Download PDF | (East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450-1450_ vol. 17) Jan Kláptště - The Czech Lands in Medieval Transformation-BRILL (2011).
567 Pages
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
Dear Reader,
Just as readers in the Czech Republic have found, I believe that you too will find Jan Klapsté’s book remarkable. Its topic is very dynamic because it is connected with the events of the thirteenth century in the medieval Bohemian state and in Central Europe. It was a period of significant and wide-ranging change in the structure of settlement and society. Groups of colonists set out to transform extensive areas of forest into a cultivated landscape similar to the older cultural landscape.
New fields and new villages were created, and entirely new settlement elements were made, such as the medieval town, new types of strongholds and monasteries joined by networks of roads. The population grew and foreign colonists arrived. In agriculture as well as in craft production, new technologies appeared; the harnessing of energy and the exploitation of raw materials increased; and trade developed. After three centuries of effort by the Church, the society affected by the second wave of Christianisation became culturally and religiously Christian. The Bohemian state emerged as a significant entity in Central European politics during the reign of the last Piemyslids.
Jan KlapSté’s exposition of these phenomena is based on the results of studies by generations of historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as his own life-long research into this epoch of transformation. As an archaeologist and historian, he has provided a number of new factual observations on the period’s material culture and settlement history. His approach is influenced by Braudel insofar as he too strives to orchestrate the complex knowledge of the past by means of dynamic multi- and interdisciplinary study.
This demanding analysis is an important instrument for Klapsté to construct an integrated picture of the period and to assess the conclusions which have been proposed. It is just as important that his method relies on the discovery and emphasis of causality in history, on the element that underlines the mutual conditionality of the historical processes and phenomena. In his text, the reader encounters not only the history of the thirteenth century but also its roots which reach back to the Central European early Middle Ages.
This approach underpins the research programme of the Centre for Medieval Studies of the Academy of Sciences and Charles University in Prague, and reflects fully the Centre’s mission to acquaint the European and American reading community with the significant results of Czech medieval studies. I am therefore happy that it has been possible to acquire the financial support of the Editorial Board of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic for the procurement of the English translation of Jan Klapsté’s book, and I am very grateful to the publishing house of Brill for undertaking its editing and publication.
Prague, 20 April 2011 Petr Sommer Director Centre for Medieval Studies of the Academy of Sciences and Charles University in Prague
FOREWORD
Asa field of academic research, history is concerned with the past, but implicitly with the present as well; it is about the people we study, but also about us. This symbiotic relationship between past and present has had a remarkable impact on modern scholarship relating to the history of the Czech lands and is evident, in particular, in treatments of the time period with which this volume is concerned.
For the Czech lands, roughly corresponding to the medieval territories of Bohemia and Moravia, the thirteenth century constituted a “time of enormous, fast-paced change: the [Bohemian] duke became a king, wide tracts of forest were cleared for agriculture, huge silver deposits were discovered and exploited, both new and long-established towns were granted charters of privilege.”!
The same period witnessed the emergence of a landed-nobility, residing in castles, surrounded by warrior retinues, practicing primogeniture, consolidating and colonizing their lands.’ In short, the Czech lands experienced a process of transformation comparable to that which, somewhat earlier, in regions farther to the west, had established the defining characteristics of a high medieval, European society.
Within the grand narrative of the Czech Middle Ages, the thirteenth century exhibits all the signs of a historical turning point.’ Like watersheds, milestones, and similar constructs, turning points have the effect of removing past events from the flow of time, understood as a continuum in which past, present and future exist simultaneously, and assigning importance to them on the basis of a selection of pre-determined, ostensibly empirical criteria. A product of hindsight, turning points always have a provisional character.
They wax, wane, or fade into oblivion in tandem with the changing perceptions of the historians who discover them. Turning points change, as we change, a principle that has as much validity for the thirteenth century as it does for any other turning point. For this reason, it will be useful to place the turning point with which this publication is concerned within an appropriate historiographical context.
As with other schools of European history, Czech historiography has not been immune to the influence of nationalism, especially during the discipline’s formative period in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, the presence of a sizeable minority of Bohemian and Moravian Germans, with their own national narrative, ensured that both Czech and ethnic German historians took a great interest in questions of nationhood and ethnic identity.‘
Such questions acquired a sense of urgency, in 1918, with the dismantling of the multi-ethnic but German dominated empire of the Habsburgs and the establishment of Czechoslovakia, a nation state dominated by the Slav majority. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the establishment of a political regime dominated by the Czechoslovak Communist Party and oriented towards the Soviet Union led to the imposition of a new historiographical orthodoxy that reflected the now dominant, MarxistLeninist ideology.
During the same, post-war era, the violent expulsion/ peaceful transfer of what remained of the German minority also left Czech historians with a point of controversy that lingers to the present day.” Neither the exodus of the German minority, erstwhile focus of ethnic anxiety in Czech historiography, nor the imposition of an ostensibly internationalist, Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy appears to have seriously undermined the nation-centered model of Czech historiography. Instead, it has been argued, the master narrative of emerging Czech nationhood was simply subsumed within a new, materialistic and deterministic model based on class struggle and revolution.’
This revised narrative of Czech history still had room for “ethnically defined class enemies” who oppressed “the Czech people, which comprised various lower classes and was represented as democratic, egalitarian and averse to hierarchies.”” An opportunity to revise this model seemed to emerge, in 1989, with the downfall of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia and the renewal of the latter’s ties, both intellectual and political, with Western Europe. At this point, the results appear to have been mixed. While acknowledging a trend towards the establishment of new paradigms, perceptions and methods, especially since 2000, a recent overview of Czech historiography notes the persistence of “nation-centric modes of writing history” and argues that attempts at a reevaluation of Czech historiography after 1989 were more likely to restore old themes rather than introduce new ones.’
More or less the same comments are applied to work concerned with the Czech Middle Ages. The authors of this overview argue that” whereas the older generation merely engaged in preserving its position from the 1960s, the younger generation of medievalists did not take up new methodological innovations and mostly adhered to traditional constitutional and administrative history as well as to parochial regional history.”® Klapsté takes a more optimistic view, arguing that the “Czech return to Europe” led to real though not immediately conspicuous changes in the perception of history.’° “National history,” he observes, “a living part of the present for generations, is becoming more clearly a chain of noteworthy but closed and distant chapters.”’’ Klapsté’s own work, as represented in the present volume, suggests that a capacity for innovation is alive and well among Czech medievalists.
One might argue that Czech historiography whatever its chronological focus, remains poised between two possible narratives, one corresponding to the traditional, nation-centered model (though shorn of its more overtly ideological aspects), the other transcending that narrative and attempting to integrate Czech history into the more general history and historiography of Europe. Klapsté has clearly chosen the second approach. In the present volume, Klapsté takes issue with earlier scholarship and offers a reappraisal that acknowledges recent trends in European medieval studies and in the study of medieval colonization.
In particular, Klapsté’s volume can be placed within a trend, evident in recent literature, to treat the colonization of the East within a more expansive narrative that includes other European regions and peoples.” Klapsté locates the medieval transformation of the Czech lands within a dynamic of “Europeanisation” that affected both Eastern and Western Europe and transcended the chronology typically assigned to “the issues of the thirteenth century” by Czech historiography.’ Freely crossing the traditional boundaries represented by the years 1197 and 1306, Klapsté argues that the transformation of the Czech lands had deeper roots and did not lack precedents and prerequisites, its stature as a historical turning point notwithstanding.
Klapsté’s book also suggests the benefits of cross-fertilization between the fields of history and archaeology, especially with regard to historical periods such as the Middle Ages.’* For the Czech lands, in particular, research and excavations undertaken by archaeologists have contributed to a portrait of the historical landscape that is denser and more detailed than literary or documentary evidence alone would have suggested.'*
As the “opportune solution” to this dramatic increase in knowledge, Klapsté advocates an analytical approach based on a “critical connection of the testimony of various witnesses, above all written records, archaeological sources and evidence from still standing medieval buildings.”’® This “opportune solution,” effectively combining the methodologies of both historians and archaeologists, provides the focal point of Klapsté own analysis. Approaching the medieval transformation of the Czech lands as a multifaceted and ongoing process rather than a single event, Klapsté exploits both object-based evidence and text-based evidence to trace its impact and progress among peasants, nobles, and townsmen.
In itself, the fresh approach taken by Klapsté would appear to suggest the value of this work, but there is also another, more general factor to consider: its contribution to the limited bibliography of relevant literature in English. For most Anglophone medievalists the medieval history of the Czech lands remains terra incognita. This is partly a matter of language abilities; the skill set of Anglophone medievalists does not generally include a reading knowledge of Czech, the language, in which most of the relevant literature has been published.'”
Citing Milan Kundera’s reference to the “strange and scarcely accessible languages of Central Europe,” Klapsté suggests that Czech medieval studies have been hidden, in effect, behind a linguistic curtain.’* Lisa Wolverton, an Anglophone medievalist who does possess a command of Czech, has characterized medieval Bohemia and Moravia as a “region long overlooked by medievalists...with an isolated specialist historiography.””” Aside from Wolverton’s own monograph, a well-received study of social and political structures with a somewhat earlier chronological focus than Klapsté’s work, and her translation of the Chronicle of Cosmas of Prague, the list of relevant publications by Anglophone scholars will appear relatively thin.” The dearth of publications by Anglophone scholars has been balanced, to some extent, by a growing list of publications produced by Czech scholars writing in English.”!
The history of the Czech lands may also have been overlooked because, with a few exceptions, Anglophone scholars tend to focus on Western Europe, a carefully and somewhat arbitrarily defined construct that consigns peoples beyond the Elbe and Danube to a kind of no-man’s land where things are different.” Invoking a concept employed by historians of the “Third World,” Jan Piskorski refers to the countries situated to the east and south of Germany and Austria as a “Third Europe” which has no place on a landscape defined by dichotomous and sharply defined boundaries between East and West.”
In light of the “important similarities” that transcend such boundaries, the notion of a deep, abiding, and clearly defined difference between Eastern and Western Europe appears highly questionable and, in any case, should not be taken for granted. Given their close ties to medieval Germany and the Holy Roman Empire, entities almost always included within the boundaries of medieval Western Europe, such doubts would appear particularly justifiable insofar as the Czech lands are concerned.”
Although they maintained a high degree of autonomy and distinctiveness within the Holy Roman Empire, the Czech lands were tied to that body in a way that Poland and Hungary, the other major states in east Central Europe, were not.”° Characterized by “routine, sometimes contentious involvement in each other’s affairs,” relations between the Premyslid dynasty and its German, imperial counterpart rested on a variety of institutional arrangements and mutual obligations as well as mutual self-interest.” Emperors called upon the Premyslids for military support and service at court.
Premyslid princes sought imperial support in securing the ducal throne and Premyslid dukes enhanced their prestige through access to imperial favor, the latter culminating in their recognition as kings of Bohemia. The relationship between the Empire and the duchy/kingdom of Bohemia attained a comparable level of intensity within the ecclesiastical sphere.** The bishoprics of Prague and Olomouc (Olmiitz) were suffragans of the imperial archbishopric of Mainz and typically received investiture from the emperor. Monks and priests of German origin appear to have been well-represented among the ranks of the Bohemian clergy, a development that did not go unnoticed or without criticism among contemporaries.”
For the historiography of the Czech lands it is especially significant that German immigrants were also represented among other social and vocational groups and that their numbers appear to have increased in the period after 1200.” As part of the German Drive to the East, the migration of German farmers, miners and city-dwellers into Eastern Europe has long attracted controversy and aroused passions. During the high tide of scientific racism, the relationship between immigrant and indigenous populations inspired qualitative evaluations of a distinctly Social-Darwinian cast.
Emphasizing the historic mission of the Germans as transmitters of culture, Heinrich von Treitschke (1834-1896), one of the most influential historians of his era, declared that German settlement had introduced “the easy-living people of the East” to “the massive gifts of German culture, the sword, the heavy plow, the stone building and the ‘free air of cities,’ [and] the strict piety of the Church.”*' The frontier thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner inspired comparisons between medieval Eastern Europe and the American West, with the Slavs as stand-ins for Native Americans.”
Scholars in Eastern Europe countered with interpretations that minimized the contributions of the Germans or excised them altogether.*? Czech historians, in particular, tended to emphasize the autochthonous status of the Czechs, characterizing the Germans as late-arriving immigrants and guests whose aggressive inclinations contrasted with the peaceful demeanor of their Slavic hosts.** As Klapsté observes, “Czech historical reflection believed in a simple formula: the Czechs were in the Czech lands first, the Germans later, and therefore they should act accordingly.”
Frantiek Palacky (1798-1876), a major figure in Czech historiography as well as in the Czech national revival of the nineteenth century, elevated opposition between Czechs and Germans to the central principle of Czech history, declaring that the latter “is based chiefly on a conflict with Germandom, that is, on the acceptance and rejection of German customs and laws by the Czechs.”® In such an overheated atmosphere, it was a small step, as Klapsté notes, “to finding the primary cause of the inter-ethnic problems of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in medieval colonization.”
Overtly nationalistic or ethno-centric narratives are far less evident in current treatments of medieval colonization. The idea that modern concepts of national or ethnic identity can be exported to the Middle Ages has been largely rejected; and there is growing recognition that medieval concepts of ethnicity and nationhood were highly subjective and provisional.” Similar doubts have been expressed with regard to boundaries and frontiers, medieval attempts at defining them being no more consistent or immune to partisan intent than modern ones.**
Indeed, insofar as the colonization of Central Europe is concerned, Jan Piskorski argues for a broader geographical focus, with borders encompassing “the territory from Holland, Switzerland and Austria (including Carinthia) to Scandinavia, Latvia and Estonia, the historic states of Poland-Lithuania, and the Hungarian and Czech lands.” A skeptical stance with regard to questionable concepts and boundaries is also evident in Klapsté’s book, most notably in his rejection of the assumption, warmly embraced by earlier generations of medievalists, that a distinction between active transmitters and passive recipients of change was a logical corollary of transformation.
For Klapsté the transformation of the Czech lands was not a monologue addressed to a static, underdeveloped society by more sophisticated outsiders, but rather the product of a “complex dialogue dependent on the active participation of several parties,” including Czechs and Germans, nobles and churchmen, farmers, merchants, and vocational specialists.“° This was a dialogue that could take place only because the ground had already been prepared by historical trends of longer duration.
The “extensive cultural change” traditionally associated with the thirteenth century occurred when a dynamic and evolving society encountered “a system of innovations” originating in regions farther to the West, but not unknown to the indigenous population. In the narrative proposed by Klapsté the question of who first introduced these innovations is less crucial than the more complex one of how innovation was incorporated into existing patterns of development to produce the turning point known as “the Czech lands in medieval transformation.”
David A. Warner
Department of History, Philosophy & the Social Sciences Rhode Island School of Design
USA
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The translation of the book The Czech Lands in Medieval Transformation is based on a revised version of the Czech publication, which was first issued in 2005 by the Nakladatelstvi Lidové noviny Publishing House in Prague. The first thanks belong to Mrs. Eva Pleskova, as director of Nakladatelstvi Lidové noviny, for her substantial assistance with the Czech edition and for facilitating negotiations with Brill Publishing House for the English edition.
The translation was undertaken by Mr. Sean Mark Miller and Mrs. Katerina Millerova, who devoted uncommon diligence and care to their task. Their approach has gone far beyond what normally can be expected in the translation process. The Czech text has presented significant terminological difficulties. Some of the Central European terms do not have a clear and uniformly used counterpart in English; within Europe, medieval realia differed, as do the traditions of modern research. The translation attempted to achieve the clearest resolution of all of these difficulties.
One example is seen as early as the introduction: the European terminology used for the periodisation of the Middle Ages in and of itself would provide enough material for a comparative study. Within the Czech milieu, for instance, the early Middle Ages go back to the period around 1200 and thus essentially overlap with the period included by German historical terminology in the High Middle Ages. The translation uses the term early Middle Ages in the wide ‘Czech’ understanding because it corresponds to the historical reality and the possibilities of its periodisation. For the sake of clarity, we have excluded the term High Middle Ages and labelled the later part of the Middle Ages collectively as the later Middle Ages.
The initial translation required professional proof-reading and editing because, among other things, it proved that significant differences remain in the way of conducting professional discourse. Traditional Central European discourse raises doubts about the basic information, does not avoid ambiguous statements, and enjoys emotionally-coloured sentences. Englishled discourse relies on more precise and more disciplined thought. Wherever possible, it was necessary to find a clearer and less ambiguous formulation. The quality and clarity of the translation was improved by the proof-reading and editing by Dr Philadelphia Ricketts (University of Liverpool). Her support was crucial. I was able to establish very important dialogue with Philly, which was also a great joy.
The publication of the book in English was proposed by Florin Curta (University of North Florida) in 2007. He has been ceaseless in his support of the entire plan, and has encouraged me during those moments when I doubted the feasibility of the whole project, and for this support I remain deeply grateful. Brill publishing house has provided magnificent support, particularly from Mr. Julian Deahl and Mrs. Marcella Mulder. The experienced and systematic leadership of Mrs. Marcella Mulder has made it possible to prepare the entire manuscript for publication, and to all I extend my heartfelt thanks.
The Czech and English versions are based on my long-term research interests which rely on a similarly long dialogue with a number of Czech, European and American archaeologists and historians. It is not possible to name them all; thanks can only be general. However, I must emphasise one fact, that my dialogue with these many archaeologists and historians has provided a number of uncommonly valuable stimuli. Inaccuracies or errors which careful readers may find in the presented book are of course my own.
Sincere thanks go to my family. It sometimes seems that in the daily hustle and bustle they are not aware of how important the knowledge of the distant medieval history is for understanding the world in which we live today; the gratitude that they deserve is so much the greater.
A research undertaking of this type depends on the support of sponsoring bodies. This book, revised from the Czech edition, was created as a part of the project, the Archaeology of Piemyslid Bohemia, which has received assistance from the Grant Agency of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (Grant P405/10/0556). Translation of the book into English was made possible through support provided by the Editorial Board of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.
Prague, 21 April 2011 Jan Klapsté
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