Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (27 page)

The County-Palatine followed a somewhat variant course. In 1477 it was seized by France, but only sixteen years later was restored to the Empire by the Treaty of Senlis as the price of peace and added to the Habsburgs’ ‘Burgundian Inheritance’. Its status was confirmed in 1512, at the time that the titular Duke Charles II (not yet the Emperor Charles V) was still considering the creation of a new administrative unit, the
Burgundischer Reichskreis
or ‘Imperial Burgundian Circle’.
¹¹⁷
There were a dozen such circles within the Holy Roman Empire in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. The Burgundian Circle, formalized in 1548, is No. IX on Bryce’s list.

Nonetheless, since the Peace of Senlis did not hold, chronic war between France and the Empire became one of the most persistent fixtures of modern European history. In the process, the territory of the ‘Burgundian Circle’ was gradually whittled down, exactly as the former Kingdom of Burgundy had been. In 1512, the Circle comprised twenty distinct territorial units. Over the years, it shrank and shrivelled. In 1555 a large part was transferred to the rule of Madrid as the Spanish Netherlands, but within twenty-five years half of these Spanish-ruled provinces broke free to launch themselves as the Dutch Republic. By the time the residue was returned by Spain to Austria in 1715, only eight of the original twenty units survived as the ‘Austrian Netherlands’.
¹¹⁸
(The Duchy of Lorraine, incidentally, where Charles le Téméraire had died, was not incorporated into the Imperial Circle. It remained technically independent, and its last duke,
le bon roi
Stanislas (r. 1735–66), was an unemployed Polish monarch, whose daughter happened to be the queen of France.
¹¹⁹
)

The trajectory of the County-Palatine of Burgundy, the ‘Franche-Comté’, was also somewhat eccentric. Most of it was handed over to Spanish rule in 1555 with the rest of the Circle. Yet the county’s capital, Besanz/Besançon, remained a
Reichsstadt
within the Empire until 1651. Only then was it restored, for just one generation, as the capital of ‘El Contado Franco’, before being ceded to France with the rest of the county at the Treaty of Nijmegen of 1678, thus breaking the Empire’s final link with its former Kingdom of Burgundy.
¹²⁰

The provinces of Bourgogne and of Franche-Comté stood side by side within the Kingdom of France from the reign of Louis XIV to the French Revolution. The former, administered from Dijon, was officially inhabited by
bourguignons
and
bourguignonnes
; the latter, administered from Besançon, by
comtois
and
comtoises
. In 1791 both were abolished, and each was replaced by republican
départements
with names of no historical significance. Everything associated with the
ancien régime
was despised. The French were deliberately cut off from their provincial identities and taught to forget the Kingdom of France, let alone the many kingdoms of Burgundy.
¹²¹

The modern French state is famed for the centralized character of its administration. Over the last 200 years many things have changed. The revolutionary Republic was replaced by the Empire: the Empire by a restored kingdom, by a Second Republic, by a Second Empire, and by the Third, Fourth and Fifth Republics. For much of this time, one thing has not changed: Paris has proposed, and the rest of France has disposed.

In the second half of the twentieth century, however, practice was modified. A measure of decentralization was introduced in 1956 for the limited purposes of state-planning and in 1982 for the establishment of regional councils. Since then, France has been divided into twenty-two regions, which are broadly comparable in size and shape to the thirty-four pre-revolutionary provinces. One region is called Bourgogne. Its immediate neighbour is called Franche-Comté.
¹²²
However, France’s regions do not operate in the same way as the devolved countries of the United Kingdom, or the cantons of Switzerland. The powers of France’s central government have not been curbed, only mildly clipped; and the appeal to historical formations has been very limited. The post-war bureaucrats who invented the regions do not appear to remember anything further back than the
ancien régime
. They ignored the Burgundian associations of Franche-Comté, and awarded the Burgundian name exclusively to the former duchy. There is no recognition that the region which they designated as ‘Rhône-Alpes’ is sitting on as strong a Burgundian claim as anywhere else.
¹²³

Nonetheless, historical memory is remarkably persistent. It may be inaccurate, confused and distorted, but it doesn’t disappear easily. One hundred and eleven years passed between the abolition of Merovingian Burgundy and the founding of the Carolingian duchy; 162 years passed between the abolition of the royal French province of ‘Bourgogne’ and its revival as a region. Clearly, these spans are not long enough for the collective psyche to forget completely. In modern times, memories of fifteenth-century ‘Burgundy’ appear to have eclipsed all others, perhaps as a result of its artistic splendour. Yet one must never say ‘never’. The day may yet dawn when the citizens of Geneva, Basle, Grenoble, Arles, Lyon, Dijon and Besançon will unfurl their banner and sing their anthem: ‘Burgundia has not perished yet, so long as we still live!’ And they might invite a representative or a delegation from Bornholm to join in the celebrations.

Bryce’s Note A ‘On the Burgundies’ contained ten items, and it mentioned a possible eleventh. It did not concern itself with the provinces of the
ancien régime
, and for obvious reasons could not have included the present-day regions. Even so, Bryce’s tally of ten or eleven ‘Burgundies’ is manifestly too short. According to definitions, there have been five, six or seven kingdoms, two duchies, one or two provinces, one county-palatine, one landgravate, one ‘United States’, one Imperial Circle, and at least one region. This brings the aggregate to a minimum of thirteen and a maximum of sixteen. At the beginning of the twenty-first century a running total of fifteen Burgundies is absolutely defensible. One is reminded of the Latin motto of Philip the Good, ‘
Non Aliud
’ – best translated as ‘Enough, but not too much’.
¹²⁴

By way of recapitulation, therefore, it may be appropriate to present a summary of Note A (Revised):

III

Most people looking for information these days reach for their computer and the Internet. They bring up a search engine like Webcrawler, Yahoo, Google or Baidu, type in a keyword, click once, and are instantaneously rewarded with uncountable numbers of ‘hits’. Traditionalists believe that new technology often produces poor results.

In the case of ‘Burgundy’, one click on Google (in February 2009) brought up 23,900,000 entries. The list was augmented by an option to have the keyword or keywords defined. One click on the ‘Definition’ offered by ‘
answers.com
’ yielded the following:

Burgundy
A historical region and former province of Eastern France. The area was first organised into a kingdom by the Burgundii, a Germanic people, in the 5th century. At the height of its later power in the 14th and 15th centuries, [it] controlled vast territories in present-day Netherlands, Belgium and north-eastern France. It was incorporated into the French crown lands by Louis XI in 1477.
¹²⁵

No one wants to be needlessly pedantic, but seekers after precision should be warned: every single sentence of the above definition contains false or misleading assertions. The first area once organized into a kingdom by the Burgundii, for example, is not in eastern France.

However, one should not judge the authors of ‘
answers.com
’ too harshly. If fifteen Burgundies is taken as a full score, they manage three out of fifteen, or 20 per cent, which if one explores further, by no means puts them at the bottom of the class. What is more, their faulty information derives from verifiable sources.
The Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
, cited by ‘
answers.com
’, defines Burgundy as ‘historical and governmental region, France’. The
Columbia Encyclopedia
goes for ‘historic region, E. France’. An entry from the online Wikipedia goes for ‘a region historically situated in modern-day France and Switzerland… and in the 4th century assigned by the Romans to… the Burgundians, who settled there in their own kingdom’.
¹²⁶

The discrepancies in these definitions are easily spotted. But it is distressing to see that their common characteristic lies in their immobility: they are all trying to tie the concept of Burgundy to a single locality. None grasps the key feature, namely that Burgundy was a movable feast.

The Google list on ‘Burgundy’ is presented in two forms. The full list, containing over 23 million entries, is impractically long. The shortened list contains 535 entries ranked by the frequency of their consultation. Here, the common characteristics are a persistent focus on the present, and again a rigid determination to locate Burgundy exclusively in France.

A new search can be conducted using two key words: ‘Burgundy’ plus ‘History’. The resultant crop of websites looks promising. They include ‘History of Burgundy’, ‘Burgundy – History’, ‘The Burgundians’, and many more. On examination, however, the drawbacks become obvious. The text of ‘The Burgundians’ stops abruptly after the second kingdom, because its remit stops in the sixth century (score 2  :  15). The home page of the ‘History of Burgundy’ offers four sub-sections, the third of which is headed ‘The Glorious Age… 1364–1477’. The purpose is to sell ‘the Glorious Duchy’ and nothing else. ‘Burgundy – History’ reveals shameless prejudices. ‘From the 10th century onward,’ it opines, ‘Burgundy meant a duchy belonging to the royal family of the Capetians.’ If that were to be believed, the imperial Kingdom of Burgundy never even existed (score 1:  15).
¹²⁷

And so one could continue, using different keywords and different linguistic preferences. The same stunted concepts recur time and time again. A French site located via ‘Bourgogne’ distinguishes the early Kingdom of
Bourgondie
(the Burgundians) from ‘the later [Frankish] Kingdom of
Bourgogne
’, and is exceptional for mentioning the Kingdom of the Two Burgundies (score 4  :  15).

Students are frequently warned against pulling information off the Internet. Wikipedia, the self-authored, online encyclopedia, is especially suspect. ‘How can anything be verified?’ one hears. ‘People can write whatever comes into their head.’ Such fears are clearly not baseless. Yet they are widely accompanied by the assumption that the old-fashioned printed works of reference, ‘the recognized authorities’, are
ipso facto
more reliable. The test of this comes, therefore, when Internet sites are compared to some of the more traditional, academic products.