Přehled o publikaci

While Volumes II, III and IV.1 of The Idea and the State presented the Bohemian Crown from a primarily royal perspective, the subsequent parts of Volume IV will focus on describing the panorama of the states. The emphasis here is placed mainly on their culture-creating activities, especially broadly understood artistic patronage, with particular emphasis on political, confessional, state and family contents. The synthetic part of this volume first discusses the structure of the highest strata of the royal aristocracy, addressing such issues as the emergence of new prince, count and magnate families, the mutual relations between these strata and their interpenetration within them, the legal conditions of the titles held, the links between the titles and offices and the sphere of state and family prestige. The main part of the book is the overview of individual families. They were presented according to a certain scheme: first a genealogical overview, then the estates and offices held, then the patronage achievements related to the ancestral representation, including residences, private towns, churches and necropolises, sphragistics and numismatics. The Přemyslids of Opava and Racibórz, the highly expansive Silesian Piasts, were presented in this way – with a division into individual family lines, then families coming from the outside or promoted to the princely state, that is the Wettins, Hohenzollerns, Podiebrads and Jagiellons because two brothers of King Vladislaus were princes in Silesia. In the next chapter, the families priding themselves on holding the titles of counts are presented in a similar fashion (Hardegg, Guttestein, Schlick). Therefore, barons of the Reich episodically appearing in the Bohemian law and property domain, such as the Gleichen and Leising families, were also added to the list of families.