Category Archives: Poland

by | 30 June 2025 · 1:13 pm

King Kazimierz III the Great

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 62-63:

King Kazimierz III the Great encouraged Jewish settlement in the Polish lands. The recent incidence of the so-called Black Death in Europe’s west had led Jews there to be turned into scapegoats, leading many to flee eastward. Kazimierz’s reception of the Jewish communities led some even to label him “king of the Jews”—and led Jews to revere his name. In charters granted in 1334, 1364, and 1367, Kazimierz made it clear that Jews were subjects of the Crown, and as such they were protected by it.

Kazimierz was a nearly model medieval monarch. He did more than consolidate and make secure the country’s expanding borders and provide for further economic development. He truly established the Corona Regni Poloniae—the Crown of the Polish Kingdom. No longer were the Polish lands simply the property of the Piast dynasty. As the Crown of the Polish Kingdom, they existed independently, outside the person of the monarch. In this way, one can see parallels between the formation of other states in the region. The united Bohemian lands were also referred to as the Crown of Saint Wenceslas, which Charles IV declared distinct from the fate of the Luxemburg dynasty; a similar understanding took hold in Hungary, which was also known as the Lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen.

Kazimierz drew up a number of statutes that would help shape the administration of the state, especially insofar as laws and the functioning of a judiciary were concerned. He also upheld the country’s defense. Even today, any Polish child can recite the ditty (unpoetically rendered here) that Kazimierz “inherited wooden towns and left them fortified with stone and brick” (Kazimierz miasta zastał drewniane i zostawił murowane). The country underwent a great program of construction. It was funded in part by a land tax paid by peasants (who nonetheless had a favorable view of the monarch, who was also known as “king of the peasants”), in part by income that came from the rich salt mines of Wieliczka and Bochnia in the south of the country. (Even today, the salt mine at Wieliczka—quite a tourist destination—is a testament to the technological feat undertaken in this early period.) Growing exports and tax revenues funded the construction of some fifty castles, and fortification walls were supplied to nearly another thirty towns.

Another major and far-sighted achievement of King Kazimierz the Great was his establishment, in 1364, of a studium generale (variously titled an academy or a university) in his capital of Kraków. Pope Urban V gave his permission for instruction to be provided in canon and civil law and all other faculties except for theology. Nonetheless, Kazimierz’s academy was a secular institution, like the universities of Padua and Bologna. Its establishment boded well for education in the Polish lands. Furthermore, it was a rare distinction in this part of the world: in Central Europe, only Prague can boast of having obtained a university earlier.

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by | 29 June 2025 · 5:18 am

Reuniting Polish Lands, 1300s

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 52-55:

Even if Poland was in pieces, the lands were developing and its people were thriving. Nor had the broader population lost its identity and connection to the Polish past. Indeed: despite a series of hurdles, an entity to be called Poland once more would come together, as a monarchy, in the early fourteenth century.

…

This coming together was the work of one of the Piast princes, Władysław Łokietek. A grandson of Duke Konrad of Mazovia, Łokietek hailed from neighboring Cuiavia, in the central-northern reaches of the Polish lands. His sobriquet was “Elbow-High,” which suggests the prince was short of stature. What Łokietek lacked in height, he surely made up for in chutzpah. This plucky—and lucky—Piast prince would begin what can be seen as an upward trajectory for the Poles. The vertically challenged Łokietek was chosen prince of Greater Poland after the death of a different Piast ruler, Przemysł II (1257–1296), who was assassinated on Ash Wednesday on orders of the margraves of Brandenburg. The German margraves were unhappy with Przemysł’s attempts to unify the Polish lands: Przemysł had brought together Greater Poland and the seacoast region known as Gdańsk-Pomerania, and in 1295 was even crowned king in Gniezno, albeit of those two regions alone. Łokietek hoped to build on these achievements.

…

The Piast was aided in other, more prosaic ways as well. One was the problem faced by many a medieval dynasty: life was brutish and short. The reign of King Václav II came to an end with his sudden death in 1305. His son and successor, also named Václav (who had become king of Hungary before inheriting Bohemia and Poland from his father), was assassinated in Bohemia the following year. The extinction of the Czech Přemyslid dynasty left the throne open (in fact, it left several thrones open), which was then contested from all sides. Habsburgs, Luxemburgs, as well as a number of Piast princes (if not Łokietek) all sought to claim the throne. Married to a Bohemian Přemyslid princess, John of Luxemburg ultimately proved victorious—thus initiating a new Bohemian dynasty. He would consider himself also heir to the Polish throne.

Tiny but tenacious, Łokietek was not one to abandon the cause of conquest and unification so lightly. Whereas Václav II and subsequent Bohemian monarchs had found support in the Germanized towns, the Piast prince managed to rally the knights (if not the towns) to his side. And he was willing to fight. With Hungarian help, Łokietek reconquered Lesser Poland, Cuiavia, and other territories, thus establishing himself as a legitimate ruler of the Polish lands circa 1306. Holding onto them proved a challenge: for example, at one point burghers rebelled in Kraków and other towns of Lesser Poland, and they had to be subdued. The Polish unifier sought to rid Kraków of the miscreants by use of a shibboleth. Those burghers who could pronounce the four words “soczewica, koło, miele, młyn” [emphasis added] (lentil, wheel, grinds, mill) were allowed to stay. Native German speakers stumbled over the pronunciation of the Polish letters “ł” and “s,” which allowed the authorities to shuffle and rearrange the city’s population. Henceforth, the Kraków burghers would find it politic to Polonize. The process of unification was anything but smooth.

Nonetheless, the Piast was persistent—and his persistence paid off. The sixty-year-old Łokietek was crowned King Władysław Łokietek in 1320. His coronation on January 20 of that year took place not in Gniezno but in Kraków, which had been gaining in political significance since Kazimierz the Restorer moved there in the eleventh century. Still, the Elbow-High succeeded in unifying only two provinces: Lesser Poland and Greater Poland. His Poland had no Mazovia, no Prussia (despite Łokietek’s best efforts, the Teutonic Knights had seized control there), no Gdańsk-Pomerania (treacherously taken by the Teutonic Knights), and no Silesia (the Silesian Piasts did not feel compelled to subordinate themselves to the upstart Łokietek, and they remained firmly in the Bohemian orbit). Once again coronation was an important symbolic act, if still just a beginning.

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by | 28 June 2025 · 9:59 am

Poland Becomes Catholic, 966

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 28-31:

Mieszko seems to have led the Polanie as of about the year 960. The reason we know of him and his state is that, like the Moravians to the south, the Germans (that is, the Christian population to the west, which was part of post-Carolingian Europe, the eastern part of which was ruled by the German emperor) were beginning to pay attention to this emerging state centered around Gniezno [cf. gniazdo ‘nest’]. Early recorded mention of Mieszko’s doings has come down to us from a Jewish trader, Ibrahim Ibn Jakub, who, while on business in Magdeburg in 966, learned of the existence of a well-organized state that was conquering some of the Slavic tribes to its west. A Saxon monk noted the existence of the dynamically expanding state, which likewise caught the attention of Otto I. Titled Emperor of the Romans by the pope only in 962, the German Otto had pretentions to the same region. Before long, Mieszko’s realm came to be referred to as Poland, or the land of the Poles.

It is customary to date the beginnings of the history of Poland to 966. This choice of date reflects a momentous decision made that year. Until this point, the Polanie and the neighboring tribes in the vicinity of Central and Eastern Europe were for the most part pagans. This was not true of the Germans further west, who had already converted to Christianity in late antiquity or the early medieval period; nor was it true for the Moravians, who had witnessed the ninth-century ministry of Cyril and Methodius, the missionaries to the Slavs, although by this time—a century later—they were under German influence. (Note that Kyivan Rus’, lying further to the east, was baptized only as of 988, but its baptism came from Greek sources, that is, Constantinople.) In this part of the world, of world-historical significance was what religion these pagan rulers chose, and at whose hands they were baptized.

It is in 966 that the baptism of Mieszko—head of the Gniezno state, this nascent Polish polity—took place. It is both interesting and important that this was facilitated not by the Germans but by a Bohemian (Czech) connection. A Czech state had emerged around the turn of the eighth and ninth centuries; first baptized by Saint Methodius, the Czechs relatively quickly came under Bavarian influence, their church under the bishop of Regensburg. In 965 Mieszko strengthened the connection with this Slavic neighbor by marrying a Bohemian princess, the daughter of Boleslav I. This Dubravka, known variously also as Dąbrówka or Dobrava, was a Christian, and she likely brought some Christian clergy with her to Gniezno. The next year, Mieszko accepted baptism at their hands.

What is important for the future history of Poland is that this was Western, and not Eastern, Christianity—that is, Mieszko was baptized into the Church of Rome, as it was then known. No less important is that baptism came from Bohemia, not from the imperial power to the west. Mieszko furthermore took care to ensure that his state was placed under the care of missionaries. As missionary priests were directly subordinated to the papacy and not to a bishop within any given territory, this gave the nascent Polish church more flexibility because it was not placed under another sovereign state.

Thus began the Poles’ connection with Roman Catholicism, one that dates back a millennium. It is a connection that has stuck. Until very recently, many people around the world associated Poland above all with the man who, until not so long ago, was head of the Universal Church—Karol Wojtyła, better known as Pope John Paul II. During his first trip to Poland after he became pontiff, John Paul II famously declared to his countrymen that “it was impossible, without reference to Christ, to understand the history of the Polish nation, this great thousand-year-old community that so profoundly shapes my existence and that of each of us.” While clearly there is much to this statement, one cannot say that the Christianization of Poland or the Poles’ historic identification with Roman Catholicism were inevitable. Nor (as we shall see) is the belief that all “real” Poles have always been, or must be, Roman Catholics borne out by the country’s history, certainly not if one examines that history in its entirety. (Such Polish paradoxes await the patient reader.)

So what motivated Mieszko’s conversion? The baptism of “Poland” into the larger Roman Catholic family appears to have been, above all, a political decision and not simply (if such matters are ever simple!) a matter of spiritual conversion. It likely extended originally only to Mieszko’s court and entourage, who through the person of his wife and her entourage were pulled into the Christian orbit. Surely Mieszko realized that, by accepting Christianity, he would no longer be subject to incursions from the west—at least, the types of incursions from the eastern marches that doubtless had long been intended to turn these Slavic peoples from paganism to Christianity. By converting, he would deny the Holy Roman Empire the pretext to interfere with his state. The fact that the baptism came at the hands of a missionary who was under papal jurisdiction proved important. The Polish church thus would not be subordinated to the Holy Roman Empire or any other lay power. Moreover, as denizens of a Christian power the Poles could now seek to spread Christianity to other pagan tribes in the region (for example, the Pomeranians or the tribes further east), thus expanding their own influence.

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by | 14 December 2024 · 2:27 pm

Rising Nationalist Communism, 1960s

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 619-621:

Romania asserted itself more boldly in the international sphere. From late 1958, its trade expanded with the West and contracted with the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Bloc’s equivalent to West Europe’s Common Market, the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (or COMECON), Romania opposed the plans of its allies to make it the agricultural base for their more developed economies. In the eyes of Romania’s leaders, such a scheme would have condemned the country to backwardness; yet it also aggravated long-festering inferiority complexes among them toward other, better established Communist parties, but also toward their own population. The Six-Year Plan that commenced in 1960 provided for sharp increases in Romania’s rate of industrialization, and Marxism-Leninism became a tool for Romanian national development. In 1963 Ceaușescu accompanied Foreign Minister Ion Gheorghe Maurer on a trip to China, North Korea, and the Soviet Union, meeting with Mao, Kim Il Sung, and Khrushchev.

Ceaușescu became the party leader after Gheorghiu-Dej’s death in 1965 and built his popularity on defiance of Moscow. Neither legitimation through Marxian utopianism nor recourse to crude violence was enough to stabilize rule in an intensely anticommunist population, and Ceaușescu evolved into a nationalist extremist, whose personal power increased as did his personal identification with the nation. Romania was surrounded by hostile countries, Ceaușescu claimed, and he was the only force that could protect the people. A younger generation joined him in the Romanian Communist Party leadership, and together they promoted a collective identity based on cults of Romanian historical heroes as well as anti-Russian and anti-Semitic insinuations. They eschewed violent strategies of maintaining power. In the post-Stalinist period, these were not only inappropriate, they were no longer necessary. Earlier mass repression had smashed hostile social groups.

Marxism-Leninism tinged with nationalism thus permitted Romania’s Communists to develop a sense of their political legitimacy for the first time in their history, and also to make appeals to the population and tap “dormant social energies,” among workers and among intellectuals. While firming his grip on power, Ceaușescu permitted the publication of works of previously forbidden authors and fostered collusion with intellectuals that was not entirely new but was greatly intensified. The turn against the Soviet Union was a rupture with previous practice, however, and endeared Ceaușescu to the West. The French leader Charles De Gaulle visited Romania in May 1968, just as workers and students were testing his own regime. He found much to admire in a country that maintained independence against the superpowers and seemed so orderly. “For you such a regime is useful because it gets people moving and gets things done,” he told the Romanian dictator. In 1969, Richard Nixon became the first US president to visit Romania, and nine years later, Ceaușescu touched down in Washington, DC, as neither the first nor last repressive dictator to be accorded full state honors. What seems unusual in retrospect is that Jimmy Carter would celebrate Ceaușescu as a champion of human rights.

Such was the topsy-turvy world of East Central Europe after Stalin, where strategies of national legitimation brought Hungary toward economic reform but took Poland to the center of a very old and toxic nationalism, on a backdrop of slow economic disintegration. Bulgaria as well as Romania retained important facets of Stalinist control under strong party leaders and pervasive security apparatuses, yet one was inseparable in foreign policy from the Soviet Union, while the other treated Moscow almost as a hostile power. East Germany behind the Berlin Wall was modeling itself as Moscow’s most loyal student, but also building pride as the strongest economy in the East Bloc, pride that would evolve into a kind of minor nationalism, “socialist in the colors of the GDR,” black, red, and gold. In 1962 the Soviet Union would force Czechoslovakia to destalinize, and after that, this country also went on its own path, toward something called “socialism with a human face,” which, as it turned out, was initially a detour back to the 1930s, connecting with native traditions of democracy and Masaryk’s idea that truth will prevail.

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by | 8 December 2024 · 1:58 pm

Communist Takeover in Prague, 1948

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 535-538:

At the Cominform’s founding, [the Soviet leaders] urged the radical Yugoslav faction to publically humiliate French and Italian Communists for sharing government with imperialist forces, and Czechoslovak Communists understood they were implicated as well. At that time, they were sharing a coalition with Catholics, Czech National Socialists, and Social Democrats, and were gearing for parliamentary elections in 1948. On returning to Prague, Party General Secretary Rudolf Slánský informed his Politburo that the time had come for a decisive act to place the country on a direct path to socialism. That implied a rupture with existing policy: the previous year, party leader Gottwald had still been speaking of a “Czechoslovak road to socialism,” without a dictatorship of the proletariat or violence on the Soviet model.

In February 1948, Czech and Slovak Communists used their huge cadre base and control of the military and police to stage a rapid seizure of power. Though backed by overwhelming force, the coup was bloodless. They took advantage of an embarrassing mistake by the National Socialist and Catholic politicians, who were tiring of the sundry illegalities of their Communist coalition partners. In November 1947, Communist authorities in Prague had staged a purge of the police force. Believing the population would support them, the Catholic and National Socialist ministers resigned in protest on February 21, thinking that the president would now dissolve the government and immediately call for elections. But they miscalculated: the Communists and their Social Democratic allies still had a majority of seats in the government, and simply replaced the ministers who had resigned with politicians of their own choosing. Then they summoned party cells across the country to form “action committees” that would purge every institution in public life.

The leaders got more than they bargained for. Within a few days, mostly young and impatient Communists had ousted directors and managers from newspapers, state administration, sporting clubs, political parties, schools, and cultural institutions such as theaters. Then they began firing people the next level down. The purge was so thorough that party chief Gottwald had to restrain students, who believed that they had advanced into a new stage of history. Charles University was expecting guests from across Europe to celebrate its six-hundredth anniversary, and the young radicals had just unseated the rector, causing several Western universities to withdraw their participation and spoiling the event’s propaganda value. Gottwald got on the phone to the student leader in charge and asked whether he and his comrades were thinking with their heads or “their behinds.” He did not object to the purges that students were carrying out in their own ranks. Opposition leaders were simply arrested, but the rest of the student body was required to appear before “verification commissions,” which expelled more than one-fifth of them. These “class enemies” were usually sent to do heavy labor, often in mines, and thus were erased from Czechoslovak cultural, economic, and political life.

A final stage now occurred in salami tactics. Having sliced off independent peasant, nationalist, and Catholic politicians, the Communists devoured their Social democratic partners whole. This was a regional trend. In the summer and fall of 1948, these more moderate Marxist parties were compelled to form “unity” parties with the Communists. The result in Hungary was the Hungarian Workers Party and in Poland the Polish United Workers Party. In East Germany, the Soviets had forced the merger of Communists and Social Democrats in April 1946, producing the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. In all these cases, the joint cadre base of the new party was much larger than when the Communists stood alone; the challenge was now to subject Social Democrats to Leninist discipline. Czechoslovakia’s Communists dispensed with the pretense of a new name, however, and after absorbing the smaller Social Democratic party, they remained the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.

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by | 22 November 2024 · 3:36 pm

East Central Europe Under the Nazis

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 463-464:

By 1941, three zones of influence had emerged in Nazi-dominated East Central Europe. The first included areas where Germany destroyed states and left no native administration, itself taking rudimentary control. The second comprised areas where it destroyed states and replaced them with its own political entities, misleadingly called “independent states.” In the third zone, states remained under control of native political elites, but they came under irresistible pressure to become German allies. Only Poland belonged to the first category.

The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia fit between the first and second zones: it was occupied and destined for absorption into Germany but valued as a place that produced high-quality industrial goods. Its population was thought to be racially valuable (50 percent of the Czechs were considered assimilable; only 10 percent of the Poles) and was permitted its own heavily supervised government, with a Czech cabinet and ministries, and even a tiny armed force. Serbia was similar, a rump, embodying nothing a Serb nationalist could be proud of, with a Serb head of state who had been a Royal Yugoslav general but was under direct Nazi oversight. As we have seen, in contrast to Bohemia, a desperate underground struggle raged, extending from Serbia across Yugoslav territory, pitting German, Italian, and Croat forces against Serb nationalists and Communist internationalists.

The second zone was made up of the “independent” states of Slovakia and Croatia, called into life by Berlin with the expectation they would be loyal, co-fascist regimes; and they matched expectations, to say the least. Their ultranationalist leaders were eager to demonstrate—above all to themselves—their personal achievements for “the nation” by becoming even more racist than the state that had created them. In 1941, a Slovak newspaper boasted that the strictest racial laws in Europe were Slovak; at the same time, the brutality of the Ustasha anti-Serb actions shocked even the SS.

The final zone consisted of states that technically remained sovereign members of the international community, yet whose leaders could see from the fate of Yugoslavia and Poland the consequences of defiance. Still, unlike the puppets Croatia or Slovakia, the Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Romanian states did not owe their existence to Nazi Germany, and everything Germany wanted from them had to be negotiated. The lever for Germany in gaining compliance was territory: though less rapacious than Nazi leaders, East European elites also hungered for Lebensraum. Bulgaria hoped to recover ground lost at Neuilly-sur-Seine and wrench away disputed lands from Greece and Yugoslavia. Hungary wanted back everything it had lost at Trianon. Romania desired the return of lands it had lost in 1940, when parts of northern Transylvania went to Hungary in the second Vienna award (at the insistence of Hitler and Mussolini), and Bessarabia and Bukovina fell to the Soviet Union. These three states knew that Germany as the regional hegemon could make their aspirations become a reality.

Yet from 1941, German diplomats increasingly insisted that the governments of East Central Europe must fulfill a prime wish of their state. They should identify and segregate their Jewish populations, place them under racial laws, and deport them to German-controlled territories in Poland for a fate loosely described as “work in the east.”

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by | 5 November 2024 · 5:35 am

Evolution of Polish Nationalism

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 287-289:

In much of East Central Europe, landowners or bosses were of a foreign nationality, and nationalists exploited a sense of economic oppression to spread national consciousness to the masses. For example, in the Czech lands, owners of factories or manors tended to be German, and the Czech movement accordingly defined Czech identity as anti-German. In Bosnia, the landowner was Muslim; in Slovenia, German; and in much of Croatia, Hungarian. In 1800, Prague and Brno, but also Budapest, Bratislava, Ljubljana, and Zagreb, were German-speaking cities. The German was an enemy against whom the self was clearly defined and who was then displaced from culture, business, politics, and all traces of the new standard version of the national language.

In central Poland, the landowners as well as peasants were Polish-speaking. The cities and towns, however, had mixed populations, mostly Polish, but there were also many Jews, who spoke their own language and pursued walks of life that were distinct: trade, commerce, money-lending, and small crafts. Jews often bought cattle and grain, made credit available to peasants, or ran the local inn. Nationalists thus had an opportunity: they could use anti-Semitism to convince village folk that Jews were foreign, and that as ethnic Poles, the villagers belonged to the same nation as Polish townspeople and gentry. They told poor villagers that their problem was not lack of land, education, or farming implements but the “alien” Jewish presence in nearby towns. As restrictions on Jewish ownership eased from the 1870s, Jewish families began competing with small farmers to buy up the land of impoverished gentry, and by 1912, they controlled 20 percent of the agricultural land in Galicia. Arguments that presented these inroads as unfair Jewish advantages in the economy convinced peasants that they shared a common identity with Polish landlords.

Gradually the national idea caught on among peasants, even those who had been alienated from all talk of nation and felt that the court in Vienna was their protector. Beginning in the latter decades of the century, peasants participated more actively in local self-government and took a stronger role in national life, and that also meant heightened circulation among them of nationalist arguments. Catholic priests contributed a debased and opportunistic reading of their faith to serve the cause. One wrote that a Pole who was not an anti-Semite “has no right to call himself a good Catholic or a good Pole, and cannot be a good patriot.” The Polish national movement created “Christian” institutions to strengthen “Polish” ownership in the economy (the equivalent of the Bohemian nationaler Besitzstand was polski stan posiadania), and soon there were Christian shops, Christian lending institutions, and Christian pubs, all of which had the function of linking Poles across classes in village and city and promoting upward social mobility for co-ethnics.

But even so, the inculcation of Polish nationalist narratives in the village was not easy. Before World War I, many peasants still uttered curses when the name Poland was mentioned because they associated Poland with the “lords.” And when they embraced national consciousness, peasants and their political movements claimed to do so in a way all their own, saying that national culture was unspoiled in the villages, in contrast to the towns, where the gentry had absorbed foreign ideas about states and laws. In the early twentieth century, leading Polish intellectuals bought those arguments and developed their own cult for the genuine Polishness of villagers, even seeking peasant brides.

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by | 20 September 2024 · 5:24 am

Crucible of Serb Nationalism

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 142-144:

Beyond Poland, only Hungary possessed a large group of nationally conscious gentry. As in Poland, the challenge for the patriotic gentry was to extend its notions of national consciousness to a largely illiterate peasantry. But in contrast to Poland, a Hungarian political entity—the Hungarian kingdom—continued to exist, even if the king was Habsburg. Within that kingdom, institutions thrived that were controlled by the Hungarian gentry, above all a parliament and schools that inculcated in children a sense of duty to the Hungarian nation. The challenge was building even more schools in a largely agricultural country and spreading the message to areas where Hungarian was not spoken.

Yet Serb patriots faced challenges unknown to their neighbors. There had been no kingdom of Serbia for hundreds of years, and over the centuries, the Serb nobility had gradually faded away, either on the field of battle or through emigration, Islamicization, or simple reduction to poverty. In general, the Ottoman rulers did not impose Islam, but they encouraged conversion by reserving positions of influence and distributing land to their coreligionists. Landowners, administrators, and the wealthy tended to be Muslims, and Orthodox Christian peasants formed an underclass of sharecroppers. It was unthinkable that a Christian could have a position of authority or command over a Muslim, whether in the economy or in the state. When a Serb national leadership emerged, it was from the more successful livestock farmers and village notables.

Regardless of wealth, Serbs possessed a sense of national identity. Percentagewise, probably more Serb-speakers were conscious of their identity as Serbs, than Polish-speakers were of their identity as Poles. This is a bit of a mystery. There were no Serb political institutions, and unlike Polish or Hungarian elites, even the wealthiest Serb peasants in Ottoman territories could not read and write. Still, Serb-speakers across a vast space, who might never meet one another, nevertheless felt they were linked. That feeling partly had to do with the Serb Orthodox church, the one institution that the Ottomans permitted to survive, with separate legal jurisdiction for Orthodox believers as well as recognition of Serb identity (as opposed to Greek or Bulgarian). The Serb church assumed almost all civil authority of the defunct Serb state and kept that state’s memory alive by canonizing Serbian kings. Humble worshipers were reminded day in and day out that people of their own language had once ruled them and should do so again. The Patriarchate of Peć, a self-governing Serbian branch of Orthodoxy under the Patriarch of Constantinople, referred to the territory under its jurisdiction as the “Serbian lands.” From 1557 that territory included Kosovo as well as old Serbia and also areas farther north in Hungary.

But equally important was a cultural form that no institution could control, the Serb practice of epic folk poetry, maintained from time immemorial, of Serbs gathering in small circles or in their homes and listening to poems sung to the accompaniment of a one-stringed instrument, the gusle. The songs, produced from memory, could last for hours and were passed down from generation to generation because they gave people consolation and a way to make sense of oppression. Best known is the dramatic “Kosovo cycle,” which recounts the glories of medieval Serbia, up to a moment of heroic sacrifice at the battlefield of Kosovo, where a Serb force met a larger Turkish army on June 28, 1389.

A battle did take place on that date, one of several through which the Ottoman Empire expanded northward, into new territories. The historical facts are unglamorous. The Serb kingdom had been shrinking since death of its last great ruler, Dušan, in 1355. In June 1389, the vassals of the leading Serb prince Lazar met the armies of the sultan on Kosovo polje, the field of blackbirds, and both Lazar and the sultan were killed. The battle was not decisive. After the sultan’s successor consolidated his position, he made Lazar’s widow accept his authority. Her daughter Oliviera entered the sultan’s harem, and her son Stefan fought for the sultan, for example in 1396 at Nicopolis against Hungary, where he saved the day for his brother-in-law. In the meantime, his father, Lazar, had been sanctified in the Serb church. During the following century, all Serbian lands gradually came under Ottoman domination as the empire spread its influence north and westward.

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by | 19 September 2024 · 5:46 am

Eastern Europe Under Napoleon

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 81-83:

By 1794 France’s army numbered some 800,000, giving it a superiority of 2:1 in most engagements. After pushing intruders from French territory, French troops occupied the Low Countries and Germany west of the Rhine, areas they would hold until 1815. During these years, most of Europe fought France through seven coalitions, aimed first at the Revolution, and after 1799 at the France of Napoleon Bonaparte, a brilliant military leader who by 1804 had created a “French Empire,” consisting of an enlarged France with vassal states in Eastern and Central Europe. These states included a new Germany (Rhine Confederation), a new Poland (Duchy of Warsaw), and for the first time ever a state of South Slavs (Illyria).

Austria was a major force in the coalitions but lost decisive battles in 1805 at Austerlitz and 1809 at Wagram and had to cede territory. Still, it never endured direct French occupation, and thus its fate differed sharply from western German areas that were ruled from Paris and saw their traditional legal and social systems revolutionized. For the first time, thanks to Napoleon, everyone in Hamburg, Bremen, and much of the Rhineland was equal before the law, peasants as well as townspeople, nobles, and churchmen, and Jews with Christians. All were free to do as they wished: to move about the map, marry, and buy or sell property. With feudal privileges abolished, for the first time these Germans, regardless of background, were citizens.

Napoleon also began revolutionizing the ancient Holy Roman Empire out of existence by compensating the moderately sized German states for territories lost to the new confederation west of the Rhine with ecclesiastical and free cities east of the Rhine. Within a few years, hundreds of tiny bishoprics, abbeys, and towns had been absorbed into Bavaria, Saxony, or Baden, a crucial step in the process of creating a simpler Germany, more susceptible to unification as a modern nation-state.

In the summer of 1804, responding to Napoleon’s self-coronation as French emperor a few months earlier, Francis proclaimed himself emperor of Austria. As a Habsburg, he remained “Roman Emperor,” but as the empire approached extinction, he wanted to ensure his status on the European stage against the Corsican upstart. The technical name for the Habsburg monarchy was now the “Austrian Empire,” but the point was not to pursue an aggressive, self-confident imperial project of the sort that animated France, Britain, or Russia. The move was instead about seeming not to stand beneath a certain standard of dynastic prestige.

The self-coronation occurred not a moment too soon, as in August 1806 Napoleon declared the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire defunct, and several princes of his Rhine Confederation seceded on August 1. Five days later a proclamation was read from the balcony of the baroque Kirche am Hof in Vienna that the empire no longer existed. In fact, the empire had long been an ineffectual league of tiny entities, unable to defend the German lands. One practical consequence was that Austria’s leadership in Germany came to an end, and indeed, Germany lost all definite political form. Though it had few effective powers of administration, the empire’s constitution had balanced rights of cities and territories and in popular understanding had come to embody the nation in ways not fully tangible.

Reports from the summer of 1806 tell us that people across the German lands were outraged that a willful foreign usurper had simply disbanded the empire. The reports reveal a previously hidden emotional attachment, reminiscent of the indignation that arose in Hungary after Joseph replaced Latin with German. Like that supposedly dead language, the Holy Roman Empire provided a basic coordinate of identity. Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s otherwise buoyant mother Katharina wrote of deep unease, as if an old friend had succumbed to terminal illness. She sensed bitterness among the people of her home city of Frankfurt. For the first time in their lives—indeed for the first time in many centuries—the empire was omitted from prayers said at church, and subtle protests broke out across the German lands. Was one now simply a Prussian or Bavarian? And if one was German, what did that mean?

Rhinelanders had welcomed Napoleon’s rule because his legal code enhanced their freedoms, yet soon sympathies began to erode. The more territory France’s emperor controlled, the less he was satisfied, and the more demands grew on his “allies” for money and soldiers. And west Germans felt humiliated by French victories over the large German states to the east. In 1806 Napoleon crushed the armies of Prussia at Jena and Auerstedt, then occupied Berlin. Two years later he forced Austria to join a continental blockade of England; and when Austria rose up the following year, he again smashed it down. The ill-fated Grand Armée that attacked Russia in 1812 was one-third German, and so were its casualties.

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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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