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235 Pages
PORTRAITS OF MEDIEVAL EASTERN EUROPE, 900-1400
Portraits of Medieval Eastern Europe provides imagined biographies of twenty different figures from all walks of life living in Eastern Europe from 900 to 1400. Moving beyond the usual boundaries of speculative history, the book presents innovative and creative interpretations of the people, places, and events of medieval Eastern Europe and provides an insight into medieval life from Scandinavia to Byzantium.
Each chapter explores a different figure and together they present snapshots of life across a wide range of different social backgrounds. Among the figures are both imagined and historical characters, including the Byzantine Princess Anna Porphyrogenita, a Jewish traveler, a slave, the Mongol general Siibedei, a woman from Novgorod, and a Rus’ pilgrim. A range of different narrative styles are also used throughout the book, from omniscient third-person narrators to diary entries, letters, and travel accounts.
By using primary sources to construct the lives of, and give a voice to, the types of people who existed within medieval European history, Portraits of Medieval Eastern Europe provides a highly accessible introduction to the period. Accompanied by a new and interactive companion website, it is the perfect teaching aid to support and excite students of medieval Eastern Europe.
Donald Ostrowski is Research Advisor in the Social Sciences and Lecturer in History at the Harvard University Extension School. His previous publications include Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-Cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier 1304-1589 (1998) and over 100 articles and review essays. He is also the editor of The Povest’ vremennykh let: An Interlinear Collation and Paradosis, 3 vols. (2003), and a co-editor of four collections of studies.
Christian Raffensperger is Associate Professor of History at Wittenberg University, as well as an associate of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. He has published multiple books including Reimagining Europe: Kievan Rus' in the Medieval World (2012) and Ties of Kinship: Genealogy and Dynastic Marriage in Kyivan Rus' (2016). He is also the series editor for Beyond Medieval Europe, a book series published by ARC Humanities Press.
CONTRIBUTORS
Neven Budak is Professor of medieval Croatian History at the University of Zagreb. As Associate Professor he was also teaching at the Central European University (Budapest). His main interests are early medieval history, urban history, history of identities, and cultural history.
Florin Curta is Professor of Medieval History and Archaeology at the University of Florida. His books include The Making of the Slavs: History and Archaeology of the Lower Danube, ca. 500-700 (Cambridge, 2001), which has received the Herbert Baxter Adams Award of the American Historical Association; Southeastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 500-1250 (Cambridge 2006); and the Edinburgh History of the Greeks, c. 500 to 1050. The Early Middle Ages (Edinburgh, 2011). Curta is the editor of five collections of studies and is the editor-in-chief of the Brill series “East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450-1450.”
Inés Garcia de la Puente is Visiting Assistant Professor at Boston University and Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University. Her research focuses on different aspects of the culture of pre-Mongol Rus’ and on Translation Studies.
David M. Goldfrank is Professor of History and Director of Medieval Studies at Georgetown University. Primarily a specialist in pre-modern Russian history, his books include The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volotsky (Kalamazoo, 1983; rev. ed., 2000); The Origins of the Crimean War (London, 1993); A History of Russia: People, Legends, Events, Forces (with Catherine Evtuhov, Lindsey Hughes, Richard Stites) (Boston/New York 2003); and Nil Sorsky — The Authentic Writings (Kalamazoo, 2008). He is currently working on a monograph on Iosif and a critical translation of his Prosvetitel’, as well as preparing for publication the late Andrei Pliguzov’s collection of 268 documents, The Archive of the Metropolitans of Kiev and all Rus'. His work on the Vojselk convoy of texts goes back to the 1980s.
Isaiah Gruber is Research Associate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Professor of Jewish History at the Israel Study Center, and co-founder of the academic services company Kol Hakatuv. He is the author of Orthodox Russia in Crisis: Church and Nation in the Time of Troubles as well as articles and translations related to art history and Jewish-Christian interaction in Eastern Europe.
Mari Isoaho is a docent in General History at the University of Helsinki. She received her PhD from the University of Oulu, where she wrote her dissertation, The Image of Aleksandr Nevskiy in Medieval Russia: Warrior and Saint, which was published by Brill in its series The Northern World, vol. 21, in 2006. Besides history, she has also experience in the field of archeology. She is an editor and co-author of the book Past and Present in Medieval Chronicles, published in the online series COLLeGIUM, Studies Across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 17, 2015. Her recent research interests include the Kievan chronicle tradition and apocalyptic thinking in Kiev.
Eve Levin is Professor in the History Department at the University of Kansas, specializing in issues of gender, sexuality, religion, medicine, and popular culture in pre-modern Russia and Eastern Europe. She is also the Editor of The Russian Review.
Timothy May is Professor of Central Eurasian History at the University of North Georgia. He is also the author of The Mongol Art of War (2007), The Mongol Conquests in World History (2009), and the editor of The Mongol Empire: A Historical Encyclopedia (2016).
Paul Milliman is Associate Professor in the History Department at the University of Arizona. He is the author of “The Slippery Memory of Men”: The Place of Pomerania in the Medieval Kingdom of Poland (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013) and teaches courses on the history of Europe in the global Middle Ages, including courses on games and food.
Balazs Nagy is Associate Professor of Medieval History at the Eétvos Lorand University and a visiting faculty member at the Department of Medieval Studies at the Central European University, Budapest. His main research interests are the medieval economic and urban history of Central Europe. He is co-editor of the Latin-English bilingual edition of the autobiography of Emperor Charles IV (ed. with Frank Schaer, CEU Press, 2001); has edited with Derek Keene and Katalin Szende, Segregation — Integration — Assimilation: Religious and Ethnic Groups in the Medieval Towns of Central and Eastern Europe (Ashgate, 2009) and Medieval Buda in Context with Martyn Rady, Katalin Szende, and Andras Vadas (Brill, 2016).
Leonora Neville is the John W. and Jeanne M. Rowe Professor of Byzantine History and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor at the University of Wisconsin— Madison. Her studies of authority and gender in Byzantium have led to Anna Komnene: The Life and Work of a Medieval Historian (Oxford, 2016), Heroes and Romans in 12th Century Byzantium (Cambridge, 2012), and Authority in Byzantine Provincial Society, 950-1100 (Cambridge, 2004).
Donald Ostrowski is Research Advisor in the Social Science and Lecturer in History at the Harvard University Extension School. He is the author of Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-Cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier 1304-1589 (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and the editor of The Povest’ vremennykh let: An Interlinear Collation and Paradosis, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, 2003), which received the Early Slavic Studies Association Award for Distinguished Scholarship. He has published over 100 articles and review essays and has been a co-editor of four collections of studies. He also chairs the Early Slavists Seminars at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University.
Christian Raffensperger is Associate Professor of History at Wittenberg University, as well as an associate of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. He has published multiple books including Reimagining Europe: Kievan Rus’ in the Medieval World (Harvard UP, 2012) and Ties of Kinship: Genealogy and Dynastic Marriage in Kyivan Rus' (Harvard-HURI, 2016). He is also the series editor for Beyond Medieval Europe, a book series published by ARC Humanities Press.
Anti Selart is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Tartu, Estonia. He has published on several topics of Livonian and Russian history in the Middle Ages and in the sixteenth century.
Heidi Sherman-Lelis and Arnold Lelis* co-created Gorm and imagined his adventures throughout Eastern Europe together. Arnold and Heidi earned their doctoral degrees at the University of Minnesota, where they studied early medieval history and archaeology, each completing dissertations on differing aspects of trade and exchange in Northern Europe. They both love teaching, moving to Wisconsin for teaching positions at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. Arnold died of cancer with Heidi at his side. We use the runic symbol Gebo (x) after his name to symbolize their gift of partnership.
Vlada Stankovic is Professor of Byzantine Studies and Director of the Center for Cypriot Studies at the University of Belgrade. He is the editor of the series Byzantium: A European Empire and Its Legacy for Lexington Books.
Cameron Sutt received his PhD from the University of Cambridge, St. Catherine’s College in 2008. He is currently Associate Professor at Austin Peay State University and Chair of the Department of History & Philosophy.
Susana Torres Prieto is Associate Professor of Humanities at IE University. Her main research interests are on medieval Russian literature and codicology.
Monica White is Assistant Professor of Russian and Slavonic Studies at the University of Nottingham. Her interests include the history of Byzantium and Rus, the Orthodox Church, and the religious aspects of warfare in the medieval Orthodox world. Her publications include Military Saints in Byzantium and Rus, 900-1200 (Cambridge, 2013).
Lisa Wolverton, Professor of History at the University of Oregon, concentrates her research on the Czech Lands in the early and central Middle Ages. She is the author of several books, including a translation of Cosmas of Prague’s Chronicle of the Czechs (Catholic University of America Press, 2009).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Christian Raffensperger
This project would not exist without Portraits of Old Russia conceived of by Marshall Poe and set up and edited by Marshall Poe and Don Ostrowski. I had heard of that book when it was still in the early stages from my dissertation advisor, Richard Hellie, who was at first skeptical and then interested in the premise that Don and Marshall were advocating. Years later when the book came out from M.E. Sharpe I reviewed it for Russian Review and enjoyed it immensely. I wanted to teach with it, and subsequently began to do so, but another idea was percolating in my head.
The week after I submitted the review I was telling my wife, yet again, about the book, and how fascinated I was by it and how I wished I could do something like it for an earlier period. She made the extraordinarily logical suggestion that I should just do it, and email Don to see what he would say. I emailed Don later that same day and he liked the idea and wanted to participate in the new project! Thus, Portraits of Medieval Eastern Europe was born.
Admittedly, it took many years from that point to bring the book to fruition with Routledge, and along the way we incurred debts to a variety of people and groups. Don and I were able to arrange a panel to start off the Portraits process at the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in Philadelphia in 2015. The participants and the audience were immensely helpful in providing positive feedback on the process which helped it grow and improve. We also hosted a conference at Harvard University in April 2016 to bring another group of Portraits contributors together. That conference was very generously supported by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, the Medieval Studies Seminar, the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, the Early Slavic Studies Seminar, and the Early Slavic Studies Association. That funding allowed us to bring in scholars from around the U.S. and Europe to participate in the conference. Getting so many contributors together in one room was an essential process to creating some of the basic synergy of the volume, and developing ideas for the companion digital humanities project.
The book would not have ever happened without the willingness of the contributors to devote their time and scholarly energy to a project that is largely devoted to undergraduates and is creative (with all of the opprobrium that brings to tenure and promotion committee). Their genuine interest and joy at talking about and writing these portraits convinced Don and me that we were onto something worthwhile. I hope that our students will agree and that these portraits will find a welcome place in the classroom.
Finally, I would not be able to do any of what I do without the support of my community and family. I want to thank Dar Brooks Hedstrom and the entire Wittenberg University History Department; Doug Lehman, Director of the Thomas Library at Wittenberg; and the Faculty Development Board who provided grants to assist me in the development of this project. Most importantly, I want to thank my family — Cara, Iris, and Malcolm — for their love and support amidst all of the work required to complete the various phases of this project.
Donald Ostrowski
My first expression of gratitude must, of course, go to Chris for coming up with this project and for his willingness to have me work with him on it. I saw it as an opportunity to introduce the Middle Ages both to students and the educated nonspecialists in a “user-friendly” way, but I also saw it as an opportunity to help change people’s misconceptions about the Middle Ages.
Patricia Kolb, who was instrumental in getting Portraits of Old Russia published, has been a staunch supporter of the Portraits of Medieval Eastern Europe from the beginning.
The conference/workshop held at Harvard University in April 2016 would not have happened without a coalition of institutional co-sponsors that Chris mentioned. Institutions don’t function without people, and their contributions need to be acknowledged. Dean Huntington Lambert III agreed to have the Extension School provide financial support and turned over his conference room for our workshop. Jeannette Binjour, financial associate, made that funding a reality. For the Davis Center, Professor Abdi Abdelal, Director of the Davis Center, approved funding, and Penelope Skalnik made it happen. For the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, Professor Serhii Plokhy, Director, approved funding, and Tymish Holowinsky, Executive Director, put it in operation. The President of the Early Slavic Studies Association approved funding from that organization, and Cynthia Vakareliyska, Treasurer, made it come true. For the Committee on Medieval Studies, Dr. Sean Gilsdorf, Program Administrator, both approved and enacted the Committee’s support.
Finally, like Chris, my main academic and career consultant is my wife, Wren Collé. Although she is continually advising me to stop taking on more projects, she approved of my taking on this one. Her advice is unerring and much appreciated.
INTRODUCTION
Donald Ostrowski
Portraits of Medieval Eastern Europe is, in effect, a prequel to Portraits of Old Russia (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2011). In that book, Marshall Poe and I gathered together brief verbal portraits by noted scholars of imagined lives in Rus’ from 1300 to 1725. In the current volume, Christian Raffensperger and I have done a similar gathering of depictions and expanded the geographical area to Eastern Europe as well as pushing back the date range of the depictions to the period from the 920s to 1401.
These imagined lives are not strictly speaking non-fiction history because in every case, the author has gone beyond the usual boundaries of speculative history. Nor are these depictions works of historical fiction, which are usually intended to entertain while maintaining a certain degree of correlation with the source evidence. In a sense, what we have here is a genre that falls in between the two, for the editors encouraged creative speculation on the part of the contributors (while of course respecting their natural inclination not to violate the testimony of the sources). In traditional works of history, the historian is not supposed to go beyond his or her sources.! Nonetheless, here we encouraged our historians to do so in order to present interpretations that could not otherwise be proposed. Additionally, the intent is not to entertain (although we hope these portraits are enjoyable to read), but to instruct. All the contributors are scholarly experts in the area of their subject’s imagined life. Each has been trained to observe the boundaries of the source testimony. But here they venture into a gray area between historical nonfiction and historical fiction.
The genre is not new with these portraits in regard to medieval European history. Eileen Power’s Medieval People (1924) and Norman Cantor’s Medieval Lives (1994) each created a series of imagined biographies to allow readers to gain access to medieval lives of peasants, women, churchmen, and rulers who otherwise have little or no evidence about them. We followed in spirit Cantor’s dictum: “This modest exercise of historical imagination preserves . . . medieval sense and sensibil-
ity that academic research has revealed.”?
One may be reminded of George Orwell’s remark when he was told that a report he wrote for the Partisan Review was inaccurate: “It is essentially true.”? Also one may be surprised to find out that Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1946) is not strictly speaking a non-fiction memoir, for he “rearranged” the events and modified them in his description to make a better narrative. The problem in both cases is that he did not identify at the time that his Partisan Review report and his Down and Out in Paris and London were not completely “true” but only “essentially true.’ Here we openly signal that these portraits are “essentially true” with a heavy dose of historical imagination having been thrown in.
In a theoretical vein, Hayden White has warned historians about the shaping tendency that narrative emplotments and interpretations can have on the presentation of evidence.* The editors and contributors to this volume are consciously aware of that shaping tendency. In other words, we are not saying what we report is what happened and this is the way it happened (as many historical narratives seem to be at least implicitly asserting), but that this is a possibility of what happened (or something very similar to it in regard to composite characters) and this is possibly the way it could have happened. We have marked these depictions as “imagined” and as “creative speculation,” and we hope the results will provide a user-friendly means of introducing medieval Eastern European history to students as well as the educated non-specialist. In the process we hope that specialists will also find something of interest in them.
The quotation from Norman Cantor above continues: “The innovation, if it may be called that, is in the way the narrative is told.”> In the current volume the contributors have, likewise, been innovative in telling their respective narratives. The various narrative strategies they employ all derive from well-known narrative strategies for works of fiction.
Narrative strategies
Generally, there are basically three basic modes of narration — first person (“I/We did this.”), second person (“You did this.”), and third person (“He/She/It/They did this.”). In third-person narration, one can have an omniscient narrator who knows, but does not necessarily tell, all. One can also have a subjective narrator, one who has a particular point of view. The subjective third-person narrator can make asides to the reader, as the narrator of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) does or even be a participant in the action, as are the narrators Nelly Dean and Lockwood in Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Bronté (Ellis Bell) or as is the narrator of the Sherlock Holmes stories — Dr. John H. Watson — who is involved in the story itself as it unfolds.
One can have an objective narrator. The strategy of the objective narrator was the basis of realist fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Among the earliest and best examples of literary realism is Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), where the narrator tells the story in a way that is similar to a clinician’s recording in the most objective and detached manner possible the unfolding of events as though they were part of an experiment.
In the present collection we have several examples of a first-person narrator. Susana Torres Prieto (IE University) adopts the diary form to tell the story of the arrival and first few years of the Byzantine Princess Anna Porphyrogenita’s coming to Rus’, her marriage to the King of Rus’, Volodimir I (ca. 958-1015), and the misery of her longing for Constantinople where she had lived her whole life until then. One can imagine, as Torres Prieto does, what thoughts must have been going through the mind of this princess, who was raised in the lap of luxury only to find herself among those she considers barbarians.
Anti Selart (University of Tartu) provides another first-person narration in the form of a memoir written by Volodimir of Pskov (1170s—1230s) as he reflects toward the end of his life on his achievements and failures. As with any good memoirist, Volodimir passes judgments on those he discusses. He calls “greedy and jealous” the priest Henry, who is generally regarded as the author of the Livonian Chronicle, and tells us that “he lied.” The people of Pskov are termed “fickle” because they twice voted for him to be their ruler and twice voted for him to leave off being their ruler. In this portrait, Selart personalizes a minor ruler who played a major role in events of his time.
Two more first-person narrations appear in the form of travel accounts. Isaiah Gruber (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) has his narrator, Yitshak ben Sirota, an imagined Jewish traveler and sometime slave of the eleventh century, tell his own life story as though it were one long peregrination. Gruber includes at the end a second first-person narrator in the form of Yitshak’s grandson Shlomo who adds a postscript after he finishes copying the manuscript in which his grandfather’s imagined life appears.
Monica White (University of Nottingham) provides an imagined travel account of the monk Fotii, a historical figure, who undertook a pilgrimage from Tver’ to Constantinople in 1277. Fotii vividly describes what he sees on the way as well as his reactions to what he is seeing. In those descriptions, White intersperses the statements that historical Rus’ travelers made in their own writings about their respective pilgrimages to Constantinople. Thus, she gives enhanced historical verisimilitude to Fotii’s imagined travelogue.
Donald Ostrowski (Harvard University) employs a first-person account as reported by another person. The Rus’ slave Vaska tells the story of Konchak, a Polovtsian leader, but in the process he tells us much of his own story. Vaska’s narration is framed as a story that he related to Dusticello of Pisa, a friend of the family of a Genoese merchant who bought Vaska on the Black Sea slave market. Thus, we have a story within a story (mise en abyme) — Vaska’s story within that of Dusticello’s, and Konchak’s story within that of Vaska’s. Such a technique of the narrator’s telling his own story as part of telling the story of another person was invoked by Robert Penn Warren in All the King’s Men (1946), where the narrator, the historian Jack Burden, tells the story of the cynical populist Willie Stark in Louisiana of the 1930s but ends up telling as much if not more about himself.
The final first-person account is by Leonora Neville (University of Wisconsin) in her presentation of the eleventh-century Byzantine princess and historian Anna Komnene’s response to criticism of her by modern-day historians. Neville refers to this technique by the Greek term ethopoeia (a rhetorical exercise). The same technique was used by the cultural historian [hor Sevéenko (1922-2009) in 1992 to present the response of the tenth-century emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (905-959) to criticism of him, likewise by modern-day historians.°
Five of our contributors utilize omniscient third-person narratives that employ the past tense in the telling of the story. Inés Garcia de la Puente (Ohio State University and Boston University) uses such a narrative strategy to advance an interpretation about Gleb Vseslavich’s wife (1074-1158). We have little evidence about her; for example, we do not even know her name. But what evidence we do have is unusual for a woman in twelfth-century Rus’, including a eulogy in the chronicle upon her death. She may have succeeded her husband as ruler of Minsk, and this portrait takes as its premise that she did so. It leads us through the princess’s thought processes as she comes to grips with her husband’s death and deals with concerns about her own situation and how she approached her new role.
Mari Isoaho (University of Helsinki) also employs an omniscient third-person narrative to describe a mother, Kuutamo Hyvaneuvo, in an indigenous kinship group of Finns in the thirteenth century. Kuutamo is waiting for the return of her son from a long journey. Since we have no evidence about specific individuals among such Finnish kinship groups, the character of the mother is necessarily a fictive one. Isoaho draws extensively, however, on contextual historical and folkloric evidence for her depiction.
The portrait by Cameron Sutt (Austin Peay State University) of a thirteenthcentury Hungarian slave, Zalava, is also told from the point of view of an omniscient third-person narrative. The narrator even knows what Zalava remembers and does not remember. The historian has little information about slaves in medieval Europe, let alone knowing many of them by name. Sutt is able to reconstruct events in Zalava’s life using his imagination and from details found in official documents of the 1270s.
Vlada Stankovi¢é (University of Belgrade) also employs the historical past tense of an omniscient third-person narrator. He begins his portrait at a particular point in time — the early days of December 1282 when King Milutin of Serbia was expecting a military attack by the Byzantine Emperor Michael VIII. Stankovic then uses that pivotal year to place Milutin’s four marriages within the context of Serbia’s relationship with the king of Sicily, the king of Hungary, the Byzantine Emperor, and the khan of the western part of the Ulus of Jochi (Qipchaq Khanate). In the process, the reader is provided an insight into the thinking, hopes and fears of Milutin, who was canonized within two years of his death.
Heidi Sherman-Lelis (University of Wisconsin-Green Bay) and Arnold Lelis (University of Wisconsin—Stevens Point) use a different form of omniscient thirdperson narrative, one that employs the historical present (praesens historicum) instead of the past tense. They tell the story of Gorm, a young Viking man of the tenth century and his trips to Gardariki (Rus’). Usually the historical present is associated with a first-person narrator, but William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition (2003), among a few others, successfully employs the third-person historical present, as Sherman-Lelis and Lelis do here. Whether utilized through the first person or third person, the historical present serves to make the events described more immediate to the reader.
Paul Milliman (University of Arizona) chooses a non-omniscient third-person narrative to tell his story. He takes the multi-volume History of Poland by Jan Diugosz (1415-1480) and adds an interpolation in the voice of Dtugosz. That imagined interpolation describes how the Master Chef of King Wladyslaw Jagiello of Poland invented a Polish national dish, bigos, a stew made with different kinds of game meat mixed together. Since the origin of Polish bigos is a matter of dispute, Milliman’s interpolation provides an explanation of how it might have been invented. Another use of the non-omniscient third-person narrative is by Balazs Nagy (Edtvés Lorand University, Central European University, Budapest) in his portrait of Bela IV, king of Hungary from 1235 to 1270. Like Milliman’s narrator, Nagy’s is a historian. Instead of a fifteenth-century historian, however, Nagy’s narrator is a present-day historian who has done his best to piece together biographical information about Bela IV based on the sources we have. The narrative strategy for presentation is an interview with the historian in which an interlocutor asks him to explain his understanding of significant aspects of Bela’s reign as king of Hungary.
Four of the accounts herein use the epistolary form, made popular by Samuel Ricardson’s novel Pamela (1740), but which ultimately derives from Diego de San Pedro’s 1485 novel Carcel de amor (Prison of Love). Each of two accounts utilizes a single letter written by a churchman.
Lisa Wolverton (University of Oregon) invokes an imaginary letter from an unnamed churchman in Prague to his uncle, another unnamed churchman in Olomouc, to tell the story of Bishop Henry Zdik, head of the church in Moravia, at a crucial moment in his career in 1140. It was also a key moment in the history of Moravia. The letter writer tells us that Sobéslav, the ruler of Moravia, died two weeks earlier and the local dukes supported his nephew Vladislaus over Sobéslav’s son (also named Vladislaus) to succeed him. We learn of the impending crisis through the eyes of the young cleric in the city of Prague as Bishop Henry began to get involved in “worldly matters” — the politics of the succession struggle and potential civil war.
Florin Curta (University of Florida) creates an imaginary letter written in 1236 from a Bulgarian patriarch to a Bulgarian emperor to tell the story of St. Sava, a few months after his death. Sava was one of the most important figures of Serbian history and was canonized as the founder of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Curta utilizes as a source for his story a genuine biography written by the Serbian monk Domentijan, who traveled with Sava during the last few years of his life. In the process, Curta creates a portrait of Sava that is both secular and religious.
The two other narratives that use the epistolary form involve a series of letters written by a single secular individual. Christian Raffensperger (Wittenberg University) imagines two letters written by Evpraksia, daughter of Vsevolod (who ruled Rus’ from 1078 to 1093), sister of Volodimir Monomakh (who ruled Rus’ from 1113 to 1125), and wife of Henry IV (Holy Roman Emperor from 1084 to 1105). As Raffensperger points out in the introduction, she was one of the most famous women of her time, took part in the Investiture Controversy, toured Europe giving speeches, and even addressed a papal council (Piacenza 1095). In these imagined letters dated 1093 and 1096, she writes to her family telling of her time at foreign courts and in foreign lands.
Timothy May (University of North Georgia) writes a series of four imagined letters from the Mongol general Siibedei, one of the great military commanders of all time.’ The first letter is addressed to Chinggis Khan telling him of the Battle on the Kalka River in 1223 against the Rus’. The next two letters are to Qa’an Og6dei, the successor of Chinggis Khan, and the second of those takes the form of an “after-action” report on the campaign in Eastern Europe. The fourth letter is a letter of advice to Siibedei’s son. The time span of the letters is twenty years.
Then there are the hybrid narratives, which combine two or more narrative strategies. Eve Levin (University of Kansas) uses an omniscient third-person narrator, who is able to report what the main character, Anna, is thinking and doing, interspersed with “letters” in the form of excerpts from genuine Novgorodian birch bark missives. Although it is unlikely the particular missives quoted were part of such a single story, given enough written birch bark documents, historians might be able one day to come close to constructing a story about a single individual based on them.
Neven Budak (University of Zagreb) begins his portrait of Paul I Bribir, the ban of Croatia, with a description in the historical present tense of his son Mladen entering the city of Zadar in March 1311. Mladen is about to receive the keys to the city for helping to oust the forces of Venice. Budak then switches to the historical past tense to describe the political and diplomatic circumstances, almost as a contemporary diplomat would, of Paul’s rise to power that set the stage for Mladen’s being honored in Zadar as well as his subsequent rule as ban of Croatia. The last paragraph of the portrait, however, is written in such a way as to evoke comparison with Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem Ozymandias on the decayed ruins and forgotten legacies of past mighty rulers.
Another hybrid can be seen in the discussion by David Goldfrank (Georgetown University) of Prince Vojgelk of Lithuania. Goldfrank employs an involved narrative style where he starts as a present-day historian who makes a few introductory remarks using the simple historical past tense. His historian then adopts the historical present to take the reader back to April 1267, describing Vojselk’s circumstances in a monastery. At that point, he puts the reader inside the mind of Vojselk/Lavrys, who then recounts in the past tense his memory of how he became ruler of Lithuania and what happened when he was the ruler. In the coda of the account, the present-day historian returns adopting the historical past tense once again to make a few last comments. Thus, the narrative comes full circle: from historical past used by the historian-narrator to historical present used by the historian-narrator to historical past used by Vojselk/Lavry to historical present used by the historian-narrator and ending up by returning to historical past used by the historian-narrator.
Being mindful of the narrative strategy each contributor employs can increase the appreciation of that particular portrait. Other narrative strategies could have been used to present more or less the same story, but perhaps not so effectively.
Terms
Defining terms is an important component of any historical work, none more so than here. The contributors to this volume, of necessity, employ terms that are used and understood differently by different people. Perhaps there is no more elusive term to define than the one in the title of this book — “Eastern Europe.” Definitions of it vary widely and some barely overlap.
The British scholar Dimitri Obolensky (1918-2001) defined Eastern Europe as that area occupied by people who are the “heirs of Byzantium.” Obolensky’s conception, which he acknowledged was “little more than a loose empirical category, combined geographical and cultural criteria. In his definition, Eastern Europe included Russia but excluded such Catholic countries as Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, and Croatia that are often included as part of Eastern Europe.* In contrast, Walter Kolarz defined Eastern Europe as that part of Europe after World War II where national boundaries were still in dispute. In that formulation, Kolarz encompassed Finland and Greece, as well as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria, all of which had irredentist movements. He did not explicitly include the Soviet Union or Russia, but by implication included Ukraine and Belorussia.? Hugh Seton- Watson assumed Eastern Europe to be that area of Europe that came under Soviet domination after World War II.!° This last definition included Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, but more or less excluded Albania, Yugoslavia, and the republics of the Soviet Union from Eastern Europe. Defining Eastern Europe for the time before the twentieth century based on political events after 1945, however, seems inherently faulty and anachronistic.
Indeed, the American historian Larry Wolff has argued that the term Eastern Europe developed during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment to relegate an area of Europe to the category of “other’’!! In this regard, Wolff saw a version of what in 1978 Edward Said called “Orientalism.’!* About the same time that Wolff published his book, the Serbian-American scholar Milica Bakié-Hayden began referring to Eastern Europe in the context of “nesting orientalisms” — in essence the further east an area is from Western Europe, the less civilized it is considered to be.'? In the light of these ideas and of the changing geopolitical situation, a number of individuals such as the comparative literature scholar Steven Cassedy have questioned the usefulness of the term itself because of the tendency for its being given to misinterpretation.'*
The American academic and journalist Sabrina Ramet has defined Eastern Europe as that area of Europe that has primarily Byzantine and Orthodox Christian, as well as some Turco-Muslim, influences. '* If one were to adopt this definition, then presumably for that area that is neither Western nor Eastern Europe, the term East Central Europe would apply.
The Polish historian Oskar Halecki (1891-1973) divided Europe vertically into four zones: Western Europe, West Central Europe, East Central Europe, and Eastern
Europe.'°
For Halecki, East Central Europe (or Central-Eastern Europe) comprised that area that between the two world wars existed east of Scandinavia, Germany, and Italy, and west of the Soviet Union. Thus, it would include the Baltic states, as well as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia. Eastern Europe in his conceptualization is that area of Europe further east toward the Ural Mountains. While promising, this schema has the same drawback for medieval studies as Seton-Watson’s schema, that is, anachronistic because it depends on later political events.
The United Nations Statistical Division divides Europe into four discrete geographic regions: Northern Europe, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and Southern Europe. It defines Eastern Europe as comprising ten countries: Belarus, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, and Ukraine.'” Thus, it excludes from Eastern Europe the Baltic countries — Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania — which it places in Northern Europe along with Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Great Britain, Ireland, and Iceland. It also excludes from Eastern Europe Greece and the Balkan countries — Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Albania, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro — which it places in Southern Europe.
For the purposes of this book, we can define Eastern Europe broadly and inclusively as the area of Europe east of a line drawn from Szczecin in the north at the mouth of the Oder River to Trieste in the south at the head of the Adriatic Sea.'* But we also include the eastern part of the UN’s Northern Europe — thus, Finland and the Baltic countries — as well as the eastern part of the UN’s Southern Europe — thus, Greece and the Balkan countries. Whatever term one uses to describe this region, it is bound to provoke objection from one side or another. We can only provide our thinking for our choice in this matter.
Another term in the title also has provoked disagreement. The word medieval (or mediaeval) derives from the Latin medium aevum, which means “between ages.” The ages being referred to are the Classical age of ancient Greece and Rome, on the one hand, and the Renaissance, on the other.
The term was first used in the early nineteenth century as an adjectival form for Middle Ages, the period that Renaissance humanists had rejected in favor of the Classical age before it. Middle Ages is perhaps better than Dark Ages, whose first use has been ascribed to Petrarch but which was then used by humanists and historians to describe the period from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century to the beginning of the Renaissance. '” A secondary meaning of medieval is “too old to be useful or acceptable,’”° and that is where the problem lies. The term Middle Ages was perceived as the least of the three ages — Classical, Middle Ages, Renaissance (or modern). Likewise, the adjectival form medieval exists within a context of denigration. So, both Eastern Europe and medieval have negative connotations.*' Nonetheless, we persist in using them here in part because we would like, to some extent, to reverse those negativities and in part because we do not have better or more precise terms to replace them.
The term Rus‘ or Rus is one that has gained increasingly widespread usage during the course of the last forty years and is now being used to designate the area from the tenth through the seventeenth centuries where East Slavic dialectics were spoken. During this time period, the four East Slavic languages — Belarusian, Russian, Rusyn, and Ukrainian — had not yet clearly differentiated themselves from each other.” Formerly this area was referred to as “Old Russia,” but that term gave priority to the Great Russian nationality, for then why not “Old Ukraine” or “Old Belarusia” instead? The term Rus’/Rus has the double advantage of being historically accurate — it was used to designate major parts of this area during that time — and of not privileging any one nationality.
The term Kievan Rus' is somewhat of a misnomer too. It is certainly better than Kievan Russia, the title of George Vernadsky’s second volume of his History of Russia series. The point of it was to distinguish early Rus’ (before the Mongol invasion) from later Rus’ (Muscovy), but by juxtaposing Kievan Russia with Muscovite Russia it implied that both were the same kind of state, and that Kievan Russia with its capital at Kiev where the “grand prince” sat on his throne, covered all of Rus’, just as Moscow was the capital of Muscovite Rus’ where the grand prince, later tsar, sat on his throne and also covered all of Rus’.
Instead, our sources present a significantly different picture of the early Rus’ principalities, which contrasts with Muscovy. For one thing, for the ruler of Kiev, we have no evidence of a coronation ritual or regalia of power such as a crown, orb, or scepter. Beginning in 1018 the chronicles began referring to Galicia and Volynia as not being part of Rus’. By 1132, Novgorod was not part of Rus’. By 1140, Polotsk was not part of Rus’. By 1146, Rostov, Suzdal’, and Vladimir-on-theKliazma were not part of Rus’. By 1147, Riazan’ and Murom were not part of Rus’. By 1148,Smolensk was not part of Rus’ (beginning 1148).”° As the Swedish scholar John Lind proposed, the term Rus’ was being equated here only with the towns whose princes were in the line of succession to the throne of Kiev.”* As a result, insofar as there was a Kievan Rus’, it was limited to the province of Kiev and the two adjoining provinces, Chernigov and Pereiaslavl’.
The difference between the spelling Rus’ and Rus (as well as the concomitant Rus'ian and Rusian is purely a spelling one). The Cyrillic spelling is Pycb with the final letter being a soft sign. The soft sign has no phonetic value in itself but indicates how to pronounce the preceding consonant (1.e., in a soft rather than hard manner). Its function is somewhat similar to the final silent e in English in words like tale or file, which tell us to pronounce the antepenultimate letter, the vowel, in a long manner (a, 1) rather than short (a, i), except in cases where it doesn’t, such as in the verb fo live. In transliterations to Cyrillic, such a final silent e is dropped or modified because it has no phonetic value in itself and can be confusing (Tam/Tai9, cpust/dum9). On the other hand, the Library of Congress transliteration system does indicate the transliteration of each letter, including both soft signs and hard signs, be made. We have left the choice to each contributor to decide what they want to do with the final soft sign in Rus'/Rus and other proper names, such as Igor’ or even the title kniaz’.
A third term that requires explanation is the word kniaz' (kHa3b). Traditionally the term is translated as prince. Yet the position that the kniaz’ often occupied in the early Rus’ principalities was equivalent in many ways to that of king in medieval western Europe and Scandinavia.** We have allowed the contributors to decide for themselves how to translate, whether as prince or king, or leave the word kniaz' untranslated. The editors came to the conclusion that readers will not be confused by the apparent inconsistency between portraits as long as it has been explained in this Introduction, which it now has, and as long as each contribution is consistent internally.
We also have differences in the spelling of proper names. The Russians like to spell the name of the ruler who converted the Rus’ people to Christianity as Viadimir. The Ukrainians prefer Volodimer, but the spelling Volodimir appears just as often as Volodimer (and more often than Vladimir) in the primary sources. Again, we have left it to the individual contributor to decide which spelling they prefer as long as they are being consistent within each sketch.
My co-editor picks up a number of these themes in the Conclusion to this volume and develops them further.
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