Libus̆a, unable to resist the popular demand that she should take a husband and give the Bohemians a king, tells the people to go to a certain village where they will find a man ploughing with oxen. Him they are to greet as their king, and his posterity will rule in this land for ever. The messengers plead that they do not know the way to the village. Libus̆a answers that if they will follow her horse it will guide them. They obey; and they at last arrive at the village of Stadic, where they find Pr̆emysl ploughing. They call on him to change his dress and mount the horse, as Queen Libus̆a and all the people demand him as their ruler. Pr̆emysl therefore sets free his oxen, telling them to go whence they came, and strikes his goad into the ground. The oxen vanish from sight, and the goad puts forth leaves and fruits. Then Pr̆emysl comes with the messengers; but he insists on taking with him his ploughman’s boots, that his successors may be made humble and merciful by the memory of the state from whence they sprung; “and these boots,” says Cosmas (writing in the eleventh century), “are preserved at Vys̆ehrad to this day in the Duke’s chamber.” There is another legend which still more quaintly marks this transition from mild and readily accepted rule to the era of physical force. According to this story the maidens of Bohemia founded a city which they called Dĕvín from Devina, “a maiden.” The young men to maintain their independence set up an opposition town called Hrasten. The intercourse between these rival towns seems to have been sometimes friendly and sometimes hostile; but always apparently on equal terms as long as Libus̆a lived. After her death, however, the men won the day, and ever afterwards held the women under their control. But the golden age of Queen Libus̆a is long past, when we catch sight of the Bohemians in even the earliest period of authentic history. First we have a dim vision of a great Slavonic Empire stretching northwards to the Spree, and eastwards to the Carpathians; of struggles with Avars and Huns, and, above all, with the Franks. Then suddenly, as the dim mist clears a little, we find that the Franks have become Christian, and the great struggle between German and Slav, hinted at already in the poem of “Libus̆a’s Judgment,” has begun in earnest. The centre of resistance to the German, however, is not in Bohemia, but in the neighbouring Slavonic dukedom of Moravia; and it gathers round a prince named Rostislav, who is encouraging both Moravians and Bohemians to stand firm against those peculiar ideas of Christianity, which Charles the Great and his descendants tried to thrust upon reluctant nations by fire and sword. Some Bohemians had indeed been compelled by Louis, the grandson of Charles the Great, to accept baptism; and Christian Bohemia owned the authority of the German Archbishop of Regensburg.[2]