Link to Chronology
Finally, back to reading Pirenne
A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War
Book Eight
The European Crisis
(1300-1450)
The Avignon Papacy, the Great Schism, and the Hundred Years War
Additional notes:
So thinking about how the Third Estate and then "The People" came to power in Europe, makes me wonder if we aren't in a variation on that theme today. And as always, you have to look for the group getting the short end of the stick to see who is going to struggle to gain power. At this time in history, that's people of limited intelligence and people with mental health problems. No idea what percentage of the population this would be, but, for the sake of convenience, let's call them the 49% (people of literally below average intelligence).
It's my belief that these are the people who have elected Trump, and that Trump represents them. Of course, Trump isn't really going to do them any good, except in so far as he makes the political establishment aware that they have to consider this constituency. What politicians are good at is attempting to act in the interest of any identifiable constituency. Politicians may be whores, but the good thing about whores is that they will service anybody if there's something in it for them.
Now all the mainstream politicians have to do is discover a new blend of policies that appeals to the 49% without offending their existing constituencies too much. It's what they should have been doing all along, because it's the right thing to do, but that kind of foresight would be remarkable in a politician.
Trump, so far, is democracy working the way it should. This is a test of American democracy but probably no uglier a test than some that happened in the 19th century. Trump is also a test of the current balance of power between the three branches of government in the U.S.A. This is trickier because the Executive has accumulated so much power during the past century. It wouldn't be a bad thing if that process was reversed now, and I can also see that happening. There's still a chance that we will come out of this crisis with a more inclusive democracy and a newly limited Executive branch. I could live with that.
Chapter III
The Empire. The Slav States and Hungary
1. The Empire
p448 Germany, during the great interregnum, had assumed the political form which she was to retain down to modern times. It is not very easy to define her constitution, in which were comprised, without any real coherence, a monarchy which possessed none of the attributes of sovereignty, a multitude of ecclesiastical or lay princes, urban republics (Free Cities), and "immediate" (unmediated) nobles, enjoying complete independence... An anarchy in monarchical form: that perhaps is the best description of this extraordinary political entity... The necessity of an Emperor, who no longer corresponded to any existing reality, was imposed by tradition. And since the King of Germany was the Emperor-designate, to suppress him would have been to abolish the Empire. He therefore continued to exist...
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p449 Rudolf of Hapsburg never found time, during his long reign (1273-1291, to go to Rome in order to receive the Imperial crown...
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p457 ... [Sigismond, House of Luxembourg, King of Hungary 1387-, King of Germany 1411-, Emperor 1433-1437] died... 1437, and his Kingdoms of Bohemia and Hungary passed to his son-in-law, Albert of Austria. Thus the vast territories of the House of Luxembourg were added to the Duchies of Austria and Styria. The aim envisaged by the House of Habsburg since its establishment in the valley of the Danube was achieved... All the efforts of so many kings to establish the power of their families had the final result of promoting the Habsburgs to the rank of the most powerful sovereigns in Europe...
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p461 ... If there were assemblies of the Estates, the bourgeoisie was nowhere powerful enough to counterbalance the nobility, which had the say in everything and enforced its will upon the country. A large proportion of the nobles were not the descendants of freemen... The peasants, who from the middle of the 14th century were entirely at the mercy of the nobles, were beginning to relapse into serfdom... [Footnote: In Flanders serfdom disappeared in the 13th century. In France it was largely abolished in the 14th century.] One of the most striking features of German life was this regression of the people into servitude under nobles of whom many were themselves of servile origin. Here and there the peasants resisted the nobles. The origin of the Swiss Confederation may be referred to such resistance: the three original cantons, Schwiz, Uri and Unterwalden, defeated Leopold of Austria at Morgahten in 1315. This was the beginning of a federation which was joined by Lucerne (1332), Zurich (1351), and Berne (1353), and which was further consolidated by the battle of Sempach, which was fought against Leopold III of Austria in 1386.
I have to confess here that I thought Swiss independence was related to the rise of Calvinism. Perhaps it was the other way round: Calvinism was able to develop in Switzerland because of its independence from the religious authorities of the time.
p462 ...the economic life of the country, down to the middle of the 15th century, was very poorly developed...
In the center of the country there were no important cities. On the whole, the greater part of the country was still rural...
2. The Slav States and Hungary
p463 ... The economic organization of this country [around Kiev after the 5th century] presented a character which was not to be found elsewhere in the territory of any other Barbarian people. It was essentially commercial. The Vikings, who where gathered round their princes in the fortified enclosures (Gorod) established along the Dnieper and its affluents, subjected the Slav population... In the spring of each year their boats assembled at Kiev and carried this merchandise to Constantinople.... When at the beginning of the 11th century the Scandinavians became Slavized, these commercial practices, together with the political exploitation of the rural population, did not disappear, but the aristocracy of boyars, at once military, mercantile and urban, dominated the rest of the nation...
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p465 ... In 1096... [the Kuman] Khan advanced to the very walls of Kiev; and from that time onwards the attacks of these ferocious Barbarians never ceased. By the middle of the 12th century it was becoming impossible to resist them. The region of Kiev, hitherto so flourishing, was becoming impoverished and depopulated. When the Barbarians occupied the mouths of the Dnieper there was an end of the trade with Constantinople. Gradually the country was deserted, some of the inhabitants migrating to Galicia and Vollynia, and others, more numerous, moving off in a north-easterly direction toward the upper reaches of the Volga (Sousdal).
This migration from south to north determined the future of the Russian people... The Slav colonists of Sousdalia mingled with the Finns, who had hitherto been the sole inhabitants of its immense forests, and from that mingling of peoples modern Russia (Great Russia) emerged. At the same time a purely agricultural life replaced the old commercial activity. Henceforth deprived of all communication with the sea, the Russians were restricted for long centuries to a purely rural economy, which had no outlets. ...the fatality of circumstances made them abandon... [commerce] just when it was beginning to develop in the West... the towns of central Russia -- like the castles of the West in the early Middle Ages -- were merely the residences of the princes, their boyars, and their servants necessary for their maintenance... Novgorod alone, which was assiduously frequented, from the beginning of the 13th century, by the merchants of the Hansa, was a center of commercial importance, and this importance it owed entirely to the foreigner. It was a German factory in Russia...
p466 ...The Greek orthodoxy which the Russians brought from the banks of the Dnieper kept them isolated from Europe, while the civilizing influence of Byzantium... could no longer remedy the disastrous result of this isolation.
And then there was the Mongol invasion of the 13th century.
...In 1223 Juji, the son of Jenghiz Khan, conquered the whole region occupied by the Kumans between the Don and the Volga. His son, Batu, pushed further west, capturing Moscow in 1234 and Kiev in 1240... Their Khan contented himself with imposing overlordship upon the Russian princes and subjecting them to tribute... [Ivan III (1462-1505) annexes principalities around Moscow.] Ivan, allied with the Khan of the Crimea, made an end of what was still left of the Mongol domination. With his reign a new era of Russian history began.
As in the case of the Russians, it was the invasion of an Asiatic people, the Hungarians, which determined the destiny of the Slavs of the South and West... the sudden and unexpected arrival of the Hungarians altered the course of [Slav] history. Making their way into the valley of the Danube, they interposed themselves between the Slav peoples, dividing them into two groups, which henceforth had nothing in common. Cut off from Byzantium, and at the same time separated from the Serbs and Bulgars, the Czechs and the Poles, like the Hungarians themselves, naturally went over to the Roman Church.
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p468 ...In consequence of the remoteness of the Western Slavs it was long before they emerged from the narrowness and poverty of their isolated existence... The power of the great landed nobility, both in Bohemia and in Poland, was exercised from the beginning by the participation of each of its members in the government of the whole country. This did not lead to the division of the country, for its political and national unity were preserved by the very weakness of a central authority which was dependent on the aristocracy. It should be added that these peoples, being cut off from the sea, had no bourgeoisie until a very late stage in their history.
p469 ... If Rudolph [of Habsburg] had been forced to rely on his own resources he could not have coped with his adversary [Ottocar II of Bohemia]. But now the Hungarians, for the first time, played the part which they were so often to play afterwards, assisting the Germans against the Czechs. Ottocar was defeated and killed in 1274, at the battle of Marchfeld. The Danubian duchies became the property of the Habsburgs, who never ceased to covet Bohemia...
We get the history of this region from the perspective of the Slavs that we've already covered from the German side.
p473 ... The Germans did not settle in great numbers except in Silesia... [around 1241, after the Mongols withdrew] Those who penetrated into the interior introduced urban life there and constituted a bourgeoisie, which... retained its [German] nationality for centuries. It found itself juxtaposed with the Jews, whom the persecution of the era of the Crusades had swept out of Germany and Hungary into Poland in the 11th and 12th centuries.
p474 ... Casimir (the Great) was to Poland much what his contemporary, Charles IV (1333-1370), was to Bohemia... He wished to make of Cracow what Charles had made of Prague, and following the latter's example he established a university there (1364) [University of Prague 1348]... In consequence of a much simpler historical evolution, [than elsewhere] the [Polish] nobles were directly related to the freemen of the Barbaric epoch; they retained the pride of the freemen, and claimed for themselves that they alone constituted the nation. Apart from the nobles [and the scattered, German bourgeoisies] there were only the servile peasants whom they exploited and despised. Above them there was only the king, whose authority they acknowledged on the condition of his reigning only for them and with them. The spirit which inspired the nobility, and never ceased to inspire it, was a spirit of liberty, but a liberty of caste which was to give the Polish State, more and more definitely, until its final collapse, the paradoxical character of an aristocratic democracy.
Casimir III defeats the Teutonic Knights at the battle of Tannenberg (July 15th, 1410) and Poland -- and the Slavs -- regain control over Prussia.
p478 The Slavs of the South -- the Croats, Slovenes, Serbs and Bulgars -- presented a very different spectacle from that of the Poles and Bohemians. In consequence of their weakness, the Croats and the Slovenes soon fell under the domination of Hungary, who took care to deny them the least measure of political autonomy. The Serbs and Bulgars... established on the south of the Danube on the territory of the Greek Empire, and faithful to the Greek Church, profited by the weakness of the Empire, after the reign of Justinian, to penetrate deeply into Macedonia, and even into Greece. While in the long run they became Hellenized, the Slavs of Macedonia preserved their language and their customs, as did the Germans who had occupied the north of the Empire.
The Bulgars threaten the Empire. The Serbs create their own little empire under "Tsar" Stephen IV (1346) which dominates the Bulgars, Macedonia, and Albania.
p479 If one wished to invoke an example in order to prove the unimportance of race in historical development, such an example is certainly provided by the Hungarians. By their origin, and by virtue of their language, these Finns, who were related to the Turks and the Mongols, were completely alien to the ethnographical group of the Indo-European peoples. However, they had barely taken their place in the midst of these peoples and adopted Christianity, when, despite the nature of the blood that flows in their veins, their cephalic index, and the linguistic characteristics of their idiom, their social lives became so similar to that of their neighbors that it would be quite impossible, if one didn't know the facts beforehand, to recognized them as intruders. The fact is that the physical individuality of a people is entirely subordinated to its moral existence... Having become Christians, they were bound to enter the European community, and so prove that they too possessed that pretended "faculty of assimilation" which a certain school of ethnologists claim as peculiar to the "German race," though it is really a characteristic of all Barbarians......
p483 ...These peoples [the Slavs and Hungarians up to the middle of the 15th century] knew nothing of the domainal organization, nor of the feudal system; they played no part in the War of Investitures, nor in the Crusades. For them the only consequence of the great epopee was the advent of the Jews who sought refuge in their territories, having been driven across the Elbe by the followers of Christ... Placed at a disadvantage by their old agricultural institutions, they yielded to the German pressure; retreating along the Elbe before the invaders, they allowed the latter to establish themselves among them, and to found cities which were like foreign islands in the midst of the national population. With the arrival of these newcomers, who looked down upon them but were a necessity for them, there began a period of superficial Germanization which continued until the middle of the 14th century. Then a reaction began to make itself felt... and there was a sudden awakening of national energy. This was manifested... by the explosive outbreak of Hussitism in Bohemia, the conquest of Prussia by Poland, and Hungary's advance toward the Adriatic. It seemed as though the moment had come for the Western Slavs and Hungarians to play an active part in European civilization. But the Turks were advancing across the Balkan peninsula, and the Slavs and Hungarians had to meet the thrust, turning back to the East in order to defend the civilization of the West instead of beginning to collaborate with it.
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