Kurt Gerlach, “ ‘Holy’ or functional lines over Bohemia”

„Heilige“ oder zweckmäßige Linien über Böhmen

Kurt Gerlach / “Holy” or functional lines over Bohemia

An astrological system of ordering means little to the German. A functional system of orderings he will recognize. Here we shall describe a network of lines over the countryside, which despite its vast size ought to be plausible, for it has a practical purpose and, moreover, is not a hypothesis of ours but deduced from historical facts, ie it actually exists.

In issues 7 and 8 for 1940, readers of Germanien have already been presented with a first rough collection of material from a system of lines with the following properties: places with the same name, sited at equal distances apart, and related by having the same original owner, led towards a central line based on the summit of the citadel in Prague. Issue 12 for 1940 gave an extension of this scheme southwards from Prague by means of the places named Žebrák. At this point research had to come to a halt, as long as restraint was enforced by the narrow-mindedness of the authorities, to whom such a phenomenon seemed “fantastic”. We could only proceed when we had cast off our inhibitions about the theory of land-organizers and land-distributors with a wide supranational (that is, imperial or ecclesiastical) authority; then, coming up into our system from the southwest, from the capital of the Ottonian empire*, we reached the heart of the matter.

*Regensburg in Bavaria [MB].

In his “Ecclesiastical History” (Ref. 3) Bishop Anton Frind mentions in passing that Domažlice too was a priory of the island monastery Ostro (situated where the river Sázava flows into the Vltava). This gave the key. The line from Domažlice to Prague runs over the royal fortress Žebrák and over Svatý Jan pod Skalou (St John below he cliff) on the Lodenice, also a priory of Ostro St John. The desert saint John the Baptist was patron of the hermits installed by the island monastery. It had further priories at Zátoň near Český Krumlov, on the Vltava in the far south of Bohemia, and in Slany. Zátoň marks the endpoint of the line running out from Prague through Ostro. The sites Prague, Ostro and Svatý Jan form an equilateral triangle with sides of 22 km. Slany can be reached by bisecting the line Svatý Jan–Prague or bisecting the angle at Ostro; the line Ostro–Slany is 44 km long. Given this line from Prague to Domažlice via Žebrák castle (a line that simply indicates the direction of the main road into the empire, and at 44 km from Domažlice crosses over Radyne, the old fortress of the Starý Plzenec district), if we now look for a corresponding line through the second Žebrák, more to the south of Prague, we arrive at Prachatice, the endpoint of the “Golden Trail” leading up from Passau over the mountains into the Bohemian basin. Let us now remember the reputed builder of this Golden Trail, the mountain saint of the Bohemian forest, the hermit Günther, and run through his life-story, which must be recounted as a basis for this article.

The hermit Günther was a Thuringian nobleman, an ancestor of the princely family von Schwarzburg. In 1008, after travelling to Rome, he laid down his coat of arms and took the cowl of a Benedictine lay brother at the monastery of Niederalteich near Deggendorf, on the Danube in Bavaria. In Rinchnach he founded three cells and a chapel of St John the Baptist, then pressed on further into the mountains, founding a number of religious cells, to which he occasionally made a retreat. It was in his cell at Hartmanice (Gutwasser) that he died in 1045. There on St Günther’s Hill, 1009 metres high, a stone chapel was built in 1618 on the site of his wooden hermitage. Duke Břetislav, however, had his body brought to Prague and interred it in Břevnov abbey. So A. Frind tells us in his history (Ref. 2).

It must surely surprise us when A. Bachmann (Ref. 1) states that “despite the isolation of the place in the expanse of virgin forest” the hermit Günther had maintained “many contacts with the emperor and the neighbouring princes”. But as soon as we chart the sites of Niederalteich, Rinchnach and St Günther’s Hill: there! from Niederalteich to Rinchnach is exactly as many kilometres as Rinchnach to St Günther’s hermitage, 55 km in all. And this alinement, measured out from the basepoint in Niederalteich, runs directly over the hill Chlum in the middle of our Žebrák system, via Břevnov abbey, up to the summit of the citadel and the old sacred site in Prague. So we must suppose that the hermit Günther was more than just a hermit: he was obviously, as shown by his state funeral in Břevnov, employed in a secular and highly practical operation; and in recognition of his services he was laid to rest in the place he had gazed on every day, and from which he span further secret threads, as we shall see. That Prague is visible from St Gütnther’s Hill is noticed by every traveller in the Bohemian forest. Domažlice and Prachatice also lie within sight. If ordinary people remembered road-building as the hermit’s occupation, they were noticing what they understood. Yet no construction succeeds without a plan: the hermit’s plan, if we may now reinterpret our Žebrák system as part of his work, was mighty, gigantic, immense, seen from the viewpoint of village or hamlet. It covered the whole expanse of the Bohemian basin, which from his high standpoint can be surveyed almost in its entirety, and it broke into it at a significant point. And this was one piece in the great plan of the empire!

Politically, the situation was that after Otto III, who had been preoccupied with Italian affairs, the Bavarian Heinrich II took over the empire in 1002. As administrative capital of the empire, Regensburg became even more important in foreign policy. But it was precisely in foreign policy that Bohemia played an important part. Poland had broken through there, and Boleslav Chrobri had brought his forces up before Meissen. In 1004, after his return from the south, where he had been crowned king of the Lombards, Heinrich liberated Bohemia and installed the rightful duke Jaromír as a vassal of the empire. After a second Italian campaign Heinrich was crowned emperor in Rome in 1014; then in 1015 he undertook a punitive expedition against Boleslav Chrobri who had tried to persuade the Bohemians to secede from the empire.

In the choice of allegiance between East and West, Bohemia had already decided under Duke Václav in favour of inclusion in the empire, and then, since it still kept the old religion, had seen the first church-building and pastoral care organized from Regensburg. Now powerful twin forces reached out towards Bohemia: western culture with its monastic foundations, and the imperial power, which however lacked a rapid means of communication with its important province. Just as the archbishop of Mainz was both a prince of the church and chancellor of the empire, so communications in the empire, whether of church or state, would tend to go along a single line: as it would seem, the hermit Günther’s line from Niederalteich to Prague. This line had been marked out earlier, it is true, but not as strongly as in his time.

In 1004 Heinrich set up the diocese of Bamberg. A line from Bamberg to Rinchnach cuts the Niederalteich–Prague line at right angles, as does the line from Domažlice to Prachatice. These lines in a southeasterly direction were presumably new; as was the extension of a pre-existing line which we shall now describe in connection with the monastic foundations of the period.

Vojtěch (Adalbert), a nobleman of the Slavnikovec family, related on his mother’s side to the Saxon royal house, had studied in Magdeburg and become bishop of Prague in succession to the German Dietmar. In 953, after a hurried journey to Rome and a stay in St Benedict’s own monastery Monte Cassino, he founded the monastery of St Margaret in Břevnov, close by the citadel of Prague, installing twelve Italian monks there. At its foundation Břevnov received the loftily-sited church of Chcebuz, together with two estates and the hill Ostro, 44 km north of Prague. Priories were set up at Nezamysl, Kostelec in Bohemia, Rajhrad in Moravia, Broumov, Police near Broumov, and Legnickie Pole in Silesia. Later, when the Benedictine monasteries at Opatovice and Podlažice were founded, hermitages of Břevnov abbey were already in existence there. Drawing the line between Rajhrad (south of Brno) and Legnickie Pole, we touch Broumov and meet the Heuscheuer Berg, 919 metres high, and the Velké Destne, 1114 metres high, Prom the latter the sighting-point at Rajhrad would most likely have been visible.

Now Slany priory, belonging to the island monastery Ostro, lies on the extension beyond Prague of the Rajhrad–Prague line. But Ostro, founded in 999 by Boleslav the Pious, appears right from the start as a daughter organization of the Bavarian monastery Niederalteich, since it took from there not only its first abbot, the German Lambert, but all its brothers of the cloth. So it is probably safe to link the Thuringian nobleman Günther, the hermit of the Bohemian forest who took the cowl in Niederalteich, with the activities of the island monastery Ostro. This is not to say that he created the great communications network over the mountains, but rather that he operated it and extended it, and was obviously responsible for collecting news. For why else were the hermitages and priories (ie small settlements of up to six brothers) laid out at these intervals of a day’s or half a day’s journey, unless something traditional and practical existed in this system? Herodotus, as early as the 5th century BC, reports that the Persian king Xerxes sent news of the ill-fated sea battle near Salamis out across the Hellespont and along the line of communications through 3000 km to Susa.

“Nothing mortal travels so fast as these Persian messengers. The entire plan is a Persian invention; and this is the method of it. Along the whole line of the road there are men (they say) stationed with horses, in number equal to the number of days which the journey takes, allowing a man and a horse to each day; and these men will not be hindered from accomplishing at their best speed the distance which they have to go, either by snow, or rain, or heat, or the darkness of night. The first rider delivers his despatch to the second, and the second passes it to the third; and so it is borne from hand to hand along the whole line, like the light in the torch race, which the Greeks celebrate to Vulcan. The Persians give the riding post in this manner, the name of angarum.” (Ref. 5).

This system, used in 480 BC, had a parallel in the calling-posts of the German army. The setting up of Christian monasteries in the territory of the pagan Slavs implies the creation of bridgeheads and outposts in enemy country. To keep them safe a staging-post was necessary. The staging-post at Nezamysl, the priory of Břevnov abbey mentioned above, lies 22 km from St Günther’s Hill on the road from Prague; a half day’s journey for a foot messenger. Admittedly it does not keep to the exact alinement upon St Günther’s hermitage, nor for that matter was it built by the Niederalteich monks in Ostro. But where the country’s ruler, Duke Jaromír, was ambushed by his rivals the Vrsovci on Mount Veliš in 1002, and tied to a tree; where this same Jaromír could be blinded even by his own brother; in a country with such coarseness of expression the cultural mission of the German monks could not remain without the supervision and protection of their homeland. The bishop of Prague, when he was a German like Dietmar, the first, Thiddag from Neu Corvey, the third, or Ekhard, a relative of Emperor Heinrich II, the fourth, was merely the protector of the German minority in enemy territory.

The founding of the fourth monastery in Bohemia, in 1032, indicates by the choice of its site the steady advance of Prague as a central point. In 1032 the hermit Procopius, having made his vows apparently in Břevnov, travelled into the forest wilderness on the river Sázava and there made his home in a cave, just like the hermits of Svatý Jan pod Skalou; until Duke Břetislav discovered him (traditionally through a hind, as at Svatý Jan) and built there the magnificent Sázava abbey. The site, however, is 44 km from Prague and lies on the alinement to Rajhrad, on which we now find two monasteries and two priories: too many for the pattern to be called a coincidence. Later Sázava had a priory in Zbyšov, founded 33 km to the east.

Here we must return to Vojtěch, who lost his entire family at the hands of the Counts Vrsovec in the bloodbath at Libice, and, giving up his bishopric in disgust at the Slavs’ obduracy and barbarity, was sent by the Pope in a direction that is already familiar to us: the one laid down by St Günther’s markpoints from Niederalteich to Prague. Continuing along this line in the same direction, we cut the Rajhrad–Legnickie Pole line close to or in Glogow and finally reach Poznań. Along this line Vojtěch must have travelled; in 997 he was martyred in Prussia and buried at Gniezno. Emperor Otto III then created an archdiocese in Gniezno and undertook a pilgrimage to Vojtěch’s grave; during which, as noted in Grosser’s “Curiosities of the Lausitz” (Ref. 4) under the year 1001, the 44-km long route from Poznań to Gniezno was covered with coloured cloth; This certainly proves, on the one hand, the high regard that the imperial power had for the cultural pioneer of the east, and on the other, the technical ability of that time. We may judge the technical ability of the period by the words of Henne am Rhyn, in his “Cultural History” (Ref. 6), who sees in the Pope of that time, Sylvester II (formerly Gerbert), an “extraordinary phenomenon”, particularly skilled in certain technical studies. “He was born in the Auvergne about 950, and through the influence of Count Borrell of Barcelona he entered the school of Bishop Hatto of Vich in Catalonia. Here were cultivated those sciences which the neighbouring Arabs had received from the late Greeks and had developed further than the Christian West, namely mathematics, astronomy and the theory of music.” Gerbert also studied in Italy, then helped the German-minded archbishop Adalbero of Reims to raise the school there to the finest in the country. He accompanied Emperor Otto II to Italy and thus became acquainted with the learned Otrik of the Magdeburg school. “He prepared a celestial globe and arranged it so as to show the rising and setting of the stars; also an instrument to calculate the length of day and night, an armillary sphere with the paths of the planets and one depicting the constellations, an abacus, a sundial after observing the Pole Star through a sighting tube, etc. In uneducated circles he was consequently looked upon as a sorcerer.” He became Pope in 999 and died in 1003. We may well credit his time, when even in Iceland simple peasants like “Star-Oddi” were observing the heavens, with the construction of staging-posts in our sense. And Vojtěch too was brought back after his death to Prague, where he had worked and whose advancement he had served. That happened in the same year that Sázava came into being: Duke Břetislav and the bishop of Prague personally carried Vojtěch’s coffin from the Rokytná brook into the citadel. Then in 1045, the year when the hermit Günther died, Duke Bretislav I built a collegiate monastery at Stará Boleslav. In this way he extended the Domažlice–Prague line 22 km beyond Prague.

The Rajhrad–Prague line was not carried as far as the river Ohře (Eger) until the twelfth century, with the founding of Postoloprty monastery. Its full significance as the main axis of the Bohemia–Moravia region is not apparent until the bishoprics of Nitra and Vac, which lie upon it, are plotted on our map. Then, lines emerge parallel to the Rajhrad–Niederalteich link; from Nitra to Wien and from Vac to Györ, where again bishoprics were created. A perpendicular to this axis, set out from Rajhrad, leads to the bishopric of Olomouc.

Even in the siting of the many later monasteries in Bohemia (but mainly in Benedictine foundations, and scarcely at all beyond the year 1200) we find alinements, orientation towards well-established landmarks, and the measurement of routes. And not only in Bohemia is it clear from sacred and secular buildings of the early German period, that there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy! For if our sober deductions from the statements of historians are a fantasy – what then is science?

References