Medieval East Central Europe in a Comparative Perspective

From Frontier Zones to Lands in Focus

Gerhard Jaritz, Katalin Szende

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317212249
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Medieval East Central Europe in a Comparative Perspective draws together the new perspectives concerning the relevance of East Central Europe for current historiography by placing the region in various comparative contexts. The chapters compare conditions within East Central Europe, as well as between East Central Europe, the rest of the continent, and beyond.

Including 15 original chapters from an interdisciplinary team of contributors, this collection begins by posing the question: "What is East Central Europe?" with three specialists offering different interpretations and presenting new conclusions. The book is then grouped into five parts which examine political practice, religion, urban experience, and art and literature. The contributors question and explain the reasons for similarities and differences in governance and strategies for handling allies, enemies or subjects in particular ways. They point out themes and structures from town planning to religious orders that did not function according to political boundaries, and for which the inclusion of East Central European territories was systemic.

The volume offers a new interpretation of medieval East Central Europe, beyond its traditional limits in space and time and beyond the established conceptual schemes. It will be essential reading for students and scholars of medieval East Central Europe.

PART I

What is East Central Europe?

1

THE MIRAGE OF EAST CENTRAL EUROPE

Historical regions in a comparative perspective

Nora Berend

As historians, we often become entrapped by the very constructs we create. Thus historical periods and concepts have famously been turned into rigid constraints that adventurous new generations must then dismantle. Well-known examples of this phenomenon include a temporal subdivision initially drawn up to serve perhaps the greatest identity myth of all times (the Renaissance creation of the ‘Middle Ages’), and a concept coined as a shorthand and tool for research (‘feudalism’). Both were eventually mistaken for objective reality, and treated as existing independently of the construction of researchers. Therefore they began to limit research. In order to regain our ability to see historical continuities and the fluidity of reality, we need to remind ourselves periodically to override such man-made constraints.¹ In this way, we have learned for example that the periodization based on the notion of a medieval and an early modern era often hides real continuities between the two supposedly distinct epochs, a distinction maintained by scholars who over generations deepened the divide by focusing on one or the other, instead of researching both periods, and created separate research tools for each.²

Historical regions are no exception. They are the construct of historians, not natural phenomena.³ While useful in overcoming national viewpoints (and prejudices), they are no more precise and objective measures of spatial reality than are states. The latter have been the ‘natural’ setting for historical inquiry, because the birth of history as a discipline is so intimately tied to the building of nation states, and the institutional and educational structures of professional history-writing continue to be mainly bound to states.⁴ Yet historical development itself is not bound to the frameworks provided by states; witness for example the significant divergence between northern and southern Italy or parts of Germany, or between Brittany and Provence. It is therefore a necessary and welcome corrective to use other spatial units, both smaller and larger, as frameworks for research. In this way both large regional histories as well as microhistories focusing on one village or small locality counterbalance national perspectives. We must not fall into our own trap, however, and start seeing larger regions that are simply another possible subdivision of the historical continuum as hard-and-fast external realities that shape the destiny of their inhabitants. The spectre of old environmental determinism haunts explanations where geographical position becomes the key factor that determines historical development. Historians can select smaller or larger geographical areas in order to investigate them in a comparative manner, from a diverse range of perspectives. As examples below demonstrate, one can find similarities between many areas in any given period and also across divergent epochs, while any such constructed historical region, characterised by a number of similarities, will also display historically significant variations among its constituent parts. Many different meaningful and valid comparisons can, therefore, be made, and historical regions can be drawn in a variety of ways.

‘East Central Europe’ is no exception. What is unusual is the intensity of the debate within and about this particular constructed historical region (itself defined in widely divergent terms concerning its territorial extent). Indeed, a recent book emphasized that the most intensive discussions of regional identity and of the question of historical divisions within Europe have come from this area.⁵ The reason for this, however, lay in modern political developments rather than historically unique regional cohesion: from the early twentieth century onwards, repeated radical political contestation and change led to the inextricable connection between politics and identity, in turn linked to a questioning of long-term historical and cultural development.⁶ Territorial contestation among successor states in the wake of the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, which continued throughout the interwar period, policies by the Third Reich and then by the Soviet Union in creating spheres of power, and local attitudes and actions to adhere to or oppose these powers led to a recurrent questioning of local regional identity. Generations of intellectuals queried the past, to discover what road led to the horrors and constraints of the twentieth century; to what extent social and political outcomes of their own times were conditioned or determined by centuries of previous developments; and whether there was a turning point in the past when history was derailed, or whether there was an original flaw in the design.⁷ The politicized nature of the debate over both the name and the extent of this supposed region has been highlighted many times.⁸

Modern views linked to self-definition, and the modern contestation of identity often lead to clashes over terminology, which is then also applied to the past. We should not confuse such modern contestation with medieval phenomena. Disputes over terminology are especially acute when the population in question sees negative, demeaning or otherwise undesirable connotations in certain names. This is the case of ‘Eastern Europe’ just as much as of the ‘Balkans’.⁹ Geographically more eastern became not simply a position on the map, but a slur. Those who wished to denote a ‘lesser’, backward, more primitive part of Europe consigned the areas to Eastern Europe. Local assertions of identity, while they had originally embraced Eastern Europe, therefore started to reject it and create alternative designations. The modern terminology of a seemingly innocent geographical division of Europe, therefore, in fact signals political contestation and a quest for identity.¹⁰

‘East Central Europe’ is a term that was initially mostly used by emigrant scholars. Its very employment in the work of Oskar Halecki shows the politicized and identity-based nature of the shift from Eastern to East Central Europe: while he initially used the term Eastern Europe, arguing that part of it was western in civilization, at the end of and after the second world war Halecki was the most influential in propagating the concept of ‘East Central Europe’.¹¹ He chose emigration during Nazi occupation, and then opposed Communism, remaining in the USA until his death. The term was used as a way to distinguish the westernmost parts of the Soviet bloc from the other parts, to argue against various countries belonging to the ‘East’, in other words to create a historical justification for not being ‘naturally’ part of the Soviet zone, and also to claim an identity in between East and West.¹² With political change, first the disintegration of the Soviet bloc, then the joining of former Soviet-zone countries to the European Union, a shift happened from the term East Central Europe to Central Europe among some, although not all, scholars. As an example, the 1993 Historical Atlas of East-Central Europe became, in 2002, the Historical Atlas of Central Europe.¹³

The fall of the ‘Iron Curtain’ for a short moment seemed to have put an end to such a link between identity politics and historical justifications, but it has already become clear that the supposed change was short-lived. Nowadays, political issues such as the contestation between proponents of nationalism on the one hand and those of the European Union on the other hand, or the Hungarian government’s promotion of the Russian model, signal the continued, and even strengthened, presence of politicized identity discourses.¹⁴ The primary impetus for intense discussions of ‘historical identity’ always came from politics and discontent, even if such discussion then took place in scholarly forums as well. The drive to explain the political present from historical identity is not without dangers: analogies to historical development from other areas, and very significant differences within ‘East Central Europe’ can be ignored.¹⁵ The name East Central Europe can be used or discarded (and although contestation of the term can be sharp, it does not lead to greater precision). If we use the term, and whatever geographical region we mean by it, we should not forget that it is only one possible historical construction of space.

While it is tempting to see the whole of history from the beginnings to our own days as made of one cloth, and the geographical coincidences between parts of the eastern border of the Roman Empire with the Iron Curtain have been used a number of times to suggest exactly that, it is important to remember the very different positions countries in the area have experienced over time. A few examples demonstrate this: while Bohemia was among the first victims of Hitler’s expansion and was then incorporated into the Soviet sphere of power after the war, it had been the centre of the empire under Charles IV in the fourteenth century. While Poland was partitioned to the point of not existing at all as a state at the end of the eighteenth century, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth had been one of the largest states of Europe in the seventeenth. The historical characteristics that have been listed as responsible for the modern fate of these countries have parallels in the early history of other countries that, however, had very different modern experiences. Thus, a small country such as Switzerland was not fated to fall a victim to more powerful neighbours; a belated start of state development did not mean lagging behind Western Europe for Luxembourg; Scandinavia joining Christendom centuries after the first European areas were Christianized did not affect its ability to reach high living standards; economic backwardness in the early modern period did not relegate Japan to continued economic failure; and the multi-ethnic character of Belgium’s population was not a trigger for civil war and disintegration. Human agency throughout the centuries rather than mere geographical accident shapes history.

The term East Central Europe itself is one among several that have been used to describe a part of Europe (the debates over which particular part of Europe it should apply to are discussed below). That naming matters to the participants of the debate becomes immediately obvious if one recalls that the appropriateness or otherwise of the term East Central Europe as opposed to the term ‘Central-Eastern Europe’ was a point of contention.¹⁶ Oskar Halecki preferred the term ‘East Central Europe’, which for him meant the area between Scandinavia, Germany, Italy, Turkey and the Soviet Union, though it is mostly forgotten that his division included a ‘West Central Europe’, too.¹⁷ He maintained that ‘East Central Europe’ was the only appropriate name, since Central Eastern Europe would mean the central part of Eastern Europe,¹⁸ while Jenő Szűcs, on the contrary, favoured exactly the term Central Eastern Europe and defined it as consisting of Bohemia, Hungary and Poland, a much smaller area than Halecki’s swathe all the way to Greece.¹⁹ Many others have opted for one out of a range of possible names, claiming the exclusive appropriateness of the chosen term. However, while justifications have been offered for a variety of names, as I have explained elsewhere, none of the names are more precise than others, nor is any of them truly free from political connotations, but some are more cumbersome than others.²⁰

Nor is East Central Europe or Central Europe a region that is (or can be) defined with scientific precision, and indeed scholars who have used the term included diverse countries as constituent parts of that region. This is true even if we focus ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Part I What is East Central Europe?
• Part II Political practices
• Part III Religious space
• Part IV Urban space
• Part V Art and literature
• Index