Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (3 page)

17 The disintegration of imperial Burgundy

18 The Duchy and County of Burgundy in the fourteenth century

19 The States of Burgundy, fourteenth–fifteenth centuries

20 The Imperial Circles of the Holy Roman Empire

21 Pyrenees

22 Marches of Charlemagne’s Empire, ninth century

23 The cradle of the Kingdom of Aragon, 1035–1137

24 The Iberian peninsula in 1137

25 The heartlands of the Crown of Aragon

26 Aragonese Empire

27 The two medieval Sicilies

28 The Kingdom of Mallorca

29 The union of Castile and Aragon, 1479

30 Belarus

31 The ‘Land of the Headwaters’

32 The Principalities of Polatsk,
c
. twelfth century

33 The Grand Duchy of Lithuania under Mindaugus (mid-thirteenth century)

34 The Grand Duchy of Lithuania with the other Jagiellonian lands,
c
. 1500

35 The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from 1572

36 The Grand Duchy of Lithuania, 1572–1795

37 The Partitions of Poland-Lithuania, 1772–1795

38 Western
gubernias
of the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century

39 Istanbul and the Bosporus

40 Contraction of the Byzantine Empire

41 Kaliningrad
oblast

42 Borussia – land of the Moravia

43 The Teutonic State, 1410

44 Royal and Ducal Prussia after 1466

45 Brandenburg-Prussia in 1648

46 The growth of the Hohenzollern Kingdom, 1701–1795

47 The Kingdom of Prussia, 1807–1918

48 The Eastern frontline, 1944–1945

49 Rome

50 Savoy and Piedmont

51 The Kingdom of Sardinia,
c
. 1750

52 Italy, 1859–1861

53 Northern Italy, spring 1860

54 West Ukraine

55 The Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria,
c
. 1900

56 Galicia in Austria-Hungary,
c
. 1914

57 Florence

58 The Kingdom of Etruria, 1801–1807

59 Napoleonic Italy, 1810

60 Free State of Thüringia and Northern Bavaria

61 Saxon mini-states,
c
. 1900

62 Montenegro, 2011

63 The tribes of Montenegro,
c
. 1900

64 Montenegro and neighbours, 1911

65 Yugoslavia after 1945

66 Modern Zakarpattia (Carpatho-Ukraine)

67 Czechoslovak Republic, 1920–1938

68 The Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine, 1939

69 Ireland, 2011

70 Northern Ireland in the late twentieth century

71 Estonia

72 The Baltic States between the wars

73 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 1945–1991

74 Russia’s western ‘near abroad’ after 1991

Introduction

All my life, I have been intrigued by the gap between appearances and reality. Things are never quite as they seem. I was born a subject of the British Empire, and as a child, read in my
Children’s Encyclopaedia
that ‘our empire’ was one ‘on which the sun never set’. I saw that there was more red on the map than any other colour, and was delighted. Before long, I was watching in disbelief as the imperial sunset blazed across the post-war skies amidst seas of blood and mayhem. Reality, as later revealed, belied outward appearances of unlimited power and permanence.

In my encyclopedia I also read that Mount Everest, at 29,002 feet, was the highest peak in the world and was named after the surveyor general of British India, Col. Sir George Everest. I naturally fell for the unwritten assumption, as I was supposed to, that the pinnacle of the earth was British; and I was duly impressed. It all looked very straightforward. By the time I received my copy of the Coronation Edition of Sir John Hunt’s
The Ascent of Everest
as a Christmas present in 1953, of course, India had left the Empire. But I have since learned that Mount Everest had never belonged either to India or to the Empire. Since the King of Nepal did not grant Everest’s men permission to enter his country, the mountain had been measured from a very great distance; 29,002 feet was not in consequence its correct height; the mountain’s English name was adopted as an act of self-aggrandisement, and its most authentic names are Sagarmatha (in Nepali) and Chomolangma (in Tibetan).
¹
Knowledge, I have been forced to admit, is no less fluid than the circumstances in which it is obtained.

As a boy, I was taken on several occasions to Welsh-speaking Wales. Being endowed with a very Welsh name, I immediately felt at home and gained a lasting affinity with the country. On visiting friends in a hill village near Bethesda, also Davieses, I met with people who did not normally speak English, and was given a present of my first English–Welsh dictionary, T. Gwynn Jones’s
Geiriadur
;
²
it made me a lifelong collector of foreign languages, though not alas a master of Welsh. Seeing the English castles at Conwy, Harlech and Beaumaris (usually and wrongly called ‘Welsh castles’), I sympathized more with the conquered than with the conquerors, and on reading somewhere that the Welsh name for ‘England’,
Lloegr
, meant ‘the Lost Land’, I fell for the fancy, imagining what a huge sense of loss and forgetting the name expresses. A learned colleague has since told me that my imagination had outrun the etymology. Yet as someone brought up in English surroundings, I never cease to be amazed that everywhere which we now call ‘England’ was once not English at all. This amazement underlies much of what is written in
Vanished Kingdoms
. Dover, after all, or the Avon, are pure Welsh names.

As a teenager, singing badly on the back row of the school choir, I was particularly attracted to a piece by Charles Villiers Stanford. For some reason, the stoical words and languorous melody of ‘They told me Heraclitus’ struck a congenial chord. So I went home and looked him up in my copy of Blakeney’s
Smaller Classical Dictionary
and found he was the ‘weeping Greek philosopher’ from the sixth century BC. It was Heraclitus who said that ‘everything is in flux’ and ‘You can never cross the same river twice’. He was the pioneer of the idea of transience, and he features early in my schoolboy notebook of quotations:

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead. They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed. I wept as I remembered how often you and I Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest, A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest, Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake, For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.
³

Heraclitus and his nightingales are not far beneath the surface of my work either.

As a school-leaver, I followed the advice of my history master to spend the summer vacation reading Edward Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, together with his
Autobiography
. Gibbon’s subject was, in his own words, ‘the greatest perhaps and most awful scene in the history of mankind’.
⁴
I have never read anything to surpass it. Its magnificent narrative demonstrates that the lifespan even of the mightiest states is finite.

Years later, as a professional historian, I plunged into the history of Central and Eastern Europe. My first assignment as a lecturer at the University of London was to prepare a course of ninety lectures on Polish history. The centrepiece of the course was devoted to the Commonwealth or
Rzeczpospolita
of Poland-Lithuania, which at its conception in 1569 was the largest state in Europe (or at least the master of our continent’s largest tract of inhabited lands). Nonetheless, in little more than two decades at the end of the eighteenth century, the Polish-Lithuanian state was destroyed so comprehensively that few people today have even heard of it. And it was not the only casualty. The Republic of Venice was laid low in the same era, as was the Holy Roman Empire.

Throughout most of my academic career, the Soviet Union was the biggest beast in my field of study, and one of the world’s two superpowers. It possessed the largest territory in the world, a vast arsenal of nuclear and conventional weapons and an unparalleled array of security services. None of its guns or policemen could save it. One day in 1991 it disappeared from the map of the globe, and it has never been seen since.

Not surprisingly, therefore, when I came to write the history of
The Isles
,
⁵
I began to wonder if the days of the state in which I was born and live, the United Kingdom, might also be numbered. I decided that they were. My strict, Nonconformist upbringing had taught me to look askance at the trappings of power. My head still rings with the glorious, measured cadences of ‘St Clement’:

So be it, Lord; Thy throne shall never,

  Like earth’s proud empires, pass away;

Thy kingdom stands, and grows for ever,

  Till all Thy creatures own Thy sway.
⁶

To her very great credit, Queen Victoria, Empress of India, asked for this hymn to be sung at her Diamond Jubilee.

Historians and their publishers spend inordinate time and energy retailing the history of everything that they take to be powerful, prominent and impressive. They flood the bookshops, and their readers’ minds, with tales of great powers, of great achievements, of great men and women, of victories, heroes and wars – especially the wars which ‘we’ are supposed to have won – and of the great evils which we opposed. In 2010, 380 books on the Third Reich were published in Great Britain alone.
⁷
If not ‘Might is Right’, their motto could well be ‘Nothing Succeeds Like Success’.