Download PDF | Tomáš Petráček, Sean Miller - Power and Exploitation in the Czech Lands in the 10th – 12th Centuries_ A Central European Perspective-Brill 2017.
384 Pages
Introduction
The social and economic relations and transformations in the Czech lands between the 10th and 12th centuries have long been an object of interest for many historians, and not just Czech scholars. Few are the periods that have produced more contradictory interpretations of social and economic history. How exactly those transformations took place and how the society of the High Middle Ages came into being are still matters of scholarly debate.
The main problem and reason for the ongoing discussions is the limited nature of the source base, which is responsible for the unclear or even contradictory nature of the historical reconstruction.1 Possibilities offered by related fields, such as archaeology and ethnology, are limited, one reason being that archaeology is not sufficiently equipped to explore questions of political or social organization, especially for societies such as that of Bohemia between the 10th and the 12th centuries.2 The basis of such research necessarily remains an analysis of the traditional sources, surviving textual material of Bohemian provenience, dated at least by content to the 11th and 12th centuries. This, however, is equally limited in size.
If one leaves aside the narrative sources, whose value for the study of social and economic issues is a whole question in itself,3 only those sources remain which have been collected by Gustav Friedrich in the first volume of his Codex.4 Of those, again a relatively small number contain information pertaining to the topic of this book. Although, because of their early date, the charters of Bohemian provenience represent the fundamental source of information for the economic and social history of the Czech lands, there is no comparable body of sources for the 11th–12th centuries in any other Slavic-speaking area.5
This book is an attempt to offer a new interpretation of that same body of evidence, with an emphasis on the lower classes of Bohemian society in the 11th–12th centuries.6 This is not a book about those social groups from which the Bohemian nobility later emerged as an internally structured class, or about the clergy, but one dedicated to those who supported the very existence of society through their labor, particularly those who appear as “donated people,” under various labels and in various situations.7
This is a daunting task, if only because of difficulty one encounters when attempting to tackle the subject. None of the existing terms in use among historians can do justice to the topic; the “donated people” of Bohemia were not liegemen, serfs, or slaves. Conversely, they were both more and less than just peasants, husbandmen or farmers. In fact, a considerable number of cases of donated persons seem to have belonged to non-agricultural occupations, particularly crafts. One of my main goals in this book is to delineate a conceptual framework for the definition of the social status of donated people. Knowledge of the unprivilegded classes is hampered by a general dearth of sources,8 primarily due to a lack of interest amongst comtemporary authors.
Nor are there any sources originating from the lower classes. One must therefore view them through the distorting mirror of the sources written by members of the “monastic-clerical ruling class.”9 In this respect, mentions of the lower classes are always tangential, in that they usually appear in the context of saintly miracles, ecclesiastical or state laws, deeds, acts and urbary books pertaining to property, or, rarely, in stories about great political figures. Moreover, there are absolutely no sources pertaining to the 9th and 10th centuries.
The first part of this work includes a relatively detailed overview of the research. Its purpose is not a comprehensive treatment of the relevant historiography, complete with the study of the social conditions in which the relevant works have been written, and their place in the development of historiography. Such a treatment would require a separate monograph. Instead, the overview is intended to introduce the reader to the relevant literature, approaches and interpretations, as well as provide with a summary of the development of the fundamental concepts. I have chosen a chronological approach to the historiography for the sake of clarity and easy comparison. In addition, the reader will find an analysis of those charters that have been treated as spurious (forgeries).
That analysis involves a great deal of discussion of the details pertaining to the paleographic and diplomatic features of those charters. Out of a total of 411 edited texts, there are 67 items in the first volume of Friedrich’s Codex pertaining to questions of property for the whole period up to 1197. The donation of personally dependent people appears in 12 authentic and 10 spurious charters. Given such a narrowing of the source basis, it has been possible and desireable to analyze all of the relevant deeds in extenso, including brief diplomatic evaluations. Such an approach avoids an a priori treatment of the social class as an ideal, typical construction. The narrative sources are treated in the same way. Reading sources with in the social context of their production is a fundamental premise of this book.10
Even though I have placed a great deal of emphasis on the charters of Bohemian provenience, I have also devoted attention to the relevant sources and secondary literature pertaining to Poland.11 This is without any doubt the best comparison for the Czech material, and is critical for filling in the gaps and ambiguities in Bohemian sources, or for placing the Bohemian situation with in the context of Central European developments. The contemporaneity of the processes in question is a major benefit of such a comparative approach.12 Equally useful in this respect are the parallels with the material (both sources and secondary literature) pertaining to Slovakia and to the Holy Roman Empire. The clearest analogies, however, remain those with Poland.
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