Prague, the influence of the papal see on the lands of the Bohemian crown[1] was very insignificant. The supremacy of Rome, indeed, only finds expression in the fact that the popes confirmed the most important decrees of the Bohemian sovereigns which referred to ecclesiastical matters.[2] This state of semi-independence in the course of time became displeasing to the rulers of the Western church. On several occasions papal legates appeared in Bohemia, who endeavoured to bring the Bohemian Church into closer subjection to Rome. They, however, encountered the hostility both of the sovereigns and of the people of Bohemia, and when, during the long contest about investitures, the rulers of Bohemia sided with the German emperors, all relations between Rome and Bohemia ceased for a considerable time.
The beginning of the thirteenth century is noteworthy as being the moment when a great change took place. Henceforth the power of the Roman Church incessantly increases. In Bohemia, as elsewhere, that church endeavoured to introduce obligatory celibacy among the clergy, and this demand appeared particularly arbitrary to the Bohemians who had first received Christianity from the Eastern Church. Their priests had hitherto almost all been married men, who were attached by family ties to the other members of the community. Thus Cosmas the chronicler,[3] the earliest of Bohemian historians, though a canon of Prague, dedicated his great historical work to the memory of his wife, Bozetecha. In Bohemia, as elsewhere, it became part of the papal policy to establish—by enforcing the celibacy of the clergy—a caste apart from the
- ↑ The lands of the Bohemian crown are Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, though Lusatia was for a time also considered a land of the Bohemian crown.
- ↑ The interesting question of the relations of the Bohemian Church to Rome in the pre-Hussite period was formerly very obscure. Recently (1904 and 1906) Dr. Krofta has in the Cesky Casopis Historicky (Bohemian Historical Review) published a valuable series of articles on this subject. I have here largely used these studies.
- ↑ For Cosmas, see my History of Bohemian Literature, pp. 42–46, and particularly Lectures on the Historians of Bohemia, pp. 6–14.
