Abstract
Stadice, the village from which Přemysl The Ploughman was elected the duke of Bohemia, became an important lieu de mémoire in the narrative of Czech history. In the spring of 1445, during the interregnum, a man called Jakub appeared in Stadice claiming himself the chosen king of Bohemia.
There are several texts narrating the event. They all originate from very different corners of society and each of them tells a distinct story.
Jakoubek of Vřesovice, a district commissioner, identified Jakub as his subject in a letter to the Czech nobleman Oldřich of Rožmberk when relating the local news just a few weeks after the event. Eneas Silvius Piccolomini, future pope Pius II, gave an extensive interpretation of the Central European interregnum to his friend Giovanni Campisio, and the king of Stadice was an excellent example to picture the chaos in Bohemia.
The manuscript variants of the Old Czech Annals (Staré letopisy české) interpreted Jakub as a fool and constructed a very ironic image of him. A mention in the famous chronicle of Václav Hájek of Libočany dramatized the narration particularly by the use of dialogues.
Modern historians, R. Urbánek and J.
Boubín, concentrated on the aspect of folk and national culture. The paper analyses every single source relating to the appearance of the king of Stadice and looks for the imagination behind the texts.
It also interprets the social contexts from which the different texts originated and shows how they influenced the wording of each of them. The vividness of the perspectives shows how current the tradition of Stadice was in Bohemia.