Hastening Toward Prague. Lisa Wolverton

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      2. THE FREEMEN

      In Cosmas’s account of the mythic origins of ducal lordship, Libuše prophesied “what the rights of a duke might be” and predicted the duke’s indisputed domination of medieval Czech society. He would, she said, do with the Czechs and their property as he pleased. Indeed, in the preceeding chapter the duke of Bohemia’s rights and assets proved extensive; he exercised comprehensive oversight in his territory and enjoyed a near monopoly of the institutional bases for power. Libuše warned the Czechs that the decision to subject themselves to a duke would result in their own near-total disempowerment. Yet throughout the Chronica Boemorum and the chronicles which succeeded it appears ample evidence that Czech laymen were by no means powerless, their lives and goods disposed according to the duke’s whim. Nor, as Chapter 6 demonstrates at length, were they too terrified of their lord to oppose him.

      All power, it goes without saying, entails relationships. Even at the highest political levels, there always existed some connection—real or idealized—between ruler and ruled. We need, therefore, to bring the Czech freemen out from behind the duke’s shadow, to treat them in their own right. Only then will it be possible to understand their motivations, constraints, and internal dynamics, as well as their stance toward the dukes they were so often ready to depose. Nevertheless, understanding the “ordinary folk” in medieval Czech society is exceedingly difficult, often quite frustrating, because most of what can be known about laymen per se must be deduced from their relations to the duke, around whom the narrative and documentary materials are oriented. The duke’s subjects, the lay inhabitants of the Czech Lands, comprised a wide array of individuals, nearly all of whom lived and died beyond the purview of the extant sources.¹ It is impossible to put faces and names to more than a few men, rare to know any background for those, and altogether futile to look for any comment about their mothers, wives, or daughters. Distinguishing between laymen of different stations, even knowing what the defining social strata were, likewise relies largely on guesswork, as do assumptions about the apparently “elite” men who appear in the sources.

      In the last one hundred years of scholarship on the medieval Czech Lands, historians have tried to remedy the dearth of sources by recourse to sociological models or by extrapolating backwards from conditions obtaining in later centuries. Such approaches have invariably led more to distortion than to clarification. For instance, the nineteenth-century preoccupation with the origins of later medieval and early modern noble families has generally obscured our knowledge of the magnates during this crucial time because many of the assumptions about the nobility in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century depend upon conceptions of lineage, especially those partrilines later associated with specific castles and heraldic devices, which we cannot be certain prevailed in the twelfth century.² At the other end of the spectrum, the Marxist effort to study the peasantry relied on anachronistic assumptions about conditions among a class oppressed by “feudal” lords. Far less information is available concerning the unfree than for those that might be construed as “the elite,” but even so no evidence supports the assumption that the countryside was populated by substantially more unfree peasants, or slaves, than freemen.³ Bridging these two approaches, however incongruously, is the “družina model” presumed by all current scholarship.⁴ It seeks to describe the Czech protonobility, to explain their relationship to the duke, and to understand the structure of lay society in Bohemia and Moravia in terms of an early medieval retinue. The assumption of its institutional existence has been taken as a starting point, rather than as the subject of focused research, with the result that every reference in the narrative sources to cum suis, clientes, satellites, cum militibus, comitatus, and any other description of men traveling with other men is taken as evidence of družiny.⁵ The flaws in such a circular argument are self-evident. A fourth approach attempts to combine all these assumptions, together with those about state development, ducal administration, and castle districts (discussed above), in order to chart a trajectory for the “development of the nobility” over several centuries; the resulting theories have only the slimmest grounding in the extant evidence.⁶ We must move away from such misguided approaches, whether the convenient short-hand designations by which kin-groups are identified in the historiography or abstract conceptual categories like the družina, in order to begin to examine the freemen’s own consciousness of kinship and lineage, notions of property and inheritance, and social, economic, and political relations with their ruler.

      One final note before proceeding: The term “freemen” is used throughout this study broadly to designate laymen in Czech society in this period, though we hardly know enough about them to determine the English term that would most accurately represent the group of individuals described by any given reference in the written sources. In other instances, “magnates” seems to be the term that approximates most closely the usage of such words as comites in the Latin sources and is also analogous to the medieval Czech župani. At the same time, even “magnate” risks misunderstanding, since it implies an elite group whose preeminence is based on landowning; the latter is certainly not the case in the Czech Lands, and we have few means of determining how “elite” individuals or groups among the Boemini, milites, or meliores were. Because they were not a closed, hereditary social group, as we shall see, “nobility” is inappropriate. The broader term “freemen” is therefore used as the basic term for the free, land-owning warriors of all ranks. “Freemen,” “magnates,” and “Czechs”—understood without explicitly ethnic connotations—are employed loosely, and deliberately so.

      Identifying the Freemen

      As with ducal lordship, consideration of the Czech laymen, their circumstances and interactions, must begin at the most basic level. Although the answers often remain elusive, structural questions need to be asked about distinctions between the free and the unfree, between those with and without landed property, among those bearing titles and moving in the duke’s circle, among various kin-groups or lineages, and between individuals of different ethnic origins. Such queries attempt to understand the Czechs in collective terms, whether in self-consciously identified groups or within the social stratifications defined by custom. This section takes another, complementary tack by examining the circumstances and careers of selected individuals. Some freemen step out of the sources by name, whether because they played a key role in the events described by chroniclers or were listed as donors or witnesses to late-twelfth-century charters. Examining their lives and roles, and the differences between these various men, offers a striking counterweight to analysis of abstract notions of status. Both the social-structural and prosopographical methods proceed by recourse to charters and chronicles, where passing remarks often provide the only clues. At times, the soundest conclusions to be drawn are negative or inconclusive. Still, while a roster of all that is not known easily becomes tedious, it can also prove revealing, especially where it helps dislodge assumptions made too easily or casually.

       Categories of Status and Lineage

      The Czech Lands, the previous chapter argued, comprised a society СКАЧАТЬ