Modele władzy dynastycznej w Europie Środkowo-Wschodniej we wcześniejszym średniowieczu

Dalewski, Zbigniew (1962– )

doi:978-83-63352-41-7

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Modele władzy dynastycznej w Europie Środkowo-Wschodniej we wcześniejszym średniowieczu

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Tytuł: Modele władzy dynastycznej w Europie Środkowo-Wschodniej we wcześniejszym średniowieczu

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The book attempts to present the strategies used in the early Middle Ages by the Piast, Přemyslid and Árpád dynasties ruling in East-Central Europe to build their own position and shape political relations both with respect to their members and the communities subordinated to their power. Its main purpose was to describe the essential elements of concepts of power, defining the rules for functioning of the system of rulership, regulating the succession to the throne and deciding on the internal structure of the ruling dynasties, and to place them within the broader comparative context of models of dynastic rule in other polities of early medieval Europe. The book shows that in the political tradition of East-Central European polities emerging in the tenth century, the right to participate in power was equally vested in all members of the ruling house. As a result, the dynasties ruling in those countries took the form of horizontal kinship structure that included a broader group of more or less close and distant relatives, participating together in rule. Concepts of power which regard it as common property of the entire dynasty and not only of its individual members or lines can be found in many traditions and cultures. Similar patterns of rulership and the dynastic structures legitimized by beliefs about the communal nature of power, can be also discerned in the early medieval polities of the Polabian and South Slavs, in Great Moravia or in Kievan Rus’. Also in other regions of early medieval Europe, both in its periphery (the British Isles, Scandinavia) and in its central areas, including the Kingdom of the Franks, both in Merovingian and Carolingian times, we deal with systems of rulership in which the right to wield power was not restricted to the narrow family of a ruler, but included also his other relatives, both close and distant. It is difficult to determine the reasons for such a widespread occurrence of those dynastic structures which could also be found in many other non-European traditions and cultures. It is worth noting, however, that the diffusion of the rights to power among all the representatives of the ruling house contributed not only to strengthening its unity and a sense of familial solidarity. The right to participate in ruling, vested in all the ruler’s relatives by virtue of their kinship with the ruler, demonstrated also to the subjects the special character of the ruling house, and marked out its difference from other noble families. Thus, paradoxically, this peculiar dispersion of power among the members of the dynasty strengthened its position and confirmed its monopoly of rule. In the early eleventh century, both in Poland, Hungary and Bohemia, some actions were undertaken to change this state of affair and to transform their ruling houses, through the limitation of the number of members entitled to wield power, into narrow hierarchical dynastic structures within which power would be vested only in one of their members. For it is in those categories that we should understand both the attempts of Bolesław Chrobry of Poland to secure the succession to the throne to his son Mieszko II, with the exclusion of his two other sons, Bezprym and Otto; and the decision of King Stephen I of Hungary to hand over power to his sister’s son, Peter Orseolo, which meant removing from power his more distant Árpád cousins; or plans of the Czech Prince Boleslav III to raise to the throne his son-of-law or his brother-in-law. Attempts of all those rulers to change the former dynastic model should be associated with their adoption of ideological programmes developed in the West, especially in the Reich [...].