Procopius (Czech Prokop) was born around 970 to a Czech noble family at Chotouň near Český Brod in Bohemia. Educated at the cathedral school of Prague (the Czech episcopal see established by Bishop Dietmar in 973 under the Otto II – Wolfgang of Regensburg ecclesiastical reorganization), he became a secular priest and married.
After the early death of his wife and the maturation of his son Jimram (who himself became a monk), Procopius undertook the hermit life — withdrawing to a remote cave-hermitage on the Sázava river in central Bohemia, where he lived alone for years in extreme ascetic discipline.
Around 1032, the Bohemian Duke Oldřich (Ulrich) of the Přemyslid dynasty discovered Procopius's hermitage during a hunting expedition (pursuing a stag that had led him to the saint's cave) — and, impressed by Procopius's sanctity, endowed the hermitage with royal lands for the foundation of the Sázava Monastery.
The Sázava Monastery — under Procopius's abbacy from c. 1032 to his death in 1053 — was the principal Slavonic-rite Latin Catholic monastery in central Europe: celebrating the Catholic liturgy in Old Church Slavonic (the Cyrillo-Methodian liturgical heritage inherited from Great Moravia) under Roman papal jurisdiction. The Sázava monastic tradition was the principal repository of the distinctive Czech-Slavonic Catholic liturgical-cultural heritage that bridged the Latin Western Catholic tradition with the Slavonic-Cyrillic Eastern Catholic tradition.
After Procopius's death on March 25, 1053, the Slavonic-rite Sázava community continued under his disciples — but was repeatedly disrupted by the tensions with the Latin-rite Czech episcopate. In 1097, the Latin party prevailed, the Slavonic-rite Sázava monks were expelled to Hungarian Vyšehrad, and the Sázava community adopted the Latin Roman rite — though the Procopian-Slavonic cultural memory persisted in Czech Catholic identity.
His canonization by Pope Innocent III on July 4, 1204 — at the request of King Přemysl Otakar I of Bohemia — established his Czech national-saint cult, placing him alongside Sts. Wenceslas, Ludmila, and Adalbert as the principal Czech national saints.