Why Central Europe
Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the Danube
Much as one might question a billionaire’s decision to don a bat costume and fight crime at night, one might also question why I’ve decided to spend my free time writing about a somewhat niche historical topic. Thankfully unlike Batman, my reason is not the murder of my parents outside of a theater. More simply, and much less violently, I’ve just read a lot into the history of Central Europe and think the region’s story is unique, engrossing, entertaining, and that knowing it contributes to a more nuanced understanding of our world.
The next question is what makes Central Europe’s history so unique, engrossing and entertaining. The answer to this is in this substack’s title. The history of Central Europe (which I define very broadly as the area covering modern-day Germany, Austria, Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, Poland and Romania,) has been shaped by both massive continental empires and the emergence of nations and nation-states out of those empires. These dual forces have given Central Europe a unique history that makes it distinct from the rest of Europe.
By the late Middle Ages (1300-1500) most of Western Europe had coalesced into the geographically, linguistically and culturally distinct countries we know today. Conversely, in Central Europe at that same time the borders between kingdoms were still changing often as the rulers of Hungary, Poland, Bohemia and Austria married each other or died without heirs. Germany wasn’t a country until 1871, until then most of modern Germany was a conglomerate of kingdoms, duchies, free cities and other territories with varying levels of self-rule known as the Holy Roman Empire. Within all these shifting borders there was a great deal of immigration, cultural exchange and economic and military competition, all of which contribute to the region’s unique history and legacy.
It’s my belief that Central Europe’s history is woefully under explored by English speaking audiences. Thankfully, in the past decade scholars on both sides of the Atlantic have been critically reassessing the region’s history. Their scholarship has widened our understanding of several historic moments and movements that have enduring effects up to present day. It’s also resulted in a new wave of very entertaining and informative books on the region for general readers. My plan with this substack is through book reviews, posts on recent scholarship, visits to museums and historic sites, and maybe even some original research, to share both that serious scholarship and fun reads on Central Europe. Below is a short explanation of how exactly I became interested in the region, and a bit more on how those two central themes of empires and nations make Central Europe’s history so unique.
The impetus for my interest in Central Europe, like the impetus for buying a time share, was a wonderful vacation. In November of 2019 on a whim my wife and I booked a three city trip to Budapest, Vienna and Prague. In Budapest I was transfixed by the imperial splendor of Budapest’s Neo-Gothic Parliament Building. This fascination grew as we visited Vienna’s Hofburg Imperial Treasury, where the Habsburgs kept, among other things, the Crown of Charlemagne, the Imperial Crown of Austria, Napoleon’s son’s crib, several pieces of the true cross, a unicorn (actually narwhal) horn and what was once believed to be the Holy Grail. In Prague we visited Prague Castle, where I learned about the medieval dynastic horse trading between Hungary and Bohemia, that Prague had once been the capital of the Holy Roman Empire, and apparently that the Empire’s capital could move.
That vacation introduced me to the breadth and depth of Central Europe’s history and started me down a rabbit hole reading list of ever more intriguing books on the region. While I realize not everyone finds things like 19th century Austrian bureaucratic reform appealing, other aspects of Central European history are both interesting in and of themselves and have something instructive to say about how our world came to be.
Nations
In the last several years nationalist groups in the United States and across Europe, have been on the rise. Nationalist politicians in turn have introduced and at times passed legislation which contradict classical liberal democratic ideals. Confoundingly, when nationalist movements first emerged in Central Europe in the 19th century, they were inspired by those same classical liberal ideals. As the Revolutions of 1848 swept through Italy, Germany and the Habsburg Empire, Czech, German, Hungarian and Polish revolutionaries fought absolutist empires for liberal principles like universal suffrage, freedom of the press, national self-determination and the right use their own native tongues in public affairs.
The nationalism that emerged within Central Europe in this time however, had a distinctly different motivation from the nationalism of Western Europe. As John Connelly asserts in his authoritative From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, Central and Eastern European nationalism contrasts itself from the nationalism of France or England which are based on a sense of pride or honor, in that it is motivated by a fear of genocide. The Hungarians, Poles, and Czechs who revolted in 1848 had seen use of their language in public limited or outlawed and experienced centuries of control by foreign empires. Their efforts were based on very real fears that if they did nothing they would cease to exist. The dark side of this brand of nationalism is most evidently seen in the ethnic violence of the twentieth century, where during both World Wars in Central Europe the conflict devolved into ethnically charged civil wars. The Balkan Wars of the 1990s are a legacy of this type of nationalism and more recently this nationalist sentiment is being used by right-wing chauvinists like Victor Orban of Hungary who see in the European Union another foreign, imperial power looking to create a cosmopolitan Europe that destroys their culture.
Conversely, many see the European Union as capable of preserving both peace in Europe (one reason for the institution’s inception) and national difference through a dynamic system of overlapping identities and sovereignties referred to as “neo-medievalism”. This solution derives from the fragmented and shared form of sovereignty of the Holy Roman Empire, showing Central Europe’s history has the intellectual roots for better understanding the 21st century’s problems.
Empires
The long presence of empires in Central Europe also makes understanding its history vital. A term with almost universally negative connotations now, the empires that stretched across Central Europe over the last 1,000 years were multicultural, often fought with each other and simultaneously held positions that to our modern perspectives seem fairly progressive and demonically repressive. Like the emergence of nationalism in Central Europe, the empires of Central Europe have something to say about why the world is the way it is, while also fascinating with how different they were in their time.
The largest, most confusing and longest lasting Central European empire was the Holy Roman Empire. A sort of elective monarchy, geographically it covered most of modern day Germany, Austria, Czechia, and parts of Italy and Poland. It lasted from Charlemagne’s crowning by Pope Leo III in 800 until its last Emperor, the Habsburg Francis II, dissolved it in 1806, essentially just so Napoleon couldn’t claim the title himself. Thought of as outdated and ineffective for most of its long existence, its longevity was a result of its governing structure’s organic formation. Rather than a modern concept of rule which sees sovereignty as indivisible, the Holy Roman Empire divided sovereignty over time between the Emperor, electors, princes, imperial cities and at times even individuals.
This “divided sovereignty” was enshrined in the Holy Roman Empire’s constitution which, in lieu of laying out one system of rights and protections for all its subjects, issued charters which conferred rights or privileges on specific groups or regions. Any sort of universal rights or laws were assumed by custom and not expressly written down. Divided sovereignty meant, for example, the Emperor could not declare war without the consent of the princes, however individual princes could wage war with their own resources, so long as it didn’t harm the Empire. This as Peter H. Wilson describes in Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire meant, “Peace in the Empire remained rooted in pre-modern methods of consensus-seeking and the defense of corporate rights, in contrast to the new ideals of sovereignty, individual rights and (after 1789) popular control of hegemonic state power.” The governance of the Holy Roman Empire provides an alternative to what modern political science has generally asserted, that a state’s sovereignty must be held unilaterally.
The Ottoman Empire is another empire whose presence looms large in Central Europe’s history. Established in the 13th century by Turkoman tribal leader Osman I, the Ottomans spread quickly across Asia Minor and the Balkans, putting an end to the Byzantine Empire in 1453 by capturing Constantinople under Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror. This brought them to Europe’s full attention. Ottoman expansion continued through the Balkans into Hungary through the 1526 battle of Mohacs, in which Hungarian troops were routed and in the retreat Hungarian King Louis II was thrown from his horse and drowned in a stream when the weight of his armor stopped him from standing up. This allowed the Habsburgs to claim the Kingdom of Hungary through dynastic succession, and so began several hundred years of rivalry between Habsburg Emperors and Ottoman Sultans. The Ottomans laid siege to Vienna twice in 1529 and 1683, remaining a force on the periphery of European great power politics for centuries.
The Ottoman Empire was depicted by its enemies as primitive, violent and myopically focused on Holy War against Christianity. In reality, as early as the 14th century the they realized, financially, politically and practically, constant holy war was untenable. The Ottomans married into Christian families for dynastic consolidation early on, entered into alliances with France against the Habsburgs, and traded frequently with the Genoese and Venetians in the Mediterranean. The Ottomans were also more than happy to back the Protestant George I Rákóczi of Transylvania in the 17th century to antagonize Habsburg efforts to control Hungary.
The Ottoman’s treatment of religious minorities is a prime example of being simultaneously progressive and repressive by modern standards. Religious toleration was, much like trade and alliances with Christian powers, a practical concern. The Empire’s vast geographic area made forced conversion of all subjects logistically impossible. Besides, what the Empire wanted above all was loyal taxpayers. It was easier to get these when all were allowed to practice their own faith. Restrictions were put on the practice of non-Islamic faiths, and non-Muslims had to pay higher taxes. However, compared to how religious minorities were treated at the time in some of Christian Europe the Ottoman Empire was a more tolerant place.
Conversely the Empire had a practice called Devshirme, in which Christian boys, primarily from the Balkans, were plucked from their villages and trained to serve as soldiers and bureaucrats for the sultan. While forced to convert to Islam, most of these boys were poorly versed in their Christian faith and this service gave them access to a level of wealth and education they would never have received otherwise. Officially considered “slaves of the sultan” they were severely restricted in some ways, but their quality of life and the future for their children was unequivocally better.
Historically, the Ottoman Empire has also been seen as an important actor in defining Europe from the outside. Its destruction of Byzantium has been understood as a major step towards a united European identity during the Middle Ages, as geographically Europe became defined as where Christianity was practiced.
Yet hundreds of years of history in Hungary and the Balkans proves just how permeable that border between the “Christian world” and the “Muslim world” has always been. The Ottomans frequent forays into Europe shaped its borders (ever wonder why Croatia is shaped so weird, thats a line the Venetians and Ottomans agreed to in a treaty in the 16th century) and this level of cultural exchange, through both warfare and trade, challenges and confounds popular conceptions of medieval and early modern Europe. Once again, to study Central Europe gives a fuller understanding of our world, and challenges the assumptions we have grown up with.
The emergence of modern nationalism, Islam’s interactions with the West, the roots of the European Union, all of these topics which have very real effects on how we live today have their origins in Central Europe’s history, and are just a few of the topics I hope to explore in this substack. I look forward to sharing more in depth stories from this region with you in the future.