The person of Czekh has rather a mythological than an historical foundation.  The whole history of that period, indeed, is so intimately interwoven with poetical legends and mythological traditions, that it seems impossible at the present time to distinguish real facts from poetical ornaments.  The hero of the ancient chronicles Samo, the just Krok, Libussa the wise and beautiful, and the husband of her choice, the peasant Perzmislas, all move in a circle of poetical fiction.  There is, however, no doubt that there is an historical foundation for all these persons; for tradition only expands and embellishes; but rarely, if ever, invents.

What we have said in our introduction, in regard to the vestiges of an early cultivation of the Slavic nations in general, must be applied to the Czekhes particularly.[4] The courts of justice in which the just Krok and his daughter presided, and which the chronicles describe to us, present indeed a wonderful mixture of the sacred forms of a well organized society, and of that patriarchal relation, which induced the dissenting parties to yield with childlike submission to the arbitrary decisions of the prince’s wisdom.  According to the chronicle, so early as A.D. 722, Libussa kept a pisak or clerk, literally, a, writer; and her prophecies were written down in Slavic characters.  The same princess is said to have founded Prague.  A considerable number of Bohemian poems, some of which have been only recently discovered, are evidently derived from the pagan period.  Libussa’s choice of the country yeoman Perzmislas for her husband, in preference to her noble suitors, indicates the early existence of a free and independent peasantry.  All these scattered features are however insufficient to give us a distinct picture of this early period; and here, as among all other Slavic nations, history commences only with the introduction of Christianity.  The small states originally founded by the Czekhes, were first united into one dukedom during the last years of Perzmislas; while under his son Nezamysl, in the year 752, they are said to have first distributed the lands in fee, and to have given to the whole community a constitutional form.

The name of Boii, Bohemians, was transferred to the Czekhes by the neighbouring nations.  They continued to call themselves Czekhes, as they do even now.  The Moravians, a nearly related Slavic race, who probably came to these regions at the same time with the Czekhes, called themselves Morawczik,[5] from Morawa, morass, a name frequently repeated in Slavic countries.  Until A.D. 1029, they were as a people entirely separated from the Bohemians.  They had formed different petty states; their chiefs were called Kniazi, like those of their eastern brethren.  The ancient Moravia, however, spread far beyond the limits of the present country of this name, and extended deep into Hungary.  Hence this portion of the Slavic race was also generally comprised under the name of