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The Margraves from Vohburg, the Czech Lands and the Cheb District

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2015

Abstract

At the end of the eleventh and in the twelfth centuries, the properties of the margraves from Vohburg formed the border territories between Bohemia and the eastern parts of the Empire in Bavaria and the Northern March, although the holdings on the western side of the border mountains were quite fragmented. We often guess or reconstruct with great difficulty the Vohburg contacts with the Bohemian milieu as the sources do not provide direct indication of them.

The fundamental platform for contacts with the Přemyslids was the court of King of the Romans, where perhaps Diepold III of Vohburg participated in negotiations of his nieces' marriages with leading representatives of the Piast and Přemyslid dynasties. In ecclesiastical matters, the starting point of research is the inclusion of some Vohburg family members in the necrologium of the Doksany Premonstratensian nuns.

Their ties to the Doksany milieu were mediated by Richenza of Berg, the wife of Duke of Bohemia Vladislaus I, herself a close relative of the most famous margrave of Vohburg Diepold III. This very Richenza and the Vohburgs could have had an influence on the arrival of the Premonstratensians and Cistercians to Bohemia, because the first Premonstratensian canonry was settled from the Rhenish monastic houses closely connected to both the Duchess of Burg and the Vohburgs.

The earliest Bohemian Cistercian foundation was settled from Waldsassen at a time when the Vogt rights were still performed by the Vohburgs. However, not even the Benedictine foundation in Kladruby was entire free of these connotations.

The Cheb district was an important contact zone that originally belonged to the Vohburg margraves. After 1146, it was taken by Emperor Conrad III, but the earlier ministeriales serving the Vohburgs were used by the new Hohenstaufen administration.

Some of the ministriales did not renounce their contacts to their original suzerain.