CHAPTER II
As has already been mentioned, the Čechs, who after the extinction of the Marcomanni settled in Bohemia, were a branch of the great Slavonic race. It is probable that the Slavs inhabited a large part of Eastern Europe from the earliest historical times, though all attempts to identify the lands they occupied are mere conjectures.
As Bohemia was henceforth to be inhabited by the Slavonic race, it will be well to throw a glance on the social and political condition of the Slavs at that period, as far as the scanty records that have reached us render it possible.
Of the religion of the ancient Slavs hardly anything is known. The writers of the earlier part of the nineteenth century, in the absence of all genuine records often relied on documents that have since been proved to be forgeries. Such were the so-called MSS. of Zelena Hora and Kralové Dvůr, and particularly the notes that were interpolated in a genuine MS. entitled the "Mater Verborum." It is to the learned Mr. Patera, formerly librarian of the Bohemian Museum, that the discovery of the fraudulent insertions in the "Mater Verborum" is due.
The earliest political institutions of the Slavs were of the most primitive nature; they appear when we first read of them to have known neither princes nor nobles, and the only existent authority was that of the starosta or elder of each village. We hear that the Slavs in the earliest times were less warlike than their Germanic neighbours, which perhaps accounts for the absence of any military institutions, and for the facility with which they were conquered and partly extirpated by the Germans.
The great struggle known as the migration of nations, forced the Slavs to imitate their neighbours by strengthening their organization. The Slavs of Bohemia were, at a time which it is difficult to determine, divided into tribes, each of which was ruled over by a chief named "voyvode." The voyvode of the most important of these tribes, the Čechs—a name which was gradually extended to all the
