Constructing hatred: So-called Dalimil, Nĕmci and the rise of ethnic strife in the fourteenth-century Bohemia

Abstract

The chronicle of the So-called Dalimil provides the clearest testimony to the ethnic tensions that arose in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century throughout Central Europe as a result of the increasing presence of newcomers from Germany. The first issue addressed in this paper is the concept of the past and the present constructed on the basis of ethnic resentment, founded on the belief that the Germans were eternally hostile to the Czechs and viewed as a constant threat to the Czech political community. An important problem is to determine the social scope of the term “Germans” used by the chronicler. An analysis confirms that he had in mind primarily members of social elites – knights and courtiers who made up the entourage of Bohemian rulers. My second question concerns the problem of the scale of knightly migration to Bohemia as a real factor in the emergence of ethnic tensions in the early fourteenth century, in a sense explaining the feelings represented by the chronicler.