This study deals with a short but little researched episode in the life of Henry of Isernia, an Italian master of ars dictaminis, who came to the court of King Ottokar II of Bohemia in the early 1270s. Henry’s letter collection contains nine letters relating to his temporary stay at the Premonstratensian monastery in Strahov. These letters are impressive, but hardly interpretable, historical sources, and are also the only ones describing the circumstances of the election of a new Abbot of Strahov that probably took place in 1274. The reliability and credibility of Henry’s sometimes exaggerated and emotionally charged narratives were assessed by comparing their historical and biographical content with existing documents and memorial sources, such as monastery necrologies and annals.
The outbreak of Schism in 1378 introduced a shift in searching for a new source of authority which could legitimise the church reform. Since the early 1390s, the conciliar tradition preferring the canon law as the leading authority for determining the Schism has been constituted and supported among French or German theologians. Nevertheless, in the late 1370s, John Wyclif developed another solution for church reform favouring God’s law and the ideal of a top-down reformation led by righteous civil lords, which Jan Hus and his followers further adopted within the early 15th Century. Conciliarism and the English model for church reform proposed by Wyclif competed in politics after 1409. Recently, new sources treating the clashes over authority issues in the Middle Ages were published, which shed new light on the problem.
The article continues the ongoing debate about a “pre-state” tribal society and the nature of its transformation into an early medieval “state” (regnum). The methodological approach is to understand this transformation as an institutional crisis within the tribal society. The opportunities to detect the key moments of this process are tested on the narrative strategies of medieval chroniclers based on the expectation that creating Christian monarchic power took place under the control of the church that tried to influence its form to correspond to the characteristics of the given patrician tradition. It also benefits from the reality that the authors of these texts were clergymen for whom this idea was natural. Using comparative examination, it seeks out typical testimonies that can be considered traditional locations of literary memory of communication between the sovereign and the tribe. In this way, the study attempts to define the basic strategy the sovereign employed to subjugate “their” people within the framework of Christian ethical discourse.