. DUCAL LORDSHIP

      In the story of the first duke Přemysl, as told by Cosmas, the Czechs become dissatisfied with appealing their disputes only to arbiters, however wise, and so choose to subject themselves to a single ruler with the power to enforce decisions. Libuše, a prophetess and their most respected judge, is deemed unsuitable for the task as a woman. She agrees to take a husband, who might become the first Czech duke, yet warns them at length of the risks:

      O most pitiable people, who do not know that they live free and that no good man leaves freedom except with death. You flee that freedom not unwillingly and submit your necks voluntarily to unaccustomed servitude. Alas later you will regret it in vain, as the frogs regretted it when the serpent, whom they had made their king, began to kill them. If you do not know what the rights of a duke might be, I will try to tell you in a few words. It is especially easy to appoint a duke, but very difficult to depose one appointed, for he who is now under your power, whether you established him duke or not, when later he is established, you and everything yours will be in his power. In his presence your knees will tremble and your mute tongue stick to a dry palate. Because of great fright you will hardly respond to his voice: “Yes lord, yes lord,” since by his command alone and without your forejudgment he will damn this one and slaughter that one, order these sent to prison and those hung from the gallows. He will make you yourselves and those among you whom he pleases some servants, some peasants, some tributaries, some tax-collectors, some executioners, some heralds, some cooks or bakers or millers. He will establish for himself tribunes, centurions, villagers, farmers of vineyards and fields, reapers of corn, makers of arms, shoemakers of various hides and skins. He will place your sons and daughters among his followers; from even your oxen and horses and mares and cattle he will take, at his pleasure, whichever are best. Everything yours, whatever is better in villages and towns, in fields and meadows and vineyards, he will take away and render for his own use.¹

      The Czechs persist in the face of this admonition: the new duke, a ploughman named Přemysl, thus gains power directly from those he rules. The legend, in Cosmas’s telling, seeks less to glorify the Přemyslid dynasty than to account for the origins of ducal lordship. In the process, the passage conjures a striking picture of raw power. The considerable disadvantages associated with a monarch are not attributed exclusively to bad rulership or usurpers, but depicted as inherent in ducal authority from the start. The tone of the speech, and the attitude toward power it betrays, belong unmistakably to Cosmas. Yet in attributing these words to a famously discerning seer, he intended them to resonate with his present while simultaneously explaining the past.

      The myth of Libuše and Přemysl, or any other consideration of the origins of Přemyslid overlordship, cannot answer questions about the exercise of power in the Czech Lands. Libuše’s speech is not construed, nor surely was it intended by the chronicler, as a depiction of the ruler’s actual rights and privileges. Yet it points in the right direction. We begin therefore, almost as Cosmas did, by taking stock of the resources, rights, and obligations comprising the lordship of the duke of Bohemia. Since the duke was undoubtedly lord of all the Czech lands and inhabitants, far and away the preeminent authority in his territory, we need to consider more closely the foundations for such power. This is to ask institutional questions of a sort, although, since bureaucratic institutions of governance based on written records had not yet been established and law was customary and oral, explicitly institutional or legal methodologies cannot be employed.² Extant materials remain limited and rarely answer directly the questions put to them, thus also disallowing a quantitative approach.³ Preoccupied with the duke and with political affairs, the authors of extant sources, whether chroniclers describing the notable events of their day or scribes redacting charters, took for granted basic issues of social and political structure. The method applied here endeavors to read between the lines, to look for patterns that manifest across time and varied materials, and to search for the structures behind the deeds the sources recount. Libuše describes ducal power, from its outset and by its very nature, as extensive and invasive, affecting the lives of the duke’s subjects in very tangible ways. This chapter seeks to determine whether it was indeed so, that is, to understand the depth and extent of the duke’s reach.

      Understanding the ways in which secular lordship permeated the lives of eleventh- and twelfth-century Czechs requires, in addition, attention to the fundamentals of medieval Czech social structure. Even if power relations were not quite the zero-sum game Cosmas envisioned, Libuše’s admonition serves as a reminder that for one to have, say, the right to judge, others must stand among the judged. Although the focus in this chapter is the duke, the significance and breadth of his rights and assets emerge by comparison with conditions prevailing in Czech society as a whole during this period. Put simply: to determine the degree to which control of land formed a basis for the duke’s power, we must comprehend the nature of landholding generally and among the freemen specifically; to assess the importance of control of castles, we must speculate as to their function; to imagine the duke’s judicial authority, we must know something about the law. For all these issues, and particularly with regard to military service, the duke’s rights must be weighed by their limitations as well as his obligations. How far above or outside the community of the governed this Přemyslid ruler stood becomes clear only by close analysis of the circumstances of broader lay society—though such a picture remains only partial without independent consideration of the Czechs themselves, the subject of Chapter 2.

      Land

      Material resources largely form the basis of social and political power in any age. The importance of more liquid assets in monetized economies should not be discounted, but real property carried particular value. We begin, therefore, with analysis of the land resources available to the Přemyslid duke of Bohemia. Given the erratic nature of the documentation, including the absence of central administrative records, reconstructing a complete list of the duke’s lands and sources of income is simply impossible. The charters record only those lands relinquished, usually to ecclesiastical institutions. Yet since wealth is always measured relatively and mobilized in a specific culture and context, the duke’s assets cannot be considered in isolation. This section thus describes the nature of landholding generally in the Czech Lands of the eleventh and twelfth centuries and the comparative breadth of the duke’s resources.

      None of the extant sources comments directly on the nature of land ownership per se, but the basic terminology of the charters is nonetheless revealing, as are a few exceptionally telling phrases. In reference to landholdings, whether villages, arable fields of different sizes, or various appurtenances, almost all the documents speak of “possessiones.” The nouns “patrimonium” and “hereditas”⁴ appear regularly and, in all the charters, the verb most frequently used is “possidere.”⁵ Many charters also explicitly note the conditions under which the recipient was to hold the land. From the end of the eleventh century, and routinely in the last quarter of the twelfth, such properties were given “perpetuo possidendam,” “iure perpetuo possidendas,” or “hereditario iure possidendum.”⁶ A charter from 1197 explicitly links these suggestive phrases, noting that Zdeslav “sold by legitimate right” his “inheritance” at Bdeněves, “which he owned according to hereditary right.”⁷ In another case, the Vyšehrad bellringers clarified that they exchanged lands with Marcant “according to the good and proper order, to be possessed in hereditary right by him or his sons or transferred to another whom he chooses.”⁸ Whether by an individual or an institution, lands were owned outright before and after any transfer. Grants conditional upon the death of a wife or heir, leased back to the donor for the remainder of his lifetime, or dependent upon the donor’s return or death on crusade, so stipulate.⁹ The possessions themselves could range considerably in size and seem not to have been legally distinguished. Whole mountains could be traded as easily as tiny plots.¹⁰ Likewise, landowners probably were not legally differentiated, though individual wealth must have varied greatly.¹¹

      Because land was owned by laymen or churchmen of every station, it could be traded freely as a commodity, that is, acquired through purchase or exchange as well as by means of inheritance or grant. A ducal