Falls

Eastern Europe Falls

Part 2 of my Eastern Europe series

(~7500 words, reading time: ~25-30 minutes)

“There are few virtues that the Poles do not possess -- and there are few mistakes they have ever avoided.”

Winston Churchill

Eastern Europe today is a bit of a mess and has been for a while. It is a large collection of countries of various sizes joined in an intricate web of complicated relationships. Some countries get along well, others have a visceral, sometimes violent dislike against each other. Every now and then, that dislike, fueled by foreign imperial amitions, snowballs into wars of epic proportions. These feelings of distrust and hatred are rooted in a trauma that all Eastern European countries share: conquest by foreign powers. Despite the fact that, as of the 12th century, the kingdoms of Eastern Europe were some of the richest and most powerful on the continent, by the 18th century, they were all conquered by empires claiming to be the successors of Rome. In this piece, the second part of my series on Eastern Europe, I try to tell a condensed story of the fall.

Innocence lost

The 12th century was a high point in European history. It was nowhere near the Islamic world when it comes to sophistication, development, or advancement, but European culture, economy, and population, were on the rise in ways not seen since the Pax Romana a millennium earlier.

This golden age included Eastern Europe as well. The kingdoms were stable and the people, that had been in flux for almost 600 years, looked like they’re here to stay. Their violent ways of ensuring their survival gave way to more peaceful ones. Instead of asserting themselves by conquest, the kingdoms’ ruling dynasties commissioned chronicles to establish their divine and earthly rights to the kingdoms; the Primary Chronicle of the Rus’, the Gesta Principum Polonorum of the Poles, the Chronica Boemorum of the Czechs, the Gesta Hungarorum of the Hungarians were signals of royal power and stability in Eastern Europe, with the Bulgarians -- by their proximity to Byzantium and copying their traditions -- being just as productive in writing their way into history.

That’s not to say these times were peaceful by modern standards; indeed, the warrior and warlord caste we call “nobles” fought constantly both between and within kingdoms. Yet, the High Middle Ages was a time of relative peace and prosperity that would be romanticized into a time of innocence. The next 6 centuries saw these kingdoms erased from the map, their centers of culture marginalized or destroyed, their people killed, enslaved, or subjugated.

I divide this time into five stages: the time of the Northern Crusades into the Baltic, the Mongol invasion of the Rus’, the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans, the Austrian conquest of Bohemia and Hungary, and, finally, the road to the partition of Poland.

This is a dark chapter so if you really can’t stand reading about war, you won’t find much to like in this post. But, if you are hardcore and in for a challenge, you can turn it into a drinking game; take a shot every time an Eastern European monarch dies without an heir or every time the province of Silesia gets yoinked and tell me how long you lasted. Let's go.

Gott mit uns: Germans and Crusaders in the Baltic and the Rise of Lithuania

Germanic peoples spread east in many waves: the first was on the turn of the 8th and 9th centuries as Franks under Charlemagne subjugated most of the West Slavs. The Frankish Empire then split into three and a tumultuous period followed in the late 9th-early 10th centuries. By the time of the late 10th century, Eastern Francia, a distant ancestor of modern Germany solidified itself and expansion resumed. 

This expansion was not only military in nature. In a period known as the Ostseidlung, Germanic people migrated into all over Eastern Europe and were welcome. They brought with them the instruments of the population boom of the 12th century -- their know-how in agriculture and land reclamation increased both the quality and quantity of land. Territories in the Polish seaboard, Silesia (in modern Poland), Prussia (today the Russian territory of Kaliningrad), and cities of the Baltic seaboard were populated with German speakers. This will become important later.

By the late 12th century, this migration wave was accompanied by a series of crusades against the pagan Baltic tribes. Crusades are usually associated with the territory of Palestine, but by this time in history, they were more of the exception than the norm. After Saladin wiped the floor with the Crusader States in the Levant, the continent’s holy orders, adventurers, and unwanted not-first-born sons forgot about wanting to reclaim the Holy Land and decided to target pagans and heretics in the hopes of finding people they could rob convert without getting killed by ferocious Saracens. The French launched the Albigensian Crusade, bringing Southern France under the king dwelling in Paris. Where the Italians went will be revealed a bit later. And as our case in point, the Germans launched the Northern Crusades against the Baltics.

Long story short, the Crusaders won, and the Baltic tribes, that had been successful in resisting attempts at conquest by the Scandinavians and the Rus’, succumbed. Two new Crusader states were formed: the Old Prussians came to be ruled by the Teutonic Order, the Latvians, Livonians, and Curonians by the Livonian Order. Estonia was fought over, then divided between Denmark and the Livonian Order, after which the Danes decided it is not worth dying over anymore and sold their half to the Order.

The one tribe that managed to resist the invaders was Lithuania. Under a leader called Mindaugas, Lithuanian tribes united against the crusaders and other tribes and managed to defeat both. In addition to his military successes against both domestic and foreign enemies, Mindaugas was a crafty diplomat, managing to play his rivals off against each other and keeping his loyalties flexible. He converted to Catholicism and was even crowned with a Papal crown, securing peace against the crusaders, only to renounce his new faith and alliance to invade Livonia the moment it was weakened. He even managed to expand into the Rus lands to the east.

Mindaugas’ story didn’t end well for him as he was assassinated by his nobles, but he laid the foundation for a Lithuanian state that would see one of the most spectacular and unlikely rises ever known to history. Lithuania remained independent, became united, and, to join the Christianity club on its own terms, its rulers adopted the Orthodox faith -- though much of the population remained pagan for generations. In the next one hundred years, Lithuania conquered Belarus, Ruthenia, Kyiv, and Bryansk, later, even Smolensk, solidifying its control over the landbridge between the river highways and becoming the largest kingdom in Europe. Its position was further consolidated in the 14th century when it entered a dynastic union with Poland, basically a permanent defensive and economic partnership. This union produced Poland-Lithuania, one of the longest running and most successful alliances between any two states, essentially dominating Northeastern Europe for the next 300 years. They beat the Crusader states and conquered the entire Baltic.

The wrath of the Khans: The fall of the Rus’

As you’ll note, in my account of the rise of Lithuania, the armies of the powerful Rus kingdom are conspicuously absent. While the crusades hurt the Rus’ as well, and Lithuania quickly went from a minor nuisance to a powerful opponent, their fall can mostly be attributed to a different group: the Mongols.

Before the Mongols showed up from the east, the Rus’ were already in decline. Their fate was tied to their biggest trade partners, the Eastern Roman Empire, and, as it happens, in 1204, in yet another crusade aimed somewhere other than the Holy Land, Italian crusaders attacked Constantinople itself. Why they attacked one of the largest and holiest of cities in the Christian world is a whole story in itself, but in any case, the crusaders won, sacked the city, and formed another bunch of crusader states in Greece. This war and its aftermath essentially destroyed the Eastern Roman Empire. It lingered on in name for a few centuries but its economic and military power were gone. 

This was great news for Bulgaria and Serbia, whose main rival and wannabe overlord was no more, but economic disaster for the Rus’. Their kingdom was never the most unified -- in many ways it was more of a federation of petty kings and princes, not unlike Eastern Francia in the early 9th century. Yet, every now and then, a guy would come along who was particularly gifted at defeating his brothers, unite the kingdom, then produce a bunch of sons who would each inherit a portion of the kingdom, rinse and repeat. By the time of the early 13th century, however, this was only in memory and the kingdom existed mostly in name only. It was divided, economically weakened, and militarily exhausted from endless wars against the Baltic tribes, the northern crusaders states, and the latest bunch of nomads, the Cumans.

Then, the Mongols showed up. If you know anything about them, it is that they created “the largest land-based empire in history”, and in doing so they rolled over the most powerful and advanced states at the time: Song China, Khwarazmian Persia, and the Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad all fell to them. They were fearsome conquerors with absolutely no chill. Even the most minor slight or act of defiance against them incurred the medieval equivalent of a nuclear response. Think of pyramids of tens of thousands of skulls and towers made of bones.

Unfortunately for the Rus’, they didn’t know of any of that. To them, the Mongols were just the latest nomadic arrivals travelling down the great highway of peoples. They’ve been dealing with people like them for centuries. So, when Mongol envoys showed up to ask haughtily that the Rus’ don’t ally with the Cumans, the Rus’, taking offense, had them killed.

Now, killing envoys, even if they were rude, was something that 13th-century contemporaries would consider a serious breach of diplomatic etiquette, but still, the Mongol reaction surpassed all expectations. As an immediate response, they destroyed the allied Rus’ and Cuman army, captured their leaders, buried them alive, and had a feast above them as they were suffocating to death.

But the real invasion came thirteen years later. Within two years, Vladimir, Rostov, Yaroslavl, Dmitrov, Tver, and many, many other Rus cities were destroyed, their populations killed or enslaved. Not even the backwater town of Moscow was spared. Kyiv would fall in 1240, followed by the Ruthenian cities of Halych and Volodymyr.

The only Rus principality to survive intact was Novgorod. Alexander Nevsky, the Prince of Novgorod did the smart thing and submitted to the Mongols without a fight. By doing so, and by fiercely resisting invasions by Swedes and crusaders from the west, he preserved an inkling of Rus independence. The Mongols would continue their campaign into Hungary and Poland, then withdraw via Serbia and Bulgaria, pillaging and destroying as they went.

The Mongol invasions were catastrophic for the affected areas. The loss of life was immeasurable, with anywhere from 20% to 50% of the population of Eastern Europe dead. Bohemia came out of it in good shape though, defeating the few Mongol units that came their way and even yoinking Silesia from Poland.

The long-term effects of the conquest were also substantial. The Mongols systematically destroyed works of culture and religious centers: the Rus spiritual and economic center, Kyiv was a smoldering ruin and would not regain its prominence. The fragmentation of the Rus’ became permanent. Ruthenia, already drifting away and flirting with Catholicism, got detached from the rest of Rus culture and would form the foundation of the Ukrainian nation. Large parts of the former Rus kingdom, such as Minsk and Kyiv were conquered by the rising Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The Republic of Novgorod continued as an independent state as sort-of merchant republic, paying tribute to the Mongols. The rest of the Rus’ became Mongol vassals, first among them being the Princes of Vladimir, later of Moscow, who served as the Mongols’ enforcers.

Rus culture has been changed. The Mongols suppressed the quasi-democratic institutions of the Rus’, the veches, the public town forums of political activism and debate. State terror was normalized, first by the Mongols, then by their chief henchmen, the Muscovites, who really got a hang of Mongol-style governance. Equality before the law was never allowed to find its footing. Religious backwardness rose as the Rus turned inwards, seeking spiritual deliverance from the Mongols whom they saw as divine punishment for their sins. What agency the Rus commoners were allowed to have prior to the Mongol yoke was shattered. All of this and more would fuel the power of future rulers. The Rus’ would wait centuries to rise again and when it did, it was a much different animal than before.

Can’t put your feet up: The Ottoman conquest of the Balkans

As mentioned above, the Mongols toured most of Eastern Europe, but their transformative effects were mostly felt in Russia. Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and Serbia, though thoroughly raided and massacred, rebounded and enjoyed about a century of watchful peace. In these kingdoms, the Mongols only accelerated processes that were already happening.

Across Europe, the Late Middle Ages was the time of stone castles. They weren’t a new invention, but before, stone castles were more the exception rather than the norm. Crusaders returning from the Middle East brought home new technologies that allowed the construction of far more sophisticated stone castles with round towers and concentric, multi-layered walls.

Simply put, kings loved castles because they were massive force multipliers that strengthened a kingdom. At the same time, they hated castles because the more there were, the more difficult it was for them to rule. A single rebellious noble in a stone castle at a strategic position could completely cripple a kingdom. Stone castles were like the nukes of the Middle Ages and kings would try their best to control their proliferation. But by the 13th century, the kings were losing control.

In Eastern Europe, the coming of the Mongols supercharged this process: Batu Khan’s invasion of Hungary in 1241-1242 ultimately failed despite the Mongols getting control of most of the countryside as, unlike the Rus’, who had never built stone walls, many Hungarian towns had (partial) stone fortifications. Eastern Europe’s kings learned their lesson and built castles wherever they could. The next round of Mongol invasions in the 1280s would be crushed by the Hungarians and Poles before they could do any major damage. But that came at a price.

In any case, though the Rus’ were destroyed, the rest of Eastern Europe saw some of the good times return. With Silesia in hand, Bohemia was larger than ever, Hungary was richer than the rest of Europe combined (producing three-quarters of the continent’s gold), Poland secured the aforementioned dynastic union with a beefy Lithuania, while Bulgaria and Serbia both decided to claim the legacy of the Rome, forming the Second Bulgarian Empire and the Serbian Empire. Like the rulers of the First Bulgarian Empire, their rulers were called Tsars, the Slavic attempt to say Caesar.

At the same time, all these kingdoms saw a decline in royal power and an increase of the power of dukes and magnates. From the safety of their castles, these oligarchs formed de facto kingdoms within kingdoms. Strong kings could still unite the realms after years of civil wars, besieging the very castles they had built, but the realm would fall apart again upon the next succession.

To this unstable mix came a new threat: the Ottomans, a Turkic dynasty, have managed to unite the beys of Anatolia. They held several advantages over the kingdoms of Southeast Europe of the 14th century: their tribal origin allowing them to take the Black Death a lot better than their settled rivals; the power vacuum left by the Eastern Romans; their effective combination of Roman, Islamic, and Turkic customs to create a centralized power structure -- instead of hereditary landed nobility, they had appointed governors, pashas, who served the crown directly and who could be rotated around as the sultan wished --, and, perhaps most importantly, dynastic stability. Unlike the monogamous Christian kings, Ottoman sultans took hundreds of wives and concubines so the next sultan could be selected from a large pool of potential heirs. They developed an ingenious solution to avoid civil wars or having the kingdom fracture: fratricide. While kinslaying was a big no-no in most of Europe, the rival claimants of the chosen Ottoman heir, his brothers, would be diligently and ritualistically strangled upon every succession. It also helped that the Ottoman military was the best organized in the world. Most notably, they had a corps of “new soldiers”, yeŋiçeri, anglicized as Janissaries, slave soldiers abducted from Christian kingdoms as children, forcefully converted to Islam, and subjected to brutal training. The survivors become the best infantrymen in all of Europe, loyal to the death to the sultan.

The Ottomans went ham on the two small empires, Bulgaria and Serbia. The Christian kingdoms launched crusades to kick them out of the Balkans, but by the year 1400, Bulgaria was conquered, and Serbia smashed to pieces: the undecisive and bloody Battle of Kosovo of 1389 saw the last leader of a sort-of unified Serbia, Lazar Hrebeljanović, die along with most of his army, though the Ottoman sultan and his army fared no better.

The Ottomans now had a foot in the door in controlling the chokepoint of the Iron Gates of the Danube. When trying to push past this, however, their conquest slowed down. In the decades that followed they had major troubles when it was their turn to be invaded by the Mongols, and some costly setbacks such as an exceptionally spirited Albanian resistance under Gjergj Kastrioti (a.k.a., Skanderbeg).

The Ottomans, however, reached new heights at the single most consequential battle you’ve never heard about: the 1444 Battle of Varna. The stakes were high. Either the Ottomans would be kicked out of Europe or they solidify their hold on to the Iron Gates, allowing them to affirm their control over Bulgaria and finally conquer Constantinople. Władysław, the King of Poland, Hungary, and Croatia, and the Grand Duke of Lithuania, basically ruler of a recently formed dynastic union of most of Eastern Europe, did more than simply lose. He died, along with his army, fighting the Ottomans in Bulgaria. Instead of a united Eastern Europe, the Ottomans would henceforth face it piecemeal.

After this decisive battle, the Ottomans conquered Constantinople in 1453 and claimed the mantle of Rome for themselves. They were now known as the Ottoman Empire, would last for almost 500 years under than name, and were ready to push their way past the chokepoint deep into Serbia.

Then came contemporary Eastern Europe’s greatest hero, the White Knight of Wallachia, János Hunyadi, the Regent of Hungary. Under his leadership, an army of Hungarians, Serbs, Czechs, and Poles, relying on a combination of the Christians’ mighty stone castles and knights, smashed to pieces the Ottoman army of Mehmet the Conqueror at Belgrade (a.k.a., the “White City” #tolkienistakingnotes), Serbia, with the sultan nearly dying with it. Christianity badly needed a win at this time and the Pope was so pleased that he ordered all bells across the Catholic world be rung at noon, a custom that stayed with us until today. The Ottomans failed to conquer Hungary (for now), but had taken over Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, and Serbia for the next 450 years.

All this allowed the two Romanian principalities, Moldavia and Wallachia, to finally break free from alternating Bulgarian and Hungarian overlordship -- only to be next on the Turks’ chopping block. The resistance of the two Voivodes (~Princes), Vlad III (the Impaler, a.k.a., Vlad the Dragon, or Vlad Drăculea -> Dracula) of Wallachia, and Ștefan III (the Great) are seen as the start of Romanian independent history. They too, lost to the Turks soon, though. Later, Michael II (the Brave) would mount a rebellion, becoming the first to unite the Romanian principalities of Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania for one year in 1600: the first and only time until the 20th century that Romanians were united in a single state.

The cultural and demographic effects of the wars are far-reaching. Just as Bulgaria and Serbia won their independence from Constantinople, they were brought back into its yoke, this time, ruled over by a different religion. The two peoples with long, proud, and troubled histories were left at the mercy of the Turks: they would be forced to pay the devshirme, the ‘blood tax’ of young children to the sultan, providing the Janissary corps, the elite infantry of their oppressors with new recruits. While the Ottomans were tolerant against the Orthodox religion, they cracked down heavily on Catholicism. After 400 years of forced and coerced conversion, the formerly Catholic Albania, Bosnia, and Kosovo came to have majority Muslim populations with significant numbers in North Macedonia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria as well to this day. These changes will, again, become important later.

The eagle has two heads: Austrian seizure of Bohemia and Hungary

Matthias, the king of Hungary and the son of János Hunyadi, died without an heir in 1490. Instead of trying to fight the Ottomans, he had expanded west, yoinking Silesia from the Bohemians and Vienna from the Austrians, but his conquests died with him. As did the country’s unity that his father had forged. Ironically, his lifetime ambition of a union between Bohemia and Hungary was realized through his death, as the Polish king of Bohemia, supported by the Hungarian nobility, won the war of succession and got himself elected king of Hungary.

His opponent was the Habsburg Archduke of Austria. The Habsburg dynasty at the time held the throne of the Holy Roman Empire, a very weird entity. A successor of the Eastern Frankish kingdom and claimant to the mantle of Rome, its territory comprised modern-day Germany, Czechia, Austria, Switzerland, and the Benelux countries. Instead of a real empire, it functioned as a union of hundreds of feudal entities of various sizes, ranging from the minuscule, glorified manors led by some penniless nobles, to the Kingdom of Bohemia. It was all presided over by an emperor with varying a degree of actual power. The Habsburgs held the Eastern Realm of the empire, (Österreich, anglicized as Austria) under their direct control and it makes sense to refer to them as ‘Austrians’. They retook Vienna from Hungary, moreover, through a good marriage, they gained a massive amount of land and power: first the highly developed Lowlands (Nederlands) of the empire, the modern Benelux states, then the recently unified and recently globe-spanning colonial hegemon, Spain.

By 1526, the Ottomans, having finished their conquest of Egypt and the Levant, saw that the balance of forces was tilted decisively in their favor against the Christian kingdoms. Their young and energetic sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, invaded. The young king of Bohemia-Hungary met them in battle. Half the nobles refused to join him, he blundered into the Ottoman army, and he died on the field together with his army. Suleiman thought he was only fighting the Christians’ vanguard but soon was informed that he had just crushed Hungary, the Ottomans’ archenemy, the strongest of the Christian kingdoms, without realizing.

Yet, the real winners were the Habsburgs. With yet another king dead without an heir, the succession in both Bohemia and Hungary was thrown wide open. By this point, the two monarchies were de facto elective positions and Ferdinand, the Archduke of Austria, humbly submitted his application. He was accepted by the Bohemian diet and half of Hungary; the other half supporting the Vajda (~Prince) of Transylvania, the noble who led the half of the Hungarian army that failed to show up for the battle. He also happened to have the support of the Ottoman sultan. An undecisive war of succession followed that left the country divided. Croatia, the western parts, and Upper Hungary (~modern Slovakia) ended up as Habsburg “Royal” Hungary, Transylvania and the east became Eastern Hungary. Having failed to put a puppet on the throne, the Ottomans annexed the central parts of the country which was thus divided in three. The Habsburgs in total gained Bohemia (with it they yoinked Silesia) and the best parts of the Hungarian kingdom: a heavily fortified, hilly buffer zone, the Croatian seaboard, and the rich mines of the north, safe in the mountains of Slovakia.

200 years of war followed between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans. As time went on, the wars went worse and worse for the latter. While they held the initiative during the 16th century, progresses in fortification technology had their campaigns bog down into endless sieges. By the time they would take a town or a castle, campaigning season would end, and half their army was dead of disease. In 1566, Suleiman the Magnificent himself, whose reign marked the absolute height of the Ottomans’ power, died shitting his guts out in the siege of Szigetvár, a no-name castle in southern Hungary defended by Croats. His ambition had always been to take Vienna, controlling the chokepoint between the Carpathians and the Alps, a safe border against Western Europe, but it was not to be.

By the early 17th century, the Habsburgs could focus elsewhere. In their ongoing fight against Protestantism and their efforts to centralize power, they cracked down on Bohemian autonomy, something they’d promised the Bohemian diet to preserve. Their plans to do so without resistance, however, went out the window. Literally.

In 1618, The people of Prague took the administrators imposed on them by Vienna and threw them out a third-story window in what was known as the “Third Defenestration of Prague” -- the city’s inhabitants had this peculiar tradition of political engagement. War broke out soon after, the Thirty Years’ War. Long story short, all the great powers of Europe ended up involved, 25% of all of Germany died, and the war ended in stalemate. By 1648, the Dutch were free from Habsburg Spain, Sweden would become the hegemon of the Baltic Sea, and Bohemia brought under firm Austrian control. It would take a world war for the Czechs (and the Slovaks) to break free.

A few decades later the Austrians faced up against the last Ottoman attempt to capture Vienna. With help from Poland, the Ottomans lost, and Austria went on the counteroffensive in the late 17th century. They “liberated” Hungary and put it under strict control from Vienna. The Habsburgs invaded Serbia to do the same, but the Ottomans held on to the territory around the Iron Gates firmly. The rest of the Balkans remained in Turkish hands.

The Habsburg-Ottoman wars were devastating for Southeastern Europe. Hungary was depopulated and wouldn’t rise again as a major power, its rich mines fueling the Habsburgs’ bid to become a global hegemon. Bosnians, Croats, Serbs, and Vlachs, would move around and live on the frontier between two of the world’s most powerful empires until the 20th century. Taking shelter in the mountains of the Balkans, many of these people turned away from agriculture to form smaller scale martial societies, serving as border guard units when their imperial overlords could afford their services and becoming bandits when they could not. Like so many other things, these changes will become important later.

This is how the Republic dies: The road to the partition of Poland

Much like the rest of Eastern Europe, the Polish monarchy was decentralizing heavily in the late medieval/early modern period. The Poles were also quite unfortunate in the feudalism game. Their royal dynasties, the Piasts, the Anjous, and the Jagiellons kept dying out. With each new dynasty coming to power, the Polish nobility managed to secure more privileges in exchange for supporting the new candidate. With the extinction of House Jagiellon in 1572, Poland, technically the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, formally became an elective monarchy. For its time, it was a decently progressive and democratic state, even calling itself the Republic -- but at a time and a place where being so was risky and difficult.

Centuries of mass handout of privileges without merit and a decline of royal power led to the emergence of two noble classes: the magnetaria, essentially the ruling dukes and oligarchs, and the szlachta, the minor nobility and the kingdom’s electorate. The magnetaria were a problem for the kingdom because they had a vested interest in keeping royal power as weak as possible, while its members pulled the realm in different directions to serve their own ends. The szlachta were a problem because they were a group of penniless and perpetually unhappy freeloaders, huge in number, up to 10% of the population. Protected by their privileges and made essential by the fact that they elected the king, they were a burden on the kingdom.

For now, however, Poland’s problems at the time were dwarfed by the ones its neighbors and adversaries faced. The Ottomans and the Austrian Habsburgs were bogged down in endless war, while Russia wasn’t in a state to be a threat to anyone. Yet.

Russia as we know it today started out as the Principality of Muscovy, whose rulers, ever since the 13th century, were basically the henchmen of the Mongols. By the 15th century, however, the Mongols were fragmented and no longer in charge; the Muscovites were free to conquer for themselves. They did, taking over the other major Russian state, the Republic of Novgorod in the 15th century.

In the mid-16th century, a guy called Ivan became the ruler of “all Rus’” and took the title of Tsar, the same title that the Orthodox Bulgarian and Serbian emperors had used, also claiming the mantle of Rome. We remember him as ‘the Terrible’ because he aggressively centralized the new Russian state, paving the way for its future strength. In the short run, however, it was devastating for Russia. Ivan, having murdered his own son, died without an heir. His death ended the Rurikid dynasty in Russia which traced their origins to the Vikings who had formed the Rus kingdom. With his death, the country entered the Time of Troubles, a period of civil strife, famine, disease, and war, that, amidst all the death and suffering, saw a powerful Poland, as well as Sweden, use Russia as a punching bag at a regular basis. Poland even took Moscow in 1610 and held it for two years.

So, as of 1640, Poland was the largest, most populous, most progressive, and most powerful kingdom in Europe. It had a fertile core land in the west of its territories, rich vassals along the Baltic with many trade cities, and an endless, mostly empty steppe as buffer in the east. Then things began to go wrong for them. That mostly empty steppe, “the borderland”, or Ukraina, between Poland proper, the Russians in the north, and the Tatars in the east (~Mongols who converted to Islam and were now vassals of the Ottoman Empire), was home to the Cossacks, an unruly and heavily martial society.

The Cossacks had been the Poles’ primary defense against Tatar incursions and irregular Ottoman forces. The latter used their bases in Crimea to take slaves from Eastern Europe by the hundreds of thousands to be sold in the Islamic world with the intermediation of Italian traders. In times of war the Cossacks’ privileges were expanded and they were used for defense. In times of peace their privileges were curtailed and their people pushed into serfdom. This was something that the Cossacks eventually began to see as a bad deal.

By the mid-17th century, the Cossacks had had enough and did something nobody had expected them to do. They joined forces with their age-old enemies, the Tatars, and, under the leadership of Hetman (Commander) Bohdan Khmelnytsky, rebelled against the Poles. A disastrous civil war ensued in Ukraine that led to a massive loss of life. Nobles were massacred by the serfs, serfs were massacred by the nobles, Jews were massacred by everyone. All the while the Tatars used the chaos to keep the slave trade flowing.

The Poles then did what everybody should have expected them to do, they paid off the Tatars who’d been in it just for the money and were happy to leave the war. Deprived of their allies, the Cossacks had to find a new one, and it just so happened that someone was offering. They made a deal with Russia. For the Tsar, the absolute ruler of his lands, this meant that the rulers of Ukraine have submitted to him and, like “all other Rus’”, they owed him direct allegiance. Later, it was seen as a “reunification between Russia and Ukraine”. For the Cossacks, who were used to feudal oaths, this was taken as something between an alliance and a vassalage, preferably weaker than the deal they had with Poland, the deal they walked away from. Both sides at the time were aware of the “misunderstanding” but both were eager to preserve the ambiguity and use it for their benefit later, so they just rolled with it for now. The war resumed.

Out of nowhere, a small regional power northwest of Poland entered the war. They happened to have the best quality military of the time, far bigger than what its economy could sustain: Sweden. The Protestant kings of Sweden had a simple yet ingenious economic model to sustain their oversized army: take the army abroad and plunder other kingdoms. To sell this practice at home and keep their conscience clean, they relied on religious justifications. Poland was weakened, distracted, rich, and Catholic, a perfect target. The king of Sweden opportunistically invaded Poland, helped by the fact that they had a claim on its throne --- because of the elective monarchy system and the contested, challenged, and corrupt nature of elections, by this time, everyone and their mother could say they had a claim on the throne of Poland.

The Polish nobility had a brilliant idea to restore peace without pain to themselves: get rid of their own king and swear fealty to the king of Sweden. The hope was to use the Swedish armies against the Cossacks and the Russians. The Swedes happily accepted the proposal, but, when it came to a choice between fighting Cossacks and Russians in impoverished Belarus and Ukraine, or staying in rich Poland proper to do what they came to do, they did what everyone should have expected them to do. They stayed in the west and looted the country bare. Poland, with its military paralyzed by its gentry, was completely overrun by Swedes, Russians, and Cossacks.

Eventually, the Poles rallied around their king, Jan Casimir of House Vasa. Mustering and finally focusing their considerable power and with some support from the Danes, the Dutch, and the Austrians, they beat all their enemies. Peace returned and Poland remained a force to be reckoned with for half a century, repaying the Austrians by saving Vienna in the Great Turkish War.

Yet, the damage was done. In the 20 years of this “Deluge” of onslaughts, Poland lost a third of its population and an immense amount of its wealth. I’ve seen estimates saying that the damage was worse proportionally speaking than the one caused by WWII --- and anything worse than WWII for Poland is a catastrophe of unimaginable scale. Just as notably, although Jan Casimir, the king of Poland won many victories, he lost the last, perhaps the most important battle. This battle wasn’t fought against Swedes, Cossacks, or Russians; it was against his rebellious magnates when he tried to centralize royal power. With the rebels’ victory, any hope of reforming the Polish kingdom was gone. Jan Casimir said something along the lines of “OK screw it, then” and abdicated the throne. Poland was wrecked but its broken political system remained.

The fighting slowed down but kept flaring up until 1686 when Poland and Russia signed a peace and agreed to focus on kicking about the ailing Ottomans. Poland sold what possessions it still had on the east bank of the Dnipro plus Kyiv to Russia; Ukraine was partitioned, along its vast natural barrier, and an autonomous Cossack state was formed.

Then, at the turn of the 18th century, Russia, Sweden, and Poland engaged in a weird 3-way war called the Great Northern War. A divided and weakened Poland, under heavy foreign influence, couldn’t really decide which of its natural enemies it wanted to side with, and was in the end exploited by both. Sweden occupied and looted Poland again, then Russia under Peter (the Great) defeated Sweden, took over the Baltic that Sweden had taken from Poland-Lithuania, and became hegemon of the north. Poland became a shell of a power, its army limited in size, its magnates squabbling, its monarchs serving foreign, mostly Russian interests.

Over the century, Russia gradually tightened its control over the Cossacks, then finally destroyed the Cossack state, exiling any dissenters into Siberia. But the Empress of Russia, Catherine (the Great) had designs for Poland as well. Catherine allied with the ruler of Prussia, a former vassal of Poland’s that had managed to break away during the Deluge a full century before. This former duchy, now a powerful kingdom, under the rule of Frederick (the Great) had since replaced Sweden as the small aggressive state with a big and high-quality army on Poland’s western border. Maria Theresa (not ‘the Great’, but not too bad herself) of Austria got in on the action too and the three divided the territory of Poland. These people weren’t friends at all, heck, Frederick had begun his career by yoinking Silesia from Maria Theresa, but they each saw Poland as nothing else than a cake to divide. Over the course of three rounds of partitions and 21 years, Poland, powerless to do anything about this, was erased from the map, not to be seen again until the 20th century. The fall of Poland and the fall of Eastern Europe was complete.

 Epilogue

So, there it is, a very, very, condensed version of 600 years of Eastern European history, during which their feudal kingdoms died, and their people were brought under foreign imperial rule. Various interpretations may tempt the reader (or indeed the writer), but we must always be careful with them.

Perhaps the most tempting narrative is victimhood, followed by calls for restitution or revanchism. For instance, a Bulgarian might feel that a historic wrong has been committed against them by the Turks. The same might be felt with Czechs and Germans, Ukrainians and Russians, or Poles and Swedes. I don’t subscribe to that. To ethnic Hungarians of the 15th century, my concept of Hungary as it exists in the 21st century would be about as alien as the concept of Netflix. There is a cultural, linguistic, perhaps even genetic link, sure, but the people who committed all those wrongs aren’t the people who are alive today.

The real victims of Crusaders, Mongols, Ottomans, Swedes, and Russians of the medieval and early modern periods are the people they victimized then and there. Yet, a lot of people seem to disagree with this philosophy in contexts outside of Eastern Europe, colonialism in particular, and talk about “historically oppressed people” with explicit mentions of restitution. I plan to discuss how the two philosophies clash in Eastern Europe in Episode 5. Here I only say that we can’t and shouldn’t try to undo the fall of the medieval Serbian Empire, or the golden splendor of Rus Kyiv, or the “innocent” pagan Baltic tribes. They are gone. Similarly, nothing will bring back the lives, freedom, and happiness of the millions butchered, enslaved, or subjugated. If you think that, with them, an important part of history, an important part of your own people is gone too, you’re right to grieve. I do it all the time, for all of them.

While I don’t think we should view Eastern Europeans today as victims (or at least, not for this), I think we should recognize that, to a lot them, the fall of Eastern Europe was, and remains, a trauma. That process, both by its nature, and by its extreme violence, left many marks on the people alive today. A Muslim in Bosnia might not (hopefully not) view their religion as a mark of trauma, but to a Serb, whose country chartered a much different course in history than it would have without the Ottoman conquest, this remains a sensitive issue centuries later. We would do well to respect or at least understand these sensitivities, lest we add to the trauma.

Unfortunately, the people who are by far the worst at respecting the trauma of Eastern Europeans are the Eastern Europeans themselves. As in any loser team, there is an endless amount of blame going on. To this day, Romanians blame the Hungarians for failing to help them against the Ottomans in Vlad’s rebellion, Hungarians blame them back for deserting the Crusaders at Varna. Then there’s the pure mockery of adjacent cultures. Russians continue to use khokhol (~crest) as an ethnic slur against the Ukrainians, a reference to the Cossacks’ unique haircut. It is their expression of the pain of Ukraine diverging from Russia after the Mongol invasion. The shared experience of their countries wearing the scars of the historical trauma that really unites Eastern Europe, more than any political entity or ideology ever did, is forgotten. How that trauma resurfaced to create yet more trauma in the 20th century I plan to write about in Episode 4 (but in the meantime, if you ever need to see evidence of this in the 21st century, just turn on the news).

Moving away, another narrative is that of institutions. Feudal kingdoms fell to the Ottomans’ pasha system. Russian repressive absolutism prevailed over Polish parliamentarism and elective monarchy. Centralization beats decentralization. Keep up with your governing institutions or die. There may also be a point to be made about the fragility of monogamous dynasties and the triumph of Ottoman polygyny and fratricide. The fall of Eastern Europe as a competition of institutions and governing traditions is thus also a tempting reading and I think there’s a lot going for it. But we best not forget that, depressing as this fact is, the final test of these institutions took place on the battlefields of Varna, Belgrade, Berestechko, Vienna, Poltava, and a hundred more. One is perhaps left with thinking how things might have been different if the Crusaders had overcome the Ottomans or if Jan Casimir had won his last battle. Then, one’s certainty of knowing the ideal government form, if there had ever been any, might be challenged.

One can also talk about economics. Did the Portuguese and Spanish begin their quest for the New World to avoid trading with the Ottoman Muslims who came to control the silk road? Did the feudal kingdoms of Eastern Europe, then the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth began to wither due to being further from the intensifying trade between East and West? Were they lacking the power to reform their institutions due to becoming the relative losers of the Columbian exchange, while the kingdoms of Western Europe, Spain, France, and Britain were becoming world-spanning empires? Were political strife and military failure due to a lack of economic growth or were these themselves the very obstacles to growth? As you can guess, these are the million-dollar questions here and I won’t even try to touch them. All I will say is that landlocked and resource-poor Switzerland, also an early modern backwater but one that has been mostly at peace for the past half millenium, is a nice place to live today, while Albania, despite having sea access, is perhaps less so.

My final narrative is great vs small-man history. All the people appearing in the post were part of the warlord class, the top of an extremely strict hierarchy they did everything to sustain. Kings and generals who were mortal enemies on the battlefield had far more in common with each other than the people they lorded over. Even though they had a tendency of dying on the battlefield, they weren’t the ones suffering the most or making most of the sacrifices. They were not the ones who developed their countries, those would be the commomers who toiled on the fields, labored in constructions, traded with each other, and advanced culture and science. We remember the warriors because 19th century statesmen decided to make them into the main heroes of nations they wouldn’t even recognize. I plan to write about that process in Episode 3. Still, students and amateurs of history are drawn to these characters because they are interesting and because their actions were consequential for which cultures, traditions, religions, values would thrive and which would fail. Could someone less crafty than Mindaugas have ensured that Lithuania survives the Crusades? Could someone less valiant than János Hunyadi have stopped the Turks at Belgrade? Could someone less tenacious than Jan Casimir have prevailed against the Swedes? Could someone less ruthless than Ivan the Terrible have reassambled Russia, could someone other than Skanderbeg or Vlad Dracula have created the great and horrible legends on which entire countries were built?

Whatever the answers to these academic questions are, by the 19th century, the history of “great men” was ending. Just as the dust began to settle on the corpse of Poland, the French Revolution ushered in a new era of governance. Outdated feudalism and arbitrary absolutism began to give way to liberalism and nationalism. It would take time for these ideas to take hold in Eastern Europe but when they would, the imperial overlords would face a whole new challenge in keeping their holdings together. The long-standing kingdoms of Eastern Europe may have ended, but the history of the nations of Eastern Europe was only beginning. In the next episode, they will be free again.

May 21, 2023

Notes:

1. I’ve seen amateur historians and history educators describe the Mongols as “religiously tolerant”, “gender progressive”, and “facilitators of trade”. To make this point, one really must stretch the definitions of these terms to the point of uselessness, even downright parody. Yes, they were religiously tolerant: they burned the temples of every religion they encountered without playing favorites. Yes, they were gender progressive, as in, Mongol women could ride horses and shoot bows. Mongol women had much less agency than Europeans on who they could marry but they were entirely free to pick their preferred means of running the logistics of the Mongol war machine while the men were fighting (=cook for their husbands). That involved knowing how to hunt with a bow from horseback. Mongol leaders had such large harems and raped so many women that one in every two hundred people in the whole world today are descended from the Khans. Yes, they were facilitators of trade because they extracted value from it without adding anything and because banditry does not really exist in an empire (not even an ‘empire’, more like ‘the range of their constantly moving hordes’) where every able-bodied man who wasn’t in the army has been killed or sold into slavery. Modern buzzwords, as ever, make very little sense when they’re used to describe medieval peoples.

2. János Hunyadi was so awesome that several modern nations want to have a piece of him. While he very clearly was a “Hungarian” in the sense that nationality was recognized at the time (=being a vassal of the king of Hungary, only nobles counted), his ethnicity is a subject of fierce debate. Specifically, Romanians are eager to claim that he was an ethnic Vlach. And while that may or may not be true, it is good to remind us that Hunyadi would probably feel closer to any random nobleman in Spain than a Vlach (or indeed, a Hungarian) commoner. There are even theories that his mom was Greek. In any case, “ethnically Vlach” nobles in Transylvania were seen as part of the Hungarian nobility. The same is true for ethnic Slovaks or Ruthenians. The only nationality (of nobles) that was recognized within the realms of the “Crown of Saint Stephen”, was the Croatian as the King of Croatia was a technically separate royal title from the King of Hungary. All this is to say that Hunyadi was Hungarian in the same sense as Vlad III and his court were Vlachs, the latter titles being tied to the Principality of Wallachia. Who is and isn't a Hungarian, Romanian, Polish, etc., in the nationalist sense was the prime question of the nationalistic movements of the 19th century and I'll touch on that in Episode 3.

3. One of the reasons Polish nobility was so hard to deal with was that a lot of their holdings were considered allodium rather than feudum. The owner of a piece of land held in feudum was in a contract with his overlord, a contract that obligated him to serve the lord, and was subject to termination upon disobedience. An allodium, much rarer in Europe, was a hereditary piece of land that the owner held freely without oversight or obligations.

4. Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the leader of the Cossack revolt was a crafty diplomat, a staunch patriot (in the early modern sense), and a brutal war leader. His leadership saw the largest antisemitic pogrom before the Holocaust, with up to 100,000 victims (numbers are heavily contested) -- Ruthenian serfs considered the Jews who gave out loans and seized their assets every now and then as their oppressors just as much as the Polish nobles. He also personally purchased 8,000 captive Poles from the Tatars after a battle only to have them all systematically beheaded and disemboweled in revenge for being defeated a year earlier. A Ukrainian national hero, a war criminal, an antisemite, or a turncloak and sellout for the Russians; you be the judge. In any case, the roots of anti-semitism in Ukraine are deep and, even though this has barely anything to do with Ukrainians today, people are still quick to jump on this.

5. The Cossacks weren’t simply freedom-loving victims of Poles imperial oppression. They ended up mimicking their ancient enemies, the Tatars and became raiders. Their livelihoods depended upon raiding the Turkish holdings along the Black Sea coast and they were always eager to provoke war between Poland-Lithuania and the Ottoman Empire. When the Polish nobles vetoed the war, the Cossacks rebelled not against the kingdom but against the Polish nobility who were governing them. That's not to say the Poles weren't actively oppressing them; they'd been pursuing the polonization of Ukraine (a.k.a., ethnic cleansing light). Again, you be the judge on who was more right or less wrong.

6. People interested in the obscure time of the early modern period in Eastern Europe are encouraged to check out romantic historical fiction literature of the 19th century and apply a dose of critical reading to filter out the nationalism (it’s not bad at all, really, but this filter is good to have in any context). Géza Gárdonyi from Hungary has written about the Ottoman Wars, most notably, the Eclipse of the Crescent Moon about the 1552 Siege of Eger. Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Trilogy of three books, With Fire and Sword, The Deluge (also a pretty epic movie btw), and Fire in the Steppe is basically the Polish version of the Three Musketeers legendarium, set in the times of the Cossack rebellions and the Swedish Deluge. Alexander Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter is set in the times of Cossacks’ wars against the Russian Empire. The Prince-Bishop of Montenegro, Petar Petrović-Njegoš’s The Mountain Wreath, set in 18th century Montenegro, showcases the struggle of Serb and Montenegrin tribes against both Western (Venetian) and Ottoman influences and domination. Ivan Vazov’s Under the Yoke is about Bulgaria's 19th century independence movement against the Ottomans -- a warmup for Episode 3.

7. I very strongly recommend the Youtube channel Eastory, whose very entertaining animated video on the Deluge got me interested in the whole period.

Comments and questions should be addressed to peter.bayer7@gmail.com