Good King Wenceslaus Looked Out on the Feast of Dying At Age 24

In order to have a happy, harmonious family get-together during the holidays, it's a good idea to steer away from topics like religion and politics. Unfortunately for the family of "Good King Wenceslaus," the Přemyslid dynasty that ruled the Duchy of Bohemia in the early 10th century, this was rather difficult given that Wenceslaus's dad, Vratislaus I, was a second generation Christian, his mother, Drahomíra of Stodard, was the pagan daughter of a chief, and everyone in the family was constantly vying for greater political sway over the country. When Wenceslaus was 13, his dad died in battle against the Hungarians, making his grandmother Ludmila (Vratislaus's mother) regent until Wenceslaus could come of age. Drahomíra, doing what any of us would do in similar circumstances, hired assassins to strangle her mother-in-law Ludmila to death with her own scarf. After Christian nobles overthrew Drahomíra to place 18-year-old Wenceslaus on the throne, he exiled his mother, because even though she was his mom and carried him in her womb for 9 months before pushing his big head out her vagina in an age before modern anesthetics and cleanliness, I guess he couldn't just let her get away with strangling his grandmother with her own scarf and rolling back Christian reforms. Wenceslaus oversaw the construction of Christian monuments and maintained tenuous order during a time of considerable upheaval in the Slavic regions until his little brother, Boleslaus the Cruel, got with some of his friends and decided to stab Wenceslaus to death and stick a spear through him, killing Good King Wenceslaus at the ripe old age of 24. And that is why we sing about him doing charity work on St. Stephen’s Day at Christmastime. Oh, and the page in the carol who’s about to give up when Wenceslaus tells him to walk in his footsteps where the warmth of his feet had melted the snow? His name was Podevin, and he killed one of Boleslaus’s co-conspirators before he was caught, executed and left hanging for several years. Merry Christmas, kids!

Additional facts:
  • Wenceslaus was not considered a king in his lifetime.  He was the Duke of Bohemia, which was still a region in the larger Slavic empire of Great Moravia, which had greatly declined in power by the time of Wenceslaus's reign.  Holy Roman Emperor Otto I later conferred the title of king upon Wenceslaus, which probably made the dead duke feel a whole lot better about being speared by his brother.
  • The state crown of Bohemia is known as the Crown of Saint Wenceslas, although it wasn't made until nearly 400 years after his death.  According to legend, any usurper who wears the crown will die within a year, and one Nazi official did just that.  Reinhard Heydrich, Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia during the Third Reich was rumored to have secretly tried on the crown during World War II less than a year before members of the Czech resistance threw an anti-tank explosive at his car, fatally wounding him.

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