Category Archives: Eastern Europe

by | 17 September 2024 · 5:53 am

Premodern natio vs. Modern “Nation”

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 54-55:

The word “nation” (natio) existed in the premodern period but did not have the meaning it has in our day. The “nation” in the lands of Croatia, Hungary, or Poland was the hereditary elite, the gentry and nobles who enjoyed privileges that separated them from the “common” people. For example, nobles had a right to be tried by their peers and not imprisoned without charges, to raise soldiers, or to intermarry. In some cases, for example in Central Poland, the gentry were sizable, comprising up to one fourth of the population. The Hungarian gentry were about 6 percent; in France, by contrast, the nobility constituted less than 1 percent of the population. In Poland and Hungary, the rights to self-rule became substantial and made the hereditary nobility more powerful than counterparts in France, not to mention in Russia. By the sixteenth century, the Polish gentry elected its kings; during the seventeenth century, a practice emerged in which passage of legislation in the Sejm (parliament) required unanimous consent, a practice called “liberum veto.”

By the seventeenth century, the Polish nobility thus felt a strong sense of cohesion, politically and culturally, over a vast territory, and increasingly practiced Roman Catholicism, though the Protestant Reformation was at first popular and tolerated. A myth emerged according to which Poland’s nobles derived from “Sarmatians,” an ancient Iranian people who had subjugated Slavic tribes during early Christendom. This had the function of tying the group together even more tightly against all others on Polish territory, reinforcing its sense of privilege, and tending to exclude all others from the idea of nation. But the cultural identity of noble nations was premodern. Polish or Hungarian poets wrote in their own tongues from the fifteenth century (native liturgical texts are much older), producing important literatures, but they did not make a cult of language. And unlike liberal-democratic patriots of the nineteenth century, early modern nobles did not believe that all those who happened to speak Polish or Hungarian constituted a Polish or Hungarian “nation.” From the seventeenth century on, they tended to speak French or Latin among themselves and felt a cultural affinity with other European elites, with whom they shared tastes in architecture and music, and with whose sons their own mingled at universities in France and Italy.

Unlike modern nationalism, the idea of natio was therefore exclusive to a social group rather than insistently inclusive across a complex population ostensibly of one ethnicity. The early modern Polish or Croatian nobility did not think of Polish or Croatian-speaking peasants as part of their nation and often considered these peasants a lower form of humanity. The word for “peasant” was often synonymous with “slave,” evoking coarseness and absence of all taste. In decades when Western European peasants were being freed from the land and from compulsory services, a “second serfdom” was taking hold in much of Eastern Europe: those who worked the land became tied to it and could not leave without the master’s permission. They were people whom he could whip and otherwise humiliate in dozens of ways. No clear line existed dividing Eastern from Western Europe in terms of agricultural regime, but as one traveled to the east, the freedoms of the peasants tended to decrease, as did the productivity of agriculture.

When Polish or Hungarian nobles made claims to territory, it was therefore not in order to unite people of the same language or “blood.” They had no idea of including all people of their ethnicity in a particular state. But this early modern noble national identity was also not ethnically exclusive in the sense of modern nationalism. Native Ukrainian-speaking nobles living in Galicia considered themselves part of the Polish noble nation, and many of them over time became culturally Polish with no questions asked. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Vatican had supported arrangements permitting Orthodox believers in Ukraine (under Polish rule) and in Transylvania (under Habsburg rule) to be “reunited” with Rome while maintaining much of their own liturgy and practices, including married clergy. These churches of the Byzantine rite that recognize papal authority are commonly known as “Uniate.”

The importance of the older legacy of noble rights is that feelings of corporate identity and privileges survived in social groups even after political structures supporting them declined or disappeared altogether, and then were spread to other social groups, usually very slowly and unevenly. Thus the Polish, Hungarian, and Croatian gentries continued to insist on rights of self-rule and “freedom” after medieval and early modern statehood was crushed. Among the Polish gentry, even after the destruction of the Polish state in the final partition in 1795, Poland continued as a community of ideas and practices—as a common culture—and was as present among the colony of émigré Polish writers in Paris in the 1840s as it was among Polish-speakers in Polish territories then part of Austria or Russia. The ideas of this “Great Parisian emigration”—that Poland had not perished and had a mission to humanity—made their way back to the Polish lands to inspire young people from other groups, including peasants, especially as Polish education became more widespread (often through the efforts of underground nationalist activists).

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Filed under democracy, Eastern Europe, education, France, labor, language, nationalism, religion

by | 16 September 2024 · 6:23 am

Eastern Europe c. 1800

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 31-33:

When Westerners discuss Eastern Europe, they stress its complexity. It seems a place where an endless array of different peoples lay claim to the same spaces—so many, and so different, that the region seems to resist historical understanding. Yugoslavia alone consisted of some ten ethnicities, and there are subgroups and minorities (for example, the Muslims of southern Serbia, in the Sanjak of Novi Pazar, or the Hungarians to the north in Vojvodina). Interwar Czechoslovakia had five major nationalities, and the Habsburg Empire contained many more. As I write, three ethnic groups are making claims on parts of tiny Bosnia. Furthermore, the boundaries have changed so often and rapidly in the past two hundred years that it seems impossible to relate nationality to statehood. Poles lived in three states just over a century ago, and currently, Hungarians live in five; while Albanians live in Albania, they also populate Kosovo and parts of Montenegro and Macedonia (and are of three religions).

But on a global background, Eastern Europe appears not so different from much of Africa and Asia, where numerous ethnic groups are settled across smaller regions and where, in certain periods of history, colonial empires have ruled many groups simultaneously, drawing administrative borders with little concern for ethnic homelands. Take a map of Africa around 1900. West European powers had seized huge stretches of diverse territory, and political maps suggested a simplicity at odds with ethnic diversity, for example in German Southwest Africa, French Equatorial Africa, or the Belgian Congo.

In 1800, the peoples of East Central Europe lived in just four states: the Russian and Ottoman Empires, the Kingdom of Prussia, and the lands of the House of Habsburg (officially known as the Austrian Empire from 1804 to 1867). Within these lands, one could identify older political divisions, but if one simplifies a bit, one sees a map that is not difficult to grasp. In the north were the lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, defunct from 1795, when Austria, Prussia, and Russia divided the Commonwealth’s lands among themselves. Farther south we find the Hungarian and Bohemian kingdoms, possessions of the Habsburg monarchy from 1526. Hungary comprised the kingdom of Croatia as well as the principality of Transylvania. The Ottoman Empire included the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia—the future heartlands of Romania—as vassal states, but it ruled directly the provinces (eyelets) of Bosna, Rumeli, and Silistre (which would become Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Albania, Macedonia, and Bulgaria) and contained the lands of the defunct medieval Bulgarian, Serb, and Bosnian kingdoms. Though nominally under Turkish rule, Montenegro maintained de facto independence because of its location in rugged mountain terrain.1 Finally, the Ottomans occupied much of central Hungary from 1526 to the 1680s, using it as a launching ground for campaigns of aggression on Habsburg lands farther north.

As in any imperial space, the political borders imposed by foreign powers belied the linguistic, religious, and ethnic diversity that had resulted from the settlement and mixing of diverse tribes centuries earlier. Much of this region had been ruled from Rome and later Constantinople (for example, the provinces of Pannonia, Dalmatia, and Macedonia on the Balkan Peninsula) but some of it, especially north of the Danube, remained beyond Roman power, and the documentary record is scantier. Still, in broad terms, we know what transpired.

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Filed under Africa, Eastern Europe, language, migration, nationalism, religion

by | 15 September 2024 · 6:31 am

Boundaries of Eastern Europe

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 25-26:

This book ascribes no stereotypes to Eastern Europe beyond saying that it is an anti-imperial space of small peoples. In the corners of its political nightmares dwells this indistinct fear of being absorbed into larger powers. The anti-imperial struggle kept ethnic cultures alive, but it also promoted ideologies of exclusion that can become racist. The old empires, especially the Habsburg empire, inspire nostalgia, because they protected human rights and indeed nations and peoples better than did many nation-states that came later. This book uses “Eastern Europe” interchangeably with “East Central Europe” to cut down verbiage, but also because both terms are understood to refer to a band of countries that were Soviet satellites not in control of their own destinies. It denotes not so much a space on the map as shared experience, such that peoples from opposite ends of the region, despite all cultural or linguistic differences, employ a common narrative about the past. When he made his odd invocation of national survival, Viktor Orbán used words that would resonate not only in Hungary and Slovenia but also in Poland, the Czech Republic, or Serbia.

The former western republics of the Soviet Union—the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Belarus—are not included, because they formed a separate story throughout much of the period studied, subject to Sovietization that tested local cultures to a degree not seen in East Central Europe. For the same reason, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) is included: this small country shared the destiny of being controlled by a superpower without being absorbed into it. But the GDR was also special. The East German regime eagerly took part in efforts to crush dissent in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland in 1980, home to small-time co-imperialists with enough hubris to tell the Motherland of socialism what socialism was really about.

The inclusion of the GDR underscores the fact that Germans cannot be thought to be outside East Central Europe, and not only because millions have lived in this space for centuries. The question of how Germany would form a nation-state after the Holy Roman Empire became defunct in 1806 has shaped the region’s fortunes and misfortunes. Bismarck’s supposed resolution of the question in the “second empire” of 1871 only exacerbated the German question by provoking a sense of abandonment among the Habsburg Germans, one in three of the total number. It was no coincidence that the original Nazi Party was founded in Bohemia in 1903. What happened when German nationalism entered Eastern European space in a time of imperial decline—first of the Holy Roman Empire, then of the Habsburg monarchy—was that it gradually moved from the old practice of absorbing Slavs into German culture to a new one of displacing them from a vast supposedly German space.

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Filed under Eastern Europe, economics, Germany, migration, nationalism, philosophy, USSR

by | 14 September 2024 · 6:41 am

East European Communist Nationalism

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 17-19:

What Hitler, the “Bohemian corporal” (he was actually Austrian) achieved through his war was to make northern parts of Eastern Europe much simpler. With the aid of local collaborators, his regime segregated and then killed the overwhelming majority of East European Jews. But when the Red Army drove the Wehrmacht back to Vienna and Berlin in 1945, millions of Germans fled Eastern Europe as well, never to return. At the war’s conclusion, as a result of allied decisions, Polish and Czech authorities placed the remainder of Germans from Bohemia and eastern Germany in railway cars and deported them to a Germany that was much smaller than Bismarck’s Reich, let alone the Holy Roman Empire.

The most avid ethnic cleansers among the East Europeans were Polish and Czech Communists, and indeed, Communists everywhere proved enthusiastic nationalists. This is astounding for two reasons. First, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had little concern for national identity: workers had no fatherland. Nationhood was not a lasting site of human subjectivity but something ephemeral, which diminished in importance as capitalism advanced. They had little but derision for East Europeans wanting to create their own nation-states. Engels called the small peoples to Germany’s east “relics.” Czechs were destined to be “absorbed as integral portions into one or the other of those more powerful nations whose greater vitality enabled them to overcome greater obstacles.” Other “remnants of bygone Slavonian peoples” slotted for assimilation included Serbs, Croats, and Slovaks. In 1852, Engels blithely predicted that the next world war would cause entire reactionary peoples to “disappear from the face of the earth.”

Second, when the world divided into two camps, appearances suggested that there was little room for East European nationalism. By 1949, every state in the region seemed to be a miniature USSR, with the same sort of ruling Communist Party, five-year plan, economy based on heavy industry, collectivized agriculture, and socialist realism. Few Poles or Hungarians, even within the Party, doubted that the annual pageant in red of May Day reflected doctrines and practices whose nerve center was in Moscow. For the first time, millions of East Europeans learned Russian, and many became as proficient in copying Soviet reality as they could. Hundreds of thousands became “self-Sovietizers,” even holding their cigarettes the Russian way, or dressing in the militaristic style of the Bolshevik party. The Yugoslav Communists, with red stars on their caps, went so far that the Soviets tried to hold them back.

But these states were not Soviet replicas, nor were they (unlike Ukraine, the Baltic states, and Belorussia) actual parts of the Soviet Union. Beyond the façades of May Day processions in Warsaw in 1949, one saw banners in Polish, not Russian, and placards honoring Polish heroes. A few blocks from the parade route the Polish socialist state, governed by a Marxian party, was lovingly resurrecting old Warsaw, razed by the Nazis in 1944. This included rebuilding many of its churches, according to plans from the eighteenth century, with attention to the details of a saint’s halo. Bookstores across the state socialist world stocked romantic authors like Jan Kollár, but also the Polish, Hungarian, or Romanian national bards Adam Mickiewicz, Sándor Petofi, and Vasile Alecsandri; the philologists Ljudevit Gaj and Vuk Karadžić; and the ethnographer Pavel Šafárik, who had studied theology with Kollár in Jena. In Poland’s west, the state fostered the destruction of all signs of the German past, including cemeteries, and proclaimed the new territories Polish to the core, though they had been German for centuries.

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Filed under Eastern Europe, Germany, language, migration, military, nationalism, philosophy, USSR, war

by | 13 September 2024 · 6:50 am

What Unites East Central Europe?

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 3-4:

What unites this dramatic and unsettling history is a band of countries that runs from the Baltic Sea down to the Adriatic and Black Seas, between the much larger, historically imperial Russia and Turkey in the east, and Prussian and Austrian Germany in the west. These small countries constitute East Central Europe, a space where more of the twentieth century happened—for good and for bad—than anywhere else on the planet.

If one seeks a simple explanation for the energies that caused this area to produce so much drama and so many new concepts, a glance at the map suggests nationalism: no other region has witnessed such frequent, radical, and violent changing of borders to make nations fit states. Two maps, one from 1800, one from 2000, tell the basic story: a shift from simplicity to complexity, from one small and three large multinational powers to more than twenty national states.

The story was carried forward by the demands of East European nationalists to control territory, demands that triggered resistance, because they contested imperial power and the European order. Since the 1820s, the work of nationalists has brought independent states into being in three stages: the first in 1878, when the Congress of Berlin produced Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Montenegro; the second, in 1919, when revolution and peace making generated Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Poland; and most recently, in the 1990s, when Czechoslovakia broke peacefully into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and Yugoslavia fragmented violently into Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, two entities in Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Kosovo. Hungary became de facto independent in 1867, when the Austrian Empire divided into Austria-Hungary; after 1920, it emerged much reduced from World War I, two-thirds of its territory going to its neighbors.

What can be debated is whether the degree of violence, especially in World War I, was necessary to break loose the nation-states that now constitute the map of Eastern Europe. Austria-Hungary was more resilient than critics gave it credit for and only began unraveling in the final year of a war that had been costly beyond any expectations. And there was little relation between intention and outcome: World War I did not begin as a war of national liberation. Yet by 1917, as the causality lists soared and any relation between intention and outcome was lost, it was interpreted to be one. It was a war for democracy—for Wilson’s national self-determination—and that helped spawn the new nation-states.

At the same time, without the cause Gavrilo Princip claimed to represent (that South Slavs should live in one state), there would have been no assassination, no Habsburg ultimatum to Serbia (which had trained Princip and supplied him with his pistol) in July 1914, and no war. Seen in rational terms, the Habsburgs’ belief that Serbia, a state of three million, represented a challenge requiring a full-scale military assault launched from their state of fifty-two million, seems one of history’s great overreactions. But Princip, the frail eighteen-year-old rejected from the Serb army for his small stature, embodied the challenge of an idea, the idea of ethnic nationalism, and the Habsburg monarchy had no response other than naked force.

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by | 29 May 2024 · 3:36 pm

Sicily’s Quarantotto

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 273-275:

WHEN, ON WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 12, 1848—the thirty-eighth birthday of Ferdinand II—the people of Palermo rose up against their Bourbon masters, they could have had no idea of what they were starting. As we have seen, risings in the kingdom were nothing new, but they had all been relatively easily dealt with. What happened in 1848—the quarantotto, as Italy remembers it—was something else. It was a revolution, and by the end of the year it had been followed by many other revolutions. In Italy alone, they occurred in Naples, Rome, Venice, Florence, Lucca, Parma, Modena and Milan; in northern and central Europe there were also those in Paris, Vienna, Cracow, Warsaw and Budapest.

Already, as the year opened, student riots had prompted the authorities to close the University of Palermo; several eminent citizens known for their liberal views had been arrested, and an unsigned manifesto was circulated calling on everyone to rise up on the King’s birthday. When that day dawned and the demonstrations began, the streets emptied, shops closed, houses were barricaded. A large number of the insurgents were mountain brigands or simple peasants, few of whom probably had much idea of what they were fighting for; but they were thrilled to be able to break down the customs barriers and give themselves over to looting to their hearts’ content. Many of the smaller villages and towns were devastated, as was much of the countryside.

The Bourbons had some 7,000 troops in the Palermo garrison, but they proved almost useless. Communications were atrocious, the roads execrable, and they could not be everywhere at once. In despair they decided to bombard the city—a decision which they soon had cause to regret, especially when a shell destroyed the municipal pawnbrokers, on which many families depended, aristocratic and plebeian alike. The infuriated mob fell on the royal palace, sacked it—sparing, thank heaven, the Palatine Chapel—and set fire to the state records and archives. Meanwhile, hundreds of prisoners were released from jail. The garrison retreated, and soon returned to Naples. In the following days a committee of government was formed under the presidency of the seventy-year-old Sicilian patriot (and former Neapolitan Minister of Marine) Ruggiero Settimo; meanwhile, the revolt spread to all the main cities—except Messina, which held back through jealousy of Palermo—and well over a hundred villages, where the support of the peasantry had by now been assured with lavish promises of land. It encountered no opposition worthy of the name.

…

By the end of the month the island was virtually free of royal troops, and on February 5 Settimo announced that “the evils of war had ceased, and that thenceforth an era of happiness had begun for Sicily.” He failed to mention that the citadel of Messina was still in Bourbon hands; nonetheless, it was clear to King Ferdinand that he had his back to the wall. Owing to the almost continuous demonstrations in Naples on the Sicilian model, on January 29 he offered a liberal constitution to both parts of his kingdom, providing for a bicameral legislature and a modest degree of franchise. “The game is up,” wrote the horrified Austrian ambassador, Prince Schwarzenberg, to Metternich; “the King and his ministers have completely lost their heads.” Metternich simply scribbled in the margin, “I defy the ministers to lose what they have never possessed.”

…

Sicily was now truly independent. The difficulty was that it lacked any machinery for self-government. Without an experienced hand at the helm, the old chaos and confusion grew worse than ever. Trade plummeted, unemployment soared, the legal system virtually collapsed. Toward the end of August, Ferdinand sent a combined military and naval force of some 20,000 under Field Marshal Prince Carlo Filangieri to restore comparative order on the island; and September saw a concerted land and sea attack on Messina. It was then that the city suffered heavy bombardment for eight hours—after it had already surrendered. The rebels fought back, and the age-old hatred between Neapolitans and Sicilians give rise to atrocities on both sides—to the point where the British and French admirals in Sicilian waters, revolted by the bloodshed and brutality, persuaded Ferdinand to grant a six-month armistice. Here, one might have thought, was an opportunity to end the stalemate, but every offer of settlement was rejected by the rebels out of hand. Had they been prepared to negotiate, they might have saved something from the wreckage; since they refused, more and more of their erstwhile supporters—for reasons of sheer self-preservation—turned back to the Bourbons. As a result, Filangieri was able to capture Taormina on April 2, 1849, and Catania five days later. On May 15, without any difficulty, he entered Palermo.

By their inefficiency, their lack of unity and their refusal to compromise, the Sicilians had perfectly demonstrated how a revolution should not be run.

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Filed under Austria, democracy, France, Hungary, Italy, military, nationalism, Poland, war

by | 14 May 2024 · 6:02 am

Sicily Gets the Boot (of Italy)

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 83-84:

When the news was brought to the Byzantine headquarters that the Sicilians, led by the King himself, were advancing in formidable numbers and strength, the Greeks saw their fellow fighters fall away. The mercenaries chose, as mercenaries will, the moment of supreme crisis to demand impossible increases in their pay; meeting with a refusal, they disappeared en masse. Robert of Loritello deserted, followed by his own men and most of his compatriots. The Sicilian fleet arrived first; then, a day or two later, the army appeared in the west. The battle that followed was short and bloody; the Greek defeat was total. The Sicilian ships effectively prevented any possibility of escape by sea. On that one day, May 28, 1156, all that the Byzantines had achieved in Italy over the past year was wiped out as completely as if they had never come.

William [the Bad] treated his Greek prisoners according to the recognized canons of war; but to his own rebellious subjects he was pitiless. This was a lesson he had learned from his father. Treason, particularly in Apulia where it was endemic, was the one crime that could never be forgiven. Of those erstwhile insurgents who fell into his hands, only the luckiest were imprisoned. The rest were hanged, blinded or tied about with heavy weights and hurled into the sea. From Brindisi he moved to Bari. Less than a year before, the Bariots had readily thrown in their lot with the Byzantines; now they too were to pay the price for their disloyalty. As they prostrated themselves before their King to implore his mercy, William pointed to the pile of rubble where until recently the citadel had stood. “Just as you had no pity on my house,” he said, “so now I shall have no pity on yours.” He gave them two clear days in which to salvage their belongings; on the third day Bari was destroyed. Only the cathedral, the great church of St. Nicholas and a few smaller religious buildings were left intact.

One lonely figure remained to face the coming storm. All Pope Hadrian’s allies were gone. Michael Palaeologus was dead and his army annihilated; the Norman barons were either in prison or in hiding. Hadrian himself was all too well aware that, if he were to save anything from the disaster, he would have to come to terms with the King of Sicily. The two met in the papal city of Benevento, and on June 18, 1156, an agreement was concluded. In return for an annual tribute, the Pope agreed to recognize William’s kingship not only over Sicily, Apulia, Calabria and the former principality of Capua, together with Naples, Salerno, Amalfi and all that pertained to them; it was now formally extended across the whole region of the northern Abruzzi and the Marches. William, negotiating as he was from a position of strength, obtained more than had ever been granted to his father or grandfather. He was now one of the most powerful princes of Europe.

Thus, in the three years separating the Treaty of Benevento from the death of Pope Hadrian [the only English Pope ever] on September 1, 1159, a curious change occurs in the relative positions of the three principal protagonists. Alignments were shifting. The Papacy, brought to its knees at Benevento, rediscovered a fact that its history over the past hundred years should have made self-evident—that its only hope of survival as a potent political force lay in close alliance with its neighbor, Norman Sicily. The German Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, impressed despite himself by the speed and completeness of William’s victories over the Byzantines in Apulia, looked upon him with undiminished hatred but a new respect, and decided on the indefinite postponement of the punitive expedition to the south that he had long been planning. Instead, he resolved on a campaign against the Lombard towns and cities of north Italy which, though technically part of his imperial dominions, had recently been showing a quite unacceptable tendency toward republicanism and independence. The result was the supreme paradox: the Lombard towns began to see the Sicilian monarchy—more absolutist by far than any other state in western Europe—as the stalwart defender of their republican ideals, hailing its King as a champion of civic liberty almost before the dust had settled on the ruins of Bari. And in the end they were victorious: on May 29, 1176, Frederick’s German knights were routed at Legnano by the forces of the Lombard League. It was the end of his ambitions in Lombardy. In Venice in the following year he publicly kissed Pope Alexander’s foot before the central door of St. Mark’s, and six years later, at Constance, the truce became a treaty. Though imperial suzerainty was technically preserved, the cities of Lombardy (and to some extent Tuscany also) were henceforth free to manage their own affairs.

William returned to Sicily with his international standing higher than it had ever been; but the last years of his reign were anything but happy. His Emir of Emirs—the title given to the Chief Minister of the kingdom—a certain Maio of Bari, was assassinated in 1160; and the following year saw a palace revolution in which the King’s young son and heir, Roger, was killed and William himself was lucky to escape with his life. The disorder spread through much of Sicily and into Apulia and Calabria, the King as always leading his army in person, captured rebels being punished with hideous brutality. Worst of all, when he returned to Sicily in 1162, he found Christians and Muslims at each other’s throats; the interreligious harmony which the two Rogers had worked so hard to achieve had been destroyed forever.

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Filed under Greece, Italy, Mediterranean, nationalism, religion, Turkey, war

by | 7 May 2024 · 7:03 am

Sicilian Slave Revolts vs. Romans

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 36-39:

One thing is certain: that the Romans treated Sicily with little respect. That monstrous inferiority complex to which they always gave way when confronted with Greek culture led to exploitation on a colossal scale. A few Greek cities managed to retain a measure of independence, but much of the island was taken over by the latifundia: those vast landed estates, owned by absentee Roman landlords, setting a pattern of land tenure which was to ruin Sicilian agriculture for the next 2,000 years. Liberty, meanwhile, was almost extinguished as the slave gangs toiled naked in the fields, sowing and harvesting the grain for Rome.

It was thus hardly surprising that the second half of the century should have seen two great slave revolts. Tens of thousands of men, women and children had been sold into slavery during the third-century Sicilian wars, tens of thousands more as a result of warfare on the mainland in the century following. Meanwhile, the Hellenistic east was in a state of turmoil. The tidy distribution of territories among Alexander’s generals was a thing of the past; Asia Minor, Egypt and Syria were now torn apart by dynastic struggles. This meant prisoners, both military and political, a vast proportion of whom, with their families, were swept up by the slave traders and never heard of again. And in Sicily, still steadily developing its agriculture, a strong and healthy worker would fetch a more than reasonable price.

The slave population was in consequence dangerously large, but it gave the authorities little cause for alarm. After all, mass revolts were rare indeed. Almost by definition, slaves—branded, beaten and frequently chained together—were permanently demoralized by the life they led, while the conditions under which they were kept normally made any consultation and planning between them impossible. On the other hand, it should be remembered that many of those who had landed up in Sicily were intelligent and educated, and nearly all of them spoke Greek. And just sometimes, out of sheer desperation, they were driven to action.

The first revolt began, so far as we can gather, in 139 B.C. on the estates of a certain Damophilus of Enna, “who surpassed the Persians in the sumptuousness and costliness of his feasts” and whose slaves most understandably resolved to kill him. Before doing so, however, they consulted another slave, a Syrian named Eunus, who was generally believed to possess magic, or at least oracular, powers. Would the gods, they asked him, give their blessing to such a plan? Eunus’s reply was as categorical as any of them could have wished. He personally marched into Enna with a following of some four hundred fellow slaves; the murder, rape and plunder lasted for several hours. Damophilus and his termagant wife, Megallis, were away in their country villa, but were quickly brought back to the city; he was killed at once, she was handed over to her own female slaves, who tortured her and then flung her from the roof. Eunus had meanwhile been proclaimed King, making his mistress (and former fellow slave) Queen at his side.

Once started, the revolt spread like wildfire. A certain Cleon, a Cilician herdsman working near Agrigento, joined Eunus with 5,000 men of his own; soon they were at Morgantina, then at Taormina. By this time their numbers probably approached the 100,000 mark, though we shall never know for sure. Another mystery is why, in contrast to the speed and efficiency they showed in dealing with similar but much smaller uprisings in Italy, the Romans were so unconscionably slow in sending troops to restore order. Admittedly they had other preoccupations at home and abroad, but the truth is that all through their history the Romans consistently underestimated Sicily; the fact that it was not part of the Italian peninsula but technically an offshore island seemed to lower it in their estimation. Had they properly considered the scale and importance of what was going on, had they sent an adequate force of trained soldiers to the island as soon as the first reports arrived, Eunus and his followers would hardly have stood a chance. As things turned out, it was not until 132 B.C.—seven years after its beginning—that the revolt was finally crushed. The prisoners taken at Taormina were tortured; their bodies, living or dead, were flung from the battlements of the citadel. Their leader, after wandering for some time at liberty, was finally captured and thrown into prison, where he died soon afterward. The vast majority of the rebels, however, were released. They no longer constituted a danger—and, after all, if life were to go on as it always had, slaves were a vital commodity.

Unlike the first, the second slave revolt had a specific cause other than general dissatisfaction. It began in 104 B.C., when Rome was once again under severe pressure, this time from Germanic tribes to the north. In order to deal more efficiently with these, she appealed for military assistance from Nicomedes III, King of Bithynia in Asia Minor.*2 Nicomedes replied that he unfortunately had no young men to spare, thanks to the activities of the slave traders who were seizing so many of them and who were actually protected by the Roman authorities. At this the horrified Senate ordered that all those of Rome’s “allies” who had been enslaved should be released at once. The effect of this decree when it reached Sicily may well be imagined. Huge crowds of slaves assembled before the Governor in Syracuse, demanding immediate emancipation. He granted freedom to some eight hundred, then realized that, if he continued, he would be destroying the entire base of the Sicilian economy. Laying down his pen, he ordered that the still-growing crowds should disperse and return to their homes. Not surprisingly, they refused—and the second slave revolt was under way.

Since the Roman decree—and the Governor’s refusal to enforce it—affected the slaves all over Sicily, the whole island was soon in an uproar.

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by | 7 April 2024 · 5:57 am

Reactions to the 1926 Treaty of Berlin

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 397-400, 416:

Meanwhile, German foreign policy once again took centre stage. Stresemann had reacted to the delay in Germany’s admission to the League of Nations by taking a crucial step in improving relations with the Soviet Union. He wanted to keep friendship with the Soviet Union as a form of insurance policy, which might be used later to alter Germany’s eastern borders at the expense of Poland.

The pivot of German foreign policy towards the western Allies at Locarno had filled the Soviet government with feelings of deep anxiety. The delay in Germany joining the League offered the Soviets an ideal opportunity to make a dramatic diplomatic intervention. The Soviet Foreign Minister, Georgy Chicherin, told Stresemann that if the Locarno powers could not push through the entry of Germany to the League, then what could Germany expect of them when more serious matters were discussed? He felt a new Russo-German agreement would weaken the idea of the western Allies developing a common front against the Soviet Union. In response, Stresemann explained that he had always wanted to sign a new agreement with the Soviet Union, and had only delayed this due to a wish not to antagonise the members of the League of Nations during Germany’s application process.

On 24 April, the Treaty of Berlin (otherwise known as the German–Soviet Neutrality and Nonaggression Pact), was duly signed in Berlin by Gustav Stresemann for Germany and Nicolai Krestinski, the Soviet Ambassador, for the Soviet Union. It greatly strengthened the relationship between the two powers. The treaty consisted of just four brief articles: (1) The 1922 Treaty of Rapallo remained the basis of Russo-German relations, to which was added a promise by the two governments to maintain friendly relations with each other, and to promote a solution to all outstanding political and economic questions that concerned them both. (2) Germany and the Soviet Union pledged neutrality in the event of an attack on the other by a third party. (3) Neither party would join in any coalition for the purpose of an economic boycott on the other. (4) The duration of the treaty was set at five years. In 1931, it was renewed for three more years. To this, Stresemann added the additional assurance that if the League ever contemplated anti-Soviet sanctions or a military attack then he would do everything in his power to oppose it. The agreement was endorsed by a vote in the Reichstag on 10 June, with only three dissenting votes. On 29 June, the agreement was officially ratified by the German government. On 3 August, it was officially registered in the League of Nations.

In Germany, the Russo-German Treaty was received with universal acclaim. There was much greater public and political unanimity than there had ever been over the Dawes Plan, the Locarno Treaties and Germany’s proposed entry into the League of Nations. On 27 April, the Reichstag Committee on Foreign Affairs, usually the scene of bitter party disputes, gave the treaty its unanimous approval. The Nationalist DNVP believed the new agreement with the Soviet government would bring closer the return of Upper Silesia, Danzig and the Polish Corridor, for it was clear that a revision of Germany’s eastern frontiers required Soviet support, or at the least benevolent neutrality. Stresemann felt the agreement would quieten Soviet apprehension about the Locarno Treaties, maintain Germany’s good relations with Russia and appease the pro-Russian element on the Nationalist Right.

In the rest of Europe, the Treaty of Berlin caused a high degree of anxiety. The reaction in France, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania was wholly critical. The French press claimed the Treaty placed Germany’s entry into the League in jeopardy, and accused Stresemann of provocatively signing the German–Soviet Treaty to undermine the Geneva negotiations over Germany’s entry into the League of Nations. To the French government the treaty represented another Russo-German threat to Eastern Europe, and the French responded in June 1926 by signing an agreement with Romania, to add to its existing security agreements with Poland and Czechoslovakia. Aleksander Skrzyński, the Polish Foreign Minister, urged the Allies to examine what effect the new German–Soviet treaty would have on the obligations Germany would have to assume if it joined the League of Nations. In Britain, The Times adopted a surprisingly conciliatory tone, suggesting the agreement was not in conflict with the agreements made at Locarno, but the Daily Mail was much less charitable, arguing the Treaty of Berlin had raised suspicions about Germany’s true motives in moving closer to the Soviet Union at a time when it was supposedly aiming to become a loyal member of the League of Nations.

…

On 10 December, the Nobel Prize Committee awarded the Peace Prize for 1926 jointly to the Foreign Ministers of Germany and France, Gustav Stresemann and Aristide Briand, for their ‘critical roles in bringing about the Locarno Treaty and Franco-German reconciliation’, while at the same time awarding the Peace Prize for 1925, retrospectively and jointly, to Austen Chamberlain, the British Foreign Secretary, for his role in the signing of the Locarno Treaties and to the American financier Charles Dawes, for the central part he had played in brokering the financial restricting of Germany’s reparations under the Dawes Plan.

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Filed under Austria, Britain, Czechia, France, Germany, military, nationalism, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, U.S., USSR

by | 6 April 2024 · 8:32 am

Turning Point at Locarno, 1925

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 377-379:

When the question of Germany’s entry to the League of Nations cropped up, Stresemann defended his government’s unwillingness to be bound by Article 16 of the Covenant. Germany, he said, could not pledge itself to support Poland in a war involving the Soviet Union. Briand tried to reassure him by saying that as Germany would be given a permanent seat on the League Council it could veto any proposal it disagreed with. A formula was finally worked out whereby each member of the League was obligated to cooperate against military aggression ‘to an extent which is compatible with its military situation, and which takes its geographical situation into account’. In return, Stresemann promised Germany would seek entry into the League of Nations as soon as possible.

Mussolini, the Italian Prime Minister, was initially lukewarm on the proposed Locarno agreements. He wanted a guarantee of the Brenner frontier between Italy and Austria to be added to the treaties, but Stresemann said this would only be possible if Germany was allowed to unite with Austria, something the Allies were not willing to accept. However, once it became clear the agreements would be signed, Mussolini turned up, on 14 October, wanting to share in the glory of joining Britain in guaranteeing the peace of Europe.

The ‘big day’ of the Conference took place in the town hall in Locarno on 16 October 1925. It witnessed the signing of the Treaty of Mutual Guarantee between Germany, France, Belgium, Great Britain, and Italy (the Locarno Pact). Under its terms, Germany recognised its western borders as fixed by the Treaty of Versailles, and the continuance of the Rhineland demilitarised zone in perpetuity. Stresemann emphasised the voluntary affirmation of Germany’s western borders was much more acceptable than the dictated terms of the Versailles Treaty. Germany, France and Belgium all agreed not to attack each other ever again, and Britain and Italy agreed to function as the joint guarantors of the agreement. All the parties agreed to settle disputes by peaceful means in future. The Locarno Treaties would only come into force when Germany was finally admitted to the League of Nations. The signatories further agreed to meet in London on 1 December for a formal signing ceremony.

Annexed to the main treaties were the German–Polish, German–Czechoslovak, German–Belgian, and French–German arbitration treaties, which promised all disputes which could not be settled amicably through normal diplomatic channels would be submitted to an Arbitration Panel or to the Permanent Court of International Justice. To add further insurance in Eastern Europe, France signed binding treaties with Poland and Czechoslovakia, pledging mutual assistance, in the event of conflict with Germany. Polish and Czech leaders signed these agreements in fear rather than hope. The agreements reaffirmed existing treaties of alliance concluded by France with Poland on 19 February 1921, and with Czechoslovakia on 25 January 1924. The British government refused to be a party to the arbitration treaties.

The Locarno Treaties were a key turning-point in the international relations of the 1920s. They were the effective diplomatic end of the Great War, and reconciled Germany and France in a way that had previously seemed impossible. Locarno was a much bigger triumph for the appeasement of Germany than Neville Chamberlain ever achieved, and how ironic that his half-brother Austen was one of its chief architects.

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