Choden

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The original Chodian flag symbol

The Chod (Czech Chodové ) are members of a Czech folk group the West Bohemian town of Domažlice (Taus) between Pilsen and the border with the Upper Palatinate to Lower Bavaria and the Cheb region , has been based since the High Middle Ages and their dialect linguistically from the Czech of The written language is different.

The Chods, subjects of the royal estates Přimda (Pfraumberg), Tachov (Tachau) and Taus (Domažlice), were largely of the peasant class. Most of their villages emerged in the 13th century. From the 14th century onwards, the kings of Bohemia gave them guard duties on the border with Lower Bavaria and the Upper Palatinate . In return, the Chodians were given special rights, their own coats of arms, seals and standards, which they confidently defended in armed conflicts with the authorities up into the 18th century.

The current name of the Chodian ethnic group comes from the role of border guard, chodit means to go in the sense of patrol . The name Choden is first mentioned in the 14th century in the Dalimil Chronicle and its German translation Di tutsch kronik by Behem lant .

history

Duties and privileges of the Chodians in the Middle Ages

Choden cutting wood, Dalimil Chronicle , 14th century.

After the state border between Bohemia and Bavaria had been marketed (established) in the 14th century , the Choden farmers were given the task of crossing the border in order to determine the shifting of the boundary stones in the forest areas. They checked whether the Bavarian border residents were chopping wood or building settlements on the Bohemian side, offered armed escort for travelers along the old trade routes for a fee, and performed guards and defense services in times of threat.

For these services, the Chodians were granted extensive rights of self-government . They were subordinate to their own court , which could release people from submission and accept new residents. The eleven well-known Chodendörfer formed their own community with a seal and flag under a village elder. Nobles were not allowed to buy into their villages in order to collect the income. The Chods were exempt from customs and toll fees , were allowed to carry weapons, hunt and cut wood in the border forest, pursue free handicrafts and only had one forced labor , namely the delivery of wood to the castle in the town of Taus (Domažlice). When this service was replaced by money levies in the 16th century, the Chodians were convinced that they were not obligated to do compulsory labor, that is, they were subject to labor and tax. They felt like free farmers.

The Chodians kept royal documents to prove their legal rights. Of particular importance was a document from Johann von Luxemburg from 1325, which made it subject to the law of the city of Taus. Until the beginning of the 16th century, the Chodians had the Bohemian kings confirm their rights when they ascended the throne. However, part of their special status was also derived from customary law and was never specified in writing.

The way into submission

Domažlice / Taus, center of the Chod region

From the 16th century, the rural border service lost its importance. The borders were stabilized and regulated by intergovernmental agreements. The development of war techniques lowered the military value of the armed peasants. In addition, the authorities tried to increase the personal dependence of the subjects and to override customary rights.

The royal goods in the Chod region, which stretched around 40 kilometers in length and 15 kilometers in width along the Bavarian border between Hostouň and the Chodská Úhlava , were temporarily pledged as early as the Middle Ages , but the medieval pledges had to expressly grant the inherited rights. After the domain of Taus fell to the Lords of Schwamberg in 1482 , the privileges here also began to crumble. The Schwamberger forbade freedom of movement, the free choice of career for children and put restrictions on trade. Messages from the Chodians to the royal chamber in Prague were unsuccessful. In 1572 they finally borrowed 7,000 thalers from the Augsburg city ​​council and bought themselves off the pledge. This solution, which was quite unusual in the context of rural subject conflicts, did not last long. As early as 1579, the emperor appointed the city of Taus to manage the estate, because the Chodians had not paid their debts. From 1585 onwards, the domain was again a deposit. The town of Taus was initially the pledge. From 1621, at the beginning of the Thirty Years' War, Baron Wolf Wilhelm Laminger von Albenreuth, from a noble family from Egerland, was granted the liens of the Taus domain and sold in 1630 with interest and labor, hunting rights and jurisdiction. As inherited subjects , they were now obliged to promise bondage, obedience and serfdom to the new master .

Conflicts of subjects in the 17th and 18th centuries

Messrs. Laminger von Albenreuth began to cultivate the estate intensively. Wolf Wilhelm, later his widow and his sons, set up a brewery , self-managed Meierhöfe , a blast furnace with five iron hammers , a glassworks and a textile factory near Taus . This proto-industrial development went hand in hand with the expropriation of peasant land and new compulsory demands that were enforced with prison and other coercive measures. The Chodians appealed to the emperor and royal offices several times, even after their privileges were all invalidated in 1668. Finally there was armed resistance, which Wolf Maximilian Laminger von Albenreuth , also known as “Lomikar”, had forcibly suppressed. The execution of the Chod leader Jan Sladký Kozina on November 28, 1695 became symbolic .

Even in the 18th century there were riots and violent conflicts under the new lords, the Counts of Stadion , in the years 1706–1707, 1767–1769 and 1775. The main goal of the Chodians was no longer restoration the old privileges, but the relaxation or abolition of compulsory labor, which also existed here until 1848 for the liberation of the peasants.

reception

Theories of origin and sagas of origin

Older research looked for the origin of the Chods in Poland , Hungary or Carinthia . For a long time, the chronicler Václav Hájek z Libočan stated that they had already participated in the battle of the Regensburger Steig in 1040 , in which Bohemian troops under Břetislav I defeated Henry III's troops . defeated. This information is rejected today, as is the popular tradition of the Chodian participation in the siege of Milan in 1158, because the specific tasks of the Chodians were only usable at all with the precise measurement of the borders in the 14th century.

The Chods and the national question

Chodian farmer, 1906

The Chodians were often idealized as a "Slavic" outpost that resisted a "Germanic" threat. The Tachau Choden are said to have been partly of Bavarian origin or adopted (as in the area around Pfraumberg) dialect components of the Middle High German language by the end of the 16th century. Since the Chodians around the town of Taus in western Bohemia have retained an archaic Czech dialect and the folk culture of special costumes for men and women until modern times, but were otherwise meaningless and have been assimilated, the name Choden has mostly only been used since the 19th century used by descendants of the former border guards.

It was not until the emergence of the Czech national consciousness that the Tauser Choden moved into the focus of public interest from the 19th century and interpreted a national dimension into their history. The Chods were a popular topic in folklore, literature, and art from the 19th through the early 20th centuries. Writers like Alois Jirásek , Božena Němcová , Karel Jaromír Erben , Jindřich Šimon Baar and Maximilian Schmidt dealt with the Chodians. Artists such as Mikoláš Aleš , Jaroslav Špillar and Věnceslav Černý created popular paintings that glorified Kozina's struggle for freedom and his colleagues.

Modern historical research, on the other hand, cannot identify a clear anti-German tendency in the conflicts between the Chods and their authorities. In the context of the subject unrest of the early modern period, parallels to other areas can be recognized, even if the Chodians are granted a special position due to their privileged position and their strong self-confidence.

Well-known works of fiction

  • Alois Jirásek : The dog heads. Neues Leben, Berlin 1985. Also Reclam's Universal Library number: 8982/85; The Czech novel Psohlavci from 1883–1884 is set in the 17th century. The Chods, led by Jan Sladký Kozina, are fighting to restore their previous privileges, their uprising was put down and Jan Sladký was executed.
  • Jindřich Šimon Baar : Chodes trilogy (three volumes). Paní komisarka (1923), Osmačtyřicátníci (1924), Lůsy (1925). Original title: Chodská trilogy.
  • Maximilian Schmidt : Hancicka, the Chod girl (1893), with a careful description of the Chodian women's costume in the 19th century.
  • Anton Schott (writer) : To law and freedom (1938), historical novel, Bergland-Verlag Salzburg.

folklore

To this day the Chodians maintain a rich folk culture with music, which also includes bagpipes , traditional costumes and folk art .

The symbol of the Chodians was a pair of felt boots , the sheepdog's head has only been used since the 19th century, when a return to national Slavic values ​​began during the time of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy . The dog breed Chodský pes is named after the Chods . The dog's head was also the uniform badge ( collar tab ) of a border troop after the establishment of Czechoslovakia in 1918: Pohraniční stráž .

Chodic villages

literature

  • Jürgen Joachimsthaler: Neighborhood as utopia: The Choden . In: ders .: Text margins. The cultural diversity in Central Europe as a problem of representation of German literature . Winter, Heidelberg 2011, Vol. 3, pp. 151-194, ISBN 978-3-8253-5919-5
  • Eduard Maur: The Choden farmers. Obstinacy and resistance of a privileged group of subjects in Bohemia in the 16th-18th centuries Century . In: Jan Peters (Ed.): Manorial societies in European comparison . Akademie Verlag Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-05-003161-1 , pp. 387-398.
  • Jaroslav Kramařík: Kozina a Lomikar v chodské lidové tradici . Academia Prag 1972, especially pp. 49-62.
  • Johanna von Herzogenberg : Between Danube and Moldau, From Regensburg to Prague, pages 46 to 70, with a contribution to the culture and history of the Choden, Prestel, Munich 1968.

Web links

Commons : Choden  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ricarda Gerhardt: Czech Republic. Iwanowski's Reisebuchverlag, Dormagen 2005, ISBN 3-933041-20-1 , p. 234.