Retoryka konfliktu. Wojny i spory Wrocławia z Kościołem w późnym średniowieczu (uwagi wstępne)

Abstract

The rhetoric of conflict. Wars and disputes between Wrocław and the Church in the late Middle Ages (introductory remarks) Drawing on the documentation of Wrocław’s conflicts with the Church in the late Middle Ages, the author emphasises the importance of research into language and rhetoric, topics virtually absent from previous studies devoted to the subject. Until Wrocław’s war with King George of Poděbrady in the second half of the fifteenth century, a vast majority of this documentation originated in church chancelleries. Analysing mainly fourteenth- century sources, created during fierce disputes over the (non-)payment of Peter’s pence and the conflicts of John of Luxembourg and some Silesian dukes with the Bishop of Wrocław, in which the city of Wrocław was involved, the author concludes that the strongly formalised vocabulary and rhetoric of trial records and the accompanying writings depended primarily on the classifications (ranks) — which belonged to different orders — of the committed/ prosecuted about act (crime), the Church’s claims and the punishment/compensation it demanded, as well as the need to make the connection between attacking the Church and sin apparent. We, therefore, need to bear in mind not only the obvious and necessary dependence of this rhetoric on the procedure and form of court records as well as letters to various instances (including the highest instance, the pope), its role as a purely legal argument, but also the need to express moral condemnation of the incriminated act and demonstrate its relation to sin. Instead, a resolution of the dispute and removal of the excommunication and interdict required conciliatory language and rhetoric that stripped the previously incriminated acts, events and condemned perpetrators of their status as criminal attacks on the Church and its laws. The vocabulary and rhetoric present in sources dating as far back as the late thirteenth and first half of the fourteenth century, and used to describe the city’s conflicts with the Church remained relevant until the end of the Middle Ages. In the second part of the article the author challenges the classification of the description, included in Chronica Principum Poloniae, of Bishop Nanker’s excommunication of King John of Luxembourg and the Wrocław councillors (1339) as an account of actual events said to have taken place in the Franciscan Monastery in Wrocław. In her opinion, the scene was made up in its entirety (the excommunication and interdict were indeed imposed) and was used by the author of the chronicle to attribute to Nanker (d. 1341) involvement in the establishment of the Archbishopric of Prague in 1344.