The Routledge Handbook of East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 500-1300

Florin Curta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367226558
• eBook ISBN: 9781000476248
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Routledge Handbook of East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 500–1300 is the first of its kind to provide a point of reference for the history of the whole of Eastern Europe during the Middle Ages.

While historians have recognized the importance of integrating the eastern part of the European continent into surveys of the Middle Ages, few have actually paid attention to the region, its specific features, problems of chronology and historiography. This vast region represents more than two-thirds of the European continent, but its history in general—and its medieval history in particular—is poorly known. This book covers the history of the whole region, from the Balkans to the Carpathian Basin, and the Bohemian Forest to the Finnish Bay. It provides an overview of the current state of research and a route map for navigating an abundant historiography available in more than ten different languages. Chapters cover topics as diverse as religion, architecture, art, state formation, migration, law, trade and the experiences of women and children.

This book is an essential reference for scholars and students of medieval history, as well as those interested in the history of Central and Eastern Europe.

1 Situating medieval Eastern Europe Historiography and discontent

Christian Raffensperger

DOI: 10.4324/9780429276217-2

In the Middle Ages, much like today, Europe was not one thing to all people. There is plenty of evidence of that in recent history. When U.S. President George W. Bush began the “War on Terror,” he enlisted a “coalition of the willing” that was largely comprised of what he and his secretary of defense called the “New Europe.”¹ Those countries, which are located in what the contributors to this book call East Central and Eastern Europe, were regarded by the American administration as being different, and implicitly better, than the “Old Europe,” which comprised the western part of the continent, and those unwilling to participate fully in such a campaign. France and Germany, stalwarts of the traditional definition of Europe, and part of “Old Europe” in the terminology of the Bush administration, were not amused.²

The “New Europe,” which received praise as trustworthy U.S. allies, had in fact been the staunch opponents of the U.S. only recently, as far as the time frame with which medievalists are concerned—before 1989, they were all members of the Communist Bloc. Following World War II, the decisions at Tehran and later Yalta divided Europe into a series of spheres of influence, and the allies granted to the Soviet Union custodianship over the territory focused on in this book, as East Central and Eastern Europe. This is the territory, which Winston Churchill, during the negotiations of those agreements, famously and disingenuously described as falling behind an Iron Curtain:

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.³

Though so recently allies in World War II, the stage was being set for the Cold War and opposition between the East and the West.

In fact, those terms (“East” and “West”) are also important to note for the construction of any dialogue about the territory under discussion. When scholars speak of Western Europe, the adjective is capitalized to indicate the idea of the West and not just a geographic orientation. The same is true, of course, about Eastern Europe. The valences attached to those terms, however, are grossly different. In modern English parlance, West and East have taken on positive and negative connotations, respectively. This is now being rightly challenged in many circles, but the ideological implications persist. In my own work, I have largely forsaken “East” and “West,” unless discussing those ideas in and for themselves, and instead used the lowercase spelling (“east” and “west”), indicative of direction. In other words, eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe, while western Europe is at the opposite end of the continent. Scholars throughout this book have their own systems of naming, but names, like so many other things, have their own impact and tell a story.

This chapter is largely about names. Before even tackling the question of East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, one must first discuss what “medieval Europe” means in common parlance, for the majority of readers, as well as for (professional) historians. Even a quick glimpse at the recent literature will immediately result in the following conclusion: “medieval Europe” is typically synonymous with Western Europe. The discussion then proceeds to an examination of why medieval Europe has been constructed in that fashion. This historiographical examination, though brief, will step through some of the major points in the construction of the idea of medieval Europe, and its juxtaposition with the West. Finally, the chapter will examine the specific historiography of East Central and Eastern Europe. Why were these terms used and how were they constructed as separate categories—those are questions that are meant to set the stage for the larger discussion of East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages. My hope is that at the end of this book, the reader will appreciate the deep interconnectivities apparent, not just between the two halves of Europe, but throughout the larger medieval Eurasian world discussed herein.

Medieval Europe is a known quantity in the popular imagination. It is the world of castles and siege engines, of knights and chivalry, as well as powerful kings and queens like William the Conqueror and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Alternately, it is the world that supplies the raw material for “Game of Thrones,” “The Vikings,” “The Last Kingdom,” the last generation of video games and so much more on various media channels. To many historians, even though much is in revision, as shown below, the picture of medieval Europe is also relatively hard and fast. A quick look at popular textbooks on medieval Europe, or even at syllabi of courses offered at major universities, could illustrate what modern Anglophone historians regard as medieval Europe.

Survey texts like Barbara Rosenwein’s have broadened coverage from just the western portions of Europe to include the eastern half of Europe, along with the Mediterranean and Islamic world.⁴ This is undoubtedly an important addition, which many western medievalists typically use to claim that the job of integrating medieval Europe is already done.⁵ However, there is much more to do. Rosenwein’s largely praiseworthy textbook reproduces the ideas of Dimitri Obolensky’s Byzantine Commonwealth, which is responsible for creating an alternate world for medieval Eastern Europe.⁶ For instance, according to Rosenwein, “choosing the Byzantine form [of Christianity] guaranteed that Russia would always stand apart from Western Europe.”⁷ Such an idea, built on the structure of Obolensky’s “Byzantine Commonwealth,” continues to perpetuate the idea that medieval Europe, much like 20th-century Europe, was divided into an eastern and a western half, or into two—one Roman Catholic and the other (Greek) Orthodox.⁸ I have effectively refuted this idea in my recent work, which demonstrates through multiple examples that Rus’ was intimately connected with the rest of Europe and that Rus’ converted to Christianity, and not (just) to its “Byzantine form,” as clearly indicated by the history of Christian Rus’ for the first couple of centuries after the 988/989 conversion.⁹ In other words, despite making a visible effort to reach all the way to Eastern Europe, Rosenwein’s textbook still reproduces a vision of medieval Europe that is largely Western, though with the significant inclusion of the Islamic world, as is currently fashionable in medieval studies.

Rosenwein’s textbook, however, is situated at the better end of the spectrum, when it comes to the inclusion of medieval Eastern Europe. William R. Cook and Ronald B. Herzman’s textbook, The Medieval World View, represents an even more Western-focused vision of the medieval world.¹⁰ Now in its third edition, this is the basis for a Great Courses class, which has an even broader distribution beyond the academic world. Cook and Herzman’s book contains a series of explanatory maps to help students visualize the world covered in the text. I include here the reproduction of one of their maps for the High Middle Ages, as a good illustration of their coverage of medieval Eastern Europe (Figure 1.1). It is quite clear from this map that, for the authors and thus the students using the textbook, medieval Europe is Western Europe, inclusive of Iberia. Of the regions covered in this book, only the cities of Prague and Constantinople are even placed on the map. Rus’ is covered by the key, and much of Scandinavia (though not covered in the present volume) is simply expunged. True, maps are faulty things, but they are also vital ways for historians to communicate with their audience. In this particular case, the authors (as well as the publisher) chose a large map displayed on two pages, one of which pages is nearly blank, except for some physical features. This was without any doubt a conscious decision.

Leaving the map aside, the contents of Cook and Herzman’s book are also problematic for Eastern and East Central Europe. Besides using the ideas from Obolensky, the authors clearly divide medieval Europe into East and West and elide history from the Middle Ages through the early modern period and even to the present day in multiple instances, though only for Eastern Europe. For instance, in regard to religious conversion once again,

Figure 1.1 Medieval Europe in the High Middle Ages. After Cook and Herzman, Medieval World View, pp. 234–35. Map drawn by András Vadas

like the Balkan Slavs, the Russians received their religion and much of their culture from Constantinople. Indeed, after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the Russians began to think of themselves as heirs to the Roman Empire: just as Rome had given way to Constantinople, so now has the torch passed to the third and final Rome, Moscow.¹¹

The conversion of Rus’ (not Russia, a modern nation, not a medieval kingdom) in 988/989 is elided to the 15th century, and even beyond, when the rhetoric of the Third Rome is actually deployed closer to the 16th century. The authors also project modern European troubles onto the fault lines that they have themselves created in medieval Europe:

When we think of problems and misunderstandings within Europe today, we in large part think of tensions and conflicts that exist along the lines of Western and Byzantine spheres of influence, for example, the line between Poland and Russia or that between Croatia and Serbia.¹²

The map mentioned above is not an accident. To Cook and Herzman, Eastern Europe is a rhetorical device meant to explain modern problems; it is not an actual place for consideration alongside the intricate ideas developed for the history of medieval France or the Italian Peninsula.

All of this might lead one to the question, which I have many times asked myself: why is “medieval Europe” constructed this way? How was this notion of Europe in the Middle Ages created? There are multiple avenues for exploring those questions, but in this essay, I will attempt to look only at a few, in order to explain why the idea of medieval Europe was created the way that it was.

Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) is probably as good a place to start as any other. Half a century ago, the British historian Geoffrey Barraclough (1908–1984) reviewed the historiography of the division of Europe in an attempt to move beyond those ideas.¹³ It seems that every couple of generations, someone attempts to review and revise current ways of understanding medieval Europe, in terms of east and west. For some reason, the results of such endeavors are never definitive. The job remains undone, ready for another attempt a few decades later. In his own time, Barraclough blamed Ranke for the idea of a divided...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• List of maps
• Introduction
• 1 Situating medieval Eastern Europe: historiography and discontent
• 2 Between migrations and origo gentis: population movements
• 3 Steppe empires without emperors: Avars, Bulgars and Khazars
• 4 Medieval nomadism
• 5 Early conversion to Christianity, Judaism and Islam
• 6 Conversion and Christianization: Bohemia, Poland, Hungary and Rus’ (9th to 12th centuries)
• 7 State formation in the 10th century
• 8 Strongholds and early medieval states
• 9 The rise of the early medieval aristocracy
• 10 Rulers between ideal and reality
• 11 Royal governments
• 12 Rural economy
• 13 Crafts, coins and trade (900–1300)
• 14 Towns and cities
• 15 Lords, peasants and slaves
• 16 Women and children
• 17 Jews, Armenians and Muslims
• 18 Church organization
• 19 Saints and relics
• 20 Heresy and popular religion
• 21 Crusades and Eastern Europe
• 22 The Baltic Crusades (1147–1300)
• 23 Political and practical literacy
• 24 Law
• 25 History writing
• 26 Hagiography
• 27 Monumental architecture
• 28 Monumental art
• 29 New powers—Serbia and Bulgaria
• 30 The Mongols in Eastern Europe
• Index