CHURCH BUILT BY ST. ADALBERT AT PRAHATICE.
Geysa, the leading chief of the Hungarians in that district, was a hospitable and large-minded man, who welcomed strangers heartily. Adalbert used the opportunity to teach Christianity, and many of the Hungarians were converted. Amongst other converts was Geysa himself, who consented to have his son Stephen christened by Adalbert. Over this child Adalbert’s influence was evidently great; and when Stephen grew up, he became the first Christian king of Hungary, recognised as such both by Pope and Emperor. From the reign of St. Stephen the Hungarians themselves reckon their beginning as a settled monarchy; and thus they owe their change from the condition of a marauding horde to an orderly and progressive nation, to the teaching of the Bohemian saint.
Twice Adalbert was recalled to Bohemia, and twice he again left it in disgust. On the last occasion he took refuge with the King of Poland, and from thence went to convert the heathen Prussians, by whom he was killed. His body was brought back by the Poles and buried at Gnesen. Next to the actual memory of his life, his most notable legacy to his country is the hymn which he wrote in the native language, and which soon became, and long remained, a kind of war-cry of Bohemian independence.
III.
RELATIONS OF BOHEMIA TO POLAND AND TO THE EMPIRE IN THE ELEVENTH, TWELFTH, AND THIRTEENTH CENTURIES.
(997-1253.)
The invasion of the Hungarians had changed the attitude of Bohemia, as of other countries, towards the German Empire. The necessity of saving themselves from the ruin which overwhelmed the dukedom of Moravia, naturally compelled the Bohemians to recognise their former enemies as their only sure protectors; and, as the vigorous line of Saxon princes put new force into the German kingdom, this relation became necessarily closer. But it was long before the German rulers were able to realise that they could gain any help, in turn, from the rising dukedom of Bohemia. Torn by the divisions between heathen and Christian, distracted to an unusual degree by family quarrels, harassed by powerful neighbours, Bohemia seemed, in the tenth and early part of the eleventh century, more fitted to be the tool or the prey of the Emperors than their ally. Nor was it only a weakening of internal security which had been produced by the Magyar invasion. The break-up of Slavonic unity, by the overthrow of Svatopluk, had caused a confusion of races in certain districts, which made them the subject of dispute between rival powers.