Friends of History Beware: This is a Preposterous Map

 

 

The above map is preposterous.  I came across it online.  I do not know its author, but it is clearly problematic, giving people some very wrong ideas.

 

It presents us with a Europe of current borders and proposes to give the year for the founding of each country. While some of the years are reasonable in the literal sense of the founding a modern state (Ireland 1916), others are pure nonsense, such as the suggestion that Greece was founded in 330, the year Constantine I established the new capital of the Roman Empire at Constantinople.  The modern state of Greece was founded in 1821 and has been notable for distancing itself from its Byzantine past and leaning on the heritage of Athens.  Much of the preposterousness of the map arises from the inconsistent application of “rules of thumb.”  Germany (1871) and Italy (1861) are based on the official founding of the modern state, while Ukraine (1119) and Russia (882) reach back to historic moments long before the modern states were created.  By the German/Italian rule of thumb, the founding of both Ukraine and Russia should be 1991.  By the map’s Ukrainian/Russian rule, Germany should be at least 1000 (earliest use of the term “Kingdom of Germany”), if not 962 (elevation of Otto I to Holy Roman Emperor), or even 843 (Treaty of Verdun which divided the Carolingian Empire into three parts).

 

But there is a more insidious problem with this map.  Mixed in with the many dates which may or may not reflect some aspect of historical reality is Russian nationalist propaganda.  The date for the founding of Russia given on the map (882) corresponds to the traditional founding of Kievan Rus, the large network of Eastern Slavic groupings that were brought under the control of the Swedish Viking rulers (“the Rus”) of the new trading city of Kiev (modern Ukrainian “Kyiv”, which I will use from this point forward).  But the actual city of Kyiv is not in Russia.  It is in Ukraine, which on the map is said to have been founded in 1119, an apparently random year during the reign of Vladimir II Monomakh as Grand Prince of Kyiv (1113-1125).  If anything, the year 882 should be given to Ukraine, and the year for Russia should be 1147, the earliest documentary evidence for the existence of the settlement of Moscow.

 

There is also a larger problem with the entire concept of this map.  Slapping a year on a piece of territory and claiming that this is how long that country has existed suggests that states come into being ex nihilo, and ignores the complex way in which tribes, cities, peoples, and political regimes interact and evolve over time.

 

 

What Historical Continuity Looks Like: A) Germany

 

There is a school of thought that says that Germany has only existed as a country since 1871.  Yes, the modern political iteration of Germany can be said to have come into being when the princes of the middle and smaller German states, having defeated Napoleon III’s France under the leadership of Prussia, hailed the King of Prussia, as deutscher Kaiser (German Emperor) and set about forging a federal state.  But that modern entity has undergone tremendous and calamitous changes since then, most notably in 1945 when it collapsed utterly: defeated, conquered, and occupied by four foreign powers.  What emerged were two successor states: the western Federal Republic of Germany, and the eastern German Democratic Republic.  Reunification in 1990 was essentially an institutional takeover of the eastern portion by the west.  Thus, we could say that the current Germany was founded in 1948 because the constitution (Grundgesetz) and institutions founded then are the ones that continue today.

 

But the German people have been in the region which modern Germany now occupies since even before the time of the creation of the Kingdom of Germany (regnum teutonici “Kingdom of the Germans”) during the Ottonian dynasty (919-1024).  The language and culture from that time evolved into the language and culture of today without interruption.  The entity called the Kingdom of Germany became the leading part of the Holy Roman Empire.  The emperor was typically both the King of Germany and the Holy Roman Emperor.  In the early 1500’s, once the Kingdoms of Italy and Burgundy had fallen away and the empire became largely co-terminus with the Kingdom of Germany, and once an agreement was reached with the papacy that the Pope would no longer crown the emperor, the empire was renamed, “the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation”.

 

This political entity was dissolved in 1806, but modern German law is still built on the legal foundations from it.  Indeed, some legal arrangements from that time are in effect today, such as the annual block grants to the regional churches.  These were originally negotiated during the secularisation and “mediatisation” process that took place just before the empire was dissolved.  Ecclesiastical states were absorbed into secular ones and large church holdings, including villages and the serfs in them, which had been the source of church finances, were secularized.  In compensation, the affected church bodies were to receive annual payments from the princely regimes in perpetuity.  That has continued to this day, now paid by the modern German state.

 

The German Confederation (1815-1866) that took the place of the dissolved “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation” was essentially a secular version of its predecessor.  Much as the princes had previously gathered in diets to consult and decide with the emperor on matters of “national” concern, those same princes, minus the former princely bishops, gathered without an emperor to make such decisions. The process of the devolution of powers from the emperor to the princes, which had begun with the demise of the Hohenstaufen dynasty in the early 14^th century, had come to its logical conclusion.  But many understood that a divided Germany would be a weak Germany, susceptible to foreign invasion, as had been the Holy Roman Empire since the 17^th century.  The only question was: Who should lead a future united Germany?  Should it be Austria, the old alpha-state, from which nearly all Holy Roman Emperors and Kings of Germany had been drawn since the late 15^th century, or Prussia, the modern, highly militarized up-and-comer?  In the end, Prussia was able to gather the smaller states under its sway and exclude Austria, creating the modern iteration of Germany.  To say that Germany has only been around since 1948, or even 1871, is highly misleading.  There is a cultural and—importantly—legal throughline from the Treaty of Verdun and the creation of East Francia in the 9^th century, to the Kingdom of Germany, to the Germany of the modern era.

 

 

What Historical Continuity Looks Like: B) The Roman Empire

Given that the Russian propagandists since the 16^th century have claimed the status of “Third Rome”, hoping to accrue status in both the secular and religious realm, it is worth summarizing how Roman continuity worked.  Following the remarkable expansion of the city of Rome into the Mediterranean-Sea-spanning empire we usually think of, there was a gradual process of integrating the administration and laws into a coherent whole.  The key markers along this trajectory were: 1) the extension of Roman citizenship (in the year 212 under Caracalla), 2) the reforms of Diocletian which created a uniform, merit based bureaucracy (reigned 284-305), 3) the centralization of that bureaucracy in the newly founded city of Constantinople by the Constantine I (330), 4) the creation of a single state religion in Christianity and the partial systematization of the Roman legal tradition in the “Theodosian Code” by Theodosius I (reigned 379-395), and 5) the completion and “perfection” of Theodosius’ legal goal by Justinian I (reigned 527-565) in his “Justinian Code”.

 

The matter about the change of capital from Rome to Constantinople is often misunderstood and thus mis-portrayed.  It did not mark a break of any kind.  Rome had not served as the functional capital of the empire for many decades before then.  In the later part of the 3^rd century, the emperors were often on the move with their troops and administrative matters were conducted from the field headquarters.  When Diocletian introduced his important reforms, his effective capital was the city of Nikomedia (across the Bosporus from an old Greek merchant colony named Byzantion).  Diocletian had divided the empire into two.  He governed the eastern half from Nikomedia and acted as senior ruler.  The western half, which included the city of Rome, was not governed from Rome, but from Milan.  Each half was further divided into two (thus the four rulers of the empire, or tetrarchs).  In the east, Sirmium, on the Danube frontier, governed the northern portion; in the west, Trier, on the Rhine frontier, governed the northern portion.  Constantine would eventually launch his campaign against the other tetrarchs from Trier.

 

When Constantine had subdued his rivals, his choice of Byzantion for his new capital of Nova Roma (later Constantinople) was not about “moving the capital” but about giving the empire once again a stable capital from which to govern.  It was placed in the east because that’s where the population, economic activity, and thus the tax revenue was.  Constantinople was also a much more easily defended location than Rome. (The city of Rome was already in a slow decline that would be precipitously accelerated in Justinian’s war against the Ostrogoths in the 6^th century.)

 

These foundational reforms carried through and continued to govern and shape the Roman Empire, even after the loss of most of its territory to German tribes and Arab invaders.  What western historians since the 16^thcentury have labelled “the Byzantine Empire” was simply the continuation of the Roman Empire, in law, religion, administration, and self-understanding, albeit with less territory. While the rump Roman Empire after the mid 7^th century was peopled primarily by ethnic Greeks, the people understood themselves to be Romans.  The national identifier term “Greek” was associated with the pagan and classical past.  This historical, legal, and cultural entity came to a slow and sad end, like a dying star, between 1204 (the taking of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade; regained in 1261) and 1454 (the taking of the city by the Ottoman Turks).  The fact that a Grand Prince of Kyiv had married the sister of one of the Roman emperors at the start of the 11^th century did not in any way—legally, symbolically, or magically—confer Roman existence or identity onto Kyiv, and certainly not onto a then non-existent Moscow.

 

 

What Historical Continuity Does Not Look Like: The Russian Narrative about Russia

 

The heyday of Kyivan Rus was from the end of the 9^th century (the “Viking era”) to the Mongol invasions in the early 13^th century.  By the time the Mongols besieged Kyiv in 1240, the once sprawling realm under Kyiv’s hegemony had fractured into numerous inependent city states.  In the following century and a half, the former Kyivan lands would come under two rival powers: the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the west, and the Mongols (eventually the Golden Horde) in the east.  Old Kyiv came under Lithuanian rule, the nascent Moscow under Mongol domination.

 

The rulers of Moscow, allied with their Mongol overlords, gradually conquered the cities that had once ruled them: Vladimir and Suzdal.  By the early 15^th century, the Muscovites were in control of most of the eastern half of the former Kyivan Rus territory, and had largely shed Mongol rule, styling themselves, “Grand Princes of Moscow and of all Russia”.  The first part of the title was true, but the second part was aspirational at best.  The name “Russia” (Rossiya) was built on the name “Rus”.  Not unlike Russia’s grand claims against Ukraine today, despite the rhetoric, half of old Rus was under the control of Lithuania or, in the case of Crimea and the adjacent steppe, of the Tatars.  Furthermore, Moscow lacked any kind of legal, dynastic, or historical claim over any of this territory.  If they were going to rule it, it would be through conquest alone.  Any assertions of “restoring” Rus would mean “ret-conning” history—which the Muscovite rulers and their successors did and still do in spades.

 

In 1472, eighteen years after the fall of Constantinople, Ivan III married Sophia Palaeologina, a scion of the former ruling family of the recently defunct Roman Empire.  For Ivan and his propaganda machine, this was as good as becoming the heir to Rome, making Moscow “the Third Rome”.  And yet, at least seven Roman princesses married various western nobles and rulers over the centuries and none of those rulers claimed that this made them the heirs to Rome.  They knew better.  Ivan IV “the Terrible”, added Tsar to his many titles, the Russian form of Caesar or Emperor.  One wonders if the presence in the west of a “Holy Roman Emperor” who, despite his limited power, commanded a level of diplomatic respect among Europe’s rulers not granted to any of the others might have been one motivation to claim such titles and connexions. [NB: The title and status of the Holy Roman Emperor is also a study of invented continuity as part of the Papacy’s ambitions to earthly power—but that is an essay for another time.]

 

Moscow’s, (which is to say, Russia’s) expansion eastward was dizzying in its speed.  In only 200 years, Moscow’s emissaries and bands of hired Cossacks subdued the peoples from the Urals to the Pacific.  It was a feat of conquest that went unnoticed by Europe.  The first indication to the west came from the reports of Captain James Cook that in his exploration of northwestern North America in 1778 he noted a Russian presence in what is now Alaska.  The revelation sent shockwaves through Europe, especially at the Spanish court which accelerated the colonization of California as a countermeasure.

 

It was fitting, and perhaps predictable, that Moscow would first expand into the territories across which their former masters, the Mongols, had come.  By dint of their connexions into the Mongol power structures, there would have been more direct familiarity with this world than the one to the west.  Indeed, if Moscow had any source of legal or cultural inspiration, any kind of “legitimacy”, it would more properly be said to have come from the Mongols and the Golden Horde who had shaped Moscow’s military and political culture and had given it its start as a regional power by supporting it against its neighbours.  The “take no prisoners” ruthlessness of the Muscovite (and later the Russian) approach to military culture has more in common with the Mongol’s scorched earth approach to conquest than with the western culture of “the rules of engagement” expressed in such ideals as chivalry.  This is not to say that there was no brutality in western warfare.  The Thirty Years War was an especially gruesome conflict.  But it was out of that conflict that the western European powers began to think about ways to limit such excesses.  That conversation has never been a serious part of Russian military thinking.  Beyond the military, other key elements of Muscovite society that were borrowed from the Mongols were the complex mestnichestvo hierarchy based on clan seniority (many of the boyar [Russian nobility] families were descended from Mongol grandees), the postal yam system based on the Mongol orto system (large empires need efficient communication networks), and the fiscal and census systems.  At the end of Mongol rule in the mid-15th century, the language of the Golden Horde, Tatar, was in regular use at the Muscovite court.

 

Moscow’s efforts to bring the old lands of Rus under its control came up against the same barrier that had stopped the Mongols: the Lithuanian cavalry, now augmented by the mounted forces of Poland.  After 400 years, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth still held the bulk of western Rus—a region by then commonly referred to as Ukraina or “borderland”.  In the Russian view, the people of what are now Belarus and Ukraine were Russians speaking in odd dialects of Russian.  In fact, these people were and are speaking different languages.  At the time when the old lands of Rus were divided between the Mongols and Lithuania in the 14^thcentury, there would have already been regional dialects developing, much as in other parts of Europe, where, for example, Western Slavic had differentiated itself into Polish, Czech, and Slovak, or North Germanic into Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian, or Latin into Italian, French, and Castilian.  Four hundred years of separation meant that Ukrainian has more lexical overlap with Polish (the Poles having become the senior partners in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) than with Russian.

 

Nevertheless, the ideology of Moscow is not concerned with facts.  Moscow, under their Austrian-born empress Catherine the Great, finally succeeded in dismantling the Polish-Lithuanian roadblock by cooperating with Berlin and Vienna in the partitions of 1772, 1793, and 1795.  From the Russian perspective, Rus was whole again!  And yet, the western lands immediately posed a cultural problem.  They were full of Jews.  Moscow had never allowed Jews to settle in their empire.  By contrast, Poland-Lithuania had invited large numbers of exiled Jews from central Europe to make a home and become part of the economic life of the realm, filling, among other things, the needs of the Polish landowning nobility for capable estate managers.  Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, was the centre of Jewish life in Europe at the time.  Within a century, the Russian establishment was implementing pogroms to “encourage” the Jew to leave.  As to the “White Russians” and “Little Russians”, as the Belarusians and Ukrainians were often referred to, Russian ethnographers of the 19^th century meticulously recorded these separate peoples on their maps and in their literature, even while the political and cultural spheres promoted the imperial idea of ethnic homogeneity.  There was a reason that Lenin created the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic: he accepted the scientific literature and the reality on the ground (especially following Ukraine’s 1919-1922 war for independence).  His decision to give formal shape to Ukraine and Belarus today rankles Vladimir Putin, who claims it is the only reason Ukraine exists at all.  He sees an invented country and wants to un-invent it.  In reality, it is a distinct people who, like peoples across the globe, seek to govern themselves on their own terms.

 

What all this shows us is that Russian continuity linking back to Constantinople and Rome is nonsense.  It’s not there.  The only real link is the Russian Orthodox Church, but then, many countries have historic Orthodox churches (Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece to name a few).  There is nothing special about the Russian church except its size and the degree to which it has now become a weapon in Putin’s propaganda war.  More importantly, the alleged link to the lineage of Kyivan Rus is absent as well.  Moscow and Kyiv have nothing to do with each other.  By the time Moscow had moved beyond being a remote refuge in the marshes for those fleeing the Mongol privations, Kyiv was under the rule of a different power structure, one oriented toward the west.  The only continuity is discontinuity.  Moscow tells a story, ret-cons history to promote a mythical and magical self-image, but it’s all smoke and mirrors—indeed, it’s the greatest identity theft in history.

 

 

The Lesson

 

The challenge for the casual skimmer of posts on pages and sites that purport to have historical content is that unless you already know a fair bit, it is easy to be taken in.   It doesn’t mean that the posters are necessarily malicious, but they themselves may be using skewed sources.  Nothing beats reading well-researched, peer reviewed academic works of history.  They are usually long and detailed and dry, but that is where you will get the good information.  There are also sources for monographs and essays that are reliable, such as Dumbarton Oaks for Byzantine studies or academia.edu for a wide range of topics.