Wenceslaus of Bohemia

Origins and upbringing

Wenceslaus was born about 907, the eldest son of Vratislav I, prince of Bohemia of the house of Přemysl, and of Drahomíra, a princess of the still-pagan Havolan Slavs. His grandmother Ludmila, widow of the first Christian prince Bořivoj, took charge of his upbringing: under her roof he was formed in the faith, and from a priest of the Slavonic rite named Paul, a disciple of the Methodian mission, he learned Slavonic letters; at Budeč he was schooled in Latin, and the Lives add Greek — the legends delight in a prince who was, by the standards of his age and rank, a genuinely lettered man. His father fell in battle against the Magyars, and the boy of about eighteen (the Slavic tradition; historians place Vratislav's death in 921) inherited a throne he could not yet hold: power passed to his mother Drahomíra as regent. Within months the regent's men had strangled Ludmila at Tetín — the young prince's first teacher his realm's first martyr. When Wenceslaus took the government into his own hands (about 924/925), one of his first acts was to translate his grandmother's relics to Prague and lay them in Saint George's basilica.

Reign

The Lives and the earliest Latin legends agree on the character of his rule: just judgment, care for widows, orphans and the poor, the ransoming of captives and of children sold into slavery — whom he had raised as Christians — peace kept where war was expected, and an open hand to the Church. He honoured the clergy of both the Latin and the Slavonic rites, built and adorned churches, and in Prague raised the rotunda of Saint Vitus, having received a relic of that martyr from the East Frankish king Henry the Fowler; the church he founded grew into the cathedral of Prague, where his own relics now lie. His accommodation with Henry (the sources place a recognition of Frankish overlordship about 929) and his favour to churchmen fed the resentment of the war party among the nobles, who found their instrument in the prince's ambitious younger brother Boleslav; the Slavic Life says plainly that the devil put it into the hearts of the nobles to set brother against brother, as once Cain against Abel.

Martyrdom

Boleslav invited his brother to his own town (the later Stará Boleslav) for the feast of the church there — the dedication was to Cosmas and Damian, kept September 27 — and pressed him to stay the night. Wenceslaus was warned of the plot; the Lives insist he refused to believe evil of his brother, or, believing it, refused to flee, committing himself to the will of God. At dawn on September 28, 935, as he went up to the church for Matins, Boleslav met him at the doors and struck at him with a sword; the prince, the stronger man, disarmed him and cast him down — and would not kill him. Boleslav's retainers ran to their master's cry and cut Wenceslaus down at the church door; he died with a prayer, the Slavic Life says, "Into Thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit." His body was hacked and left without burial; his mother, hearing of it, laid him in the church at the princes' court. The blood splashed on the church doors, the tradition relates, could not be washed away, until on the third day it vanished of itself.

Relics and translation

Boleslav, seized in time by remorse — and instructed, the legends say, by the wonders at the grave — had his brother's body translated to Prague and laid in the church of Saint Vitus which the martyr himself had built. The translation, three years after the murder, is kept in the calendars on March 4. The relics rest in the Wenceslas chapel of Saint Vitus cathedral, built over his tomb, the holiest place of the Czech nation; the skull is borne in procession at the national pilgrimage of Stará Boleslav each September 28.

Veneration and later cultus

Veneration began at once and never lapsed. Within a generation Latin legends were written (Crescente fide, Gumpold of Mantua, Christian's Legend), and in the Slavonic rite two Church Slavonic Lives — the First Slavonic Life, composed in tenth-century Bohemia, and a second, translated from Gumpold; through the Sázava monastery and the common Slavonic book culture these passed to Kievan Rus', where the "holy Viacheslav" entered the calendar, the Prologue, and — decisively — the pattern-book of Russian sanctity: the Lives of Boris and Gleb (†1015) invoke Wenceslaus by name as the model of the prince who accepts an unjust death from a kinsman in the meekness of Christ rather than resist with the sword. The type of the passion-bearer, in which the Russian Church would glorify Boris and Gleb and, in time, the last imperial family, thus has Wenceslaus at its head. In Bohemia he became the eternal ruler of the land — the crown of the kingdom was the "crown of Saint Wenceslas," held by kings as his deputies — and his chorale ("Svatý Václave"), attested from the twelfth century, is still sung; September 28 is the Czech national day. The West knows him besides from the nineteenth-century English carol "Good King Wenceslas," which hangs a Victorian legend of winter almsgiving — true at least to his recorded charity — on his name. Portions of his relics have been shared with Orthodox churches, and the Orthodox Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia honours him, with his grandmother Ludmila, at the head of its national saints.