Wenceslaus I, Duke of Bohemia

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Wenceslaus I, Duke of Bohemia bigraphy, stories - Czech royal saint

Wenceslaus I, Duke of Bohemia : biography

907 – 935

Cardinal [[Miloslav Vlk with skull of Saint Wenceslaus during a procession on September 28, 2006]]

Wenceslaus I ( c. 907 – September 28, 935), or Wenceslas I, was the duke (kníže) of Bohemia from 921 until his assassination in 935, purportedly in a plot by his own brother, Boleslav the Cruel.

His martyrdom, and the popularity of several biographies, quickly gave rise to a reputation for heroic goodness, resulting in his being elevated to Sainthood, posthumously declared king, and seen as the patron saint of the Czech state. He is the subject of Good King Wenceslas, a Saint Stephen’s Day carol written over 900 years later, in 1853, that remains popular to this day.

Legacy

Canonisation and other memorials

Wenceslas was considered a martyr and a saint immediately after his death, when a cult of Wenceslas grew up in Bohemia and in England.Describing the , a thirteenth-century manuscript from Bohemia in the Swedish National Library in Stockholm, it is stated: "All this bears witness to the outstanding importance of the cult of Vaclav in Bohemia at the time of the Devil’s Bible’s compilation. Moreover, all three festivals are inscribed in red ink, denoting their superlative degree." Within a few decades of Wenceslas’s death four biographies of him were in circulation.The First Slavonic Life (in Old Church Slavonic), the anonymous Crescente fide, the Passio by Gumpold, bishop of Mantua (d. 985), and The Life and Passion of Saint Václav and his Grandmother Saint Ludmilla by Kristian.Lisa Wolverton’s Hastening Toward Prague: Power and Society in the Medieval Czech Lands, p. 150. Available online at . These hagiographies had a powerful influence on the High Middle Ages conceptualization of the rex justus, or "righteous king"—that is, a monarch whose power stems mainly from his great piety, as well as from his princely vigor.http://www.mun.ca/mst/heroicage/issues/9/defries.html See Defries, David. "St. Oswald’s Martyrdom: Drogo of Saint-Winnoc’s Sermo secundus de s. Oswaldo", §12, in The Heroic Age: A Journal of Early Mediaeval Northwestern Europe, Issue 9 (Oct 2006).

Referring approvingly to these hagiographies, the chronicler Cosmas of Prague, writing in about the year 1119, states:Book I of the Chronica Boëmorum, Quoted in Wolverton, op. cit. Not to be confused with Saint Cosmas.

Several centuries later the legend was claimed as fact by Pope Pius II..

Although Wenceslas was, during his lifetime, only a duke, Holy Roman Emperor Otto I posthumously "conferred on [Wenceslas] the regal dignity and title" and that is why, in the legend and song, he is referred to as a "king".]

“St Wenceslas”]. The usual American English spelling of Duke Wenceslas’s name, Wenceslaus, is occasionally encountered in later textual variants of the carol, although it was not used by Neale in his version.Wencesla-us is the Mediaeval Latin form of the name, declined in the Second Declension. Wenceslas is not to be confused with King Wenceslaus I of Bohemia (Wenceslaus I Premyslid), who lived more than three centuries later.