The Medieval Networks in East Central Europe

Commerce, Contacts, Communication

Balazs Nagy, András Vadas, Felicitas Schmieder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351371162
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

Medieval Networks in East Central Europe explores the economic, cultural, and religious forms of contact between East Central Europe and the surrounding world in the eight to the fifteenth century. The sixteen chapters are grouped into four thematic parts: the first deals with the problem of the region as a zone between major power centers; the second provides case studies on the economic and cultural implications of religious ties; the third addresses the problem of trade during the state formation process in the region, and the final part looks at the inter- and intraregional trade in the Late Middle Ages.

Supported by an extensive range of images, tables, and maps, Medieval Networks in East Central Europe demonstrates and explores the huge significance and international influence that East Central Europe held during the medieval period and is essential reading for scholars and students wishing to understand the integral role that this region played within the processes of the Global Middle Ages.

Part One

East Central Europe – No Man’s Land or Historical Region?

1

Reimagining Europe

An Outsider Looks at the Medieval East–West Divide

Christian Raffensperger

As the subject of this article is bias, intentional and otherwise, the best way to begin is to be open about my own identity and the perspective from which I am approaching the topic. Though it is possible to take such postmodern ideas too far, in this case, appraising one’s audience of one’s identity seems to be only good sense when discussing such fraught issues as those related to modern identity and the creation of historical narratives and regions. This particular framing of the article will result in often returning to a first person narrative that is rare in academic writing, but which better suits the points discussed here. First off, I am an American, though one who speaks more than one language and does care about history. This means that I am divorced in not just time but also space from the medieval past. None of the places where I lived or grew up had cathedrals built in the High Middle Ages or historic battlefields marking resistance against the Turks, Mongols, French or Russians. Second, but related, my roots as an American stretch back to the eighteenth century, thus despite my name I have no connections to Germany or Austria or any European kin. Third, I am comparatively young – I remember the Soviet Union, but it fell before I was in high school and I never visited there. I teach classes about Eastern Europe but I never experienced it, I have only read about it. By the time I got to college and then graduate school to begin my studies on medieval Europe there was no reason to think about a divided Europe and certainly no reason to project one back into the past. I offer all of this personal clarification by way of introducing my topic – an outsider (in many different ways) looking at the medieval European past and especially the medieval East–West divide.

My identity and the time in which I have lived have shaped my scholarship immensely. When I read Dimitri Obolensky’s Byzantine Commonwealth in graduate school in the early 2000s, I found its framing completely obsolete.¹ It was clear to me then that he was using a Cold War mentality to project an East-West divide into the past. I wrote this in an article and subsequently it developed into the first chapter of my book, Reimagining Europe.² In Reimagining Europe I talked about a new way to envision Byzantium’s influence on Europe as an ideal empire, hence the title of the chapter – “The Byzantine Ideal.” Byzantine art, architecture, titulature, etc. was appropriated by people throughout medieval Europe, not just those who happened to fall to the east of Obolensky’s medieval Iron Curtain. But even there I referenced, but did not pursue, the idea that it was not just medieval Europeans of East and West who appropriated from Byzantium, but others as well including the Turks, especially the sultanate of Rum.³ Removing the idea of a divided Europe did not change the history of appropriation from Byzantium, but it did change the way I talked about it; moving from Obolensky’s idea that it impacted solely Eastern Europe to seeing how Byzantium affected all of Europe. From this early engagement with the idea of projecting an East-West divide back into the past came my academic cause – to introduce to American medieval scholarship the idea that there was a kingdom of Rus’ and that it (and the rest of eastern Europe) was part and parcel of the larger medieval world.

This is particularly a challenge because of the normative classroom portrayal of medieval Europe in higher education in the United States. The vast majority of medievalists are teaching survey classes that deal primarily with western Europe, and rarely (if ever) with anything to the east of the Rhine or Elbe Rivers.⁴ One can examine this portrayal in a variety of ways, but here I will simply look at one textbook in some detail and then two others quite briefly to make the point. In 2012 the third edition of William Cook and Ronald Herzman’s Medieval World View came out from Oxford University Press. This is a major university press, and is the third edition of a popular medieval history textbook for classroom use. Cook and Herzman do not deal with eastern Europe in the book in any specificity, instead continuing to perpetuate the idea of Obolensky’s Byzantine Commonwealth and reading an East-West barrier back into history. For instance, in one mention they say that, “When we think of problems and misunderstandings within Europe today, we in large part think of tensions and conflicts that exist along the lines of Western and Byzantine spheres of influence, for example, the line between Poland and Russia or that between Croatia and Serbia.”⁵ Continuing the theme, they ascribe the violence in the Balkans to its place between Byzantium, the Latin world, and the Islamic world in the Middle Ages.⁶ But even with these brief tidbits, this is virtually all there is to say about interactions with anything east of the Rhine River. Perhaps this lacuna is better illustrated in the maps that they provide in the book (included here as Maps 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3). The first map depicts that same divide between the Byzantine, Islamic, and “Western European” worlds (see Map. 1.1).

Map 1.1Europe, Byzantium, Islam (after Cook and Herzman, The Medieval World View; drawn by Béla Nagy)

What defines “Western Europe,” and what period this covers is in fact difficult to determine and is not clarified. One might guess roughly Merovingian due to the exclusion of Saxons from “Western Europe,” but then the situation in the Italian peninsula is wrong, as is the situation in the Balkans. However, despite these still relatively major problems, the biggest problem is the gaping white space east of the Rhine, north and east of the Danube and north of the Black Sea. This does not improve in more detailed maps such as the one showing the Early Middle Ages (see Map 1.2). In this map, the empire of Charlemagne is indicated, but so are Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary, though Rus’ is left out. There is clearly a rich urban existence among the Franks, where there are two dozen cities important enough to be named, while east of the Elbe there is not a single city worthy of recognition, and in the entire Byzantine Empire, Constantinople is the only city worth putting on the map.

Map 1.2Europe in the Early Middle Ages (after Cook and Herzman, The Medieval World View; drawn by Béla Nagy)

The entire eastern half of Europe fares no better in the High Middle Ages (see Map 1.3). The cities have multiplied in France and England, but the anachronistically named Holy Roman Empire has seen a reduction in cities and the enormous labels of Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary are gone, but at least Prague is now labeled, though it is entirely alone on the eastern half of the European portion of the map. The authors have gone to the trouble to choose a map which includes eastern Europe, and even has the full hydrography for it, in fact the eastern portion of Europe takes up a full page in the book, yet there is virtually nothing on that page barring the labels for the Adriatic Sea, the Black Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, and five cities spread out throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa.

Map 1.3Europe in the High Middle Ages (after Cook and Herzman, The Medieval World View; drawn by Béla Nagy)

I have chosen The Medieval World View to pick on here, but reviewing other popular textbooks reveals some of the same problems. Both Barbara Rosenwein and Lynette Olson in their textbooks use the framework of the Byzantine Commonwealth to talk about Rus’ for instance.⁷ Though they do at least talk about Rus’, Byzantium, and some of the other parts of eastern Europe, they do so in such a way that emphasizes their difference rather than their similarity. They are often sectioned off and their mentions are to prove a later point, for instance Olson says, “The elevation of Slavic into a sacred and written language, subsequently spreading with the conversion of Serbia and Russia, was of immense cultural significance, for it buttressed Slavic culture in the areas most to be affected by the later Mongol and Turkish invasions.”⁸ While this comment is not necessarily factually incorrect, Olson does not use events in western European history to prove points about later events, but for eastern Europe, that seems to be the point of the inclusion of the information. Generally, it is not much, if any, of an exaggeration to say that this is a largely accurate portrayal of the state of medieval European textbooks in the American higher educational system.

When medieval European history classes in American academia do leave western Europe, the focus is on topics like the Crusades, but only the crusades that go to the eastern Mediterranean, thus the presence of cities like Constantinople, Jerusalem, and Damascus on the High Middle Ages map, or to Iberia, which similarly has cities included (see Map 1.3). The Baltic Crusades involving Poland, Hungary, and Rus’, the last as both participant and enemy, go almost entirely unremarked.⁹ This is especially odd when they might well serve the pedagogical purpose of enshrining western European exceptionalism by highlighting those crusades as moments defining what is Western, or more broadly, Latin Europe, fighting against the non-Latin East. A similar moment, the Mongol invasion of Europe is often mentioned, but only as an attack by an eastern other. Béla IV’s flight from Muhi and subsequent capture and ransom by a German duke is absent, as is his letter defining Hungary as the Gate of Christendom which has been so well publicized in recent years by the excellent work of Nora Berend.¹⁰ This too, the letter in particular, would work nicely to create the image of a line demarcating western medieval Europe as a distinct entity – the Wes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Maps
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part One East Central Europe – No Man’s Land or Historical Region?
• Part Two Christianization and the East–West Link
• Part Three Trade Relations of East Central Europe in the Age of State Formation
• Part Four Trade Relations of East Central Europe in the Late Medieval Period
• Index