Kings and Carols

Right, hold tight: I’m about to explode a cherished seasonal myth: Wenceslas was not a king; he was not even called Wenceslas! He was Václav, duke of Bohemia. It was the Emperor Otto I who extended the regal dignity to him posthumously. This was a purely personal honour, one that only serves to confuse, especially as the real King Wenceslas I of Bohemia finally stood up in the thirteenth century!

In a recent brief article I read on Wenceslas, not the first, the original, Jonathan Pollard asks if he was good, as the carol alleges. Well, he was declared a saint and all saints have to be good! But really it’s all a question of party politics, the parties in question being Pagan and Christian. Václav was a Christian, which seems to have been the only measure of his ‘goodness.‘ He was brought up by Saint Ludmila, another goody, eventually strangled on the orders of Drahomira, Václav’s mater, a Pagan, and therefore a bad person, although there is not a trace of evidence to suggest that she was - a Pagan, that is!

The fact is the saint came from a back-stabbing, power-mad family. His mother had his grandmother murdered and he was murdered in his turn by Boleslaw, his brother, who wanted the throne for himself. Which party did Boleslaw belong to? You've already guessed, I suspect - he was a Pagan! That’s how the hagiography goes, though Boleslaw seems to have been somewhat relaxed when it came to matters of personal faith, encouraging the growth of Christianity while he was duke and asking the Pope to make Prague a bishopric, rather odd behaviour, I feel sure you will agree, for a Pagan. It gets even odder when one remembers that Mlada, his daughter, became a nun and his son of the same name was so pious that he was to be known as Boleslaw the Pious!

The murder, as Pollard says, probably had nothing to do with Václav’s Christianity or his goodness and everything to do with his pro-Holy Roman politics, which was in danger of turning Bohemia into just another province of the Empire. His retrospective kingship shows how valued he was by the imperial court, just as Boleslav’s decision to go to war soon after his succession shows that he was the true defender of Czech liberties, not his brother, rather ironic considering that it was Václav who went on to become the nation’s patron saint.

Never mind the history; you are still left with the carol, the much loved classic with words by John Mason Neale. Incidentally I made up my own version of that, one my set used to sing at school, which opens like this;

Good King Stephen last looked out
On the feast of Wenc-lass,
When a snowball came in sight
And nearly knocked him senseless.
Oh, the stars he saw that night,
And his head was cruel,
Oh, the stars he saw that night,
And his head was cru –ooo –el.

I was a bad girl, a Pagan, clearly, not a Christian. :-)

Yes, a super song, just so seasonal. There is just one tincy-wincy thing. The tune to which Neale set his lyrics is Tempus Adest Floridum (It is time for flowering), a thirteenth century carol celebrating spring. So, you see, nothing really is as it seems.

The Empire of the Imagination

My empire is of the imagination. So says Ayesha, the sorceress queen in She, the novel by H. Rider Haggard. In a sense the Holy Roman Empire was also of the 'imagination.' It was an ideal that never quite became a reality, and never developed in any meaningful sense as an integrated state. The maps showing the imperial borders, even before it turned into a crazy patchwork of political and religious entities, are actually quite deceptive, because even at its height under Charlemagne and Otto the Great, the Empire was always a federation to a lesser or a greater degree. Charlemagne created a Universal State, in other words, with roots in the old Germanic tribal system. Over time tribal chieftans turned into kings and princes in their own right; and thus the Emperor, no matter how much reverence was attached to the title, was never in the strictest sense a 'monarch.' After Charlemagne the closest they ever got to the old Roman form was as primus inter pares-first among equals-and sometimes not even that.

Beyond this, the Empire, from the very outset, was shaped around a dangerous political contradiction: that between the 'Universal State' and the 'Universal Church.' Charlemagne's Frankish empire arose at a time of papal weakness; but once the papacy began its steady ascent, from the tenth century onwards, the struggle between Church and Empire was to become one of the great defining features of the early Middle Ages. There were points when this struggle broke down into outright civil war between the Imperial faction or the Ghibellines, on the one hand, and the Papal faction or the Guelphs, on the other. The struggle reached its height during the reign of the Emperor Frederick II of the House of Hohenstaufen and Pope Innocent IV, with the Papacy emerging as the final victor.

After the death of Frederick in 1250 the whole Empire made an ever more rapid descent into the twilight, and was no longer taken seriously as an entity in European power politics. The later Emperors, from Henry VII onwards did have a distinct territorial power base, contrary to the point made by Adam, which introduced an additional element of rivalry, contributing still further to the decline.

I began with a quote, so I will end with a quote, that of Voltaire, which serves best as the Imperial epitaph-The Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy, nor Roman nor an Empire.