Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
After the emergence of new Christian polities, the history of the three central European countries diverged in terms of their politics. Poland and Hungary were independent realms; Bohemia-Moravia became part of the Holy Roman Empire. Each polity was affected by territorial subdivision to some extent, above all Poland, which fragmented into principalities. Hungarian rulers held a royal title continuously, whereas some Bohemian and Polish rulers were styled kings, and others dukes. Yet some structures of governance, for example, the strongholds and districts organized around them, were similar in all three realms.
In the late 1970s, Dušan Třeštík and Barbara Krzemieńska developed a model describing the emergence and organization of central European states in the tenth through the twelfth centuries. They argued for striking similarities in the organization of social, political and economic life in Bohemia, Poland and Hungary. According to them, the ruler had almost absolute power based on the warrior elite, who were dependent on him and served as his bodyguard, and who until the twelfth century did not own land. The ruler retained almost exclusive control over land and the peasants who farmed it, and allocated part of the revenues to members of the elite. The territorial organization of state administration was based on the system of strongholds and their respective districts. (Chapter 5 discusses the social and economic implications of the model.) This model of the development of central European states in the eleventh and twelfth centuries informed studies on all three polities published from the 1970s through the 1990s. Today, however, it is being questioned.
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