Category Archives: Greece

by | 16 June 2026 · 12:09 am

Volodymyr Goes Full Byzantine

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 67-70:

VOLODYMYR TOOK THE throne in 980. He spent the first decade of his rule on warfare, ensuring that the realm created by his predecessor stayed together. Following in Sviatoslav’s footsteps, he again defeated the Khazars and the Volga Bulgars, reasserted his power over the Viatichians in the Oka basin, and pushed westward to the Carpathians, taking a number of fortresses from the Poles, including the town of Premyshl (Przemyśl) on today’s Polish-Ukrainian border. His main concern, however, was the southern frontier, where the Rus’ settlements were under continual attack by the Pechenegs and other nomadic tribes. Volodymyr strengthened border defenses by building fortifications along the local rivers, including the Sula and the Trubizh. He settled those areas with prisoners of war and subjects from other parts of the realm. Rus’, born of conquest, now sought stability by defending its borders instead of attacking the frontiers of other states.

Under Volodymyr’s rule, Kyiv’s relations with Byzantium were also changing. Whereas his predecessor on the Kyivan throne, Helgi, allegedly had sent troops against Byzantium to obtain trade preferences, and Sviatoslav did the same to acquire new territory in the Balkans, Volodymyr invaded the Crimea in the spring of 989 in pursuit of marriage, if not love. He besieged the Byzantine town of Chersonesus, demanding the hand of the sister of Emperor Basil II. A few years earlier, the emperor had asked Volodymyr for military assistance, promising the hand of his sister Anna in return. Volodymyr sent his troops to help up the emperor. But Basil was in no hurry to fulfill his promise. After receiving this slap in the face, Volodymyr refused to turn the other cheek and instead attacked the empire. His tactic worked. Alarmed by news of the fall of Chersonesus, Basil dispatched his sister Anna to the Crimea. She arrived with a retinue that included numerous Christian clerics.

Volodymyr’s request for marriage was granted in return for an assurance that the barbarian chieftain (as the ruler of Kyiv was regarded in Constantinople) would accept Christianity. Volodymyr went along. His baptism would start the process of the Christianization of Kyivan Rus’ and open a new chapter in the region’s history. Once the wedding party had moved back to Kyiv, Volodymyr removed the pantheon of pagan gods, including the most powerful of them—Perun, the god of thunder—from a hill above the Dnieper and put the Christian clergymen to work baptizing the population of Kyiv. The Christianization of Rus’ had begun—a long and difficult process that would take centuries to complete.

Our main source on the baptism of Rus’, the Kyivan chronicler, writes that Muslim Bulgars, Jewish Khazars, Christian Germans representing the pope, and a Greek scholar who spoke on behalf of Byzantine Christianity, the religion that Volodymyr chose, had all importuned Volodymyr. The story of the choice of faith as told in the Primary Chronicle is of course naïve in many ways. But it reflects certain real alternatives facing the Kyivan ruler, for he indeed did the picking and choosing. Volodymyr chose the religion of the strongest country in the region, in which the emperor was no less important an ecclesiastical figure—more important, in fact—than the patriarch. By choosing Christianity, he gained the prestige of marrying into an imperial family, which promptly elevated the status of his house and realm. Volodymyr’s choice of Christian name sheds additional light on his reasons for accepting Christianity. He took the same name as the emperor, Basil, indicating that in Byzantium he had found a political and religious model to emulate at home. A generation later, Kyivan intellectuals such as Metropolitan Ilarion would compare him and his baptism of Rus’ to Emperor Constantine and his role in establishing Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire.

To be sure, the Byzantine political and ecclesiastical elite helped Volodymyr make the “right choice.” They were unhappy with the marriage but not with the conversion. The Byzantines had begun sending missionaries to the region soon after the Rus’ Vikings attacked Constantinople in 860. Back then, Patriarch Photius of Constantinople, the same clergyman who left us the description of the Viking attack, had sent one of his best students, Cyril of Thessalonica, to the Crimea and then to the Khazar kaganate. Along with his brother Methodius, Cyril devised the Glagolitic alphabet to transcribe Christian texts into the Slavic languages. The two men subsequently became known as the apostles to the Slavs and gained sainthood. Attempts to convert Kyivan rulers were undertaken long before Volodymyr’s conversion, as attested by the story of his grandmother, Olha, who became the first known Christian ruler and the first Christian woman in Kyiv named Helen. Apart from propagating Christianity, the Byzantine elites began to gain influence over the “barbaric” rulers and peoples, who had no fancy genealogies and little in the way of sophisticated culture but a great deal of destructive power.

After Volodymyr’s conversion, the patriarch of Constantinople created the Metropolitanate of Rus’, one of few ecclesiastical provinces named after its population and not the city where the bishop or metropolitan would reside. The patriarch reserved for himself the right to appoint metropolitans to head the Rus’ church—most of them would be Greeks. The metropolitan in turn controlled the appointment of bishops, most of whom would come from the ranks of the local elite. The first monasteries were established, using a Byzantine statute. Church Slavonic, the first literary language of Kyivan Rus’, initially functioned predominantly as a translation tool, making Greek texts understandable to local elites. Volodymyr issued regulations defining the rights and privileges of the clergy and gave one-tenth of his income to the church. Christianity in Kyivan Rus’ began at the top and moved slowly down the social ladder, spreading from center to periphery along rivers and trade routes. In some remote areas, especially northeastern Rus’, pagan priests resisted the new religion for centuries, and Kyivan missionaries who ventured there would end up dead as late as the twelfth century.

Volodymyr’s choice would have a profound impact on his realm and on the history of eastern Europe as a whole. Instead of continuing warfare with Byzantium, the new Rus’ polity was entering into an alliance with the only surviving part and continuator of the Roman Empire and thereby opening itself to the political and cultural influences of the Mediterranean world. It would prove fateful that Volodymyr not only brought Rus’ into the Christian world but also made it part of Eastern Christianity. Many of the consequences are as important today as they were at the turn of the second millennium.

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Filed under Greece, language, migration, military, nationalism, religion, Scandinavia, Ukraine

by | 15 June 2026 · 12:49 am

Kyiv as Byzantium North

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 65-66:

FROM THE VERY first reports about the Rus’ princes on the Dnieper River, we hear of their attraction to the Byzantine Empire. The same thing that had attracted the Huns and Goths to Rome drew the Viking merchant warriors to the Byzantine capital, Constantinople: earthly riches, along with power and prestige. The Vikings never set out to topple Byzantium, but they tried to get as close to the empire and its capital as possible, launching a number of expeditions to capture Constantinople.

Sviatoslav’s death in 972 closed an important period in the history of Rus’ and its relations with its powerful southern neighbor. To the next two generations of Kyivan rulers, association with Constantinople was no less desirable than it had been for Sviatoslav. But Sviatoslav’s successors were concerned not only with money and commerce but also with the power, prestige, and high culture emanating from Byzantium. Instead of conquering Constantinople on the Bosphorus, as their predecessors had attempted to do, they decided to reproduce it on the Dnieper. This turn in Rus’ relations with the Byzantine Greeks and the new expectations of the Kyivan princes came to the fore during the rule of Sviatoslav’s son Volodymyr and the latter’s son Yaroslav. The two ran the Kyivan realm for more than half a century and are often credited with turning it into a true medieval state—one with a more or less clearly defined territory, system of government, and, last but not least, ideology. Much of the latter came from Byzantium.

As a prince of Kyiv, Sviatoslav’s son, Volodymyr, was less bellicose and ambitious than his father but turned out to be more successful in achieving his goals. Fifteen years old when his father died near the Dnieper rapids, Volodymyr had brothers who wanted the throne for themselves, and a new wave of Scandinavian arrivals eased his path to power. Before wresting the Kyivan throne from one of his brothers, Volodymyr spent more than five years as a refugee in Scandinavia, the ancestral homeland of his clan. He returned to Rus’ with a new Viking army. The Kyivan chronicler tells us that after Volodymyr took Kyiv, his soldiers asked for payment. Volodymyr promised to give them tribute from the local tribes but was unable to deliver. Instead, he recruited the Viking commanders as his local administrators in forts that he built on the steppe frontier, allowing the rest of the army to engage in an expedition against Byzantium. He also ordered his people not to let that army into their towns and to prevent them from returning.

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Filed under Greece, migration, military, nationalism, Scandinavia, Turkey, Ukraine

by | 13 June 2026 · 1:09 am

Slavs Meet Byzantium

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 43-45:

THE SLAVS FIRST came to general attention in the early sixth century AD, when they showed up en masse on the borders of the Byzantine Empire, which had been weakened by the Goths and Huns, and moved into the Balkans. Jordanes, a sixth-century Byzantine author of Gothic descent, distinguished two major groups among the Slavs of his day. “Though their names are now dispersed amid various clans and places,” he wrote, “yet they are chiefly called Sclaveni and Antes.” He placed the Sclaveni between the Danube and the Dniester, reserving for the Antes the lands between the Dniester and the Dnieper, “in the curve of the sea of Pontus.” Linguistic data suggests that the ancestral homeland of the Slavs lay in the forests and forest-steppe zone between the Dnieper and the Vistula, mainly in Volhynia and the Prypiat marshes of today’s Ukraine. By the time Jordanes wrote, the Slavs must have moved from their forest recesses into the steppes, creating a serious problem for Emperor Justinian the Great.

Justinian ruled the Byzantine Empire between 527 and 567 and was ambitious enough to attempt a restoration of the Roman Empire in its entirety, both east and west. On the Danube frontier, where the empire faced unceasing attacks from local tribes, Justinian decided to take the offensive. Procopius, a sixth-century Byzantine author who left a detailed account of Justinian’s wars, writes that in the early 530s Chilbudius, a commander personally close to the emperor, was sent to wage war north of the Danube. He scored a number of victories over the Antes, which allowed Justinian to add “Anticus” (conqueror of the Antes) to his imperial title. But the success was short-lived. Three years later Chilbudius was killed in battle, and Justinian returned to the old policy of defending the border along the Danube instead of trying to extend it.

Justinian brought back the old Roman tactic of “divide and rule.” By the end of the 530s, not without Byzantine encouragement and incentives, the Antes were already fighting the Sclaveni, while Byzantine generals recruited both groups into the imperial army. Even so, the Slavic raids continued. While at war with the Sclaveni, the Antes managed to invade the Byzantine province of Thrace in the eastern Balkans. They pillaged the land and took numerous slaves, whom they brought back to the left bank of the Danube. Having manifested their destructive potential, the Antes offered their services to the empire. Justinian took them under his wing and designated the abandoned Greek city of Turris, north of the Danube, as their headquarters.

Like many other enemies of the empire, the Antes became its defenders in exchange for regular payments from the imperial treasury. They tried to enhance their status by claiming to have captured the emperor’s best general, Chilbudius, whom they wanted to recognize as their leader. Since Justinian had granted Chilbudius the title of magister militum, or commander of all the imperial troops in the region, such recognition would have made them legitimate citizens of the empire, not merely its gatekeepers. The plot did not succeed. The true Chilbudius was, of course, long dead, his impostor was captured and sent to Justinian, and the Antes had to accept the status of foederati—allies rather than citizens of the great empire.

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Filed under Balkans, Bulgaria, Greece, language, migration, military, Turkey, Ukraine

by | 13 June 2026 · 12:47 am

Classical Pontic Steppe Divisions

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 39-41:

Ovid’s contemporary Strabo, author of the acclaimed Geographies, knew more about the Pontic steppe than did the famous Roman exile. From Strabo we learn the names of the Sarmatian tribes and the areas under their control. According to him, the Iazyges and Roxolani were “wagon dwellers,” or nomads, but the famous geographer gives us literally nothing about the sedentary population of the forest-steppe areas around the Dnieper, not to mention the wooded areas farther to the north. Unlike Ovid, however, he did not live among the peoples of the region; nor were his sources as good as those of Herodotus. They knew nothing about the “northerners,” and Strabo complained about the ignorance that prevailed “in regard to the rest of the peoples that come next in order in the north; for I know neither the Bastarnae, nor the Sauromatae, nor, in a word, any of the peoples who dwell above the Pontus, nor how far distant they are from the Atlantic Sea, nor whether their countries border upon it.”

Strabo’s informants came from one of the colonies, but if Herodotus made numerous references to the Dnieper, Strabo seemed more familiar with the Don. His sources likely came from Tanais, a Greek colony at the mouth of the Don that belonged to the Bosporan Kingdom, the most powerful union of Greek colonies revived with the arrival of the Romans. For Strabo, the Don had a special meaning. It served as the easternmost boundary of Europe, the term used in the Aegean homeland to describe the expanse of the Greek presence in the outer world. Europe lay to the west of the Don, while Asia began to the east of it.

Thus, at the beginning of the first millennium AD, when the Romans came to the Pontic colonies, the Ukrainian territories found themselves once again at the very edge of what would become Western civilization. The northern frontier of the Hellenic world had now become the eastern boundary of Europe. There it would remain for almost two thousand years, until the rise of the Russian Empire in the eighteenth century redrew the map of Europe, moving its eastern boundary all the way to the Urals.

The division of the Pontic steppes into European and Asian parts did not mean much in the time of the Romans. Strabo wrote about the Sarmatians on both the left and right banks of the Don, and Ptolemy, one of his successors, wrote in the second century AD about two Sarmatias, one European, the other Asian—a division that would remain constant in the works of European geographers for another millennium and a half. More important than the imagined eastern boundary of Europe was the real civilizational frontier between the Mediterranean colonies on the northern shore of the Black Sea and the nomads of the Pontic steppes. Unlike the Greek colonies with their surrounding fortifications, that frontier was never set in stone, creating instead a broad zone of interaction between colonists and locals in which languages, religions, and cultures intermixed, producing new cultural and social realities.

The all-important boundary between the steppe nomads and the agriculturalists of the forest-steppe areas that was known to Herodotus became invisible for Strabo. Whether it disappeared altogether or Mediterranean writers simply did not know about it is hard to say. Geography and ecology stayed the same, while the population probably did not. It certainly refused to stay put in the middle of the first millennium AD, when we next encounter references to the region in the writings of learned Greeks.

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Filed under Asia, Europe, Greece, migration, Turkey, Ukraine

by | 12 June 2026 · 4:29 am

Herodotus on Ukraine

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 29-30:

THE FIRST HISTORIAN of Ukraine was Herodotus, the father of history himself. This honor is usually reserved for the histories of countries and peoples belonging to the Mediterranean world. Ukraine—a stretch of steppes, mountains, and forests north of the Black Sea, which was known to the Greeks as the Pontos euxeinos (Hospitable Sea, latinized by the Romans as Pontus euxinus)—was an important part of that world. Its importance was of a particular nature. The world of Herodotus was centered on the city-states of ancient Greece, extending to Egypt in the south and the Crimea and the Pontic steppes in the north. If Egypt was a land of ancient culture and philosophy to study and emulate, the territory of today’s Ukraine was a quintessential frontier where Greek civilization encountered its barbaric alter ego. It was the first frontier of a political and cultural sphere that would come to be known as the Western world. That is where the West began to define itself and its other.

Herodotus, known in Greek as Herodotos, came from Halicarnassus, a Greek city in what is now Turkey. In the fifth century BC, when he lived, wrote, and recited his Histories, his birthplace was part of the Persian Empire. Herodotus spent a good part of his life in Athens, lived in southern Italy, and crisscrossed the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern worlds, traveling to Egypt and Babylon among other places. An admirer of Athenian democracy, he wrote in Ionic Greek, but his interests were as global as they could be at the time. His Histories, later divided into nine books, dealt with the origins of the Greco-Persian wars that began in 499 and continued until the mid-fifth century BC. Herodotus lived through a good part of that period and researched the subject for thirty years after the end of the wars in 449. He depicted the conflict as an epic struggle between freedom and slavery—the former represented by the Greeks, the latter by the Persians. Although his own political and ideological sympathies were engaged, he wanted to tell both sides of the story. In his own words, he set out “to preserve the memory of the past by putting on record the astonishing achievements of both the Greeks and the Barbarians.”

Herodotus’s interest in the “barbarian” part of the story turned his attention to the Pontic steppes. In 512 BC, thirteen years before the start of the wars, Darius the Great, by far the most powerful ruler of the Persian Empire, invaded the region to avenge himself on the Scythians, who had played a trick on him. The Scythian kings, nomadic rulers of a vast realm north of the Black Sea, had made Darius march all the way from the Danube to the Don in pursuit of their highly mobile army without giving him a chance to engage it in battle. This was a humiliating defeat for a ruler who would pose a major threat to the Greek world a decade and a half later. In his Histories, Herodotus spared no effort in relating whatever he knew or had ever heard about the mysterious Scythians and their land, customs, and society. It would appear that despite his extensive travels, he never visited the region himself and had to rely on stories told by others. But his detailed description of the Scythians and the lands and peoples they ruled made him not only the first historian but also the first geographer and ethnographer of Ukraine.

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Filed under Egypt, Greece, Iran, philosophy, scholarship, Ukraine

by | 1 March 2026 · 10:12 pm

Herodotus as a Child?

From Travels with Herodotus, by Ryszard Kapuscinski (Vintage,  2009), Kindle pp. 44-46:

When I immersed myself in various sources, however, I learned that we know little about Herodotus’s life, and that even the few facts we do have are not entirely reliable. For in contrast to Rabindranath Tagore—or, for instance, his contemporary Marcel Proust, both of whom meticulously parsed every detail of their childhoods—Herodotus, like the other great men of this epoch—Socrates, Pericles, Sophocles—tells us next to nothing about his. Was it not customary? Was childhood considered irrelevant? Herodotus says only that he came from Halicarnassus. Halicarnassus lies above a calm bay shaped like an amphitheater, in a beautiful part of the world, where the western shore of Asia meets the Mediterranean Sea. It is a land of sun, warmth, and light, of olive trees and vineyards. One instinctively feels that someone born here must naturally have a good heart, an open mind, a healthy body, a consistently cheerful disposition.

Biographers tend to agree that Herodotus was born between 490 and 480 B.C.E., perhaps in 485. These are greatly important years in the history of world culture. Around 480 B.C.E., Buddha departs for the other world; a year later, in the Lu principality, Confucius dies; Plato will be born fifty years later. Asia is the center of the world; even insofar as the Greeks are concerned, the most creative members of their society—the Ionians—also live in Asia. There is no Europe yet; it exists as myth only, in the name of a beautiful girl, Europa, daughter of the Phoenician king Agenor, whom Zeus, transformed into a white bull, will carry off to Crete to have his way with her.

The parents of Herodotus? His siblings? His house? All of this is in deep shadowland uncertainty. Halicarnassus was a Greek colony on land subject to the Persians, with a non-Greek native population—the Carians. His father was called Lyxes, which is not a Greek name, so perhaps he was a Carian. It was his mother who most probably was Greek. Herodotus was therefore a Greek Carian, an ethnic half-breed. Such people who grow up amid different cultures, as a blend of different bloodlines, have their worldview determined by such concepts as border, distance, difference, diversity. We encounter the widest array of human types among them, from fanatical, fierce sectarians, to passive, apathetic provincials, to open, receptive wanderers—citizens of the world. It depends on how their blood got mixed, what spirits settled in it.

What sort of child is Herodotus? Does he smile at everyone and willingly extend his hand, or does he sulk and hide in the folds of his mother’s garments? Is he an eternal crybaby and whiner, giving his tormented mother at times to sigh: Gods, why did I give birth to such a child! Or is he cheerful, spreading joy all around? Is he obedient and polite, or does he torture everyone with questions: Where does the sun come from? Why is it so high up that no one can reach it? Why does it hide beneath the sea? Isn’t it afraid of drowning?

And in school? With whom does he share a bench? Did they seat him, as punishment, next to some unruly boy? Or, the gods forbid, a girl? Did he learn quickly to write on the clay tablet? Is he often late? Does he squirm during lessons? Does he slip others the answers? Is he a tattletale?

And toys? What did a little Greek living two and a half thousand years ago play with? A scooter carved out of wood? Did he build sand castles at the edge of the sea? Climb trees? Make himself clay birds, fish, and horses, which we can study today in museums?

Which aspects of his childhood will he remember for the rest of his life? For little Rabi, the most exalted moment was the morning prayer at his father’s side. For little Marcel, it was waiting in a dark room for his mother to come and hug him good night. Which experience did little Herodotus anticipate in this way?

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Filed under China, education, Greece, Mediterranean, philosophy, religion, South Asia

by | 21 February 2026 · 5:34 am

Mincemeat and Mussolini

From Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, by Ben Macintyre (Crown, 2010), Kindle pp. 291-293:

The most significant victim in the fallout on the Axis side was Mussolini himself. From the first Allied footfall in Sicily, Il Duce was doomed, though he refused to acknowledge it. Goebbels noted: “The only thing certain in this war is that Italy will lose it.” The Pact of Steel was cracking up. By July 18, the Allied front line had moved halfway up Sicily. That day, Mussolini sent an almost defiant cable to Hitler: “The sacrifice of my country cannot have as its principal purpose that of delaying a direct attack on Germany.” The Führer summoned him to an urgent meeting. Il Duce did not care to be summoned anywhere but went meekly. The two fascist leaders met in Feltre, fifty miles from Venice, where Hitler launched into a long harangue, lambasting the “inept and cowardly” Italian troops in Sicily and insisting: “What has happened now in Sicily must not be allowed to happen again.” In the midst of the tirade, an aide interrupted to inform Mussolini that Rome was under massive air attack, the first time the capital had been targeted. Mussolini sat impassively through the two-hour monologue. The great Italian bull seemed to be fatally gored, diminished, and distant. At the end of the excruciating meeting, he said simply: “We are fighting for a common cause, Führer.” It sounded more like an epitaph than a statement of solidarity. On July 22, Palermo fell to Patton’s American troops. Three days later, Mussolini was outvoted by the Fascist Grand Council, summoned by King Victor Emmanuel III to a private audience, and toppled. “It can’t go on any longer,” said the king: Mussolini must resign at once, to be replaced by Marshal Pietro Badoglio, the former chief of the armed forces. Italy’s deposed dictator left the royal Villa Savoia hidden in an ambulance, and the new government in Rome began the secret task of extracting Italy from the war and Hitler’s poisonous embrace. In Badoglio’s words: “Fascism fell, as was fitting, like a rotten pear.” The next day, Rommel was recalled from Greece to defend northern Italy.

Would it have fallen so fast, or rotted so quickly, without Operation Mincemeat? The invasion of Sicily was a far from perfect military operation, bedeviled by poor planning and personal rivalries between selfish and powerful men. A relatively small contingent of German troops successfully held up the advance of an Allied host seven times larger and then evacuated the island to continue the battle up mainland Italy. The fight for Sicily was grim, bitter, and costly. But how much worse would it have been had the Nazi high command been prepared for it? What if, say, the full-strength, battle-tempered First Panzer Division, instead of being dispatched to Greece to await an imaginary invasion, had been deployed along the coast at Gela?

It is impossible to calculate how many lives, on both sides of the conflict, were saved by Operation Mincemeat, or exactly how much it contributed to hastening the end of the war and the defeat of Hitler. The Allies had expected it would take ninety days to conquer Sicily. The occupation was completed on August 17, thirty-eight days after the invasion began. Looking back after the war, Professor Percy Ernst Schramm, keeper of the OKW war diary, left no doubt that the fake documents had played a critical role: “It is well known that under the influence of the letters, Hitler moved troops to Sardinia and southern Greece, thereby preventing them from taking part in the defence against [Husky].” In September, Italy formally surrendered, although the war in Italy would not end until May 1945.

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Filed under Britain, Germany, Greece, Italy, Mediterranean, military, U.S., war

by | 20 February 2026 · 3:02 am

Nazi Intelligence Failure in 1943?

From Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, by Ben Macintyre (Crown, 2010), Kindle pp. 229-232:

The first full German intelligence assessment of the documents was written on May 11 and signed by Baron von Roenne himself. It was addressed to the OKW Operations Staff, or Wehrmachtführungsstab, headed by General Alfred Jodl, and entitled, portentously, “Discovery of the English Courier.” It began: “On the corpse of an English courier which was found on the Spanish coast, were three letters from senior British Officers to high Allied Officers in North Africa. … They give information concerning the decisions taken on the 23rd April, 1943, regarding Anglo-American strategy for the conduct of the war in the Mediterranean after the conclusion of the Tunisian campaign.” Major Martin is described as “an experienced specialist in amphibious operations.”

Von Roenne went on to lay out, point by point, the misinformation prepared by Cholmondeley and Montagu. “Large scale amphibious operations in both the Western and Eastern Mediterranean are intended. The proposed operation in the eastern Mediterranean, under the command of General Wilson, is to be made on the coast round Kalamata, and the section of the coast south of Cape Araxos. The code name for the landings on the Peloponnesus is ‘Husky.’ … The operation to be conducted in the Western Mediterranean by General Alexander was mentioned, but without naming any objective.” Von Roenne, however, had picked up on the reference to sardines. “A jocular remark in this letter refers to Sardinia,” he wrote. “The code name for this operation is ‘Brimstone.’” The attack on Sardinia, he surmised, must be “a minor ‘commando type’ since Mountbatten had requested the return of Major Martin after the operation. This indication points to the invasion of an island rather than of a major undertaking. … This is another point in favour of Sardinia.”

Just as important, Von Roenne relayed the news that Sicily was not a real target for the Allies, but a decoy: “The proposed cover operation for ‘Brimstone’ is Sicily.” That lie would sit, immovably, at the center of German strategic thinking over the coming months: the attacks would come in the east, in Greece, and in the west, most probably in Sardinia; evidence of any planned assault on Sicily could safely be dismissed as a hoax. The only uncertainty, von Roenne warned, was that of timing. If the two divisions identified in Nye’s letter—the Fifty-sixth Infantry attacking Kalamata and the Fifth Infantry Division aimed at Cape Araxos—were deployed at less than full strength, then the “operation could be mounted immediately” and the offensive might start at any time. However, the Fifty-sixth Division, von Roenne noted, had two brigades “still in action” at Enfidaville. If the entire division was to be used in the assault, these troops “must first be rested and then embarked. This possibility, which necessitates a certain time lag before the launching of the operation, is, judging by the form of the letters, the most likely.” In von Roenne’s mature estimation, Germany still had “at least two or three weeks” to reinforce the Greek coast before the attack.

That was also enough time for the British to change their plans, which they might well do if they knew the information had reached the Germans. Von Roenne now turned to this important consideration. “It is known to the British Staff that the courier’s despatches to [sic] Major Martin fell into Spanish hands,” he wrote, but “it is not perhaps known to the British General Staff that these letters came to our notice, since an English Consul was present at the examination of the letters by Spanish officials.” The letters had been reinserted in the envelopes and returned to the British, and a senior officer of the Madrid Abwehr station had personally inspected the resealed envelopes before they were returned to Alan Hillgarth. The British might suspect but would have no proof that the letters had been read, let alone passed to the Germans and copied. “It is, therefore, to be hoped that the British General Staff will continue with these projected operations and thereby make possible a resounding Abwehr success.” In order to convince the British that their secrets were still safe, von Roenne suggested that the Germans mount their own deception: they should give no indication that they feared simultaneous attacks in the eastern and western Mediterranean and instead “initiate a misleading plan of action which will deceive the enemy by painting a picture of growing Axis concern regarding Sicily.” The Germans should pretend to reinforce Sicily, while doing nothing of the sort.

Von Roenne ended with a security warning. “News of this discovery will be treated with the greatest secrecy, and knowledge of it confined to as few as possible.” The baron’s assessment was remarkable in many ways: it hauled on board every single aspect of the deception and even launched a corresponding deception plan to reinforce it. But perhaps most astonishing of all was the ringing endorsement that accompanied the appraisal: “The circumstances of the discovery, together with the form and contents of the despatches, are absolutely convincing proof of the reliability of the letters.” The army’s chief intelligence analyst, from the outset, utterly dismissed the possibility of a plant.

This was, to say the least, strange. The analysts of FHW usually distrusted uncorroborated information emanating directly from the Abwehr, knowing the inefficiency and corruption of that organization, and tended to be skeptical of Abwehr revelations “unless these were clearly corroborated by more tangible evidence.” Von Roenne’s natural caution seems to have deserted him. He knew only what the Madrid Abwehr station had told him about the discovery of the body, which was secondhand information derived through Adolf Clauss. The report detailing the results of the second meeting with Pardo on May 10 had not yet reached Berlin. No additional checks had been made, the body had not been examined, and the original documents had remained in German hands for only one hour, far too short a time for forensic testing. And yet he chose to describe the documents as incontrovertibly genuine.

Deception is a sort of seduction. In love and war, adultery and espionage, deceit can only succeed if the deceived party is willing, in some way, to be deceived. The betrayed lover sees only the signs of love and blocks out the evidence of faithlessness, however glaring. This unconscious willingness to see the lie as truth—“wishfulness” was Admiral Godfrey’s word for it—comes in many forms: Adolf Clauss in Huelva wanted to believe the false documents because his reputation depended on believing them; for Karl-Erich Kühlenthal, any intelligence breakthrough to his credit, no matter how fantastic, made him safer, a Jew among anti-Semitic killers. Von Roenne, however, may have chosen to believe in the fake documents for an entirely different reason: because he loathed Hitler, wanted to undermine the Nazi war effort, and was intent on passing false information to the high command in the certain knowledge that it was wholly false and extremely damaging.

It is quite possible that Lieutenant Colonel Alexis Baron von Roenne did not believe the Mincemeat deception for an instant.

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by | 12 July 2025 · 5:55 am

Catholic vs. Orthodox Slavs

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 231-235:

The war with Muscovite Russia was hardly over. Despite the accomplishments of the valiant Transylvanian [Stefan Batory], Polish-Russian relations had yet to enter into their most interesting—indeed, most incredible—phase. In the interim, another development took place, one that would have important repercussions for the battle not only for territory but also for the hearts and minds of the borderland inhabitants.

More precisely, this new development represented a war for souls. At the same time that Poland-Lithuania and Muscovy were vying for control of the Rus’ principalities, questions of jurisdiction over the Orthodox population of Eastern Europe generated sparks. This was the world of the Greek Church, adherents of Christianity in its Byzantine (that is, Eastern) rite.

Byzantine Christianity differed from the Church of Rome in a number of ways, not all of them doctrinal. Whereas in Roman Catholicism the high church language was Latin, there was no one single high church language in the Greek world: the Slavic lands had been given their own church language by the earliest missionaries to the Slavs, Cyril and Methodius. This language came to be known as Old Church Slavonic. Distinct from the spoken vernaculars of the region, it was nonetheless for the most part comprehensible to the population.

The relationship of the church and state in the East was also different than in the West. Following the pattern of Byzantium, the Eastern Church pragmatically subordinated itself to the authority of the state in which it functioned. Another seemingly obvious distinction: the Eastern churches did not owe allegiance to the pope in Rome but, rather, acknowledged the patriarch of Constantinople. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the position of the Greek Church was much diminished. This allowed for some jockeying within Eastern Christendom, especially in the East Slavic lands, where the majority of the faithful resided and the religion flourished.

To be sure, even before the Ottomans moved into Byzantium, not all was well in the Eastern Greek world further north. This in part was the result of the fact that, from its inception, the head of the Greek Church in the Rus’ lands had been the metropolitan of Kyiv. The shift of state borders that resulted in the Greek faithful residing in different states complicated the ecclesiastical picture and led various clergymen to vie with each other for influence over the faithful of Eastern Europe. To give one example: the Bulgarian clergyman who was chosen as metropolitan of the Ruthenian lands in 1415 soon found himself excommunicated by the patriarch of Constantinople, whose mind had been poisoned by the metropolitan of Moscow, who wanted this position for himself. Not until 1458 was Poland-Lithuania able to establish an independent Kyivo-Halych metropolitanate for its Orthodox population.

…

Those in the Commonwealth realized that they needed to counteract such moves. Essentially there were two options. They could either establish an autocephalous Orthodox church for the country or bring about church union—here, union with what was still the biggest force in Christianity: the Church in Rome.

The latter option won out, in part because the Church of Rome had made similar efforts in the past. First attempted in Constance, union between the Roman and Greek Churches had been achieved at the Council of Florence (1439), although nothing ultimately came of it (it is this attempt at union, incidentally, that led to the formation of an autocephalous Orthodox church in Moscow). Yet another sign that union was the direction favored by the Vatican was that, as early as 1573, a Greek College was opened in Rome as well as a Congregation for Eastern Churches.

The Commonwealth, thus, was convinced to work toward union and capitalized on a desire among Commonwealth clergymen not to subordinate themselves to Muscovy—in particular, not to send their financial dues there. This became visible in the synods that took place in the town of Brest, along the internal Polish-Lithuanian border, at the end of the sixteenth century. The Greek clergy decided to support the idea of union—with qualifications. While they would recognize the authority of the pope in Rome, they were not ready to make many changes that would affect the look and feel of their religion. They were allowed to retain their distinctive Eastern rite: the liturgy in Church Slavonic, as well as other traditions, including the marriage of the clergy. A selling point for the Orthodox bishops was a further advantage specified in the act of union: they were to be admitted into the Senate of the Commonwealth, on par with the Roman Catholic bishops.

This Union of Brest, as the 1596 agreement was called, produced a new phenomenon in the Commonwealth: so-called Uniates. These were Eastern-rite Catholics, in official parlance members of the Greek-Catholic Confession of the Slavonic Rite. In other words, while they retained their traditional Eastern rite and practices, they were part of the Catholic Church.

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by | 24 October 2024 · 6:20 am

Hungarian & Romanian Gentry, 1910s

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 257-259:

Rather than getting involved in risky commercial activity and taking on the role of a middle class as their liberalism demanded, for the most part Hungary’s nobles turned to Jews, many from Galicia, who within a generation formed the backbone of the entrepreneurial and professional classes. In the process, they acculturated. If in 1880, 58.5 percent of Hungary’s Jews claimed Magyar as their mother tongue, by 1910 that number had risen to 77.8 percent. Enjoying full legal equality, young Jews advanced through Hungarian educational and professional institutions and then excelled in urban pursuits in commerce, finance, and industry. They also took an important place in the agricultural economy, as landowning farmers, but also as tenants and salaried employees of large landowners, who valued Jews as efficient and rational producers.

By World War I, Hungary’s elite seemed to be opening up to Jews as well. In 1914, one-fifth of the large landholders were Jews, and over one-fifth of the deputies in parliament were of Jewish parentage. Tens of thousands of upwardly mobile Jews also excelled in patriotism, and as teachers, journalists, and professionals went into Slovak and Romanian areas spreading Magyar culture. Numerically, Magyarized Jews made the culturally Magyar population just over half of the Hungarian kingdom. At the same time, the lower class Magyar Christian population, unable to adapt as quickly to the challenges of modernization, looked on the advance of Jews with skepticism and jealousy, becoming further alienated from the gentry elite.

In contrast to the Czech national elite, Hungary’s gentry thus failed to provide perspectives for social and economic advancement for the land’s village dwellers. Instead, it endeavored to use state resources to slowly Magyarize ethnic others. Because of the property limitations on the electorate, and multiple forms of administrative chicanery, the spaces for opposition politics in Hungary, whether social or national, were severely constrained. A Hungarian Social Democratic party emerged but not a significant movement for Christian Socialism or agrarianism. The elite’s suppression and neglect of the interests and rights of the local ethnicity virtually ensured a full outburst of radical nationalism when economic circumstances reached a nadir in the early 1930s.

The relations between elite and common folk were similar in Romania, but the extremes were greater. In 1912, 82 percent of Romanians still lived in the countryside. Some 2,000 families had owned 38 percent of arable land in 1864, and that percentage worsened: in 1905, some 5,000 families controlled 50 percent of all arable land. The share of medium-sized properties was negligible (10 percent), while 40 percent of all lands consisted of tiny plots between five and ten hectares. By 1905, there was probably no country in Europe where the disparity was so great between large- and smallholdings: a few thousand families held as much land as more than a million. Like its Hungarian counterpart, the elite was quasi-aristocratic, and through control of the local administrative apparatus, they became a law unto themselves, with little concern for the welfare of peasants.

As in Hungary, professional bureaucrats of gentry (boyar) background dominated the state apparatus and acted as nationalist modernizers, focusing on development in a few large cities, but stopping short at the countryside, where grain and cereal were grown on huge estates, and asymmetrical social relations remained untouched. Also similar to Hungary was the low level of overall development, with industrial output not exceeding 15 percent of national income before World War I.

Jews likewise had particular roles in the economy and society in Romania, but as we have seen, Romania’s elite stalled on granting them citizenship rights—in defiance of the stipulations of the Congress of Berlin. Jews could not own land and therefore lived in cities, becoming artisans, traders, administrators, bankers, peddlers, tailors, and craftspeople. In 1900, less than 5 percent of Romania’s population was Jewish, but it was almost entirely urban, constituting 50 percent of the inhabitants of Iaşi and one-third those of Bucharest. Jews were employed in the advanced sectors of economy, as in Hungary, and though enjoying far less official support, they still managed to develop the economy.

The ethnic Romanian elite preferred city life and as a rule left the administration of their huge estates to middlemen, usually Greek, Armenian, Jewish, or German, who pressed as much from the peasants as possible in seasonal contracts. In Moldavia, the percentage of Jewish leaseholders approached 40 percent, and therefore in the eyes of peasants, Jews became identified as the outstretched hand of an exploitative system that extended from the remote and alien cities into their own rural homelands.

The peasants either had no land or too little to make ends meet and tended to sharecrop on the large estates. As their numbers increased, so did their misery, and many fell victim to poor diets and pellagra (a disease caused by a chronic lack of niacin, often among people heavily dependent on maize for sustenance, reported cases of which rose between 1888 and 1906 from 10,626 to more than 100,000). A particular index of peasant poverty was the high mortality rate among children. Meanwhile, the government did little to protect peasants from exploitation by landowners and their middlemen, against whom the peasants had almost no bargaining power. In tough times, desperate need for money forced peasants to sell grain to speculators at below-market value. The loans on offer were extortionate, and state taxes could amount to 80 percent of the peasants’ annual production.

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