Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (original 2011; edition 2012)

This is my fourth book by Norman Davies and not only is it written in his attractive and accessible style, it presents a set of European histories that it is impossible to find together anywhere else.

As he points out, history is written by the winners, so it is doubly useful to record the stories of kingdoms/ peoples that were once well-known but are now almost forgotten. They influenced their epoch and their millions of citizens had lives the same as those of the winners.

In the last chapter he reflects on his "Vanished Kingdoms" saying that historians are not comfortable with the idea of random causation, and that some sort of analysis, however tentative, is desirable and he goes on to categorize the various internal and external ways that kingdoms/ peoples can be overwhelmed.

A few private reflections triggered by the book would include the following:

He shows how larger geographic kingdoms often break up along ethnic lines when central control weakens but somehow England managed to integrate invaders a varied as Saxons, Normans, Scandinavians and Celts with the original Old British (Welsh) inhabitants in what is now the English part of the British Isles. The same would go for Spain in integrating Basques, Moors, Carthaginians, Greeks and Visigoths in most of the Peninsula. Possible reasons could include the newcomers plans to settle and how long they live together under central control.

Davies perhaps shows that the old European late monarchic system was ready to collapse after the blows of the French Revolution, the rise of commercial middle classes and new democratic egalitarian ideas, so maybe it only needed a good push when traditional authority was gravely weakened after WW1, particularly in Russia after its military defeat by the central powers.

There is no doubt after reading the book that the business of the Communists was destruction, and their explicit aim was to extend their dictatorship to all Europe and liquidate whole sections of the population there in the same way that they did in Russia (15 million people in the extreme violence of the Great Terror according to Robert Conquest). They were nothing like as effective at building society (if they cared) as Davies shows by his account of the economic failure and implosion of the USSR.

Finally, he also follows the well trodden path of remaining silent about the fact that the Bolsheviks were not Russians.

As David R. Francis, the US ambassador to Russia at the time, said in a 1918 dispatch, "The Bolshevik leaders here, most of whom are Jews and 90 percent of whom are returned exiles, care little for Russia or any other country but are internationalists and are trying to start a worldwide social revolution." Almost all of the top leadership was Jewish as were the heads of the NKVD (Genrikh Yagoda and his deputy Yakov Agranov) and all the heads of the Gulag (Aron Solts, Yakov Rappoport, Lazar Kogan, Matvei Berman and Naftaly Frankel) according to Solzhenitsyn in "The Gulag Archipelago". It was Lazar Kaganovich who organized and executed the Holodomor (3 million+ deaths in the Ukraine) and Jews who were the leading activists/administrators with a special protected status until the last days of the Stalin dictatorship as is amply demonstrated in Slezkine's recent book, "The Jewish Century".

In the 20th century they switched from being the primary aggressors to the primary victims but maybe this is outside the scope of the text.

I found "Vanished Kingdoms" to be another great book from Norman Davies and it ought to be of interest to all Europeans. It seems to be resonating more in the UK than it does in the US judging by Amazon reviews.

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Norman Davies já nos tinha entusiasmado com obras como “Europe at war”, “Europe: a history” e a muito interessante “God’s playground: a History of Poland”.
Em 2011 publicou este “Vanished Kingdoms – The history of half-forgotten Europe” uma visão caleidoscópica de estados que ocupam apenas breves linhas nos tomos de história da Europa ou dos quais é apenas apresentada uma visão restrita.
Os estados analisados nesta obra são de vários tipos: alguns com duração de vários séculos, outros com duração de apenas breves anos antes de serem engolidos pelos vizinhos mais poderosos.
Alguns são nossos conhecidos como o Reino Visigótico de Tolosa (418 – 507), os reinos de Burgundia (411 – 1795) , o Reino de Aragão (1137 – 1714) ou o Eire.
Outros são mais obscuros e desconhecidos como Alt Clud – o Reino da Pedra (sec. V – sec. XII), a Etrúria (1801 – 1814), a Sabaudia – o Reino que Humberto construiu (1033 – 1946) ou Rosenau (1826 – 1918).
Especialmente apaixonantes são as vidas dos estados do leste da Europa, estados devorados e regurgitados várias vezes ao longo de conflitos, estados com povos com uma consciência nacional que durante anos parece adormecida para renascer poderosa em certas épocas.
Espantosa é a história da Lituânia, a dos seus reis estrangeiros contratados e a sua fusão com o Reino da Polónia para se tornar um dos poderosos estados da zona.
Dos bélicos vizinhos da Lituânia encontra-mos a história da Borussia – a terra aquosa dos Prusai, aniquilados pelos seus conquistadores; a Irmandade dos Cavaleiros Teutónicos da Virgem Maria.
Lê-mos também sobre Tsernagora – o Reino da Montanha Negra, no Montenegro, com a sua breve existência de 1910 a 1918 ou a ainda mais breve existência de um dia de Rusy – A República de 1 dia.
Da Alemanha de hoje vem-nos o Reino da Galicia – O Reino dos nus e dos esfomeados (1773 – 1918).
Norman Davies é um historiador e um escritor dos pormenores que levam aos grandes panoramas históricos. São mais de 800 páginas de escrita elegante que nos leva ao mais profundo da vida destes efémeros estados que analisa.
Nós, portugueses, que vivemos com a carga pesada e estabilizada de séculos de existência e de história, temos, por vezes, dificuldades em compreender a vida e a mentalidade destes povos que passaram tantas vezes de mão em mão, que um dia tinham uma nacionalidade para no dia seguinte terem outra. Poucas obras nos dão esta visão de como os estados, as sociedades e as culturas são efémeros, nascendo e morrendo ao longo dos anos. Nada é eterno nesta manta de retalhos da história da Humanidade.
A bibliografia é abundante e com indicação de sítios na Internet onde mais informação pode ser obtida.
Quando olho para os escaparates dos livros de história das nossas livrarias como sinto a falta das traduções de obras grandes como este “Vanished Kingdoms – the history of half-forgotten Europe”

http://umlivrodia.blogspot.pt/2013/04/vanished-kingdoms-history-of-half.html ( )

A rather interesting, albeit cluttered, set of historical essays on states and nations which no longer exist, from the kingdoms of Spain to Alt Clud/Strathclyde in Scotland, to the USSR.

The memory of every thing is overwhelmed in time, says Marcus Aurelius, three centuries before his empire passed. Why did these old states crumble - wars, internal strife, warring ethnicites, imperial ambitions? Perhaps. Some states, like the Republic of Carpatho-Ruthenia, survived for but a day, swallowed by the ambitions of Germany and Hungary. Some endured for centuries - Lithuania was once the largest empire in Europe. Prussia was the catalyst behind modern Germany. Some endure despite everything - Estonia clung to its identity through centuries of Russian domination. Some leave behind traces in other nations - the German state of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha left behind the current British ruling family.

Of course decline is not always death, but possibly rebirth - Ataturk rebuilt Turkey from Ottoman ruins. Italy escaped monarchism and Fascism, and somehow endured Napoleon and Berlusconi alike.

It is easy to forget that states are not immutable and eternal entities. Internal ethnicities and other such conflicts still pervade the post-colonial statelets of Africa, or the Middle East's own blood feuds. Even the Chinese titan still struggles to mollify or suppress the Tibetans or the Uighurs.

Much to learn from this. ( )

Norman Davies has hit upon an interesting idea and addresses a frequently overlooked area of European history but somehow he seemed never quite to reach out and grasp the reader's undivided attention.
His basic premise is that there have been many nations that have featured prominently, if fleetingly, at various stages of European history, but have subsequently vanished from the public perception. Among the more engaging chapters that Professor Davies offers are Tolosa (home of the Visigoths in what is now south west France), Burgundia (of which several markedly different iterations have emerged at different times), and these demonstrate his comprehensive research. However, i found that these chapters were in the minority, and the completion of this book almost became a demonstration of Zeno's Arrow principle whereby I would first have to complete half of the remaining pages, and then half of the next remainder and so forth.
Still i managed it somehow, and while I suppose I am a wiser and better-informed person as a consequence, I feel a need to read something a bit more readily rewarding. ( )

Norman Davies is one of my favourite writers of European history, as he has ways of making connections between different countries and events and individuals that lead the reader to a richer understanding of that continent. In Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe, he describes 15 nation-states from the past, ranging from a Visigoth kingdom in the 5th Century to Estonia and Ireland (Eire) in the 20th Century. Along the way, we learn a great deal about the interactions, and inter-dependencies, among, especially, the Baltic region and Eastern Europe (which is well-represented with about half of the countries described), and particularly we learn about how the "larger" powers of any given time tended to give the needs of the populations of the smaller nations scant attention, even when those nations were allies of the larger ones. Each chapter is divided into three parts: a look at the modern region under discussion, a much longer delve into the history of the place, and a final summation of treatments and futures for the area (he's especially melancholy about the survival of the United Kingdom in the third part of the Eire chapter, considering that once Scotland leaves the Union - which he believes it is likely to do - the rest of the remaining countries of the Kingdom will break away from England too). I find his style of writing to be very vivid and at the same time very clear; he footnotes everything meticulously, like the scholar he is, although his footnotes are of the more boring variety (citations of sources; no more than a handful of interesting tidbits of informational asides) so unless you're a scholar too, it's not necessary to check the footnotes obsessively. And I like the fact that in this book he's looking at parts of Europe that might be very well-known (France, Scotland, Spain) to Western readers, and at the less-known Eastern regions too, in ways that allow us to see the development of that continent over centuries in a very different way than is usually presented in history books. I think interest in historical matters is a very individual taste; but if you have that interest, particularly in the European realm, this is a really informative and interesting book to peruse, though you might want to take it in chunks rather than all in one go. Recommended! ( )