Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe

by Norman Davies

Clovis the Frank did kill Alaric the Visigoth. The Franks drove out the Visigoths, and not vice versa. It is not unreasonable to maintain, therefore, that ‘The history of France began at Vouillé’.

The gap between the collapse of the Western Empire in 476 and the emergence of recognizable modern states like France or England spans five hundred years at least.

It is well attested that people faced by the decline of their native language are particularly reluctant to abandon two things: the numbers, whereby they learned to count, and the prayers through which they addressed their God.

Analytical studies have shown that Wikipedia, for all its faults, can sometimes match the most prestigious academic brands. It has the virtue of being constantly corrected and updated.

Sicily stayed cut off from the rest of Italy. Indeed, for a long time to come, Sicilians probably had more in common with Catalans and Aragonese than with Piedmontese, Lombardi or Tuscans.118

the thirteenth century two external dangers appeared whose impact was to be lasting. The first was the Teutonic Knights, a German crusading order that had assumed the mission of converting the Baltic pagans. The second, the Mongol Horde of Genghis Khan, galloped out of Central Asia into the heart of Europe. The principalities of Rus′ were caught between the two.

The consequences of the Union of Kreva were felt more immediately in the grand duchy than in the Kingdom of Poland. The pagan religion of the Lithuanian elite was prohibited. The sacred groves were felled. The pagan priests and vestal virgins were banished, and mass Christian baptisms were enacted in the River Vilnya on the orders of the now Catholic monarch. Henceforth, Roman Catholicism became the official religion of court circles in Vilnius, and increasingly of the more ambitious nobles.

Byzantium, the ‘Second Rome’ was dead. Long live Moscow, therefore, the ‘Third Rome’! Ivan III (r. 1440–1505), known as ‘the Great’, was the first Muscovite prince to take the idea seriously, to adopt the Byzantine two-headed eagle as his emblem, and thereby to spread the notion that he was the only true successor of the Roman Caesars, the ‘tsars’. The

The peoples of the former grand duchy disappeared from view in the late eighteenth century and, with a brief exception during the Russian Revolution, only resurfaced in the late twentieth. Suddenly in 1989–91, the world woke up to the news that the western regions of the Soviet Union had not really been Russian at all. New nation-states, such as Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine appeared as if from nowhere, and precious few commentators were able to explain where they came from.

[T]he old capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was a desired political capital to Lithuanians, Belarusians, and Poles … a spiritual capital to the Jews … and an ancient Russian city to the officials who exercised power. Most of the city’s schools taught in Russian, most of its churches were Roman Catholic, more than a third of its inhabitants were Jews … The city was … ‘Vilnius’ in Lithuanian, ‘Wilno’ in Polish, ‘Vil′nia’ in Belarusian, ‘Vil′na’ in Russian and ‘Vilne’ in Yiddish …

The Jewish community was deeply split between the secular, pro-Soviet element organized by the all-powerful Yevsektsiya or Jewish section of the Communist Party and the traditional, religious and non-Communist majority.

The translation of the Roman Empire from a state whose centre of gravity lay in Italy to one based further east took place very gradually. Its division into Western and Eastern sub-states, each with its own emperor, was introduced by Diocletian in AD 285; the choice of Byzantium as the new capital was made by Constantine I in 330; the Western Empire collapsed in 476; and the definitive loss of Italy occurred in stages between the initial invasion of the Lombards in 567 and their much delayed entry into Rome in 772.

In his History of the Crusades (3 vols., 1951–4), he constantly battled the self-centred prejudices of the ‘West’, preferring to believe that the Easterners were guardians of Europe’s culture and refinement, and Westerners the barbarians.

several cities – Danzig (Gdańsk), Marienburg, Elbing and Königsberg – joined the international trading network of the Hanseatic League.

Until very recently, German development has been widely described in terms of its Sonderweg, a sinister ‘Special Path’ that was leading in the wrong direction from the start. Communist crimes are rarely measured by the same criteria as Nazi crimes, and, despite a plethora of historical truth-telling in recent decades, Russia is still perceived, on balance, as having been a force for good.76 Young scholars who challenge the German-centred consensus can still sometimes expect a roasting.

Few writers can ever have received such an extravagant shower of plaudits as the author of Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia. To almost universal acclaim, Christopher Clark, a Cambridge don of Australian provenance, has written a text whose intellectual content is as cogent as its style is lucid. The reviews bristle with flattering adjectives: ‘riveting’, ‘illuminating’, ‘profoundly satisfying’, ‘enthralling’, ‘authoritative’, ‘shrewd’ and ‘judicious’. Clark rejects the jaded accusations against the Hohenzollern state, offering in their place a portrait of a polity that was progressive, cosmopolitan and enlightened.

Five decades later, a visiting historian who saw the place with her own eyes, made a considered judgement: [KÖnigsberg was] one of the few places where Stalin succeeded completely in what he set out to do. He exterminated the East Prussians as thoroughly as the Teutonic Knights once exterminated the Prus, taking a few years instead of a century. He filled the city with outsiders. He destroyed the churches and the houses and the trees. He put concrete blocks in their place. He obliterated the past. ‘If I were dropped in this town by parachute and asked where I was,’ wrote [Marion von DÖnhoff ]

By 1947 there was virtually nothing left. Prussia suffered the fate of Carthage: ‘ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant’, ‘they create a desert, and they call it peace’.

The Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria was created in 1773 from the acquisitions of the Austrian Empire during the First Partition of Poland, and was destroyed in October 1918

Prince Metternich, the Austrian chancellor from 1815 to 1846, famously remarked that ‘Asia begins at the Landstrasse’, a street in Vienna’s eastern suburbs. The Viennese were apt to regard anywhere and everywhere to the east of their magnificent city as backward and exotic, and they played a prominent role in launching the stereotype of ‘Eastern Europe’ as a reservoir of underdevelopment and inferiority.

Virtually all Galician Jews were murdered, either shot in cold blood or transported to the gas chambers of Auschwitz or Sobibor.89 Slightly later, part of the Ukrainian underground launched a programme of ethnic cleansing in which hundreds of thousands of Poles were murdered.

The Poles of east Galicia/eastern Małopolska/Distrikt Galizien, now labelled ‘repatriants’, were packed onto trains and dispatched from Soviet territory. Almost the entire surviving Polish population of Lemberg was sent to Wrocław/Breslau, the capital of Silesia, where it replaced the expelled German citizenry.93 This was social engineering on an unprecedented scale.

The former east Galicia, forcibly Ukrainianized, now formed part of the Ukrainian SSR. The former west Galicia, artificially Polonized, belonged to the Polish People’s Republic. The new Soviet– Polish frontier reduced contacts to a minimum. The Ustrzyki district was finally restored to Poland by the Soviet Union in 1951.

The Kingdom of Etruria was the first of Napoleon’s monarchical experiments. All the earlier states and statelets thrown up by the French Revolution, from Batavia to Helvetia, had been republics modelled on the French Republic itself. But by 1801, as first consul for life, Napoleon was free to indulge his own autocratic tendencies.

His consolation was that by marrying Victoria he had given his own name of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to the British royal family. He had also the gratification of hearing his bride promise ‘to obey him and serve him’. Five months earlier, the queen’s advisers had insisted that he would not be allowed to propose marriage during their engagement but that the proposal must be made by her. Yet now, when it came to the wedding, they did not interfere with the traditional service. Albert was required ‘to love, comfort, honour and keep’ his wedded wife, but Victoria was further required to proffer both obedience and service to her wedded husband.25 This was no mean concession. And

Through all of this, the royals honed their upper-class English accents, threw themselves into patriotic and charitable activities, spoke no German in public, deflected awkward questions, avoided their German relatives and, in a sustained campaign of genealogical legerdemain, massaged their family tree beyond recognition. Most of their subjects do not know that Lady Diana Spencer (1961–97) was the very first person of primarily English descent who ever came near the British throne in the whole of its 300-year history.

Like all his compatriots, he had been brought up to believe that the Ottoman victory over the Serbs at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 was the greatest catastrophe in world history.

In addition, Serbia was a landlocked country. There were four possible directions in which her promised ‘access to the sea’ could be projected: over Croatian territory to the north-west, over Albanian territory to the south-west, over Greek territory to the south, or directly over Montenegro. Greece and Croatia were strong enough to resist. Albania was in turmoil. Montenegro offered the easiest target. At the turn of October 1918 the stalled Yugoslav project had suddenly come to life.

During the Assembly’s second session two days later a ‘Decision Document’ stated first that ‘the Serbian people of Montenegro share one blood, language, religion and tradition with the people of Serbia’, and secondly, that the unification of Montenegro with Serbia offers ‘the only possible salvation for our people’. No debate was permitted.

President Wilson agreed to meet a Corsican delegation, not realizing that Corsica formed part of metropolitan France. When reprimanded by Clemenceau, he cancelled the appointment, telling his secretary: ‘I cannot interfere with the internal affairs of a friendly ally.’ Lloyd George pounced. ‘I hope your Excellency will apply the same rule to Ireland,’ he said, ‘which I need not remind you is still a part of Great Britain … After all, are we not your ally?’ ‘Associate,’ the President responded sourly, ‘not ally.’95

Lenin, who accepted a loan from Ireland for Soviet Russia, was the sole foreign leader to acknowledge the Irish Republic’s existence.

De Valera resisted persistent demands to give Roman Catholicism the status of a state-backed religion, and on issues such as divorce or the role of women simply followed the social teaching of his day.

Nonetheless, De Valera’s defiant, not to say gratuitous gesture in April 1945, when he visited the German embassy in Dublin to present his condolences on Adolf Hitler’s death, exceeded the normal demands of protocol.

‘The gathering of the lands’, a long process whereby Moscow aimed to take control of all the East Slavs, had been proclaimed in the fifteenth century.

Expansion across the Urals into Siberia and Central Asia, the largest demographic vacuum on the globe, was launched at the end of the sixteenth century; the conquest of lands in the west and north-west possessed by Sweden and Poland began in the mid-seventeenth. The pace of expansion was relentless. Between 1683 and 1914 it averaged 53 square miles per day, and may be characterized as a case of bulimia politica.

The dilemmas faced by Estonia and other East European countries during the German occupation are rarely understood by Westerners, who have been led to believe that only one ‘Evil Force’ had to be confronted. In reality, the Germans wielded ruthless power and resistance was near-impossible. There were also sound patriotic reasons for joining the ‘war against Bolshevism’, particularly after a measure of self-government was introduced, extremely welcome after the preceding ‘Great Terror’.

Practically everything that Lenin and the Leninists did was accompanied by killing; practically everything they said was based on half-baked theories, a total lack of integrity and huge, barefaced lies – what the Russians would call naglaya lozh′.