The Chronicle of the Czechs

Book One

BooK one Prologue Addressed to Provost severus1 To lord severus, provost of the church of Mělník,2 endowed with both literary knowledge and spiritual understanding, from Cosmas, dean in name only of the church of Prague,3 who after the contest of this life will have his reward in the celestial kingdom. i submit myself to your paternity with so much love and devotion of my mind that—i call God as my witness—i cannot speak, just as human reason cannot comprehend a love so great. True love can in no respect be kept one’s own, private or hidden; it should be expressed to the one whom it loves with sincere affection. if true love had not been present, i would by no means have presumed to offer these, my senile delusions, to a man of such authority. seeking something to offer you, i truly sought something pleasant or idle, but i find nothing as laughable as this little work of mine. if we laugh gently when we see someone dash his foot against a 29 1. of the two prefatory letters here at the chronicle’s beginning, this one was probably intended as a prologue to the whole text and was added at a point when Cosmas had all three books nearly complete. notice that it stresses the author’s old age. 2. The provost was the head of a collegiate chapter, rather like the abbot of a monastery, except that the members of the chapter were secular canons charged with ministering to the laity. The chapter at Mělník, an older castle situated at the confluence of the elbe and the Vltava, was established sometime before the middle of the eleventh century. Typical of such early foundations, no early documentation exists. see Wolverton, Hastening Toward Prague, 115. 3. on Cosmas’s rank as dean, see the introduction. The remark here that he is dean “in name only” may suggest that, by the time this was written, he had effectively retired from his duties as dean, though he retained the formal rank and title. 30 The chronicle of The cZechs stone,4 you will see so many of my stumblings in this work and so many errors of the grammatical art that if you wished to laugh at every one, you would be able to do so beyond what is fitting to a human being. farewell. Whether these senile trifles please or displease you alone, i ask that no third eye see them.5 Preface to the Work that follows, Addressed to Master Gervasius6 To Archdeacon Gervasius,7 fully imbued with the pursuits of the liberal arts and anointed with the wisdom of every kind of knowledge, from Cosmas, a servant of the servants of God and saint Václav8 (though he is hardly worthy to be so called): a gift 4. Mt 4:6 and lk 4:11. 5. here and elsewhere in his prefatory letters, Cosmas adopts a false humility that is entirely typical of medieval authors. This “humility trope,” involving protestations of intellectual inadequacy, pleas for correction, and groveling flattery of the addressee , was a kind of literary etiquette, sincere in its insincerity. it was usually expressed in difficult, arcane latin which belied the author’s contradictory claims of inability to achieve a proper, erudite style. readers should, therefore, not take too seriously Cosmas ’s request that severus not share his laughable, error-riddled trifles with others, or similar statements in the prefaces that follow. 6. This prefatory letter was probably written when Cosmas circulated the first book (of the three he planned) among friends. The reign dates at the end point to its composition between 1119 and 1122. Most scholars consider this the date when the letter was attached to a finished or nearly finished Book 1, rather than the point at which it was begun or substantially written. 7. A clerical office subordinate to the bishop with administrative authority within the diocese, whether over a particular subregion or the whole. The specific functions of an archdeacon in early twelfth-century Bohemia are unknown. The implication here is that Gervasius, like Cosmas, was a member of the cathedral chapter, though he may have had duties that kept him away from Prague regularly, hence the need for such a formal letter. As with the other men named in Cosmas’s prefaces, we know nothing of Gervasius beyond what is written here. 8. Another way of indicating the cathedral church in Prague...