AROUND 1120 an elderly Czech, Cosmas, a secular canon in the Prague cathedral chapter, finished the first book of a Latin text he called a “chronica Boemorum,” that is, a “Chronicle of the Czechs.”¹ It began in a legendary age with the first inhabitants of Bohemia, who gave the land its name, then told the story of their first ruler, their conversion to Christianity and first native saints, wars with neighboring peoples, the succession of bishops of Prague, and closed with the accession of the great mid-eleventh-century duke, Břetislav I. Five years later, Cosmas had finished two more books, relating...

IF YOU ARE COSMAS, how do you write your region’s first proper history? How do you determine what will be part of the story? What resources do you have to know what the components even are? How do you structure the telling and inflect it with your own view? These are the questions with which we begin, focused on the process of composition. UnderstandinghowCosmas worked is the first step toward appreciating why the resulting text reads as it does and what he intended by it. Chronicles do not flow seamlessly from pen to parchment, nor spring full-grown and...

ALTHOUGH COSMAS comments generically on the writing of history at the outset of his Chronicle, he provides no hint there about his motivation to undertake a project as large as theChronica Boemorum. While the proverbial desire to rescue the past from “oblivion” often contains a grain of truth, just as often other, more mundane purposes inspired medieval authors to take up the pen. Rarely stated outright, these purposes must usually be inferred from careful analysis of the form and content of the text. While this holds for Cosmas as well—and is the explicit purpose of this book—he...

THE PREVIOUS chapter demonstrated how the legends that open theChronica Boemorumdefined ducal lordship as predatory and oppressive, and considered how this portrayal reflected a deeper political pessimism manifest throughout Cosmas’s text. The legends of Libuše and Přemysl also hinge explicitly on issues of gender. A gendered logic indeed governs the Chronicle as a whole, beyond the realm of legend, beyond Libuše. In this chapter, we ask why—and what consequences this holds for women and the rest of Czech society as the Chronicle depicts them.¹

As established by the first duke Přemysl, the Czech political order is explicitly...

IN A PREVIOUS CHAPTER we observed Cosmas roundly castigating his contemporaries, describing them as “denuded of virtues.”¹ And while he contrasted them unfavorably with “men of old,” the first part of his Chronicle by no means offered examples of men behaving better. Instead he cast his pessimistic view of the current era back onto the legendary one, so that the two were wholly intertwining and mutually reinforcing. We turn now to analyze more closely the nature of his critique of his own age, and of politics as practiced in the Czech Lands, not just as constituted in principle. We need...

THE PRECEDING chapters have argued that Cosmas’s motivation and the message of theChronica Boemorumwere primarily political and pessimistically so, that his text constitutes a diatribe against the exercise of political power wrapped in an account of the past—or rather, a narrative of past events thoroughly shaped by a dark vision of the nearly unredeemable nature of political power. In this chapter, we push the analysis one step further, to grapple with Cosmas’s reputation as the author of a “national history.” If Cosmas’s chief aim was to write a political treatise, why frame it as the history of...

THIS BOOK HAS ARGUED that theChronica Boemorumis an historical narrative preeminently concerned with politics. Influenced by the poets of Roman antiquity, especially their warnings about the dangers of tyranny and civil war, Cosmas thought deeply, and with considerable originality, about the fundamental nature of politics. His aim was to weigh in, with no little cynicism, on contemporary political difficulties and debates—even to exhort contemporaries to take a role in shaping a more just political order. This, not any desire to legitimate or extol the dynasty, explains the preeminent role of the dukes of Bohemia in his account...