The Uses of the Middle Ages in Modern European States: History, Nationhood and the Search for Origins (Writing the Nation)

The Uses of the Middle Ages in Modern European States History, Nationhood and the Search for Origins

Edited by

R.J.W. Evans and Guy P. Marchal

The Uses of the Middle Ages in Modern European States

Also by R.J.W. Evans RUDOLF II AND HIS WORLD THE MAKING OF THE HABSBURG MONARCHY AUSTRIA, HUNGARY, AND THE HABSBURGS: Essays on Central Europe, c.1683–1867

Also by Guy P. Marchal DIE FROMMEN SCHWEDEN IN SCHWYZ. DAS ‘HERKOMMEN DER SCHWYZER UND OBERHASLER’ ALS QUELLE ZUM SCHWYZERISCHEN SELBSTVERSTÄNDNIS IM 15. UND 16. JAHRHUNDERT GESCHICHTE DER SCHWEIZ UND DER SCHWEIZER SCHWEIZER GEBRAUCHSGESCHICHTE. GESCHICHTSBILDER, MYTHENBILDUNG UND NATIONALE IDENTITÄT

The Uses of the Middle Ages in Modern European States History, Nationhood and the Search for Origins

Edited by

R.J.W. Evans Regius Professor of History, University of Oxford and

Guy P. Marchal Emeritus Professor of Medieval History, University of Lucerne

Editorial matter and selection © R.J.W. Evans and Guy P. Marchal 2011 All remaining chapters © their respective authors 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–57602–5

hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The uses of the Middle Ages in modern European states : history, nationhood and the search for origins / edited by R.J.W. Evans, Guy P. Marchal. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–57602–5 1. Europe—History—476–1492—Historiography. 2. Middle Ages— Historiography. 3. Civilization, Medieval—Historiography. 4. National characteristics, European. I. Evans, Robert John Weston. II. Marchal, Guy P. D116.U74 2010 940.1072—dc22 2010042579 10 20

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents

Notes on the Contributors 1

vii

Introduction Guy P. Marchal

1

Part I Celts and Scandinavia 2

3

4

5

5

Transmission and Translation of Medieval Irish Sources in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries Bernadette Cunningham The ‘Decline of Norway’: Grief and Fascination in Norwegian Historiography on the Middle Ages Jan Eivind Myhre

18

‘Braves Step out of the Night of the Barrows’: Regenerating the Heritage of Early Medieval Finland Derek Fewster

31

Interpreting the Nordic Past: Icelandic Medieval Manuscripts and the Construction of a Modern Nation Guðmundur Hálfdanarson

52

Part II

Benelux

73

6 A Serious Case of Amnesia: the Dutch and their Middle Ages Peter Raedts 7

8

Medieval Myths and the Building of National Identity: the Example of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg Michel Margue and Pit Péporté An Era of Grandeur. The Middle Ages in Belgian National Historiography, 1830–1914 Jo Tollebeek

Part III 9

7

Balkans

75

88

113

137

To Whom Does Byzantium Belong? Greeks, Turks and the Present of the Medieval Balkans Johannes Niehoff-Panagiotidis v

139

vi

10

Contents

The Image of the Battle of Kosovo (1389) Today: a Historic Event, a Moral Pattern, or the Tool of Political Manipulation Marko Šuica

Part IV

Central Europe

11 Italy’s Various Middle Ages Mauro Moretti and Ilaria Porciani 12

13

14

152

175 177

Medievalism, the Politics of Memory and Swiss National Identity Guy P. Marchal

197

The Public Instrumentalization of the Middle Ages in Austria since 1945 Herwig Wolfram

221

‘Old Czechs Were Hefty Heroes’: the Construction and Reconstruction of Czech National History in its Relationship to the ‘Great’ Medieval Past František Šmahel Conclusion R.J.W. Evans

245 259

Bibliography

263

Index

284

Notes on the Contributors

Bernadette Cunningham is Deputy Librarian of the Royal Irish Academy ([email protected]). Robert J.W. Evans is Regius Professor of History at the University of Oxford ([email protected]). Derek Fewster is a researcher in the Department of History at the University of Helsinki ([email protected]). Guðmundur Hálfdanarson is Professor of History at the University of Iceland ([email protected]). Guy P. Marchal is Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at the University of Lucerne ([email protected]). Michel Margue is Professor of History at the University of Luxembourg ([email protected]). Mauro Moretti is a Professor in the Department of Human Sciences at Siena Foreign University ([email protected]). Jan Eivind Myhre is Professor of Modern History at the University of Oslo ([email protected]). Johannes Niehoff-Panagiotidis is Professor of Byzantine Studies at the Free University Berlin ([email protected] or niehoffj@ ceu.hu). Pit Péporté is a researcher in the Department of History at the University of Luxembourg ([email protected]). Ilaria Porciani is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Bologna ([email protected]). Peter Raedts is Professor of Medieval History at Radboud University Nijmegen ([email protected]). František Šmahel is vice-director of the Centre for Medieval Studies of the Czech Academy of Sciences ([email protected]). Marko Šuica is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Belgrade ([email protected]).

vii

viii Notes on the Contributors

Jo Tollebeek is Professor of Cultural History at the Catholic University of Leuven ( [email protected]). Herwig Wolfram is Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at the University of Vienna ([email protected]).

1 Introduction Guy P. Marchal

In 1975 František Graus demonstrated in his book Lebendige Vergangenheit1 that ‘whereas the past itself may be over, our view of the past can never be definitive and unequivocal, if only because the observer and his point of view are an inseparable part of its construction’. Graus reminded us how precisely as a result of this basic condition, historiography had to share responsibility in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for some cultural evils, and warned that research into the way historical images have been moulded by different periods and ideologies must become ‘an integral part of historical enquiry’. But the implications of his demand for national historiography were as yet hardly appreciated. Graus’s pioneering work was far ahead of its time. Meanwhile, however, his methodological postulate has become an acquis commun. Especially since the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, and if we take congresses as indicators of mainstream activity, we can observe a lively comparative debate in this area. Several international colloquia have been devoted to this problem,2 and in 2003, under the aegis of the European Science Foundation (ESF), the hitherto largest such project was launched, the programme of ‘Representations of the Past: the Writing of National Histories in Europe’, that embraces some 30 European nations.3 The present volume was generated by that ESF programme, and goes back to a cross-team conference, organized by both its editors, on ‘The Role of Medievalism in the Writing of National Histories’, which was held at Oxford University on 6–7 April 2006. For this publication the papers given there have been enhanced by a number of additional contributions. Innovatively for his time, the medievalist Graus proceeded from medieval historical traditions and took the examples of Bohemia, Germany and France to show how these were mythicized in the modern period and invested with ‘national meaning’. Since then investigation of the reception and instrumentalization of medieval antecedents has become commonplace. Discussion of the various ways of ‘exploiting’ the Middle Ages is by now so standard 1

2 The Uses of the Middle Ages in Modern European States

that in 2005 a well-attended international congress at the Central European University in Budapest could address over several days the most diverse forms of ‘uses and abuses of the Middle Ages from the nineteenth to the twentyfirst century’.4 The present volume resumes Graus’s approach to the national appropriation of medieval themes, but tackles the issues from the other side, as it were. It takes national historiography as its starting point and asks what have been the role and significance of the Middle Ages in the construction of national pasts and national identities since the nineteenth century. Thus the history of modern receptivity to the Middle Ages gains a firm focus in its relation to nation-building, and by the same token we can set particular forms of medievalism in a more concentrated and socially informed context. The comparative analysis of national historiography and national identity formation has normally embraced only modern phenomena, such as fall within the time frame of the relevant historiographical discussion. Earlier periods have hardly ever been placed in the centre of a debate about national histories, as we do here with the Middle Ages. Only for certain countries do there exist a few relevant publications.5 A targeted comparison of the treatment of the Middle Ages in different national historiographies and of its role in creating related modern identities has never before been essayed on this scale. The choice of nations to be treated in what follows may raise some eyebrows, but is easily explained. It might be thought that major and well-known cases such as Germany, France and England, those where a great medieval past is bound in with lasting traditions and powerful modern states, would be indispensable for our purposes. Yet we have proceeded on the opposite principle. Our starting point is the assumption that the Middle Ages must have been most clearly instrumentalized in precisely those countries which possessed no distinct medieval statehood of their own. On this criterion it falls to consider young sovereign states which emerged only later, mainly during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from much larger territorial complexes, such as Belgium, Finland, Iceland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Alongside these we examine states with an interrupted development, which already existed in some form during the Middle Ages, but then became for centuries subordinate parts of larger political structures, such as Bohemia, Ireland, Norway and Serbia. In addition we embrace states, like Switzerland and Austria, that survived from the medieval period onwards with some kind of legal continuity, but re-emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a new guise and with quite different constitutional forms. And finally, in the cases of Italy and the successors to Byzantium, we are interested in how medieval themes were handled against a background of great traditions from antiquity. This, then, is our programme. However, we have grouped the various contributions on the basis of geography rather than of that typology. Practical considerations come into play here. Yet equally important is the fact that the

Guy P. Marchal

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chapters are very diverse in their actual conception and content, thanks precisely to the different national history cultures from which they derive, with their specific historiographical presuppositions, their own heuristic traditions and their own understandings of how the past should be approached. A regional ordering does better justice to that diversity. Not only will readers learn in this book about the history of nations with which they are likely to be largely unfamiliar; they will also discover such a wealth of constants, parallels and variations in the ways in which the Middle Ages have been placed in the service of modern national identity that we feel the relevance of our underlying conception for the work will be fully vindicated.

Notes 1. František Graus, Lebendige Vergangenheit. Überlieferung im Mittelalter und in den Vorstellungen vom Mittelalter (Cologne/Vienna, 1975). 2. ESF-Programme ‘Origins of the Modern State in Europe 1300–1800’, Cross-team Conference, Rome, 18–31 March 1990, published as Wim Blockmans and JeanPhilippe Genet (eds), Visions sur le développement des états européens. Théories et historiographies de l’état moderne (Rome, 1993). Polish–Swiss Colloquium, August 1992, published as Krzysztof Baczkowski and Christian Simon (eds), Historiographie in Polen und in der Schweiz (Cracow, 1994). Conference in Cardiff, 9–11 April 1996, published as Stefan Berger et al. (eds), Writing National Histories: Western Europe since 1800 (London/New York, 1999). Exhibition ‘Mythen der Nationen’, Berlin, 20 March–9 June 1998, published as Monika Flacke (ed.), Mythen der Nationen. Ein europäisches Panorama (Berlin, 1998). Conference in Berlin, June 1999, published as Christoph Conrad and Sebastian Conrad (eds), Die Nation schreiben. Geschichtswissenschaft im Vergleich (Göttingen, 2002). Conference in Oslo, 24–26 September 1999, published as Frank Meyer and Jan Eivind Myhre (eds), Nordic Historiography in the 20th Century (Oslo, 2000). ESF-exploratory workshop, Lucerne, 19–20 November 1999, ‘Construction et déconstruction des histoires nationales’, unpublished, but led to the ’Representations of the Past’ project, cf. next note. 3. Mary O’Dowd and Ilaria Porciani (eds), ‘History Women’, Storia della Storiografia, 46 (2004); Stefan Berger and Andrew Mycock (eds), ‘Europe and its National Histories’, Storia della Storiografia, 50 (2006); Berger et al. (eds), Narrating the Nation: Representations in History, Media and Arts (Oxford, 2008); Berger (ed.), Writing the Nation. Global Perspectives (Basingstoke, 2007); Frank Hadler and Mathias Mesenhöller (eds), Lost Greatness and Past Oppression in East Central Europe: Representations of the Imperial Experience in Historiography since 1918 (Leipzig, 2007). 4. The series of publications on reception of the Middle Ages, Studies in Medievalism (Cambridge 1979–), covers the whole gamut of possible responses, from literature through the visual arts and architecture to film. There are a few items on political instrumentalization. Comparative collections: ‘Italia e Germania. Immagini, modelli, miti fra due popoli nell’Ottocento: il Medioevo – Das Mittelalter. Ansichten, Stereotypen und Mythen zweier Völker im neunzehnten Jahrhundert: Deutschland und Italien’, Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento – Jahrbuch des italienisch–deutschen historischen Instituts in Trient, 1 (1985); International Conference, CEU Budapest, 30 March–2 April 2005, ’Uses and Abuses of the Middle Ages, 19th–20th Century’ (in press). János M. Bak, Jörg Jarnut, Pierre Monnet and Bernd

4 The Uses of the Middle Ages in Modern European States

Schneidmüller (eds), Gebrauch und Missbrauch des Mittelaters, 19.–21. Jahrhundert – Uses and Abuses of the Middle Ages: 19th–21st Century – Usages et Mésusages du Moyen Age du XIXe au XXIe siècle (Munich, 2009). 5. Christian Amalvi, Le goût du moyen âge (Paris, 1996), esp. 185–260 ; id., De l’art et la manière d’accommoder les héros de l’histoire de France. De Vercingétorix à la Révolution: Essais de mythologie nationale (Paris, 1988); Gerd Althoff (ed.), Die Deutschen und ihr Mittelalter (Darmstadt, 1992) ; Derek Fewster, Visions of Past Glory. Nationalism and the Construction of Early Finnish History (Helsinki, 2006); Guy P. Marchal, Schweizer Gebrauchsgeschichte. Geschichtsbilder, Mythenbildung und nationale Identität (Basle, 2006, 2nd edn 2007).

Part I Celts and Scandinavia

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2 Transmission and Translation of Medieval Irish Sources in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries Bernadette Cunningham

1 The medieval tradition The medieval Irish origin legend, describing the peopling of Ireland as found in the Middle Irish treatise known as the Leabhar Gabhála (Book of Invasions), comprised a sequence of interlinked stories of waves of settlers who arrived and established themselves on the island. The sequence usually began with Ceasair, supposed daughter of Noah, thereby establishing a link with the genealogical material in the Old Testament. Subsequent invasions by Parthalón, Nemed, the Fir Bolg and the Tuatha dé Danann were recorded, culminating in the settlement of Ireland by the Milesians, the sons of Míl Espáine who journeyed to Ireland having ultimately come from the Middle East.1 It was from this last group – from the three sons of Míl, namely Eremón, Éber and Ír – that the Gaeil, the Gaelic Irish, were said to have been descended. Over time, the earlier elements of the ‘invasions’ story declined in popularity while the Milesian element retained its resonance, with the term ‘Clann Mhíleadh’ (family of Míl) being used as a synonym for the Gaelic community in the seventeenth century. The origins of the Leabhar Gabhála tradition are obscure and many variant recensions of the text survive from the twelfth to seventeenth centuries, but its basis was essentially genealogical. Its significance was that it provided a broad, and ultimately biblical, context for the genealogical lore that was an indispensable element of each family’s collective memory. Throughout the medieval period both prose sagas and saints’ lives adopted the context of the pseudo-historical scheme of the Milesian origin legend for chronological or genealogical purposes.2 The framework of the Irish origin legend as recorded in the Leabhar Gabhála continued to be a requisite element of histories of Ireland down to the nineteenth century.3 The second core element to form part of early Irish historiography was the succession of kings. This material, in the form of the Réim Ríoghraidhe (roll of kings), usually followed on from the Leabhar Gabhála in medieval manuscript 7

8 The Uses of the Middle Ages in Modern European States

compilations. Like the book of invasions, the Réim Ríoghraidhe was adapted by seventeenth-century historians who compiled new histories of Ireland using medieval manuscript sources. They also incorporated material on later kings including the Tudors and early Stuarts, weaving them almost seamlessly into the narrative of Irish kingship.4 A third, later, strand in pre-modern Irish historiography centred on the idea of Ireland as an ‘island of saints and scholars’. This element, too, was popularized by Irish Catholic historians of the early seventeenth century, and used as part of the polemical debate between Christian denominations in the era of Reformation and Counter-Reformation. The impetus to promulgate the image of an island of saints and scholars was most clearly discernible among the Catholic Irish who were educated at universities in continental Europe in the early seventeenth century.5 It was, in large part, a reaction to adverse publicity circulated in the writings of the twelfth-century commentator, Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis), whose work was widely disseminated. Gerald’s Expugnatio Hiberniae had been made available in print in English in a London edition of 1587 and was published in Latin at Frankfurt in 1602 as part of a larger work edited by William Camden.6 In a companion volume to the Expugnatio, the Topographia Hiberniae, Gerald of Wales had included denigratory comments about the nature of Irish Christianity. While conceding that St Patrick had converted the Irish to Christianity in the fifth century, Gerald observed that the Irish were largely ignorant of the doctrines of the Christian faith. They were, he said, ‘a filthy people, wallowing in vice ... following the external teaching and not the true doctrine of the Old Testament’.7 The public expression of such adverse comment was perceived to offend the honour of Ireland. For those in the early modern period who sought to disprove such comments, the obvious strategy was to draw attention to evidence of the civility and learning of the Gaeil. One attractive option was to work to publicize the lives of Irish saints, known to have been active in Ireland or Europe in the early medieval period, and to build a story of the Irish Christian past focusing on this theme. While the lives of holy men and women also had a didactic and moral purpose, they undoubtedly were used also for their propaganda value in an era of heightened national consciousness in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.8 This was in addition to their undoubted propaganda value in the ongoing confessional debate among historians from rival Christian traditions about which church was the true inheritor of the early Christian legacy. These three core themes were selected by seventeenth-century Irish historians and used as the framework on which new narratives of Irish history were compiled: the invasions origin myth, with Gaelic roots traced to the Orient and the ancestors of the Gaeil reaching Ireland through Spain (neatly avoiding any hint of ancestral links between the Gaeil and the English); the succession

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of kings, presented as evidence of the antiquity of the kingdom of Ireland; and the stories of the worthy doings of Irish saints. Seventeenth-century Irish Catholic writers who were educated in continental seminaries and universities took on the task of promulgating Irish saints’ lives with some enthusiasm, spurred on by the piracy of a Scottish writer, Thomas Dempster, who sought to claim saints from ‘Scotia’ as Scottish rather than Irish. An account of early Irish origins, explaining why Scotia was the ancient name of Ireland, was required as part of this hagiographical research. Throughout the debates of the seventeenth century, therefore, there was a particularly strong emphasis on the early medieval period in Irish history. Therein lay the foundations for definitions of Irishness that could be adapted to current circumstances.

2 The early modern histories By the 1630s the Catholic case for the antiquity of the Irish kingdom had been presented in the history of Ireland written by Geoffrey Keating. His history, entitled Foras feasa ar Éirinn [Compendium of knowledge about Ireland], was completed by the early 1630s. Written in elegant vernacular prose, it presented a narrative account of Irish origins and the reigns of Irish kings from the creation down to the coming of the Normans in the late twelfth century. He consciously sought to present the story of Ireland as that of all Irish-born Catholics, termed Éireannaigh [Irish people], irrespective of whether they were of Gaelic ancestry or descended from the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman settlers as Keating himself was. A second comprehensive Catholic history of Ireland was also completed in the mid-1630s, in the form of annals. The ‘Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland’ by the Four Masters chronicled the history of Ireland from the biblical flood down to the early seventeenth century, ending in 1616. This was the work of four scholars who had been born into Gaelic hereditary learned families in north-west Ulster, the leader of whom, Míchéal Ó Cléirigh, had joined the Irish Franciscan order at the College of St Anthony established in Louvain in 1607. The compilers were motivated by the example of other European nations, but they also had formal scholarly training as hereditary Irish historians and enjoyed ready access to the rich manuscript heritage that then existed. The annals compiled by the Four Masters provided a comprehensive chronicle of Irish secular history from earliest times to the seventeenth century, by scholars of reputable pedigree. The high regard in which these annals were held in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries stemmed from a belief that they essentially synthesized the contents of the medieval manuscript sources for the history of Ireland, using many manuscripts that were subsequently destroyed. By the early nineteenth century there was a belief that almost all the medieval sources on which Keating and the Four Masters relied had been lost. Although,

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in reality, many of the sources available to these seventeenth-century scholars had been preserved in major manuscripts of the twelfth to sixteenth centuries such as the Book of Lecan, the Book of Ballymote, the Book of Leinster, and Leabhar na hUidhre [the Book of the Dun Cow], these texts were beyond the reach of most antiquarians and historians of the nineteenth century, both because of semiprivate custodianship and the technical difficulties in reading the archaic forms of the Gaelic language in which they were written.9 Given the challenging nature of the medieval sources, the great virtue of the work of seventeenth-century Irish historians was that they provided an accessible synthesis of Irish history. One of the key transitions in Irish historiography between the early modern period and the nineteenth century was the change in the language in which it was written. There was a shift from the early seventeenth-century norm of Catholic historians writing in Irish, using Irish-language sources, to Protestant historians writing in English by the end of that century and into the eighteenth century, most of whom required the assistance of translators to gain access to medieval source material.10 As descendants of seventeenth-century settlers, and thus lacking a long pedigree in Ireland, most Protestant writers in the eighteenth century were content to concentrate on the recent past. But even before history became the preserve of Protestant writers of English ancestry, already in the 1630s there was a demand for an English-language history of early Ireland. By then the use of English had become the norm for governmental and legal purposes, and the educated class were increasingly bilingual. Almost immediately after Keating’s Foras feasa ar Éirinn was completed c.1634, an English translation of the history was commenced by Michael Kearney in 1635.11 This was the first of four separate known English translations or adaptations of Keating’s history made in the century after it was written. Keating’s history was also translated into Latin by a priest named John Lynch, probably with a view to publication in continental Europe.12 However, Keating’s history was not issued in print in the seventeenth century in any of the three languages in which it circulated in manuscript. The political and social upheavals of mid-seventeenth-century Ireland resulted, among other things, in a temporary decline in patronage of the kind that would have encouraged historical scholarship. More seriously, the government prohibition on Catholic printing meant that historical works by Catholic authors could not be published. The story of the eventual publication of Keating’s history and the Annals of the Four Masters is a useful case study of the revival of interest in medieval matters among scholars in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland, and it is to this that we now turn.

3 The nineteenth-century antiquarian movement A new enthusiasm to publish the Annals of the Four Masters emerged clearly in the early 1830s, prompted by the purchase by the Royal Irish Academy of part

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of the original autograph manuscript. The great mid-nineteenth-century antiquarian and collector, Sir George Petrie, best known perhaps for his study of Irish round towers, had been instrumental in bringing the work into public ownership when he purchased the autograph manuscript at auction on behalf of the Academy in 1831.13 Immediately, he set about ensuring that the annals for the years 1171–1616 were made available in print, and secured the services of an Irish scholar, John O’Donovan, who was capable of translating the work into English, and providing extensive scholarly annotations. Both the Royal Irish Academy, founded in 1785, and the Irish Archaeological Society, founded on St Patrick’s Day 1840, were keen to be involved in the publication plans for what was regarded as a work of ‘great national importance’,14 but neither body had the financial resources necessary to see it through to completion. Ultimately, it was a commercial publisher, George Smith, a close personal friend of George Petrie, who produced the work. Smith paid the salary of O’Donovan, and also paid another Irish scholar, Eugene O’Curry, to prepare a complete transcript of the Irish text. The format of the publication and the reception accorded it when published are revealing of contemporary attitudes to sources for the history of medieval Ireland. It was agreed that the Irish text should be published, accompanied by an English translation. Particular attention was paid to the appearance of the Irish text, with Petrie designing a special typeface for the work, which became known as his ‘Irish Hibernian’ type.15 The idea of parallel Irish and English texts was important, because it preserved the integrity of the source material; it brought the authentic Irish-language material into the public sphere, and it also made the work accessible to those who had difficulty reading the text in its original language. The laudatory review published in the Irish Ecclesiastical Journal extended over four monthly issues in 1848. Drawing attention to the value of Irish annals in general as a historical source, the reviewer asserted that ‘they are a wonder, and without parallel in the world’.16 Eugene O’Curry, writing for an academic readership some years later, praised the publisher who had underwritten the work: Mr Smith’s edition of the Annals was brought out in a way worthy of a great national work, nay, worthy of it, had it been undertaken at the public cost of a great, rich, and powerful people, as alone such works have been undertaken in other countries. And the example of so much spirit in an Irish publisher – the printing of such a book in a city like Dublin, so long shorn of metropolitan wealth as well as honours – cannot fail to redound abroad to the credit of the whole country, as well as to that of our enterprising fellow-citizen.17 O’Curry was here echoing the sentiments of his contemporaries who saw the publication of these volumes as transcending the mere academic achievement

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of producing a scholarly edition of an important primary source for the history of Ireland. As one reviewer had observed in 1851: At a period of unexampled commercial prostration and disaster, and when, especially in Ireland, the social system was shaken to its foundation ... they [Hodges and Smith] have again come forward to demand national gratitude by the publication of the greatest original work which has ever issued from the Irish press.18 For these commentators, the publication of a work on medieval Irish history was a beacon of hope for the future in the face of the considerable distress caused by the Great Famine, economic depression and political upheaval of the late 1840s in Ireland. In terms of academic scholarship it was a benchmark publication, setting the standard by which subsequent editions of medieval Irish texts would be evaluated. The Annals of the Four Masters had been chosen as the text to be prioritized because of its content, which would be of use to researchers working on other texts, and because of its language, which would be a model and a guide to those engaged in linguistic research. Editions of other medieval Irish annals eventually followed, with a variety of strategies being adopted to fund their publication.19 Thus, for instance, the Annals of Ulster and the Annals of Loch Cé were published in London and Dublin as part of the Rolls Series, as a consequence of political lobbying by Irish scholars to ensure that texts relating to Ireland were accorded parity of esteem with texts relating to England in research projects funded by the British government.20 Lobbyists such as Sir J.T. Gilbert regarded the preservation of the memory of the past as an entitlement not to be denied the Irish people. The recovery of the medieval past became a political issue, in an atmosphere in which any perception that Ireland was being treated less favourably than other parts of the United Kingdom became a matter of public concern.21 Meanwhile Geoffrey Keating’s general history of Ireland was in circulation in quite different forms. Always popular in manuscript, even before it was published in English translation, it formed the basis of histories written in English by others, including Peter Walsh’s Prospect of the State of Ireland (1682). It was first printed in English in 1723, but only the very wealthy could have afforded the purchase price of this lavish folio edition.22 However, with the advent of cheap print in the early nineteenth century a Catholic publisher produced a pocket edition of the same translation, allowing much wider dissemination.23 A much more elaborate edition, translated by John O’Mahony and intended for the Irish-American market, was published in New York in 1857.24 Keating’s history also continued to circulate in manuscript in the Irish language through to the end of the nineteenth century. That process only came to an end

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with the publication of a full edition of the Irish text, with parallel English translation, by the London-based Irish Texts Society in the first decade of the twentieth century.25 That Irish Texts Society edition has been in print more or less ever since, ensuring the general accessibility of what has long been regarded as a canonical text of medieval Irish history. It should be noted, however, that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Keating’s work was valued not so much for his historical analysis as for his prose style and his mastery of the Irish language. For this reason, once the Irish language came to be permitted as an academic subject in the Irish school curriculum in the 1870s, extracts from Keating’s history were popularized as educational aids. Textbooks based on Keating’s writings were made available from 188026 and a pocket book entitled Stories from Keating’s History of Ireland, first published in 1909, is still in print and still on the curriculum for students of Irish at third level. But the use of Keating’s history of Ireland has not been confined to the study of Irish. From the establishment of an independent Irish state in 1922 down to 1971, the department-of-educationapproved curriculum in Irish primary schools advocated the use of legends of Irish heroes as a means of encouraging an interest in history among Irish schoolchildren. Many thousands of Irish students, over several generations, have been taught legend, myth and history as part of a communal memory of the early medieval Irish past that has been in essence derivative of the stories of kings and heroes recorded in the seventeenth century in Keating’s history of Ireland. Keating’s history has been valued ever since then as an authentic account of the Irish past, its reputation for authenticity deriving in no small part from its having been written in the Irish language. Keating himself, in his polemical introduction, written in 1633, had made particular play with the language issue, asserting that those who could not read the Irish sources could not be relied on as commentators on the Irish past. There is no doubt but that his point about language struck a chord, in a colonial context, where bilingualism was rapidly becoming the norm, Gaelic scholars noting with regret in the 1630s that English was ‘now the more respected language among us’.27 By the eighteenth century, it was generally admitted that the numbers of scholars who had the skills necessary to read the medieval sources in the Irish language had greatly diminished, so that the work of Keating as a mediator of those medieval sources came to have a special value.28 Those who sought to recover the medieval past in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Ireland did not do so out of disinterested antiquarianism. They did so in the belief that preserving the memory of the Irish past held the key to the future well-being of the Irish nation.29 Various learned societies became involved in publishing editions of medieval texts, first the Irish Archaeological Society in the 1840s, followed by the publications of the Celtic Society from 1847, and the Royal Irish Academy’s Todd Lecture series from 1889. The Irish

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Texts Society began similar work in the 1890s that is still ongoing.30 Together, the activity of these learned societies provided evidence of a belief that the recovery and transmission of medieval Irish texts, particularly those in the Irish language, were a matter of importance, something worth striving for, and that Ireland would be the poorer without knowledge of its medieval past. The prospectus issued when the Celtic Society was initiated in 1845 explained matters succinctly: The great object of the Society is to preserve the evidences and landmarks of a distinct nationality by means of a more enlarged cultivation of the Language, History, Antiquities &c of Ireland; to attain this end, it is hoped the New Society will constitute a rallying place for the patrons and friends of our vernacular language, and by that means prove a potent auxiliary for the promotion and diffusion of the Gaelic literature of Ireland.31 The process of transmission was not straightforward, first because of the confessional bias of the seventeenth-century authors who had served as mediators of the essence of medieval Irish history to modern audiences, and secondly because of the language issue. Generally, though not exclusively, Protestant historians and antiquarians dominated the research agenda through the nineteenth century in Ireland. In their desire to assert their Irishness, they looked to the rich heritage of the Irish manuscript tradition. As in the seventeenth century, so also in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the quest for access to primary sources for the history of Ireland brought together scholars of different religious and political affiliations in the common cause of researching the ancient Irish past. The pre-Norman era provided a relatively uncontroversial phase of the common past of those who regarded themselves as Irish, but interest also extended to Gaelic sources of the early modern period, attractive to later generations of Irishmen by virtue of their Gaelic character. In the process of accessing medieval source material as mediated through the work of early modern Irish Catholic authors, the confessional bias of the early modern historians was essentially ignored. In the 1723 printed edition of Keating’s history, for example, the word ‘Christian’ was substituted for the word ‘Catholic’ throughout, thereby broadening its acceptability as an origin legend for the Protestant Anglo-Irish community. Nineteenth-century Protestant antiquarians were generally prepared to disregard the matter of religious difference in pursuit of the extant source material of the medieval Irish past, which they had come to regard as part of their own origin legend. The language shift that was almost complete by the mid-nineteenth century necessitated translation of both medieval and early modern texts from Irish to English to meet the needs of contemporary antiquarians, most of whom had only a cursory knowledge of the Irish language. Here, the language itself was

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an important part of the heritage to be recovered, and the medium of print was used to bring that language more fully into the public sphere. The renewed interest in medieval historical sources in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Ireland, as well as the renewed interest in the extant literature – particularly the sagas of legendary heroes of the Fiannaíocht tradition32 – was inextricably bound up with an interest in the language of those sources. Language, like historical memory, was deemed to be a key element in the formation of a nation. The dual language editions of medieval and early modern texts that have continued to be produced in Ireland from the 1840s down to the present time symbolize something of the nature of Irish identity in a colonial environment. There had long been an awareness that ownership of the memory of the past could not be taken for granted, but needed to be defended or recovered. The work of nineteenth-century scholars in recovering and bringing into the public sphere medieval Irish texts did not take place in a political vacuum. In the midst of cultural battles over the nature of Irishness and the political status of the Irish nation in the nineteenth century, the conscious preservation of historical memory reaching back to the medieval period absorbed the energies of some of the greatest scholars of the age.

4 Conclusion The work done in the nineteenth century in translating and transmitting medieval Irish historical material for modern Irish readers nourished the cultural environment of subsequent generations of Irish people. That the history of heroic kings, and the uplifting story of an ‘island of saints and scholars’, combining as it did myth, legend and history, became familiar to all and provided the historical underpinning of Irish Catholic identity in the twentieth century, can be attributed in equal measure to the work of nineteenth-century antiquarians who were active in learned societies, and to the seventeenthcentury historians whose work was brought to the attention of new audiences in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One outcome of the complex cultural politics of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland, which drew scholars into a study of the remote past in a renewed quest for a usable origin legend, was that something of the essence of early and medieval Irish history became accessible and familiar to all.

Notes 1. Lebor gabála Érenn: the Book of the Taking of Ireland, ed. R.A.S. Macalister (5 vols, Dublin, 1938–56). 2. John Carey, ‘Leabhar Gabhála and the Legendary History of Ireland’, in Helen Fulton (ed.), Medieval Celtic Literature and Society (Dublin, 2005), 32–48.

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3. For a typical early nineteenth-century view of Irish origins deriving from this tradition, see L.C. Beaufort, ‘An Essay upon the State of Architecture and Antiquities, Previous to the Landing of the Anglo-Normans in Ireland’, Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, 15 (1828), 101–4. 4. Bernadette Cunningham, ‘The Making of the Annals of the Four Masters’ (PhD thesis, University College Dublin, 2005). 5. Bernadette Cunningham, ‘The Culture and Ideology of Irish Franciscan Historians at Louvain, 1607–50’, in Ciaran Brady (ed.), Ideology and the Historians: Historical Studies 17 (Dublin, 1991), 11–30, 222–7. 6. Bernadette Cunningham, The World of Geoffrey Keating: History, Myth and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Ireland (Dublin, 2000), 68, n. 59. 7. J.J. O’Meara (ed.), First Version of the Topographia (Dundalk, 1951), 90. 8. Thomas O’Connor, ‘Towards the Invention of the Irish Catholic natio: Thomas Messingham’s Florilegium (1624)’, Irish Theological Quarterly, 64 (1999), 157–77; Cunningham, ‘Culture and Ideology’. 9. See, now, http://www.isos.dias.ie for digital images of many of the most significant medieval Gaelic manuscripts. 10. Bernadette Cunningham, ‘Historical Writing, 1660–1750’, in Raymond Gillespie and Andrew Hadfield (eds), The Oxford History of the Irish Book. Vol. 3: The Irish Book in English, 1550–1800 (Oxford, 2006), 264–81. 11. Royal Irish Academy, MS 24 G 16. 12. Cunningham, World of Geoffrey Keating, 173–92. 13. Petrie’s purchase is now Royal Irish Academy, MSS 23 P 6 and 23 P 7. 14. Royal Irish Academy, Council minutes, iv.295. 15. Dermot McGuinne, Irish Type Design: a History of Printing Types in the Irish Character (Dublin, 1992), 102–3. 16. Review of John O’Donovan (ed.), Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland (3 vols, Dublin, 1848), in Irish Ecclesiastical Journal, 5 (1848), 79. 17. Eugene O’Curry, Lectures on the Manuscript Materials of Ancient Irish History (Dublin, 1861), 161. 18. Irish Quarterly Review, 1 (1851), 697. 19. The Annals of Clonmacnoise were published in 1896 under the auspices of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, in an edition by Denis Murphy. 20. Annála Uladh, Annals of Ulster ... A Chronicle of Irish Affairs, 432–1131, 1155–1541, ed. William Hennessy and Bartholomew MacCarthy, Rolls Series (4 vols, Dublin, HMSO, 1887–1901); The Annals of Loch Ce: a Chronicle of Irish Affairs, 1014–1590, ed. William Hennessy (2 vols, London, 1871). 21. Raymond Gillespie, ‘Printing History: Editing and Publishing Historical Documents in Nineteenth-Century Ireland’, in Martin Fanning and Raymond Gillespie (eds), Print Culture and Intellectual Change in Ireland, 1660–1941 (Dublin, 2006), 74–94. 22. The General History of Ireland Containing 1. a Full and Impartial Account of the First Inhabitants of that Kingdom ... Collected by the Learned Jeoffry Keating ... Faithfully Translated from the Irish ... by Dermo’d O’Connor (London, 1723, another printing Dublin, 1723). 23. [Geoffrey Keating], The History of the Ancient Irish from their Reception of Christianity till the Invitation of the English in the Reign of Henry the Second, Translated from the Original Irish ... with Amendments [by D. O’Connor] (Newry, 1820); further cheap editions were issued by the Dublin publisher James Duffy through the 1840s and 1850s.

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24. [Geoffrey Keating], The History of Ireland from the Earliest Period to the English Invasion, trans. John O’Mahony (New York, 1857). 25. Foras feasa ar Éirinn: the History of Ireland, ed. David Comyn and P.S. Dinneen (4 vols, London, 1902–14). 26. Foras feasa ar Éirinn ... History of Ireland, book i, part i, ed. P.W. Joyce (Dublin, 1880). 27. Michael Kearney’s 1635 address to the reader in his English translation of Keating’s History: Royal Irish Academy, MS 24 G 16, f. 36v. 28. Cunningham, ‘Historical Writing, 1660–1750’. 29. For discussion of the parallel interest in Irish archaeology, see John Waddell, Foundation Myths: the Beginnings of Irish Archaeology (Bray, 2005). 30. Pádraig Ó Riain (ed.), Irish Texts Society: the First Hundred Years. Essays to Mark the Centenary of the Irish Texts Society (London, 1998). 31. Prospectus. The Irish Celtic Society. 1845: Royal Irish Academy, SR 12/I/15, no. 11. 32. Kuno Meyer, Fianaigecht: Being a Collection of Hitherto Inedited Irish Poems and Tales Relating to Finn and his Fiana, with an English Translation (Dublin, 1910).

3 The ‘Decline of Norway’: Grief and Fascination in Norwegian Historiography on the Middle Ages Jan Eivind Myhre

1 A national question According to an anecdote, the Norwegian historian Johan Schreiner (1903–67) once uttered the following significant statement to his students: ‘The older I get, the less I think about women and the more I think about the decline of Norway (Norges nedgang).’ As everyone in the audience knew, Schreiner was referring to one of the major research problems of his history career: How could one account for the decline of the Norwegian state in the late Middle Ages? The question had been haunting Norwegian historians for generations prior to Schreiner, and after him as well, although the various historians emphasized different aspects of the matter and invested unequal amounts of emotional attachment in it. However, the historians had a common point of departure, namely a proud past. By the early fourteenth century Norway was an independent kingdom of medium European influence. From its unification around 900, it had developed into a state of considerable might and stability, with overseas territories at the northern edge of the British Isles. The princesses of Norway were eligible for the European royal wedding market, and the king Håkon Håkonson IV (d. 1263) was once even mentioned as a possible candidate for Holy Roman emperor. In 1319, the king Håkon V died with no male heir to succeed him, and the kingdom of Norway entered into a series of personal and political unions with its neighbouring kingdoms Denmark and/or Sweden, with Norway increasingly playing the role of junior partner. In 1536, the election charter (håndfesting) of the Danish king1 declared Norway a part of Denmark, on a par with Funen, Jutland and other subordinate regions. This has commonly been regarded as Norway’s nadir. The political decline, meaning the dissolution of the Norwegian state, was accompanied by demographic, economic and to some historians also social and cultural decline. It was accompanied too by territorial loss in a long period from the late Middle Ages to 1814: the islands and 18

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other territories at the northern edge of the British Isles, some border counties to Sweden in the seventeenth century, and finally Greenland and Iceland to Denmark in 1814. The rise and decline of states, cultures and civilizations have been a recurrent obsession of historians for a number of reasons, not all of which are purely academic. To some decline is easily associated with decay, with its special fascination.2 The obsession is certainly often tied to contemporary conditions. To many Norwegian historians, the what, how and why of Norway’s decline have been intimately connected to the re-establishing of a Norwegian state in the nineteenth century and, in general, the rise of a modern national identity in the last two centuries. The question of the decline of Norway has not only been a professional problem, but also a political and a national question, and therefore loaded with values and emotions. The historians have felt impelled to answer a number of nationally motivated questions, particularly acute in the nineteenth century, but relevant also in the twentieth. The questions may be assembled into five major ones. First, what were the forces behind the formation of a Norwegian state from the ninth century onwards (including problems concerning the Vikings and the transition to Christianity)? The next concerns the nature of the Norwegian state in the high Middle Ages. The third question was the decline of Norway from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Number four involved the question of continuity between the independent medieval state and its nineteenth-century successor. Question five was related to the preceding one, asking to explain the rise of the modern Norwegian democratic state in 1814.3 The first Norwegian university was founded in Christiania (Oslo)4 in 1811, as one of the concessions made by the Danish king Frederick VI to the Norwegians, who wanted a national institution. Before 1811 Norwegians had attended the university in Copenhagen. One of the king’s motives was to retain Norway. His efforts were of no avail, however. In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars Norway was forced to enter into a personal union with Sweden in 1814. The Norwegians managed to keep the democratic constitution which was drafted during a short-lived uprising protesting against the treaty of Kiel, which gave Norway to Sweden. From the very beginning, the Royal Frederick University in Christiania (as it was called until 1939) contained two chairs in history and remained the centre of Norwegian scholarly history for almost a century and a half. The topics concerning Norway’s medieval history outlined above were focused on right from the start. What decided the problems chosen by Norwegian historians, and what decided the answers given by them? At the outset we may discern some parameters: 1. The need for a usable past in Norway and among historians varied greatly with time, depending on political and cultural circumstances. The need for a

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heroic Norwegian Middle Ages was definitely more urgent, say, in 1850 than in 1950. 2. The degree to which history was professionalized certainly mattered. Professionalization demanded more rigorous methods of the historians, contributing to curb, but not to eliminate, its political and ideological content. 3. Another parameter concerned what history is about, meaning the breadth of historical topics and problems. You ask different questions and get different answers when you work with historical demography than when you deal with high politics.5 4. The internationalization of history tended to move scholarship away from national matters. In dealing with Norwegian historiography about the Middle Ages, I will partly borrow the periodization employed by Sverre Bagge (1942–).6 This periodization, by the way, works also for Norwegian historiography in general, which might indicate how influential medieval history has been in Norway, or, alternatively, to what degree medieval history has been part of Norwegian mainstream historiography.

2 The nineteenth century: the dominance of national relevance Science and scholarship in the re-erected Norwegian state from 1814 on were firmly rooted in a concept of national relevance. To the sciences this meant two things: the researchers ought to distinguish themselves internationally to prove the worth of the young nation; and the unique (as they saw it) Norwegian natural features had to be mapped and explained: the geography, the geology, the glaciers, the lakes, the sea, the fauna and the plant life. An interesting result was that after two or three generations, at the turn of the century, Norway could pride itself on a number of world-renowned scientists in the earth sciences (geophysics), but rather few distinguished ‘mainstream’ physicists, chemists and mathematicians. Even the natural sciences had become national sciences. In particular, research on the Polar regions was defined as a distinct Norwegian speciality. It was in this field that some scientists also became national heroes, in fact the first celebrities, Fridtjof Nansen being the first name that springs to mind. In the field of the humanities scholars wrestled with the problems of defining Norwegian language, culture and history. One intuitively turned to the Old Norse language, to stave churches, to sagas and other features of an age when Norway was an independent kingdom. At the first national assembly in May 1814, its president proudly declared: ‘Now is re-erected the ancient

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Norwegian royal throne, once occupied by the likes of Adelsten and Sverre, and from which they governed old Norway with wisdom and strength.’7 The rejuvenated nation of the nineteenth century was, with the aid of the Middle Ages, given a usable history and a useful culture, in other words a national identity. Part of the job could even be done administratively. The parliament and its two chambers took medieval names: Storting, lagting and odelsting. So did the regional courts. Interestingly, the academic elite of higher civil servants which effectively ruled Norway for much of the nineteenth century lived in parallel intellectual worlds, of classical antiquity and national romanticism with a medieval flavour. The hallmark of their intellectual trade was Latin, and their domestic cultural icon was the Norwegian freeholder.8 History with a national relevance did not necessarily mean ideological history in a narrow sense. From the 1830s on, the leading Norwegian historians consequently adhered to the source criticism laid down by the German historicist school. As an example, the patriotically inspired theory of Rudolf Keyser (1803–64), saying that Norwegians originally in-migrated from the north-east after the Ice Age, and therefore were a people of their own, clearly distinct from Swedes and Danes (who were Goths coming from the south), was effectively put down by a colleague, Ludvig Kristensen Daa (1809–77). In 1879 the philologist Sophus Bugge stated that the Old Norse Edda poetry did not stem from Old Norse culture solely, but based itself on broad cultural importation. The political nationalists did not like this, but had to accept it.9 In the nineteenth century, history almost coincided with history about the Middle Ages. The pages of the Norwegian historical journal (Historisk tidsskrift, founded in 1870), were dominated by medieval history and its major problems: the unification of the small principalities creating one kingdom, the transition to Christianity from the ninth to the eleventh centuries and the rise of the Church as a secular power in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the civil wars between 1130 and 1240, the role of the aristocracy, the organization of the state in the thirteenth century and, last but not least, the decline and disappearance of Norway as a sovereign state. A major effort by nineteenth-century historians was the publication of medieval document sources like sagas, laws, agreements and letters. For a long time, however, the strong state of the high Middle Ages attracted the strongest interest. The young nineteenth-century state needed to establish a positive model before the country’s decline was to be explained. In many ways, the portrayal of Norway in the late Middle Ages given by Absalon Taranger (1858–1930) in 1915–17 sums up three generations of scholarship. He sees the decline of Norway in strong nationalist terms and has no qualms speaking of national interests and nationalistic sentiments in the Middle Ages. To him, the decline, and decay, of Norway was a national tragedy. Taranger’s work was part of a large-scale multi-volume history of Norway,

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initiated in the wake of complete independence in 1905. It was the first of five such grand schemes in the twentieth century, the others being published in the 1930s, around 1960, in the late 1970s and in the 1990s.10 Following Hayden White (after Northrop Frye) Francis Sejersted (1936–) has suggested that these large-scale works taken together, all of them written by numbers of historians, represented the genre of romance in Norwegian historiography, leaving individual historians to represent the genres of tragedy, comedy and satire.11 The long period of unions and subjection to Norway’s Scandinavian neighbours (1319 or 1380 to 1814) constituted a major problem for the historians who wanted to see the medieval state as a forerunner to the democratic nineteenth-century one. Some of the early historians would rather forget ‘the 400-year-long night’, the way many Balkan rulers of the twentieth century harked back to their classic roots or glorious medieval pasts and encouraged historians to jump the Ottoman period.12 Or the way Dutch historians would rather jump the Middle Ages to go straight to the Dutch Golden Age.13 But jumping centuries hardly solved the problem of continuity. Historians in the second half of the nineteenth century gradually took more interest in the unification period (Foreningstiden), in its demographic, economic, social and political aspects. A dominant group of conservative historians upgraded this period, viewing the early modern era as giving birth to contemporary Norway. This meant, however, accepting the socially and economically leading groups of nineteenth-century Norway, often hailing from Danish and German immigrants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and speaking a Danish-like language, as Norwegians (or rather having a Norwegian culture) on a par with the majority of the people. The radical nationalist movement did not accept these civil servants and merchants as carriers of Norwegian culture. Its historian, Ernst Sars (1835–1917), launched a grand theory, aiming at genuinely joining what the poet Henrik Wergeland (1808–45) had named the two semicircles (or semi-rings), which up until the time of Sars had been seen as joined by an ‘artificial solder’ (or weld). The semicircles symbolized the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century, the artificial solder the period of unification. One of the major reasons for the decline of Norway, Sars insisted, was the weakness of the Norwegian aristocracy after 1300, which made it incapable of upholding an independent Norwegian state. This weakness was, interestingly, portrayed as a result of the aristocracy’s initial strength. But the aristocrats sought too close a cooperation with the king, thereby alienating themselves from the people. This weakness, however, turned out to be an advantage in the long run, since it paved the way for an independent and strong peasantry, which already in the seventeenth century had become the backbone of rural Norway. With no aristocracy to speak of (it was formally abolished in 1821), the country was in the nineteenth century in principle ready to be ruled by

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the class which, at the social level, represented the continuity from the Middle Ages, namely the peasantry. Its political takeover, in alliance with radical bourgeois elements, took place in 1884. Sars’s theory, then, amounted to the claim that Norway’s weakness in the late Middle Ages was turned into strength when it came to creating a modern democracy. This dialectical and teleological construction (creating a Norwegian democracy was considered the peasants’ historical mission), linking the Middle Ages to modern Norway, made a strong political as well as intellectual impact in the late nineteenth century. Identifying what was nationally Norwegian with the characteristics of the peasants (later farmers) in the centuries when Norway had few or no political institutions of its own, had interesting historiographical consequences, which become visible mainly in the twentieth century. There is in a sense something paradoxical about the simultaneous worshipping by the historians of the medieval state and the freeholder peasant. Although there were certainly quite a few freeholders during the Middle Ages, only during the seventeenth century, as an inferior part of Denmark, did the Norwegian peasantry became freeholders to a large extent. This was, ironically, a result of the demise of the medieval Church in 1537. The Reformation meant that the king took over the large church estates, later to be sold to the peasants when the king ran into financial troubles because of the wars.

3 The early twentieth century: class and nation A famous quotation says that the history of Sweden is the history of its kings, pointing mainly to the country’s strong warrior-kings from Gustav Vasa to Charles XII, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, but also to the fact that Sweden has an almost uninterrupted line of rulers from the early Middle Ages onwards. The history of Norway, on the other hand, is often construed as the history of its people, meaning the peasants, the only social entity supplying continuity from the Viking age to the modern age. That was the viewpoint of late nineteenth-century nationalist historians. This meant that historians, as part of a national endeavour, to a large degree took an interest in studying agrarian history, including the peasantry. That tradition remained even when national history writing was no longer looming large on the historiographical agenda, after the First World War. Historians would, for example, study local peasant politics (bondekommunalisme, peasant communalism) up to the present day.14 They would study the peasant economy, a field that after the Second World War would be named ‘the big change’ (Det store hamskiftet), the history of how the peasant economy from the mid-nineteenth century onwards slowly changed from subsistence orientation to market orientation, eventually turning the peasants into farmers. Another prominent field of study was the way a large number of Norwegian farms

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became deserted in the wake of the plagues in the late Middle Ages.15 The Black Death was a problem in itself. At this stage historians were not able to discuss why it hit Norway so hard (that came much later16), but were certainly haunted by the question of how the country took so long to recover.17 The question of the deserted farms is of course intimately connected to the ‘decline of Norway’ issue. In the interwar years, however, medieval history had to a large degree lost its national relevance. There were several reasons for this. The materialist conception of history had gained considerable ground, associated with the historian Edvard Bull the Elder (1881–1932). Accompanying it a concept of social rather than national relevance arose. The peasantry became viewed as a class rather than a carrier of national identity. One consequence of this twist in perspective was that the decline was to some extent seen as a good thing for the people. There were fewer authorities (big landowners and bailiffs) around to harass the peasants, and there was more land available for the survivors. Newer research has also emphasized that the functions of the state did not break down in the fifteenth century, as some older historians would have it, meaning that the population was spared complete anarchy or civil war-like circumstances.18 Somehow, however, a national or nationalistic framework remained. Halvdan Koht (1873–1965), the great conciliator historian of the national and the social in the first half of the twentieth century, interpreted Norwegian history as the story of how different social groups, from initially fighting each other, gradually became integrated into the national community. We are talking about the aristocracy, the burghers, the bourgeoisie, the civil servants, the peasants and finally the workers, exchanging their red flags for the red, white and blue national symbol. The multi-volume History of the Norwegian People from the 1930s (note the title, its predecessor was called only the History of Norway), also reveals this ambiguity. Despite new economic viewpoints on the regression, the old national mourning for the political decline from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries remained. The author, Sigvald Hasund (1868–1959), seems to have taken over uncritically Absalon Taranger’s account from 20 years earlier.19 Koht too, and even the materialistically oriented Holmsen, lamented the decline of Norway.

4 The late twentieth century: critical empiricism, dispersion and synthesis After the Second World War the interest taken by historians in the Middle Ages has still been rather strong. Relatively to other periods of study, however, the Middle Ages has lost ground, particularly in the last generation. But since the number of professional historians has increased vastly, especially since 1960, the number of historians of the Middle Ages is larger than ever.

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Some traits seem to stand out clearly. The study of the Middle Ages seems to have lost its national relevance, with one or two exceptions (see below). The decline problem, in particular, seems to have little relevance to contemporary political questions, becoming more a question of academic interest. However, the study of the late Middle Ages as a period seems to have attracted more than one would have thought was its fair share of students. There are many reasons for this, one of course being that sources are more abundant in this period. The relative richness in sources meant that the late Middle Ages served almost as a laboratory for studies becoming popular and possible in the post-Second World War era. I am referring to demographic studies (particularly the Black Death), studies of settlement, class studies (aristocracy), migration studies and studies of foreign trade. Such internationally oriented studies have tended to take the edge off the subject’s potential national content. Some of the fields of study had certainly been cultivated before, in the first half of the twentieth and in the nineteenth centuries. The Hanseatic League had been given the blame for the decline of Norway (by Johan Schreiner, by the way). The aristocracy has been mentioned above. The plagues had been viewed as explaining the national disaster, meaning the loss of independence. In the late twentieth century, however, these topics have largely been disassociated from their links to decline as a national problem. What is more, migration, settlement, trade, social groups, agriculture, urban history and similar themes were also seen in a very long context, stretching through the Middle Ages and into the early modern era. Norwegian historians are sometimes prone to using the term ‘the old society’ to describe the whole pre-industrial or pre-modern society, stretching way back with no particular place to stop.20 History appointments at Norwegian universities tend to be in modern or ‘newer’ (nyere) history or in ‘older’ (elder) history, the dividing line placed around 1800. This conceptualization of history naturally tends to overlook medieval history as a field of its own. There are, however, still a number of positions in medieval history in Norwegian universities and colleges. Much of the state of the art in medieval history has been collected for the Cambridge History of Scandinavia, published in 2003.21 As a Nordic endeavour it is devoid of any national lamenting of Norwegian decline. But what is more, the ‘decline of Norway’ perspective seems to be missing altogether. Of the 24 entries in the index attached to Norwegian conditions, none deal with ‘decline’, although many of course deal with retraction of settlement, the Black Death and loss of political sovereignty. The relative irrelevance of the national aspect of medieval studies after the Second World War was strengthened by two more traits. While historiography prior to the war had sometimes been characterized by grand syntheses, national or social, the first decades after 1945 rejected ideological and teleological elements and emphasized scientific and empirical history. The account of

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the late Middle Ages in the multi-volume history of Norway published around 1960 is strictly detached and value-neutral.22 That is also the case with the two remaining large works of Norwegian history, published in the 1970s and 1990s. However, the mere fact that such large history endeavours are undertaken (initiated by publishers) indicates that the national element persists, with publishers, with readers (the books sell well), and ultimately with the historians. The Middle Ages as a period, however, does not play a part in this any different from other periods of history. Or does it? When the publisher Aschehoug launched its new 12-volume history of Norway in the 1990s, they chose the stern of a Viking ship as their main visual symbol. The story goes that the authors, some of the country’s most prominent historians, were quite annoyed. Let me speculate a moment on this. The Viking age has been called a nineteenth-century construction and was very much a part of the making of a national identity.23 The Viking age, corresponding to what the archaeologists call the younger Iron Age, was identified roughly as the years between the late eighth and early eleventh centuries and displayed a number of useful traits for the purpose of nation-building. This was the age of unification and the introduction of Christianity. The Vikings were daring, fearless, brave and proud. They were able seamen, adventurers, explorers, state-builders, traders, settlers and culture spreaders. The Danes and Swedes were Vikings too, but the Norwegians, or rather their successors on Iceland, got furthest, all the way to America. Norwegian historians and archaeologists in the nineteenth century devoted much time to studying the Vikings and the main sources: the old landscape laws, the sagas of Snorri Sturluson and others, and the Viking ships excavated at Oseberg and Gokstad. With time, the interest in the Viking age among professional historians has somewhat waned. In an ‘age of extremes’ warriors, colonizers, rapists and looters (the Vikings were that as well) were not held in high esteem. When the American satirist Michael Moore wanted to say that all nations have (had) their share of cruelty and violence, he turned to the Vikings: ‘The original Vikings were terrible people. …You [meaning Norwegians] were the original Nazis – the Vikings.’24 Another reason for the lack of interest among historians is that the historical sources (that is, documents) are few, and the field of Viking studies now probably counts fewer historians than archaeologists, who constantly discover new material underground. At the University of Oslo, the largest in the country, it is even difficult to find able teachers for the many foreign students expectantly coming to Oslo to study the Viking age. Leaving aside the Viking ship symbol on the dust cover of the latest multivolume history of Norway, has the Middle Ages lost its societal relevance as interpreted through Norwegian historiography? Certainly the critical empiricism in the first generation after the Second World War and the social historical

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thrust in the 1970s and early 1980s concentrated on the Middle Ages as just another academic subject. There seems, however, to be a certain spillover from the study of the Middle Ages to other periods of history. The study of plagues has moved to the seventeenth, eighteenth and even nineteenth centuries. The study of medieval aristocracy has its counterpart in a newly found interest in modern elites. Even the decline problem may be said to have a parallel in the economic crisis between the wars. Just as in the late Middle Ages, decline, crisis and the erosion of old structures laid the foundations of a fresh start and a new growth. In the 1990s, however, the Middle Ages, along with the early modern period, were ascribed new societal relevance, connected to renewed discussions about nationalism, triggered both by the international scene (like Yugoslavia) and the debate over Norway’s referendum as to whether the country should join the EU. The debate partly concentrated on whether national sentiments, rather than international politics, could explain Norway’s (semi-)independence and liberal constitution from 1814;25 but the question of Norwegian nationalism was taken way back to the Middle Ages. ‘Was There a Norwegian National Identity in the Middle Ages?’ one participant asked, and others joined in.26 The answer to the question, of course, depended on how you define nationalism: as a truly modern thing, following Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm; or as an older phenomenon, following Anthony Smith. The debate on nationalism and national identity can be seen as a continuation of an earlier discussion about the nature of the unions between 1319 and 1814.27 The discussion has circled around what we may call the suppression problem. Although there was no denying that the period from the mid-sixteenth to the early nineteenth century was one of economic growth and a considerable population increase, the question still remains whether Denmark was exploiting its province and junior partner Norway economically. Another interesting aspect concerns the names given to the institutional arrangements. One normally speaks about the ‘unions’ (unioner) of the later Middle Ages, like the Scandinavian Kalmar union of 1397. The union, amalgamation or partnership between 1536 and 1814, however, is commonly referred to as the ‘age of unification’ (foreningstiden, as in German Verein or Vereinigung). The word forening is stronger than ‘union’, but carries more positive associations, and was given as a designation of the Danish period (dansketiden, another term for that period) by the historians in the 1860s, under the influence of the Scandinavism or pan-Scandinavism at the time.28 The foreningstid was, after all, a time of growth, and by 1660 Norway was considered a kingdom again, not a province. It is rather the term ‘union’ that has had a sad fate, due to the increasing unpopularity of the union with Sweden, and perhaps because the unions of the late Middle Ages inaugurated the decline of Norway. So when the European

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Community changed its name to the European Union, it was remarked in the 1990s, the case was lost for adherents of Norwegian membership.29 The question of religion has not been discussed so far. As Peter Raedts tells us elsewhere in this volume, the determination of many Dutch historians to more or less erase the Middle Ages from their history has much to do with its Catholicism. The rise of the Dutch Republic was tied to Protestantism, or rather Calvinism. Although Norway was a Protestant country from the sixteenth century onwards, matters were quite different there. A well-known story tells how King Sverre (1177–1202) spoke out against the pope (‘Roma midt i mot’), and was excommunicated. The pride with which Norwegian school books render this story is not a Protestant pride, but a national one. It was in fact the last Catholic bishop, Olav Engelbrektson, who tried to uphold Norwegian sovereignty in the early sixteenth century. And the nadir of Norway in 1536 was tied to the accession of King Christian III and his introduction of Lutheranism as state religion in 1537. The national revival in the nineteenth century was mainly a secular movement, most historians of the nineteenth as well as the twentieth century having a left-liberal or social-democratic leaning with little interest in religion. Norwegian national identity has had some ties with Protestantism, but not very strong ones.

5

Conclusion

Norway’s Middle Ages present us with the birth, flowering and death of a state, as Jens Arup Seip (1905–92) has remarked.30 That is aesthetically as well as academically interesting, particularly for twentieth-century historians. I do believe, however, that its fascination for many Norwegian historians, especially in the nineteenth century, but also in the twentieth, lies elsewhere. In much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Norwegian medieval kingdom, seen as an age of greatness, served as a model for an independent Norwegian state. What is more, medieval cultural traits have been regarded as fundamental to modern Norwegian culture. The strongest legacy, however, is perhaps that Norwegian history is regarded as the history of its people, a legacy from historians working to give the Middle Ages contemporary relevance.

Notes 1. The håndfesting was a contract between the king and the nobility. In DenmarkNorway the tradition ended with the introduction of absolutism in 1660. 2. Jørgen Sevaldsen, ‘Forfaldets fascination: “the Decline of Britain”-debatten’ (Danish), Historisk tidsskrift ser.15, 3, 2 (1988), 282–312, in his discussion of the ‘Decline of Britain’ debate, uses the heading ‘The Fascination of Decay (Forfaldets fascination)’.

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3. See e.g. the four anthologies with a selection of Norwegian historians writing about the Middle Ages c.1850–1960s: Norske historikere i utvalg, ed. Andreas Holmsen and Jarle Simensen (4 vols, Oslo, 1967–70). Cf. also, in general, Frank Meyer and Jan Eivind Myhre (eds), Nordic Historiography in the 20th Century (Oslo, 2000). 4. Christiania (Kristiania) was named after its founder in 1624, the Danish king Christian IV. It was situated only a long stone’s throw away from the medieval town of Oslo, which had burned down. The renaming of the city as Oslo in 1925 was a characteristic sign of the times when several towns, counties and institutions got back their medieval names. 5. The two might intersect, of course. In a plea for social history, Peter Stearns wrote that ‘when the history of menarche is widely recognized as equal in importance to the history of monarchy, we will have arrived’. In dynastic matters, of course, the fertile age of the queens to be meant a good deal: ‘Coming of Age’, Journal of Social History, 10, no. 2 (1976), 248. 6. Sverre Bagge, ‘The Middle Ages’, in W.H. Hubbard et al. (eds), Making a Historical Culture. Historiography in Norway (Oslo, 1995), 111–31; id., ‘Udsigt og innhogg. 150 års forskning om eldre norsk historie’, Historisk tidsskrift, ser.16, 5, 1–2 (1996), 37–77 (with English summary). 7. Quoted from Anders Johansen and Jens E. Kjeldsen, Virksomme ord. Politiske taler, 1814–2005 (Oslo, 2005), 19 (my trans.). The mentions of Adelsten and Sverre refer to Norway’s international standing. Håkon I was raised at the English court in the late tenth century. Sverre proudly challenged the pope. 8. Øystein Sørensen and Bo Stråth (eds), The Cultural Construction of Norden (Oslo, 1997), 6. 9. Sivert Langholm, ‘The New Nation and the New Universities. The Case of Norway in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 20 (1995), 51–60, at 60. 10. Teis Hellevik, ‘Ulike syn på Norges nedgang i senamiddelalderen. En historiografisk analyse av fem allmenne historieverk fra det tyvende århundre’ (Hovedfagsoppgave [master’s thesis], University of Oslo, 2004). 11. Francis Sejersted, ‘Approaches to Modern Norwegian History’, in Hubbard et al. (eds), Making a Historical Culture, 156–78. The historians were Edvard Bull the Younger, Sverre Steen and Jens Arup Seip, respectively. 12. Mark Mazower, The Balkans (London, 2001), 14. 13. See Peter Raedts’s contribution in this volume. 14. Steinar Imsen, Norges nedgang (Oslo, 2002); id. and Günther Vogler, ‘Communal Autonomy and Peasant Resistance in Northern and Central Europe’, in Peter Blickle (ed.), Resistance, Representation and Community (Oxford, 1990), 5–64. 15. Associated in particular with the scholarship of Andreas Holmsen (1906–89). 16. Ole Jørgen Benedictow, Plague in the Late Medieval Nordic Countries. Epidemiological Studies (Oslo,1992). 17. See the articles in Holmsen and Simensen (eds), Norske historikere i utvalg (1968). 18. Sverre Bagge, ‘Nationalism in Norway in the Middle Ages’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 20/1 (1995), 1–18. 19. Hellevik, ‘Ulike syn på Norges nedgang’. 20. ‘The old society’ (Det gamle samfunn) may also refer to the society immediately before industrialization and modernization, that is in the early nineteenth century. 21. Knut Helle (ed.), The Cambridge History of Scandinavia. Vol. I: Prehistory to 1520 (Cambridge, 2003).

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22. Hellevik, ‘Ulike syn på Norges nedgang’. 23. Jørgen Haavardsholm, ‘Vikingtiden som 1800-tallskonstruksjon’ (PhD dissertation, University of Oslo, 2004). 24. According to Stian Bromark and Dag Herbjørnsrud, Norge. Et lite stykke verdenshistorie (Oslo, 2005), 405–6. 25. Kåre Lunden, Norsk grålysning: norsk nasjonalisme, 1770–1814, på allmenn bakgrunn (Oslo, 1992); id., Nasjon eller union: refleksjoner og røynsler (Oslo, 1993). 26. Kåre Lunden, ‘Was There a Norwegian National Identity in the Middle Ages?’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 20/1 (1995), 19–33; Bagge, ‘Nationalism in Norway’; Erik Opsahl, ‘900–1537’, in id. and Sølvi Sogner, Norsk innvandringshistorie. Vol. I: I kongenes tid 900–1814 (Oslo, 2003). 27. See, for example, Bagge, ‘Udsigt og innhogg’, 63–4. 28. Personal communication from Øystein Rian. 29. Inge Lønning, according to Iver B. Neumann, Norge – en kritikk. Begrepsmakt i Europadebatten (Oslo, 2001). 30. Seip, 1940, according to Bagge, ‘The Middle Ages’, 131.

4 ‘Braves Step out of the Night of the Barrows’: Regenerating the Heritage of Early Medieval Finland Derek Fewster

The epoch, which has gone to its grave and on the barrows of which new life is already flowering, has given us a cultural foundation, a produce of itself and a heritage of previous eras – as generations supersede each other the cultural heritage continues, and without this continuity no national life can endure. The roots of the nation’s civilization are in the distant past, and these roots may even today provide the life of the nation with fresh juice, while we have no need to hold in contempt what is found above the roots, where the branches, where the leaves, where the flowers, and where the fruits are.1 E. N. Setälä (1933)

1 Introduction This study is a rather sweeping examination of how the distant national past was conceived, constructed and even utilized in Finland from the midsixteenth century to the early twentieth century. During this long period, the emerging national consciousness went through several phases, as it came to require a public, distant, yet obligating, past: a time of true, untainted and spiritual nationhood. In the end, the main task of the national enlightenment [Fin. Kansanvalistus] was to convince the Finnish people of their presumed lost unity and slumbering potential. The Finns were to recomprehend their heritage and to remember the sacrifices generations of inhabitants had been forced to make in defence of their national survival. During the so-called struggle for a ‘national awakening’ [Fin. kansallinen herääminen] in the nineteenth century the nationalists built an extensive imagery of what was considered original ethnicity and national history. 31

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However, most of the region known today as Finland had been a part of the Swedish realm from about the twelfth century until 1809, and remained under the rule of the Russian emperor, who was the grand duke of Finland, until 1917. Any ardent nationalist looking upon Finnish history would need to trace ‘original Finnishness’ beyond these periods of supposed decline, degradation and oppression. Accordingly, the ‘original spirit’ of the nation resided among the rural Finnish-speaking population of prehistoric and early medieval Finland, even if the Volksgeist both could and would ‘emerge’ when required during later times of distress and ‘foreign rule’, as during the Club War [Fin. Nuijasota] in 1596–7 and the frequent Swedish wars with Russia before 1809. This close relationship between nationalism and historiography – the usefulness of the past – is in no way unique for the Finnish case, nor is it as such a neglected international field of research. The common scholarly consensus is that an adapted interpretation of ancient history has been, and remains, essential for constructions of the nation all over the globe. As Anthony D. Smith has pointed out, a national identity needs and utilizes myths of ethnic descent, both genealogical and ideological: Ethnic myths of descent figure prominently in the nationalist Weltanschauung. As a community of culture and a distinctive unity, the nation not only has a past; the roots of its unique identity must reside in its origins and genealogy. In order to claim the new status of a ‘nation’, a community’s spokesmen had therefore to advance a case which rested, at least in part, on the conviction of ethnic ancestry and common history.2 Finland is a school-book example of this, as most of the constructed features still live on in public history and present-day history culture. If we use Smith’s classification from 1984 of the six components of the general myth of descent – the Myth of Temporal Origins, the Myth of Location and Migration, the Myth of Ancestry, the Myth of the Heroic Age, the Myth of Decline and the Myth of Regeneration – the first five were definitely constructed of pre-modern (mostly early medieval) elements in the Finnish case.3 The concepts of migration, ancestry, a heroic age and a subsequent decline did in fact provide the main topics for nearly all the activities of both the professional and the amateur interpreters of Finnish prehistory and early medieval history throughout the phases of evolving Finnish nationalism. The issues addressed in this chapter are linked to a literally fundamental feature of nationalist myths and symbols: the urgent need for an early history, proven by archaeological finds, by the timelessness of ethnographically documented traditions and folklore, by various common traces discernible in the surviving languages of the presumed heritage, and by the rare historical sources.

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2 The Finno-Geatic scholars The beginnings could be called a phase of patriotic or proto-nationalist antiquarianism, which lasted from the seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century, the concepts being offsprings of Swedish proto-nationalism. The first phase involved a rather tentative attempt to provide Finland with a distinctive early history, and gave the first versions of the Myth of Location and Migration. The original concept of a proto-historic Finnish nation is certainly an old one among the scholars. Such a state is even implied in some early medieval Scandinavian sources, which name certain ‘kings’ and even a ‘prince’ of ‘Finland’.4 As an academic construct, a pre-Swedish but unified Finland can be found on the Carta Marina map of Olaus Magnus, printed in 1539, where the text ‘Finlandia vel Finningia olim regnum’ has been inserted on the southern part of the region. The great works of Johannes Magnus and Olaus Magnus present the same case in both the Historia de omnibus Gothorum Sveonumqve regibus, published in 1554, and in the Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus, published the following year. Johannes Magnus’s posthumously published history became the handbook for the Geatic historians of Sweden for the following two centuries: the royal lineage of Sweden was accordingly drawn from Magog, son of Japheth and grandson of Noah, a certainty seldom or never doubted when the glorious origins of the realm and its inhabitants were presented.5 This augmented memory of a ‘royal’ or ‘national’ tradition – be it then totally constructed, somewhat interpreted, mostly misunderstood, or even to some degree well-founded – lived on in scholarly environments throughout the following centuries, although critical voices were increasing with the decline of Sweden as a great power.6 The Swedish scholars of the seventeenth century were quite interested in the origins and antiquities of the various home regions, of the counties and the realm. In this process the eastern, Finnish, part of the Swedish monarchy did receive due attention, as a great patriotic heritage was constructed for the whole Swedish nation.7 During the seventeenth century some authors, Johannes Messenius being the most renowned among these, even used the vague and ambiguous remarks regarding ‘Finnish’ kings in the Gesta Danorum by Saxo Grammaticus and a few Icelandic sagas to compile complete lineages of resident regents before the Swedish ‘conquest’, all in the spirit of Johannes Magnus and the Geatic view of history.8 On the Finnish side of the realm, however, the image of the national heritage was changing, and the Royal Academy of Turku, founded in 1640, was to provide the first forum for the emerging ethnic understanding of early Finnish nationalism. Daniel Juslenius’ Vindiciae Fennorum, published as early as 1703 with apparent political intentions, was the first clear exposition of Finnish (proto-)nationalist sentiments and the earliest construction of a Finnish national entity, presenting the Finns as a conceptual ‘we’ and not as being

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Swedish. For the patriot Juslenius gens, populus, patria and natio could well be Finnish, while the highest loyalty remained with the Swedish realm, ‘ejus nationis’. His Finnish nation was something more than the diocese of Turku or the nominal grand duchy of Finland: it consisted primarily of a people of farmers. Yet, his ideal was neither ethnic nor linguistic; becoming Finnish was achieved by growing up in the region, regardless of ancestral origins. Juslenius did also, as so many of his Geatic predecessors had done, assume that Finland had once been an independent kingdom, the Finns being sovereign in their own country. The Finns of Vindiciae Fennorum were not a tribal construction, but a bilingual nation inhabiting the grand duchy. Juslenius’ rational and secular concept of the natio was built on conceptual analogies with the natio of Roman antiquity. This early nationalism did not require a present or future state, which the later victorious nineteenth-century nationalist ideology did require.9 Although the ‘Finno-Geatic’ view, which Juslenius represented, was to fade from professional historiography in the eighteenth century, the specific regional or national antiquarian suppositions he propagated did not disappear from public or scholarly history, but remained current throughout the following century, developing further as new ideas were added. Once published, the key elements, symbols, myths and memories were available and adaptable for the ‘enlightenment’ of countless future readers. For instance, the increasing belief in the possibilities of collecting an oral tradition of history finally led to the compilation of the first Kalevala in 1835. The military prowess Juslenius lengthily described suited both the final decades of Sweden as a great power in Europe and the new militarism of freshly independent twentieth-century Finland, when the public imagery of the early medieval period was to be filled with chieftains, war leaders and their brave sons. Nevertheless, the fabulous constructions of Messenius or Juslenius were not up to the scholarly standards of emerging critical historiography. The FinnoGeatic view – with its uncritical acceptance of what previous authorities had proposed and its patriotic acknowledgement of Swedish sovereignty – was even less acceptable for the following nineteenth-century nation-builders of Finnishness. In fact, for the later ethnic nationalists both the early FinnoGeatic scholars and the eighteenth-century ‘Swedish-bred’ historians, for example Algot Scarin and Johan Bilmark, were quite unsuitable role models. Instead, a late eighteenth-century ‘native’ scholar was elevated and chosen to be the ‘founding father of Finnish historiography’: this title was awarded to the knowledgeable and prolific professor Eloquentiae at the Royal Academy of Turku between 1777 and 1804, Henrik Gabriel Porthan. H. G. Porthan, who is also considered the high mark of the Enlightenment in Finland, certainly ranks high among the early constructors of a national heritage and a historical identity. Thoroughly influenced by the neo-humanism of

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the University of Göttingen – and by his immediate historiographical predecessors Scarin and Bilmark – his interest in classical antiquity, aesthetics, mythology and art history was put to good use as the sum of Finnish antiquity once more came to be reconsidered and prepared for a learned public. Porthan’s extensive scholarship, which comprises a high level of source criticism and an abundant use of long explanatory footnotes, includes several works that became classics of Finnish historiography. In his works Porthan settles the score with the ‘Finno-Geatic’ view in a series of arguments thoroughly discrediting his great-uncle Daniel Juslenius and his ilk. Thus, according to Porthan, the ancient Finns had no king (rex) or leader (dux) with any authority to influence the outcome of the Swedish crusades. No imperator or princeps is mentioned in the sources, Porthan states: the Finnish kings of the Icelandic sagas are mere tales. Any battles fought must have been skirmishes (tumultuaria), no castles or fortifications are mentioned, and oral traditions of hill forts can often be linked to hills with no human constructions. A lack of towns and specialized artisans is further added to his long list of ancient Finnish barbarity. As to the origins of the inhabitants of Finland, Porthan omits the biblical explanations, but does of course follow Christian chronology in maintaining the migrational, ‘Israelite’ wandering of the Finns to their land. An important consequence of the dropping of Magog from the ancestors of the Finns was the simultaneous separation from the history of the Swedes. Porthan fixed the arrival of the Finns to about the year AD 700, which for more than a century would set the early medieval limit of Finnish presence in the region named after them. Basically this implied that the Finns had several hundreds of years of national history before the first Swedish crusaders arrived in the midtwelfth century. This medieval period would in the following century become the ‘golden age’ of the ancients and the foundational epoch of all original Finnishness for the ethnic nationalists. Working from an early medieval chronicle, Porthan further lists the apparent peoples of the Finnish kin (ad Fennicum pertinere genus). The Maris, Mordvins, Udmurts, Permian Komis, Komis, Chuvashs, Mansis, Khantis, Estonians/ Tchuds, Ingrian Finns, Livonians, Karelians, Bjarmians and Saamis are here given as peoples of an erstwhile Finnish unity. Quoting János Sajnovics’s pioneering work from 1770, Porthan even adds the Hungarians to his list. This listing of kindred peoples is extraordinary. What Porthan outlines is in fact one of the earliest scientific versions of the Finno-Ugrian language tree; he calls it ‘the common roots/stem’ (stirps communis). This proposition would become the sine qua non for generations of linguists well into the twentieth century, and the primus motor for the development of professional archaeology in Finland. The novelty of Porthan’s vague proto-nationalism, in comparison with Juslenius’, was making language and ethnicity issues of consequence. His

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unfinished De Poësi Fennica outlined language and folk poetry as markers of the still continuing national existence of the Finns. Since his critical Chronicon episcoporum dismissed many of the other extant sources as false or irrelevant, language as such became one of the main portals to the ways of the ancient (and medieval) Finns. For Porthan, Finnishness came from a common language and, most importantly, from a common historical origin. From this view ensued another consequential definition: contrary to Juslenius’ opinion, Porthan did not consider those speaking Swedish and living along the southern and eastern coastlines as part of the Finnish nation.10 Porthan’s argumentation thus definitely included a certain essence of ethnic proto-nationalism: the Finns still qualified as a separate nation, despite their original low level of political organization and despite the Swedish ‘conquest’ with subsequent centuries of Swedish administration. In addition, Porthan was the first to propose the image of a Finland consisting of three ‘nations’ – i.e. semi-foreign Swedes (living mainly in the towns and inhabiting the coastal regions), semi-decadent lowland dwellers (who were quite civilized, yet influenced by erroneous papist beliefs), and near-original highlanders (with too many surviving heathen traditions, living in the interior of Finland). Porthan of course never thought of the issue as the nineteenth- or twentiethcentury nationalists interpreted it, yet over time his simple supposition was to have a tremendous influence on the concepts of Finnish identity: it made some ‘Finns’ and their regions more original than others. Even if Porthan still saw the highland Finns as uncivilized barbarians, meriting principally only antiquarian interest, the political shift of 1809 made these ‘savages’ of the interior increasingly admirable, unspoilt and ‘truly Finnish’. For the nineteenth-century nation-builders – like Johan Ludvig Runeberg, Elias Lönnrot and the multitude of Karelianists – the division remained, but the heroes of the dichotomy simply shifted side. Thinking of ethnic Finns as two, or more, distinct groups became a basic truth necessary for defining and finding the ‘original untainted Finns’, a crucial task for all the later nationalists attempting to idealize the agrarian hamlets of the highland forests and later making Karelia into a preserve of medieval Finnishness and a true source of ancient heritage.

3 Finding the lost people The following phase could be labelled Romantic national antiquarianism, ranging from the early nineteenth century to c.1890. The age saw the emergence of a fully nationalist programme utilizing the scientific construction of a FinnoUgrian language family and traces of folk poetry, while creating several myths of ancestry and a Myth of the Heroic Age, as the need to find and formulate the ‘lost heritage’ of the Finnish tribes grew. After the death of Porthan in 1804 and the shift in Finland’s political outlook following its new administrative status in 1809, the development of the

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constructed early medieval heritage took a new turn, as Finnishness could now be linked to a distinct political entity. Severed from the old patria of Sweden, the Finnish scholars of the renamed and relocated Imperial Alexander University in Finland were to become increasingly committed to a new concept of Finland and the construction of a new national identity. Even if the process began immediately, it was a slow one. For decades it remained an intellectual issue of the mainly Swedish-speaking academic and cultural elite, and there were indeed very few attempts before the last third of the century at popularizing the scholarly constructions of a medieval nationhood. Only when the various political preferences required ‘enlightened’ supporters or voters – during the next phase – did early medieval Finnishness surface as a major feature of public nationalism. After all, the Finnish diet did not convene again before 1863, after a break of over 50 years. Although political life was revolutionized by the possibilities the diet offered the four estates, Finland certainly remained a class society until the parliamentary election of 1907 and after, despite the emergence of modern political parties and political citizenship. While the literate contemporary’s choice of viewing the Finnish people could be either romantic or neoclassical, the rather abstract ‘people’ were nevertheless being steadily introduced as the foundation of the nation and the grand duchy. When Johan Ludvig Runeberg published The Elk Hunters – in hexameter – in 1832 he gave the farmers of Finland a harmonious and noble, nearly ‘Greek’ existence: an image he would elaborate in several of his later works. Parallel with the creation of the long-lived Runebergian ideal of a poor and loyal but content nation, the past greatness of the Finns was also receiving much academic attention. The collecting of ‘ancient’ folk poetry flourished and the advancing linguistic studies of the Finno-Ugrian languages were to be just as foundational in the defining of Finnishness. The up-to-date switch from ‘Finno-Geatic’ kings to the heroes of the oral traditions – like the sage Väinämöinen – was to be an important one. Already by 1816–17 several authors had claimed that Väinämöinen was historical. In 1827 Elias Lönnrot defended a thesis De Väinämöine, Priscorum Fennorum Numine, a collaboration with his praeses Reinhold von Becker, in which both the human and the posthumous divine aspects of Väinämöinen were laid out. Regardless of Porthan’s critical approach to oral traditions, his successors were becoming increasingly convinced of their combined historical and aesthetical potential. In the arts, by 1814, a neoclassical Väinämöinen had been ordered and modelled by Eric Cainberg into a plaster relief within the main building of the university in Turku, at that time still under construction. The Danish artist Gotthelf Borup created a statue of Väinämöinen, ‘the Finnish Apollo’, for the public park of Monrepos manor near Viipuri in 1831. These sculptures rank among the earliest implicit images of Finnish antiquity, albeit only the kantele

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instrument in Väinämöinen’s lap distinguishes the character from other contemporary neoclassical, heroic sculptures. Yet the first physical representations of the sage still displayed him more as a generic myth or an antiquarian legend than as a historical person. When Lönnrot in 1835 chose a name for the first version of the Kalevala, it was therefore only natural to name it Kalevala or Old Karelian Poetry from the Antiquity of the Finnish People, as he by then had become certain of the historicity of the traditions.11 Lönnrot had consciously taken the role of a historian when he began the compilation of the great epic. After all, the national epics known and admired by him and his contemporaries, like the Homeric epics, the Nibelungenlied and the Poems of Ossian, were all at the time considered tales containing actual historical data. The significance of the Kalevala for developing Finnish nationalism was stupendous: the influence of Lönnrot on the fuelling of a latent Finnish medievalism and the creation of a sparkling piece of national heritage cannot really be overestimated. What Juslenius had briefly implied, what Porthan summarized, yet refuted, and what Becker suggested, had matured in the romantic imagination of Lönnrot: folk poetry and oral traditions became historical sources, which gave deep insights into Finnish national antiquity. Through Lönnrot’s writings the ‘sundered’ national epic of the Finns of old was ‘restored’, and the fragments of different oral traditions became a complete and coherent tale of high literary value, comparable with any other known medieval European epic, and soon just as famous abroad.12 The continued vision of the Kalevala as a rendition of historical realities provided Finnish nationalism with a tremendous set of historiographically adaptable myths for more than a century of nation-building and popular enlightenment. Relating the Kalevala to actual early medieval history is a persistent feature still haunting some Finnish and international studies. The Kalevala remains an inventive compilation of a multitude of oral fragments: a book effectively envisioned and written by Elias Lönnrot as a means to an end.13 The publication of the Kalevala codified the medievalization of true Finnishness as it became both the second bible for persons possessing a romantic nationalist conviction and a cultural inspiration for generations of Finnish authors and artists. The scientific impact followed suit: folklore studies developed into an advanced speciality of the Finnish humanities. Even the Finnish Literature Society [Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura] was founded in 1831 with the specific task to publish and finance the continued gathering of oral traditions of the peasantry, besides a more idealistic wish to promote literature in the Finnish language. In a sense, the Finnish intellectual need for a distant past was channelled into analysing and illustrating the Kalevala, which became the symbol of an ancient national culture. The sacral acceptance of the Kalevala has probably been the main reason why any imagery or representation relating to

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ancient Finns in general has often been labelled – and dismissed – as ‘Kalevala romanticism’, while the deeper constructive and nationalist signification of national antiquity has been overlooked.14 Meanwhile, on another front, the ‘prehistorization’ of Finnishness advanced steadily with the establishment of a discipline of Finno-Ugric linguistics. Working from the foundational concepts of János Sajnovics and H. G. Porthan, while adopting the historical–comparative methods of Rasmus Rask, Jacob Grimm and Franz Bopp, the scholars A. J. Sjögren and M. A. Castrén opened a whole new field in the study of Finnishness. Establishing the scope of the FinnoUgric connection actually became the main preoccupation of the professional linguists in autonomous nineteenth-century Finland – and of the archaeologists too, somewhat later. This trend lasted well into the late nineteenth century. Castrén’s interest took him far, as he envisioned the largest historical realm of ancient ‘Finnishness’ ever. Castrén was convinced that every line of the Kalevala was original and ancient, and reported in 1839 that he had undertaken a journey to Russian Karelia specifically to find explanations for the poems printed in 1835–6.15 After nine years of extended fieldwork and documentation he returned once more to Finland, claiming in 1850 that the FinnoUgric, Samoyed, Turkic, Mongolian and Tungusic languages were all of the same ‘Altaic family’.16 Although debated, this proposition – probably his main ideological achievement, with a definite touch of early Finnish nationalism – thoroughly influenced the concept of Finnishness for a century to come. Castrén was also among the first who undertook archaeological excavations to further their knowledge of the Finnish ethnogenesis. Castrén died in 1852, but generations of scholars have continued to debate and contemplate the geographical origins – the ‘cradle’ – of the Finno-Ugric languages, which was equated with the origins of the peoples speaking the languages, and thus with the pre-medieval roots of the united Finnish ‘people’. Later on other ‘beginnings’ were proposed. Following vague suggestions made by Torsten Aminoff in 1873, the Russian Darwinist and entomologist F. T. Köppen argued in 1886 for a European homeland, placing it along the middle stretches of the river Volga. Although largely unknown to central European scholars, his proposition would become the favourite of many pioneering nineteenth- and twentieth-century linguists in Finland. Another suggestion was voiced by Otto Donner in 1882, when he claimed the mid-Ural mountains were the original habitat of the unscattered Finno-Ugrians. Before the suggestions made by Köppen and Donner, Castrén’s Altaic theory was the ruling scientific answer to the question.17 As such these interpretations of the conceived ethnogenesis of the Finns were nothing more than somewhat secularized modifications or clarifications of the Finno-Geatic migrations outlined by Messenius and Juslenius, further tied to a linguistic geography introduced by Porthan. The biblical or ‘Scythian’

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origins had changed to ‘Finno-Ugrian’, yet the essence remained. Even Lönnrot writes in the preface of the 1835 Kalevala and on several occasions during the next year about the historical migration of the Finns, who, led by the hero Kaleva arrived in Finland, a region immediately named ‘Suomi’. The march had begun in Asia, Lönnrot stated already in 1836.18

4 The manifest destiny of Finland Even before the public enlightenment had the opportunity – or need – to utilize art and illustrations in the propagation of national values, artists had begun to create a certain romantic imagery of original Finnishness for the intellectual elite. The Kalevala provided scores of motifs for such images, and the cultural and historical role of the epic made these paintings and sculptures into something more than mere mythological–aesthetic representations. These works of art were also memorials of the (possible) medieval heroes they depicted. They were in the Finnish case historical renditions picturing concepts of the still so elusive original Finn.19 When more regular illustration of the Kalevala finally began in the 1850s, the national ideology was already shifting towards a more radical ethnic nationalism and the heroic romanticism that Lönnrot had infused into the epic was becoming outdated. The turning point in the representation of Finnish antiquity was initiated in 1845, when the already established painter Robert Wilhelm Ekman returned to Finland. In doing so he received extraordinary praise and soon found himself painting national romantic views of the harmonious Finns in peasant settings. Ekman was actually continuing what others had begun, but he added a further dimension of national idealism to the genre-paintings. In 1847 he was commissioned to decorate the chancel of Turku cathedral; the work was to include two historical scenes painted al fresco and depicting the two most crucial moments of the religious history of Finland, i.e. the initial conversion of the Finns in 1157 and the presentation of the first Finnish translation of the New Testament in 1548. The murals were ready by 1854, and harvested an immediate and great enthusiasm for the spectacular works of art, which for the first time introduced the distant past of Finnishness to a host of common churchgoers. Increasingly now, the heritage was to be recycled from the scholars back to the ‘people’. The mid-nineteenth century introduced a new stringency into Finnish nationalism. After a few decades of separation from Sweden the current political situation had come to be taken for granted. A new-found romanticized love of the country had spread among the students and intellectuals in 1848, much thanks to the pacifying efforts of the older generation. Moreover, the ascent of Emperor Alexander II to the throne in 1855 brought the national issues to a head as a series of liberal reforms were begun in Finland; when the diet finally convened in 1863 the literate Finns were already fully involved in projects

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of liberalization and nationalism – or fighting against either of them. For the ruling class the following decades were marked by a bitter strife between the Finnish and the Swedish nationalists, the ‘Fennomans’ and the ‘Svecomans’.20 Three Fennoman scholars and authors – one philosopher and two historians – stand out as central figures in the nineteenth-century creation of a nationalist medievalism in Finland and the development of a national consciousness and new appreciation of the lost Finnish heritage. All three were important for the invention and propagation of a national proto-history and the extension of public literacy for the achievement of a new national identity. Johan Vilhelm Snellman (1806–81), the leading philosopher in Finland, criticized the early nineteenth-century romantic ethos as regressive. The key concept in Snellman’s thinking was Sittlichkeit, morality: the individual had moral obligations to the nation. In Snellman’s ‘civic belief’– which was modelled on the Lutheran ethos, Herderian national definitions and Hegelian philosophy – religion was no longer the ultimate good, but the national spirit was to be the main concern of the Finns.21 What Snellman introduced was scientific and rational nationalism, which was no longer based on the previous cultural or romantic sense of identity. His concept of ethnicity was political, something also present in the here and now, and inherently entwined in the concept of the state. Snellman’s lines of thought emphasized the Finnish state as a manifestation of the national spirit, which further depreciated or reduced the ‘Swedish period’ to a mere parenthesis. Finnish language, traditions and institutions were to be the future of the grand duchy. As a consequence Snellman was deeply engaged in the practical construction of a society based on Finnishness, first as a teacher and journalist and later occupying high civic positions. He emphasized the need to favour the Finnish language and literature; consequently the residing elite was required to become Finnish in language and manners in the future. Snellman’s philosophical and political programme meant the final introduction of a definitive state-centred, yet ethnic, nationalism of European standard. Not surprisingly, historians were prominent in the national construction. Two of the most celebrated figures in promoting a nationalist perception of Finland were professors of history at the university in Helsinki: Georg Zacharias Forsman and Zacharias Topelius. Both received their full chairs in 1863.22 Topelius’ and Forsman’s novelty was that they furnished national historiography with a new conceptual ethnic enemy, the Swedes, who became the main ‘other’ of Finnishness. The thought was a logical conclusion from J. V. Snellman’s ethnic spirituality and it became the guiding rule of the whole Fennoman movement and of the Finnish nationalists well into the next century. Not unexpectedly Forsman’s and Topelius’ guiding visions of a vigorous and ultimately victorious Finnishness met with fierce resistance from many conservative Swedes in Finland, who soon found it necessary to form an ethnic

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identity of their own in defence of privileges and traditions now threatened. The ensuing language conflict would span the following decades, only growing in strength until the political issue was resolved rather peacefully in the twentieth century. Much of this battle was, however, fuelled with research and assumptions of the national medieval history: Who was here first, the Finns or the Swedes? Who was culturally and racially superior? Who is my true ancestor, the Viking or the Ugrian? Were the medieval Finns even capable of forming a state? Were the crusades bloody? How much did the Finns oppose Catholicism or the Swedes? Can a native slayer of a missionary bishop become a hero? In the national historiography most of these questions still remain a minefield, loaded with nationalist connotations for both ethnicities. Realizing the necessity of popularization if the Fennoman cause was to emerge victorious, Forsman (1830–1903) was actively involved in promoting the development of a Finnish primary school system and spreading the nationalist cause to all those who could read Finnish. He became one of the first successful authors and orators using the Finnish language as the medium for achieving a national ‘awakening’ and was the first to lecture in Finnish at the university. The contribution to Finnish nationalism of Zacharias Topelius (1818–98) was fundamentally different from what the others offered. Whereas Snellman’s basic arguments were rational and philosophical, and Forsman’s were political and emancipatory, the core of Topelius’ national concept was spiritual and providential.23 Following Herder, Topelius assumed both a specific Finnish national character and a providential significance for the national history; hence the Finns were one of the chosen peoples with a global mission. Topelius was the popularizer who turned the great destiny of Finnishness into an object of public enlightenment and made the grace of (a Protestant) God into a persistent component of public Finnish nationalism. Although he quite obviously turned from radicalism to loyalism in 1848, many of his earlier writings bear witness to how intensely he envisioned the ethnic aspect of true Finnishness. Topelius’ view was teleological: according to this notion Finland became a grand duchy in 1809 as a part of an already predetermined future. The whole Finnish past could be seen as a great build-up aimed at the emergence of a nationally conscious political entity.24 This was already the basic message of Topelius’ famous lecture for the Ostrobothnian student nation in 1843, ‘Does the Finnish People Have a History?’, in which he distinguished between a political history of the state and a cultural/‘popular’ history of the Volk and its Volksgeist. Topelius concluded here that Finland had no political history before 1809, but most certainly had a preceding ‘prehistory’ of ‘upbringing’ between 1157 and 1809. His statements on Finnish history before 1157 are revealing: If we are to conclude what has been stated, the following results appear to be unconstrainedly evident: 1) that the Finnish people during its

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independence comprised all the elements that form a specific nationality, capable of a many-sided development; 2) that this nationality did not have the time to express itself in common and fixed forms, neither in religion, society, nor state, before its independent development was cut off by the Swedish conquest and Christianity; 3) that its activities throughout the Swedish occupation were limited to ceaseless negation ...25 Here Topelius admitted to a form of national independence before 1157, when the Swedish conquest and occupation (!) cut off the sovereign development of the nation. The statement was clear in its view of the Swedish period as a parenthesis, albeit benevolent and civilizing as Topelius often otherwise presented it. For Topelius the Finnish nationality – or angelic Volksgeist as he came to believe – was primordial or at least millennial; the events of 1808–9 only awakened it from its slumber. The quoted statements demonstrate nothing less than the common standpoints which later Finnish nationalists would ardently defend or elaborate. This divine ‘purpose’ of Finnish history, and the obligations it brought, became even more ‘self-evident’ after Topelius’ death, when full independence became a reality in 1917–18. Traces of a concept of a preordained Finnish state – be it then the grand duchy that Topelius was quite satisfied with or the later republic that the radical men of the Academic Karelia Society wished to expand – are visible in much, if not most, of Finnish historiography and the ensuing proto-historical representations.26 As ‘modern’ Finland was considered the ‘end of history’, features and developments of the national past were continuously – even if often subconsciously – being compared with contemporary Finnishness. For Topelius and his followers the distant past of Finnishness was in full harmony with the divine master plan. According to Topelius the conquest of Finland was drawn out as the Finns offered fierce and tenacious resistance, and conversion was achieved by the point of the sword. Young Topelius’ picture of the proto-history of the Finnish tribes is remarkably warlike: Here the battle was not one of surprise, but the struggle of Christianity and Swedishness against the original Finnish continued for half a millennium, and nothing, except maybe the example of the Jews, can be compared with the tenacious opposition by which the Finn here step by step defended his independence. In this long fight – this is how the physical and spiritual struggle during the whole period of Swedish domination from 1157 to 1809 must be viewed – the Finn has matured into what he is, and taken from an inner point of view, this struggle offers a rich and contemporary interest.27 For the nationalist view of history this construction was an absolute necessity: a people submitting peacefully to the conquest of another was not worthy of

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a national spirit guiding it into greatness. Topelius for instance considered the Lapps cursed for giving way so easily and letting other tribes push them north. For Topelius the notion of Finnish military prowess was, however, anchored in an honourable love of peace, and the genuine Finns were the only people of their ethnic community – the Finno-Ugrian tribes – ordained for a great future. The historiographical process of militarizing the ancient Finns – which became so important after 1890 – was to that effect begun by Topelius, who further offered the romantic postulate of a sundered ethnicity: the Finns were fractured by internal hostilities, which facilitated the piecemeal conquest of the region. The ancient society knew of no social stratification except of free men and slaves; there were no kings except leaders in times of war. Even the slaves were treated exceptionally well, and women were venerated and held in high regard.28 The main impact of Topelius on the proto-historical image of Finland can be found in the long use and extraordinary popularity of one of his books intended to spread enlightenment and morality to the younger generations, first published in Swedish in 1875 as Läsebok för de lägsta lärowerken i Finland: Boken om Wårt Land, and translated into Finnish in 1876 as Lukukirja alimmaisille oppilaitoksille Suomessa: Maamme kirja. This famous textbook, usually abbreviated as Boken om vårt land or Maamme kirja – both meaning ‘The Book of Our Country’ – included long passages on Finnish medieval history and became the all-time Finnish steady-seller for primary school readers, reaching 45 editions in Finnish and 20 in Swedish by 1942. By 1908 it had already been printed in some 270,000 copies in Finnish and 70,000 copies in Swedish; in comparison the Kalevala had only reached a sum total of c.130,000 copies by 1937. The remarkable Boken om vårt land/Maamme kirja was also illustrated from the first editions on, which was a novelty in Finnish education. It must further be noted that in the school year of 1875–6 there were only around 18,000 pupils attending elementary schools in Finland; by the school year 1907–8 there were 148,000. Meanwhile the population increased from 1,800,000 to 3,000,000.29 Thus the historian Zacharias Topelius became the first truly successful popularizer of the learned and intellectual vision of Finnishness, in both the contemporary and historical sense. The medium by which he reached the population and achieved his national fame is further emphasized by the epithet he was given, ‘the fairy-tale uncle’ [Fin. Satusetä]. This slightly pejorative ‘title’ both hides the political and providential message he was transferring and reveals how effectively his message was received. Topelius himself used the term ‘saga’ as a synonym for ‘ancient history’ already in his early works. For the future construction of a medieval Finland his ideas and concepts were instrumental.

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5 The medievalized defence of Finland By the late 1880s the nationalist conviction of the Fennoman pathfinders was becoming a self-evident phenomenon for the general public as well, and the nationalist cause became a quite commonly accepted civic obligation during the following period of high national medievalism, c.1890 to c.1918. Nationalist sentiments were welcomed by an increasing share of the population, and the conviction of belonging to an important and specifically Finnish tradition was embraced far beyond the original Fennoman intellectual elite of the university teachers, the officials and the clergy. Professionalized antiquarians still provided the tools for the spreading of the Myths of Descent, but it was the increasing political tensions which brought a developed and acknowledged nationalism to the defence and regeneration of Finnishness against the threat of a renewed decline under enforced Russian rule. The old Myth of Location and Migration was also clarified and codified for several generations by the archaeologist Alfred Hackman in 1905, when he claimed that the Finns had arrived several hundreds of years earlier to their country, not as a tribe but as a prolonged migration of individuals.30 Besides providing ornaments and illustrations for the Kalevala, this was the main contribution of the by now professionalized archaeologists to the national cause, giving a longer duration of national heritage in Finland. Political developments in the 1890s accelerated the progress of Finnish nationalism remarkably. Being an associated part of a great power, which also was embracing a nationalist standardization of the realm, meant that Finland after decades of more or less autonomous developments and liberties came under heavy administrative pressure from the Russian government. Troubled by a tangible and manifest Finnish ‘separatism’, the emperor and his Russian deputies were finding it increasingly important to bring the grand duchy back in line as an integrated part of the empire. In such a situation the continuing – and still rather successful – Fennoman struggle against cultural and administrative Swedishness could not remain the sole issue of the nationalist cause. After 1890 the Russian decrees and resolutions of standardization were issued at an increasing pace, and matters of legislation were decided and enforced from the point of view of the empire and not primarily of the minute grand duchy. Towards the turn of the century, national discontent was growing – as far as the active censorship permitted – and for many radical, both right- and leftwing, intellectuals ‘Russianness’ was quickly becoming the biggest threat to the conception of Finnishness and the western heritage they wished to represent. The escalation of the conflict would in 1900–5 turn elements of the previously extremely loyal nation into saboteurs, draft dodgers, objectors, demonstrators, voluntary exiles and even political assassins. In time the nationalists would call

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these years the ‘Period of Persecution’ and consider the Russian administrative measures as features of ‘Russification’. The overall task of enlightening the people to their (proto-)historical uniqueness, first undertaken by central associations, was by now also quite successful on the regional level, where primary school teachers, new folk high schools, newly founded local museums with their supporting societies, local youth associations, and other free associations and study circles continued what the urban elite had begun. Of great importance for the success of the local projects was the positive attitude and financial support the estates, and after 1907 the parliament, provided. National enlightenment remained a central feature of the whole nationalist programme, regardless of whether the supposed opposition was Swedish, Russian or even Finnish. The introduction of universal suffrage in 1907 only made the need to reach out to the national Volk even more urgent, as the common Finns were to be guided away from possible political dangers and other unwanted temptations. The nationalists, actually regardless of the ethnicities and political parties they represented, needed to mobilize the voting public both for the defence of Finnishness in general and for the support of their parties in particular. New ways of schooling the Finns to their national task(s) became necessary as political nationalism turned into a mass movement in the early twentieth century. As the core of Finnishness was seen as ancient, antiquarian issues remained in the front line of the Great National Project after 1890. In brief, the 1890s and 1900s became a veritable ‘golden age’ of the emerging ‘national’ culture in Finland. Economically the grand duchy enjoyed great prosperity and the escalating political conflicts of the time provided vast arenas for cultural endeavours for both the elite and the increasingly literate population at large, who were gaining an ethnic and civic consciousness previously unknown. Literature, drama and music flourished within the paradigm of Finnishness, while the public education of the masses reached new levels as fresh means of enlightenment were brought into action. ‘Finland awakes’ [Fin. Suomi herää] was a slogan used by contemporaries to emphasize how the labours of the previous generations of nation-builders finally were touching the hearts of the Finnish people. The conceived ancient heritage was integral to the process. If the Finnish cause was to be defended, it needed widely distributed roots and an ethnic history comparable with those of the competing nations west and east of the region. Artistic medievalizations also provided an excellent – and often concealed – way of addressing the national issues and bringing the people together around their heritage. Russian censorship rarely understood the hidden agenda and danger of the medievalizations, as they ‘only’ displayed very distant features of ancient Finnishness. The ethnic revival – or even fervour – of the new generation of Finns also manifested itself as an intellectual movement or drive called ‘Karelianism’,

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visible throughout the cultural pursuits of the Finnish intelligentsia after about 1890. The meaning of Karelia for the preservation and proper understanding of the ‘Finnish’ heritage was of course nothing new, but the extent of the interest was now considerably amplified due to the ‘cold winds’ blowing from the east. The pathos and emotions that travellers to Karelia sought were not primarily ‘national romantic’: their journeys were rather a search for a nationalist insight which could be exploited when they returned to their spheres of publicity.31 All in all, the period saw an abundance of medievalizing cultural products. There was a steady stream of fresh Kalevala-inspired plays, using archaeological details on stage to loan a certain historical credibility to the verse drama. A national costume, inspired by medieval archaeological finds in Karelia, was created in 1893 and it remained a standard prop of more than 100 medievalizing plays, Kalevala dramas and historical operas, well into the late 1930s. The main female dress, the Aino costume, was several times published in emancipatory magazines for women as an appended needlework pattern for the ladies to manufacture and wear, thus showing their national concern.32 A society, The Friends of Finnish Folk Dance, was founded in 1901; it also promoted the public use of the equivalent ‘medieval’ men’s national costume. Parades of ‘ancient Finns’ were frequent during song festivals from 1891 onward, when the first public display of physical and fully attired ‘proto-Finns’ could be seen in the streets of Kuopio. Public dramatizations and tableaux with scenes enacting real or imaginary medieval events became a common part of fundraising events and festivities. Even much of Jean Sibelius’ music from this period was clearly linked with the medievalizing features of then-contemporary Finnish nationalism. Even the development of the historical novel in Finland was closely linked to the Great National Project. After some initial attempts before the 1890s, medievalizations became particularly frequent around 1898–9, and after this the production of early historical or ancient novels and short stories advanced steadily. The breakthrough of the modern novel describing some form of ‘medieval’ national culture was Juhani Aho’s Panu, which explored once again, in 1897, the tragic aspects of the Finnish conversion to Christianity. Cheap editions of the Kalevala followed, with illustrations transmitting a state-of-the-art imagery of related antiquarian and ethnographic knowledge. Large historical wall charts, intended as teaching aids for history lessons, were issued from 1900 onward. Prehistoric, medieval or otherwise ‘ancient’ motifs are clearly overrepresented among these images. If the total count of Finnish historical and geographical wall charts printed before 1945 reached 109 specimens, 75 of them in some way or other displayed pre-modern, ancient Finnishness or medieval sites. The multitude of ‘early medieval’ and antiquarian images presented in the fine arts, printed in satirical magazines and editions of school books, on postcards and other enlightening prints and booklets are simply too numerous to list. The visual images, solemn music, historical drama, and

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literature certainly provided a surge of nationalist medievalism beginning in the 1890s, which mounted to a crescendo after the turn of the century. By 1905, early medieval Finns could be seen nearly everywhere in the public sphere. Russian attempts to consolidate the empire resulted in a countering surge of ethnic and ancient images and literary references to the distant past of the Finns. The period thus produced a certain mental unification of the Finns – the conceived alterity of Russia provided a great threat for those wishing to close the ranks of Finnishness against all foreign influence. Nevertheless it would be the advent of the First World War which finalized the major shift in the conception of the national, distant past. Although the use of early medieval images and symbols increased dramatically from the 1880s, the basic image of the proto-historical Finns was one of rather peaceful characters, only defending their hearth when foreign invaders threatened them with violence. After August 1914 the militarization of society, combined with a still increasing displeasure with the Russian administration, resulted in a remarkable militarization of the conception of ancient Finns in the public imagery.

6

Finland’s second independence

By nationalist standards the national struggle ended with manifest destiny fulfilled in 1917–18. For the ardent Finn, the independence of 1917 was the self-evident sum of centuries of previous developments. The achieved political status was considered preordained; in fact, it was nothing less than the long envisioned return to a distant past, the Myth of Regeneration come true. What had begun as a more or less cultural project during the grand duchy, had become a political reality, a second independence of the Finns, for those committed to the cause of Finnishness. However, the beginnings of the freshly emerged state were heralded in the spring of 1918 with a short but ferocious civil war between socialists and conservatives. The quite commonly accepted scholarly illusion of a united Finnish nation and ethnicity was severely shaken by this event. The victors simply considered the radical socialists and their beaten army as ‘betrayers’ of the cause of Finnishness and the retaliation was fierce. Although the mistrusted Social Democrats soon reorganized and returned to the parliament, anti-socialist movements were common, especially in the 1930s, and Finnish society remained divided until the Second World War. Although territorially completed, nationalism remained the central force for building an improved Finnish identity after 1918. The ‘otherness’ of the Russian Empire was inherited by the Bolshevik Soviet Union, and national medievalism was somewhat adapted to the new political situation. The distant past was still seen as filled with obligations for the future, yet medievalizations were actually disappearing from the public venues, the theatres and the fine arts in general after 1918.

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It could be argued that the glory days of the ‘national humanities’ [Fin. kansalliset tieteet] were over, at least for the time being, as the nationalist movement, which once had needed them so self-evidently, lost much of its scholarly interest. After all, the necessary ethnic construction and the key elements of true Finnishness had already been achieved and were readily available for continued and further diffusion by 1918. By then (medievalizing) nationalism had in fact become a self-evident banality within Finnish society. Rephrasing the title of Benedict Anderson’s well-known book, Imagined Communities, it could be claimed that the ‘community was already imagined’ by the outset of the Republic. From a nationalist viewpoint most, if not all, of the historical requisites were already available, and the competing patriotic movements of the many political parties now available had to concentrate on planning and defending a greater future for the victorious and ‘reinstated’ Finnish cause. The concepts of modernism, progress and development were central for the cultural and political scenes of the 1920s and 1930s, while the trivial obligations of the past emerged as worn-out and peripheral in comparison. The ancient heritage was, however, established enough to pass into the treasury of self-evident nationalism, as the myths, symbols, images and constructs of ancient Finnishness – like the skullcap, which still remains a symbol of Finnishness – already had become embedded into society by the turn of the century. Instead, the imagery of early medieval Finland was mainly transferred to youth education and adventure stories, the Scout movement, and the training of the Civil Guards. Here features like the defence of hill forts, hunting crossbowmen, wise tribal leaders, the ‘eternal’ struggle against Russia, and weapons of ancient warfare became key elements of the phase of militant medievalism, between about 1918 and 1944–5. The hypotheses, constructs and images of the previous generations remained accessible and continued to be enhanced and utilized for contemporary interpretations and political needs, and conceived features of the ancient past remained well-established elements of the national history culture in the interwar period. During the Second World War the ancient ‘memories’ of Finnishness were of obvious use for nationalist propaganda. Although the scholarly impact on the imagery of the distant past faded after the 1910s, the general public still encountered scores of renditions and representations of early medieval Finland throughout the interwar period and the ensuing great conflicts of the Second World War. Yet, the centre of gravity had shifted, as the artists and antiquarians of the ‘golden age’ gave way to journalists, teachers, illustrators and other enlighteners of lesser fame but continued prominence. After 1917–18 the ‘hot’ antiquarian nationalism of the previous decades turned ‘banal’, using two concepts Michael Billig has applied to the development of nationalism in modern societies. Accordingly, the nationalist cause left its heated and proclamatory origins and became ever-present and ‘unwaved’, yet constantly flagged.33

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7 A conclusion – medieval Finland after the 1940s The defeat of ‘White’ Finland in 1944 and the reluctant but final acceptance of socialism as a political reality within the nation led both to a decline of past ideological values and to a rise in determinist, evolutionary and positivist scholarship. The public descent of the political image of early medieval Finland continued and culminated around 1980. In that year a large symposium of researchers decided to re-examine and publicly discard the previous Myth of Location and Migration. ‘Finns’ had now been living in ‘Finland’ since the Ice Age: such was the ‘official’ conclusion. A fully nationalized Stone Age emerged with this perennial model of national settlement. Although this definition is now generally accepted, the older medievalizing concepts and constructs of the previous phases have found room to coexist, and can be seen as lingering undercurrents in several connections, such as on the Internet. Questions of ‘ethnic roots’, ‘settlement continuity’ and Kulturkreis divisions are still current in public archaeology and the national antiquarian consciousness, despite an additional ‘Europeanization’ trend, which emerged in the 1990s.

Notes 1. Quoted from F. A. Heporauta and Martti Haavio (eds), Kalevala: Kansallinen aarre: Kirjoitelmia kansalliseepoksen vaiheilta (Porvoo, 1949), 318. 2. Anthony D. Smith, ‘National Identity and Myths of Ethnic Descent’, in Myths and Memories of the Nation (Oxford, 1999 [1984]), 57–95, quoted at 60–1. 3. Smith, ‘National Identity’, 62–8. 4. Some of the names are apparently purely mythical and some of the assumed ‘kings’ are apparently rulers of Finnmark in Norway. Considering this complex question here would exceed the scope of this study. 5. Erkki Urpilainen, Algot Scarin ja gööttiläisen historiankirjoituksen mureneminen Ruotsissa 1700-luvun alkupuolella (Helsinki, 1993), 33–4, 116, etc. 6. Urpilainen, Algot Scarin, 40–7. 7. See Urpilainen, Algot Scarin, and Päiviö Tommila, Suomen historiankirjoitus: Tutkimuksen historia (Porvoo, 1989), for a general survey of these developments. 8. Two central works must be presented here: Johannes Messenius, Scondia Illustrata: Tomus X (Stockholm, 1703) and the anonymous seventeenth-century Chronicon Finlandiae, incerto auctore, published in 1728 by Christian von Nettelbladt in Swedische Bibliothec. 9. Juha Manninen, Valistus ja kansallinen identiteetti. Aatehistoriallinen tutkimus 1700-luvun Pohjolasta (Helsinki, 2000), 76–97 and passim. 10. Manninen, Valistus, 235–41. Manninen argues that Porthan used nation in the same sense as nineteenth-century thinkers used when speaking of nationality, and as Anthony D. Smith still uses when speaking of the concept ethnie. 11. [Elias Lönnrot] Kalewala: taikka: Wanhoja Karjalan runoja: Suomen kansan muinosista ajoista (Helsinki, 1835–6). 12. Early translations of the Kalevala (before 1880) include Swedish (1841; 1850/51; 1852; 1857; 1864 and 1868; 1875), French (1845; 1868/79), Russian (1847), German (1852), English (1868) and Hungarian (1871).

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13. See e.g. the works by Väinö Kaukonen, Kalevala ja todellisuus: eräitä kielenkäytön ongelmia (Helsinki, 1948), and Elias Lönnrotin Kalevalan toinen painos (Helsinki, 1956). 14. The huge impact of the Kalevala on the creation of a new Finnishness is well documented in the research. Cf. Derek Fewster, Visions of Past Glory: Nationalism and the Construction of Early Finnish History (Helsinki, 2006). On the growth of folklore studies, see William A. Wilson, Folklore and Nationalism in Modern Finland (Bloomington, 1976). 15. Kaukonen, Kalevala ja todellisuus, 29, 31. 16. Even Hovdhaugen et al., The History of Linguistics in the Nordic Countries ([Helsinki], 2000), 173–6. 17. Kaisa Häkkinen, Suomalaisten esihistoria kielitieteen valossa (Helsinki, 1996), 68–9. 18. Kaukonen, Elias Lönnrotin Kalevalan toinen painos, 425–8. 19. See further Jukka Ervamaa, R. W. Ekmanin ja C. E. Sjöstrandin Kalevala-aiheinen taide (Helsinki, 1981), 9–17, on the influences affecting the origins of the Finnish Kalevala art. 20. Cf. Matti Klinge, Finlands historia, vol. 3 (Esbo, 1996), 151–6 and passim. 21. Marja Jalava, ‘Jumalan kuolema? – nietzscheläiset ja kollektivistinen kansallisidealismi autonomian ajan Suomessa’, Historiallinen Aikakauskirja, 4 (2001), 390–402. 22. Forsman was later elevated to the nobility as G. Z. Yrjö-Koskinen and is commonly known by his literary alias ‘Yrjö Koskinen’. 23. Nils Erik Forsgård, I det femte inseglets tecken (Helsinki, 1998), and Matti Klinge, Idylli ja uhka: Topeliuksen aatteita ja politiikkaa (Porvoo, 1998). 24. This conviction of an ordained historical development of Finnishness has been called by critical historians the ‘Fennoman paradigm’ of Finnish historiography. 25. Z. Topelius, ‘Äger Finska Folket en Historie?’, Joukahainen: ströskrift utgifven af Österbottniska afdelningen, 2 (Helsingfors, 1845), 215. 26. AKS [Fin. Akateeminen Karjala-Seura] was a radical nationalist student organization working, among other things, for the (re)creation of a Greater Finland of all the neighbouring Finno-Ugrian tribes, between 1922 and 1944. 27. Z. Topelius, Finland framstäldt i teckningar (Helsingfors,1845–52), 48. 28. Topelius, Finland framstäldt, 31, 38–9, 50. 29. Annuaire Statistique de Finlande: Nouvelle Série, 9 (Helsingfors, 1911), 6–7, 402–3. 30. Alfred Hackman, Die ältere Eisenzeit in Finnland, vol.1: Die Funde aus den fünf ersten Jahrhunderten n. Chr. (Helsingfors, 1905). 31. See for instance Hannes Sihvo, Karjalan kuva: Karelianismin taustaa ja vaiheita autonomian aikana (2nd edn, Helsinki, 2003), and Riitta Konttinen, Sammon takojat: Nuoren Suomen taiteilijat ja suomalaisuuden kuvat (Helsinki, 2001), and the references provided in these works. 32. The popularity of especially the woman’s costume of the reconstructions might actually be partially explained as a feature of the contemporary struggle for universal suffrage in Finland. 33. Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London, 1995), 37–59, 93–127.

5 Interpreting the Nordic Past: Icelandic Medieval Manuscripts and the Construction of a Modern Nation Guðmundur Hálfdanarson

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Introduction

‘My object in visiting Iceland was twofold’, wrote the 28-year-old English schoolteacher Sabine Baring-Gould in the opening of his account of a trip to Iceland during the summer of 1862: ‘I proposed examining scenes famous in Saga, and filling a portfolio with water-colour sketches.’1 For the young Englishman, the journey was like a pilgrimage to a holy place, because Icelandic medieval literature had fascinated him for years. Baring-Gould, who is best known today for his hymn ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’, had even taught himself to read the sagas in Old Icelandic, translating excerpts from them for his students.2 ‘It must be remembered that the Sagas from which I draw my extracts are not mere popular tales’, he claimed, ‘they are downright history.’ To support this assertion, Baring-Gould quoted ‘our highest English authority on the subject’, George Webbe Dasent, professor at King’s College London and assistant editor of The Times. Dasent, who made his name as the first English translator of the best known Icelandic family saga, Njáls Saga, placed the sagas among the finest historical chronicles in Europe; much ‘passes for history in other lands on far slighter grounds’, Dasent wrote in the introduction to his translation published in 1861, ‘and many a story in Thucydides, Tacitus, or even in Clarendon or Hume, is believed on evidence not one-tenth part so trustworthy as that which supports the narratives of these Icelandic story-tellers of the eleventh century’.3 Sabine Baring-Gould was only one of a number of English Victorian travellers who visited Iceland during the second half of the nineteenth century to explore the country where the medieval family sagas had been written and to visit some of the sites where they were supposed to have taken place.4 This interest was indicative of the great admiration many learned Europeans had for Old Icelandic literature during this period and beyond, especially in Germany, Scandinavia and the English-speaking world.5 The cause for this attraction 52

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differed from one admirer to another: as for Baring-Gould and Dasent, it was their belief in the historical accuracy of the sagas that brought them to their attention, while many nineteenth-century romantic intellectuals saw in the Icelandic sagas and the mythical epics preserved in Icelandic medieval manuscripts, or the so-called Eddic poetry, the clearest traces of an ancient Germanic spirit and cultural heritage.6 During the nineteenth century, this foreign interest in the Icelandic medieval literature became a great source of pride to Icelanders, because it seemed to place the small and peripheral nation firmly in the pantheon of European civilization. During the first centuries of Icelandic history – the so-called ‘saga age’, or the Icelandic ‘golden age’ – Icelandic society ‘was so rich and enchanting and remarkable’, wrote the Icelandic historian Jón Jónsson Aðils in 1903, that it was only rivalled by ‘the Ancient Greeks at their highest stage of development, where, as far as we know, human life reached its pinnacle in antiquity’.7 In Aðils’s opinion, medieval Iceland had to be regarded as one of the most important generators of European culture, and it should, therefore, come as no surprise that the Middle Ages played a central role in the construction of Icelandic national identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In their writings, Icelandic intellectuals and political commentators used the image of a glorious past to boost the confidence of the nation they wanted to ‘awaken’, at the same time as it helped them to garner sympathy for their cause abroad.8 To them the achievements in the past indicated what the nation could become in the future, in both cultural and economic terms, once it had freed itself from a foreign yoke. The nationalist interpretation of the medieval sagas and cultural heritage was far from simple, however, because it involved obvious recontextualization of historical narratives and literary works. The sagas and the other literary achievements of the Middle Ages were composed or compiled centuries before self-conscious nationalist identity had developed in Iceland, or anywhere else for that matter, and therefore one needs to read these stories in a particular manner if they are to be understood as ‘national literature’ or as expressions of ‘national spirit’. Thus Icelandic students of the saga literature emphasized its Icelandic origins, interpreting the sagas as a testimony to a distinctive national culture, which was formed through the Icelandic experience and reflected the natural environment and social structure of the Icelandic nation. Nationalist interpretations of this type are, of course, a common practice, as most nations are based on similar claims of specific ‘memories’ and distinctive cultural markers. But in the Icelandic case, the ‘nationalization’ of medieval culture took an interesting turn, because it came into open conflict with nationalist interpretations of the same medieval heritage in some of the other Nordic countries. This cultural strife attests to the fact that the boundaries of national communities and cultural groups are often contested and usually fluid,

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reflecting today’s identity formations rather than the ideas of the known and unknown producers of medieval cultural works. Here the nationalist interpretations of the past, and the role of these interpretations in the construction of modern nationalist identities, will be studied through the so-called manuscript debates between the Icelandic and Danish authorities and related disputes over the national origins of the saga literature. The debates centred on the question of who could rightfully claim possession over the thousands of existing medieval manuscripts, manuscript fragments, and documents originating in Iceland but preserved in Danish libraries and archives; however, they also digressed into general debates on the ‘national ownership’ of cultural heritage. In fact, these disputes over Old Norse – or Old Icelandic – medieval culture exemplify both how the Middle Ages have been utilized and reinterpreted to serve as a basis for the construction of modern national identities and how this construction has influenced modern visions of the past. One can characterize these interpretations as a creative dialogue between the past and the present, as the literature conserved in the medieval manuscripts, and thus the manuscripts themselves, have inspired people’s selfunderstanding in the present, while these interpretations have, in turn, shaped people’s views of the cultural heritage and its origins. This interaction between the past and the present, or between ‘memory’ and ‘identity’, demonstrates how changeable – if not arbitrary – and often contentious such interpretations can be, although they are commonly seen as both fixed and natural.

2 National treasures reclaimed ‘At last, the nation has returned home with all of its belongings, sovereign and independent. The political separation from a foreign state has been completed’, the speaker of the Icelandic parliament, Gísli Sveinsson, declared on 17 June 1944 in a speech at the official celebration of the foundation of the Republic of Iceland.9 These words are indicative of the jubilant mood in Iceland at the moment when the country severed its ties with Denmark after more than half a millennium of relations with the Danish monarchy. Finally, the Icelandic nation had gained full authority over its own destiny, restoring the political and cultural independence it allegedly had lost in the late thirteenth century. As soon as this triumphant moment had passed, the Icelandic authorities returned to a quest they had started a few decades earlier. The fact was that some of the most highly valued ‘Icelandic belongings’ still remained in Copenhagen, as the lion’s share of the existing Icelandic medieval manuscripts – which Icelanders regarded as their most important national treasures – were stored in Danish libraries and manuscript collections. In September 1945, soon after the German occupation forces had left Danish soil, a group of Icelandic representatives visited Copenhagen to finalize the political divorce from the

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Danish monarchy. One of their primary objectives was to reclaim all Icelandic manuscripts stored in Danish public collections, because they thought that these important cultural artefacts should be kept in the country where they had originally been transcribed and collected.10 With the foundation of the Republic this demand had taken on new urgency, because a free and independent nation could not allow its crown jewels to remain in the hands of the former ruling state. The main targets of the Icelandic demands were medieval manuscripts and documents kept in two Danish collections, the Danish Royal Library and the Arnamagnæan Collection of the University of Copenhagen. Most of these medieval records had come into Danish possession during the latter half of the seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries; some had been donated directly to the Danish king by leading Iceland dignitaries, but other manuscripts had been collected by Icelandic antiquarians, either working on their own initiative or travelling to their native country at the behest of the Danish king. The most prolific of these collectors was Árni Magnússon – or Arnas Magnussen as he called himself in his testament. Magnússon, who was of Icelandic origins, served for many years as professor philosophiæ et antiquitatum Danicarum at the University of Copenhagen and also as secretary at the private archives of the king of Denmark.11 At his death in 1730, Magnússon bequeathed his ‘books and papers, both the printed ones and the written’, and most of his other assets to the University of Copenhagen, to be used for ‘the good of the fatherland and the Publici’, as Magnússon stated in his will. A few decades later, the so-called Commission for the Arnamagnæan Foundation was established in Copenhagen, in order to manage Magnússon’s huge private collection of books, vellums and paper manuscripts.12 While Iceland was a part of the Danish monarchy, Copenhagen served as its main political and cultural centre. Naturally, the capital of the state attracted both cultural artefacts and aspiring literati from the Icelandic periphery, in part because the most important – and for a long time the only – university of the monarchy was in Copenhagen. As Icelanders gradually gained more autonomy in their domestic affairs, with home rule in 1904, their own university in 1911, and full sovereignty in 1918, they demanded not only political separation from Denmark but also control over what they regarded as their own past. There the medieval manuscripts played a central role: ‘The manuscripts are like a part of us’, stated Alexander Jóhannesson, rector of the University of Iceland in 1939; they are ‘like flesh of our flesh and blood of our blood’. Therefore these literary masterpieces had to be returned to Iceland, he maintained, and with their return the University of Iceland would become, as it should be, ‘the centre of Icelandic studies, the greatest literary works of our ancient culture will be published in Iceland, and foreign scholars, specializing in this discipline, will come to our country to warm their spirit by the fire of Icelandic scholarship’.13

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The Icelandic demands for the manuscripts were usually expressed in this sentimental and nationalistic language. These cultural artefacts, and the literature transcribed on their pages, were, to quote the nationalist discourse of the 1950s and 1960s, ‘the products of the Icelandic national soul … the children of Iceland’;14 they were the school of the nation, the ‘entertainment and spiritual source of energy, the light in the minds of the Icelandic people … their appearance reflects the fate of the nation, the course of its life and natural characteristics’;15 and, finally, they had been ‘the lifeline of the nation for centuries … its cultural mainstay. They were, and still are, the bedrock of Icelandic nationality and the Icelandic language, one of the primary justifications for the independence of Iceland.’16 For the Danes, wrote Sigurður Nordal, the influential professor of Icelandic literature at the University of Iceland, in 1946, ‘the Icelandic manuscripts have only value as museum pieces or as sources for academics. … For Icelanders they have a different and greater value. The Icelandic medieval literature is like the poor man’s only sheep, because the old vellums are the only visible traces from the heyday of our national culture.’17 The main problem for the Icelandic government in its quest for the medieval manuscripts was the fact that, from a legal point of view, the Icelanders had no case to pursue.18 Most of the manuscripts in Danish libraries had been acquired through entirely lawful means, as they had either been bought by or donated to the Danish king or the manuscript collectors who had transported them to Copenhagen. Moreover, Árni Magnússon had donated his valuable collection to the University of Copenhagen, and the authenticity of his will could not be questioned. For this reason, the Icelandic requests could only be expressed in moral terms, appealing to the Danes’ sense of justice and their desire to reach a compromise with their former subjects. ‘The Danes will understand our demands and rights’, one member of the Icelandic parliament, the Alþingi, remarked in 1938, ‘when they pause to think, when they reflect on their own destiny, as all small nations must do at the present time. Every nation must attempt to defend itself and its independence, with all means available, and then it is impossible to refuse other nations their rights.’ As Iceland desired to maintain friendly relations with the Danes and the other Nordic nations, he concluded, he ‘expected full understanding and fairness from the Danish nation and the Danish authorities on this issue’.19 The first claims for the manuscripts, expressed by the Icelandic parliament in 1907, were quite modest, as the members of the Alþingi asked only for the return of ‘documents which Árni Magnússon had borrowed from the archives of [Icelandic] bishops, churches or monasteries or from other official or institutional archives …’20 Two years later, the Danish authorities turned down the request, and the issue was laid to rest for a while. In 1924, the parliament repeated the appeal from 1907,21 and this time it prompted a general release of

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official documents which specifically concerned the administration of Iceland, from Danish public archives to the Icelandic National Archives. Included in this so-called ‘Danish consignment’ were 700 official documents and four manuscripts from the Arnamagnæan Collection which Magnússon had borrowed from the archives of the Danish administration and thus were not regarded as the lawful property of the Arnamagnæan Collection.22 As it turned out, this concession did not satisfy the Icelandic authorities, because in 1930 the Icelandic parliament increased its claims, demanding all manuscripts in Danish libraries, ‘which were conceived of and composed by people in this country, written in Iceland and preserved in Iceland for a longer or shorter period of time’, to be returned to their ‘proper home’.23 The parliament reiterated this plea in 1938, as all Icelanders were totally convinced, according to one member of the Alþingi, ‘that Iceland had the right to have these objects returned’. The legality of the request was rather suspect, he had to admit, but ‘it is indubitable that the nation has moral and cultural entitlement in this case’.24 When the Icelandic government renewed the request for the manuscripts in the wake of the Second World War, the Danish ministry of education responded by forming a committee of politicians and medievalists to review the case from legal, historical, political and cultural points of view. The committee published its report in 1951, after four years of deliberations. The whole committee agreed on most of the general points – Iceland had no legal entitlement to the manuscripts, returning cultural objects to their country of origin was not a common practice in international relations, and many of the manuscripts were of common Nordic heritage rather than specific Icelandic cultural property – but they could not reach a unanimous conclusion on how to respond to the Icelandic requests. The politicians representing parties on the left of centre were forthcoming, declaring that ‘Denmark should, in this case, put aside issues of legal and national nature, as well as scientific prestige’, and simply return more or less all manuscripts written in Iceland to their country of origin. This would be a sign of goodwill and sympathy between the two nations, they maintained, and thus it would facilitate all future relations between Iceland and Denmark.25 The most important proposal was, however, signed by four of the academics on the committee, including the directors of the Danish National Archives and of the Royal Library. Their official status gave the opinion a certain weight, and in the end it became the basis for the conclusion of the disputes. While they emphasized both the Danish legal and moral rights to keep the manuscripts, they also expressed a certain sympathy for the Icelandic desires. It is understandable, they wrote, ‘that the Icelanders, based on their national conditions, find it an unnatural situation that … more or less all the manuscript material, testifying to the rich blossoming of Icelandic cultural life in the past, is now outside Iceland’s borders’. Unlike Denmark, which had numerous historical monuments – medieval castles and churches, rune stones, etc. – the manuscripts were the only

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existing remnants of Iceland’s medieval past.26 Thus they proposed, ‘on the basis of common Nordic compassion and as a gift’, that the Danes would relinquish to Iceland ‘manuscripts, which had particular ties to the country, including manuscripts which were both written by Icelanders and dealt with Icelandic conditions and persons, and which would therefore be of special interest to Icelanders and would not, in any significant degree, be studied by other than Icelandic researchers’.27 The idea of giving in to the Icelandic demands was received with consternation by many prominent intellectuals in Denmark. To them, surrendering any of the manuscripts appeared to be still another defeat, marking the final demise of the old ‘Danish empire’. In 1917, the authorities had, wrote Vilhelm Grønbech, professor of religious history at the University of Copenhagen, sold the Virgin Islands to the United States ‘in utmost secrecy’, and now they wanted, in the same manner, to ‘surrender our most valuable manuscripts and archival documents to Iceland’. Preserving the manuscripts in Denmark was a question of national honour, he argued. ‘Will our place in future history be one footnote, where Denmark and the Danes will simply be mentioned as the people who wrote themselves off?’ Grønbech asked, pleading with the authorities to rethink their position.28 But in 1961, after intense negotiations between government representatives from the two countries, the Danish government presented a bill in the Danish parliament, stipulating that all manuscripts written in Iceland, in the Icelandic language, which dealt with Icelandic issues, should be transferred to their country of origin. In addition, two of the most valuable Icelandic vellums stored in Copenhagen – the so-called Codex Regius, a thirteenth-century manuscript containing the most complete collection of Germanic mythical poetry in existence, and the largest Icelandic medieval vellum, called the Book of Flatey – were, at the insistence of the Icelandic government, included in the items for return although they should have remained in Copenhagen according to the general principle of the proposed law.29 The bill kept open the question of who actually owned the cultural heritage, and left a considerable part of the Icelandic manuscript heritage in Danish collections. The bill passed through the Danish parliament with ease in 1961 and again in 1965, and, after long legal battles in the Danish courts, the first manuscripts arrived in Iceland on 21 April 1971.30 Thus the manuscript debates were, for all practical purposes, over.

3 Nationalization of medieval culture: whose past? One of the central themes of the manuscript debates was the question of intellectual ownership of these lieux de mémoire – to use Pierre Nora’s wellknown expression. This issue was raised frequently in the arguments of the Danish academics protesting against the transfer of the manuscripts to Iceland. Their claim was that the cultural heritage preserved in the medieval vellums

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was simply common to all of the Scandinavian countries, and therefore no one Nordic nation could take them as its private property. ‘It is commonly assumed’, wrote the Danish linguist Kåre Grønbech in 1952, that manuscripts written in the Old-Norwegian–Icelandic language are a specific Icelandic national domain. Nothing is farther from the truth. The manuscripts in question, sagas, Eddas, and other documents, are, alongside various archaeological findings, the basis for everything we know about our own people’s prehistory, and this foundation is common to all of us, Danes, Norwegians, Swedes, Faroese, and Icelanders.31 To prove this point, it was often pointed out that the origin of the Eddic poetry was unknown, and much of the material described in the manuscripts did not originate in Iceland, be it stories of Norwegian kings or historical accounts from Denmark, Greenland and the Faroe Islands.32 This was an old source of contention between Icelandic academics and some of their Scandinavian colleagues. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the advent of the Romantic movement in Scandinavia, interest in medieval history and literature increased considerably in the region, as nationalists of various extractions searched for the sources of their respective national cultures.33 A novel feature in the romantic outlook was not only to regard the medieval sagas as history, but to place them in history,34 emphasizing the time of their origins and postulating their possible authors. This effort became particularly important for Norwegian nineteenth-century academics, as they sought to define an original culture for their nascent political nation and to demarcate it in relation to the cultures of the other Scandinavian nations. In the spirit of the age, this original culture had to be both unique and respectable in the eyes of other nations. Thus, the Norwegian historian Rudolf Keyser and his disciple Peter Andreas Munch, who together laid the foundation of the so-called ‘Norwegian historical school’,35 expounded the idea that the medieval literature transcribed in the Icelandic manuscripts was really Norwegian rather than Icelandic, demonstrating the vigour and vitality of medieval Norway but not the Icelanders’ literary prowess. Keyser’s arguments are a testament to the influence of Herder’s and Fichte’s cultural nationalism on the Nordic intelligentsia.36 The Norwegian Volksgeist had emerged early, Keyser explained, and had first been articulated in popular culture. ‘Already, as a people [et Folk] takes its first steps on the path of culture’, he wrote in the opening of a treatise on the Norwegians’ erudition and literary production in the Middle Ages, ‘it feels the need to give the sentiments, which have captured all of its members, and the things they have experienced in their national life [sit Folkeliv], certain consistence and durability, encompassing the national family of the past and carrying it on as a heritage by

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their descendants.’37 Before the introduction of writing, popular ‘emotions’ or ‘memories’ were expressed and preserved in oral poetry and legends, which were transmitted from one generation to another, Keyser maintained, and this cultural activity had already reached a high level of complexity when the art of writing finally reached Norway. Therefore, Norwegian literature took on a ‘national character’ as soon as it was transformed from its oral to written form, expressing the ideas and feelings of the Norwegian nation. Until this time, the oral poetry had been the common property of a nameless multitude – the product of the people – and when it was written down by individual scribes, they absorbed the existing Volksgeist of the national culture and expressed it in a written form. In this sense, the first Norwegian scribes were not ‘authors’ in the modern meaning of the word, because they only wrote down what the people had already composed. As a ‘living word’, these cultural products had ‘not only attained a clear inner character, but also fully developed outer form. Generally, the scribe used only the pen; the thoughts and words belonged to tradition.’38 Behind his insistence on the oral roots of the Norwegian literature one can discern a fact which Keyser could not easily bypass. In the mid-nineteenth century, the major part of the alleged Norwegian medieval literature, in addition to much of what was known about Norwegian medieval history, had been written by people born in Iceland, and it had been preserved in Icelandic rather than Norwegian manuscripts. For Keyser, this was not of great consequence however, as he regarded medieval Iceland simply as a minor branch of the Norwegian national tree. ‘In spite of many centuries of political independence’, he wrote, ‘Iceland’s inhabitants never ceased to look upon themselves as Norwegians.’ Members of the Icelandic elite were, he pointed out, in constant communication with the mother country, maintaining strong personal contacts with their Norwegian colleagues and seeking fame at the Norwegian royal court. Moreover, in this relationship between the centre and the periphery, Iceland had to be at the receiving end, because Icelandic scalds acquired their reputation by working in Norway and learned their trade there. ‘One cannot speak of independent scientific activity, in which their nationality as Icelanders asserted its influence’, Keyser wrote about the Icelandic men of letters, because they only copied what they had learned in the more advanced Norway.39 The Norwegian kings’ sagas were, admittedly, written down in Iceland by Icelanders, but they had really been composed by Norwegians, and the Icelandic ‘saga men’ very ‘rarely changed the form, the language or the tone of the sagas they had learned in Norway’.40 As one might expect, Keyser’s attempts to reduce medieval Iceland to nothing more than an insignificant Norwegian annex were not received with great enthusiasm by his Icelandic colleagues.41 ‘A Disappointed Nation’ was the title of a chapter in one of Sigurður Nordal’s unpublished manuscripts, which was

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to be the second volume of his treatise on Icelandic medieval cultural history, Íslenzk menning [Icelandic Culture].42 The phrase refers to the Norwegians, who – according to Nordal – envied the Icelanders their literary glories in the past.43 The question he asks himself is why ‘Icelanders rather than Norwegians wrote the histories of Norwegian kings, even if the age of writing started at the same time in Norway as it did in Iceland, if not earlier’.44 Nordal’s answer to the question is not of great importance here, but his basic premise for refuting Keyser’s nationalistic reading of medieval history was a key contribution to the nationalist reading of Nordic medieval culture. In Nordal’s view, the Icelanders and the Norwegians were two separate nations as early as the tenth century;45 there were certainly strong ties between the two sister nations through much of the Middle Ages, he admitted, but they were clearly two distinct political and cultural communities all the same. ‘The settlers became Icelanders’, he wrote in Icelandic Culture, ‘as soon as they took up their abode in Iceland and knew its name.’ It was only, however, in 930, with the foundation of the Alþingi – the assembly which met at Þingvellir every year – that they turned into a separate Icelandic nation. ‘The Alþingi helped awaken a national consciousness and promote and preserve original and homogeneous national culture.’ It was surprising, he stated, how unified Icelandic culture was so early in the history of the nation, but this could be explained by the strong ties which were formed at the annual assemblies at Þingvellir. ‘Out of this unifying tendency evolved the classical aspect of the old Icelandic civilization, which reminds one of the ancient civilization of Greece: the Olympic Games may be said to correspond to the Alþingi. Both these great gatherings were national festivals as well as national schools.’46 To prove the Icelandic origins of the medieval literature, Sigurður Nordal developed the so-called ‘book-prose theory’ to its logical conclusion. This literary theory, which had originally been suggested by the nineteenth-century German legal historian Konrad Maurer and later elaborated by the first rector of the University of Iceland, the literary historian Björn M. Ólsen,47 was originally launched as a response to the ‘free-prose theory’ promoted by Rudolf Keyser and a number of scholars who followed in his footsteps. The ‘free-prosists’ assumed that the literature transcribed in the Icelandic medieval manuscripts was all based on oral sources, and thus they downplayed the role of the transcribers in its genesis. What united them, explains the literary historian Theodore M. Andersson, was the idea that the ‘relationship of the saga writer to his material was that of an editor rather than a creator’.48 In this way, they shifted the creative achievement from the moment when the story was actually transcribed for the first time to a long process of oral transmission. Seen in this manner, the ‘cultural ownership’ of the stories was unclear – in its most extreme form, the free-prose theory was used to support Norwegian claims to the entire Old Norse cultural heritage, and even in its less partisan

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guises it undermined the Icelandic origins of the literature. The Icelandic family sagas were unique cultural achievements, argued for example the prominent Norwegian folklorist Knut Liestøl in 1929, ‘because in Iceland oral culture reached a pinnacle which it reached nowhere else’.49 The underlying theme in his analysis of the origins of the family sagas was, however, that many of the stories and the saga tradition itself had travelled to Iceland from Norway, and thus it was – partially at least – an integral part of Norwegian national culture. To prove this point, Liestøl pointed out that the regions in Norway where the Icelandic settlers came from were known for their wealth of poetry and stories, a tradition which they had allegedly carried with them to the new homeland.50 The ‘nationality’ of the medieval culture was, therefore, ambiguous, and Norwegian historians continued to count the Icelandic sagas as part of their literary history.51 The Icelandic ‘book-prosists’ looked very differently at the saga heritage. In their view the sagas were primarily works of art, written or compiled in Iceland by individual authors. Some of this literature was, admittedly, based on oral sources, but the sagas were composed though the collection of diverse pieces, which were altered and arranged to fit the narrative of a unified literary work by individual artists – or the persons who recorded the stories for the first time. Some of the sagas, they thought, were even pure fiction, without any foundation in oral tradition. This was the case with Hrafnkels Saga Freysgoða, argued Sigurður Nordal in a classic study of one of the well-known medieval Icelandic family sagas; it was ‘the work of a single author whose purpose was not to narrate a true story but to compose a work of fiction; a man who, endowed with a powerful imagination, literary virtuosity, and a knowledge of men, was sustained by one of the most powerful literary movements in recorded history’.52 Nordal consoled those who believed in the absolute historical veracity of the sagas by pointing out that Hrafnkell, the protagonist of the saga in question, was no less ‘real’ for the fact that he had never existed, comparing him to another famous fictional character, Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Moreover, by looking at the sagas as fiction rather than as historical accounts, the literature played an even greater role ‘for the honour of our nation’ than it had before. In the period of a brutal world war, it seemed more appropriate to raise a brilliant author to the status of a national hero than the ‘fictitious killers’ described in the sagas.53 Thus Nordal felt no loss in reading the sagas as pure fiction, placing their creators in the company of Shakespeare rather than of historians such as Thucydides or Hume. The main objective of Sigurður Nordal and his Icelandic colleagues in this effort was to prove that the sagas and the other literary works preserved in the Icelandic manuscripts were, in fact, an Icelandic and only an Icelandic national heritage. The literature emerged in close interaction between individual authors and their audience, they maintained, and therefore these works emerged like

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cooperative projects, where the audience (the Icelandic nation) and the few outstanding Icelandic authors who had composed or compiled them worked together to create literary masterpieces.54 Icelandic culture had certainly developed from Nordic roots, and the Icelandic literati had worked with common Germanic and Scandinavian themes, but in their preserved form their literary works were shaped by Icelandic tastes and reflected Icelandic conditions – therefore they exemplified the Icelandic literary genius. For this reason the literature and the ‘vehicles’ which preserved them – the medieval manuscripts – belonged to no other nation than the Icelanders, and the only logical place for keeping them was the new centre for Nordic medieval studies, the University of Iceland.

4 Nationalization of medieval culture: connecting the past and the present The question of the ‘national ownership’ of medieval literature centred not only on origins but also on how the literature had been utilized through the centuries. This was in accordance with theories of cultural nationalism, as a ‘real’ national culture should not only be original, but it had to be formed through a continuous development from its beginning to the present. Attitudes of this sort were both latent and expressed explicitly in the disputes over the manuscripts, as Danish and Icelandic academics and politicians debated both how to place the manuscripts in the respective national histories of the two countries and how to link the medieval literature with modern national cultures. For the Danish academics and curators who sought to hold on to the manuscript collections placed in their care it was simply absurd to heed the Icelandic demands. In their view, significant collections of cultural artefacts, such as the Arnamagnæan Collection in Copenhagen, were coherent units which must be kept intact, because in time they become, irrespective of the origins of their individual parts, a ‘cultural heritage’ in themselves.55 This was the basic premise for the opinions of the directors of the Danish National Archives and the Royal Library mentioned before, as they were convinced that Denmark had strong claims to keep the manuscripts, in spite of their Icelandic origins. Through their meticulous scientific work since the seventeenth century and the publications and translations of the manuscripts into modern languages, members of Danish academia had set their mark on the medieval heritage, and thus transformed it into something it had not been before.56 According to this interpretation, the manuscripts were scientific objects rather than ‘living’ cultural artefacts, and therefore they belonged to the scientific community rather than to any particular nation. It is a common ‘misunderstanding to believe’, a group of Danish scholars contended, ‘that one who knows Icelandic can, without any preparation, read the Icelandic manuscripts’. The handwriting on the

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vellums was so archaic that a person needed specialized knowledge to read them,57 the scholars maintained, and this expertise could only be acquired through years of training. The scientific editions produced by the staff of the Arnamagnæan Collection had given academics all around the world access to the manuscripts and the culture they contained; this gave Denmark a ‘moral right to keep the Icelandic manuscripts’, the directors of the Danish Royal Library and the National Archives argued, and thus, in a rather subtle twist, the alleged scientific objects had been reconverted into Danish national culture.58 Although the Danish academics often accused – quite correctly – their Icelandic colleagues and politicians of being overly sentimental, if not rabid nationalists, it was difficult for themselves to escape the nationalist logic and attitudes that pervaded the debates. The manuscripts and the stories they contained had played a crucial role for the construction of Danish national identity, some of them contended, and for this reason they had to be regarded as a Danish national treasure. The nineteenth-century ‘intellectual fathers’ of the modern Danish national culture, including the politician and preacher N. F. S. Grundtvig and the romantic poet Adam Oehlenschläger, exploited the sagas and the mythical poetry profusely in their works, Professor Mogens Brøndsted wrote in a catalogue for an exhibition of Icelandic manuscripts in 1965. Thus they introduced this literature into Danish artistic and national discourses. This tradition continued with twentieth-century writers, including the Nobel laureate Johannes V. Jensen, who used material and motives from the Eddic poetry, kings’ sagas and the family sagas in some of his works.59 According to Kåre Grønbech, Danish youth were raised on stories of Roar and Helge, Rolf Krake, Volund the Smith, Thor and Loke, Ragnarok, Njal and Gunnar at Hlidarendi, Sigurd Fáfnisbani, Olaf Tryggvason and Saint Olaf. All of these names are dear to us from early childhood and our first years at school, and they remind us of a long chain of excellent stories. These stories have edged into our spiritual heritage in the same manner as [Bernhard Severin] Ingemann’s Morning and Evening Songs, and Grundvig’s Christmas hymns … This medley of names, taken from a variety of literary genres preserved in the Icelandic medieval manuscripts, had become, Grønbech concluded, a part ‘of the wealth of memories, which unites all Danes, and … forms the basis for [their] identity’.60 What is interesting in these attempts to place the manuscripts into modern Danish national culture, and thus to justify their continued preservation in Denmark, was the fact that this contradicted the traditional understanding of Icelandic culture in Denmark and its place in the development of Danish and

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Nordic cultural life. In the past, many Danish politicians and cultural figures had expressed their gratitude to the dependency in the north for its role in ‘preserving the remnants of the past, from which we all must obtain our future hope’, to quote the well-known nineteenth-century politician Orla Lehmann.61 Iceland was the place where Nordic history had been written and remembered; the country was, in Adam Oehlenschläger’s poetic language, ‘An holy island! Memory’s most magnificent temple!’62 This was an image which Icelandic politicians, academics and cultural figures had promoted for decades – if not for centuries – and attempted to use to their advantage. Iceland was not only a place of magnificent literary production in the past, they argued, but also a place of memory where the cultural heritage was constantly renewed and exploited. ‘Foreign scholars who study our ancient literature’, wrote Sigurður Nordal in 1924, ‘generally know very little about our cultural life during the last five centuries. They seem to believe that Icelandic literature died around the year 1400.’ In spite of foreign oppression and severe natural conditions, Nordal pointed out, the nation did not surrender, but sustained its literary creativity through a healthy combination of cultural conservatism and innovation. ‘It is a sign of the vigour of our culture that the Icelandic nation has been able to learn from and be inspired by other nations without losing its nature …’ In order to accept foreign influences, it was of utmost importance, Nordal warned, for the nation to understand its literary history and to preserve its strong ties with the medieval literature. ‘Our connection with the literature of the tenth and fourteenth centuries becomes much closer if we realize’, he argued, ‘that the thread uniting us and the past is unbroken – there has never been any rupture in the development.’63 What Nordal wanted to convey with these words was the conviction that medieval literature and history were still a living reality in Iceland, and therefore the manuscripts were much more than relics from the past or simply objects for philological research. This argument was a common theme in the Icelandic line of reasoning in the manuscript debates, because it related directly to the cultural ‘ownership’ in question. ‘Professors and philologists have buried the later centuries’ literature under their endless discussions on the literature of the Golden Age’, wrote the Lutheran pastor Sigurður Einarsson in 1957. ‘But at the same time, the Icelandic nation has carried this literary tradition forward without ever breaking with the past.’64 This continuous cultural consumption was even evident from the visible marks on the vellums themselves, as they were generally worn and soiled; ‘even the damage proves that they have not lain unused in coffers’, wrote the Icelandic professor at the University of Copenhagen and director of the Danish Arnamagnæan Collection, Jón Helgason, ‘only occasionally to be shown to prestigious guests, but were enjoyed by many generations in the past’.65 The manuscripts were, therefore, the products of the Icelandic nation, they had been read by the nation through

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the centuries, and the literature they contained had influenced the national culture since its conception. The conclusion of the manuscript debates was remarkably undramatic, in both Iceland and Denmark, especially considering the emotionally charged language often used on both sides. One reason for the general acceptance of the solution was the fact that the two parties interpreted it in a very different manner. The Danish government offered a part of the Icelandic manuscripts as a gift, which they deemed necessary to placate their former subordinates, while the Icelanders received the manuscripts as their rightful property – to them, the manuscripts had ‘returned home’ after centuries of exile in Copenhagen. Thus, to the chagrin of its Danish members, the academic committee formed to decide how to divide the manuscripts was called ‘skilanefnd’ in Icelandic – which translates literally as the ‘restoration committee’ – while its Danish title was ‘deludvalg’, or ‘partition committee’.66 Moreover, the division of the manuscripts into two groups, one remaining in Copenhagen while the other was transferred to Iceland, was generally accepted simply because in the end it worked quite well. At the present, two institutes, both named after the manuscript collector Árni Magnússon – the Arnamagnæan Institute in Copenhagen and the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies in Reykjavík – preserve the contested manuscripts; they work closely together and ‘function without doubt’, according to the former director of the institute in Copenhagen, ‘as the most important cultural link between the two countries’.67 Thus the ‘cultural heritage’ continues to be, for all practical purposes, at the same time divided and united.

5 Medieval manuscripts and modern national culture The people Sabine Baring-Gould encountered on his travels in Iceland bore, in his opinion, limited resemblance to the heroes of the medieval literature – at least as he had imagined them after reading the sagas and recounting them to his students. ‘In character, the people are phlegmatic,’ he wrote about the nineteenth-century Icelanders, ‘conservative to a fault, and desperately indolent.’ Comparing Iceland to the Norse settlement on Greenland, his conclusion was that Iceland had ‘withered under the same paralysing influence, and the whole character of the people has been deteriorated by the grinding want of necessaries of life, so that there is now none of the energy and enterprise among them which were the distinguishing features of the early population’.68 Baring-Gould’s unflattering assessment was, in fact, in line with the comments of many of his Danish and Icelandic contemporaries, who criticized the Icelandic peasants for their torpor and superstitious beliefs.69 This glaring discrepancy between images of medieval heroes on the one hand and of the contemporary poor and indolent peasants on the other was, without doubt, one of the main incentives for using the Middle Ages as a

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central theme in national identity formation in Iceland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. ‘Our forefathers had the fortune of creating classical literature’, argued Professor Ólafur Lárusson in a speech he gave to welcome the Norwegian crown prince on his visit to the University of Iceland in 1947. ‘These literary works are now seven to eight centuries old, but they still retain their value – and then not only their artistic or scientific value, like most cultural achievements of the past, but also their organic value …’ This attribute had secured for Icelandic medieval literature its place in the cultural history of the world, Lárusson maintained; this literature ‘has commonly been regarded as one of the three bright lights in the history of human intellectual life. It has been placed alongside the Bible and the classical literature of Greece and Rome.’ From this cultural resource, the Icelandic nation had sought its spiritual sustenance through the ages, he continued, and in it the nation found the key for its future: The land of the sagas has been our promised land, a beautiful and glorious land, to which we have looked for inspiration in times of need, and in which we have sought strength, courage, and hope. The sagas showed how Iceland was a long time ago, and we have believed that what the country once was, it could become again.70 Lárusson’s words are a testimony to the great respect the Icelanders had for Icelandic medieval literature. By placing the sagas alongside some of the greatest cultural achievements in the world, they defined Iceland as one of the most significant sources for modern culture. Lárusson’s words are also symbolic of how Icelandic intellectuals interpreted the medieval heritage and history. To them the protagonists of the sagas were not the real heroes of the Middle Ages, but rather the authors or transcribers of medieval literature. Thus, Icelandic nationalists did not look back for social paradigms or for military victories to celebrate, but rather in search for the alleged ‘cultural essence’ of the Icelandic nation and to prove that the modern nation had preserved its core characteristics through centuries of tribulation. This line of reasoning was based on two basic premises: first, the medieval culture was Icelandic in its nature, expressing the creative genius of the nation; and, second, the past and present were linked through a continuous development and uninterrupted use of the cultural heritage. Using the past in this way to legitimate a modern political order proved to be contentious however, because the cultural heritage preserved in the Icelandic medieval manuscripts was important not only for the construction of Icelandic national identity, but also for the identity formation of the other Nordic nations, and then for the Norwegians in particular. In part, this reflects the fact that the division of the Nordic area into five – or more – distinct

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national territories and cultures is fairly recent. Thus when these divisions are transferred back in time, the past is forced into modern categories which had a very different meaning in the Middle Ages. For the authors or the compilers of the sagas and the Eddic poetry, the ‘nationality’ of their culture was not a significant issue, but to later times this was of crucial importance. On the Icelandic side, this struggle for retrieving the ‘cultural heritage’ was fought on two fronts, because Icelandic politicians and academics wanted not only to prove that the literature itself was essentially Icelandic – and therefore an expression of the ‘Icelandic essence’ – but also that the physical traces of Icelandic medieval culture, the manuscripts containing the literature, were an Icelandic national heritage, and thus belonged to the Icelandic nation only. In the academic community, all seems to be quiet now on both fronts, as the manuscript debates ended with the final division of the Arnamagnæan Collection and problems concerning the ‘ownership’ of the medieval literature have been laid to rest. ‘The question if [the Eddic poetry] is originally Norwegian or Icelandic’, writes the former director of the Árni Magnússon Institute in Reykjavík, Vésteinn Ólason, ‘is absurd’,71 and the Norwegian historian Sverre Bagge concurs, pointing out that ‘in dealing with medieval history of ideas, the question of national heritage is irrelevant’.72 The national frameworks are difficult to escape, however, as Ólason’s remarks appear in a survey work on the history of Icelandic literature, while Bagge’s dismissal of national heritage is expressed in a survey of Norwegian history of ideas – and both use the same literary works for the analysis of the historical traditions of their respective nations. This is, in many ways, symbolic of the role national identities play in modern society. Increasingly, nationality is regarded as constructed, if not arbitrary, in the academic literature, but it still functions as one of the most important categories of social and cultural classification in the world. This is hardly going to change any time soon, and therefore it is important to understand the nationalist debates of the past, even if they sometimes sound rather outdated to modern ears.

Notes 1. Sabine Baring-Gould, Iceland: Its Scenes and Sagas ([1863] 2nd edn, Oxford, 2007), p. xli. 2. See Martin Graebe, ‘Foreword’ in Baring-Gould, Iceland, pp. xiv–xl, and Andrew Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians. Inventing the Old North in 19th-Century Britain (Woodbridge, 2000), 295–302. 3. Baring-Gould, Iceland, pp. xli–xlii; see George W. Dasent, The Story of Burnt Njal; or, Life in Iceland at the End of the Tenth Century. From the Icelandic of the Njals saga (2 vols, Edinburgh, 1861), i.6. 4. See Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians; Gary Aho, ‘“Með Ísland á heilanum”: Íslandsbækur breskra ferðalanga 1772 til 1897,’ Skírnir, 167, 1 (1993), 205–58; and Sumarliði R. Ísleifsson, Ísland framandi land (Reykjavík, 1996), 151–207.

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5. See Mats Malm, ‘The Nordic Demand for Medieval Icelandic Manuscripts’, Óskar Bjarnason, ‘The “Germanic” Heritage in Icelandic Books’, and Andrew Wawn, ‘The Idea of the Old North in Britain and the United States’, all in Gísli Sigurðsson and Vésteinn Ólason (eds), The Manuscripts of Iceland (Reykjavík, 2004); Julia Zernack, Geschichten aus Thule. Íslendingasögur in Übersetzungen deutscher Germanisten (Berlin, 1994); Anna Wallette, Sagans svenskar. Synen på vikingatiden och de isländska sagorna under 300 år (Malmö, 2004). 6. Jón K. Helgason, The Rewriting of Njáls Saga: Translation, Politics and Icelandic Sagas (Clevedon, 1999), 28–41. 7. Jón Jónsson Aðils, Íslenzkt þjóðerni. Alþýðufyrirlestrar (Reykjavík, 1903), 238. Comparing the sagas to the literature of classical Greece was quite common; see for example Francis Bull’s speech at the University of Iceland in 1947, printed in Árbók Háskóla Íslands. Háskólaárið 1946–7 (Reykjavík, 1949), 94–8. 8. See for example, Guðmundur Hálfdanarson, ‘Iceland: a Peaceful Secession’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 25, 1 (2000), 87–100, and ‘Severing the Ties – Iceland’s Journey from a Union with Denmark to a Nation-State’, ibid., 31, 3–4 (2006), 237–54. 9. Alexander Jóhannesson, ‘17. júní’, in Lýðveldishátíðin 1944: Þjódhátid¯arnefnd samdi ad¯ tilhlutan Alþingis og rikisstjórnar (Reykjavík, 1945), 165. 10. Sigrún Davíðsdóttir, Håndskriftsagens Saga – i politisk belysning (Odense, 1999), 48; see also Betænkning vedrørende de i Danmark beroende islandske håndskrifter og museumsgestande (Copenhagen, 1951), 79–80 and Poul Møller, De islandske håndskrifter i dokumentarisk belysning (Copenhagen, 1965), 80–7. 11. See Már Jónsson, Árni Magnússon. Ævisaga (Reykjavík, 1998), and Sigurgeir Steingrímsson, ‘Árni Magnússon’, in Sigurðsson and Ólason (eds), The Manuscripts of Iceland, 85–99. 12. ‘Den Arna-Magnæanske Stiftelse’, in Samling af de for Universitetets Legater gjældende Bestemmelser (Copenhagen, 1890), 132–44 (the quotes are from art. 4 and 7 of the testament, at 134–5). 13. Árbók Háskóla Íslands. Háskólaárið 1939–40 (Reykjavík, 1940), 10. 14. Jakob Jónsson, ‘Salómonsdómur í handritamálinu’, Alþýðublaðið, 11 March 1954. 15. Kristinn E. Andrésson, ‘Íslenzk þjóðernismál’, Tímarit Máls og menningar, 22, 5 (1961), 348. 16. Gylfi Þ. Gíslason, Handritamálið (Reykjavík, 1961). 17. Sigurður Nordal, ‘Hvar eru íslenzku handritin bezt komin?’, in his Ritverk. Samhengi og samtíð, vol. 3 ([1946] Reykjavík, 1996), 368. 18. See Ólafur Lárusson, ‘Yfirlit yfir kröfur Íslendinga um skil á handritum og skjölum úr dönskum söfnum fram til þessa’. National Archives of Iceland. Documents of the Ministry of Education. 1989. B/417. Handritamálið 1946–55, pp. 3–12. 19. Alþingistíðindi 1938, vol. D (Reykjavík, 1938), cols 29–30; see also vol. A, pp. 530–1. 20. Alþingistíðindi 1907, vol. A (Reykjavík, 1907), p. 1149. 21. Alþingistíðindi 1924, vol. A (Reykjavík, 1924), p. 634. 22. See Bætenkning, 63–9, and Sigfús H. Andrésson, Þjóðskjalasafn Íslands. Ágrip af sögu þess og yfirlit um heimildasöfn þar (Reykjavík, 1979), 26–31. 23. Alþingistíðindi 1930, vol. A (Reykjavík, 1930), p. 1430. 24. Alþingistíðindi 1938, vol. D (Reykjavík, 1938), cols 28–9. 25. See Betænkning, 106–10. 26. This was a common argument for the return of the manuscripts: see, for example, Louis Hammerich, ‘Fremtiden for de islandske Haandskrifter i dansk Eje’, Politiken, 24 July 1946.

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27. Betænkning, 102–5; see also Icelandic National Library, Manuscript Section (INL), Lbs. Sigurður Nordal’s Correspondence. Jón Helgason to Sigurður Nordal, 27 Jan. 1951. 28. Vilhelm Grønbech, ‘Danmark afskriver’, Frie ord, 3 (1948), 1–3. 29. Davíðsdóttir, Håndskriftsagens Saga, passim; P. Møller, De islandske håndskrifter, 88–120; and J. Greenfield, The Return of Cultural Treasures (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1996), 12–41. See also Jónas Kristjánsson, Heimkoma handritanna (Reykjavík, 1981), 49–55. 30. Davíðsdóttir, Håndskriftsagens Saga, 265–365. 31. Kaare Grønbech, ‘I dag håndskrifterne – hvad bliver det næste?’, repr. in Berlinske Aftenavis, 4 May 1966; see also Niels Alkjær, ‘Den upopulære håndskriftsag’, Berlinske Aftenavis, 24 Jan. 1966. 32. See for example Fakta om de islandske håndskrifter (Copenhagen, 1964), 4–5, and Ole Widding. ‘Hvorfor Flatøbogen og Den ældre Edda?’ Berlinske Aftenavis, 8 June 1961. 33. See for example Jöran Mjöberg, Drömmen om sagatiden. Vol. I: Återblick på den nordiska romantiken från 1700-talets mitt till nygöticismen omkr. 1865 (Stockholm, 1967). 34. Theodore M. Andersson, The Problem of Icelandic Saga Origins. A Historical Survey (New Haven, 1964), 22–40. 35. Øystein Sørensen, Kampen om Norges sjel. Norsk idéhistorie, vol. 3 (Oslo, 2001), 171–83, and Tore Pryser, Norsk historie, 1814–1860. Frå standesamfunn mot klassesamfunn (Oslo, 1999), 139. 36. See Per S. Andersen, Rudolf Keyser. Embetsmann og historiker (Oslo, 1961), 186–7. 37. Rudolf Keyser, Normændenes Videnskabelighed og Literatur. Efterladte Skrifter, vol. 1 (Christiania, 1866), 3. 38. Ibid., 6–7, 15. 39. Ibid., 21–3. 40. Ibid., 413. 41. For a recent Icelandic response to Keyser’s arguments, see Jónas Kristjánsson, ‘Er Egilssaga “Norse”’, Skáldskaparmál, 3 (1994), 216–31. 42. ‘Fragmenta ultima. Drög að Íslenzkri menningu II’, in Sigurður Nordal, Ritverk. Fornar menntir, vol. II: Kraftaverkið (Kópavogur, 1993), 13–169; the chapter ‘Vonsvikin þjóð’ is at 149–59. 43. For a similar opinion on this issue, see National Library of Iceland, Manuscript Section. Lbs. 3481, 4to: a letter from Guðmundur Björnsson to Björn M. Ólsen, 21 Dec. 1915. 44. Nordal, ‘Fragmenta ultima’, 18. 45. This was the general view among Icelandic scholars; see Bogi Th. Melsteð, ‘Töldu Íslendingar sig á dögum þjóðveldisins vera Norðmenn?’ in Afmælisrit til dr.phil. Kr. Kålunds, bókavarðar við safn Árna Magnússonar, 19. ágúst 1914 (Copenhagen, 1914), 16–33. 46. Sigurður Nordal, Icelandic Culture, trans. V.T. Bjarnar (Ithaca, NY, 1990), 102. 47. See Andersson, Problem of Icelandic Saga Origins, 65–81, and Jesse L. Byock, ‘Modern Nationalism and the Medieval Saga’, in Andrew Wawn, Northern Antiquity. The Post-Medieval Reception of Edda and Saga (Enfield Lock, 1994), 163–87; cf. Nordal, ‘Fragmenta ultima’, 35–40, 100–19. 48. Andersson, Problem of Icelandic Saga Origins, 65. 49. Knut Liestøl, Upphavet til den islandske ættesaga (Oslo, 1929), 236. 50. Ibid., 27–8; see also Axel Olrik, Nordisk Aandsliv i Vikingetid og tidlig Middelalder (Copenhagen, 1927), 111–12.

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51. See, for example, Fredrik Paasche, Norsk litteratur historie. Vol. I: Norges og Islands litteratur indtil utgangen av middelalderen (Oslo, 1924). 52. Sigurður Nordal, Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða: a Study, trans. R. George Thomas ([1940] Cardiff, 1958), 57. 53. Ibid., 64–7; on Sigurður Nordal and the ‘Icelandic school’, see also Jón K. Helgason, Hetjan og höfundurinn, brot úr menningarsögu (Reykjavík, 1998), 117–31. 54. Nordal, ‘Fragmenta ultima’, 166, and ‘Auður og Ekla í fornmenntum Íslendinga’, in his Ritverk. Fornar menntir, ii.173–94. 55. This is a common reaction to demands for the return of cultural artefacts to the place of origin; see Monika Minnhagen-Alvsten, ‘Reflexioner kring återförnande av kulturarv till dess ursprungplass’, Nordisk museologi, 2 (2002), 49–57. See also Møller, De islandske håndskrifter, 121–7; Palle Lauring, Pigen der trådte på brødet: Danmark og de islandske håndskrifter (Copenhagen, 1965); and Johannes Brøndum-Nielsen, ‘Hvor staar vi nu i haandskriftsagen?’, Berlinske Aftenavis, 28 July 1961. 56. Betænkning, 102–5; see also Paul Diderichsen, ‘De islandske håndskrifters betydning for dansk videnskab – dansk videnskabs betydning for de islandske håndskrifter’, in Edda og saga. Nationalmuseet 17. januar–8. februar 1953 (Copenhagen, 1953), 5–11. 57. Fakta om de islandske håndskrifter, 4–9. 58. Betænkning, 103; see also Lis Jacobsen, ‘Islandske Krav paa dansk Privateje og dansk Nationalejendom’, Berlinske Tidende, 24 Mar. 1946. 59. See Mogens Brøndsted, ‘Den norrøne tradition i dansk digtning’, in Islandske håndskrifter og dansk kultur (Copenhagen, 1965), 29–46; see also Flemming LundgreenNielsen, ‘Grundtvig og danskhed’, in Ole Feldbæk (ed.), Dansk identitetshistorie, vol. 3: Folkets Danmark, 1848–1940 (Copenhagen, 1992), 9–187. 60. Kaare Grønbech in Edda og saga, 1. 61. Orla Lehmann (ed.), Den islandske Forfatningssag i Landsthinget 1868–9 (Copenhagen, 1869), 52, cf. 39. 62. Adam Oehlenschläger, ‘Island’, Poetiske skrifter, vol. 1 (Copenhagen, 1805), 233–6. 63. Sigurður Nordal, ‘Samhengið í íslenzkum bókmenntum’, in his Ritverk. Samhengi og samtíð, vol. I ([1924] Reykjavík, 1996), 15–38. 64. Stefán Einarsson, ‘Sagatraditionen i islandsk folkelig kultur’, in Island—Danmark og håndskriftsagen (Kolding, 1957), 34. 65. Jón Helgason, Handritaspjall (Reykjavík, 1958), 27. 66. Davíðsdóttir, Håndskriftsagens Saga, 368. 67. Peter Springborg, ‘Sigrún Davíðsdóttir: Håndskriftsagens Saga’, Fortid og nutid, 1 (2001), 74. 68. Baring-Gould, Iceland, pp. lxvi, lxxvi. 69. See, for example, Lehmann, Den islandske Forfatningssag, 18–19, 52; Carl E. Bardenfleth, Livserindringer efterladte af Geheimeconferentsraad C.E. Bardenfleth, ed. I. Bardenfleth (Copenhagen, 1890), 31–6; and Tómas Sæmundsson, ‘Bókmentirnar íslendsku’, Fjölnir 5 (1839), 73–145. 70. Árbók Háskóla Íslands. Háskólaárið 1946–7, 92. 71. Vésteinn Ólason, ‘Eddukvæði’, in Guðrún Nordal et al. (eds), Íslensk bókmenntasaga, vol. I (Reykjavík, 1992), 77. 72. Sverre Bagge, Da boken kom til Norge. Norsk idéhistorie, vol. 1 (Oslo, 2001), 81.

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Part II Benelux

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6 A Serious Case of Amnesia: the Dutch and their Middle Ages Peter Raedts

1 When in 1872 the Dutch government finally decided to build a national museum in the capital, Amsterdam, it chose among the many candidates for the job the Roman Catholic architect Pierre Cuypers to make a plan. If Cuypers had presented a neoclassicist design with a noble Corinthian facade and an entrance hall, lined with statues of Dutch heroes dressed up as Greek philosophers or Roman senators, the arbiters of taste would probably have moaned a little that it was a worn-out concept, but no one would have raised any serious objection. But what Cuypers came up with was a neo-Gothic extravaganza of enormous proportions, to celebrate the glorious past of the fatherland. From the very beginning his plans elicited massive controversy, best summed up in the words of King William III, who, when he saw the plans, pronounced his firm intention, expressing himself in the language of monarchs rather than that of the people: ‘Je ne mettrai jamais le pied dans ce monastère.’ For once the king represented the true feelings of a large part of his subjects, to whom the construction of the Rijksmuseum was yet another step in the papist plot to suppress freedom and true religion in the Netherlands.1 This incident shows how ambivalent the reputation of the medieval past was in the Netherlands even in the second half of the nineteenth century, after the great movement of Romanticism, in which, for the first time, the Middle Ages had been celebrated all over Europe as the founding era of European civilization in general and of the modern nation states in particular. The Dutch had not joined in that celebration: there had been no romantic movement in the Netherlands, and Dutch nationalists cherished the memory of the seventeenth century, the era of Rembrandt, when Amsterdam was the world’s first port, and the Dutch soundly beat the English in several wars, over that of the Middle Ages, which was the age of Flanders rather than that of Holland. And Flanders was a region best forgotten after the humiliating separation between Belgium and the Netherlands in 1830. 75

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But it was not just that in the Middle Ages the economic and political centre of the Netherlands was in the south rather than in the north. The simple truth was that in the Middle Ages there was no such thing as a Dutch state or a king of the Netherlands; there was no easy nucleus around which a later national consciousness could cluster. What later became the Dutch state was in the Middle Ages nothing more than a geographical area: a number of tiny principalities in the swampy delta of the Rhine and the Meuse, a remote corner of the Holy Roman Empire. A first effort to reunite these various, unconnected territories was made by the dukes of Burgundy in the fifteenth century, but it was not until the sixteenth century that a first Dutch state was born in the struggle against the king of Spain, the rightful heir to the dukes of Burgundy. That revolt was of the simple stuff that national myths are usually made of. In later historiography it could be and was represented both as a struggle for the restoration of traditional freedom against the Spanish tyrant (libertatis causa), and as a struggle for religious freedom against the pope in Rome (religionis causa). It was that heroic fight for freedom that was the beginning of the glorious Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century, of which the nineteenthcentury kingdom was the rightful heir. In this brilliantly simple narrative the Middle Ages were no more than the dark contrast against which the glorious rise of the nation could be painted in shining colours. The state archivist, Reinier Bakhuizen van den Brink, summed it all up when in 1841 he remarked that in other countries interest in ‘the age of chivalry’ – and he meant that ironically – might be understandable, but that one could wonder whether the Dutch nation in those days was so strong and developed that its later glory could be explained from such inauspicious and humble beginnings. And he recommended that nation-building should take its cue from the Golden Age of the seventeenth century when the Dutch became what they even now still wanted to be.2 Another reason why most Dutchmen wanted to forget about their medieval past was, of course, that in their eyes it was a Roman Catholic past, in fact the most glorious part of the Roman Catholic past. Claiming the medieval past, therefore, seemed to imply, in some way, heeding the claims of the Church of Rome. It was not just in the Netherlands, but in the whole of Europe that the alleged Roman character of the Middle Ages proved a stumbling block in accepting the whole of the medieval past as the nation’s past: in the first place in Protestant countries, but perhaps even more so in Catholic countries where the Church remained a powerful political presence claiming an allegiance that, in an age of nationalism, rightly seemed to belong to the nation, as we can see from the example of Jules Michelet, who in his struggle against the Church lost his chair at the prestigious Collège de France. Some Protestant nations managed quite well to claim the medieval as their own past despite its ‘Roman Catholic’ character. German nationalism

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constructed the long contest between papacy and Empire as an episode in the eternal fight between Romanic and Germanic Europe and pictured emperors such as Henry IV and Frederick I Barbarossa as Germanic proto-Protestants and victims of papal scheming and plotting. The amazing thing that happened in England was that the Established Church, although it was Protestant, managed to reclaim the medieval past as part of its inalienable inheritance. That was, of course, the work of the Oxford Movement, a religious revival unparalleled in the rest of Protestant Europe.

2 In Holland, however, such a way out proved impossible. In 1834 Dutch Protestants in the northern provinces rose in revolt against a government that was trying to turn the Reformed Church into a national church of an almost non-denominational character. The purpose of their revolt was a return to a stern Calvinist orthodoxy, not a state church but a confessing church, as had allegedly existed in the days of the Reformation. In the view of the neo-Calvinists a complete darkness had fallen all over Europe since the days of the first Church of the apostles, until such time as the reformers had preached the Word of God once again. In their eyes the Reformation constituted a complete and utter break with the medieval past: there could be no talk of continuity, no talk of proto-Protestantism, or of any form of Christian community between the days of the Apostles and the Reformation. Their spokesman was the stern Calvinist Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer (1801–76), who in 1841–6 wrote an introduction to Dutch history (Handboek der geschiedenis van het vaderland) that proved one of the most influential historical works in Holland in the nineteenth century and beyond. Even now it is still in print and widely read in the circles of orthodox Protestants.3 In Groen’s introduction the history of the Netherlands does not start with the first count of Holland in the tenth century, nor with the Act of Abjuration in 1581; it starts in 1517 when for the first time since the early Christian age true Christian doctrine was preached once again. It is Groen’s deep conviction that Holland as a nation owes its existence only to the struggle for the true faith; in his own words: ‘Her history commences when, through Christian Reform, the seeds of her existence were sown.’4 The Middle Ages were nothing else but a time of moral corruption, empty ritual and idolatry: ‘Everything was dedicated to God except the heart.’ The wickedness of the popes equalled that of pagan emperors.5 Groen had such an aversion to the Middle Ages that he could not bring himself to do research in the archives for that period. In the few pages of his Introduction that deal with the Middle Ages (50 of 900), he relies completely on eighteenth-century Dutch historians, such as Adriaan Kluit.6 And they are not much more than a series of sketches without much coherence.

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One such sketch is about the scandalous goings-on in the wealthy abbey of Rijnsburg, the burial place of the counts of Holland. Admission was limited to women of noble birth, the abbess had to be addresses as ‘Your Highness’, and life in the abbey was so luxurious that in 1450 Pope Nicholas V intervened, without any success. The only reason that the nuns had become so rich was the foolish trust that men could earn a place in heaven by donating to such vain institutions. The consequence was ‘that through false hope and trust the hope and trust in Christ was taken away’.7 Groen had to admit that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there had been a few efforts to return to the simplicity of the true gospels. He mentions the movement of the Modern Devotion and the names of Geert Grote, Thomas à Kempis and Erasmus, but he has no sympathy for them. He regards Erasmus as a coward who refused to make choices. He admits that Geert Grote and Thomas had always taught that faith was a matter of the heart and not of good works. Unfortunately they told it only to a small group of pupils, which was disastrous, because the consequence was that ‘the whitewashed tombs were whitewashed all over again’. It was the Reformation and the Reformation alone that turned the tide. And it was the Reformation that brought the Dutch nation into being. Since then ‘the reformed faith of the people has been the support of Church and Fatherland in every perilous time’.8 It is this kind of muscular language which makes it understandable that Protestant Dutchmen, unlike their English counterparts, have never been able to accept the Middle Ages as part of their Christian and national past. Sometimes buildings speak louder than books. Let me illustrate the difference between English and Dutch Protestantism through the interiors of their respective churches. Medieval English churches often display on their walls a list of all the incumbents that served the parish, from the times that historical record-keeping began, usually the twelfth or thirteenth centuries, till the present day. In their simplicity these lists are an impressive testimony to a sense of solidarity with the whole of the past that still prevails in large parts of England. Holland, too, has its medieval churches. In these churches lists of ministers are also displayed, but they all, without any exception, start in the year that the Reformation was introduced to that particular parish, somewhere in the 1570s or 1580s: it is as if the medieval clergy had never existed. The lists show a will to erase the medieval past. The inscription on the wooden beam that replaced the rood screen in the ‘Old Church’ in Amsterdam sums it all up: ‘The abuses introduced into God’s Church age by age, were suppressed here in the year fifteen seventy eight.’9 Behind the beam the chancel is empty, no altar, no choir stalls, nothing. The pulpit in the nave has been the centre of the church from 1578 till the present day. Although the number of rebels in the nineteenth century was really quite small, their influence on the whole of the Dutch Protestant nation was, and

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still is, out of all proportion to their number. Somehow, they managed to become the conscience of the whole of the Protestant nation, no doubt because they had extremely talented propagandists in men such as Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer, and later in the century the formidable Abraham Kuyper who forged the neo-Calvinists into a mighty weapon in Dutch politics. And one of the consequences was that in the formation of Dutch national consciousness it was sixteenth-century Protestantism and the sixteenth-century revolt against Spain that became the two pillars of Dutch nationalism, usually known in Holland as the ‘God–Holland–Orange’ myth.

3 This being said, I must nevertheless pay attention to a few nineteenth-century Dutchmen who made a serious effort to provide the Dutch with a medieval past. The first I want to discuss is the Amsterdam lawyer Jonas Daniël Meijer (1780–1834), who in 1808 became a member of the humanities section of the newly founded Royal Dutch Institute of Sciences, the predecessor of the later Royal Academy of Sciences. In many of his writings Meijer deplored the exclusive concentration of most Dutch intellectuals on the classics. Even a genius such as Grotius had hardly dared to make a statement without quoting some classical authority for it. The medieval period, although in many ways barbarous, as medieval people were not acquainted with classical literature, yet was important, because it witnessed the origin of all modern nations and their peculiar institutions and traditions. Peculiar to the Dutch had always been their incessant struggle for survival against the forces of the sea, a struggle that could only be won in a joint effort. Wetlands had to be reclaimed, dykes had to be built, and the polders could only be safe if their dykes were constantly supervised, and all this required cooperation. The Dutch, therefore, had, from the earliest days on, learnt to do things together, to build their own organizations and to choose their own administrators. Feudal oppression never stood a chance in the Netherlands. To oppose aristocratic dominance the Dutch founded communal organizations, which constituted the beginning of the towns. By the early sixteenth century these towns had become so strong and so used to cooperation that, together, they managed to expel the Spanish king and to establish a free republic of equal citizens.10 It was a valiant effort to find a past that could unite all Dutchmen from whatever religious hue. But freedomloving as the Dutch were, and conscious of their proud status as burghers, a past without any religion in it simply proved unacceptable to the Christian majority to which Meijer himself, incidentally, did not belong: he was a scion from a prominent rabbinical family. Somehow, Christianity had to be part of Dutch national consciousness. And that would prove to be very difficult, because at the beginning of the nineteenth century religion had the capacity

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of tearing the nation apart, with the orthodox Protestants on one side of the spectrum and the ultramontane Catholics on the other. It is a curious fact of modern Dutch historiography that the religious divisions in the Netherlands are not discussed before the later nineteenth century when they could no longer be denied, because by then there were explicitly Protestant and Catholic political parties. Modern Dutch historians of the nineteenth century like to give the impression that in the first half of that century the happy few who were allowed to vote liked to discuss political and national questions without much reference to religion. The story is that men of breeding thought that talking about church and religion was, somehow, in bad taste, best left to the lower classes, and that it was only later in the century that fanatics, both Catholics and Protestants, placed religion on the political agenda by stirring up the masses. But that story is wrong and can only be explained by the present, conscious or unconscious, wish to erase religion from the discourse of nation.11 In fact, a lot of attention was being paid to the position of Christianity and the Christian churches in the Dutch nation, even before the foundation of political parties explicitly based on Christian beliefs.12 Everyone realized that religion was very important to most Dutchmen, and that the existing (and growing) religious divisions could stand in the way of the development of a truly national consciousness. The question was how to reconcile loyalty to the church with loyalty to the nation. Influential as the orthodox Protestants were, there were other voices in the Reformed Church, more liberal, more influenced by the latest developments in German theology. To them the days of religious controversy were a thing of the past; they preached toleration, mutual understanding, and inclusiveness, instead of the orthodox Protestant exclusiveness. They thought that traditional forms of Christianity were contingent, that some Christians liked incense and rituals, others the undiluted Word of God, but that it did not really matter, that it was the spirit which counted. They were convinced that the traditional churches had lost their right to exist. What modern society needed was a truly national church that could accommodate all varieties of Christian faith, perhaps even Catholicism, of course without Rome.13 Such noises, of course, were music to the ears of a Dutch government that, certainly up to 1830, was in serious trouble over the demands of Catholics in the south. King William I even dreamt of an ‘Aréopage européen’, a sort of permanent council of the several national non-denominational churches, chaired by the pope.14 What His Holiness made of this idea is unknown, but in view of his fierce opposition to the Holy Alliance I think not much. It was in these circles of liberal Protestants that a new, more inclusive concept of Dutch history was developed that also encompassed the medieval past. In 1842 Petrus Hofstede de Groot (1802–86), professor at the University of

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Groningen and the most prominent liberal theologian of the day, published a lengthy article in which he embarked on a quest for a truly national Christianity, a Christianity that could never be Roman, of course, but neither could it be German (Luther) or French (Calvin).15 Hofstede de Groot discovered the first typically Dutch form of Christianity in the movement of the Modern Devotion in the fourteenth century. Geert Grote and the Brethren of the Common Life lived and preached a Christian way of life that was truly unique, truly Dutch. To live together as brothers and not as monks was an idea that had never been tried before anywhere in the Christian world. The life of the Brethren was characterized by evangelical simplicity, distaste for scholastic speculation and an emphasis on teaching the young. They saw very clearly that religious instruction was the key to the practice of Christian virtue. The purest expression of this ideal was to be found in the book of the Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, a book that recommended a life of quiet unpretentious devotion to Christ, no mystical visions, no disputes about the Trinity. ‘What good does it do to speak learnedly about the Trinity if, lacking humility, you displease the Trinity? Indeed it is not learning that makes a man holy and just, but a virtuous life makes him pleasing to God.’16 Hofstede had a point here. It was certainly true that among Dutch Protestants, and especially among the most orthodox, the Imitation of Christ was the most widely read book after the Bible and that it was also very popular among Catholics. In other words this small book of devotion was a common Dutch inheritance that transcended religious division. And that was as true in the nineteenth century as it had been in the centuries before. The most illustrious pupil of the schools of the Brethren was Erasmus. With him Dutch Christianity could have conquered all of Europe. Unfortunately at the same time Luther and Calvin preached a reform of the Church that almost killed off that simple, practical, unspeculative evangelism of Dutch Christianity. If the Dutch have one weakness, it is that they are not proud enough of their own heritage and like to shop elsewhere. That is what happened in Holland during the Reformation.17 Speculative French Calvinism became the norm, at the thoroughly unnational Synod of Dordt (1618–19). And national Christianity almost died out. On the Catholic side it survived in Jansenism and the later Old Catholic Church. On the Protestant side the Arminians, the group that lost at the Synod of Dordt, carried on the tradition of an ethical, practical form of Christian faith. Hugo Grotius was the most shining example of that simple, Dutch faith.18 What Hofstede de Groot clearly hoped for was that now in the nineteenth century, sensible, enlightened Dutchmen on both sides of the great Protestant–Catholic divide would come together to be the founders of a national Dutch church that once again would display all the virtues lost since the Middle Ages.

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4 Yet what really happened was exactly the opposite. The gentle mood of irenicism and ecumenism that was so characteristic of upper-class piety in the first decades of the nineteenth century was roughly disturbed by the orthodox Protestant revolt in the 1830s and 1840s. But it was not only on the Protestant side that the mood was changing. The Catholics, too, began to draw the line, and for the first time in Dutch history Catholics became aware of the fact that they were a distinct and, indeed, quite a strong, social group. That may sound surprising as Catholics, since the days of the Reformation, had always constituted one-third of the population in the Netherlands. But it was not until the 1820s that the Dutch Catholics became aware of their distinctiveness and strength as a group. The main reason for that was, in my opinion, the same process of nation-forming which on the Protestant side in the end led to a reaffirmation of the Calvinist character of the nation. In that same process Catholics were forced to ask themselves how they were going to give shape to the participation in the nation that was demanded of them. They could no longer stand aside as they had done for centuries: they had been Catholics in the Netherlands; now they had to become Dutch Catholics.19 Forming a social group requires many things, but one thing that it certainly requires is the idea of a shared past. So Dutch Catholics had to find a past that justified both their religion and their statehood. They had to show that Catholicism was just as much part of the Dutch national inheritance as Calvinism. That was not an easy task. As I said, the Dutch state undeniably had its origin in a revolt against the Catholic king of Spain. And it certainly looked as if Catholics, therefore, could not be good patriots. Catholics could, of course, try to prove that the revolt against Spain was not about religion at all, that there had been many Catholics who supported the rebels, or indeed had been rebels themselves. But instead of protesting it would be much better if Catholics succeeded in writing their own history on their own terms, and the best way to do that was to prove that there had been a Dutch past before the Reformation, a medieval past, a Catholic past.20 It took Dutch Catholics some time before they found their way to the Middle Ages. Catholic intellectuals around 1800 were more concerned to integrate quietly into Dutch society than boast about their Catholic identity. There had been a Catholic periodical since 1794 in which historical pieces were sometimes being published, rarely about the Middle Ages though. The 1814 issue was an exception in that it carried an article about Thomas à Kempis. Interestingly Thomas was not described in that article as a Catholic, but as a truly Dutch patriot, whose name had always been remembered by all Dutchmen up till the present.21 A few years later in another Dutch Catholic periodical, Minerva, an article appeared on monastic life in the Middle Ages. The main argument of the

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article was that monks in the Middle Ages made themselves useful by teaching and scholarly work and that their wealth was not squandered on foreigners but always used to support the cause of the fatherland.22 It is obvious, I think, that Dutch Catholics in the first generation after official emancipation were most anxious to overcome differences, to build bridges and to present themselves as simply Dutchmen, not as Dutch Catholics. Too much medievalism would not achieve that. This attitude, however, was always limited to a small number of upper-class Catholic families who were accepted in Dutch society anyway. The majority of Catholics, if they had to integrate, wanted to integrate on their own terms and not pander to the prejudices of their opponents. Their spokesman became Joachim Le Sage ten Broek (1775–1847), a convert, former minister of the Reformed Church, who, in 1818 founded a periodical that became his main pulpit, The Friend of Religion (De Godsdienstvriend). In the first issue he immediately set the tone by arguing that Protestants could never be good citizens and true patriots, because their religion was founded in revolt against the legitimate authority of the one true Church. And if they had rejected God and his Church, what could a mere earthly king expect? It followed that Catholics were the only loyal Dutchmen. That was the stuff to give the troops. His magazine was a runaway success and monopolized Dutch Catholic opinion-making for more than 20 years. Le Sage was also the first who mobilized medieval history to strengthen the Catholic position. All that had survived of the Catholic Middle Ages in the Netherlands were a few monasteries in the south, the most famous of which was the nunnery of St Catherine’s Vale (St Catharinadal) near Breda, founded in 1268. Somehow these convents had survived the Reformation, only to be hit by an imperial decree of 1812, which forbade all monastic orders to accept new members. For some reason St Catherine’s Vale was overlooked and the nuns quietly went on to accept novices, but they were the only ones. In 1814 the restored Dutch government had confirmed the Napoleonic decree, so monastic life in the Netherlands was doomed. There were no Catholic protests. It seems odd, but Catholics had practically forgotten that these monasteries existed. So little interest did they show in their national history. It was Le Sage who in a series of articles on the monasteries of Brabant reacquainted his fellow Catholics with the existence of these historic communities and buildings and thus created a first awareness in the Dutch Catholic community that it had a glorious past and that the Netherlands had once been Catholic before the disaster of the Reformation struck. He could be all the more dramatic about it, because at the time of writing all these monasteries were under threat once again, as an unfeeling government, although it preached freedom, in fact prevented Dutch citizens from leading the life of prayer and penitence they had freely chosen. So what le Sage did was twofold: he made his fellow Catholics

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aware of the wealth of their own Dutch Catholic past, and he used that awakening of historical perspective as a weapon in the struggle to improve the position of Catholics in his own time.23 In both he was successful. The 1812 decree was abolished in 1840, but much more important was that Dutch Catholics really began to take an interest in their own national history. That interest took a curious form though. Up till 1850 Catholics published no histories of the medieval Church, nor surveys of Dutch history from a Catholic perspective. They composed chronicles instead, chronicles of medieval churches and monasteries in which their fortunes were described year by year. As an appendix lists were added of the rectors or abbots or other prelates who had been attached to these places through the centuries. It sounds a bit primitive, and maybe it is, but these chronicles and lists did something very important. They gave temporal depth to Catholic memory, they created a historical perspective and they made Catholics aware that these places that still existed were living testimony to the unbroken continuity between the Church of the Middle Ages and that of the nineteenth century.24 It also implied that Catholic national memory became more attached to places than to stories. But perhaps that was a good thing in a population that intellectually was decidedly backward and was to remain so for some time yet.25 After 1850 the Catholics’ drive to reclaim the medieval Dutch past for themselves gathered speed. Now it became not so much a matter of continuity with that past as of a reconstruction of that past, a reconstruction that happened not so much in the rewriting of history as in rebuilding a sort of neo-medieval society, as is clear from the struggle over church architecture.26 In the first half of the nineteenth century Catholic churches had always been built in a dry classicist style. But in 1850 Joseph Alberdingk Thijm, one of the few non-clerical Catholic intellectuals in those days, published an article in which he attacked the neo-pagan architecture of classicist churches and called for a return to the Gothic architecture of the thirteenth century, because only the high Gothic style could truly embody the harmony between heaven and earth that found expression in medieval Catholicism.27 His ally was the architect Pierre Cuypers, the one who later built the national museum, mentioned in the introduction. Their cooperation was decisive: not only was Holland in the space of 30 years covered with a huge number of splendid neo-Gothic churches, but more importantly they succeeded in monopolizing the Gothic style for Catholics, far more than in any other country in Europe. I remind you of the remark of the king when he was asked to attend the opening ceremony of the Rijksmuseum. In the last quarter of the century this reconstruction movement began to embrace the whole of the political and social life of the Catholic community. When Catholic trade unions were founded, they were modelled on medieval guilds. Mining communities were built like medieval villages with the church as the centre of village life. It was as if Dutch Catholics tried to deny that such

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catastrophes as the Reformation and the Revolution had ever happened. But even more important was that they could show their fellow-countrymen that Catholicism embodied the continuity of the centuries and that, therefore, the true roots of the Dutch nation were medieval and Catholic. That was a claim that no one else in the Netherlands could make, not even the Dutch state. To prove that claim Dutch Catholics began to revive medieval sanctuaries and places of pilgrimage. In 1876 the pilgrimage to Dokkum, where St Boniface was murdered in 754, was restored and drew large crowds of people.28 Far more important was the restoration of the pilgrimage to what was called the ‘Sacrament of the Miracle’. In 1345 a eucharistic miracle had occurred right in the centre of Amsterdam. Quite soon a church was built on the place of the miracle, which became the centre of one of the most successful pilgrimages in the Low Countries till the city of Amsterdam turned Protestant in 1578. But among Amsterdam Catholics the memory of this miracle had always been kept more or less alive, no doubt because the miraculous house was next to the beguinage that remained in Catholic hands. In 1881 some Amsterdam laymen decided to revive the procession that had taken place annually till 1578. Their problem was that public religious manifestations were forbidden by law in the Netherlands. So what they did was follow the same route the procession had taken in the Middle Ages, but do so in ordinary clothes, praying silently, and with the rosary in their pocket. They allowed no one to show any outward sign of religiosity. Thus this curious procession showed both the possibilities and the limits of the emancipation process. The initiative proved a huge success. By 1900 the annual procession drew 80,000 pilgrims from all over the Netherlands. The Silent Ambulation (Stille Omgang), as it was called, was the most successful effort to restore a medieval tradition in order to establish a Dutch Catholic identity.29 The reintroduction, albeit on a reduced scale, of a medieval Catholic ritual in the heart of the Dutch capital made Catholics fully aware not only that they had deep roots in national history, but even more that they stood at the origin of the nation. One of the stories Catholics liked to tell about the Miracle was that the origins of Amsterdam’s amazing rise as the capital of world trade lay not in the zeal of its merchants, but in its devotion to the Blessed Sacrament wherein Christ himself remained present among his faithful. Catholic devotion stood at the origin of Amsterdam’s glory. Such claims made Dutch Catholic identity strong. By 1900 Catholics were just as proud of their nation as Protestants were.30 But by claiming the Middle Ages as exclusive Catholic territory, to which no other Dutchman was allowed access, they made it impossible for the medieval past to become the past of all Dutchmen. Orthodox Protestantism and ultramontane Catholicism, although each other’s opposite in every way, agreed that the Middle Ages belonged to Catholics. I started with a monument and I end with a monument. By 1900 it became clear that the chapel of the Miracle, Protestant since 1578, was on the verge of

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collapse. It was no longer needed as a church, yet it was one of the finest pieces of medieval architecture in Amsterdam. So all lovers of art and architecture started to clamour for its restoration and Catholics secretly nursed the hope that the Reformed Church, now that the chapel was redundant as a place of worship, would be willing to sell the ruin to the Catholics. But the chairman of the Amsterdam Reformed Church council would have nothing of it, because, as he said, ‘in this country art usually smacks of Romanism, and restoration usually means Romanization’.31 In 1908 the church was pulled down and replaced by a hideous structure that shows more clearly than words how much Dutchmen wanted to forget about their medieval past.

Notes 1. Gerard Brom, Romantiek en katholicisme in Nederland (2 vols, Groningen/The Hague, 1926) i. 314, 316; Gijs van der Ham, 200 Jaar Rijksmuseum. Geschiedenis van een nationaal symbool (Amsterdam, 2000), 147–9. 2. Adriaan Miltenburg, Naar de gesteldheid dier tyden. Middeleeuwen en mediëvistiek in Nederland in de negentiende eeuw (Hilversum, 1991), 121. 3. G.J. Schutte, Mr. G.Groen van Prinsterer (Goes, 1976), 44. 4. Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer, Handboek der geschiedenis van het vaderland (2 vols, repr., Veenendaal, 1978) i. 49. H. Smitskamp, Groen van Prinsterer als historicus (Amsterdam, 1940), 145–6, 148, 159. 5. Groen, Handboek, i.20, 46. 6. Smitskamp, Groen, 149. 7. Groen, Handboek, i.20–1. 8. Groen, Handboek, i.47, 50. 9. The original reads: ‘ ‘t Misbruyck in Godes Kerck allengskens ingebracht Is hier weer afgedaen in ‘t jaer seventich acht - Xvc’. I thank Mr J. van Zaane, chairman of the Church Council of the Old Church, for drawing my attention to this uncompromising abjuration of the medieval past. 10. Miltenburg, Naar de gesteldheid dier tyden, 65–6. 11. Ed Jonker, ‘Sotto voce. Identiteit, burgerschap en de nationale canon’, Tijdschrift voor geschiedenis, 119 (2006), 178–95, at 194. 12. It is Dutch church historians who now point out this curious blind spot in Dutch historiography: e.g. Peter van Rooden, ‘Het Nederlands protestantisme en zijn vaderland’, in J.M.M. de Valk (ed.), Nationale identiteit in Europees perspectief (Baarn, 1993), 95–115, at 95–7, 100–8; Joris van Eijnatten, ‘Opklaring, opwekking en behoud. Religieus conservatisme in Nederland, 1780–1840’, Geschiedenis van de wijsbegeerte in Nederland, 10 (1999), 9–24, at 10. 13. P. Hofstede de Groot, ‘Beschouwing van den gang, die de christelijke godgeleerdheid in het algemeen dus verre in Nederland heeft gehouden’, Nederlandsch archief voor kerkelijke geschiedenis, 2 (1842), 121–90, at 121–6. 14. J. A. Bornewasser, Kerkelijk verleden in een wereldlijke context (Amsterdam, 1989), 132, 140–3. 15. On Hofstede de Groot, see Jasper Vree, De Groninger godgeleerden. De oorsprong en de eerste periode van hun optreden, 1820–43 (Kampen, 1984), 29. For his theory of the development of the Dutch Church and its predecessors, see Peter van Rooden,

Peter Raedts

16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

28.

29.

30. 31.

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Religieuze regimes. Over godsdienst en maatschappij in Nederland (Amsterdam, 1996), 158–61. Hofstede de Groot, ‘Beschouwing’, 128–9. The quote is from De Imitatione Christi, I.i.3. Hofstede de Groot, ‘Beschouwing’, 142–3. Ibid., 168–73. P. Raedts, ‘Le Saint Sacrement du Miracle d’Amsterdam: Lieu de mémoire de l’identité catholique’, in P. den Boer and W. Frijhoff (eds), Lieux de mémoire et identités nationales (Amsterdam, 1993), 237–51, at 237–40. P. Raedts, ‘Katholieken op zoek naar een Nederlandse identiteit 1814–98’, Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 107 (1992), 713–25, at 714–17. Mengelingen voor Roomsch-Catholijken, 5 (1814), 113–14. ‘Lofrede ter eere van den H. Franciscus den Assysier’, in Minerva, Mengelwerk 1 (1818) 122–43; ‘Diensten der geestelykheid en der kloosters in de duistere Middeleeuwen’, ibid., 233–7. Raedts, ‘Katholieken’, 717–18. J. Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge, 1977), 90–1, points out that the composition of lists of princes and remarkable events in almost all cultures forms the beginning of written culture and of a first distinction between history and myth. Raedts, ‘Katholieken’, 718–20. Jan Bank, Het roemrijk vaderland. Cultureel nationalisme in Nederland in de negentiende eeuw (The Hague, 1990), 37. On Thijm, see Michel van der Plas, Vader Thijm. Biografie van een koopman-schrijver (Baarn, 1995), esp. 150–6. J. A. Alberdingk Thijm, ‘Nieuwe katholieke kerken’, De Spektator, 9 (1850), 169–70, id., ‘De kerken van den Architekt Petr. Jos. Hub. Cuypers’, Dietsche Warande, 6 (1864), 107; id., ‘Willen wij alleen de Gothiek?’, ibid., 4 (1858), 177. H.J.J. Prenger, ‘Pelgrimaadje naar Dokkum’, De Katholiek, 69 (1876), 387–96; [A.J. Callier], ‘Godvruchtige oefeningen ter eere van den H. Bonifacius’, ibid., 73 (1878), 380–1. P.J. Margry and C.M.A. Caspers (eds), Bedevaartplaatsen in Nederland, vol. I: Noord- en Midden-Nederland (Amsterdam/Hilversum, 1997), 134–50; Ch. Caspers and P.J. Margry, Identiteit en spiritualiteit van de Amsterdamse Stille Omgang (Hilversum, 2006); P. Raedts, ‘Amsterdam: de Heilige Stede (Nieuwe Zijdskapel), 1345. Ommegangen en mirakelen’, in W. Blockmans and H. Pleij (eds), Plaatsen van herinnering. Nederland van prehistorie tot Beeldenstorm (Amsterdam, 2007), 290–301. Raedts, ‘Katholieken’, 723–5, id., ‘Saint Sacrement’, 248–51. B. Voets and H. van Noord, ‘Het verhaal van een honderdjarige. De Stille Omgang begon in 1881’, Ons Amsterdam, 33 (1981), 34–45, at 41.

7 Medieval Myths and the Building of National Identity: the Example of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg1 Michel Margue and Pit Péporté

1

Introduction

The celebrations of the one-hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Luxembourg’s independence in 1989 took place in the context of several landmark moments for the European integration process: the Single European Act came into effect in 1987, the project of monetary union had just been accepted, and the Schengen agreement was under discussion. European integration was evolving, but it was counterbalanced by a heightened sensitivity for expressions of national identity, such as celebrations of the national past. That same year France celebrated the two-hundredth anniversary of the Fall of the Bastille, and Germany commemorated the fortieth anniversary of its Basic Law. Luxembourg answered by extolling its independence. The celebrations in 1989 were sponsored and financed by the government, including a major exhibition called ‘From State to Nationhood, 1839–1989. 150 Years of Independence’ [De l’Etat à la Nation, 1839–1989. 150 ans d’indépendance], designed by a committee of historians under the direct supervision of a commission of the state ministry. Although the exhibition was intended to focus on the previous 150 years of local history, considerable space was allocated to the medieval period. The exhibition’s formal inauguration was attended by international heads of state and Luxembourgian officials and was marked by three speeches, the longest and most important of them given by the historian Gilbert Trausch.2 It was based on the four great dates of national history, but he insisted above all on the first of these, the year 963: The Luxembourgian State exists and it must have had a beginning. [The date of] 963 is inescapable. That year has entered the Luxembourgers’ collective memory as the founding act. Its old age provides Luxembourg with a character of nobility so to speak. […] The geographical place that came 88

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into existence in 963 would bestow its name on the principality that formed around it. It is not common that a city baptizes a state. How could one then dissociate them?3 We notice first that all the key ingredients of national historiography are present: factitiousness, self-reference, linearity, continuity and a proximity to contemporary political discourse. Secondly, the speech includes a search for the origins of the nation state, which are to be found in 963. Thirdly and in consequence, the passage hints at an intrinsic link between the medieval county and the modern grand duchy, an element that the historian further expands in the catalogue to the exhibition: ‘Before the state there was a principality, a duchy (after 1354) and a county (after 963). Before the national sentiment there was a particularism, a complex sentiment that makes a group perceive itself as different from others ...’4 This reference to collective memory alludes to a symbiosis of ‘history’ and ‘memory’. The fusion (or maybe confusion) of those two terms during these festivities is also reflected by a poll that was staged simultaneously. When asked who the best-known figures of national history were, the population named three medieval figures among the top five: John ‘the Blind’, king of Bohemia, count of Luxembourg and a fourteenth-century chivalric hero in second place; the tenth-century Count Sigefroid, alleged founder of Luxembourg, in fourth; and the thirteenth-century Countess Ermesinde, the purported founder of the ‘second’ medieval dynasty in fifth place.5 All these examples show that during the latest self-celebration of the Luxembourgian nation state, the Middle Ages occupied a prime position in the national discourse as well as the collective memory – both essential elements for the construction of a national identity. In a first section of this chapter, the evolution of Luxembourg’s historiography will be sketched out, to indicate when and for what reasons the Middle Ages were endowed with an increasingly important role. Thereafter we show how the rediscovery of the medieval period contributed to a dominant historical discourse. This discourse was created over at least a century and adapted to the needs of a nation state eager to legitimize its independence through the crises of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Throughout the chapter we will refer to the changing symbolism of the main medieval lieux de mémoire.

2 Historiography before 1815 From the late fifteenth century, Luxembourg constituted the southernmost province of the Habsburg Low Countries. Rule alternated between the Spanish and Austrian branches of the house, with two short-lived French conquests of the duchy (1684–97 and 1795–1815). Lacking any major economic resources or

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centres, the duchy’s attractiveness lay mainly in its strategic significance, providing its Habsburg rulers with a defensive post against France, and its French occupants with a foothold in the Low Countries and access to the Rhineland. In consequence the fortress of Luxembourg was extended to an impregnable size so as to encompass two-thirds of the city’s area. The principality had remained embedded in larger political entities and unlike its western neighbour, the ecclesiastical principality of Liège, it never developed any major central institutions. The titular rulers resided far away and the alternating governors were little involved in local life. The absence of the ruler’s court deprived the duchy of an obvious centre for cultural and intellectual life; the consequence was a deficit in these matters as well as the relative lack of a local historiography. Another obstacle for early modern history writing was the absence of existing tradition. There were no medieval chroniclers at the court of the counts of Luxembourg. Smaller narrative accounts from the period were only to be found within larger works written outside the duchy’s borders, for instance within German, Bohemian or Burgundian chronicles. A similar situation characterized the early modern historiography of Luxembourg. Most historians writing on the history of the duchy were either not born there, or were educated and worked outside its borders. Richard de Wassebourg was an archdeacon and based in Verdun,6 as was the medical doctor Jean d’Anly – although the latter had been born in Malmédy.7 Although d’Anly had provided the first historiographical account centring on the duchy of Luxembourg, Jean Bertels (1544–1607) is generally considered the first local historian, mainly because he wrote in Luxembourg, where he was the abbot of Neumünster abbey and later Echternach.8 Nonetheless, even Bertels had been born and educated in Louvain and his perspective is that of an outsider. He also wrote a history of Hainaut in the same mindset. Only Eustache of Wiltheim (1600–78) and François Pierret (1673–1713) were both born in the duchy and wrote their accounts there.9 While the latter was a notary in the town of Luxembourg, Wiltheim stemmed from a noble yet very erudite family. Eustache himself made a career in the duchy’s administration and in 1648 became the president of the provincial council; his brothers entered clerical careers, and one of them, Alexander, published extensively on Roman antiquity.10 The titles of historiographic works reflect the erudition and approach of the humanist scholars: their writings are guided by an interest in the history of a region, its primary sources, its ruling dynasties and its ‘antiquities’. Their histories are descriptive, narrative and chronological, while showing little attempt at historical analysis. Some of them focused on the duchy of Luxembourg, others on its ruling dynasties. But others again only embedded a few selected details into a much wider perspective. Consequently, in none of these cases does one sense an expression of a particularist consciousness or a regional identity that went beyond the defence of local customs and privileges. Even the Jesuit Jean

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Bertholet (1688–1755), one of the latest and, for posterity, most influential of these early historiographers, is far from being a ‘particularist’ historian: his eightvolume history of the duchy is a celebration of Habsburg absolutism and steeped in his clerical morality.11 The fact that he also wrote an unpublished history of Liège12 actually places him in an even wider Low Countries context, since the prince-bishopric of Liège did not form part of the Habsburg territories at all. However, it is important to note that many of the historical representations still prevalent in the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries originate from the early modern period, notably from the writings of Jean Bertholet. Like his predecessors, he did not bestow on his history an overarching narrative structure or an intrinsic purposeful progression. His method is influenced by the diplomatics of Mabillon and the source analysis promoted by the Jesuits at the time. It is centred on the selection and edition of primary sources. Based on these sources he depicts historical scenes, which he judged to serve as instructive models. But for this aim he needed to shape his historic figures. Bertholet did not always create these moulds anew, instead borrowing heavily from the existing traditions; nonetheless those that he bound into his works were to dominate historiography in Luxembourg for most of the subsequent two centuries. It is impossible to generalize when it comes to ascertaining the role attributed to the medieval past by these authors, except that none seem to make a serious effort towards periodization in their work. This emerges most clearly from those writers who focus on dynastic successions, such as Wassebourg, and whose accounts are structured by family ties. Only Bertholet provides his eight volumes with a chronological division, which is however entirely based on the political status of Luxembourg. The structure is thus based on a selection of major diplomatic sources rather than being constructed as a historical analysis of the country’s identity or the destinies of its inhabitants. A first section deals with the ‘prehistory’ of the principality, the second section starts with the ‘first count of Luxembourg’ (963), the third with the ‘first duke of Luxembourg’ (1353). In any case, none of the early modern writers who influenced local historiography used the Middle Ages as a narrative element, or endowed the period with its own character.

3 The 1815–1830s: the silence of historiography From the negotiations at the Congress of Vienna (1815), the principality emerged as a de jure independent grand duchy within the German Confederation and with a federal garrison in the fortress.13 At the same time, and as with the other parts of today’s Benelux, it was to be ruled in personal union by the king of the Netherlands. Luxembourg was the only old principality in the Low Countries to be awarded, at least officially, an independent status – though not because

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of the desire of its people, but rather by decree of the great powers. This new political situation did not provide any new impulses for historiography: neither from the king-grand duke, who despite the stipulations of the treaties of Vienna treated Luxembourg like the eighteenth province of his kingdom, nor from the inhabitants, who failed to mount a noteworthy uprising against the regime as did the Belgians in 1830–1. Few people believed in the political survival of the smallish agrarian state, situated outside the great economic and cultural centres and vulnerable to a complete absorption by the Netherlands or even its French or Prussian neighbours. Potentially the writing of history could have been of interest to the ruler for the purpose of rallying the people around the new dynasty, or it could have represented a means by which the population of Luxembourg could have begun the construction of a collective identity. Yet, during the first decades of the grand duchy’s existence, history was not exploited, either by the monarch, or his subjects. King-Grand Duke William I of Orange-Nassau showed little interest in the past and even less so in that of Luxembourg. To use a local example, his dynasty had owned one of the most magnificent medieval castles of the principality since the fifteenth century: the castle of Vianden. Having been merged with the domains of the state in 1819, it could have been shaped into a symbol linking the monarch with his new territories.14 William I saw a different opportunity. In 1818 he auctioned the historic vestiges of the dynastic castle to a speculator, who in turn sold it piece by piece to the highest bidder.15 It was quickly reduced to such a degree of ruin that the French writer Victor Hugo, who passed by in 1862, judged the Dutch monarch severely as a ‘stupid crowned bourgeois, who sold Vianden, the cradle of his forefathers’.16 This act of ‘vandalism’, as it was judged at the time, did not constitute an isolated case. In 1826 the medieval convent of Marienthal shared a similar fate; its stones served the construction of the royal stables in Walferdange.17 Historiographic output was instead limited to a few textbooks, written by the Société pour l’éducation scolaire for the instruction of those teachers who planned on teaching history to their pupils.18 The authors of these short accounts did not engage in new research, and relied largely on Bertholet’s historical structure and edition of sources. In addition they constituted timid attempts at winning over the population to the new ruling house of OrangeNassau, dynastic fidelity and love for the fatherland being the principal objectives of history teaching. In 1838 the purpose of teaching history was a patriotic, not a national one: ‘The history of the country of Luxembourg must be of highest interest to everyone holding dear his fatherland.’19 In this vaterländisch history, the Middle Ages did not constitute a central theme. One does however notice the importance attributed to the four fourteenth- and fifteenth-century emperors, the kings of Bohemia and Hungary of the house of Limburg-Luxembourg. They represent an element of pride: ‘locals’ who shaped

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history at large. Later historians would develop this idea of a grand medieval past of the small country in great detail. In summary, the creation of the grand duchy in 1815 was not based on any existing local national sentiment. In consequence, local historiography did not generate the idea of an ‘other’ or the concept of a ‘foreign domination’ at the time, as was the case in some German principalities under French rule, or in what was to become Belgium under the rule of the house of Orange.

4 1840–c.1900: the first wave of national romanticism One medieval figure was increasingly made symbolic of fourteenth-century grandeur: John, king of Bohemia and count of Luxembourg. Several factors contributed to assure his prominence. First of all the king himself fostered a chivalric image of himself during his very active lifetime by participating in tournaments, and by his roles in the northern crusade and several decisive battles of the times, especially that of Crécy at which he met his death (1346).20 This image survived in much of medieval literature, partly because of John’s own patronage of that art. The result was a rich quantity of narrative sources alluding to John’s feats by writers such as Jean Froissart or Peter of Zittau, which in turn provided ample material for later historians of the period. A second factor of importance is John’s tomb in the town of Luxembourg, which remained as the only burial place of a local medieval ruler surviving the sixteenth century. During the ancien régime, the sepulchre of the chivalric hero played a fundamental role as a focal point for the self-understanding of the nobility of the duchy, which gathered regularly around the tomb to remember the dead king and his fallen retainers. When the grand duchy came into existence in 1815, John’s mortal remains lay in foreign ground.21 The bones were hidden from the French revolutionary troops that conquered the lands in 1795, to emerge some time later in the hands of a local industrialist, whose relative brought them across the border to a family factory in Prussian lands.22 The factory’s owner, Jean-François Boch-Buschmann, passed them on to Crown Prince Frederick William (later the fourth king of the name) on a visit to the area; the prince was well known for his nostalgic feelings towards a past medieval ‘grandeur’. He in turn had his favourite architect Schinkel create a new mausoleum on a romantic setting high above the river Saar. John was reburied there in 1838, at which point the population in Luxembourg discovered that the king’s remains had not simply been lost as had been assumed. The reactions were varied, ranging from emotional shock to utter indifference. The discovery that the king had been taken to Prussian lands occurred at a critical time: the last days of the Belgian Revolution in Luxembourg. When in 1830 Belgium declared independence from the Dutch crown, most of Luxembourg’s population willingly united with the newly created kingdom – only

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the capital with its Prussian garrison remained loyal to the house of Orange. The readiness with which the population joined the Belgian cause reflects how little national sentiment existed in Luxembourg at the time. This can be further illustrated by the discussion ensuing from the discovery of John’s remains. Boch-Buschmann defended his actions by declaring John of Bohemia a German prince, resting very much at home in Prussian lands.23 In this he was vehemently opposed by Pierre-Albert Lenz, a native of Luxembourg who made a career in Belgium and had become a professor at the University of Ghent.24 Lenz saw in John ‘the son and father of the two great emperors that Belgium has given to Germany’, and since his ancestors were ‘born in Luxembourg, Brabant and Hainaut […] the inhabitants of these provinces can regard him as one of their heroes’.25 In 1839 Luxembourg was partitioned, the francophone west staying with Belgium, while the Germanic-speaking east with the capital remained an independent principality of the German Confederation under the Dutch monarch. The clear winner of this outcome was the bourgeois minority that had stayed loyal to the house of Orange; its members now started to occupy the more prominent positions in local administration and public life. The overall liberal stance of these ‘Orangists’ was complemented by a demand for a higher degree of local autonomy and the development of parliamentary institutions. Combined with the upset caused by the territorial division, the result was an increasing tendency to present Luxembourg’s past and ‘nationality’ as distinct. This change in selfperception appeared clearly in the local debate on how to react to the Prussian takeover of John of Bohemia’s remains. A report written in 1836 by the office of the attorney-general specifies: ‘The remains belong to the Luxembourgian fatherland (patrie luxembourgeoise) … they constitute an inalienable part of the public domain.’26 The author was François-Xavier Würth-Paquet, who was not only a lawyer, but also a passionate historian we shall meet again later. Frederick William of Prussia had not remained deaf to the official protest dispatched by the Luxembourg municipality and promised to return John’s body under the condition that an appropriate mausoleum was built in Luxembourg. This was taken up in 1844, when the inhabitants of Luxembourg were asked to make donations for the completion of Cologne Cathedral: that ‘German’ project was opposed by a ‘national’ initiative for the construction of a mausoleum for King John.27 The latter project was initiated by the authorities in the capital, but additionally promoted by an anonymous author writing to the editor of the official newspaper: Is it the glory of Germany that we shall seek before our own? I would say ‘no’, and history, this impartial and inflexible history, confirms […] that the Luxembourgers are not supposed to seek […] the glory of Germany, since they have never belonged to the German nation.28

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In the end, many ended up donating to both projects – further proof of the unstable and undeveloped character of nationalized patriotism. Although this first attempt at creating a fitting memorial for John failed, it was nonetheless part of changing perceptions of the past in general and the medieval past in particular. These were further nourished by the involvement of the monarch. While William I had remained particularly uninterested in the grand duchy of Luxembourg, save for fiscal policies, his son William II (reigned 1840–9) had a different perspective, visiting his southern possessions on numerous occasions. During his 1844 visit he promised a large sum for the erection of a mausoleum for the Bohemian king, thus providing official support for the glorification of the ‘Luxembourgian’ past. Unlike his father, he also visited the ruins of Vianden castle, promising that it should be rebuilt and its ancient splendour restored.29 Yet another unrealized project foresaw a reburial of John of Bohemia in the castle’s Romanesque chapel: a symbol of the dynasty’s union with its subjects via the medieval past.30 While fuelling local national ideals, William’s attitude served at the same time his own popularity. On numerous occasions the Dutch monarch was directly compared to the king of Bohemia and presented as his rightful successor.31 This reflects the tentative beginnings of the role that the medieval period was to be given to play in relation to the present: a first moment of Luxembourgian grandeur and autonomy that was to be resurrected by the house of Orange. Under William II the state institutions of Luxemburg took shape, and there was some burgeoning interest in the preservation of national heritage as well as the writing of national history. This stemmed, as far as the preservation of buildings was concerned, from the wave of Romanticism. As for historical writing, the reign witnessed the foundation of learned societies, by teachers, lawyers, physicians, high-ranking civil servants and churchmen. In 1845 the Society for the Research and Conservation of Historic Monuments in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg was created.32 The learned society stood under the protection of the monarch and its mission was defined as ‘showing to posterity the proofs of our ancestors’ fidelity and devotion for their prince. We would like to suggest these examples as a model to follow.’ 33 This theme marked historical research until the end of the century: love for the fatherland and loyalty to the ruling house of Orange were the most fundamental motivations for the rediscovery of the Middle Ages in general and the study of the medieval ruling dynasties in particular. This same ideological context gave birth to the idea that Luxembourg underwent a ‘political renaissance’ under William II after long centuries under ‘foreign domination’. The first chairman of the Historical Society, François Xavier Würth-Paquet (1801–85), also happened to be the president of the supreme court of justice and of the state council (Conseil d’état). He set about editing and publishing over 10,000 summaries of medieval documents.34 This collection stems partly

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from Würth-Paquet’s legal interests, yet it also contains an expression of the liberal Orangism that he shared with his fellows.35 His research gave prominence to the thirteenth-century Countess Ermesinde, who had given a first charter of enfranchisement to the townsmen of Luxembourg in 1244 and was therefore presented as the founder of local liberalism.36 In consequence she attained an eminent status among medieval rulers, which was to be further exploited by nationalist historiography.37 The period 1850–95 produced a first surge in the writing of local history, initiated mainly by those who had helped to shape the country politically and define its international status. Despite their ‘amateur’ background and the lack of a local institution of higher education, the quality of their work was high by international comparison.38 With the rise of a national consciousness in this period, the study of history also began to be infused with political meaning and educational purpose. The result was the establishment of a selected core of medieval themes that found acceptance within society at large. John of Bohemia certainly became the most prominent of these, inspiring not only romantic poetry, popular songs and paintings,39 but additional historiographic output. In 1865 Jean Schoetter (1823–81) published the first methodical monograph by a local historian: a two-volume biography of King John.40 Countess Ermesinde had become the second most important representative of the medieval period and her monastic politics assured her popularity among Catholic historians and thus well beyond the strictly liberal-minded camp.41 To this we must add the tenth-century Count Sigefroid, who had traditionally (but wrongly) been regarded as the first count of Luxembourg and now received the status of founder – of the dynasty, the city and the country.42 Sigefroid’s standing in historiography was additionally cemented by visual representations of his castle. In the years 1890–5, both Ernest Werling and the state architect Charles Arendt (1825–1910) mixed existing presumptions with then current ideas about medieval castles into magnificent visual reconstructions.43 Although the historic tenth-century fortifications were most likely rather basic and probably included wooden structures, these two representations show a large castle made of stone with a tall keep, high curtain walls and towers, some five stories high. The highly popular and wellknown artists Michel Engels (1851–1901) and Pierre Blanc (1872–1946) took up their ideas and produced similar visions of the tenth-century setting, lacking none of the grandeur. These representations convey a feeling of security and comfort to the population inside, an image of power and steadfastness to the outside. The symbolism of the location would come to full splendour in the middle of the twentieth century, when it was further developed especially as a literary motif.44 Sigefroid together with John of Bohemia and Ermesinde slowly developed into three lieux de mémoire around which medieval history was structured.45

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One should perhaps ask whether representations of the medieval past were fragmented by the presence of a Kulturkampf. Unlike Belgium, the liberals in Luxembourg were initially not balanced by a strong and unified Catholic camp – this was partly because no Luxembourgian bishopric existed before 1870. On the other hand, the Orangists were comprised of a wide array of liberal forces, from progressive to more conservative orientations.46 While their view of history dominated after 1839, the balance shifted in favour of historians with a more conservative-Catholic perspective at the end of the century, practically leaving Nicolas van Werveke (1851–1926) as the sole remaining champion of the liberal camp.47 Nonetheless the continuity in their general interpretation of the medieval past is striking. Although these two groups may have attributed different connotations to certain concepts such as ‘nationality’,48 or given different weight to certain issues, religious aspects in particular, they nonetheless did share a belief in the venerable age of the territory, the continuity of local law and liberties, and the legitimacy of monarchic rule through historical times.

5 After 1900: medieval history serving the nation state For most of the second half of the nineteenth century, the aim of national history was twofold: firstly, to reject the feeling of ‘Belgianness’ that was so contrary to the dominant Orangist political ideology; secondly, to create a distance from pan-German tendencies, which the nation could have identified with under different political circumstances. However, its stance was less problematic with regard to France; in fact one notices an increasing amount of sympathy towards that neighbouring country, especially shortly after 1900. Again the example of John of Bohemia affords insights. Based on the research of the French historian Théodore de Puymaigre, Luxembourgian historians and literary authors alike not only became aware of John’s close ties with the French royal court, but they endowed his politics with a Francophile dimension, using for his ‘heroic’ death at Crécy the same rhetoric as that for the victims of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870: John had died for France (mort pour la France).49 In Luxembourg the idea fitted into a larger intellectual movement co-initiated in 1907 by the writers Batty Weber, Frantz Clément and Marcel Noppeney.50 Central to their views was to regard Luxembourgian culture as a Mischkultur, a mixture of both German and French. The idea acknowledges the undoubted Germanic origins of the local language, but further suggests that centuries of French influence have refined local culture and elevated it to a superior degree. The ensuing triumph of their vision was above all due to the Great War and the subsequent reshaping of Luxembourg politics and identity discourse. During the First World War, the positioning of the Luxembourgian government to the German occupation forces was ambiguous. Despite disapproval

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of the situation, it did not explicitly condemn the occupation publicly, since the country was economically dependent on Germany; this however earned the government the reputation of collaboration abroad. Behind the scenes, the large metallic industrial complex even accepted orders for war material from German companies.51 On the other hand, the majority of the population asserted a noticeable degree of Prussophobia and developed more of a Francophile stance.52 A severe political crisis in 1919, challenging monarchical rule, the country’s independence and economic ties reinforced the demise of German cultural and political influence. While the ruling dynasty was reconfirmed in its position, economic ties with Germany were severed and the population opted for closer links with the victor of the war: France.53 In the same spirit, the first large national monument was erected in 1923, the so-called Monument du Souvenir,54 in memory of those Luxembourgers who had fallen on the Allies’ side during the First World War. The monument illustrates the will to forget any existing German collaboration during the wartime occupation, in favour of a pro-French memory. At the same time it glorifies those soldiers who died for France, paving the way for a reassessment of John of Bohemia’s death at Crécy, from then onwards considered a precedent. This appears clearly in the 1927 play Pro Patria by the nationalist poet Lucien Koenig (1888–1961). He lets the French Field Marshal Pétain enter the stage and compare those Luxembourgers who fell during the Great War on the French side to ‘their great national hero, John the Blind, who died for France’.55 The idea of a fourteenth-century rapprochement with France now quickly entered the wider mainstream. The history school book by Pierre Biermann, for instance, uses John to express a preference for French over German culture. Medieval Luxembourg is regarded as a state in between France and the Empire, the latter being identified with Germany. The paragraph on John of Bohemia starts with his relationship to France and the author comments that John’s Francophile attitude was characteristic of the weakness of the Empire.56 Compared to Joseph Paquet who in 1838 had seen in the king a friend of Emperor Louis,57 and to Jean Schoetter who in 1865 remained rather ambivalent about the ties to Louis, Pierre Biermann describes his relations to the emperor as ‘schwankend’, i.e. fluctuating, but with the connotation of unsteady, uncertain or hesitating. Joseph Meyers’ Geschichte Luxemburgs, which came into use in schools in 1939, also uses Crécy both to illustrate the close links to France and further to enhance the heroic image.58 After the war, Meyers (1900–64) stressed that the French influence brought civilization and democratic culture and had rendered Luxembourg profoundly non-German ever since the later Middle Ages. In a 1946 interview with a highly popular magazine, Meyers added that ‘Germany was culturally influenced by the Luxembourg rulers from west to east, one could even say colonized. It is significant that Germany received its first and only constitution from Charles IV in his Golden Bull.’59

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The invention of a fictive continuity

For some members of the general public the rapprochement with France after the First World War signified a desire to merge politically with either the French or the Belgian neighbour, while for others it reflected their republican ideals. In this perspective they were countered by most historians, who stood faithful to the ruling dynasty and were strongly supportive of Luxembourg’s independence. To them the mental rapprochement with France only helped to affirm the country’s cultural and historical independence from Germany. Their nationalist views led to the creation of a national historical narrative that originated in the last decades of the nineteenth century and whose main medium was the school book by Arthur Herchen (1850–1931), used between 1918 and 1972.60 It dominated representations of national history for most of the twentieth century and thus recurs for instance in the neo-romantic historiography of the 1930s, which used its schema against the menace of Westforschung and the looming annexation by Nazi Germany.61 After 1945 the model was taken up again to celebrate the victory of the Luxembourgian nation and state. This national historical narrative is based on three phases. Firstly, national history was said to begin in 963, when Count Sigefroid ‘founded’ Luxembourg. During this first medieval phase the country grew and its rulers became increasingly influential abroad, a process that is epitomized by John of Bohemia. The period was followed by the early modern times, viewed as a period of ‘foreign domination’, of wars and disorders. This dark age was in turn followed by the re-establishment of the old duchy at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, a state of independence and neutrality that was reinforced by the great powers in 1839 and 1867. The central element of this teleological perspective is the concept of ‘foreign domination’ to describe the reign of early modern princes, who were not more foreign than others, but ruled over Luxembourg by virtue of dynastic treaties or inheritance pacts.62 Jean Joris, who was the first historian to use this concept in a Luxembourgian context, wrote: From 1444 to 1815 […] the grand duchy was time and again trampled on by the Burgundians, the Spanish, the Austrians, the French and the Prussians. Nonetheless, the Luxembourgian character managed to remain unscathed by these numerous contacts (attouchements). The love the Luxembourger feels for his native soil has not weakened. This small nationality stands firm despite the terrible crises it has gone through, [crises] that a people rarely withstands.63 The passage can be inscribed in an essentialist understanding of national identities: throughout the centuries of oppression the particular character and identity of the nation are supposed to have remained unbroken. This was

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expressed in the vague notion of ‘particularism’, said to characterize the state of mind of the Luxembourg people and distinguish them from the inhabitants of other principalities that made up the Habsburg Low Countries. Within this scheme, medieval history took the role as the time of the nation’s birth and growth. It is a time of continuous territorial and political expansion with its apogee in the fourteenth century, before the decline that culminated in the takeover of the duchy of Luxembourg by the dukes of Burgundy in 1443–4. The ‘feudal’ age that Herchen announces in his table of contents64 is not a time of oppression – as the connotation of the word suggests in many other contexts – but of freedom and independence, or Selbstständigkeit as Meyers wrote 20 years later.65 Even though the dukes of Burgundy brought a halt to much of the local feuding and created a stability that resulted in economic improvement for the duchy,66 their times tend to be depicted in much darker colours than the fourteenth century, simply because they were associated with a loss of political independence. Another part of this perspective was to identify the nation by its monarchy: as long as medieval rulers reigned from Luxembourg, their dynastic policies were translated into national politics.67 It is at this point that the pro-monarchical and nationalist ideologies meet. Together they forcefully underline the idea of early modern ‘foreign domination’, a concept that – as indicated – found its origins in the validation of modern-day dynasties by presenting them as successors to the medieval ones. The nineteenth-century trend of basing historiography on a combination of love for the fatherland and dynastic fidelity towards the house of Orange-Nassau through the study of medieval rulers continued under the dynasty of Nassau-Weilburg, which ruled the country from 1890 onward. While the palace in the city of Luxembourg was renovated and extended – unlike their Orange predecessors, the new dynasts decided to reside in the country – a number of references to the medieval rulers in general and to John in particular were incorporated.68 When in 1919 the monarchy saw its position seriously challenged as an aftermath of its role in the First World War, it reacted by reinventing itself. The collaboration with the German occupants with which Grand Duchess Marie-Adelaide (reigned 1912–19, before abdicating) was accused, was counterbalanced by the openly Francophile stance taken by her sister Charlotte (reigned 1919–64), who succeeded her. In 1921 the grand-ducal couple’s first-born son and heir was named John, a name that had never occurred in their own lineages.69 According to a confidential letter sent by the father to the Holy See, asking Pope Benedict XV to be the child’s godfather, Prince Felix confirmed that his choice was indeed intended as a reference to the medieval monarch.70 The public understood the message. The press welcomed the choice of name for the new prince, not least because he was the first male heir to the throne born in Luxembourg since John of Bohemia himself.71

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Commemorations of the ‘national past’

Medieval history provided the Luxembourgian monarchy with a means to demonstrate the unity of crown and people. This emerged at its clearest during the four large-scale national ceremonies held between 1936 and 1963, which honoured great anniversaries of ‘national history’. They channelled the country’s strongest expression of national sentiment to date, fuelled by the looming German menace in the late 1930s and by the rediscovered national freedom in the aftermath of the war. The mass character of these commemorations also led to an increased presence of historical themes in the mass media. Most nineteenth-century and earlier media were aimed at a highly educated audience, but this started to broaden in the second half of the century with the inclusion of romantic literature, publicly exhibited visual art and wider access to education and exposure to school books. Anniversaries, however, offered themselves as moments when the conglomerate of historians, politicians and artists who shaped collective memories could focus on a particular figure or event. The output of scholarly literature as well as popular media and memorabilia increased significantly during these occasions. Of the four large-scale national ceremonies in this period, three were directly linked to the medieval past. The seven-hundredth anniversary of the handing of the first local charter of enfranchisement by Countess Ermesinde to the town of Echternach was celebrated with great pomp in 1936. The lengthy guest list of Luxembourgian and foreign dignitaries reflects the national character of an event that could just as easily have been of merely local importance.72 Likewise, the focus of the event was not the smallish town of Echternach or its representatives, but the monarch. Prime Minister Joseph Bech began by extolling the peaceful and democratic character of Ermesinde’s reign: the charter of enfranchisement was not issued as the result of a popular revolt, but on the initiative of the countess. Yet he finished by creating a link to the present, observing how ‘wonderful’ it was that the newly inaugurated plaque united the name of Ermesinde and that of Grand Duchess Charlotte: In the name of our country, I can only confirm the profound sense of this link and relationship: that today as well, in these severe times, our princess only lives for the good of the country! She is our best charter of enfranchisement and the guarantee that we remain what we are: a free country, a country of freedom!73 The passage contains two main ideas. Firstly, that at both the beginning of Ermesinde’s reign and in the 1930s the country lived through phases of hardship. We need of course to consider the increasingly volatile international

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situation of the moment, marked by the rise of fascist regimes in Germany and Italy, and the only recently commenced Spanish Civil War. Bech’s reference to a thirteenth-century liberty was both in line with the nineteenth-century tradition of interpreting Ermesinde’s politics as ‘liberal’, and the perception of the medieval epoch as one of national autonomy. The exaltation of national independence followed the model of freedom pitted against foreign oppression, which was transplanted back into the thirteenth century. Secondly, the prime minister expressed the hope that yet again the ruler would save the people with her goodwill. Charlotte is presented as a modern-day incarnation of Ermesinde – as her uncontested successor. The ceremony further saw a re-enactment of the issuing of the charter very much in line with Bech’s speech: interestingly the dressed-up countess handed the charter’s replica not to the townsmen of Echternach, but to the grand duchess, as the representative of all the people of Luxembourg.74 The moment illustrates the transfer of the civic element to the national level, or further a monarchical one. Again it presented the modernday ruler as an inheritor of the medieval countess, who placed the well-being of her subjects into the hands of her ‘successor’.75 Three years later, in 1939, the nation celebrated the centenary of its independence. The anniversary was arguably invented, since it rests on an interpretation that recognized the painful partition of 1839 as the glorious birth of national independence rather than the creation of the grand duchy in 1815. The motivation for staging celebrations on such a scale was the increasing threat of German invasion and the resulting need for a display of national unity.76 Although the event remembered at the occasion took place in the nineteenth century, the fundamental presence of medieval themes throughout the festivities is nonetheless telling. One of the central elements of the festivities was a long parade in historical costume, representing the great moments of national history; half of the protagonists portrayed medieval figures.77 As for the other anniversaries, the strategy was to create a national tradition dating to medieval times. As such, it was also a celebration of the historical narrative set up by Herchen and his colleagues. After the traumatic occupation of the Second World War, the nation celebrated its own survival with the ‘repatriation’ (as it was called) of John of Bohemia in 1946, fittingly on the six-hundredth anniversary of his death. The government used the fragile political situation in Germany to ‘reclaim’ the body of King John from German territory and transport it to the grand duchy’s capital, where large-scale festivities awaited it. The ceremony itself consisted of a strange mix of nationalist symbolism, military ritual and medieval-style display.78 Covered in the national colours of modern Luxembourg, the coffin was placed onto a caisson on entering the grand duchy and then driven with a large military escort to the capital. In every village, local notables paid tribute to the passing carriage, the church bells sounded and children stood by the

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roadside waving the national flag. After the procession had entered the capital it stopped for a minute in front of the Monument du Souvenir, as a mark of respect to the local soldiers fallen on the allied side in the First World War,79 then meandered through the city’s streets until it reached the centrally located Place Guillaume. Here the grand-ducal family, a large number of dignitaries and large crowds were awaiting the king’s coffin. This was laid on an elevated base, and a military ceremony started. Thereafter a religious service was performed at the cathedral and John was laid once more to rest in his pre-1793 sarcophagus. It stands in the crypt, close to the burial place of the grand-ducal family; over the entrance one can recognize John’s crest of vulture feathers over the Luxembourgian coat of arms. The ‘repatriation’ of John’s remains in 1946 employed all of the existing myths – and thus reinforced them. John’s own fondness for Luxembourg and its inhabitants was reiterated in order to stress his ‘national importance’. His assumed Francophile attitude was used in the negotiation with the French military representatives and emerged during the speeches. The prime minister stressed that ‘we brought home the ashes of John the Blind, as a couple of months ago we brought back those of our heroes of the last war’.80 The anti-German symbolism attached to him since the days of Frederick William IV of Prussia was also strengthened by presenting the ‘repatriation’ as a result of ‘victory’ over the eastern neighbour. As the historian Nicolas Margue put it: ‘It would have been unacceptable to us had he remained in foreign, especially enemy, soil.’81 By ‘reclaiming’ John’s remains, the nation also symbolically reclaimed a part of its ‘identity’ after all its suppression during the occupation. The ceremony above all constituted a moment where the nation could again celebrate itself after the war. As usual for these occasions, it was almost entirely centred on the monarchy, which had presided over the whole ceremony. Again it presented a medieval ruler as a precursor to the modern-day dynasty, adding to the latter’s legitimacy as both a ruling family and a form of government. Luxembourg’s 1963 ‘millennium’ celebrations of the country’s purported origins through the deeds of Count Sigefroid also came to represent its new beginning within the European Community. The early 1960s were a time of economic boom and Luxembourg’s newly developing political role as a leading light in the European Coal and Steel Community. The capital city had been chosen as the permanent seat of this new international body, which resulted in changes on not only a political, but also an architectural scale, at least within the city of Luxembourg. New large-scale buildings were needed and the authorities decided to develop an entirely new site at Kirchberg, a plateau to the east of the old centre.82 The commemoration took place in a setting that combined historical themes with the idea of a modern expansion. The scheduled events were very diverse in style.83 On the one hand, we find clear references to the

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ancient past, such as the unveiling of a millennium monument on the rock where the medieval castle stood.84 Similarly, a large exhibition on the country’s 1000 years of history was held from 30 June to 15 August.85 On the other hand, we find exaltations of the city’s new guise. The two major ceremonies in this respect were the inauguration of a large new theatre and the laying of the foundation stone for a long new bridge that connects the city centre with the new project on Kirchberg. The ‘new theatre’86 was, by the standard of the surrounding structures, a colossal building. At the same time it was used for quite a few of the celebration events. The bridge in turn had not taken much shape at this time, but the government had chosen the design because of its bold character and the prospect of international recognition.87 The general impression was a sense of living through a period of transition: Sigefroid’s historic city now opened itself to the new European future.

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Since the 1970s: beyond the nation state?

Since the 1970s national historiography has undergone severe questioning. The reflex for a large-scale national commemoration flared up once again in 1989, 50 years after the 1939 anniversary. But in retrospect this anniversary shows an odd combination. It appears as a last grand moment, when an older generation of historians and politicians encouraged the nation to celebrate itself. On a more scholarly level historiography had already long moved beyond the traditional approach. This process was nourished by a new generation of historians who were ever more firmly rooted in an international context. The models they had started to create in the 1980s reached mainstream status from the mid-1990s at the latest. While national politics had increasingly become enshrined within a European context, historiography started to destroy many of the myths that had dominated the previous centuries. The result was a rejection, at least on a scholarly level, of the historical narrative that had dominated the view of local history for more than 70 years. The most evident victim of this development was Count Sigefroid, who lost his standing as the founder of Luxembourg. Since the mid-1970s historians and archaeologists alike have refuted the grand visions of his castle, leaving him with little more than a fortified tower on the fringe of his territorial holdings.88 This went along with a rejection of the idea that Sigefroid had founded the city, or even the county of Luxembourg.89 At the same time other figures, such as the eleventh-century Count Conrad I, were tentatively promoted as having had a larger share in setting up local territorial structures.90 These new views rather undermined a larger, political instrumentalization of the count. Furthermore Sigefroid did not seem to fit a European mould in line with the general political trend. It is therefore neither a bust nor statue of the purported ‘founding father of Luxembourg’ Sigefroid that decorates the site of the medieval fortifications

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today, but a medallion of the politician Robert Schuman, one of the ‘founding fathers of Europe’. John of Bohemia, on the other hand, seemed malleable enough to fit within this new European paradigm. The year 1996 – the six-hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his death and the seven-hundredth of his birth – provided a pretext for a thorough reinvestigation of the count’s life and deeds. The anniversary was marked by an academic conference, many articles in the press and a popular exhibition a year later. The main publication of that year begins by mapping John’s itinerary,91 with the reader exposed to a European map covered with coloured dots from today’s Kaliningrad to Toulouse, and from Malines to Bologna, retracing the king’s travels. John appears to have transcended borders which have become permeable again; at least the book’s main title A European Itinerary (Un itinéraire européen) can be interpreted in this way despite referring to a geographic entity. Conveniently, the president of the European Commission at the time was the former Luxembourgian prime minister Jacques Santer, who was willing to provide the publication with a high-profile preface. Considering John’s position, Santer saw a particular aspect of the present reflected in the past: ‘[…] I would like to stress John’s politics of openness (politique d’ouverture) towards Central Europe, Bohemia, Poland and Hungary […]. At the time, the position of these countries within the concert of European states was without doubt.’92 The second sentence seems to imply that this had not been the case for a long time, but had now changed once again. By letting this statement follow the first sentence, Santer leaves the impression that John was indeed a precursor of modern-day European integration and enlargement. The inaugural session of the academic conference held that same year was attended by the grand duke. More importantly in this context, it also saw three speakers: a German, a French and a Luxembourgian historian. Again this seems to reflect an attempt to place John of Bohemia into a European context, as a link between the French- and German-speaking worlds with Luxembourg in between them.93 This also shows how the pro-European discourse is a successor to that of the Mischkultur.94 There is a risk, particularly in ‘small’ Luxembourg, of claiming a European past back into much earlier times. The same process can be observed in the case of another famous figure of the fourteenth century, Peter of Aspelt, archbishop of Mainz (1306–20). Stemming allegedly from the village of Aspelt in the south of today’s grand duchy, Peter made a high-flying ecclesiastical career in the early fourteenth-century Holy Roman Empire. As prince-elector, he was attributed the role of ‘kingmaker’ in the elections of Henry VII and Louis of Bavaria as Roman kings, and that of John as king of Bohemia. The Luxembourgian historians of the late nineteenth century interpreted his imperial politics as German and Luxembourgian in nature. During the 1930s he was represented as a great Luxembourgian patriot. Although he was presented as merely an

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agent of the interests of the Luxembourg dynasty in the years after the Second World War, his role changed once again when the European movement arose. Now his activities in Germany, Bohemia and Luxembourg made him ‘one of the great contributors (patrons) to the new Europe’. Moreover, Robert Schuman did not fail to take up the idea during the seven-hundredth anniversary of this ‘proto-European’ in 1953.95 In Luxembourg the Middle Ages have provided a strong focal point for national identification since the slow creation of national sentiment from the 1840s onward. The period offered a wealth of historical and legendary heroes for all those constitutive elements of national identity discourse. Rendered popular in the nineteenth century by the romantic current, these medieval figures were integrated into the historical discourse of the nation state and their symbolical content changed according to the political context. National historiography, which focuses on the nation state as the inevitable end point of historical evolution, developed in Luxembourg in the aftermath of political crises of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is therefore important to note that it does not predate the construction of the state, but that it is a late outcome of it. Its clear-cut division of ‘national history’ into three phases (the birth of the state in the Middle Ages, foreign domination and the rebirth of the state in the nineteenth century) is a teleological discourse that has prevailed until recently and has had a lasting impact on collective memory. Key elements of this narrative are the medieval origins, the union of the people and the dynasty, and the idea of a particularist identity in Luxembourg. The last was defined by the country’s intermediary cultural position between France and the Empire, as well as its opposition to its mighty neighbours, particularly Prussia and Germany. The creation of a collective memory also entailed obliviousness to other elements, such as the period between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries, and within the Middle Ages the role of some counts of Luxembourg and the Holy Roman emperors of the same dynasty, the latter considered too prone to assimilation by a pro-German perspective. Although in most cases historiography developed the initial models, its message was perpetuated by different media, such as the national ceremonies in the central decades of the twentieth century. Since these media are all the more powerful in a small state, popular memory rapidly took on board this instrumentalized view of the Middle Ages.

Notes 1. The authors would like to thank Sonja Kmec and Hérold Pettiau at the University of Luxembourg for their help with the translation of certain passages from French, and Andrew Brown at the University of Edinburgh for his useful comments on a draft version of this chapter.

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2. The speech was reprinted in the daily newspapers of the country and in a special brochure (see next note). 3. Gilbert Trausch, La signification historique de la date de 1839. Essai d’interprétation (Ministère d’Etat, Commission gouvernementale pour la commémoration du 150e anniversaire de l’Indépendance du Grand-Duché de Luxembourg, Luxembourg, 1989), 7. 4. Gilbert Trausch, ‘Un mot d’introduction’, in De l’Etat à la Nation 1839–1989. 150 Joer onofhängeg. Catalogue de l’exposition … 1989 (Luxembourg, 1989), 7. 5. Ilres-Tageblatt, ‘Umfrage zur Luxemburger Geschichte’, in Tageblatt, 18 Apr. 1989, p. 4. 6. His notable book is Richard de Wassebourg, Premier [et second] Volvme des Antiqvitez de la Gaule Belgique, Royaulme de France, Austrasie, & Lorraine. Avec l’origine des Duchez & Comtez, de l’anciene & moderne Brabant, Tõgre, Ardenne, Haynau, Mozelane, Lotreich, Flandre, Lorraine, Barrois, Luxembourg, Louuain, Vvaudemont, Iainuille, Namur, Chiny. Et autres Principautez extraites sous les Vies et Euesques de Verdvn, ancienne Cité d’icelle Gaule (Paris, 1549). 7. Jean d’Anly, ‘Recueil ou Abrégé de plusieurs histoires contenant les faictz & gestes des Princes d’Ardenne, speciallement des Ducs & Comtes de Luxembourg et Chinÿ auec d’aultres entremesléz, dignes de memoire & remarquables’, MS (1585) : ANL FD 100/125. For d’Anly see also Claude Loutsch, ‘Bertels et les historiens luxembourgeois du XVIe siècle’, Hémecht, 58 (2006), 461–82, at 478. 8. His main contribution to local historiography is Jean Bertels, Historia Luxemburgensis seu Commentarius (Luxembourg, 1605, repr. 1856). On Bertels see Paul Spang, ‘L’abbé Jean Bertels, 1544–1607. Quelques notes sur sa vie et son œuvre’, Hémecht, 16 (1964), 7–12; Loutsch, ‘Bertels et les historiens luxembourgeois’. 9. Eustache of Wiltheim, Kurzer und schlichter Bericht und Beschreibung des Hauses, Schlosses und Landes Luxemburg sammt dessen Fürsten und Herren Ursprung und Herkommen was sich auch bei deren Regierung im gemelten und anderen ihren Landschaften verlaufen und zugetragen, 1648, ed. and trans. Jacques Grob, Hémecht, 6 (1900); François Pierret, ‘Essay de l’Histoire de Luxembourg’: MS ANL A-X-34. 10. Tony Kellen, ‘Die luxemburgische Geschichtsschreibung: ein Rückblick und ein Ausblick’, in Jonghémecht. Blätter für heimatliches Schrift- und Volkstum, 7 (1933), 97–203, at 130–1. 11. Jean Bertholet, Histoire Ecclésiastique et Civile du Duché de Luxembourg et Comté de Chiny (8 vols, Luxembourg, 1741–43, repr. 1973 and 1997). Jean-Claude Muller, ‘Jean Bertholet SJ (1688–1755), umstrittener Historiker des Herzogtums Luxemburg’, Hémecht, 46 (1994), 93–102. The term ‘particularist’ is borrowed from Jo Tollebeek, who applied it to (other) historians in the Low Countries under the ancien régime: ‘Historical Representation and the Nation-State in Romantic Belgium, 1830–50’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 59 (1998), 329–53, at 333. 12. See Tom Verschaffel, ‘The Modernization of Historiography in 18th-Century Belgium’, History of European Ideas, 31 (2005), 135–46, at 139. 13. See Christian Calmes and Danielle Bossaert, Histoire du Grand-Duché de Luxembourg. De 1815 à nos jours (Luxembourg, 1995). 14. Jules Vannerus, ‘Le château de Vianden’, Les Cahiers Luxembourgeois, 8 (1931), 29–55, at 53–4. King-Grand Duke William I of Orange-Nassau was also the titular count of Vianden, a title he held as the successor of the counts of Nassau who had kept the castle since the early fourteenth century. 15. Le comte de Montalembert, ‘Du Vandalisme’, Revue des deux Mondes, Dec. 1838, p. 422, quoted by Joseph Goedert, De la Société archéologique à la Section historique de

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16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

33.

l’Institut Grand-Ducal. Tendances, méthodes et résultats du travail historique de 1845 à 1985 (Luxembourg, 1987), 42. As found in Jean Milmeister, Geschichte der Grafen von Vianden, 1090–1795 (Vianden, 2003), 287. Goedert, De la Société archéologique à la Section historique, 42. See Jean-Pierre Mäysz, Chronologische Übersicht der Geschichte der Stadt und des Großherzogtums Luxemburg. Nebst einer Topographie. Zum Gebrauche der vaterländischen Elementar-Schulen des Mittel-Unterrichts (Luxembourg, 1819), and Joseph Paquet, Die Hauptthatsachen der Luxemburger Geschichte, zur Grundlage bei seinem Unterrichte (Luxembourg, 1838, 2nd edn 1839). On Jean-Pierre Mäysz, see Joseph Sprunk, ‘J.-P. Maeysz père et fils’, in Biographie Nationale du Luxembourg, vol. 4 (Luxembourg, 1912), 416–56. Note that history was not a compulsory school subject at the time. ‘Die Geschichte des Luxemburger […] Landes muß demnächst das höchste Interesse haben für jeden, dem sein Vaterländchen theuer ist […]’: Paquet, Hauptthatsachen, 3. For John of Bohemia, see Michel Margue and Jean Schroeder (eds), Un itinéraire européen (Luxembourg, 1997), and Michel Pauly (ed.), Johann der Blinde. Graf von Luxemburg, König von Böhmen. 1296–1346. Tagungsband der 9es Journées lotharingiennes, 22–26. Oktober 1996 (Luxembourg, 1997). For John of Bohemia’s different burial sites see Paul Spang, ‘Die Grabstätten Johanns des Blinden’, Jahrbuch für westdeutsche Landesgeschichte, 19 (1993), 217–34. The factory was based in Mettlach on the river Saar, about 20 kilometres outside the grand duchy’s borders. The area had come under Prussian rule in 1815 at the same time as the Rhineland. Jean-François Boch-Buschmann, Jean l’Aveugle, Roi de Bohême, de 1795 à 1838 ([Luxembourg], ?1838). Pierre-Albert Lenz, Jean l’Aveugle, Roi de Bohême, Comte de Luxembourg, Marquis d’Arlon. Esquisse Biographique (Ghent, 1839). Ibid., 7. Goedert, De la Société archéologique à la Section historique, 45. Jacques Maas, ‘Johann der Blinde, emblematische Heldengestalt des luxemburgischen Nationalbewußtseins im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert’, in Pauly (ed.), Johann der Blinde, 597–622. Journal de la Ville et du Grand-Duché de Luxembourg, 24 Jan. 1844, p. 3. See Mathieu-Lambert Schrobilgen, Relation du voyage de Sa Majesté Guillaume II, Roi des Pays-Bas, Prince d’Orange-Nassau, Grand-Duc de Luxembourg, etc., etc., etc., dans le Grand-Duché, en Juin 1841 (Luxembourg, 1841), 6. Vannerus, ‘Le château de Vianden’, 55. See Courrier du Grand-Duché de Luxembourg, 17 July 1844, p. 3; Karl Fachinger, Wilhelm II., König der Niederlande, Großherzog von Luxemburg. Biographische Skizze nach den besten Quellen (Trier, 1855), preface (unpaginated); Jean Joris, Notice Biographique sur Guillaume II. Roi des Pays-Bas. Prince d’Orange-Nassau, Grand-Duc de Luxembourg, etc., etc., etc. (Luxembourg, 1877), 180. The original French name was Société pour la recherche et la conservation des monuments historiques dans le Grand-duché de Luxembourg; it later changed its name to Societé Archéologique and became in 1869 the Section historique de l’Institut Grand-Ducal. For the society’s history see Goedert, De la Société archéologique à la Section historique. Ibid., 47.

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34. They are included in many volumes of the Publications de la Section Historique de l’Institut grand-ducal. 35. On his life see Jules Mersch, ‘François-Xavier Würth-Paquet’, in Biographie Nationale, vol. 15 (Luxembourg, 1967), 299–330. 36. See François-Xavier Würth-Paquet, ‘Table Chronologique des Chartes et Diplômes relatifs à l’histoire de l’ancien Pays-Duché de Luxembourg et comté de Chiny [Règne d’Ermesinde]’, in Publications de la Section Historique 14 (Luxembourg, 1859), 66, and id. and Nicolas van Werveke, Cartulaire ou Recueil des Documents politiques et administratifs de la Ville de Luxembourg de 1244 à 1795 (Luxembourg, 1881), 3. 37. On Ermesinde as a lieu de mémoire, see Paul Margue, ‘L’image d’Ermesinde dans l’historiographie et dans la tradition populaire’, in Michel Margue (ed.), Ermesinde et l’affranchissement de la ville de Luxembourg. Etudes sur la femme, le pouvoir et la ville au XIIIe siècle (Luxembourg, 1994), 311–24, and Pit Péporté, ‘Ermesinde’, in Sonja Kmec et al. (eds), Lieux de mémoire au Luxembourg (Luxembourg, 2007), 61–6. 38. On the first members of the Société Archéologique and later Section Historique, see Paul Margue, ‘“Hommes studieux et amateurs de l’histoire nationale”: remarques sur nos historiens du XIXe siècle’, Hémecht, 58 (2006), 515–23. 39. Rendered a myth, the figure of John of Bohemia aroused for the first time a real popular excitement for medieval history: pupils and students peregrinated to his tomb in foreign lands, paintings presenting the king are interpreted as acts of patriotism and gratefulness of the Luxembourgian people for ‘their’ medieval ruler. 40. Jean Schoetter, Johann, Graf von Luxemburg und König von Böhmen (2 vols, Luxembourg, 1865). 41. See, for instance, Arthur Herchen, Manuel d’Histoire Nationale (Luxembourg, 1918), 37. On Herchen, see Christiane Huberty, ‘La vie politique du XIXe siècle dans l’historiographie: bilan et perspectives’, in Hémecht, 58 (2006), 549–61. 42. For a recent overview of Sigefroid, see Michel Margue, ‘Sigefroid’, in Nouvelle Biographie Nationale, vol. 3 (Brussels, 1994), 295–300. 43. The reconstruction by Werling can be found in the appendices of Jean-Pierre Biermann, Abrégé Historique de la Ville & Forteresse de Luxembourg (Luxembourg, 1890); for Arendt’s see Charles Arendt, Hypothetischer Plan der ehemaligen Schlossburg Lützelburg auf dem Bockfelsen zu Luxemburg (Luxembourg, 1895). 44. See for instance Franz Binsfeld and Jules Krüger, Melusin. Oper an drei Akten no enger National-So (Luxembourg, 1951), 25. 45. On the concept of the lieu de mémoire see Pierre Nora (ed.), Les lieux de mémoire (7 vols, Paris, 1984–92), especially the introduction to the first volume, republished in English as Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History’, in Representations, 26 (1989), 7–25. For lieux de mémoire in Luxembourg see Kmec et al. (eds), Lieux de mémoire au Luxembourg. 46. Daniel Spizzo, La nation luxembourgeoise. Genèse et structure d’une identité (Paris, 1995), 161–200. 47. Van Werveke’s stance may have also had a personal dimension. Apparently he had problems getting along with Arthur Herchen, arguably the most highly regarded historian among those of conservative attitudes. See Kellen, Die luxemburgische Geschichtsschreibung, 153–4, 159. 48. Spizzo, La nation luxembourgeoise, 161–200. 49. See Alfred Lefort, La Maison souveraine de Luxembourg (Reims/Luxembourg, 1902). 50. Claude D. Conter, ‘Mischkultur’, in Kmec et al. (eds), Lieux de mémoire au Luxembourg, 23–4.

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51. Gilbert Trausch, ‘La stratégie du faible. Le Luxembourg pendant la Première Guerre mondiale, 1914–19’, in id. (ed.), Le rôle et la place des petits pays en Europe au XXe siècle (Baden-Baden/Brussels, 2005), 45–176, at 56–8, 62–4, 100. 52. Ibid., 95–6. 53. The French rejected the Luxembourgian offer, and in consequence the grand duchy turned to its third neighbour to form the Belgium–Luxembourg Economic Union (UEBL) in 1921. 54. The monument is popularly known as the Gëlle Fra (Golden Lady), for what is its most recognizable feature. For more information, see Benoît Majerus, ‘Gëlle Fra’, in Kmec et al. (eds), Lieux de mémoire au Luxembourg, 291–6. 55. ‘ … leur grand héros national, Jean l’Aveugle, mort pour la France’ : Lucien Koenig, Pro Patria! Drama an 3 Akten vum Siggy vu Letzebuerg (Luxembourg, 1927), 32. 56. Ibid., 33. 57. Joseph Paquet, Die Geschichte des Luxemburger Landes (Luxembourg, 1872), 27, 29. 58. Joseph Meyers, Geschichte Luxemburgs (Luxembourg, 1939), 74. 59. Revue 2/18, 1946, p. 355. 60. Arthur Herchen, Manuel d’Histoire Nationale (Luxembourg, 1918; 9th edn 1972). 61. See Joseph Meyers, Geschichte Luxemburgs (Luxembourg, 1939; 9th edn 1967). 62. For a detailed analysis, see Guy Thewes, ‘Dominations étrangères et fidélité dynastique. Deux mythes de l’historiographie luxembourgeoise’, in: forum 199, 2000, pp. 39–43; Michel Margue, ‘Dominations étrangères’, in Kmec et al. (eds), Lieux de mémoire au Luxembourg, 29–34. 63. Jean Joris, 1867–72. Une page d’histoire du Grand-Duché de Luxembourg (Luxembourg, 1888), 4. 64. Arthur Herchen, Manuel, ed. Nicolas Margue and Joseph Meyers (Luxembourg, 1972), 5. 65. Meyers, Geschichte Luxemburgs, 47. 66. See Jean-Marie Yante, ‘Economie urbaine et politique princière dans le Luxembourg 1443–1506’, in Jean-Marie Cauchies (ed.), Les relations entre princes et villes aux XIVe–XVIe siècles: aspects politiques, économiques et sociaux. Rencontres de Gand (24 au 27 septembre 1992) (Neufchâtel, 1993), 107–29, at 121–7. 67. This appears at its clearest in a comment on Wenceslas of Luxembourg and Brabant found in the posthumous editions of Herchen’s textbook: ‘Wenceslas Ier, qui n’était ni empereur ni roi de Bohême, est à considérer comme le dernier souverain vraiment national du Luxembourg au moyen âge. Il est vrai qu’il était aussi duc de Brabant, mais le Brabant n’avait pas vis-à-vis du Luxembourg une importance telle qu’il a pu empêcher Wenceslas de se consacrer à son pays d’origine.’ The last sentence is supposed to set him in a stark contrast to his successors in the duchy of Luxembourg: Herchen, Manuel (1972 edn), 98. 68. The palace was conceived as the ‘Schatzkammer historischer Erinnerungen an die frühere Geschichte und Größe des Luxemburger Landes’, and thus had to show a selection of the great facts of national history. Consequently the Middle Ages are represented well, while the early modern period is neglected. One could see references to John of Bohemia and the knights who supposedly fell with him at Crécy, as well as Countess Ermesinde, Count Sigefroid and Melusine. See Nicolas Ries, ‘L’Art de la Renaissance’, in Paul Wurth-Majerus et al., Monographie du Palais Grand-ducal (Luxembourg, 1936), 1–8, at 6–7; Robert L. Philippart, ‘A la découverte d’un intérieur somptueux’, ibid., 198–9, 222, 231, 268, 274; Simone Weny, ‘De Palais’, in Kmec et al. (eds), Lieux de mémoire au Luxembourg, 185–90.

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69. The name John (Johann/Jean) cannot be found as a first name in the house of Bourbon-Parma, nor Nassau-Weilburg, nor even Orange-Nassau. As seen above, John of Bohemia himself most likely inherited the name from his maternal grandfather John of Brabant, since the name had never been used among the wider Limburg dynasty, nor even in the families of Ardenne or Namur. 70. ‘Le peuple désire beaucoup le nom de Jean, en souvenir de Jean de Luxembourg mort à la bataille de Crécy 1346’ : as found in Georges Hellinghausen, ‘Naissance et baptême du Prince Jean’, [1921] in Hémecht, 43 (1991), 85–207, at 187. 71. See, for instance, Luxemburger Wort, 6 Jan. 1921. 72. ‘Stadt Echternach’s siebente Jahrhundertfeier der Überreichung der Freiheitsurkunde’, Luxemburger Wort, 27 July 1936, p. 4. 73. A German summary of the speech had been published, ibid., pp. 4–5; for the original Luxembourgian version of his speech see ‘700. Jahrfeier in Echternach’, Luxemburger Wort, 28 July 1936, p. 4. 74. See also Henri Trauffler, ‘Aux origines de l’affranchissement de la ville de Luxembourg: Ermesinde et Echternach’, in Michel Margue (ed.), Ermesinde et l’affranchissement, 223–34, at 224–5. 75. This allusive link between Countess Ermesinde and Grand Duchess Charlotte was to survive within historiography. See, for instance, Gilbert Trausch, Ermesinde et Charlotte. Deux grandes souveraines du Luxembourg (Luxembourg, 1990). 76. Claude Wey, ‘Le Centenaire de l’Indépendance et sa commémoration en 1939’, Hémecht, 41 (1989), 29–53, at 29–31. 77. Ibid., 40. 78. For the programme of the festivities see ‘Am Sonntag 25. August 1946. Heimholung der Gebeine Johanns des Blinden’, Luxemburger Wort, 21 Sept. 1946, p. 2. 79. In fact the symbolism of the monument at this point was more complex. The Germans had torn down the golden lady at its top. The plinth was regarded as a scar from the German occupation until the rediscovery of the lost statue in the 1980s. See Majerus, ‘Gëlle Fra’, 291–6. 80. ‘Aujourd’hui, nous avons ramené dans la patrie les cendres de Jean l’Aveugle comme, il y a quelques mois, nous avons ramené ceux de nos héros de la Dernière Guerre’ : Pierre Dupont, quoted in Jacques Dollar, Jean l’Aveugle à Crécy (Luxembourg, 1991), 93. 81. ‘Il eût été inadmissible pour nous qu’il continuât à rester en terre étrangère, voire même ennemie’ : Nicolas Margue, ‘Jean de Luxembourg’, Luxemburger Wort, 27 Sept. 1946, p. 1. 82. See also Christian Dessouroux, ‘D’Rout Bréck’, in Kmec et al. (eds), Lieux de mémoire au Luxembourg, 297–302. 83. For the full programme see Ville de Luxembourg (ed.), Die Jahrtausendfeier der Stadt Luxemburg 1963. Offizieller Festkatalog (Luxembourg, 1963). 84. The ‘monument’ consists of a stone wall with the chronogram: SAECLA DECEM REPLENS LEGAT VRBS VESTIGIA PRISCA 963–1963 (Having completed ten centuries, the city shall keep its venerable vestiges 963–1963). 85. See the exhibition catalogue: Jean-Pierre J. Koltz et al., Luxembourg. Histoire d’une Ville Millénaire (Luxembourg, 1963). 86. Locals still refer to the building as the ‘new theatre’, even though the official title was ‘Théâtre Municipal de Luxembourg’, which has been changed recently after some major renovation works into ‘Grand Théâtre de Luxembourg’. 87. Dessouroux, ‘D’Rout Bréck’, 297.

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88. Jean-Pierre Koltz, Baugeschichte der Stadt und Festung Luxemburg mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der kriegsgeschichtlichen Ereignisse, vol. 1 (3rd edn, Luxembourg, 1972), 51–2, 54–5. For a more recent example, see the description of the castle in John Zimmer (ed.), Aux origines de la Ville de Luxembourg (Luxembourg, 2002). 89. See here especially Michel Margue and Michel Pauly, ‘Saint-Michel et le premier siècle de la ville de Luxembourg’, Hémecht, 39 (1987), 5–83. 90. Michel Margue, ‘Du château à la ville: les origines’, in Gilbert Trausch (ed.), La Ville de Luxembourg (Antwerp, 1994), 47–59, at 55–7. 91. Margue and Schroeder (eds), Un itinéraire européen, 12–13. 92. Jacques Santer, ‘Préface’, ibid., 5. 93. Peter Moraw, ‘Das Reich im mittelalterlichen Europa’, in Bernd Schneidmüller and Stefan Weinfurter (eds), Heilig, Römisch, Deutsch. Das Reich im mittelalterlichen Europa (Dresden, 2006), 440–50, at 449–50. 94. Conter, ‘Mischkultur’, 23–4. 95. See the catalogue of the exhibition: 750 Joerfeier vum Péiter vun Uespelt (Aspelt, 2003), 16–17. See also Pierre d’Aspelt 1953. 7e centenaire de sa naissance (Luxembourg, 1953).

8 An Era of Grandeur. The Middle Ages in Belgian National Historiography, 1830–1914 Jo Tollebeek

1 Introduction The Revolution which turned Belgium into an independent state in 1830 marked a fresh turning point in a history full of rapid changes of regime. In 1792, the ‘Southern Netherlands’, which had previously been under Austrian control, were incorporated into the French Republic together with the princebishopric of Liège. After the fall of Napoleon, these same areas were added in 1815 to the Dutch Republic, which had in the meantime been transformed into a kingdom; they now formed part of the ‘United Kingdom of the Netherlands’, which was governed from The Hague. Barely 15 years later, this union too came to an end: a series of riots in Brussels led to a split between north and south, between the Netherlands, now halved in size, and the new state of ‘Belgium’. In the legitimation of this new state, references to the medieval past – a period when nothing resembling an independent, unified state in the modern, nineteenth-century sense had existed – played an important role, as they did in many other European countries. This essay examines that theme in detail. The central point of interest will be not the multifaceted response to and predilection for the medieval past in nineteenth-century Belgium, medievalism tout court,1 but the ‘use’ of the Middle Ages in national historiography. The focus will be on the period 1830–1914, from the declaration of independence to the eve of the Great War, when reflection on the nation’s history and the place of the Middle Ages in it took a new turn. In Belgium, just as in other countries such as Switzerland, the use of the Middle Ages to legitimate the new state relied on a paradox constructed by historians: the state of 1830 was small, but ‘its’ medieval past was incontestably magnificent. That raises the question: Which Middle Ages were these? What images of this medieval past that was regarded as so magnificent were evoked, and what developments can be discerned in them? And, pursuing the 113

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same line of enquiry further, how did these images help create and reinforce a national identity, and what form was that identity given? In other words, we are concerned here with associations: Which Middle Ages were identified as characteristic of the nation, how did the (putative) national identity receive medieval ‘foundations’ and what feelings and ambitions tightened the link between the medieval past and the new state?

2

National historiography

The new state was carried along by an enthusiastic patriotism, forged by the Revolution of 1830. This – romantically coloured – love of the fatherland was reinforced by harmony on the ideological front. Catholics and liberals, the two dominant ideological groups, had already come to terms with each other before 1830, in their opposition to the regime of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. After 1830 this ‘unionism’ persisted: the Belgian motto was L’union fait la force. Patriotism and unionism were expressed in the euphoria over the gaining of independence. Nobody doubted the new state’s right to exist. Nevertheless, there was a good deal of scepticism about the viability of the young Belgium. Abroad especially, many thought that the Belgian state was simply the result of the great European powers’ desire not to endanger peace, and that the Belgian national identity was therefore une nationalité de convention. The concept of nationhood, it was believed, only existed in Belgium in the rhetoric of a few functionaries; it would quickly become apparent that it could not prop up the new state. Even the new king, Leopold I, was sceptical. As late as 1859 he wrote to one of his confidants: ‘Belgium has no nationality, and in view of the character of its inhabitants it will never be able to have one either.’2 This scepticism was countered in two complementary ways. On the one hand, the Belgian patriotic elite emphasized that the new state was a forwardlooking power. They presented it as a progressive state, whose modernity was demonstrated not just in its political institutions and its cultural dynamism, but also on the economic front: Belgium was an industrial power whose vigour was soon apparent from its fast-expanding rail network. On the other hand, though, the elite hoped to convince the sceptics who did not share its patriotic faith by explaining the new state’s rationale on historical grounds: Belgium was a young state, but also an old nation. Its past guaranteed its viability, it was claimed. For this reason, the political authorities – led by the minister for the interior – encouraged the development of a broad historical culture. In historical parades, monumental history paintings and historical novels and plays, attention was continually focused on the patriotic past.3 All media were used (although there were also exceptions: the first postage stamp with a historical theme was only issued in Belgium in 1914, later than in other European countries such as Portugal, Greece and Germany4).

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At the same time as this broad historical culture, a national historiography flourished. Its roots lay in the second half of the eighteenth century, when a historiography of the whole of the ‘Southern Netherlands’ had emerged under the Austrian regime. The Revolution of 1830 reinforced it and gave it a romantic character. Between 1839, when the Dutch king, William I, finally dropped his opposition to Belgian independence, and 1850, one Histoire de la Belgique after another was published. The Ghent-based professor Henri Moke, his Leuven colleague Jan-Baptist David, their Liège counterpart Adolphe Borgnet, the wellknown man of letters Hendrik Conscience: all wrote histories with a literary character, in which the nation’s past was stirringly evoked.5 Their accounts were primarily intended for the Belgian public, which needed to know its own history. Without that knowledge, argued the prolific writer and semi-official national historian Théodore Juste in 1840 in his Histoire de Belgique, the people would remain ‘un étranger dans sa patrie’: a stranger in its own land.6 The national historians taught that that land was a venerable one. They traced the Belgians back to the ‘Ancient Belgians’, the remote ancestors who had been called the bravest of the Gauls by Caesar. Had not the Nervii and the Eburones resisted the Romans? This had been the beginning of a true national history.7 In this perspective, the 1830 uprising was not just a revolution: it was in fact a restoration, or, better still, a renaissance. In 1830 the ‘hour of awakening’ of the Belgian people had struck. The nation had risen phoenix-like out of its own ashes and assumed its own political form. The historians therefore taught that the Belgians had not just an ancient history, but their own specific history. This was far from obvious, given that historians, journalists and politicians alike also presented the nation’s history as a succession of foreign regimes. The Belgian people, it was constantly said, had endured subjugation for many centuries, first under the Spanish and the Austrians, and later under the French and the Dutch. The myth (for myth it was: before the French invasion, the population had never regarded the legitimate princes – the princes naturels – as occupiers) became widespread. In 1860 it was officially endorsed. In the new Brabançonne, the national anthem, the words appeared: ‘After centuries of slavery, the Belgian, arising from his grave, has regained his name, his rights and his flag through his courage.’8 At the same time, it was repeatedly claimed that Belgium had always been Europe’s battlefield. But all those occupations and battles had not robbed the nation of its character. Belgium had always remained Belgian, Juste concluded laconically.9 Historiography thus rooted the state of 1830 in the past and legitimated it by doing so. It conferred prestige by making it clear that the young Belgium was not the artificial product of the great powers’ diplomatic whims, but the political manifestation of an ancient – one might almost say natural – national consciousness that united all Belgians. The jury which in 1856 issued the five-yearly

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prize for national history instituted by the Belgian Royal Academy understood the importance of national historiography very well: ‘Its task is to reassert in the mind of the world and in the mind of an element of the Belgians our place among the nations of Europe and our claims to a separate nationality.’10 The Middle Ages gained a noteworthy place in the national view of history which was developed between 1830 and 1850. As the Kunst- en Letterblad noted as early as 1840: ‘The Middle Ages are currently the specific topic of general interest and investigation.’11 There was a considerable difference from the Netherlands in this respect. There, little attention was paid to the Middle Ages. State archivist R.C. Bakhuizen van den Brink customarily rejected articles on medieval history which were submitted to the journal De Gids with the comment that the national memory was more attached to the geus, the rebellious Dutchman who had fought for the country’s freedom in the sixteenth century, than to the perfect knight.12 In Belgium, by contrast, the Middle Ages stood for national grandeur. Even in the second half of the eighteenth century, the period had already attracted considerable interest from historians.13 This appraisal was not a self-evident one: ‘Belgium’ had not formed an entity in the Middle Ages, after all. The area that would later become the state of 1830 had been a patchwork of small principalities in which only gradual expansion could be observed, and which in feudal terms remained dependent partly on the French king and partly on the German emperor: the county of Flanders, the duchy of Brabant, the county of Hainaut, the prince-bishopric of Liège, and so on. It was a heterogeneous set of principalities, in which particularist sentiments had predominated and which could therefore only with difficulty be regarded as a precursor of the state of 1830. The nineteenth-century historians recognized this fragmentation as a historiographical problem, just as they perceived the continual changes of regime in the nation’s history as jeopardizing the continuity of the historical account. How could unity – a Belgian unity – be brought to the geographical diversity of the Middle Ages? Or to put it even more baldly: How could the national history be more than a simple juxtaposition of the histories of the old principalities? This was a difficult question. Only in the late fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries was the fragmentation brought to an end, through the action of the dukes of Burgundy. Burgundian territorial and institutional unification had ushered in a new period, and the Middle Ages were over. For the nineteenth-century historians, who were also impressed by the Burgundian pomp and circumstance, unification represented a step forward. Despite this, they continued to adopt a hesitant stance towards the dukes. The policies of the Burgundians – who were, it should not be forgotten, French rulers (with suitably French customs, it was noted) – sat ill with the old liberties. Philip the Good and Charles the Bold in particular were accused of despotism. This led to unpopularity. The end of the Middle Ages was not celebrated.14

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3 Three associations The Middle Ages occupied a striking position in national historiography during the first few decades after independence because it was a period that could be linked with the most important contemporary aspirations. The Middle Ages were associated with the striving for national autonomy, with religious devotion and with the yearning for freedom. This led to three powerful images of the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages were firstly associated with an ongoing struggle for independence. The ‘Belgian’ principalities – so it was claimed in nineteenth-century national historiography – had originally been threatened by great powers, but had shown great determination to maintain or regain their autonomy. Two military episodes from the Middle Ages were used to illustrate this. They acquired the same status in the national view of history as, for example, the battle of Kosovo Polje (1389) in the Serbian collective memory. In the new Belgium too, the national identity was constructed around military events.15 The battle of Woeringen (1288) marked the end of the Limburg War of Succession. The duke of Brabant and the count of Gelre faced each other, each with his own allies. The combat ended with victory for Duke John I of Brabant, as a result of which the duchy of Limburg was added to Brabant and the duke of Brabant became one of the most powerful rulers in the region. However, in the later patriotic historical account, the battle was described not as a conflict in which ‘Belgians’ had opposed each other (the Luxembourgers, for example, had supported Gelre against Brabant). Instead, ‘Woeringen’ became the battle in which the strong duchy of Brabant had ensured the nation’s independence from Germany. The battle was therefore worthy of commemoration in word and image. Nicaise de Keyser, one of the country’s leading history painters, produced a dramatic depiction of the episode in 1840.16 However, the battle of Courtrai or the battle of the Golden Spurs (1302) gained a far more important place in the collective memory. In it, the count of Flanders had taken on his feudal lord, the king of France. Quite unexpectedly, the infantry of the militias of Count Gwijde of Dampierre and his supporters had defeated the French cavalry army. The status gained by this victory in the national memory was if possible even greater than that of ‘Woeringen’: the victory of 1288 had ensured independence from Germany, but ‘1302’ had done the same with respect to France, in nineteenth-century eyes a far more dangerous neighbour. In the state of 1830 this led to an extensive cult, one which, incidentally, also built on an older cult.17 Antiquarians and historians, painters, poets and playwrights put the heroes of ‘1302’ in the spotlight once again. De Keyser painted the battle as early as 1836. Two years later Conscience published the historical novel De Leeuw van Vlaanderen (The Lion of Flanders), which brought the battle of the Golden Spurs enormous fame.18

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The importance attached to the victory at Courtrai for the consolidation of national autonomy also meant that the medieval county of Flanders came to be regarded as the cornerstone of the later Belgium.19 Of the six parts of the Histoire de Flandre published by Baron Joseph Kervyn de Lettenhove between 1847 and 1850, five were therefore devoted to the Middle Ages. The fact that the medieval county was eventually subsumed in a larger entity and thus disappeared was not seen as a matter for regret by the baron from Bruges. However, he stressed that Belgium could only survive if the power of the historical county was transferred to the young state.20 This view was also shared by the up-and-coming Flemish Movement, which called for the recognition of the Dutch language and culture in the officially French-speaking Belgium. The Flemish loyalists pointed eagerly to the battle of the Golden Spurs. They wrote poems and songs about the battle, named their associations and journals after the Flemish warriors (or weapons) of past times and even inaugurated a society which used a system of year-numbering starting in 1302. They called on contemporary Flemings to remember the ‘sacred examples’ of their ancestors – the warriors of the medieval county of Flanders – and to shake off their lethargy and impotence. This did not mean that the Flemish loyalists opposed the new state with their Golden Spurs cult. On the contrary, the supporters of the incipient Flemish Movement shared in the enthusiasm for the Belgian state. Their emphasis on the ethnic and linguistic duality of contemporary Belgium was in fact directed at distinguishing the new state from France, which was inclined towards assimilation. Conscience followed his novel, which became a sacred text for the Flemish loyalists, with a patriotic Geschiedenis van België (History of Belgium) a few years later. Thus Flemish consciousness and loyalty to the Belgian fatherland were not mutually exclusive. In both cases, France was the ancestral enemy, and the recollection of ‘1302’ was intended to contribute to vigilance with regard to that powerful neighbour. It was a matter of national integrity. Thus the Middle Ages of the battles of Woeringen and the Golden Spurs stood for the desire to preserve this integrity. The resonance of both military episodes in the nineteenth century pointed to the determination of the state of 1830 to safeguard its independence from its large neighbours to the east and the west. Small but determined, ran the message. The Middle Ages also propagated a second message in the nation’s view of its history: that of devotion to the ancestral religious faith. The focus here was directed on the ‘holy wars’ of the crusades. The event which had triggered these crusades was clear: Jerusalem, long a place of pilgrimage for Christians, had been ‘desecrated’ by ‘Saracens’ or ‘Muslims’. In the struggle to recover Jerusalem, it was stressed by the authors of Histoires de la Belgique in the first few decades after 1830, the ‘Belgians’ had played a crucial role. They had been the pioneers of the crusades and had thus altered the course of world history. This notion constituted a counterpart to

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the idea of God’s ‘chosen people’ which was prominent elsewhere in Europe – in countries such as Switzerland or the Netherlands – in the national view of history. The Belgians could not boast chosen status of this kind, but they had not hesitated to drop everything when it was learnt that the Holy Land was in danger. Led by God (Gesta Dei per …), they had set out for Jerusalem. No land had given the crusaders more soldiers than Belgium. The historical culture which developed after 1830 evoked the crusades. In the historical parade which formed part of the great national festivities in Brussels in 1856, both the province of Luxembourg and the province of Hainaut chose the crusades as the subject of their float.21 These episodes in the nation’s history were also given extensive coverage in textbooks.22 Among other subjects, historians focused on Baldwin IX of Flanders, who had occupied Constantinople during the fourth crusade – in the early thirteenth century – and had been crowned Latin emperor in 1204. But it was especially the first crusade (1096–9) which attracted considerable interest in national historiography. After all, was it not Peter the Hermit who had instigated this crusade against ‘the Turks’? And had not that fiery preacher been born in the Belgian town of Huy (although it was claimed in Amiens that he was Picardian)? However, Peter the Hermit was an ambiguous figure: the undisciplined troop he led, the defeat at the hands of ‘the Turks’, his demoralization and his failed attempt to flee – these things made him hard to commemorate.23 Things were much clearer with Godfrey of Bouillon. Godfrey of Bouillon, duke of Lower Lotharingia, was seen as the ‘leader’ of the first crusade. A legend quickly sprang up around his name in which valour and piety were intermingled: Godfrey had been a ‘Christian Hercules’, who had fearlessly carried out a divine mission, had shown almost superhuman strength in the process and had ultimately refused to wear a golden crown in the place where Christ had been made to wear a crown of thorns. This idealized picture was not just romanticized in the nineteenth century; it was also nationalized: Godfrey now became a Belgian.24 In 1848, an equestrian statue was unveiled in the presence of the king and queen at the Place Royale in Brussels, near the Royal Palace and the park where the Dutch troops had been defeated during the Revolution of 1830. It was not the first statue intended to recall a glorious past, nor would it be the last. A royal decree of 1835 which encouraged the installation of statues led to a veritable ‘statuomania’. But the statue of Godfrey remained exceptional: in him, honour was paid to ‘the first king of the Belgians’. It is therefore not surprising that when Louis Gallait decorated the semicircular senate chamber with 15 portraits of patriotic heroes from 1865, Godfrey of Bouillon was among those selected. Gallait included the crusader in the series of five warriors (alongside a series of five legislators and a series of five patrons of literature and the arts). In 1873, he supplemented the 15 historical

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portraits with two large knightly portraits to decorate the Royal Palace. Godfrey was one of the two figures depicted.25 Thus the man said to embody the crusading spirit was included in the patriotic pantheon. He had earned his place in the national gallery of heroes because of his exceptional merits, but also because he had incarnated the virtues of the national ‘race’.26 The emphasis in the nation’s historical culture and historiography on the crusades and the role of the ‘Belgians’ in them showed the patriotic Middle Ages in a Christian rather than a military light. This reflected the Catholics’ desire to present contemporary Belgium as a truly religious community. But in unionist Belgium, their ideological opponents could also identify with this message. At the unveiling of the statue of Godfrey of Bouillon, the liberal minister of the interior hailed him as a pioneer in ‘the history of Christian civilization’, adding that ‘for this reason alone he brought his country lasting fame’.27 For these liberals, the Middle Ages could also be associated with a third ambition: the struggle for freedom. The fourteenth century in particular was remembered for the emancipation that the municipalities had experienced at that time and for the way in which they had doggedly defended it. Juste described it as a period in which the spirit of freedom – and equality – had manifested itself in an ongoing struggle between the élément féodal and the élément démocratique. The latter element had triumphed in ‘Belgium’, just as it had in northern Italy, the Swiss mountains and a number of German cities: here too, to borrow the phrase of Bakhuizen van den Brink, the perfect knight was thus not the model. For Juste, the county of Flanders in particular, with its free cities such as Bruges, Ghent and Ypres, thus became ‘the cradle of democracy’.28 The Flemish cities had – at the count’s expense – developed into powerful, prosperous centres. In nineteenth-century Belgium they embodied a glorious past. The monuments which recalled that past, such as the Belfry in Bruges, were cherished.29 The focus on the free medieval municipalities reflected the liberal desire to present Belgium as a state in which freedom was the highest good. For the liberal ideologists it was also safer to trace back their own freedom, as enshrined in the constitution of 1831, to the ‘ancient Belgian liberties’ than to the French Revolution of 1789.30 It was not the revolutionaries of the late eighteenth century, but Jacob van Artevelde – the liberal counterpart to Godfrey of Bouillon – who was therefore treated as an exemplary figure.31 Between 1338 and 1345, when he was murdered, he had led a rebellious Ghent against the Flemish count and the French king, in an alliance with England. In the eighteenth century, his actions were still regarded as an expression of a chaotic period.32 That negative judgement did not disappear in independent Belgium: for example, it was echoed in the Histoire de la Belgique of Moke, in which Artevelde’s authority was called anarchic and partisan.33 But the iconography quickly took a positive turn, and Artevelde became ‘the uncrowned king of Flanders’, both popular leader and wise man, courageous and independent. He was said to have been a Belgian William Tell.34

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This led to a veritable Artevelde cult in the 1840s. Historical painters depicted the highlights of his rule. Conscience published a historical novel about his life in 1849. In the same year, in a historical parade in Ghent, an effigy of him was carried which showed him as a loyal champion of a sacred cause, with one hand swearing to defend the privileges of Ghent and the Flemish municipalities, and the other hand on his heart. Four years previously, a large bronze bust had already been installed in Ghent Town Hall. It was not just the liberals who extolled him either. His renown was also great in Catholic circles. Kervyn de Lettenhove concluded in his Histoire de Flandre that Artevelde’s rule, despite its short duration, dominated the whole national memory of the Middle Ages, so great had his genius been.35 Not everyone was convinced of that genius, however: to his critics, Artevelde remained a dangerous revolutionary. The Catholic politician Etienne de Gerlache, a respected holder of high office, wrote in one of his historical essays that Artevelde belonged to the type of ‘capable demagogues found in all periods who have occupied their master’s place to rule amid the parties’. The result was only too familiar: ‘The parties are dominated through terror alone. That is the story of all revolutions.’36 De Gerlache was writing in the mid-nineteenth century, after 1848, at a time of growing calls for further political and social emancipation. From this perspective, Artevelde too was increasingly democratized, by both the opponents and the champions of this development. For the socialists, he became a heroic tribune of the people. In 1863, he was given a statue at the Ghent Vrijdagmarkt, one of the holy places of the Flemish workers’ movement. It was unveiled with a mass spectacle, but proved controversial.37 Thus the Middle Ages carried a threefold message in the national view of history which took root in the early decades after 1830. The new state would unwaveringly defend its newly won independence against any external threat, remained devoted to the Christian faith of its ancestors and stood for freedom, which had also brought so much wealth to the cities during the medieval period. It was a message to which everyone – provided it was not formulated too radically, at any rate – could subscribe. The image of the Middle Ages reinforced contemporary unity.

4 Chronicles and professorships The associations that the national Medieval Ages evoked continually directed attention at the period from the eleventh to the fourteenth century, a relatively small portion of the Middle Ages. Before this period, the Middle Ages were considered to have been ‘dark’. This does not mean that that long period did not also contain valuable elements for the national view of history. There was Clovis, who had introduced Christianity to ‘these parts’ in the early sixth century and was therefore held in high esteem in Catholic circles, but who

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nonetheless failed to acquire a firm place in the national self-image.38 There were the great abbeys which had made the seventh and eighth centuries the siècles des saints. And of course there was Charlemagne, who was claimed for the Belgian fatherland, was naturally included in Gallait’s pantheon and also had a statue dedicated to him in 1868 (in Liège).39 But darkness was the dominant feature. The account tracing the power of the counts of Flanders back to the title that the so-called forestiers or ‘forest lords’ had been granted by the king of France in the seventh century had already been exposed as a legend in the eighteenth century.40 Without that aetiological account, what remained – up to the end of the eleventh century – was primarily barbarity. The incursions of the Franks had meant the loss of civilization and religion, the Merovingians had been insolent, bloated rulers, the savage Normans had pillaged and murdered. Finally, the feudalism of the tenth and eleventh centuries had changed little: violence and insecurity continued to prevail. There was little to be said about this period. So what could be recounted about those episodes – such as the battle of Woeringen – which were regarded as interesting? Again, not much: there was too little source material. This changed: the remarkable position gained by the Middle Ages in the national view of history led to it becoming an important theme in the historical research which was initiated in the new state. That research may have been fuelled by romantic impulses, but more importantly it filled in the gaps and blanks in the romantic accounts. In the process, an elaborate history-related infrastructure arose: the archival system was organized under the leadership of Louis-Prosper Gachard, a Commission for National Biography was set up in 1845, and a year later there followed a Royal Commission for the Publication of the Ancient Laws and Decrees of Belgium. For knowledge of medieval history, this was a crucial development. The cornerstone of this new infrastructure was the Commission Royale d’Histoire. This commission was founded in 1834, succeeding earlier initiatives under the Austrian regime and during the period of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. In 1827 a commission had been set up, with a pronounced bias towards the southern part of the kingdom, whose task it was to issue previously unpublished chronicles which were important for the country’s history. The Belgian commission was given the same assignment: it was to publish sources for the knowledge of the nation’s past. From 1850, Gachard was the driving force behind it.41 From the time of its formation, the Royal Historical Commission concentrated on non-archival material relating to the Middle Ages. In this respect it followed the commission of 1827, which had started its work by editing the late thirteenth-century rhyming chronicle of Jan van Heelu (in which the battle of Woeringen was recounted). The Belgian commission’s continuation along the same lines was implicit in its original name: in the royal decree

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announcing its establishment, it was still known as the ‘commission instituted for the purpose of seeking out and publishing unpublished Belgian chronicles’. The publication of chronicles – medieval chronicles – was thus its first task. Its first plan of work and achievements confirmed this: the commission’s members laboured on the editions of the Chronique rimée by Philippe Mouskès, a Corpus Chronicorum Flandriae, and the Brabantse Yeesten, the chronicle of the dukes of Brabant by Edmond van Dynter. The monumental editions of medieval chronicles carried on appearing in succession. New manuscripts were sought with great dedication, and new texts about the fatherland’s glorious past deciphered with considerable zeal. From the mid-nineteenth century, at Gachard’s prompting, the focus of activity shifted. The editions were no longer primarily of medieval chronicles, but of archive material relating to sixteenth-century history, such as the correspondence of Charles V and Pope Adrian VI. However, this was not a complete break with the past: archive material was also published relating to medieval history.42 Besides, it was not just at national level that interest remained fixed on the Middle Ages in the collection and publication of source material. Local, regional and provincial historical societies, motivated by pride in their own history, also attached considerable importance to the medieval past and the chronicles that recounted it. For example, the Société d’Emulation pour l’Histoire et les Antiquités de la Flandre Occidentale which was formed in Bruges in 1838 left this matter in no doubt: Article 1 of the society’s statutes stated that its purpose was to identify, analyse and publish medieval texts. Again, in practice the medieval texts in question were narrative sources. In the first few years, for example, a number of monastic chronicles were published. The Middle Ages were also a prime topic of interest in the journal that the society published until late in the nineteenth century.43 The publishing policy of the Royal Historical Commission and of the ‘lower’ societies illustrated the importance that was assigned in the historical infrastructure to the Middle Ages. A second example demonstrates the same point: chairs of history at the universities. In the first few decades after 1830 the universities were definitely not as important for the study of history as they would become in the final quarter of the nineteenth century; the archives were initially no less important. But both at the two state universities – Ghent and Liège – and at the two free universities – Catholic Leuven and liberal Brussels – history was taught. A law of 1835 stipulated what had to be taught: ancient history, medieval history, modern history and the history of Belgium. But this did not mean that each university appointed four professors. The subjects were combined. The most prestigious combination was that of medieval and national history, which occurred at both the state universities. Later commentators judged the quality of these professors’ work harshly: too much romantic narrative and not enough erudition, ran the verdict.44

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But there were exceptions. The German Leopold-August Warnkoenig, who was appointed at the University of Ghent in 1831 (having previously taught in Liège and Leuven) and lectured in legal history there among other subjects, published the first part of a Flandrische Staats- und Rechtsgeschichte, based on thorough archive research, in 1835. The German medievalist’s mastery of historical source criticism, which had taken off in his homeland a decade earlier, was superior to that of his Belgian colleagues. A dispute with the less critical Gachard led to his retirement and departure to his country of origin. ConstantPhilippe Serrure, who taught medieval and national history in Ghent, also had high standards, as was demonstrated by the editions of medieval texts for which he was responsible. Both Warnkoenig and Serrure were not just prominent figures in the academic study of history: they were also antiquarians, and as such active in the definitive forum of the antiquarian movement in Belgium, the Messager des Sciences Historiques. This journal, likewise published in Ghent, contained no narrative contributions, but overviews and analyses of the material remnants of the country’s past and of the institutions that had existed in its past. Here too, the same conclusion could be drawn: the Messager mainly contained articles about the medieval period.45 The Middle Ages, it may further be concluded, were interesting; they therefore deserved to be the subject of constant investigation.

5 In political conflict The predilection for the Middle Ages, as a period in which the roots could be traced of attachment to national independence, ancestral faith and freedom, and the associated prestige of the period in the research that was carried out in the new historical infrastructure, fitted in with the Belgian national framework that was created in 1830. As time went by, that framework came under pressure. From the late 1850s onwards, national unity gave way to ideological conflict. Catholics and liberals opposed one another on fundamental issues such as the subsidization of education. Social tensions also gradually increased. History was involved in these political antagonisms. The view of history of the romantic generations, which had been subscribed to universally, gave way to varying historical images. In this pluralism, the Middle Ages were likewise subjected to differing evaluations by the different parties. On the Catholic side, during the decades after 1850, and especially after 1870, the Middle Ages were presented as a period in which a harmonious society had existed. The close communal ties of that time were contrasted with the ‘liberal individualism’ and ‘socialist anarchy’ of the present day. The leading propagandist of this line of thinking on the historiographical front was the Liège-based professor Godefroid Kurth.46 Kurth was famed in academic circles for his efforts to bring historical research and teaching at the universities to a

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higher level, among other means by introducing foreign models. His medievalism sought to be a scientific medievalism. At the same time, however, Kurth revealed himself to be a militant Catholic. In the 1870s and 1880s, that meant opting for conservatism and corporatism. In the 1890s, he then turned to a more progressive, but equally militant Christian democracy. Kurth’s treatment of the Middle Ages was no isolated phenomenon. It was consistent with the philosophical and artistic attempts on the Catholic side to give society a ‘medieval’ form once again, and in a sense provided the foundation for those efforts. In philosophy, this striving presented itself under the name ‘neo-Thomism’. In architecture and the arts, it was the neoGothic style.47 This had emerged shortly after independence, encouraged by the National Commission for the Conservation of Monuments which had been established in 1835.48 At that time it had focused on the restoration of medieval town halls, cathedrals, city walls and so on, because it regarded these as the monumental foundations of the nation. From around 1865, however, it became a movement which regarded historic buildings as ‘trophies in the struggle between clerics and liberals’. It drew inspiration from Eugène Violletle-Duc, but did not follow the French architect and architecture historian in his view of the Middle Ages as a period of secularization. On the contrary, Gothic now became un style chrétien, to be used by those who wanted to create a truly Christian society.49 In this way, the neo-Gothic movement – whose foremost champion was Jean-Baptiste Bethune – became a missionary movement with its own infrastructure: its own association (the Guild of St Thomas and St Luke), its own educational institutions (the St Luke colleges), its own chair in Christian Archaeology at the University of Leuven, and its own networks (such as the network based around the architect, professor and politician Joris Helleputte).50 As a result, it was able to cover a broad field.51 However, the fact that the neo-Gothic was not yet an exclusively Catholic possession by the end of the nineteenth century was demonstrated by what was perhaps the greatest neo-Gothic project in Belgium: the recreation of Bruges around 1900 as a ‘medieval’ city.52 In that project, there was cooperation across the political boundaries to ‘restore’ the city to its medieval glory, not just in order to enhance its beauty, but also in order to stimulate the growing tourist trade. In the process, the distinction between old and new was blurred. Around 150 private houses were ‘reconstructed’ in their presumed original Gothic style with government subsidies in order to achieve stylistic unity. In addition, a number of large ‘restoration projects’ were initiated. The best known of these related to St John’s Hospital, which dated back to the twelfth century; it was fitted out as a museum for the ‘Flemish primitive’ artist Memling, and so became the destination of a veritable pilgrimage.53 Bruges thus turned into a ‘neo-Gothic shrine’. At the same time, symbolist painters and writers rediscovered the city, to which they felt drawn by its quiet, mystical atmosphere.

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On the Catholic side, this neo-Gothicism was rooted in a broad vision of history. In this vision, an important place was assigned to the Middle Ages, not just as an architectural and artistic style which could be drawn on once again, but as the sacred source of modern civilization. Explaining this was a task that a historian such as Kurth was eager to take on.54 In Les origines de la civilisation moderne, a stylishly written revised version of his Liège lectures which was published in 1886, he emphasized the close link (deux termes équivalents55) between the concepts of civilization and Christianity. For him, modern civilization had originated not in the sixteenth or eighteenth century, during the Renaissance or the Enlightenment, but at the point when Christianity had left its stamp on history. For the time being, Kurth confined himself to the first eight centuries of this process. He described how heathen (and hence unsound) ancient civilization had emerged in the West and survived in Byzantium, how the Germanic world was converted, and how the Church had accomplished its civilizing mission in the early Middle Ages. The climax and finishing-point of his account was the imperial coronation of Charlemagne by Pope Leo III, which symbolized the final breakthrough of modern civilization. In 1900, Kurth pursued this line further. In L’Eglise aux tournants de l’histoire, he surveyed the entire history of civilization. Central to this synthesis was the notion that the Church had remained faithful to its mission across the centuries and had repeatedly succeeded in overcoming the obstacles thrown in its path, for example during the time of the neo-pagan Renaissance. Kurth and his Catholic readers thus approached the Middle Ages differently from Juste and his romantic colleagues. They were revisionists. There could be no clearer illustration of this than the address delivered by Kurth in 1897 under the title Qu’est-ce que le moyen âge. In it, he called for the traditional historiographical terminology to be dropped. The ‘Middle Ages’ were – contrary to what their name suggested – not the long ‘night of a thousand years’ between the brilliant Greco-Roman world on the one hand and the Renaissance, which reached back to ancient civilization, on the other; they were not an immense parenthèse or zone de ténèbres.56 The real ‘Middle Ages’ had followed later, during the Renaissance, which was to be regarded as an intermezzo between the birth and the coming to maturity of modern civilization. ‘Maturity’, because Kurth was no traditionalist who sought a return to the Middle Ages. He wanted to be its heir and at the same time to bring it to perfection. Thus for Catholics from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the Middle Ages became a historical ideal without close ties to the country’s national history. Their liberal adversaries took a quite different view of the matter: for them, the Middle Ages were a period of ecclesiastical dominance and inquisition, of dogmatism and oppression, which had left deep marks on the country’s history. This is not to say that the Middle Ages could have no further positive significance on the liberal side. The recollection of the freedom of the urban

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bourgeoisie in the fourteenth century lived on in particular, among other publications, in the successful Le siècle des Artevelde – a more programmatic title would scarcely have been possible – published in 1879 by the Brussels professor Léon Vanderkindere. The parallel with the nineteenth century was readily drawn. Overall, though, the picture was a negative one. Superstition, childishness, abuse of power, corruption, nepotism: the list of invectives was extensive. Present-day issues were never forgotten for long: Rome, argued the liberal ideologists fairly bluntly, remained a dangerous power apparatus even today. The liberals therefore had little sympathy for the admirers of the Middle Ages. As early as the mid-1840s, they had opposed in parliament the granting of a subsidy to André van Hasselt for his Histoire des croisés belges. The term ‘obscurantism’ was used in the debate.57 Rather than the fourteenth century (or indeed the Middle Ages at all), the liberal historians were now preoccupied by the sixteenth century, the century in which the Netherlands had rebelled against the tyrannical Spanish regime and its bigoted Roman ally.58 In 1870s liberal Belgium, the geus supplanted the city-dweller (just as the neo-Gothic in architecture was supplanted by the so-called Flemish Renaissance59). There was something paradoxical about this. After all, the sixteenth-century conflict was lost: Philip II, Alva, Rome and the other tyrannical powers had triumphed. More important for the liberal historians, however, was the fact that the impulse had been given at this time for spiritual protest, the start of a tolerant tradition, which the liberals also wished to embody in the nineteenth century. They set up statues to the sixteenthcentury national heroes and reconsidered the main episodes of the rebellion. Their Catholic critics had an answer ready for them: the rebels had been nothing more than traitors. They remained ensconced in the Middle Ages. The political conflict and the passions that sometimes ran high in the process thus led to a point where the Middle Ages were far less uncontroversial in the national view of history than had formerly been the case. They yielded material for party identities, but far less so for national identity in the final quarter of the nineteenth century.

6 A medieval trait d’union In addition to the ideological and social antagonisms, the country’s unity was also jeopardized towards the end of the nineteenth century by growing ‘communitarian’ tensions: in political rhetoric, the Belgians were increasingly supplanted by the Flemish and the Walloons. This development had occurred little by little. Initially, the Flemish Movement had demanded recognition for Dutch language and culture. But political demands were also linked to this claim, for language laws that would safeguard the equality of Flemings and Walloons. Around 1860, the Flemish Movement had radicalized. From then

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on, increasing numbers of Flemish loyalists were fuelled by an autonomous Flemish consciousness which gradually emerged. Although this only assumed anti-Belgian forms among a small group, it was strong enough to be distinct from mainstream Belgian-national consciousness. Tellingly, the term ‘Flanders’ was now no longer used purely to designate the medieval county or the two provinces in the north of the country (East and West Flanders), but also – at least in Flemish loyalist and literary circles – to confer a unity on the entire northern, Dutch-speaking half of Belgium.60 This ‘modern’ Flanders also gradually created its own past. It re-examined its own heroes and episodes from a history which was deemed to be splendid. To begin with, there was a plural national consciousness in many cases. The major festivities organized in Damme in 1860 to mark the inauguration of a statue of the medieval poet Jacob van Maerlant, for example, were undeniably a Belgian patriotic event. But in the speeches made on the occasion, Maerlant’s Flemishness was emphasized, and it was the richness of Flemish culture that was celebrated in every possible way.61 There was a complex interplay of themes: the local pride of the little city (Maerlant had written some of his most important works in Damme), pride in Flemish literary culture and old Belgian patriotism all informed the celebrations. In other instances, the tensions were more pronounced, however. Among other examples, this was true of the jubilee celebrations for the battle of the Golden Spurs. The cult which arose around ‘1302’ was initially a Belgian patriotic affair. Even the first few generations of Flemish loyalists who commemorated the battle of the Golden Spurs had at the same time shown loyalty to the Belgian fatherland. Over time, however, there arose a multiplicity of incompatible images of the battle. Ideological and social tensions were primarily responsible for this. They led to disagreement during the jubilees and hence to separate celebrations. When a statue of Jan Breydel and Pieter de Coninck, the Flemish heroes of ‘1302’, was unveiled at the Grand’ Place in Bruges in 1887, there were two celebrations. A quarter of a century later, when the sixhundredth anniversary of the battle was commemorated in Courtrai in 1902, any consensus seemed to have broken down completely: a Flemish celebration was followed by additional liberal, Catholic and socialist events. On this occasion, ‘communitarian’ differences also had an impact. The battle of the Golden Spurs was increasingly used by radical Flemish loyalists as an anti-Belgian symbol. ‘1302’ could now also be understood as a summons to fight against the Belgian state with its French cultural bias, which had ‘subjugated the Flemish’. This development was to continue apace after the First World War. By then, the Walloon Movement had likewise acquired its own history. It evoked the heroic resistance offered by the ‘Six Hundred Men of Franchimont’ to the duke of Burgundy in 1468.62 It was clear that not just the country but its (medieval) history was becoming divided.

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In the Histoire de Belgique published by Henri Pirenne from 1900, a new national view of history was presented, in which the tension between Flemings and Walloons was dissipated and the Middle Ages were again assigned an important role.63 This was not the first time Pirenne had shown his exceptional talents.64 He had studied in Liège and at French and German universities, had started his academic career in Liège and was then appointed professor at Ghent in 1886, where among other subjects he taught medieval history. He had acquired a considerable reputation in a short time with a series of studies of the history of medieval towns.65 Now, at the request of his German colleague Karl Lamprecht, he ventured upon a synthesis of Belgian national history. He did so in a context of political and social tension, yet also in an atmosphere of expansion: Belgium had recently become a colonial power, the country was experiencing new economic growth, and the Brussels bourgeoisie was characterized by cultural dynamism. This gave the country self-confidence. The Histoire de Belgique was the expression of this self-confidence, of a new Belgian nationalism. Pirenne had set out the programmatic foundation of the Histoire de Belgique in La nation belge. In this lecture given in 1899 at the invitation of the minister of the interior and education, he had considered the factors which differentiated Belgian history from other national histories. He had referred to the exceptional position of the country, which had emerged from the Middle Frankish kingdom of Lothar I and was hence une fusion de romanisme et de germanisme, to the fact that national unity had arisen before political unity, which meant that Burgundian unification could not be seen as a coincidental or artificial creation, and to the pax belgica, the long-standing peaceful coexistence of different ethnic groups. These three factors, he had concluded, had given the Belgian people – un peuple de frontière, but also un peuple de milieu – its unique history and hence too its raison d’être.66 In the first volume of the French edition of the Histoire de Belgique – the book was originally published in German in 1899 – Pirenne summarized these ideas in a brief preface. He wrote that he wished to show in this volume the origins of Belgium’s uninterrupted progress through the ages. He did not intend to appeal to the concept of a timeless Belgian ‘national genius’ (an âme belge): that would be romantic mystification, which could not satisfy his objective mind. Instead, the origins of contemporary Belgium must be sought in the historical process itself, and to be more precise in the Middle Ages, when, long before political unification, a cultural and social unity had emerged which justified a ‘history of a civilization’ such as the Histoire de Belgique. Of what, then, did this unity consist? Pirenne was unable to point to any geographical, ethnic or political substrate: medieval ‘Belgium’ had had no natural boundaries, had been largely bilingual and was split into an odd assortment of principalities and bishoprics. But that was precisely the point: the population

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of ‘this land of contrasts’ had been subject to the influence of its neighbours like no other. Belgium had been the battlefield of Europe (Pirenne too subscribed to this view), but also the forum in which the intellectual culture of the Latin world had encountered that of the Germanic world. It had been the economic entrepôt of north and south, the crossroads between the French kingdom and the German empire. As a result, a Mischkultur had emerged in this central zone, a ‘syncretism’ of the Germanic and Romanic civilizations. This was the feature which caused Pirenne to regard the principalities – bilingual since time immemorial – of Liège, Brabant and above all Flanders as archetypal early instances of the Belgium that had fought for its independence in 1830. But it also explained the paradox of Belgium’s national distinctiveness: the country’s originality lay in its internationalism, in its openness to foreign influences, which it had succeeded in assimilating time and time again.67 All of this meant that Belgium in the Middle Ages had become a truly European land, européenne dans son fond. Pirenne sought to make this clear to his readers with a range of expressions. Belgium, he wrote, had become ‘un “microcosme” de l’Europe occidentale’ in the Middle Ages, an expression that he borrowed from Lamprecht, who had described medieval Flanders and Brabant in the third part of his Deutsche Geschichte (1895) as ‘ein Mikrokosmos gleichsam des gesamten Landes zwischen Rhein und Seine’.68 Again, Belgium’s unique history had made it an entente cordiale, ‘a rich and harmonious combination of the best elements of Franco-German civilization’. Or again, Belgium in the Middle Ages had become the ‘hyphen’, the trait d’union, between the two great peoples who had contributed most to modern civilization. Could such a country come to grief from the tensions between two population groups – Flemings and Walloons – who in a sense might be regarded as representatives of the cultures which had brought the land together? It was with this powerful and optimistic picture – the Middle Ages as the cradle of the European mission and of the country’s national unity – that Belgium entered the Great War. For Pirenne, who as late as 1912 had still been referring to his great good fortune as one who had never had to contend with life’s adversities, the war came as a shock: one of his sons fell in battle, his German friends and colleagues (including Lamprecht) became war propagandists, and in 1916 he himself was deported to Germany. He returned at the end of the war as a national hero. He remained the national historian par excellence. But collaboration with the German occupiers during the war by part of the Flemish Movement had exacerbated ‘communitarian’ tensions. It was difficult to talk in terms of a pax belgica any longer, and the idea that Belgium had been a trait d’union between the French and German civilizations since the Middle Ages had lost its meaning now that any contact with the Germans had become morally impossible. But Pirenne did not turn away from the Middle Ages. On the contrary, he broadened the scope of his research from national to

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general history, and considered the origins of the Middle Ages. The result was his Mahomet et Charlemagne, published posthumously in 1937.69 The book’s thesis was controversial. But the debate no longer related to the grandeur of the Belgian nation state.

Notes 1. For other European countries compare inter alios Jürgen Voss, Das Mittelalter im historischen Denken Frankreichs. Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalterbegriffes und der Mittelalterbewertung von der zweiten Hälfte des 16. bis zur Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1972); Henk B. Teunis and L. van Tongerloo (eds), Middeleeuwen tussen Erasmus en heden. Bundel aangeboden aan prof. dr. F.W.N. Hugenholtz bij zijn afscheid als hoogleraar aan de Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht (Amsterdam/Dieren, 1986); Adrianus P.J. Miltelburg, Naar de gesteldheid dier tyden. Middeleeuwen en mediëvistiek in Nederland in de negentiende eeuw. Vier studies (Hilversum, 1991); and René E.V. Stuip and Cornelis Vellekoop (eds), De Middeleeuwen in de negentiende eeuw (Hilversum, 1996). 2. Jean Stengers, ‘La Belgique de 1830, une “nationalité de convention”?’, in Hervé Hasquin (ed.), Histoire et historiens depuis 1380 en Belgique, theme issue of Revue de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1981, nos 1–2, 7–9. 3. See inter alios Tom Verschaffel, ‘Leren sterven voor het vaderland. Historische drama’s in het negentiende-eeuwse België’, Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 113 (1998), 145–76. 4. Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Mass-producing Traditions. Europe, 1870–1914’, in David Boswell and Jessica Evans (eds), Representing the Nation: a Reader. Histories, Heritage and Museums (London/New York, 1999), 70. 5. See inter alios Reginald de Schryver, ‘Tussen literatuur en wetenschap: tweeëntwintig maal Belgische geschiedenis, 1782–1872’, Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 87 (1972), 396–410, and Evert Peeters, Het labyrint van het verleden. Natie, vrijheid en geweld in de Belgische geschiedschrijving, 1787–1850 (Leuven, 2003). 6. Théodore Juste, Histoire de Belgique (Brussels [1840]) 2. On Juste: Jo Tollebeek, ‘Juste, Théodore’, in Nouvelle biographie nationale (Brussels, 2005), viii.202–4. 7. See Ivan Wijnens, ‘O dierbaar Oud-België. De mythe van de Oude Belgen in de lange negentiende eeuw’ (unpubl. licentiaat diss., Leuven, 1999), and Tom Verschaffel, ‘Tongeren: het standbeeld van Ambiorix. De roem van de Oude Belgen’, in Jo Tollebeek et al. (eds), België, een parcours van herinnering, vol. 1: Plaatsen van geschiedenis en expansie (Amsterdam, 2008), 34–45. 8. Jean Stengers, ‘Le mythe des dominations étrangères dans l’historiographie belge’, Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Filologie en Geschiedenis, 59 (1981), 382–401. 9. Théodore Juste, Histoire de Belgique depuis les temps primitifs jusqu’à nos jours (Brussels, n.d.), i.4. 10. Quoted in K. van Sweevelt, ‘Een geschiedenis over de geschiedenis van België. De vijfjaarlijkse prijs voor vaderlandse geschiedenis uitgereikt door de Koninklijke Academie van België, 1845–1965’ (unpubl. licentiaat diss., Leuven, 1991), 2. 11. Quoted in Fernand Vercauteren, Cent ans d’histoire nationale en Belgique (Brussels, 1959), i.33. 12. Quoted in Catrien Santing, ‘“De Middeleeuwen ontsluierd”: de beoefening van de middeleeuwse geschiedenis in Nederland’, in ead. (ed.), De Geschiedenis van de Middeleeuwen aan de Groningse Universiteit, 1614–1939 (Hilversum, 1997), 161.

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13. Tom Verschaffel, De hoed en de hond. Geschiedschrijving in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden 1715–94 (Hilversum, 1998), 319–44. 14. Ph. Carlier, ‘Contribution à l’étude de l’unification bourguignonne dans l’historiographie nationale belge de 1830 à 1914’, Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Nieuwste Geschiedenis, 16 (1985), 1–24. 15. Cf. Nikolaus Buschmann and Dieter Langewiesche (eds), Der Krieg in den Gründungsmythen europäischer Nationen und der USA (Frankfurt/New York, 2003). For Kosovo, see Marko Šuica’s chapter in this volume. 16. Wim Blockmans, ‘Die Schlacht von Worringen im Selbstverständnis der Niederländer und Belgier’, Blätter für deutsche Landesgeschichte, 125 (1989), 99–107. 17. Detailed treatments of this cult include Véronique Lambert, ‘De Guldensporenslag van fait-divers tot ankerpunt van de Vlaamse identiteit, 1302–1838. De natievormende functionaliteit van historiografische mythen’, Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 115 (2000), 365–91; Gevert H. Nörtemann, Im Spiegelkabinet der Historie. Der Mythos der Schlacht von Kortrijk und die Erfindung Flanderns im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 2002); Paul Trio et al. (eds), Omtrent 1302 (Leuven, 2002); Jo Tollebeek, ‘De cultus van 1302. Twee eeuwen herinneringen’, in Raoul C. van Caenegem (ed.), 1302. Feiten en mythen van de Guldensporenslag (Antwerp, 2002), 194–239, 294–6; and Andreas Stynen, Een geheugen in fragmenten. Heilige plaatsen van de Vlaamse Beweging (Tielt, 2005), 27–53 and passim. 18. See inter alios Edward Vanhoute (ed.), De ene Leeuw is de andere niet. Zeven maal De Leeuw van Vlaenderen herlezen (Antwerp, 2002), and Jo Tollebeek, ‘Consciences niemandsland. De Leeuw van Vlaenderen, de natie en de geschiedenis’, in Pierre Delsaerdt and Marcus de Schepper (eds), Letters in de boeken. Liber amicorum Ludo Simons (Kapellen, 2004), 329–38. 19. See Reginald de Schryver, ‘Vlaams bewustzijn en interpretatie van het Belgische verleden. Vragen rond wederzijdse beïnvloeding’, Handelingen der Koninklijke Zuidnederlandse Maatschappij voor Taal- en Letterkunde en Geschiedenis, 42 (1988), 73–92. 20. Peeters, Het labyrint van het verleden, 105. 21. Tom Verschaffel, Beeld en geschiedenis. Het Belgische en Vlaamse verleden in de romantische boekillustraties (Turnhout, 1987), 185–7. 22. Jean-Jacques Hoebanx, ‘L‘histoire de Belgique dans quelques manuels scolaires’, in Hasquin (ed.), Histoire et historiens depuis 1830, 61–80. 23. For the interest in the first crusade, see inter alios Denis Diagre, ‘La Première Croisade dans les histoires populaires belges des XIXe et XXe siècles’, in Le Temps des Croisades (Brussels, 1996), 173–8. For the historical image of Peter the Hermit: Hiltrud Wallenborn, ‘Pieter de Kluizenaar of een “Belg” die Europa de beschaving brengt’, in Anne Morelli (ed.), De grote mythen uit de geschiedenis van België, Vlaanderen en Wallonië (Berchem, 1996), 55–64. 24. See Georges Despy, ‘Godefroid de Bouillon, mythes et réalités’, Bulletin de la Classe des Lettres et des Sciences morales et politiques de l’Académie Royale de Belgique, 5th ser., 71 (1985), 249–75; Isabelle Wanson, ‘Godfried van Bouillon’, in Morelli (ed.), De grote mythen, 47–53; and Alain Dierkens, ‘Brussel, het standbeeld van Godfried van Bouillon. De geest van de kruistocht’, in Tollebeek (ed.), België, een parcours van herinnering, i.46–57. 25. Serge Le Bailly de Tilleghem, Louis Gallait, 1810–87. La glorie d’un romantique (Brussels, 1987), 216–25.

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26. On the pantheon idea in Belgium: Jo Tollebeek and Tom Verschaffel, ‘Group Portraits with National Heroes: the Pantheon as an Historical Genre in Nineteenth-Century Belgium’, National Identities, 6 (2004), 91–106. 27. Quoted in Wanson, ‘Godfried van Bouillon’, 51. 28. Juste, Histoire de Belgique, 141–2. 29. Marc Boone, ‘Brugge: het belfort. De macht en de rijkdom van de middeleeuwse steden’, in Tollebeek (ed.), België, een parcours van herinnering, i.82–95. 30. Lode Wils, ‘Het beroep op “de oude Belgische vrijheden” in het midden van de 19de eeuw’, Standen en Landen, 32 (1964), 113–22. Compare Jo Tollebeek, ‘De Franse Revolutie in de negentiende eeuw. Over de politiek als spiegelpaleis van de geschiedenis’, in Henk de Smaele and J. Tollebeek (eds), Politieke representatie (Leuven, 2002), 171–86. 31. On Artevelde’s reputation in the nineteenth century: Henry S. Lucas, ‘The Sources and Literature on Jacob van Artevelde’, Speculum, 8 (1933), 125–49; David Nicholas, The van Arteveldes of Ghent. The Varieties of Vendetta and the Hero in History (New York, 1988); and Sophie Rottiers, ‘Jacob van Artevelde, de Belgische Willem Tell?’, in: Morelli (ed.), De grote mythen, 77–93. 32. Verschaffel, De hoed en de hond, 337–9. 33. Henri G. Moke, Histoire de la Belgique (Ghent, 1839), 209. 34. On the reputation of William Tell in Switzerland itself, see inter alios: Guy P. Marchal, ‘Die Schweizer und ihr Mittelalter. Missbrauch der Geschichte?’, Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte, 55 (2005), 131–48, and id., Schweizer Gebrauchsgeschichte. Geschichtsbilder, Mythenbildung und nationale Identität (Basel, 2006), 21–171. 35. Joseph Kervyn de Lettenhove, Histoire de Flandre (Bruges, 1853), ii.358–9. 36. Etienne de Gerlache, Essais sur les grandes époques de notre histoire nationale et mélanges politiques et littéraires (Brussels, 1859), 128. 37. Gita Deneckere, ‘De resurrectie van Jacob van Artevelde in de 19de-eeuwse Gentse arbeidersbeweging. Over het verlangen naar “de grote man”’, Handelingen der Maatschappij voor Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde te Gent, 50 (1996), 155–87; Marc Boone, ‘Gent: Vrijdagmarkt. De macht van de massa’, in Wim Blockmans and Herman Pleij (eds), Plaatsen van herinnering, vol. 1: Nederland van prehistorie tot Beeldenstorm (Amsterdam, 2007), 240–51. 38. Alain Dierkens, ‘“Onze koningen”, van Clovis tot Karel de Grote’, in Morelli (ed.), De grote mythen, 37–46. 39. See Ronald van Kesteren, Het verlangen naar de Middeleeuwen. De verbeelding van een historische passie (Amsterdam, 2004), 41–120, esp. 102–6. 40. Verschaffel, De hoed en de hond, 327–30. 41. See, above all, Henri Pirenne, ‘La Commission Royale d’Histoire depuis sa fondation’, in La Commission Royale d’Histoire, 1834–1934. Livre jubilaire composé à l’occasion du centième anniversaire de sa fondation (Brussels, 1934), 9–68. 42. See ‘Publications de la Commission Royale d’Histoire’, ibid., 357–70. 43. Sven Vrielinck and Romain van Eenoo, IJveren voor geschiedenis. 150 jaar Genootschap voor Geschiedenis ‘Société d’Emulation’ te Brugge (Bruges, 1989), 8, 18–20, 104–5. 44. Walter Prevenier, ‘De mislukte lente van de eruditie in België na 1830’, in Jo Tollebeek et al. (eds), De lectuur van het verleden. Opstellen over de geschiedenis van de geschiedschrijving aangeboden aan Reginald de Schryver (Leuven, 1998), 263–72; Walter Prevenier, ‘Inleiding’, in Van Romantiek naar Wetenschap: een hobbelig parcours. Een eeuw mediëvisten aan de Gentse universiteit, 1817–1914 (Ghent, 2005), pp. v–ix.

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45. Jo Tollebeek, ‘Geschiedenis en oudheidkunde in de negentiende eeuw. De Messager des Sciences historiques, 1823–96’, Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 113 (1998), 23–55. 46. For biographical details: Paul Gérin, ‘Kurth, Godefroid’, in: Nouvelle biographie nationale, viii.212–19. 47. For a global overview: Jean van Cleven et al., Neogotiek in België (Tielt, 1994). 48. Herman Stynen, De onvoltooid verleden tijd. Een geschiedenis van de monumenten- en landschapszorg in België, 1835–1940 (Brussels, 1998). 49. See the clear outline in Jan de Maeyer, ‘België: de ziel van de natie. Achtergronden en functie van ideologische concepten in de negentiende-eeuwse monumentenzorg’, in id. et al. (eds), Negentiende-eeuwse restauratiepraktijk en actuele monumentenzorg (Leuven, 1999), 71–85. On the ‘reinterpretation’ of Viollet-le-Duc: Jean van Cleven, ‘Viollet le Duc et la Belgique’, in Actes du Colloque international Viollet le Duc (Paris, 1980–82), 295–304. 50. See, among others, Jan de Maeyer et al. (eds), Joris Helleputte. Architect en politicus 1852–1925 (2 vols, Leuven, 1998), and the review article by Benoît Mihail, ‘Le goût du Moyen Age au XIXe siècle: réflexions autour d’un livre sur Georges Helleputte, 1852–1925’, Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Filologie en Geschiedenis, 78 (2000), 535–65. 51. See inter alios Anna Bergmans, Middeleeuwse muurschilderingen in de 19de eeuw. Studie en inventaris van middeleeuwse muurschilderingen in Belgische kerken (Leuven, 1998), and Thomas Coomans and Jan de Maeyer (eds), The Revival of Medieval Illumination. Nineteenth-Century Belgian Manuscripts and Illuminations from a European Perspective (Leuven, 2007). 52. Inter alios: Jo Tollebeek, ‘Rousseau en Khnopff. Notities over het verleden in Brugge’, in Omtrent Brugge. Indrukken en gedachten (Oostkamp, 1999), 130–5; Marc Boone, ‘Van Heilig Bloed en Blanke Zwanen. Omgaan met het middeleeuwse verleden in het Brugge van de 19de en 20ste eeuw, een historiografische wandeling’, in Jan Art and Luc François (eds), Docendo discimus. Liber amicorum Romain van Eenoo (Ghent, 1999), i.117–32; and Lori van Biervliet, ‘Is Brugge zot, ziek of uniek?’, in Anna Bergmans et al., Zorg geboden? Neostijlen in de negentiende eeuw (Leuven, 2002), 118–29. 53. Hilde Lobelle-Caluwé, ‘Brugge: het Sint-Janshospitaal. Het oudste hospitaal en Memlingmuseum’, in Blockmans and Pleij (eds), Plaatsen van herinnering, i.144–55. 54. See Jo Tollebeek, ‘“Omdat de doden in ons leven.” Belgische en Nederlandse katholieke historici en de perceptie van maatschappelijke vernieuwing’, in id., De ijkmeesters. Opstellen over de geschiedschrijving in Nederland en België (Amsterdam, 1994), 157–78. 55. Godefroid Kurth, Les origines de la civilisation moderne (Leuven/Paris, 1886), i, p. xxxiv. 56. Godefroid Kurth, Qu’est-ce que le moyen âge (Brussels, 1898), 4–5. 57. Vercauteren, Cent ans d’histoire nationale, i.170. 58. For more detail, see Jo Tollebeek, Writing the Inquisition in Europe and America. The Correspondence between Henry Charles Lea and Paul Fredericq (Brussels, 2004), pp. xxxii–xxxvii. 59. Among other things, note the changes in the competitions organized by the Belgian Royal Academy: Ellen van Impe, ‘Architectural Historiography in Belgium, 1830–1914’ (unpubl. diss., Leuven, 2008), 53–4. 60. Reginald de Schryver, ‘Het vroege gebruik van “Vlaanderen” in zijn moderne betekenis’, Handelingen van de Koninklijke Zuidnederlandse Maatschappij voor Taal- en Letterkunde en Geschiedenis, 41 (1987), 45–54. 61. Marc Ryckaert, ‘Damme. Van bruisende havenstad tot schone slaapster’, in Blockmans and Pleij (eds), Plaatsen van herinnering, i.134–5.

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62. Sophie Rottiers, ‘De eer van de Zeshonderd Franchimontezen’, in Morelli (ed.), De grote mythen, 65–75. 63. See Jo Tollebeek, ‘Het gevoelige punt van Europa. Huizinga, Pirenne en de plaats van het vaderland’, in id., De ekster en de kooi. Nieuwe opstellen over de geschiedschrijving (Amsterdam, 1996), 225–47. 64. For biographical details, see inter alios: Bryce D. Lyon, Henri Pirenne. A Biographical and Intellectual Study (Ghent, 1974); Bunna Ebels-Hoving, ‘Henri Pirenne, 1862–1935’, in Arend H. Huussen jr. et al. (eds), Historici van de twintigste eeuw (Utrecht etc., 1981), 26–40; and Marc Boone, ‘Henri Pirenne, 1862–1935. Godfather van de Gentse historische school?’, Handelingen der Maatschappij voor Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde te Gent, new ser., 60 (2006), 3–19. 65. See Raymond van Uytven, ‘Les origines des villes dans les anciens Pays-Bas (jusque vers 1300)’, and Walter Prevenier, ‘Henri Pirenne et les villes des anciens Pays-Bas au bas moyen âge (XIVe–XVe siècles)’, in La fortune historiographique des thèses d’Henri Pirenne, special issue of Archief- en Bibliotheekwezen in België, 28 (1986), 13–26 and 27–50, and Adriaan Verhulst, ‘L’historiographie concernant l’origine des villes dans les anciens Pays-Bas depuis la mort de Henri Pirenne 1935’, in Henri Pirenne. De la cité de Liège à la ville de Gand, special issue Cahiers de Clio, 86 (1986), 107–16. 66. Henri Pirenne, La nation belge (4th edn, n.p., 1899). 67. Henri Pirenne, Histoire de Belgique (Brussels, 1900), i, pp. vii–xii. 68. Karl Lamprecht, Deutsche Geschichte (Berlin, 1895), iii.3, 190. 69. See Alfred F. Havighurst (ed.), The Pirenne Thesis. Analysis, Criticism and Revision (Boston, 1958); Bryce D. Lyon, The Origins of the Middle Ages. Pirenne’s Challenge to Gibbon (New York, 1972); Richard Hodges and David Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe. Archaeology and the Pirenne Thesis (London, 1983); and Bryce D. Lyon, ‘Le débat historique sur la fin du monde antique et le début du moyen âge’, in La naissance de l’Europe (Milan, 1987), 135–45.

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Part III Balkans

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9 To Whom Does Byzantium Belong? Greeks, Turks and the Present of the Medieval Balkans* Johannes Niehoff-Panagiotidis

1 In 2004, on 1 May, Hungary and other countries of so-called ‘east-central Europe’ entered the European Union. The preparative steps to this event had been accompanied by intense discussion concerning such organizations as the ‘European House’ and questions pertaining to a ‘common’ European history, etc., since the fall of the Iron Curtain. The very concept of east-central Europe – Ostmitteleuropa – as a historical region is connected with this process, and my former university – the Central European University in Budapest – played a major role in its conceptualization. But during the same time, the 1990s, another process took place, a process that formed, or was perceived as, the negative background to the discussions about east-central Europe: the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, the wars in Bosnia and Croatia, and then, in 1999, in Kosovo. In those years I lived in Germany, where a vivid discussion was going on concerning the Balkans, the role of the Balkans in Europe, and especially the position of Greece in that context. Just to remind you: Greece claimed the name of the Republic of Macedonia to be illegitimate and a Greek privilege. The then minister of foreign affairs of Greece, A. Samaras, who was soon to leave the Mitsotakis government to found his own right-wing party called the Political Spring (Politiki Anoixi), proposed to the Greek parliament the division of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia into various spheres of influence, claiming the south for ‘historical reasons’ for Greece. Another war seemed highly possible. Those were different times, indeed. On 1 January 2008 two countries from the south-eastern periphery of Europe, Romania and Bulgaria, entered the European Union. Croatia may follow soon. Turkey’s membership is very much the subject of debate at the moment (chiefly in Germany);1 and after the Thessaloniki accord of 2003, the possibility of Albania, Macedonia and Serbia becoming members of the EU at 139

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some point in the future – perhaps as early as 2014 – seems not to be a dream any more. As a sign of how times have changed, so far as historians are concerned, in 2005 the renowned specialist on modern and contemporary Balkan history, John Lampe, published Balkans into South Eastern Europe, the title of which can be read as a programme.2 For Lampe, south-east European history belongs beyond any doubt to the realm of European history, albeit with special features. But his useful book tells the story of these countries from the late nineteenth century onwards only. It seems to be a truism that the roots of most of the European nations go back to the Middle Ages.3 But is this also true of the states and nations on the southeastern periphery of Europe, a region that can still be labelled contemptuously ‘the Balkans’? Astonishingly enough, at least as far as national identity is concerned, no less than three of these nations link their present expressly not to the Middle Ages but to antiquity: Greece to the ancient Greeks, as demonstrated by the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympic Games in Athens in 2004; Romania to the ancient Romans; and, most prominently and bizarrely, Albania to the ancient Illyrians – bestowing an Illyrian ancestry on Alexander the Great and Pyrrhos alike. By contrast, when dealing with nationalism, nation-building and the role of religion in south-eastern Europe, Eric Hobsbawm and Ernest Gellner somewhat capitulated to the idea of a special and separate development for the Balkans.4 These considerations inevitably lead to the question: Were there any Middle Ages on the Balkan Peninsula at all? So a reassessment of the history and at the same time of the image of the history of south-eastern Europe seems a desideratum. One possibility would be, of course, to follow the lines drawn by Maria Todorova in her seminal Imagining the Balkans, an attempt to apply the theories of Edward Said (whom Todorova cites more reluctantly than was fitting) to south-eastern Europe, in describing the creation of the region by nineteenth-century European scholarship.5 Here I will not follow Todorova’s line. As a Byzantinist teaching and doing research at a department for Medieval Studies,6 I will follow another path and concentrate on the following questions. Which historical experiences shaped the collective memory of the Balkan peoples, and made them allegedly so different from those in western Europe? And, connected to the first, how did these people record their experiences, or how did they fix them as oral and written memory? I will concentrate primarily on written memory, though I am fully aware that oral history plays a crucial role even today in the Balkans, and should be seen as interacting closely with written memory. Strangely enough, there has been astonishingly little comparison done, even in the field of written memory, between western and south-eastern historical narratives. I know of no book comparing medieval Latin historiography with Byzantine historiography. So, this study is comprised of two parts. The first is about how memory was organized in south-eastern Europe during the time contemporary to the

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western Middle Ages and early modern times. The second part will treat how the emerging Balkan nations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries perceived their past, as it was handed down to them in written form. I will not waste too many words describing the geographical borders of south-eastern Europe. There are many works on this topic, which generally reflect the political preferences of an author: articles with titles like ‘Does Romania belong to the West or to the Balkans?’ The seminal book by Wilkinson, Maps and Politics, which appeared in 1951, should still be consulted for guidance in that regard.7 I will not discuss this fruitful issue here, because my line of argumentation is completely different.8 For me, south-eastern Europe coincides to a high degree with the presence of the Orthodox Church, excluding Russia for reasons I will mention later.

2 With a tip of the hat to Sir Steven Runciman, the first part of my chapter could be summed up as ‘from the Byzantine Empire to the Great Church in Captivity’.9 In the historical consciousness of western and central Europe the fall of the Roman Empire is an event that still is considered as crucial for the founding of the Middle Ages. Indeed, the triumph of the barbarian kingdoms on the soil of former Roman provinces, the rise of the papacy from the position of the bishop of Rome to the only legitimate power in Latin Christianity, including the role of the pope as emperor-maker since 800, are intrinsically linked to the decay of the Western Empire after 395. Patrick Geary has written a beautiful little book on that process.10 Consequent upon these events, the prophet of the medieval philosophy of history, Augustine, wrote his De Civitate Dei as an answer to the looting of Rome in 410 by the Visigoths. This and other related events put into doubt the very Constantinian synthesis which claimed, in brief, three things: the Roman Empire was the only legitimate empire on earth; the Romans were the elected people of God, verus Israel, thus depriving the Jews of their claim; and the Roman emperor was the true vicarius Christi – emperor and priest.11 Augustine’s famous answer to that political theology was a thunderous ‘no’. For him, the Roman Empire was nothing but a congregation of robbers, a latrocinium, and the elected by God were not to be identified with any nation, but only with some very few chosen by his grace. Later on these electi, perhaps a reminiscence of Augustine’s Manichaean past, were to be identified with the Western Church. This Augustinian dichotomy proved in the long run to be decisive for the Latin West. It once and forever gave a loud farewell to the traditions of the ancient polis, where the divine grace was apparently materialized in the visible success of the city and its outstanding individuals, characterized by birth, power and Greek (later Greek and Latin) education. Since then the Kingdom of God has vanished from the earth.

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This crucial historical experience and its transformation into an interpretation of the past are completely absent from south-eastern Europe. Of course, we have the shrinking of the Empire after the Arabic conquests, when the whole Near East was lost; ‘barbarian’ tribes, mostly of Slavic origin, established regional dominations on Byzantine soil (called Sklaviniai in Greek); and the capital, the New Rome, was more than once on the verge of being sacked and plundered like her older sister in 410 by Alaric. But that did not happen, at least until 1204. The common historical experience of all Balkan people up to the high Middle Ages is exactly this: the persistence of the Roman Empire with its capital in Constantinople with the emperor, the one and only true heir to Christ and Constantine the Great, residing there. And, of course, the Romaioi were the chosen people and the only legitimate claimants to Roman history and tradition in the world.12 Written memories, and especially narrative history, reflect this framework precisely. Byzantine historical writing shares the same literary exempla of late antiquity with western sources, and to a certain extent is compatible with western written memoria. Since the days of the founding father of Byzantine studies, Karl Krumbacher, scholars of the Byzantine period have distinguished between ‘annals’, ‘chronicles’ and ‘historia’ (istoria).13 But the genres typical for the West are missing in Byzantium, at least until 1204. We have no local chronicles, no regional historical writing, no monastic annals comparable to the ‘casus S. Galli’, and, astonishingly given the prominence of this tradition in Ancient Greece, no writing of the origo gentis type. The only gens worthy of being described were, of course, the Romans, and their origin was well known.14 So, there was no question of ‘who we are’ – at least not one committed to writing.15 Of all the genres of ancient historiography in the broader sense, the one that had been called istoria in Greek since ancient times was the most prestigious, going back as far as Thucydides and Herodotus, and linked in Roman times with the idea of the world-empire as the only true subject for this sort of literary writing.16 Highly artificial, written in lofty Latin and lofty Attic Greek in late antiquity, it was the most prestigious historical genre for authors of the early Byzantine centuries too; and here Procopios, for one, comes to mind. Its main devices of narration were not Christian; some of even the latest writers were pagans, such as Zosimos and Ammian. Interestingly enough, this genre disappears after about 620 from Byzantium, only to reappear with the restoration of the Empire under the Macedonian dynasty in the ninth and tenth centuries. But from that time onward, an unbroken chain of written istoria, the aurea catena Homeri, covered all Byzantine political events until 1453 and beyond, with a marked tendency of increasing classicism and even archaism. So, in the twelfth century Anna Comnena drew extensively on Homer in describing her father’s deeds in her Alexias, thus bestowing epic overtones on her narration,

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while at the start of the fourteenth century George Pachymeres reintroduced the Attic month names, thus causing great chaos in chronology. It is now that we may take the rising Orthodox nations of Byzantium and south-eastern Europe into consideration, treating them not as separate national units, but against their Byzantine background. A first point is that there was very little writing of narrative historiography in south-eastern Europe during the Middle Ages and beyond at all, except in Greek. The Albanians were almost without any literary culture at all until the nineteenth century, and the history of such a prominent hero as Skanderbeg has to be traced using not Albanian, but Italian, Latin and Ottoman sources, following humanist patterns of historiography.17 The Romanians did not write history in their own language until the seventeenth century – until then, they used Church Slavonic. Church Slavonic literature then, which apart from Greek forms the bulk of written memoria on the Balkans, is characterized by comparatively little historical narrative, and one genre is lacking totally: Byzantine istoria. The Bulgarians, the first Slavonic nation in the Balkans, hardly wrote history at all; what little they wrote was solely from the annals and chronicle genres, and in this they were almost completely dependent on translations of Byzantine texts. One gets the impression that the imperial title was reserved for Byzantium, because despite the claim Bulgarian tsars made to being Byzantine emperors, even the most imperial genre could be exercised only in close connection with the imperial court. As for the Serbs, it was only very late that they developed a royal history of their kings, but always in the garb of saints’ lives, all their kings of the Nemanjid dynasty being holy. Only Kievan Rus, linked to but never directly dominated by Byzantium, had its own tradition of historiography, most prominently represented by the Povest’ vremennych let (the Russian Primary Chronicle). This developed, of course, on the basis of Byzantine texts (e.g. Joannis Malalas and Georgios Hamartolos), but also betrays a consciousness of imperial status in its own right: hence the claim to be the Third Rome.

3 What I have said thus far about Byzantine historiography is correct only for the time before 1204, the ‘fourth crusade’. The events following that crime against humanity are crucial for the second part of my chapter on the image of the medieval past among the rising Balkan nations of the nineteenth century. With our nod to the lives of the Serbian kings written by Domentian and the abbot Daniil we have entered the fourteenth century, when radical changes had taken place.18 After 1204, the Empire split up, never to be fully unified again. Large parts of it were occupied by western powers, chiefly by Venice and by French barons, while after about 1300 the whole area came under the spreading power of the Ottoman Turks. And it is then, in the still poorly understood late

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Byzantine times,19 that all the narrative genres typical of the Latin West after 476 or even earlier come into being. Local chronicles, family and city histories appear. As a general trend, the management of cultural values shifts definitively to the Orthodox Church, as the imperial state approaches its fatal ruin. This does not mean for a moment that imperial historiography comes to an end. It survives, even in brilliant examples, but in a different manner. Late Byzantine histories in the capital were, from the thirteenth century on, the histories of an imminent end, first dealing with the events of 1204 and then with the vain attempts at recovery and the subsequent Turkish conquests. Ample literary material was to be found in ancient histories to describe these dire events. With 1453, the end of the Byzantine state, that tradition almost came to an end.20 Cultural identity was now, as enforced by the Ottoman system of domination, exclusively in the hands of the Orthodox Church, represented by the patriarch residing in the old-new capital who was responsible for the spiritual affairs, the education and the administration of Orthodox Balkan Christians. So, for recording both contemporary events and the Byzantine past, there were almost exclusively ecclesiastical patterns of narration at hand, and we can verify the translation process of late Byzantine istoria-writing into ecclesiastical chronicles or annals before and immediately after 1453. As a general tendency, the re-elaboration of works of istoria into ecclesiastical works on the Byzantine past involved a simplification of language and a definitive shift of interest from the successful imperator triumphans to the religious virtues of militarily weak rulers such as, for example, Emperor Isaac II (1185–95) as depicted by Nikitas Honiatis and rewritten by Theodoros Skoutariotes. And it is not by chance that most Byzantine manuscripts of the istoria type are to be found in western libraries. When the learned elite of late Byzantium fled the Turks, they took those manuscripts with them which contained the most imperial memory of their ‘Roman’ past. The sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries saw in general no significant production of histories in south-eastern Europe among the Orthodox Christians, with some notable exceptions such as Dositheos, Patriarch of Jerusalem.21 This pattern, represented by the dominant Greek Church, was, as is to be expected, closely followed by the Orthodox Balkan peoples living under Ottoman political and Greek cultural domination. After the disappearance of the last Orthodox states in the Balkans, the venerable tradition of Byzantine historiography, stemming back to antiquity and imitated by Church Slavonic historical writings, definitively comes to an end. Thus, there existed only one single imperial history at that time, but this was written in Ottoman. Many years ago Y.H. Yerushalmi wrote his book on memory culture in Judaism, Zakhor – ‘remember!’22 He showed that history writing, so prominent for Judaism in antiquity, was almost totally eclipsed after the destruction of the temple in 69 CE. Even if scholarship has pointed out that there were some

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examples of Jewish historical narratives during the Middle Ages, there is a lot of truth to Yerushalmi’s statement. The last Jewish historian for many centuries was Flavius Josephus, who described the final catastrophe of the rebellion against Rome and the destruction of the symbol of Jewish identity, the temple. After the conquest of Constantinople, something comparable happens with historical writing in south-eastern Europe – it almost disappears for centuries, Michael Kritoboulos, the Byzantine court historian of Mehmed the Conqueror, being its last representative. And it is significant that when the national awakening of the Balkan people set in, i.e. towards the end of the eighteenth century, a writer such as the Bulgarian Paisij Hilandarski (his name shows where he lived: on Mount Athos, in the famous Serbian monastery, Hilandar), who intended to give to his Bulgarian compatriots the notion of their historical past, had to rely on western sources written in Italian, not Bulgarian historical writings, which were not at his disposal or did not exist. If we take this situation as a given at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when most of the Balkan nations passed through a process of ‘nation-building’ usually called ‘national awakening’ (vuzrazhdane, anagennisis, etc.), we can see that it was difficult for these emerging nations to make any claim on the medieval past, for two major reasons. Firstly, unlike most European nations, the histories of Byzantium and of Bulgaria or Serbia, to cite just the most prominent examples, were not a success story at all (at least in the framework of nineteenth-century European history writing), because all political units in the Balkans had been conquered and destroyed by the Ottoman Empire. The only topos the emerging nations could derive from this fact was a permanent rhetoric of defeat, with messianic overtones. One outcome of this is the complex legend of the battle of Kosovo for Serbia (abused by Slobodan Miloševic´ in his fatal speech in 1989 on the same battlefield); another is the myth of the last Byzantine emperor.23 Thus, apocalyptic thinking replaced historical narrative. Secondly, the true heir of the Byzantine Empire, and to a certain degree of the Bulgarian tsars, was, as I have said before, the Orthodox Church with the patriarch residing in the new-old centre of power, Constantinople. This Church formed an integral part of the power elite of the Ottoman state, the church hierarchy enjoyed many privileges, and its monasteries were richly provided for by Ottoman officials – Christian and non-Christian alike. This resulted in a confusion of historical identity among the members of the leading Christian elites in the late Ottoman Balkans. The Greek, or Hellenized representatives of the Enlightenment, on whom I will concentrate in what follows, rejected the Byzantine and Ottoman past in toto until well into the nineteenth century.24 So, Adamantios Korais, in his famous Mémoire sur l´état actuel de la civilisation de la Grèce (1803), depicted the whole span of history from the Roman conquest of Greece up to his own time as a period of permanent alienation and decay. The model for the emerging Greek nation state could only be Ancient Greece.

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And it was Ancient Greece as dreamt by European classicists, mainly British and German ones. For Greece, this resulted in an almost complete rejection of her medieval past up to the 1880s. Byzantium was a dark stain against which ancient-modern Greece (i oraia Ellas) had to be born/reborn. From this approach followed the attitude of the recently established nation state of Greece – an attitude that in some aspects remains today. One outcome of this was the changing of place names from their medieval form back to the – often only alleged – original ancient Greek: Nemea and Tegea, Delfoi (or the medieval name, used even today: Kastri) and Sparta (Mistra) suffered antiquarian resuscitations in the nineteenth century. Another more far-reaching result of this attitude was the destruction of many medieval monuments in Greece. The best example of this is the Acropolis of Athens. It served, until the war of independence, as the castle of Athens (Kastron), where ancient Roman, Byzantine, French, Catalan and Ottoman monuments organically stood together, built one into the other. This old castle was literally destroyed in the nineteenth century, not so much by the Turks, but by German archaeologists and their all-too-willing Greek pupils. The result is what you see today; the almost sad remnants are the most impressive ruin German Altertumswissenschaft handed over to the Greek state as a national symbol. Amongst other things destroyed, the once beautiful Catalan tower was literally cut into pieces to regain the Temple of Athena Nike, as imagined by the archaeologists. Another point is language – the almost obsessive preference given to Ancient instead of Modern Greek starkly contradicts late Byzantine and Ottoman language politics, and led to what was called ‘the language question’ (to glossiko zitima) well into the 1980s. To sum this up: at the foundation of the modern Greek state we cannot find any sort of ‘medievalism’, but rather an overt ‘anti-medievalism’, precisely because the Byzantine and Ottoman past was still so close, and its presence could (and can) be felt through the presence of the Church. We should not forget that the state that emerged in 1830 was only a very small part of the territory with a Greek population, or one that could be claimed as such. The most influential group of Greeks living outside the dwarf national state, whose capital was Athens, were of course the Greeks living in Constantinople, the Byzantine capital. And they accepted Athenian classicism only very partially during the nineteenth century. This modern Greek anti-medievalism was a direct result of the nation-building process. In so far as this process was carried on over the course of the nineteenth century, the patterns of remembering the Byzantine past altered.

4 Attitudes changed slowly during the last third of the nineteenth century because of two developments which had their centres not in Greece, but abroad. Firstly,

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after the Crimean War, or at the latest after the Congress of Berlin, it was clear that the Ottoman Empire could not and would not survive without the help of the European powers.25 One of these powers, Russia, was Orthodox and paradoxically claimed to be the true heir of Byzantium without having ever been under Byzantine domination. Since the days of Peter the Great, Russia had put her hand on the Balkans, supporting the Orthodox Christians there. The creation of a Bulgarian state was the result of direct Russian action, and after the coup d’état of 1903, Serbia passed definitively from Austria’s to Russia’s sphere of influence. The fact that Thessaly was ceded by the Ottoman Empire to Greece in 1881 was a direct outcome of the Congress of Berlin, and from that time until 1923 Greek foreign policy was dominated, if not obsessed, with the ‘great idea’ (megale idea): the (re)conquest of Constantinople – a dream also prominent in the mind of the first Bulgarian tsar, Ferdinand (as it had been present in his medieval predecessor, Simeon of Bulgaria). Connected with these processes, in Greece a profound, but not total, revision of the medieval past began. The second factor which contributed to this, linked to the first, was the discovery of Byzantium by European scholarship in the second half of the nineteenth century.26 The centres of these studies were in Germany and France, where there had been a tradition of research in the field since the seventeenth century. In Russia, too, rather later, under the last Romanovs, a keen interest could be felt in Byzantium and the ‘Old Russian’ past. And last but not least the modernization of Constantinople during the Tanzimat led to the first excavations and restorations in the capital. The land walls of Theodosios and the Hagia Sophia (now a mosque) saw their first scholarly or semi-scholarly investigation, very much supported by the Greek minority of Istanbul. In Greece various approaches towards a revision of the Byzantine past coexisted. One was folklore, whose study was mainly represented by the German-trained anthropologist Nikolaos Politis. It was strongly connected with the collection of folk songs, e.g. on the conquest of 1453 and other historical events from the nation’s Byzantine past.27 Another, strongly linked to the first, was contemporary poetry whose leading figure was Kostis Palamas. A third one, and perhaps the most important, was history and history writing. And it is not by chance that the founding father of Greek historicism, Konstantinos Paparrhigopoulos, was born in Constantinople and gave to his book the title History of the Greek Nation (Istoria tou Ellinikou Ethnous), thus coining the modern Greek word for nation, ethnos. Recent articles on this period have pointed out that there was a substantial network of persons during that time who tried to shape a different picture of the past, prominent amongst its members Politis, Palamas and Hatzidakis (a linguist), and that this network had strong national aspirations.28 The general line of all these works can be characterized in one word: continuity (synekheia). The Byzantines, so it was claimed, were just the Ancient Greeks, Christianized to a certain degree, and with some Roman elements absorbed

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(e.g. law). There was no break in this continuity at all, and all the events, groups or kingdoms which might undermine the general pattern of continuity were notable for their absence from the picture. They were not included in regular university curricula. Such people as Slavs (chiefly Bulgarians), Turks, Arabs and ‘Franks’ were simply forgotten. In other words, the original dogma of continuity of the Greek enlighteners, the paradigm ‘Ancient Greece – Modern Greece’, still served as a blueprint for the ‘Byzantinism’ of the late nineteenth century. It was only enlarged by a vision of the Byzantine past from an extremely nationalist, sometimes even racist point of view. This excluded many groups from the picture – most conspicuously Slavs who had been in steady contact with Byzantium since their first incursions during the sixth century, and who shared with Greeks the Orthodox faith. Strangely enough, even the catastrophe of 1923 did not change this basic structure of modern Greek medievalism. And it is here that the roots of the Macedonia conflict of the 1990s can be revealed. Macedonia – I mean the part of the Ottoman Empire remaining in Europe after 1878–81 – became prominent as a place of historical imagination during the last decade of the nineteenth century, when a group of younger Athenian intellectuals tried to alter the direction of Greek foreign policy. According to them, it should be the most urgent goal not to conquer Constantinople, but to ‘liberate’ Greek Macedonia from the Bulgarian threat, actually from Bulgarian aspirations to the region after the peace of San Stefano failed. For this goal they dreamt of an alliance between Greece and the Ottoman Empire to keep down Bulgaria. The leading proponents of this idea – Ion Dragoumis, Athanasios Souliotis-Nikolaidis and Pavlos Melas – published lengthy articles and books to support the conquest of the greatest part of Ottoman Macedonia. And they are the source of the ‘myth of Macedonia’ so prominent in modern Greece, above all in the symprotevousa, Thessaloniki. This ‘myth’ can be characterized as the dogma of continuity applied to a regional entity, Greek Macedonia. It claims a whole range of persons and places to support one claim: that this region is and has been Greek for some 3000 years. Macedonian Hellenism forms a continuous line, beginning with Alexander the Great and Philip of Macedon,29 through Saint Paul preaching in Thessaloniki and Philippi, to the ‘Macedonian dynasty’ in Byzantium, and Thessaloniki as the ‘second capital’ of the Empire, up to the ‘fighters for Macedonia’ (makedonomakhoi) at the beginning of the twentieth century. This myth has a serious problem with some hard historical facts: for example, that Greek Macedonia was mostly inhabited by Slavs and Vlachs, and the capital, Thessaloniki, was inhabited by Sephardic Jews when the Greek army conquered the city during the first Balkan war. The myth went through a renaissance when the birth of a new nation, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), seemed

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to threaten the ratio essendi, and thereby even the very existence, of Greek Macedonia. To sum up: it is highly doubtful that anything like a ‘Middle Ages’ existed at all in south-eastern Europe. Unlike the use to which the past could be put in other parts of Europe in the nineteenth century, the heritage of Byzantium, the leading political formation of the region, left a memory that was very difficult to incorporate into any kind of ‘national’ patrimony. The fact that one important element of Byzantium, the Orthodox Church, survived the end of the Empire in 1453 and was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire, made it impossible for the Greeks to use the Church as any kind of ‘founding mother’ for national aspirations, at least during the Enlightenment. The reinterpretation of the Byzantine past is strongly connected with the development of the Balkan nations during the last third of the nineteenth century. Two options existed for Balkan nations: either a kind of nativism, as in Greece, that is a negation of the medieval past (this was the strategy used in Romania and Albania, and in part also in Macedonia); or cutting the cloth of medieval Balkan history to fit national patterns (that is the paradigm followed by Serbia and Bulgaria). This leaves us with two problems yet to be addressed. What did the Ottoman Empire and later the Turkish Republic do with this past; and how does Greece deal with the presence of the western Middle Ages on her soil and in her literature?30 Almost every place in southern Greece or on the islands possesses its Venetian castle, and the earliest monuments of modern Greek literature are clearly connected to the French and Italian presence in the region. But those are questions to be dealt with elsewhere.

Notes * This chapter has been edited by Eric Beckett Weaver. 1. On German debate about Turkey, see Angelos Giannakopoulos and Konstadinos Maras, ‘Die europäische Türkei–Diskurs: eine Vergleichsanalyse’, in id., Die TürkeiDebatte in Europa: ein Vergleich (Wiesbaden, 2005), 213–29. 2. John R. Lampe, Balkans into South Eastern Europe: a Century of War and Transition (Houndmills, Basingstoke, 2006). 3. Patrick J. Geary’s thought-provoking The Myth of Nations: the Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, NJ, 2002), poses serious challenges to this received view. This is not the place to discuss his ideas, but I want to mention two points related to Geary’s work. His book is centred almost entirely on western and central Europe; and I also very much doubt that the medieval ancestries which most European nations gave themselves were merely inventions of the nineteenth century. 4. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY, 1983); Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, 1990). 5. Maria N. Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York, 1997). 6. I also teach at a department for Greek and Latin Philology at the Free University of Berlin.

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7. Henry R. Wilkinson, Maps and Politics: a Review of the Ethnographic Cartography of Macedonia (Liverpool, 1951). 8. A good demonstration of work done so far on the ‘spatial turn’ is Raumstrukturen und Grenzen in Südosteuropa, ed. Cay Lienau (Munich, 2001); in which see esp. Holm Sundhaussen, ‘Die Dekonstruktion des Balkanraumes, 1870–1913’, 19–41. 9. Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity: a Study of the Patriarchate of Constantinople from the Eve of the Turkish Conquest to the Greek War of Independence (London, 1968). 10. Geary, Myth of Nations. 11. Gilbert Dagron, Emperor and Priest: the Imperial Office in Byzantium, tr. Jean Birrell (Cambridge, 2003); originally as Empereur et prêtre: Etude sur le césaropapisme Byzantin (Paris, 1997). 12. Cf. the somewhat older, but still very useful book by Endre von Ivánka, Rhomäerreich und Gottesvolk. Das Glaubens-, Staats- und Volksbewußtsein der Byzantiner und seine Auswirkung auf die ostkirchlich-osteuropäische Geisteshaltung (Freiburg, 1968). 13. See the discussion on this Krumbacherian distinction in vol. 2 of Herbert Hunger, Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner (Munich, 1978), 252ff. 14. It has to be said that most Byzantine historians insert passages of the origo gentis type into their writings. But the work by Jordanes is the last one which is exclusively dedicated to the topic until the latest decades of Byzantium. 15. In popular writings stemming from Byzantium this is different, sometimes very different. But scarcely any evidence has been preserved. 16. Karl Kaser, Südosteuropäische Geschichte und Geschichtswissenschaft (2nd rev. edn, Vienna, 2002), is one of the few historians I know who deals in a more detailed fashion with the old istoria-tradition and its consequences for the writing of south-east European history. 17. The leading specialist on Skanderbeg is Oliver-Jens Schmitt. See his Das venezianische Albanien, 1392–1479 (Munich, 2001); and his recent article ‘Skanderbegs letzte Jahre. West-östliches Wechselspiel von Diplomatie und Krieg im Zeitalter der osmanischen Eroberung Albaniens, 1464–8’, Südostforschungen, 63–64 (2004–5), 56–123. 18. On Domentian and Daniil, see entries in the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (Oxford, 1991), and in the Lexikon des Mittelalters (Stuttgart/Weimar, 1977–). 19. John V.A. Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans: a Critical Survey from the Late Twelfth Century to the Ottoman Conquest (Ann Arbor, 1987), is still the best introduction I know of to the period. Also excellent, and including Russia, is Dimitri Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453 (New York, 1971). 20. Leften Stavrianos, The Balkans since 1453 (New York, 1959) is still a classic on the period. See also Edgar Hösch, Geschichte des Balkans (2nd edn, Munich, 2007). 21. Gerhard Podskalsky, Griechische Theologie in der Zeit der Türkenherrschaft, 1453–1821 (Munich, 1988), p. v. 22. Yosef H. Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle, 1982). 23. For Miloševi´c, see Marko Šuica in this volume. Donald M. Nicol, The Immortal Emperor. The Life and the Legend of Constantine Palaiologos, Last Emperor of the Romans (Cambridge, 1992). 24. There are many good or excellent works on the subject of the movement to Greek independence As a general introduction, Richard Clogg, A Concise History of Greece (2nd edn, Cambridge 2002), is most useful. The very readable Wolf Seidl, Bayern in Griechenland: die Geschichte eines Abenteuers (Munich, 1965), is centred on the Bavarian interlude of Greek history. See also Reinhard Heydenreuter (ed.), Die erträumte Nation. Griechenlands Wiedergeburt im 19. Jahrhundert (2nd edn, Munich,

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25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

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1995), and the impressive catalogue of an exhibition, Das neue Hellas. Griechenland und Bayern zur Zeit Ludwigs I., ed. Reinhold Baumstark (Munich, 1999). Ioannis Zelepos, Die Ethnisierung griechischer Identität, 1870–1912. Staat und private Akteure vor dem Hintergrund der ‘Megali Idea’ (Munich, 2002), is excellent. See the vol. ed. Evangelos Chrysos, Enas neos kosmos gennietai. I eikona tou Ellinikou politismou sti Germaniki epistimi kata ton 19on aiona (Athens, 1996). Michael Herzfeld, Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology and the Making of Modern Greece (Austin, TX, 1982), is still crucial. Zelepos, Die Ethnisierung; and Effi Gazi, ‘National Ideology, Scientific Disciplines and the Intellectual Fields in Greece, 1880–1922’, Südostforschungen, 58 (1999), 247–65. The case of the tomb of Philip II in Vergina in Greek Macedonia is the classic example. It became a site of pilgrimage for Macedonian identity within Greek discourse. On the question of the Ottoman heritage, see L. Carl Brown (ed.), Imperial Legacy: the Ottoman Imprint on the Balkans and the Middle East (New York, 1996), which includes a useful article by Maria Todorova.

10 The Image of the Battle of Kosovo (1389) Today: a Historic Event, a Moral Pattern, or the Tool of Political Manipulation* Marko Šuica

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Introduction

Some events become cornerstones or crucial segments of certain historical processes and prove worthy of memory for centuries. At the time of their occurrence, or soon afterwards, contemporaries may understand and sometimes even predict their impact and significance. But the memory of the battle of Kosovo of 1389 is significant for other reasons, disconnected from the event itself. The paucity of historical records on the battle demonstrates that it only gained its significance after some time, gradually and systematically being lifted into Serbian national mythology. Over centuries the genuine historical core of the story was distorted, dissolved or reshaped under layers of narrative tradition. Epic poetry based on carefully sifted historical facts created a picturesque, yet homogeneous group of characters shaped as much from imaginary as from historical elements. This was convenient for determining and promoting moral patterns and values over the centuries when the medieval Serbian states, which had been subjugated by the Ottomans, no longer existed. By simplifying the original historic circumstances and presenting them through an easily understandable scenario, the foundation on which to create and solidify ethnic identity was set. This construction of Serbian ethnic memory gave the historic event a vibrant future. The historical core was wrapped in legendary substance, creating an almost sacred aura, which ensured a stable endurance of this narrative. Even today, more than 600 years after the blood-spattered episode, the battle of Kosovo of 1389 plays a central role in the cognitive spheres of Serbian national remembrance. Events of greater historic importance for the Serbian state or ethnic and cultural bodies have had less impact on the shaping of national identity than the battle of Kosovo. Some have concluded that ‘in all of European history it is impossible to find any comparison with the effect of Kosovo on the Serbian national psyche’.1 This statement might sound a little 152

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excessive, but in its essence it is true. Many events and battles have changed the flow of history, but Kosovo played and continues to play a crucial role in the formation of Serbian cultural and national identity.2 The Middle Ages, usually depicted as a golden age in the Serbian past, provide many stereotypes related to Serbian cultural, spiritual or state superiority. Among them, some derive from the cultural or religious sphere, like the missionary activity of the Church, and especially of Saint Sava, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, the promotion of an original code of laws in the Serbian language in the fourteenth century, or the exquisite Serbian court rituals and high etiquette. Other issues come from the arena of politics, such as the widening of state borders by taking lands from the Byzantine Empire in the fourteenth century, the rise of a Serbian state to the rank of empire under the Emperor Dušan, or the uncompromising fight against infidels (i.e. Muslims). This last motif is most prevalent. Its strength derived from more than 400 years of Ottoman rule, to which Serbs hardly responded in peaceful or constructive ways. In the recent past or even today the battle of Kosovo still preoccupies Serbs’ imagination and holds a prominent position in everyday communication. It is connected to the idea of sacrifice and martyrdom, as well as to the ‘sacred soil’ on which the battle itself took place. The territory of Kosovo, not just the field, but the whole province, is reduced to the symbol of a historic battle. Presented as the last vantage point for defending national identity or state integrity, it serves as a theoretical ground, a vital argument for political actions and an ideological unity. The victims of the battle of Kosovo and the stigmatized martyrdom of Prince Lazar enveloped in his eternal heavenly vow – a sacrifice for freedom and Christianity – still illuminate the Serbian demagogical public consciousness and often sustain a political discourse. Today every single attempt to prevent the territorial separation of the Kosovo region from Serbia is somehow linked to the medieval event and its far-reaching consequences.

2 The battle of Kosovo as a historic event – various contemporary perspectives Kosovo was the second great battle between Serbian regional rulers and the Ottomans in the fourteenth century. Although presented by national tradition, simply and unquestionably, as a clash of Christianity and Islam, of Serbia and the Ottoman state, the genuine event was more complex and deserving of thorough analysis. While the theme of a clash between religions is appealing, the broadly coherent Christian coalitions were not created simply as a defence against Islam, nor were the Serbian lands united against the Ottoman Turks on an ethno-religious principle. The battle was more of a fight between the conquerors and the defenders of certain dominions than a titanic struggle between two civilizations.

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The transformation of this one military event into the paradigm of Serbian epic tradition and stereotypes that still colour Serbs’ identity, even to a certain effect their political language and way of thinking, happened because of a variety of factors. Two decades ago, on the eve of the six-hundredth anniversary of the battle, an eminent Serbian poet and member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts said that Kosovo is the most expensive Serbian word. ‘It could not have been bought without blood [viz. the blood of Serbs who perished in the battle in 1389] and therefore without blood it could not be sold.’3 This illustrates the degree to which Kosovo has become a powerful, recognizable but also multi-purpose word in Serbian. There is no confusion about its significance and political weight. Kosovo implies sacrifice and martyrdom, and it often suggests patriotism in its rudest, most radical and primal shape: patriotism that rejects any different political viewpoint on national issues. To understand the processes that shaped the last days of the unified Serbian Empire in the fourteenth century, we must go back to two decades before the battle of Kosovo, to the consequences of a battle in 1371 at Chernomen (today Ormenio, Greece) near the Maritsa river. This clash deeply changed the political picture of the Balkans and the historical map of Serbian political regions as well. A Serbian king, Vukašin (r. 1365–71), and his brother, the Despot John Uglješa, lost their lives in the clash with the Ottomans, and they were the first royal victims of the new conquerors from the East. Their territories (today in the Republic of Macedonia, and partly in Kosovo) were torn apart and occupied, in part by surrounding Christian/Serbian rulers, and in part by Ottoman forces. Modern historical research has come to the conclusion that the battle at Maritsa was of greater significance to regional and European history than that at Kosovo.4 But even the best-founded research has not proved able to depose Kosovo from its pedestal of the first and the most adored Serbian national symbol, carrying motifs of heroism and divinity that are deeply rooted in the Serbs’ collective epic memory. North of Vukašin’s kingdom lay the territories under the rule of Prince Lazar, the main protagonist of the Kosovo drama. The events that preceded the battle of Kosovo show that the Christian lands reacted to the danger posed by the Ottomans in a fragmented and unbalanced manner. Sultan Murad I (r. 1359–89) forced his way up the Balkans to Kosovo gradually and thoroughly. This historic route was neither easy nor continually successful for the Ottoman ruler. Murad captured Sofia in 1385 and Niš in 1386. These were the most important strategic cities on the ancient via militaris, the arterial Balkan road from Belgrade to Constantinople. A few years later, in 1388, Lala Shahin Pasha, Murad’s commander, suffered heavy losses at the battle of Bilec´a in Bosnia, just one year before the struggle in Kosovo. Despite such occasional losses, the Ottoman advance proved unstoppable. By the time of the battle of Kosovo an enormous region of formerly Byzantine, Bulgarian and Serbian lands had

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been integrated into the Ottoman Empire. Even more disturbing, the circle of Ottoman vassal states grew rapidly amongst the Christian states and provinces outside the Empire. It is in this milieu that Prince Lazar created a prosperous state around the Morava river (in the central part of modern Serbia) from Kosovo in the south to the Danube in the north, using his sword as much as his diplomacy. Who was Prince Lazar? Was he merely another parvenu feudal lord fighting for his domain, or was he an ingenious politician with strong influence acting as the regal successor at the time when the last Serbian legal royal dynasty of the Nemanjids had been extinguished? Could he have been both? Belonging to the relatively new aristocracy, Lazar started his court career with the lowest title. Historical sources from the time of central Serbian power do not mention him being called a prince. Lazar’s career was made in the last years of his reign, and particularly after the death of the last member of the Serbian royal family, Emperor Uroš (1371). The support of the highest circles in the Serbian Church, gained by his playing the leading role in the reconciliation with the Byzantine Church (1375), and his marriage to Milica, of Nemanjid descent, ensured him a strong and superior position amid the other Serbian regional aristocrats. He made war against other Serbian lords with great success, and by the end of the eighth decade of the fourteenth century Lazar had eliminated his rivals and conquered their territories. He also created and spread a net of political alliances by marrying his daughters to the surrounding Serbian or foreign high nobility.5 His oldest daughter was married to Vuk Brankovic´, the ruler of the province south of Prince Lazar’s. The centre of Vuk’s feudal domain was in Kosovo, where the famous battle took place. The collision of the two armies positioned on opposite sides of the Kosovo field near Prishtina (today the capital of Kosovo) in the early hours of 15 June 1389 became a turning point in Serbian history. Ottoman sources present the battle of Kosovo as gaza-i ekber, indicating a great, decisive battle, led by the sultan himself.6 These sources, and some Serbian epic poems, suggest that the time and place for the battle were arranged between Sultan Murad and Prince Lazar.7 The Serbian coalition consisted of three major units. One was led by Prince Lazar (positioned in the centre of the battlefield according to later Ottoman sources); the second was organized by his son-in-law Vuk; and the third was the Bosnian army under the command of Voivode [duke] Vlatko, a representative of Lazar’s ally, King Tvrtko I of Bosnia (r. 1377–91). On the Ottoman side the army was under the personal command of the sultan. His two sons, Yakub and Bayezid, were at the head of the European and Anatolian wings, to the left and right of the central ranks. Knowledge about the other participants in the battle is based on circumstantial evidence, or derived from later sources. It is important to stress that no detailed source, chronologically close to the battle, has been preserved. The first known accounts are blurred and too

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general. They are also driven by the long-term political consequences of Ottoman conquest, and influenced by literary creation. Whether shaped by Islamic court ideology or by Christian clerical views, these narratives do not represent a credible basis for the reconstruction of the battle itself. No clear conclusion can be made about such a basic fact as the winner or loser of the battle. We can only calculate or rather try to estimate the numbers of troops and casualties, the probable main characters, and the ethnic backgrounds of the armies. We do not know how battle developed, at what point both leaders were murdered, whose forces left the battle victorious, or whose forces withdrew first from the clash. Relevant sources are too heterogeneous and diverse, and do not even present a balanced picture about the assassination of the sultan. We do not know if there were one or 12 plotters involved in his murder. The oldest source was recorded 12 days after the battle, in a distant town called Astravia on the coast of the Black Sea. A Russian monk there on pilgrimage recorded that he had heard about the death of the two rulers, but had no clue as to the outcome of the battle. He simply could not know who had won. Judging from this source, we can feel the atmosphere of fear and confusion that prevailed in the Ottoman state.8 The first written accounts in Serbian take the form of short literary notes on medieval book margins, and give insights into the impressions of contemporaries rather than evidence about the battle. Monks copying the books in monastery scriptoria wrote that sorrow spread all over the land when the Serbian prince and the Ottoman sultan were killed in the battle.9 Beside the death of both army leaders, which was commonly noted in most texts, some monks gave testimony about the many dead Christians and ‘Turks’. The surviving participants on the Christian side who were directly or indirectly involved in the battle came to be classified either as winners or as traitors. The Bosnian King Tvrtko and Vuk Brankovic´ can be placed here on two completely opposite sides in terms of their politics and systems of values. Nominally the ruler of the Serbs, Tvrtko had the right to consider himself the legitimate surrogate for the Serbian Empire’s former rulers, the Nemanjid dynasty. But King Tvrtko was not at the battle. On the day when the Serbian and the Turkish armies collided, Tvrtko was busy conquering certain areas in Dalmatia at the expense of the kingdom of Hungary. Command of Tvrtko’s troops at Kosovo was taken by his loyal and able duke, Vlatko. In that context, the earliest account of Kosovo is the letter of King Tvrtko on 1 August 1389 to the Adriatic coastal town of Trogir. The next, connected to the first, is dated 20 October 1389, and is the response of the municipality of Florence to a letter – sadly lost – from the king. These letters, written from another perspective, and far away from the Serbian lands exposed to direct Ottoman attack, record the outcome of the battle in a rather different way than is now accustomed. King Tvrtko describes his victory against the infidels and the heroic deed of 12 knights ‘who broke through the enemy ranks and the camels tethered round

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about, opening a way with their swords, and reached Murad’s tent. Blessed above the rest was he who, running his sword into the throat and skirt of the leader of such a great power heroically killed him.’10 These sources show how King Tvrtko depicted the outcome of the battle. From his point of view, Kosovo was to be described as a great military victory.11 Tvrtko’s attitude is based on the death of the rival leader, and the survival and return of part of the Bosnian army. Tvrtko acted as the nominal and titular double king of Bosnia and Serbia, which added more significance to his ‘victory’ and his reputation as a leader, especially during the period of growing tension between him and the king of Hungary, Sigismund (r. 1387–1437). And indeed, in the short term, for Tvrtko and the Bosnian state, the battle of Kosovo may have been a true victory; he could legitimately hold it up to western states and towns on the Adriatic as a Christian success and, conditionally speaking, a demonstration of Bosnian military power. If the consequences of the battle are viewed from Tvrtko’s perspective, it is no wonder that he proclaimed a great victory over the Ottomans. Nowhere in these letters can any detail of Prince Lazar’s death be found, and this is the prince who had been in charge of the Serbian lands’ defence. By contrast, Serbian historical sources on Kosovo view it as a clash between Lazar and Murad, while King Tvrtko’s role is not mentioned. The Venetians, who were generally quickly and well informed, were still puzzled about the outcome of the battle in July 1389. They sent a diplomatic envoy to the Ottoman Empire with two separate letters of condolence for Murad’s successor, because they did not know which one of the sultan’s sons had died in the battle along with his father. The most illustrative example about the confusion after the battle of Kosovo is this Venetian statement: ‘… various things have been spoken that can nevertheless not be believed; we have, however, heard of the death of the said Lord Murad, for which we grieve mightily’.12 Among the precious literary sources, Prince Lazar’s son wrote one, which later became famous. It was inscribed on the marble column (no longer existing) erected at the place where Lazar was captured or beheaded. Despot Stephen had it erected when Sultan Bayezid was no longer in power; that is, after the battle at Ankara in 1402. In the inscription, the Serbian despot said: … When you arrive at this field named Kosovo, you will see all around a lot of bones, and among them, you will spot me [the column] … I shall tell you the truth of what happened. … Prince Lazar and the Christian knights … killed the wild beast and the great enemy ... Sultan Murad and his son. ... Oh, Friends, the brave martyr was caught … and was cut by Murad’s son [Bayezid]. All of this ended in the year 6897, 12 indict, fifteenth day, month of June, on Tuesday, the hour was the sixth or seventh. I don’t know. Only God knows.13

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As we have seen, authentic historical sources are few and far between, containing some scarce traces of what really happened during the battle, who the main protagonists were, and how the leading figures behaved.14 However, one very important Serbian source, chronologically close to the battle, was written by Constantine the Philosopher. He worked in Belgrade, the Serbian capital at the beginning of the fifteenth century, as a librarian, a diplomat and a scholar at the court of Despot Stephen, the son of Prince Lazar. As a highly educated courtier, Constantine belonged to the inner circle of the despot, whose hagiography he wrote. Because of his position, Constantine was well informed. He wrote about the battle of Kosovo in the hagiography. This description starts with the murder of the sultan and the glorification of ‘someone among the soldiers who was blessed and who was suspected by the envious to be unfaithful to the prince. And he, to show his loyalty and courage… suddenly ran and stabbed with his sword the horrible autocrat.’ Later, in a manuscript, someone wrote ‘Miloš’ on the margin near this paragraph. Constantine also depicts certain dynamics and the course of the battle: At first, Lazar’s men resisted and they were victorious. Alas, the moment for liberation was behind them. Therefore, that emperor’s son grew stronger again in that very battle and won, as God permitted it. … Lazar reached a blissful death by being decapitated. … This battle took place in the year of 6897, in the month of June, on its fifteenth day. … And then there was not an inch of the country that was bereft of sobbing and moaning… Here, in this early source, lay the first foundations of the later legend. Doubts are raised about some Serbian aristocrats’ faithfulness and honesty, and heroism is personified here. Far-reaching effects, and later developments that could not have been known immediately after the battle, were the indispensable factors determining who the winner had to be. These were the very things that Constantine the Philosopher was aware of. The battle of Kosovo held a significant place among Ottoman sources (Ahmedi, Urudz, Ashik Pasha, Shukrulah, Neshri, etc.), which provide a more detailed description of the fighting. The problem with these Ottoman sources is also their tendentiousness, and their chronological distance from the events in question (the second half of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth). Contrary to Serbian sources, the Ottoman accounts do not recall the killing of the sultan as an act of bravery, performed by a Serbian knight during the battle, but they call it an assassination committed by an infidel hiding among the corpses at the moment when the Ottoman horsemen were chasing the fleeing Christians. The sultan’s murderer, named Miloš Kobila, is mentioned in Ashik Pasha’s work from the very end of the fifteenth century.

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Unlike King Tvrtko, the Lazarevic´ and the Brankovic´ families, whose territories faced the immediate and full impact of the Ottomans, initially suffered the brunt of the battle of Kosovo. It was only in the next century that Bosnia was to endure political instability, an erosion of power, demographic and economic decline, and the uncertainty and hopelessness that befell the Serbian central provinces in the first decade following the battle. Closer to Kosovo, Prince Lazar’s death opened up numerous vital issues about the further survival of Serbian states against the Ottomans and it additionally dramatized the political vacuum in his state, perhaps even during the battle itself. Prince Lazar’s death on the battlefield brought him everlasting glory, an embodiment of sacrifice for the fatherland, and finally martyrdom. The prince’s demise doubtless caused his family grief and fear for their continued existence, but the family also received the church authorities’ support. That support would play the decisive role in the later creation of the Kosovo legend. With some difficulty, we can ascertain what happened to the Serbian lords and landowners who had survived the Kosovo ‘earthquake’. Vuk Brankovic´ weathered the battle. In historical terms, he became a true loser and perhaps the biggest victim of this conflict. His political involvement after Lazar’s death failed to bring salvation to the Serbian lands and his name, instead of turning into the paradigm of an uncompromising fighter versus the ‘infidels’, became synonymous with treason and disloyalty in the Serbian ethnic tradition.15 The troubles that came in the post-Kosovo period smothered Vuk Brankovic´, and forced his political moves. As time passed, under the pressure of various influences, the character of Vuk was reshaped to fit legend. Vuk became a villain, embodying human moral hypocrisy and diabolical fate along the lines of Judas, Brutus or the anti-hero of The Song of Roland, Ganelon. Vuk became the focus of all the people’s wrath for ages to come, fury caused by a powerlessness to change anything and an inability to rationally contemplate the loss of sovereignty and absorption into the Ottoman Empire. In Vuk, the Serbs found their matchless anti-hero. In point of fact, however, after the battle Vuk spent the rest of his life saving the leftovers of the Serbian state and continuing to fight for Lazar’s vow to struggle against the Ottoman conquerors. Vuk’s wider family and state entourage were, to a great extent, unsympathetic to him, showing little understanding and failing to offer him the support he needed. Thus, in legend and perhaps fact, Vuk was exposed to tremendous personal temptations. From the battle of Kosovo onwards, Vuk Brankovic´ would be torn between the boundaries set by reality and his desire to defy his destiny: the irreversible historic processes whose inner laws overwhelmed every individual effort. Some cult scriptures dedicated to Prince Lazar were composed by prominent figures in the Serbian Orthodox Church at the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth century. For the first time new themes appear, which are

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to become central to the Kosovo legend. These first signs of the sacred dimension that would be attributed to Prince Lazar appeared just a few years after his death. Following the translation of his remains, the Serbian Patriarch Danilo wrote a cult text about the prince and his sacrifice. The description of this new, partly religious, partly political, narrative was not of this world. In Christian tradition, adjusted to local political circumstances, Prince Lazar became the first Serbian ruler who chose a heavenly kingdom instead of one on earth. Any participant of the battle who had survived, who did not lay his life on the altar of the state, was therefore a traitor. This was an element of the legend created and disseminated soon after the battle by the highest church circles, to influence the dynastic rivalry between Lazar’s family and the family of his son-in-law, Vuk. The first historical source calling Vuk a traitor was Il regno degli Sclavi published in Pesaro by Mavro Orbini in 1601. The distance between the battle and this particular denunciation of Vuk is too great. At that point, the oral tradition of Vuk’s betrayal had long existed and had been recorded, and was just further developed and upgraded. The historian Rade Mihaljcˇic´, who thoroughly researched the transformation of the battle into legend, concluded that incomplete knowledge of the event was quickly converted into legend that was refreshed over time with new motifs, and spread further. Kosovo became in tradition and oral recollection a fundamental temporal point of reference. People believed that the battle destroyed the Serbian state. Even more, they thought that the beginning of the centuries of slavery under foreign rule was directly linked to the battle. Later, numerous studies were written based on well-known sources and the tradition. But every attempt to reconstruct the events of 1389 has been developed out of a fug of legend that has obscured the historical essence.

3 Streams of Serbian history on the battle of Kosovo The huge gap created by the loss of Serbian statehood during the period of Ottoman rule, which lasted until almost the end of the nineteenth century, was more of a physical nature. The remembrance of a distant blossoming of Serbian culture in medieval times was built into folklore and oral poetry, which preserved a metaphysical awareness of the Serbian state. This collective memory of the past was spread among the ordinary people (or raya – as the subjects of the Ottoman Empire were called) by bards and poets. The shift from the social stratification predominant in medieval society to a broader Serbian national awareness was accelerated by the religious discrepancy between the ruling Muslims and the subject Christians. This process lasted for a long, but definable period. The idea of heroic behaviour and the close connection to a semi-legendary past shaped the Serbian collective national identity and, to a certain extent, established the idea of a hibernating or hidden statehood. With

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the loss of state independence, medieval court literature lost its base in Serbia and moved with the Serbian aristocracy to Christian states west and north of the conquered territories. The sole repositories of oral tradition remaining were the Orthodox Church, an authoritative institution which guarded tradition and Serbian cultural heritage in its monasteries, and individual bards from the lower social classes, people who had but middling educational achievements and artistic abilities. They came to be the precious repositories of the glorious past of a then non-existing Serbian state. In the centuries that followed the battle, Serbian epics based on the Kosovo myth and legend, and the cycle of tales about King Marko (whose historical role also contradicts his place in the epic tradition) became pillars on which a Serbian ethnic mentality and moral values could be constructed. Diverse sociological and literary studies of the origins and development of Serbian national identity have shed light on this matter from different angles. The risings against the Turks in 1804 and 1815 produced a new cycle of poems which attempted to motivate Serbs to rise against the Ottoman Empire, to become more homogeneous, and to revive the Serbian state. During the rule of the Obrenovic´ dynasty in the nineteenth century, a great deal of Serbian territory was liberated from the Turks and, in 1878 at the Congress of Berlin, both Serbia and Montenegro gained formal recognition of their independence. What remained was the struggle to regain territories still held by the Ottomans, territories which had been an integral part of the Ottoman Empire since the Middle Ages. The Kosovo poems and the legend developed further, in parallel to political changes over time. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Kosovo legend again played a notable role in shaping Serbian national identity. It was at this time that the first truly historical, source-based attempts were made to separate the historic nucleus from the Kosovo legend. This was not only a question of applying historical methodology, but was an issue that deeply penetrated the very essence of the national tradition, and threatened to upset the pillars which sustained Serbian national consciousness. Nevertheless, the components of the Kosovo vow, and the victims and betrayers of the heavenly kingdom, were for the first time ever subjected to critical study based on solid sources. Historical investigation thrived, with researchers coming to the subject from both the ecclesiastical and secular world. The merit of their work lay not in an introduction of new historical and methodological principles, but rather in their strict and steady application of already existing ones.16 They tried to move forward by using historical sources that were chronologically as close as possible to the event, and this meant an abandonment of folk tales and legends as relevant sources for the battle of Kosovo. Their work was not easy. It was very difficult to get around stereotypes, which held a greater significance in the nineteenth century than they do today. The paucity of academic life limited the reception for such

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careful studies in a country which had only won its liberty in 1878, and was still in the grips of the national passion that had brought independence. Some prominent figures, such as Pantelija Srec´kovic´, a professor at the socalled Velika Škola (the forerunner of the university in Belgrade), were steadfast defenders of the national folk tradition as a relevant historical source for the medieval past in general, and the battle of Kosovo in particular. It was only on the occasion of the upcoming five-hundredth anniversary of the battle (1889) that historians of the new generation, such as Ilarion Ruvarac, Ljubomir Kovacˇevic´, Konstantin Jirecˇek and Franjo Racˇki, were able to apply historical method to the old theories based on legends. Their findings were substantial. Folk heritage had incorrectly attributed the title emperor to the Serbian leader. The new generation of historians practically had to wage war with the romanticists to prove that the highest title he could have claimed was prince. Lazar’s son-in-law, Vuk Brankovic´, had been the lord of the territory where the battle of Kosovo took place, and researchers could demonstrate that Vuk was not a traitor at Kosovo. Legend had made of Vuk a paradigm of treason that had (and has) been used for centuries as the model of moral decline at the most trying moments for Serbian statehood. Thus Vuk epitomized the negative hero, from whom people received a subliminal message about the necessity of national unity on various levels and occasions. The representatives of the new critical historical approach were faced with the most difficult and complex task in trying to prove Vuk’s innocence of the alleged treason. And apart from modifying the ethical duality individualized through the positive characters of Prince Lazar and Miloš Obilic´, and the negative one of Vuk Brankovic´, the Kosovo legend had given birth to an array of fictional persons that served as choreography for the plot of the myth. These fictional characters also provided moral lessons in the tale. The most famous example of this concerns a noblewoman who loses her nine sons at the battle. While various other themes were disputed, the disintegration of the Serbian medieval state at the end of the fourteenth century and, in particular, the historical kernel of the battle of Kosovo lay at the centre of this debate between traditional romanticists and critical historians, who were striving to lay more solid cornerstones for Serbian historical research. While the field of history advanced, the political celebration of the fivehundredth anniversary of Kosovo had a completely different quality. The commemoration was prepared and marketed extremely carefully with a view to the political sensibilities of the time, particularly with regard to Serbia’s foreign relations.17 It should be noted that while Serbia was independent, Kosovo was at the time still within the Ottoman Empire. Just a decade after acquiring international recognition, the kingdom of Serbia had to balance between the need to strengthen its own national identity and integrity, and maintaining relations with neighbouring Turkey, from which Serbia had won its independence.

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Regard also had to be paid to the sensibilities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with its large Serbian minority, to Serbia’s north and west. The central celebration marking the battle took place in Kruševac, Lazar’s medieval capital. In 1912, at the battle of Kumanovo in the First Balkan War, the Turks were decisively beaten. As a result, Kosovo was handed over to Serbia, and the slogan ‘Kumanovo for Kosovo’ was coined. In the minds of the people, the victory at Kumanovo was the long-awaited revenge for the debacle at Kosovo in 1389. The first opportunity to organize a significant commemoration at the battlefield itself came in 1939, on the five-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the battle. King Peter II and his mother honoured this event with their presence. The commemoration also included a parade of military strength, with over 100,000 people in attendance to witness the glorifying of national values. Immense media attention was given to this celebration. Newspaper headlines were ‘Kosovo – the source of our people’s unbreakable hopes and life force’ and the like, and some articles of a similar kidney were written by eminent historians. One, Mihailo Dinic´, wrote that ‘history has not been able to distinguish between the historic Kosovo and the legendary one’, which primarily concentrated on the outcome of the battle. The first six pages of national dailies were dedicated to messages for the present deduced from the battle of Kosovo and its legend, and to the importance of the event for Serbian national identity. In the post-Second World War period Serbian historians continually discussed the causes and results of the battle of Kosovo, as well as the origins of the legend and its multiple meanings. In that sense distinguished historians, starting from Mihailo Dinic´ and Ivan Božic´, through to members of later generations such as Mihaljcˇic´, produced a number of important works, while literary historians like Miodrag Popovic´ and Jelka Red¯ep concentrated on the matter of the legend and folk tradition. But the greatest outpouring of work on Kosovo came only at the end of the twentieth century, immediately preceding the six-hundredth anniversary of the battle. Those celebrations started a year early, in 1988, with a solemn religious procession bearing Prince Lazar’s sarcophagus with his remains on a tour around Serbia. The Serbian Orthodox Church’s reintegration into the (still) one-party system in Serbia was ideologically guided by a Communist party preparing the ground for the national homogenization needed for the regrouping of political forces in the former Yugoslavia. Honouring the Serbian saint’s relics by kissing the sarcophagus of him who had sacrificed his life on the ‘altar of the fatherland’ symbolically prepared the population for the impending celebration and its political use, leading to confrontation with the other nations of Yugoslavia. After visiting many towns, Lazar’s remains were brought to Kosovo on Vidovdan (St Vitus’s day) 1989, on their way to their final resting place at a monastery built by Prince Lazar at Ravanica, in central Serbia. The motif of the Kosovo legend, and the historic event itself once again became topical, but this time in the most

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brutal and trivial way, with an entirely clear and unscrupulous goal, which was in no way the case with the five-hundredth anniversary celebration at the end of the nineteenth century. Leading academic and religious institutions played prominent roles in popularizing the historic event and re-evaluating the key questions associated with the battle of Kosovo. Among them we can name the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU), the Serbian Orthodox Church, and a variety of other significant scientific and cultural institutions. In the context of the time, it was not easy to separate the state and its cultural and scientific institutions from the historic events that were being marked. In all Communist states in the post-war period, it was a widespread practice to celebrate the anniversaries of the Socialist revolution and partisan ‘victories’ over the enemy in the Second World War, and Serbia was no exception. Because of this tradition of commemoration and the common understanding of what was wanted on such occasions, after the fact it is difficult to discover any direct dictatorial state intervention amongst academic circles, particularly historians, before the sixhundredth anniversary. Whether as a result of the general social climate, some ‘self-consciousness’ on the part of historians, or their own interest in the subject, their work became an inseparable element of national enthusiasm by the end of the 1980s. Slobodan Miloševic´’s politics received great support from a group of academicians who published a Serbian national manifesto called the Memorandum SANU, and this in turn proved stimulating to those who wanted to reanimate national awareness from its inertia under the pseudo-socialistic bureaucracy. The memory of Kosovo was thoroughly worked over, as is evident from the countless round-table discussions and publications on the issue. Unfortunately, the stimulus provided by the public and academic commemoration of the sixth century after the battle coincided with party shifts in Serbia, and preparations for the restructuring of the state which turned out to be the break-up of Socialist Yugoslavia. Viewed from the medievalist aspect, Serbian histories of the battle of Kosovo might well have been corrected a little; that is, to a certain degree they demonstrably did work in tandem with the political needs of the day. Whatever the case, historical work on Kosovo blossomed. There was almost an open competition among historians looking for a variety of approaches to illuminate the event. But space for political abuse was only made from the long historical perspective: not the more limited one of medieval studies, but rather the larger view of ‘Kosovo’ and the depiction of ‘Kosovo martyrs’ throughout the history of Serbian culture and mentality. For its part, the Serbian Orthodox Church took care not to be bound by any scientific methodology, but to act as the spiritual patron of the celebrations by trying to preserve the memory of the fallen knights at every event, scientific or popular, associated with Kosovo and the battle. Heads of the Church and historians who connected Kosovo to

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current events were given roles in the politicized celebrations of the anniversary. They were joined by nationally awakened poets and novelists who had no regard for principles of historical research. Their contributions to scientific meetings or special publications related to the topic of Kosovo, the battle, or Prince Lazar, gave a very different meaning to the objective achievements of medievalists’ research. In attempts to gain political weight, the editorial boards of some medieval historical studies gave the closing sections of their publications to authors who had nothing to do with medieval studies. We should stress here that during the six-hundredth anniversary of the battle of Kosovo, Serbia was still led by a totalitarian Communist party. The party had, however, already changed within, bringing to the fore a new group of people who were no longer ideological but rather nationalistically mutated Communists, who used the Communist party’s political monopoly to seek an unconditioned, uncompromising and limitless realization of their policies. This historical enterprise owed more to collective euphoria than to state dictatorship. Serbs living abroad were greatly involved in the six-hundredth anniversary celebration preparations. Their activities ranged from marketing the event abroad to the financing of certain projects in the Serbian motherland. There were innumerable commemorative gatherings throughout Serbia. Some of them did not limit themselves to a remembrance of the distant past, but also aspired to establish new historical results founded on methodologically verified historical research. Other celebratory conferences, apart from mentioning some academic achievements and historical conclusions, tended to use the memory of the battle as a warning of the threats facing the Serbian people and their unjust position in Yugoslavia six centuries after the gravest defeat in Serbian history. Some seminal works were published as integral components of these conferences on the battle of Kosovo. In the space of a few years before and after the jubilee (1987–92), a great number of colourful books were published. They were miscellanies, monographs, syntheses, catalogues and other special publications related to the battle of Kosovo or the history of Kosovo and Metohija. These publications are exemplary indicators of the contextualization of Kosovo, and the tendency to popularize and promote it by adjusting the history of the battle to contemporary requirements. To demonstrate this it suffices to review their themes, contents and especially the number of volumes published to satisfy the local market and foreign consumers. Circulation numbers testify that at a certain point history was converted into a means for achieving certain nationalistic propaganda effects. During the amalgamation of dying communism and its phoenix-like rebirth in nationalist form, the Serbian Orthodox Church gained a prominent social status immediately associated with the commemoration of warriors who had fallen in the fourteenth century. Simultaneously with changes in the leadership of the Serbian Communist party, the Church initiated the arrangements for

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celebrating the six-hundredth anniversary of the battle of Kosovo as early as 1987. An exquisitely luxurious book of almost 900 pages, on ‘Kosovo Legacies, Monuments and Omens of the Serbian People’, was published by the Church in 1987, in Belgrade and Prizren. It contained several hundred coloured illustrations and detailed descriptions of the Serbian cultural heritage. This edition was financially supported by hundreds of donors from Serbia and abroad. The book was not created exclusively by clerics. Some outstanding historians and art historians participated as well. This publication served as a pattern for later books which portrayed the victimization of the Serbs from Ottoman days up until the 1980s. The book’s ending took the form of an almost prophetic warning. Populism and an aggressive dissemination of topics related to the battle of Kosovo were reflected in the megalomaniac print runs of some academic works and historical sources published in 1989. A typical example of this, and of church influence on the Serbian public, is the monographic miscellany of articles entitled ‘Kosovo and Metohija in Serbian History’. It was published in 8000 copies in 1989 by the Srpska Književna Zadruga (one of the main Serbian cultural institutions, established in 1889) in cooperation with a certain ‘Society for Preservation of Monuments and Cherishing of the Traditions of the Serbian Liberation Wars (until 1918) in Belgrade (Swiss Branch)’. It is difficult to tell where this society’s backing came from and what its true purpose was. Besides dealing with the history of Kosovo from the Middle Ages up to its place in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, this book consisted of a manifesto in the form of an appendix documenting the martyrdom of Serbs in Kosovo. The work by the monk (later bishop) Atanasije Jevtic´, Stradanja Srba na Kosovu i Metohiji od 1941 do 1990 [The Chronicle of Serbian Agony in Kosovo and Metohija, 1941–90] (Prishtina, 1990), was devoted to the long history of Serbs in Kosovo. When read along with pieces approaching Kosovo history from the Middle Ages to modern days, the clergyman’s chronicle of individual criminal incidents metamorphosed Kosovo into a ‘historical alarm’ for the Serbian people, or rather for the intellectual elite to whom his book was addressed. A similar concept was applied in the academic miscellany The Kosovo Battle and its Consequences (Belgrade, 1991), published in 1000 copies by the Balkan Institute of the Serbian Academy. In fact, the articles collected in this publication originate from an academic meeting organized in 1989 in Himmelsthür, Germany, by the Serbian Orthodox bishopric for western Europe, and Matica Srba (an association of the Serbian diaspora) in collaboration with Serbian emigrants. The selection of topics presented at this meeting was very heterogeneous, varying from those of a strictly medievalist historical approach,18 ranging over those concerning the Kosovo legend,19 and extending to those with a historical essayistic mode,20 and those dealing with memories of the battle of Kosovo during the nineteenth century. The two final texts by Žarko Vidovic´ (‘The Vow – European History’s Original Principle’), and Veselin ¯Duretic´ (‘The Political

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and Historical Background of the Kosovan and Metohijan Serbs’ Tragedy in the Period after World War II’), display the impact of the sudden political and nationalistic ‘awakening’ of the Serbs. Through these texts this miscellany, for all the value of many of the works it contains, took on a new functional dimension. ¯Duretic´’s conclusion, written in almost prophetic biblical manner, is illustrative enough of this: … After the chaos [the destruction of Yugoslavia], Serbia is necessarily being born with its complete ethnic frontiers [including the Serbs of Croatia and Bosnia], neither by force nor any political game … but on the basis of the statistics and the other indices which take precedence over violence, taking into consideration the souls of the living and the dead. Thus, a distant historical event is given a modern political usage, serving as an irrefutable argument for the introduction of the Serbian national issue to communism. It would not be just to neglect mention of academic miscellanies that remained free of non-academic influence. One such is ‘The Round Table. The Kosovo Battle in Historiography’, published in 1000 copies in 1990 by Belgrade’s Institute of History. Several studies in the book clearly demonstrate that there were serious scholars who were not seduced by the collective trance.21 Of similar value is the miscellany, ‘The Battle of Kosovo – Older and Newer Interpretations’ (Belgrade, 1992), a modest book printed in a not insignificant number of 1000 copies. As the market lacked selectivity and was imposingly well supported by the policy to publish huge print runs of practically anything related to the topic, even some short academic papers appeared in enormous numbers. That seemingly popularized academic approaches to Kosovo, but simultaneously it also reinforced the Serbian cult of the battle. ¯Dord¯e Trifunovic´’s sophisticated article ‘The Oldest Serbian Writings/Notes on the Kosovo Battle’ (Gornji Milanovac, 1989), a critical edition of some medieval writings, was thus published in a remarkable 3000 copies. Who the target group was for all these copies remains unclear. A similar case was the reprint in 1989 of the study Pricˇa o boju kosovskom [The Kosovo Battle Tale] by the Serbian historian Stojan Novakovic´. The work was originally published in 1878 with sections taken from original sources written in the old Serbian language, which is now hardly comprehensible to the average reader. And yet the book was published in 1989 in 5000 copies. The significance ascribed to academic research can be judged by the publication of the work of the historian and eminent professor at Belgrade University, Rade Mihaljcˇic´. An internationally acknowledged scholar of medieval studies, he wrote a trilogy dealing with the period of the second half of the fourteenth century and the battle of Kosovo. The first book in the series was published

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in 1974 with the title Kraj srpskog carstva [The End of the Serbian Empire]. It concluded with events preceding the battle of Kosovo. The second book was dedicated to the history, cult and tradition of Prince Lazar, and was published in 1984. Mihaljcˇic´ finished the third book, Junaci kosovske legende [The Heroes of the Kosovo Legend], in time for the six-hundredth anniversary. It treated the development of legends related to Kosovo, and how history had reshaped the collective folk imagination. The publisher republished the previous two books along with the final volume in 1989 in 10,000 copies. These luxuriously designed books were amply advertised and quickly sold. The trilogy, even amongst less educated people, became a sort of status symbol. Simultaneously with the release of the trilogy, another book by Mihaljcˇic´, The Battle of Kosovo, was published in 3000 copies in English. The discrepancy between the numbers published in Serbian and English (10,000 and 3000 copies) speaks volumes for the profits the publisher made, and demonstrates the degree to which the domestic market had been mobilized socially and politically. Coinciding with this immense publishing project, the Serbian version of The Battle of Kosovo (in fact a summary of the trilogy) was published in instalments in the main Serbian daily, Politika. The fact that Serbian society, at the dawn of the six-hundredth anniversary, was fully focused on this historic event is also demonstrated by the fact that special art exhibitions were organized and music was composed inspired by the motifs of the battle of Kosovo, Prince Lazar, and their spiritual legacy. The influence of history and the medieval motifs were omnipresent throughout Serbia. As never before, Serbs seem to have taken energy and inspiration for the future from their distant past and this single medieval event. The literary historians did not lag behind historians. Vojislav ¯Duric´ assembled a book in Serbian on The Kosovo Battle in Serbian Literature (Belgrade, 1989), presented on 650 pages, and printed in 4000 copies. The book contains a collection of shorter texts and extracts from eminent nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians. The greater part of the book, however, is dedicated to extracts on the battle of Kosovo from historical sources and epic poetry, ending with 350 pages of text from nineteenth-century authors and from modern poets inspired by the Serbian national transformation at the end of the twentieth century – all connected, of course, to the history, myth and legend of Kosovo. Among the numerous authors who jousted for national attention on the Kosovo battlefield and had an effect on society, the academician and playwright Ljubomir Simovic´ holds a prominent place. His play Boj na Kosovu [The Battle at Kosovo] was turned into a screenplay, with underlying propaganda messages. The play and the film were constructed around legendary motifs, so that the moralizing ideals of heroism and sacrifice for freedom and for Serbia were primary, naturally not omitting Vuk Brankovic´’s betrayal. Making the utmost of artistic liberty, the author absolutely avoided entanglement with historic facts, offering

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those who saw the film a legend on screen. The rush to make the film testifies to its political purpose. Shooting lasted only some 40 days from 3 April to 13 May 1989. It had to be completed in time for the 28 June celebration. Even though this movie was made for television, it was first screened on 21 June (1989) in the Sava Centre, the largest conference hall in Belgrade. An audience of more than 4000 watched the film that evening. Among them were government officials, as well as representatives of the Serbian Orthodox Church and many cultural institutions. The public was able to see this movie on the First Channel of Belgrade Television on 26 June at prime time, 8.00 p.m., just after the evening news. In a way, the film thus appeared as an appendix to the news. It was broadcast everywhere in Serbia and Montenegro, and could be viewed in other parts of the former Yugoslavia as well. Kosovo, its motifs and legend were thus, through ambitious histories, every sort of artistic genre, and ultimately through the mass media, transmitted to all of Serbian society. The battle of Kosovo had long been a cohesive narrative for Serbs, and once again, immediately preceding the break-up of Yugoslavia, it became an inescapably common part of Serbian cultural identity, and integral to daily politics.

4 The battle of Kosovo today – between national stereotype and political abuse Leading Serbian politicians’ interests coincided with the six-hundredth anniversary, thus paving the way for a renewed political actualization of the battle of Kosovo. The voluminous historical, literary, religious and cult oeuvre that had grown over centuries around Kosovo and its participants generated an inexhaustible potential for selective use of the historic event and its reinterpretation for any number of purposes. Historical and meta-historical aspects existing in the legend and the folk tradition were overlaid with an ethereal moral fibre, which served to strengthen the narrative and provide the weft of nationalist inspiration. While the experts in medieval studies primarily dealt with the causes, the event itself, and its immediate consequences, a great part of the Serbian cultural elite exploited the six-hundredth anniversary of the battle of Kosovo in another way. It served as an instrument to transmogrify decadent Communist elites into nationalists, a transformation that was essential for the events to come. The battle of Kosovo reached the climax of its political abuse on the very day of its anniversary. Several hundred thousand people gathered at Kosovo Field, near Prishtina, where Slobodan Miloševic´ delivered a speech that has since become infamous, ominously announcing the events portending the impending doom of Serbia and Yugoslavia. A great number of people attended the celebrations in Kosovo; estimates range from 300,000 to 2 million. Through Miloševic´’s words, medieval history became a kind of prototype and tool for facing

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contemporary events, and also a vision – a way of solving political conflicts. Considering that the public had already been exposed to the hyperactivity of the Serbian academic and cultural media for a year or two before, the terms and associations Miloševic´ used to address the nation in a virtual dialogue were profoundly rooted in the consciousness of his audience. Slobodan Miloševic´’s speech highlighted him as the prominent representative of the Serbian political elite. While he demonstrated a measure of appreciation for historical research, he simultaneously stuck to a narrative built on the layers of the legends of the battle of Kosovo. His words were: By the force of social circumstances this great six-hundredth anniversary of the battle of Kosovo is taking place in a year in which Serbia, after many years, after many decades, has regained its state, national, and spiritual integrity. Therefore, it is not difficult for us to answer today the old question: how are we going to face Miloš [Obilic´]. Through the play of history and life, it seems as if Serbia has, precisely in this year, in 1989, regained its state and its dignity and thus has celebrated an event of the distant past which has a great historical and symbolic significance for its future. Today it is difficult to say what the historical truth of the battle of Kosovo is, and what is legend. The distinction is no longer important. Oppressed by pain and filled with hope, the people used to remember and to forget, as, after all, all people in the world do; they were ashamed of treachery and glorified heroism. Therefore it is difficult to say today whether the battle of Kosovo was a defeat or a victory for the Serbian people, whether because of it we fell into slavery, or thanks to it we survived as a people despite this slavery. The answers to those questions will be constantly sought by science and the people. What has been certain through all the centuries until our times is the disharmony at Kosovo 600 years ago. If we lost the battle, then this was not only the result of the social superiority and military advantage of the Ottoman Empire, but also of the tragic disunity in the leadership of the Serbian state at that time. In that distant 1389, the Ottoman Empire was not only stronger than the Serbs but it was also more fortunate than the Serbian kingdom. The lack of unity and betrayal in Kosovo will continue to follow the Serbian people like an evil fate through the whole of its history. Even in the last war, this lack of unity and betrayal led the Serbian people and Serbia into agony, the consequences of which in the historical and moral sense exceeded fascist aggression ... Elsewhere, militantly bitter political speeches abounded with quotations from folk poems interlaced with Kosovo motifs shortly before the war broke out in Yugoslavia in 1991. Rally slogans were: ‘The Emperor Murad fell at Kosovo and you traitors will fall now’; ‘We won’t give up Kosovo, we won’t give away Miloš’s grave’; ‘Miloš arise!’; and ‘Kosovo is sacred’. Those mottoes enabled

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Kosovo to become an element of war propaganda, while the war was taken as a premise, indispensable and inevitable. Articles from Politika (then the regime daily) were shrouded in the Kosovo myth on the day of the celebration. Headlines portrayed the desirable public mood and a blueprint for social behaviour. Some of them were: ‘Six Centuries since the Kosovo battle – the age of Kosovo’, with the subtitles ‘Serbian people celebrated and celebrate their Heroes and recognise Traitors’ and ‘We didn’t defend Serbia, only Europe’. Newspaper texts oozed with references to Miloš Obilic´ and Vuk Brankovic´. Prince Lazar’s alleged words ‘It is better to die honourably than to live dishonestly’ provided a conclusion, and an imperative. Through the Kosovo motifs, people were convinced to re-examine themselves, their inner beliefs and aspirations, so that the political moral had to be drawn at both the collective and individual levels. Monolithic moralizing intimations related to the sacrifice made by Prince Lazar and Miloš Obilic´ gradually transmuted into signals to be patriotic, while their antipode, Vuk Brankovic´’s alleged betrayal, became a threat to those having different views, or who did not support the new political schemes. The homogenization of the nation and the condemnation of future ‘traitors’ were being fabricated around the battle of Kosovo and its saga in 1989 and 1990. One of the most frequently used phrases taken from the folk tradition was the ‘Kosovo vow’. It was displayed by sacrificing for a higher cause and disregarding one’s own individuality. As a direct line, almost a short cut, to the ‘holiest’ Serbian historical event and its protagonists, this pseudo-religious avowal evoked the ultimate goal of sacrifice for the fatherland and a determination to end in the heavenly kingdom. The choice between that kingdom, reserved for heroes and patriots, and the earthly kingdom chosen by the ‘traitors’ was essential and unequivocal. This ideological trap derived from the participants at the battle of Kosovo. On the grounds of Lazar’s resolution and determination to gain the heavenly kingdom, the idea of a ‘heavenly’ Serbian people was launched, suggesting an eternal sinless national tradition. Through the imputed categories of patriotism, sacrifice and treason, this mythical adaptation of the battle of Kosovo occupied a prominent place in the thinking of the whole Serbian populace, educated and ignorant alike. During the warfare of the 1990s Miloš Obilic´’s feat of killing the sultan was evoked on several occasions, distorted into banality, while Vuk’s legendary betrayal was recycled whenever needed. Thus was it evoked in 1991, in the grim atmosphere of international sanctions against Yugoslavia and war in Slovenia, when a rhyme was coined using the name of the European Union’s representative: ‘Hans van den Broek you are Brankovic´ Vuk.’ Even today, reflections on the heritage and symbolism of the battle of Kosovo are ubiquitous. The Serbian Orthodox Church maintains its symbolic duty of recalling the battle to the mind of a public overburdened by economic troubles and unsolved political

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issues. The future political status of the province of Kosovo has given rise to manifold actions, including a re-evoking of the theme of the battle and Prince Lazar’s sacrifice. On the eve of the celebration in 2007, the Serbian Orthodox Church published a luxury monograph, ‘The Holy Prince Lazar and the Kosovo Vow’, in 100,000 copies, at a time when histories in Serbian are normally published in 500–1000 copies. This huge number represents an attempt to evoke forgotten patriotic emotions that were once so prevalent during the time of Miloševic´ and the destruction of Yugoslavia. Even at that time such books were, as we have seen, generally published in runs of 10,000 copies. Sticking to the anachronistic national tradition and legendary heritage, disregarding the results of modern historical research, the Serbian Orthodox Church reawakens and propagates the old legend about treachery among Serbs on the battlefield that led to the final defeat of the Serbs, setting it up as an eternal, cyclical and still tangible truth. Today the Serbian Orthodox Church continues to cling to nineteenthcentury theories that have been completely abandoned outside church circles, proclaiming the results of modern historical research to be mere deception. The top authorities of the state also, for everyday political purposes, continue to make parallels with Kosovo, bringing it into the modern context. So, more than 600 years after the medieval battle was fought, on St Vitus’ Day, 28 June 2007, the Serbian prime minister, Vojislav Koštunica, declared: ‘Today, the Serbian–American battle of Kosovo is occurring before the eyes of the world. While the medieval Kosovo battle was fought with weapons and was lost for Serbs, the current battle is fought with the power of argument and the force of law.’ The fact that the Serbian prime minister’s source of rhetoric is also the Church’s justifies the conclusion of numerous sociological studies which have demonstrated the depth to which the myth of Kosovo has penetrated the collective Serbian consciousness. Some have concluded that Serbian politicians can most clearly and authoritatively speak to the nation through an arsenal of sacred motifs provided by the Kosovo tales – motifs which are exclusively comprehensible to Serbs.22 Hence, it is no wonder that Kosovo and the battle itself have become synonymous with Serbian suffering, no matter where that might happen. Bishop Anastasije Jevtic´ once proclaimed that ‘all those places where Serbs were persecuted [throughout history] from Kosovo to Jadovno [where Serbs were massacred in World War II] may bear the name of Kosovo’.23 According to Jevtic´, the places of spilt Serbian blood – the battlefields, in this case Kosovo Polje – have the extraordinary symbolic value of creating an unbreakable and almost organic link with the past and that territory and, through the victimization of the Serbs, a connection to the divine. Thus even today the battle of Kosovo remains, amongst the Serbs, a universally comprehensible commonplace of national and cultural identity that can still be put to political use.

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Notes * This chapter has been edited by Eric Beckett Weaver. 1. Tim Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (2nd edn, London, 2000), 30. 2. Some authors compare the battle of Kosovo with the battles at Poitiers (732), Kulikovo (1380) or Thermopylae (480 BC). See Olga Zirojevic´, ‘Kosovo u kolektivnom pamc´enju’, in Nebojša Popov (ed.), Srpska strana rata. Trauma i katarza u istorijskom pamc´enju (Belgrade, 1996), 234; tr. as ‘Kosovo in the Collective Memory’, in Popov (ed.), The Road to War in Serbia. Trauma and Catharsis (Budapest, 2000), 189–211. ˇ olovic´, ‘Kosovo – zlatna grana srpske politike’, in id., Dubina: cˇlanci i intervjui 3. Ivan C (Belgrade, 2001). The quote is from ‘Kosovo – the Most Expensive Serbian Word’, a lecture given by Matija Bec´kovic´ in Australia, around Europe and Yugoslavia throughout the course of 1989. 4. George Ostrogorsky, History of the Byzantine State (Oxford, 1956), 481–2. 5. Miodrag Purkovic´, Kc´eri kneza Lazara (Melbourne, 1957). 6. Gliša Elezovic´, ‘Boj na Kosovu 1389. godine u Istoriji Mula Mehmeda Hešrije’, Brastvo, 31 (1940), 2. 7. Olga Zirojevic´, ‘Lazarevo pismo Muratu ili kako je došlo do Kosovskog boja’, in Nikola Tasic´ and Veselin ¯Duretic´ (eds), Kosovska bitka 1389. godine i njene posledice (Belgrade, 1991), 29–34. 8. ¯Dord¯e Sp. Radojicˇic´ (ed.), Antologija stare srpske književnosti, XI–XVIII veka (Belgrade, 1960). 9. ¯Dord¯e Trifunovic´, Najstariji srpski zapisi o Kosovskom boju (Gornji Milanovac, 1989), 6–7. 10. Maximilian Braun, Kosovo. Die Schlacht auf dem Amselfelde (Leipzig, 1937), 9–10, 14–15. The translation of the historical source is given by Rade Mihaljcˇic´, The Battle of Kosovo in History and in Popular Tradition, tr. M. Hrgovic´ et al. (Belgrade, 1989), 47. 11. A collection of the most important sources on the battle in Serbian translation is given by Sima C´irkovic´, ‘Istorijski izvori o Kosovskom boju. Bitka na Kosovu 1389. godine’, Galerija SANU, no. 65, 167–96; fragments of sources are given by Braun, Kosovo. 12. Mihaljcˇic´, The Battle of Kosovo. 13. Radojicˇic´ (ed.), Antologija stare srpske kniževnosti. 14. For documents, see C´irkovic´, ‘Istorijski izvori o Kosovskom boju’. The most highly regarded reconstructions of the battle are given by G. Škrivanic´, Kosovska bitka (Cetinje, 1956), and Petar Tomac, Kosovska bitka (Belgrade, 1968). On attempts to reconstruct the battle, see Miloš Blagojevic´, ‘Vojno-istorijske rekonstrukcije Kosovske bitke’, in Slavenko Terzic´ (ed.), Kosovska bitka u istoriografiji (Belgrade, 1989), 11–21. For a personal view on the battle and the clash over its commemorative reconstruction, see Sima C´irkovic´, ‘Kosovska bitka u svetlosti novih istraživanja’, in Dragutin Rankovic´ (ed.), Srpski narod u drugoj polovini XIV i prvoj polovini XV veka: zbornik radova posvec´en šeststogodišnjici Kosovske bitke (Belgrade, 1989), 29–41. 15. On the role of Vuk Brankovic´ and the history of events associated with him and with certain locales in national tradition, see Ljubomir Kovacˇevic´, ‘Vuk Brankovic´’, ˇ upic´a, 10 (1888), 215–301, republ. in Rade Mihaljcˇic´ (ed.), Boj na Godišnjica Nikole C Kosovu – starija i novija saznanja (Belgrade, 1992), 297–353. On Prince Lazar, see Ivan

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16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

Božic´, Neverstvo Vuka Brankovic´a (Belgrade, 1975), 223–40, and id. ‘O ulozi Vuka Brankovic´a’, Letopis Matice Srpske, 415, no. 5 (1975), 475–82. On the anti-hero, see Rade Mihaljcˇic´, Junaci kosovske legende (Belgrade, 1989), 109–27, motifs 127–48; and id., The Battle of Kosovo, 115–23. On the Brankovic´ family in history and tradition, see Momcˇilo Spremic´, ‘Brankovic´i u istoriji i predanju’, in Mihaljcˇic´ (ed.), Boj na Kosovu, 509–24. Sima C´irkovic´, ‘O knezu Lazaru: studija Ilariona Ruvarca’, in Mihaljcˇic´ (ed.), Boj na Kosovu, 9–15, at 12. Mihailo Vojvodic´, ‘Srpsko-turski odnosi i proslava petstogodišnjice Kosovske bitke’, in Mihaljcˇic´ (ed.), Boj na Kosovu, 483–505. Some themes are in Boško Bojovic´, ‘Geneza kosovske ideje u prvim post-kosovskim književno-istorijskim spisima’, Sopoc´anska vid¯enja, no. 9 (1990), 43–51; Olga Zirojevic´, ‘Lazarevo pismo Muratu’; J. Kalic´, ‘Srbija i zapadni svet, 1389–1459’; and Dragoljub Dragojlovic´, ‘Politika Apostolske stolice na Balkanskom poluostrvu pre i posle Kosovske bitke’, in Tasic´ and ¯Duretic´ (eds), Kosovska bitka, 65–76. Jelka Red¯ep, ‘Kosovska legenda i Pricˇa o boju kosovskom’, in Tasic´ and ¯Duretic´ (eds), Kosovska bitka, 77–89; and Dinko Davidov, ‘Kult svetog kneza Lazara i njegov lik u srpskoj grafici XVIII veka’, ibid., 91–100. Radovan Samardžic´, ‘Za carstvo nebesko’, in Tasic´ and ¯Duretic´ (eds), Kosovska bitka, 9–14. Slavenko Terzic´ (ed.), Okrugli sto: Kosovska bitka u istoriografiji (Belgrade, 1990), with outstanding works by Sima C´irkovic´, Rade Mihaljcˇic´, Dušan Korac´ and Radivoj Radic´. ˇ olovic´, The Politics of Symbol in Serbia: Essays in Political Anthropology, See Ivan C tr. C. Hawkesworth (London, 2002). ˇ olovic´, ‘Kosovo – zlatna grana’. Cited in C

Part IV Central Europe

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11

Italy’s Various Middle Ages1 Mauro Moretti and Ilaria Porciani

1 The contemporary Middle Ages In his famous essay Quale dei governi liberi meglio convenga alla felicità d’Italia (1797), the political writer Melchiorre Gioia described the Italian republics of the Middle Ages as a fiercely fratricidal world: for him it amounted to a history that Italy would do well to leave behind. A few years later the same experience would be viewed quite differently. In his summary of Italian history published in 1846 Cesare Balbo, a member of the Piedmontese nobility and one of the leading figures of the Catholic liberal movement for independence and constitutional government, though not particularly keen on the republican tradition, would explicitly point out the central role of the Middle Ages in the history of the nation. Balbo labelled the memory of the Roman Empire as ‘inopportune’ in the perspective of national emancipation and the creation of a new Italy.2 Although the adverse side emphasized so strongly by Gioia – the constant refrain of those bemoaners of civil strife that figure so centrally in the historiography of the age – would not be forgotten, the republics came to be hymned as a golden age of independence and political liberty, the history of which should inspire the rebirth of national awareness. As Enrico Artifoni rightly observed, ‘in spite of the connection between scholarship and politics, it would not be correct to reduce Italian medievalism to patriotic rhetoric’.3 Nonetheless, the civil, national and national-pedagogical implications of historiography could not have been stronger, as is clear, for example, from another passage by Cesare Balbo in 1850: I feel that impartiality consists not in not judging, but in judging impartially; indeed, I fail to see how there can be impartiality without judgment, for without that there can only be indifference. The (fortunately rare) histories written in indifference to virtue or vice, good or bad politics of the homeland, ill accord with that duty which we claim to lay on history, that 177

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it be a teacher in the public life of men and nations. Besides, all this has to do with more than a literary question: it touches on some of the most important conditions found in our country. It behoves any nation to form a national policy and hang on to it.4 Balbo’s own life story was hardly that of an academic or scholar: as a young man he involved himself in Napoleon’s government of Piedmont, was then exiled after the revolutionary coup of 1821 and headed the first constitutional Piedmont government in 1848. Historiography was one of the favourite tools used by him and others in the bid to build a national identity: reference to the Middle Ages played a central role in rethinking national history before unification; to use an expression from Walter Benjamin, Italy had a ‘past laden with modernity’.5 Such features are common to most European countries. The recent exhibition on Mythen der Nationen6 shows how extensively the origins of nationhood were identified with the Middle Ages. Italy was culturally a nation, but not independent or constituted as a state, which made the position more complex. One could look back on the Middle Ages from many angles, all of which linked up with the ideas for solving the country’s political problem that were being debated before 1860. Some pointed towards the model of the independent commune; others stressed the political role of the Catholic Church. Others again saw the southern reign of Frederick II in the thirteenth century as a turning point and forerunner of the new modern centralized state. It was not just in the central relevance of the Middle Ages and the way they kept being brought up to date that Italy resembled other European countries. There was another key feature in common, one that would confer new professional status on historians. In Italy as elsewhere, it was medieval documents that provided the acid test of a new historiography which was now blossoming into a science in its own right, distinct from philology and law, with its own corpus of sources to sift and sort. The most fertile terrain for the growth of professionalism among Italian historians was medieval history, not ancient history which retained the trappings of classical philology and an archaeology still steeped in ancient lore. But despite the points of similarity, there are marked peculiarities about the Italian case which deserve to be emphasized. It belongs within the context of the present book to point out the lack of recognition of nineteenth-century Italian historiography in international terms. Let us remember that Fueter, who gave such prominence to Italian humanists in his Geschichte der neueren Historiographie, failed to cite any Italians at all in that ‘century of history’. Such silence and exclusion drove Croce to write his History of Italian Historiography in the Nineteenth Century. Italian history in the nineteenth century – and for that matter nearly all Italian treatment of the history of historiography – languished

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for a long time in the shadows, while the spotlight was on France and the Germanic world. Only lately have volumes of essays by many hands placed Italy back in a broader framework.7 This chapter sets out to summarize the features of the Italian case, with some of its most significant trends and interpretations, throughout the long nineteenth century. We will be concentrating in particular on the first 50 years. Between 1818 and 1860 medieval history becomes the centre of an innovatory intellectual debate full of political and civil implications. From a strictly historiographical point of view it will maintain this central place down to the first decade of the twentieth century, attracting philological and juridical research and an emerging school of inquiry devoted to social and economic sides of the Italian Middle Ages – one thinks of the work of scholars like Pasquale Villari, Gaetano Salvemini and Gioacchino Volpe.8 But the ‘technical’ progress of a discipline that had now found its academic feet, together with the solution to the national problem via monarchy, unification and a constitution, inevitably brought about a decline of interest in the highly ideological approach to medieval history which had characterized the pre-unification decades. Heavily wrapped in ideology, medieval history had blossomed at a decisive stage in the formation of national awareness and identity. After unification, in Italy as elsewhere in Europe, one begins to note more attention being paid by scholars to ancient history, and a growing interest in Renaissance themes, which figure prominently in European historiography from Michelet to Burckhardt and Symonds, as well as in modern and contemporary Italian history. Where the fascination of the Middle Ages kept its impact and scope was as a source of images, models and local identities. On a local level and as a store of collective images (including interior decoration, historical paintings and statuary), the Middle Ages continue to count for much in the field of identity, much as they do in other countries. We shall revert to this point in the last section.

2 Italy: a European case study of decadence The first point to note is the complexity of the Italian situation, and its farreaching European relevance. In a ground-breaking essay of 1973, L’Italia fuori d’Italia, Franco Venturi9 highlighted the historiographical and cultural complexity of the ‘Italian case’, as viewed by European culture from many angles across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Italy was often seen as a problem of general interest and was thus examined by many non-Italian scholars, from Sismondi to Leo, Quinet to Gregorovius, and so on. If we take the question of ‘decadence’, for example, Italian history presented a kind of laboratory for both history and the philosophy of history, and Rome stood for the classical civilization of the western world and not for Italy alone. In short, Rome and Machiavelli cast their shadow further afield: they not

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only belong to Italian national history but hold a broader significance on a European scale. And yet such questions as the weight and nature of the classical inheritance, or the incidence of the papacy in European history, took on a special meaningfulness in relation to Italy and in the eyes of Italian historians. Unlike the construction of the French nation state, Italian history had been marked by political fragmentation ever since the fall of the Roman Western Empire, as well as by the lack of any national dynasty, the loss of independence and occupation by foreign powers from the sixteenth century on, despite the enormous economic and civil development in parts of the peninsula over the previous centuries. This was no original discovery of the nineteenth century. Machiavelli, in the first book of the Istorie fiorentine, already clearly singled out the areas where Italian history differed from that of ‘other Roman provinces’, stressing the part played by the papacy above all: how it was too weak to unite Italy, but strong enough to prevent others from doing so; how it allied itself with many a foreign power as the moment required, ‘which manner of proceeding lasts down to our own times, and has kept Italy disunited and sick’. In the nineteenthcentury debate this judgement by Machiavelli would be picked over many times: it would be challenged by Catholic and liberal-Catholic historians who saw the Church as the sole bulwark of the ‘Latin’ populations against the violence of barbarian invaders, as Alessandro Manzoni phrased it in his Discorso sopra alcuni punti della storia longobarda in Italia, first published in 1822.10 But similar ideas will be found at the end of the century in poetic works like the Chiesa di Polenta by one of the most important poets of the second half of the nineteenth century, Giosue Carducci, whose works were to be learned by heart by generations of Italian school students. The papacy, they claimed, formed the basic support for the freedom of the communes in their fight against the Germanic emperors. Not least, the summoning of a French army to Rome in 1849 in order to quash the democratic republic and restore the pope to power seemed confirmation of Machiavelli’s dictum. Republican liberty had anyway come to nothing. In his lessons on the History of Civilization in Europe, part of the voluminous Cours d’histoire moderne, François Guizot points out how quickly the Italian bourgeoisie defeated a weak form of feudalism and far-distant emperors. ‘Hence the immense early superiority of Italian towns; where poor communes were struggling to form elsewhere, here saw the birth of republics, states.’ Yet the situation was not destined to be consolidated, Guizot went on: When one considers the history of Italian republics from the eleventh to the fifteenth century one is struck by two apparently contradictory, yet incontestable, facts. One sees admirable development of courage, action, genius; there follows great prosperity; movement and freedom absent from the rest

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of Europe are to be found there. But if one wonders what the inhabitants’ actual lot was like, how their lives were spent, what degree of happiness was theirs, the picture changes […]. In a word, two things are lacking from those bright, rich, energetic republics: the safety of one’s skin, prime condition of the social state, and progress on the part of institutions. Italy was worn out with division and no longer able to stand up to foreign aggression by the end of the fifteenth century. Italy, Guizot concludes, lacked ‘despotic centralization that would have forged a people and made her independent of the foreigner’. ‘Traditional freedom’ was destined to disappear, replaced by ‘new, more regular, more centralizing powers’, and ‘that revolution was not only inevitable, it was useful’.11 However well founded, such a line of interpretation could only be greeted with reservations by Italian historians, sensitive as they were to what Sismondi would write in 1832: ‘Italy is crushed […], and Europe will have no peace until the nation that lit the torch of civilization and of liberty in the Middle Ages itself enjoys the light it created.’12 The allusion to the origins of liberty was significant: as recent studies have shown, Italian history is also central to the debate on certain important facets of constitutionalism. It was Sismondi again who traced the turning point in the history of modern liberty to the peace of Constance, 1183, where, long before Magna Carta, liberty was ‘given a legal footing, bringing to an end the first and most noble stand by the peoples of modern Europe against despotism’.13

3 ‘Italy will go it alone’ Mazzini created the slogan ‘L’Italia farà da sé’ (Italy will go it alone), meaning that it would not need foreign help. This motto could also describe the attitude of Italian historians of the early nineteenth century: they were usually keen to refer primarily to their own autochthonous tradition in research as well as in scholarship; they did not completely ignore other European experiences such as the new German historians, but Vico and Muratori remained the tutelary deities of their history. The great European historians drew extensively on Italian sources, ploughing through the Italian archives, as Ranke did when studying the reports of the Venetian ambassadors, once the Frari archive had been personally approved by Metternich for consultation.14 One thinks primarily of the large-scale inclusion of sources relating to the history of Italy in the German publishing project Monumenta which covered all areas under the imperial sway, and brought a spate of German historians to Italy. Unfortunately foreign interest in Italy and genuine circulation of ideas did not always go hand in hand. The German way of organizing studies never really took root in Italy, despite the interest shown by intellectual circles in the kingdom of Sardinia.15 Even linguistic barriers

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often made it hard to deal with German historians, despite the reception given to important historiographical theories, like Savigny’s on the survival of Roman institutions after the German conquest, spreading through Italy and in Italian, thanks to Pietro Capei, the Pisa professor of legal history; despite, too, the work of translating and reviewing done by Cesare Balbo and by Alfred von Reumont, who published a series of systematic articles on foreign historiography in the Archivio Storico Italiano.16 Thanks to Balbo, for example, the works of Heinrich Leo circulated widely in Italy. Relations with French and British culture were different, at least as to the texts read, and the circulation of certain themes: from Thierry to Guizot to Gibbon, Robertson and Hallam, not to mention Walter Scott who was translated in his youth by Michele Amari, the Sicilian democratic patriot who would go on to become one of the main Italian historians of the nineteenth century. There are many well-known and much cited authors who became benchmarks for scholars even from quite other walks, as occurred with Thierry, the liberal Catholic Manzoni and the republican democrat federalist Cattaneo. In terms of both training, together with the research institutions around which historiography began to professionalize, and the development of an agenda of problems for the historian, Italian culture in the first half of the nineteenth century did not yet enjoy the same level of organization of research and teaching infrastructures as did its French and German equivalents, for obvious political reasons. Italian scholars drew on European models and patterns of historiography, and yet their programme remained deliberately national; their efforts at organization and their research into medieval affairs were geared to that end. The founding of the Regia Deputazione di Storia Patria [‘Royal Deputation for Studies on the Homeland’] in Turin in 1833, and the beginning of its publishing series Monumenta Historiae Patriae three years later, were essentially an attempt to consider the space of the kingdom of Sardinia and therefore indirectly to bolster the dynasty, enterprises supported by the Piedmontese state. By contrast, a review like the Archivio Storico Italiano, a private venture which saw the light in Florence in 1841 and enlisted a broad, nationwide network of collaborators, set out to publish historical source material for the whole of Italy. But both cases harked back to the eighteenth-century experience of Ludovico Antonio Muratori, which would be lauded by a work like Vincenzo Gioberti’s Primato morale e civile degli italiani, a memorial to Muratori’s undying intellectual achievement. Italy in the period had no scientific or organizational set-up to compare with the young intellectuals that gravitated round Ranke’s Berlin seminar and the Monumenta workshop, and no centres of education to match the Ecole des Chartes, founded in 1821 and relaunched in 1846. The new history chairs established at Pisa University in 1839 and Turin in 1846–8, or the reorganized State Archive of Florence in 1852 with its school for research, hardly bear comparison with the impact and effectiveness of European

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institutions of the same age, but they do at least express a declaration of intent and a desire for action.

4 Features of Italian medievalism: Sismondi, Manzoni, Balbo The first point that needs stressing in any comparative European context is that Italy lacked any Novalis-style medievalism, even in areas where such inspiration might have found an outlet, such as paintings and stage sets showing the Middle Ages. In literature and history nostalgic hankerings and flights of mysticism were not completely unknown, but that was not the main inspiration and produced no really significant works. No such claim, indeed, could be made for the Apologia dei secoli barbari, published in 1823 by Costantino Battini, a member of the religious order of Servites.17 This long, vigorous, anti-Enlightenment, anti-revolutionary tract by a leading exponent of a religious guild and professor of theology at Pisa aimed to restore the values of the Christian Latin medieval world (and as such was far from well disposed towards the ‘destructive hordes’ of invaders); it was harshly critical of any modern trends setting in from the sixteenth century on and epitomized by the spread of Reformation and syphilis. Gothic atmosphere and a harking back to chivalry are generally not typical of Italian history books: in what is a pivotal work for the debate of the period – Manzoni’s already mentioned Discorso – talk of ‘freshness’ of origins or the ‘dews of the Middle Ages’ came in for mockery. The Italian Middle Ages depicted by the published sources, the arguments of historiography and even the historical novel belong mainly on an urban and hence basically bourgeois scene; the interest is all in the juridical and institutional features. Sismondi’s Histoire stands as a landmark in the brief analytical survey we present in this chapter: a reference point in many ways.18 Yet there was a difference between the aims Sismondi actually pursued and the way in which his work was received in Italy – a gap which it would pay to examine. Within the broad canvas of his narrative, Sismondi focused especially on a ‘constitutional’ kind of issue: the basis and character of modern liberty, a subject that was also engaging Benjamin Constant at the same time. On this score the experience of the communes was judged decidedly limiting: unable to ensure rights for every man by stable mixed government, the Italian republics were inspired by an ‘antique’ democratic notion of liberty, seen as participation in the res publica. In the course of his book Sismondi’s analysis goes into greater detail; what concerns us here is to note how the Histoire – which was basically built around sources that Muratori had published – came actually to be regarded as an enormous sourcebook of stories available to all: painters and musicians, poets and engravers. Sismondi recounted the valour and glory and feats of heroism distinguishing the past of Italy’s cities; he vindicated tradition and for many Italians restored

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‘a fatherland they could look on with pride’. He also implicitly delineated a peculiar political and civil geography of Italy: the town and commune experience developed fully in northern and central Italy, whereas the history of the south and Sicily followed a quite different pattern. The south was overrun in waves by the Byzantines and Arabs, the Normans, Swabians and Angevins. This provided the basis for a structural difference, which Cattaneo too would notice many years later, and for a dualism that a quite different scholar, Leo, would interpret in a geographical, naturalistic light: the south, to him, was the land of division, separatism, and hence indiscipline. Sismondi is responsible for another much-debated theory: that Catholic education, Counter-Reformation Catholicism, had powerfully contributed to the decadence of Italy. Manzoni used his Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica to rebut Sismondi on this point; another Catholic historian, Balbo, argued the importance of the ‘history of those great Italian princedoms which gradually established themselves in this era [the fourteenth century], lasting from then on and hence holding a much more topical interest for us’:19 not an anachronistic political ideal like the communes, but concrete factors on which a policy of national independence might be built. Sismondi began his Histoire more than a decade before Scott published Ivanhoe or Thierry the first ten Lettres sur l’histoire de France. In it the notion of conquest, dominion, ‘victors’ and ‘vanquished’ was barely sketched, though in his argument Sismondi touched on certain motifs recurring elsewhere: ‘individual strength’, typical of forest folk of the north, and ‘social strength’ found in city dwellers of the south. But in Italy, as in the rest of Europe, the idea of ‘conquest’ would rapidly gain ground. The national implications of such topics were still more evident in Italy since, following the Congress of Vienna and the quelling of the 1820–1 uprisings, the conquests of the past seemed to live on. Around the ‘Lombard question’ hung a series of open issues that fuelled historical research, literary output – Manzoni’s verse tragedy, the Adelchi (1822) is the classic example – and political passion.20 The object at stake was complex. There was a need to fix whether the law and institutions of the urban Italy of the Middle Ages broke with or were linked by continuity to Roman tradition, and at the same time to define the origins of a true ‘national’ history, distinct from Rome or the Empire. Juridical and political relations between conquerors and conquered needed depicting; a position had to be taken on Machiavelli’s old theory that the Church had prevented a Romano-Germanic kingdom from taking root in Italy. To find a satisfactory point of political agreement proved quite difficult. As Giovanni Tabacco wrote, Italian patriotism had conflicting historical claims to national independence. If a surge of anti-German feeling stressed the destructive violence of the Lombards, there was a risk of negating the continuity of civil and institutional

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tradition on which proud claims to a Latin origin of society might rest. If one stressed the continuity, one might have to admit the civil importance of the Lombard rule and the military aristocracy that reigned supreme over much of medieval Italy right into the age of the Communes.21 Some, like Manzoni and Carlo Troya – the liberal, neo-Guelph historian from Naples who besides important works on Dante’s allegories wrote a fourvolume history of Italy in the Middle Ages – took a clear-cut stand: the Lombard invasion was a traumatic event, reducing the Latin peoples to a state of subjection. There was no process of fusion between the two peoples occupying the same land, and the role of the Church in defending the ‘vanquished’ was fundamental. For Troya,22 the origin of the communes lay in a combined Germanic matrix, later enriched by contact with Latin culture, and mediated by the Church. A more subtly ambivalent position was taken by Cesare Balbo: anti-Roman like Manzoni – he would write that ‘the awkward memory of imperial Rome’ has blighted ‘nearly all our modern history’ – he was also remote from any sentimental favouring of the ‘feudal order, one of the worst social disorders there has ever been’ or the ‘dream of certain political poets’ that Christendom might reunite around pope and emperor. Here the allusion to certain works of Germanic political romanticism is clear. If the Roman mission was to unite the ancient world and be the prime see of Christianity, the age of the communes had the job of restoring vitality to Christianity, not only for Italy’s sake but for that of civilization at large. But Balbo was chiefly concerned to show ‘two different forms of liberty’ at work ‘in Italy and other regions of Europe’.23 The Italian communes were divorced from all contact with a national monarchy, and had failed to produce any stable order; elsewhere communes had joined forces with monarchs to obtain representation. Balbo was mainly thinking of England; but it is hard not to connect such remarks with Thierry’s claims about France.

5 Features of Italian medievalism: Cattaneo, Amari The debate over conquest and the relation between ‘Latins’ and ‘Germans’ varied: it might refer to institutions or concentrate on social stratification. Discussion ranged between Roman law and German law, urban classes and military aristocracy, nobility and the third estate. To Carlo Cattaneo power relationships underpinned everything, and close attention to a recurring theme of those years – the ‘militia’, military organization and virtues – was the key to understanding urban emancipation. Cattaneo was not a historian by profession, but an essayist and journalist, in politics a democrat and federalist. In 1858, in response to Giuseppe Ferrari’s Histoire des révolutions d’Italie, where medieval

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history was reduced to a clash between papal thinking and imperial thinking, Guelphs and Ghibellines, Cattaneo published an essay, La città considerata come principio ideale delle istorie italiane, in which he outlined a long history of Italian town organization, the political and territorial basis of the peninsula since pre-Roman times. In such a framework the juridical and historical issues surrounding the birth of the communes held little importance. Cattaneo rapidly sketched his theory of developments from the ninth to the thirteenth century whereby ‘those whom historians are pleased to call victors and vanquished’24 all merge together. Towns declined under the barbarian dominion of the Lombards: ‘Good traditions faded away with each generation. Evil is not good; barbarism, ruin, destruction are not progress. Soldiering, agriculture, trade, science, letters, the alphabet itself got forgotten.’25 In Carolingian times towns were weak and defenceless; they began to retrieve a role for themselves by building walls and defences in the crisis of the ninth century, and ultimately regained their freedom by arms, not by juridical concession. A different geographical perspective on the Italian Middle Ages would shift the focus on to different objects, though the great romantic theme of invasion and conquest would still be visible in the background. This applies to one of the greatest, though most singular, nineteenth-century Italian historians, the Sicilian Michele Amari26 and his chief work Storia dei Musulmani di Sicilia (1854–72).27 Amari is perhaps better known for another book, first published in 1842, La guerra del Vespro siciliano, which would circulate throughout Europe, translated into English and German. This told of the anti-French revolt in Sicily in 1282, an episode which would become a central subject for art and music (Verdi’s opera dates from 1855). Reconstruction of the revolt had broad national implications, but above all gave Amari an opportunity to inveigh against the Neapolitan government in Sicily. But the political subject was framed by a broad historiographical coverage. Amari paid great attention to events in international politics, with Sicily central to a plot that embraced the whole Mediterranean area at the end of the twelfth century. He traced the consequences of an urban popular movement at least temporarily demolishing the municipal divisions in Sicily and bolstering a specific brand of constitutionalism. When the work was published the anticlerical, democratic Amari was driven into exile in France. There he turned to Arabic studies and contacted some of the leading lights in contemporary French historiography, the venerable Thierry, Michelet and Renan. The need for a closer look at Muslim Sicily and its history connected up with a broad-ranging historiographical project covering the whole history of Sicily in the Middle Ages. In his various preparatory studies and later in the main work, Amari tried to add his own interpretation of the original nature of Islam and show the strengths and inner contradictions of Arabo-Islamic expansion. Amari was far removed from any sort of neo-Guelphism in history or politics,

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such that in 1864 Jules Michelet could write to him of ‘notre grande guerre contre le moyen-âge chrétien’. But two points have to be spelt out here. First, Amari’s anticlericalism had no connection with neo-Ghibellinism, or magnifying of imperial policy: with reference to the nation, he wrote, the Empire was at least ‘as fatal to Italy’ as the presence of the papal state or the descent of the Franks on the country. Nor did he discuss Islam as a way of inveighing against Christianity. Amari highlighted the tensions between the egalitarian features of Mohammedan doctrine and the persistence of ethnic and social divisions, and above all the tribal–familial organization of Arab society. Convinced as he was that ‘religious feeling has never dispelled national antagonism or healed social division, the two cruxes over which mankind joins issue’, Amari was not prepared to accord Islam any greater cohesive power than Christianity. He went on to criticize the backwardness of Muslim theocracy in politics, ‘the fatal splicing of religious and civil power’. Amari concurred with Cattaneo that liberty resided in cities and afforded them protection. Behind the lofty discourse on the merger, or clash, between ‘Latinity’ and ‘Germanism’ lurked the question of the origin and nature of modern liberty. The Arabs, wrote Amari, did not inject ‘either freedom or tranquillity into their colonies’, but industriousness. However, in a Sicily fresh from Byzantine rule that spelt regeneration. What Amari proposed was a relative assessment: the vanquished in Muslim Sicily were less badly off than continental Italians under the Lombards and Franks; the degree of civilization reached in Sicily was higher than in other ninth- and tenth-century Italian regions. It was on a bedrock of Muslim administration that the Normans held sway in Sicily. With them a national note would return to the island; by halfway through the eleventh century a ‘new Italian people’ could be discerned as an active presence. Despite the persisting division between Arabs and Berbers, Muslim rule in Sicily had brought not only visible colonization in western Sicily above all, but substantial political autonomy and a certain degree of civil, cultural and economic development. This held over into the Norman and Swabian courts of post-Muslim times. In this sense we must note that Amari’s was not just political history: with his detailed attention to material features of the territory, including place names and topography, linguistic and ethnographic facts and the various aspects of economic and cultural life, he added an important page to the history ‘of that admirable civilizing of our common fatherland which put an end to the Middle Age’.

6 Not only historiography Pierangelo Schiera has pointed out that at the end of the eighteenth century and even more in the early nineteenth, study of the Middle Ages originated in a feeling of pronounced continuity – a sort of continuity flux – with the

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present. At the end of the nineteenth century or in the twentieth it would have been impossible to feel this kind of continuity any longer. For a number of philosophical and methodological reasons detachment, separation, cold scientific ‘observation’ had become compulsory.28 In the decades following unification professional historiography became more technical and lost the pathos that had previously characterized it. However, this attitude essentially affected the field of professional historiography, by the 1870s well established in Italy through a centralized and newly reorganized state university system.29 True, the years around 1870 show a profound cleavage.30 This turning point is clearly not only an Italian one, but is valid on a European scale: the conquest of Rome and therefore the end of the phase of unification, the foundation of the Second Reich, the new French Republic and most of all the fear of the Parisian Commune bring forward new issues, even among the foundation myths of the nation states. The nation is also founded in the present. In Italy King Victor Emmanuel and the great hero Garibaldi (Mazzini, being too dangerously republican and ‘socialist’, would be reappraised much later) were put at the centre of the new master narrative of statues and frescoes. They even occupied conspicuous public sites dense with memories of the Middle Ages, such as the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena.31 Present-day events and figures jostled for celebration and a central position in the new representation and image-store of the nation, which had become a nation state. Not only in Germany did the generation of 1870 need big new gestures in the field of art.32 However, in some cases the allegory of the nation continued to wear medieval clothes, as in the case of Germania, or even Italia, and not only in the peaceful Overbeck painting. Germania33 and Italia wearing medieval armour continued to appear in military pose on many postcards – even military postcards used in the First World War – and engravings. More particularly, the regional past would have a pronounced medieval colour: one thinks of the allegories of the Italian regions in the attic of the Roman monument Il Vittoriano, dedicated to Vittorio Emanuele II, the ‘father of the fatherland’, unveiled in 1911.34 But the provinces celebrating the house of Savoy in Raffaele Casnedi’s frescoes in the royal lodge of Milan’s central station had already afforded a significant precedent in 1865. As is clear from these examples, if we move our gaze out of the field of professional historiography, Schiera’s thesis could easily be contradicted. The evocation of the Middle Ages did not end in those years; their fascination persisted and would become corroborated by decades of historical research and writing. The Middle Ages did not go out of fashion, as many books, essays, public lectures in cultural associations of different kinds and articles for magazines testify. In the first half of the century, while professional historiography in Italy was not even at the teething stage, the starting point for the revival of the Middle Ages had been poetry and literature. As Ernesto Sestan pointed out

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in a still valid essay,35 certain long-lasting myths – later studied and confirmed (or in some cases denied) by professional historians – were first discovered by poets and painters and not by historians. The central myths of the Risorgimento were discovered and created by poets, painters and even musicians – certainly not by historians. Some events found their way right into popular culture and acquired popularity thanks to poems and art and not through academic historiography or archive findings. This happened not only in Italy, but elsewhere too, as most of the chapters of this volume testify. To look at the broader European context, it is worth highlighting the different, and often opposite, usages of some historical characters and events: the case of Charlemagne would be emblematic, the name itself being Italianized, Frenchified or Germanized as Carlomagno, Charlemagne, or Karl der Grosse. But for Italy other examples were still more specific. In Italy great emphasis was put on the ‘glorious’ battle of Legnano, in which the Italian communes defeated the German Emperor Frederick I (Barbarossa). Barbarossa was evoked as the great bogeyman – the German who foreshadowed ‘German’ (i.e. Habsburg) control over a large part of the country in the nineteenth century; by a significant synchrony the strength and fame of Barbarossa were appropriated by Prussia, as is evident from the Kyffhäuser monument.36 Novels, poems and operas which played a major role in stirring up and enhancing the national consciousness and feelings focused on glorious moments of Italian life in the Middle Ages. In so doing they made the Middle Ages more accessible to a much larger public than that of intellectuals discussing sources and manuscripts. Thus, the Sicilian Vespers – that is, the revolt in Palermo in 1282 against Angevin domination – became a national icon. In 1834 and again in 1844–6 the great painter Francesco Hayez37 captured the popular imagination by the scene of a woman harassed by a French soldier as she left the cathedral of Monreale together with her brother and future husband. The image of the young woman almost fainting under the outrage of her breast being bared by the offender allegedly searching for arms hidden under her clothes would sum up private feeling and also political resentment and became extremely popular in upper- and middle-class liberal milieux. In the last quarter of the century this same icon was widely reproduced in illustrated books and postcards,38 although the story of the outrage was never proved by historical findings as the real beginning of the rebellion. This kind of half-mythical ‘medievalism’ continued, sometimes contradicted by the findings of archivists and scientific historians who questioned the sources and proved the lack of evidence for many events which had by then became real through images and various media. Often it was Sismondi’s work, the Italian Republics in the Middle Ages, that provided the raw materials in the earliest phase. These volumes were in the library of the painter Francesco Hayez, as well as in Verdi’s. Typical of these new myths, and their fortune at different

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levels of culture, is the oath of allegiance at Pontida marking the origins of the Lega Lombarda (1167). This had been virtually ignored before nineteenthcentury romanticism, an episode of strictly local importance, while historians like Ludovico Antonio Muratori had expressed substantial doubts as to its veracity. The Lega Lombarda became extremely popular in 1848 when the new constitution, the Statuto – another medieval name for a brand new institution – was granted in Turin. Then there was the ‘carroccio’ – the ox-drawn cart with a bell symbolizing the commune on which a priest and trumpeters would stand to encourage the fighters during battles. This now began to appear in the piazzas and gained topicality. In Rome that same year 1849, Verdi’s opera La battaglia di Legnano was presented for the first time at one of the hottest moments of the city’s political life: a week before the opening of the constituent assembly in which the republic would be demanded, in an atmosphere laden with enthusiasm and expectations.39 It was the perfect symbol. The Battle of Legnano was chosen by the librettist Cammarano and by the composer for overtly political reasons: ‘In you, as in me’, – he wrote to the composer on starting the work – ‘the desire burns to show the most glorious epoch of Italian history, that of the Lega Lombarda. This topic should move every man who has an Italian soul in his breast.’40 By 1866 the diplomatic history of the Lega Lombarda written by Cesare Vignati had shown that the oath was nothing else than the invention of a Milanese writer active four centuries before. The illustrated Italian history by Francesco Bertolini would acknowledge this criticism, but one of the beautiful engravings of the book would still show the men swearing in the church while holding their swords high, ready for the battle. Small wonder if one found such a painting by Amos Cassioli in the municipal council room of Siena. The icon of the Lega became extremely widespread and was one of the favourite paintings for theatre curtains after unification: a significant place to be represented, since theatre culture was important for more than the upper classes. There is another instance of the extraordinary duration of this myth: one of the first and most successful bicycle brands was named Legnano, and carried the logo of Alberto Da Giussano, one of the legendary heroes of Pontida. By an ironical inversion, the same image had an extension to its fortune when it inspired the political movement and later party of the Lega Nord, campaigning for federalism and not for national unity. Myths survived as invented traditions, independent of scientific research, which would concentrate on economic and legal history. However, in the last quarter of the century the situation was reversed. Not poetry but history became the source of inspiration: history in its broadest compass, not in its dry academic version. In the crucial years after unification, when Italy was made but as yet not the Italians, to use the well-known expression attributed to Massimo D’Azeglio,41 the Middle Ages remained at the centre of the public

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and sometimes also the private image-store: one need only think of the many references to this period in the interior decoration of bourgeois homes. Most of all, the Middle Ages offered ideal materials for the construction of national myths, as the long fortune of the Lega Lombarda testifies. Medieval history was investigated by intellectuals meeting regularly in learned societies; it won a central place in school curricula as well as in universities. In 1862 Luigi Filippo Polidori42 argued for the institution of chairs of national history in Italian secondary classical schools and universities, claiming it would enhance patriotism and civic awareness; and the Middle Ages would figure prominently in this. In the 1860s, the curriculum of the national school system founded after unification included history.43 Primary-school children had to read about the main characters and most relevant episodes of the Italian Middle Ages, though teachers would have to avoid raking up the age-old municipal divisions of the Italian Middle Ages. For schools the essence of the medieval period was that it linked political and civil history with the history of literature. School syllabuses saw the linguistic and literary tradition as central in legitimating Italy as a nation and defining the national identity. The high-school programme for 1884 ran: ‘The school of letters must provide the young with a baptism into Italianhood; by the end they must be enamoured of our literature and language through which, come what may, we shall play our part in civilization and preserve the nation’s dignity.’44 With the centenary year of 1865, reference to Dante Alighieri45 took on enormous importance. The idea was that early Italian from the youth of the nation would be a valid way of teaching the national language to adolescents. The ‘writers of the Trecento’, said the instructions to secondary-school teachers in 1867, convey ‘thought with rare directness and liveliness’.46 The time allotted to medieval history on school syllabuses was proportionately great and often focused on a gallery of famous characters. With Italy newly unified, the full force of opposition to the Church was naturally invested in presenting medieval history. It was certainly no accident that in 1865 an Italian high school was named after the medieval heretic Arnaldo da Brescia. No doubt thanks to such dissemination of knowledge, medieval history became the fashion and a focus of interest for intellectual society. On her mid-August holiday in 1889, Margherita of Italy surprised the poet and historian Giosue Carducci by asking a number of questions about Matteo Spinelli’s recently published chronicles, down to the codices and the whereabouts of libraries where one could find sources and literature about the Middle Ages.47 The gift devised for that same Queen Margherita to mark the occasion of the 1884 national exhibition was the key of the newly built medieval borough: a borough, not a castle, inhabited by artisans dressed in medieval costumes, as architect D’Andrade had suggested.48 Once again, this was not just an Italian issue: medieval villages were also fashionable in other European countries.

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The Middle Ages were crucial when it came to constructing the narrative of the Savoy dynasty. This figured in school textbooks and in popular works, as well as in the cycle of frescoes in the rooms connecting the royal palace in Turin to the chapel of the Holy Shroud.49 But they also played a significant role in the representations of the nobility, an opportunity to celebrate the deeds of their dynasties and to depict themselves as the enduring, traditional and still effective local ruling elites. This phenomenon is clearly observed in Tuscany. In Siena the prime minister Baron Bettino Ricasoli, one of the organizers of the annexation of Tuscany and heir to a family already recorded in the tenth century, had his castle of Brolio rebuilt as the ‘typical’ medieval mansion. The same attention to medieval architecture also seized the bourgeoisie and their spokesmen. Soon the medieval past of Italian cities would become crucial for the construction of new local identities as fears began to mount that the construction of a national identity might destroy any form of local identity. This issue is really important and deserves great attention. We will confine ourselves to a few aspects. In the last 15 years of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth a number of cultural associations and learned societies devoted to local history came into being. Their members were prominent figures of the old local elites, aristocrats and professionals, or else new intellectuals like high-school teachers and librarians. Most of these societies took the initiative for preserving monuments and buildings and restoring city centres. In most cases, notably in northern and central Italy, they chose to cancel or at least not emphasize the survival of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century urban architecture and to highlight the medieval look of the towns through restoration and often heavy reconstruction of some significant buildings. Siena and Bologna are examples in that respect. Bologna hosted a great public festival for the eighth centenary of its university, the oldest in Europe. The architect, antiquarian and writer Alfonso Rubbiani50 – a ‘neo-Guelph’ who had fought in Rome against the troops of the Italian king – redesigned some of the most important civic spaces and a full portrait of the legendary jurist Irnerio in colour was painted in order to reassert the prestige of the medieval Italian university. In Siena, not only was the main street heavily retouched by the architect Partini (a ‘neo-Ghibelline’), in order to add crenellations and lay bare the medieval brick of the buildings, but in the traditional horse race – the Palio – eighteenth-century allegories were forgotten and the participants wore medieval costumes. At a time of profound change, deeply marked by the shock of the Parisian Commune and the birth of the Socialist party as well as by social unrest, the discovery and invention of these Middle Ages, this ‘public use of history’, was once more full of pathos. Often it contradicted the findings of scientific historiography, as in the case of the Sicilian Vespers. It also aimed to present the medieval commune as characterized by a supposedly strong cohesion

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between the various social classes. In some cases it sought to bring out continuity between the oldest local elite and the present one: this is evident in the pageantry organized at the unveiling of the new facade of Florence Cathedral, when many aristocrats who were members of the city council took part in the large procession around the piazza del Duomo dressed in ancient costume and representing their own ancestors. Yet this irenic representation of solidarity between elites and the lower classes recreated for the benefit of the public ran counter to the discoveries of the latest historiography: for as Salvemini pointed out in his Magnati e popolani in Firenze dal 1280 al 1295 (1899), there were markedly violent struggles between the different social classes in Florence in the thirteenth century. The reinvented Middle Ages were to play an important role in the celebration of the Savoy dynasty, which was of feudal nobility with the cross of the crusades in its arms. The medieval borough and castle reconstructed at the national exhibition in Turin in 1911 sought to give a new popular twist to the story of the royal family by linking the memory of the oldest heroes of the dynasty with the newly created gardens and picturesque medieval buildings where the inhabitants of the first capital city of Italy would stroll on Sundays. It was not just the Italians who liked it. Tourism played a remarkable role in the new wave of Italian medievalism, as is clear from many a European writer: one thinks of the writings on Florence and Rome by intellectuals like John Ruskin and the rich collection – now an important museum – put together by the wealthy banker Federico Stibbert. We cannot go deeper into this issue here, though we would like to finish by drawing attention to a tiny surviving citystate, today mostly known to tourists and stamp collectors: San Marino. Part of the significance here was due to the myth of liberty. San Marino had already been the focus of a book published in 1804 by Melchiorre Delfico, one of the intellectuals of the Italian Enlightenment. But it became really popular at the end of the nineteenth century when first the walls and later the Palazzo Comunale were reconstructed in typical medieval style, and poets like Giosue Carducci, who was also one of the leading figures of the Bolognese historical scene, wrote important contributions in order to show the relevance of the small state as an icon of liberty.51 Nor was it chance that another great historian, Pasquale Villari, was chosen to prepare the new diplomatic agreement between the kingdom of Italy and the diminutive republic in 1897.52

Notes 1. The text is a joint venture. Sections 1, 2, and 6 were written by Ilaria Porciani, sections 3, 4 and 5 by Mauro Moretti. 2. Cesare Balbo, ‘Sommario della storia d’Italia’, in id., Storia d’Italia e altri scritti editi e inediti, ed. Maria Fubini Leuzzi (Turin, 1984), 410.

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3. Enrico Artifoni, ‘Il Medioevo nel Romanticismo. Forme della storiografia tra Sette e Ottocento’, in Guglielmo Cavallo et al. (eds), Lo spazio letterario del Medioevo. Ser. I: Il Medioevo latino, vol. IV: L’Attualizzazione del testo (Rome, 1997), 175–221, at 210. Other general contributions on the subjects dealt with in this essay are to be found in Reinhard Elze and Pierangelo Schiera (eds), Italia e Germania. Immagini, modelli, miti fra due popoli nell’Ottocento: il Medioevo (Bologna/Berlin, 1988); Enrico Castelnuovo and Giuseppe Sergi (eds), Arti e storia nel Medioevo, vol. IV: Il Medioevo al passato e al presente (Turin, 2004), esp. Simonetta Soldani, ‘Il Medioevo del Risorgimento nello specchio della nazione’, 149–86, Massimo Vallerani, ‘Il comune come mito politico. Immagini e modelli tra Otto e Novecento’, 187–206, Ilaria Porciani, ‘L’invenzione del Medioevo’, 253–79. 4. Cesare Balbo, ‘Prefazione progettata dall’autore per l’edizione nona (1850)’, in id., Storia d’Italia, 343–9, at 344. 5. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (London, 1999), 245–55. 6. Mythen der Nationen. Ein Europäisches Panorama, ed. Monika Flacke (Munich/Berlin, 1998). 7. See Stefan Berger et al. (eds), Writing National Histories. Western Europe since 1800 (London, 1999). 8. Gian Maria Varanini (ed.), Carlo Cipolla e la storiografia italiana fra Otto e Novecento (Verona, 1994); Mauro Moretti, Pasquale Villari storico e politico (Naples, 2005); Enrico Artifoni, Salvemini e il Medioevo. Storici italiani tra Otto e Novecento (Naples, 1990); Innocenzo Cervelli, Gioacchino Volpe (Naples, 1977). 9. Franco Venturi, ‘L’Italia fuori d’Italia’, in Storia d’Italia, vol. III: Dal Primo Settecento all’unità (Turin, 1973), 987–1481. 10. Alessandro Manzoni, Discorso sopra alcuni punti della storia longobardica in Italia, crit. edn by Isabella Becherucci (Milan, 2005). 11. François Guizot, Storia della civiltà in Europa, ed. Armando Saitta (Turin, 1956), 178–80, 193–4. 12. Jean-Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi, Storia delle Repubbliche italiane (1832), ed. Pierangelo Schiera (Turin, 1996), 364. 13. Sismondi, Storia delle Repubbliche italiane, 57. 14. Mauro Moretti, ‘Archivi e storia nell’Europa del XIX secolo. Un discorso introduttivo’, in Irene Cotta and Rosalia Manno Tolu (eds), Archivi e storia nell’Europa del XIX secolo. Alle radici dell’identità culturale europea. Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi nei 150 anni dall’istituzione dell’Archivio Centrale, poi Archivio di Stato, di Firenze. Firenze, 4–7 dicembre 2002 (2 vols, Rome, 2006), i.7–28, at 26. 15. Gian Paolo Romagnani, Storiografia e politica culturale nel Piemonte di Carlo Alberto (Turin, 1985). 16. Ilaria Porciani, L’ ‘Archivio Storico Italiano’. Organizzazione della ricerca ed egemonia moderata nel Risorgimento (Florence, 1979); Mauro Moretti, ‘Alfred von Reumont e Karl Hillebrand. Primi appunti per una indagine su personaggi e temi di una mediazione culturale’, in Arnold Esch and Jens Petersen (eds), Deutsches Ottocento. Die deutsche Wahrnehmung Italiens im Risorgimento (Tübingen, 2000), 161–86. 17. Costantino Battini, Apologia dei secoli barbari (Bologna, 1823). 18. One of the latest contributions on Sismondi as historian of the Italian republics: Mauro Moretti, ‘Note di storiografia sismondiana’, in Francesca Sofia (ed.), Sismondi e la civiltà toscana. Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi. Pescia, 13–15 aprile 2000 (Florence, 2001), 231–65; Carlo Pazzagli, Sismondi e la Toscana del suo tempo, 1795–1838 (Siena, 2003), 113–49. 19. Balbo, ‘Sommario della storia d’Italia’, 557.

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20. On the Lombard issue in Italian historiography, see the recent Enrico Artifoni, ‘Ideologia e memoria locale nella storiografia italiana sui Longobardi’, in Carlo Bertelli and Gian Pietro Brogiolo (eds), Il futuro dei Longobardi. L’Italia e la costruzione dell’Europa di Carlo Magno. Saggi (Milan, 2000), 219–27; worth consulting on these topics are the essays collected in Gian Pietro Bognetti, Manzoni giovane (Naples, 1972). 21. Giovanni Tabacco, ‘La città italiana fra germanesimo e latinità nella medievistica ottocentesca’, in Elze and Schiera (eds), Italia e Germania, 23–42, at 27. 22. Carlo Troya, Storia d’Italia nel Medio Evo (Naples, 1839–59). 23. Balbo, ‘Sommario della storia d’Italia’, 410, 440, 447, 488. 24. Carlo Cattaneo, ‘La città considerata come principio ideale delle istorie italiane’ [1858], in id., Opere scelte, vol. IV: Storia universale e ideologia delle genti. Scritti, 1852–64, ed. Delia Castelnuovo Frigessi (Turin, 1972), 79–126, at 104. 25. Cattaneo, ‘La città’, 98. Observations on Cattaneo’s historical thinking are to be found in Martin Thom, ‘Unity and Confederation in the Italian Risorgimento. The Case of Carlo Cattaneo’, in Berger et al. (eds), Writing National Histories, 69–81; Elisa Occhipinti, ‘Il Medioevo di Carlo Cattaneo’, Società e Storia, 2 (1984), 237–68. 26. On Amari’s historical work, see Illuminato Peri, Michele Amari (Naples, 1976), and Mauro Moretti, Introduzione a Michele Amari (Rome, 2003), pp. iii–xlvii (including the Amari quotations given in the text). 27. For a new edition of the work, see Michele Amari, Storia dei Musulmani di Sicilia, ed. Giuseppe Giarrizzo (4 vols, Florence, 2002–3). 28. Pierangelo Schiera, ‘Introduzione’, in Elze and Schiera (eds), Italia e Germania, 9–22, at 16. 29. In a contribution focusing on Italian medievalism it is also worth mentioning that in parliamentary discussions on reforming the Italian university system one of the most frequent rhetorical topics was the primacy of the Italian university in the Middle Ages and the need to recuperate some of the positive aspects of this tradition by restoring the administrative self-government of the universities and the freedom of teaching and learning. 30. Ilaria Porciani, ‘L’immagine debole dell’Italia’, in Fare gli italiani. Scuola e cultura nell’Italia contemporanea, ed. Simonetta Soldani and Gabriele Turi (Bologna, 1993), i. 385–428. 31. See Cartoni di Cesare Maccari per gli affreschi nel Palazzo Pubblico di Siena, ed. Alberto Olivetti (Milan, 1998). 32. This is the expression used by Waetzoldt in his history of German painting published in 1919: see Ekkehard Mai, ‘Nationale Kunst- und Historienmalerei vor und nach 1870. Von der Romantik der Geschichte zu geschichtlicher Wirklichkeit’, in Anton von Werner. Geschichte in Bilder, ed. Dominik Bartmann (Munich, 1997), 19. 33. See Marianne und Germania, 1789–1889. Frankreich und Deutschland. Zwei Welten. Eine Revue, ed. Marie-Louise von Plessen (Berlin, 1996). 34. Catherine Brice, Il Vittoriano. Monumentalità pubblica e politica a Roma (Rome, 2005). 35. Ernesto Sestan, ‘Legnano nella storiografia romantica’ in id., Scritti varii, vol. III: Storiografia dell’Otto e del Novecento, ed. Giuliano Pinto (Florence, 1991), 221. 36. See Rudy Koshar, From Monuments to Traces. Artefacts of German Memory (Berkeley/Los Angeles, 2000), 42. 37. See Hayez. Dal mito al bacio, ed. Fernando Mazzocca (Venice, 1998). 38. For further information about the development of this myth and its diffusion in the popular media, see Ilaria Porciani, ‘Italien. Fare gli italiani’, in Mythen der Nationen, ed. Flacke, 206–9.

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39. See Piero Brunello, ‘Pontida’, in I luoghi della memoria. Simboli e miti dell’Italia unita, ed. Mario Isnenghi (Rome/Bari, 1996), 15–28. 40. Carteggi verdiani a cura di Alessandro Luzio, vol. 2 (Rome, 1935), 59. 41. On this attribution, see Simonetta Soldani and Gabriele Turi, introduction to Fare gli italiani. 42. Luigi Filippo Polidori, ‘Della necessità d’istituire cattedre d’istoria nazionale in tutti i ginnasi e licei, e nelle università d’Italia, Discorso’, in Atti del X congresso degli scienziati in Siena (Siena,1864), 173. 43. Anna Ascenzi, Tra educazione etico-civile e costruzione dell’identità nazionale. L’insegnamento della storia nelle scuole italiane dell’Ottocento (Milan, 2004). 44. Mauro Moretti, ‘Le lettere e la storia. Di alcuni aspetti dell’istruzione secondaria classica nell’Italia unita, fra vecchi programmi e nuove ricerche’, in Pier Luigi Ballini and Gilles Pécout (eds), Scuola e nazione in Italia e in Francia nell’Ottocento. Modelli, pratiche, eredità. Nuovi percorsi di ricerca comparata (Venice, 2007), 279–306, at 304. 45. Wolfgang Krogel, ‘Dante und die italienische Nation. Untersuchung der 600-JahrFeiern zu Ehren Dantes in Florenz, 1865–1921’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 77 (1995), 429–58; Thies Schulze, Dante Alighieri als nationales Symbol Italiens, 1793–1915 (Tübingen, 2005). 46. Marino Raicich, Scuola cultura e politica da De Sanctis a Gentile (Pisa, 1981), 121–3. 47. See Giosue Carducci, Opere, edizione nazionale, vol. 30 (Bologna, 1940), 168, and Porciani, ‘L’invenzione del medioevo’, 266. 48. See Paolo Marconi, ‘Il Borgo medievale di Torino’, in A.C. Quintavalle (ed.), Medioevo: arte e storia. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Parma, 18–22 settembre 2007 (Milan, 2008), 491–520. 49. See Susanne von Falkenhausen, Italienische Monumentalmalerei im Risorgimento, 1830–90. Strategie nationaler Bildersprache (Berlin, 1993), 45–82. 50. Alfonso Rubbiani: i veri e i falsi storici, ed. Franco Solmi and Marco Dezzi Bardeschi (Bologna, 1981). On neo-medievalism in Emilia, see the recent Neomedievalismi. Recuperi, evocazioni, invenzioni nelle città dell’ Emilia-Romagna, ed. Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli (Bologna, 2007). 51. Un palazzo medievale dell’Ottocento. Architettura, arte e letteratura nel palazzo pubblico di San Marino (Milan, 1995). 52. Giovanni Spadolini, San Marino. L’idea della repubblica. Con documenti inediti dall’archivio di Pasquale Villari (Florence, 1989).

12 Medievalism, the Politics of Memory and Swiss National Identity* Guy P. Marchal

1 Introduction Contemporary Switzerland, the state which is officially called the ‘Swiss Confederation’ (Schweizerische Eidgenossenschaft), was founded in 1848. Though it can trace its history back to the Middle Ages, the new state is nonetheless a completely different entity from the ‘Old Confederation’ (Alte Eidgenossenschaft) that perished in 1798. When Eduard Fueter wrote his history of ‘Switzerland since 1848’,1 he stated in the introduction that in 1848 a wholly new epoch began, which, ‘in a single blow’, had made the old quarrels obsolete. And William Rappard postulated a paradox in that, after a century of unconstrained constitutional development, the Swiss form of government was far more similar to the one enforced upon it in 1798 than to the one which had gradually developed in the preceding centuries. He took this idea so far as to suggest that the starting point for understanding modern Switzerland was not the Middle Ages, but ‘the radical revolutions of 1798 and their profound consequences’.2 Nonetheless, the evocation of the confederate Middle Ages continues to play a vital role in the forging of national identity and the self-legitimization of contemporary Switzerland and in its political life. There are several reasons for this. The first part of this chapter is concerned with the tradition of historicizing self-perception that can be traced back to the fifteenth century. The second part deals with the modern scientific historiography that evolved in the nineteenth century, which came into conflict with bygone ideas, but was eventually merged with some of these into the national(ist) historiography of Switzerland. The third section deals with the political instrumentalization of the confederal (‘eidgenössisch’) Middle Ages for political purposes. But first it will be necessary to provide a brief introduction to medieval Switzerland, dwelling only on its character as a state and its politics. In the Middle Ages, the area of what is now Switzerland was filled with a multitude of small dominions (Herrschaften). These positioned themselves 197

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differently towards the hegemonial aspirations of the great regional dynasties, the dukes of Savoy and Habsburg, all being aware of, but responding far from uniformly to, the general inefficiency of imperial government in their region. Among these dominions were also those towns and territories which entered into reciprocal alliances in the interest of collective security. From the mid-thirteenth century onwards, most importantly Bern, and later Freiburg, began to ally themselves with various regional towns and formed something akin to the ‘Burgundian Eidgenossenschaft’ in the west of the region. Zurich was allied to the towns on Lake Constance from the late thirteenth century onwards, but also repeatedly with Habsburg Austria. At the same time, the political elites of the three central Alpine lands formed an alliance primarily for the purpose of reciprocal legal aid in matters of government.3 In the fourteenth century, widely different and contingent factors led to the successive agreements of alliance which eventually formed the Eidgenossenschaft. These confederate alliances were anything but uniform: none of them included all the ‘Orte’ (the city-states and rural communities now known as cantons) of the Confederation and each also legislated differently. No desire to bind these disparate units into a Swiss state is discernible. Only once the crisis of the ‘Alter Zürichkrieg’ was surmounted and the old alliances were renewed towards the end of the fifteenth century can one begin to speak in terms of state law of a consolidated confederation, which had purged some of its internal incongruities and kept its constituent members from embracing rival political options. At the time, the members who carried full legal rights were the city-states of Zurich, Bern and Lucerne and the rural communities of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden, as well as the town and administrative district of Zug and the region of Glarus. This order is not chronological, but corresponds to the official usage of the time, and shows the political weight these competitors could wield. Furthermore, a changing number of not fully legally entitled allies, the so-called ‘adherent states’ (Zugewandte Orte) existed, as well as a number of subject lands, the so-called ‘Gemeine Herrschaften’, which were communally administered by the Orte as a whole. A central authority only began to develop from the beginning of the fifteenth century onwards, and feebly so, in the form of the Tagsatzung, which nonetheless proved to be quite effective. This body cannot be considered to have been a parliament, but rather a congress of envoys of sovereign states, which often pursued their own, divergent interests. The towns dominated, which also led invariably to antagonism between rural and urban members. Many conflicts could only be decided by an intricate system of arbitral jurisdiction. Despite the military might it had proven during the Burgundian Wars, the Swiss Confederation was a weak ‘state’.4 This meant that instances of internal crisis, even if they led to episodes of warfare, had to be resolved relatively quickly through compromises – otherwise, the system would break apart. It also meant

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that the Confederation could not pursue an active foreign policy, which however also kept it out of the major European conflicts. More than anything else, it was this circumstance that made it possible for the Corpus Helveticum – which by 1513 had been joined by Freiburg, Solothurn, Basel, St Gallen and Appenzell and thus merged into a confederation of 13 full members – to survive in its archaic form and with only minor territorial changes till the collapse of the ancien régime in 1798.5

2 Memory and tradition Since the fifteenth century, a certain kind of self-representation based on the invocation of history has been continuously fostered in Switzerland. How did this come about?6 The second half of the fifteenth century, when the Confederation consolidated itself in a constitutional and legal sense, was also a period during which Europe as a whole increasingly drew together politically. In this context, awareness of its own, unique character as a state became common within the Confederation; the more so as the Confederation was still faced with the propaganda of Austrian Habsburg claims to the recuperation of their lands, and the increasing pressure of imperial reform. Both members of the Habsburg Austrian party as well as, later on, imperial propagandists sought to deny the Confederates constitutional legitimacy, as they accepted no prince, no dominus naturalis, as their lord. The historical argument for this was based on the death of Count Leopold in the battle of Sempach in 1386. The charge that the Swiss peasant rabble had on this occasion killed their own lord on his own land during a fight for his inheritance was already voiced in the immediate aftermath of the battle. More important, however, was that it became the centrepiece of propaganda aimed at the Swiss Confederation. In the second half of the fifteenth century, this charge led to the intrinsic stigmatization of the Swiss Confederates as insubordinate peasants, an accusation that was taken on board in the Empire towards the end of the century, for instance in Maximilian I’s manifesto. The Confederates began to argue against this through an ideological argument that was likewise historical. This process can be characterized as ‘stigma management’, during which the stigmatized alterity was confidently flagged. Yes, the Swiss Confederates had been simple peasant folk, who had risen against a nobility that had neglected its duties and who had supplanted the nobility in their lands. This unique reversal of the Christian order of society had however been according to the will of God. The large number of successes on the battlefield were taken as proof of this, and were interpreted as divine judgement in favour of the Confederates. They, the humble, had been chosen by God, according to the words of St Paul (1 Cor. 1: 27–9), to shame the haughty: the Confederates therefore saw themselves as God’s chosen people. Deliberations

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gained currency about when this revolution had taken place, and when the Swiss common weal had come into being. The tradition that prevailed was that of liberation, including the Rütli oath and the Burgenbruch uprising, which made the more general ideas about the peasantry’s struggle with the nobility more concrete. All in all around 1500 these ideas became personalized in the form of great heroic figures, that of Wilhelm Tell in the context of the story of liberation and Winkelried in the battle of Sempach as a counter-figure to the gradual stylization of Count Leopold as a hero. From the beginning of the sixteenth century, this self-representation became increasingly stylized into a historical image of the ‘Old Confederates’. This image was held up as an example to the particular times it was invoked in, and was thereby constantly renewed as it became interpreted afresh in changing cultural, confessional and political contexts. Hence in the confessional age Protestants as well as Catholics claimed to be following in the ‘footsteps of the ancients’, and accused their opponents of betraying through their behaviour the bond with God and thus having lost the status of a chosen people. Apart from this, insubordinate peasants intent on legitimizing their actions kept invoking the peasant ancestors, above all Tell. In the great peasant war of 1653, the rebels, who had modelled their union on the example of the first Confederation, saw themselves as the real successors of the first freedom fighters and victorious ‘Old Confederates’. This was the case to such an extent that their vision of history, which had begun decisively to guide their actions, led them into fatally miscalculating the actual relations of power.7 The vision of history of the Old Confederates held within itself an extremely positive selfimage, while at the same time urging the descendants to preserve the status of having been chosen by God. Early modern critical pamphlets therefore used it again and again in order to show the present generation how far it had strayed from their example and what needed to be done in order to once again adhere to it. This example, however, as much as it appeared to be the result of historical retrospection, was constantly formulated afresh, depending on the grievances at hand.8 At the forefront of these arguments were ‘peasant’ virtues, such as piety and simplicity of lifestyle, self-sufficiency and economic independence. They were also meant to counteract the diagnosed love of luxury in customs of dress and eating, seen to have been imported from France. For Enlightenment thinkers, history was a treasure trove of knowledge ample enough to guide a responsible person in his decisions. They therefore used the image of the ‘Old Confederates’, enriched in an ahistorical fashion with all necessary virtues, as an instrument for their own proto-national, educational ends. By 1800 this image was already widely disseminated among the population as a whole.9 This idealization of the ‘Old Confederates’ was extremely effective in popularizing and mythicizing the Swiss vision of history in the nineteenth century, though at first only in the realm of politics. The national identity developing

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in the young federal state drew its strength of integration from images of history of the confederate Middle Ages. In an environment of revolutionary social crisis, brought about in the 1870s by the first wave of industrialization, the invocation of the ‘Old Confederates’ turned out to provide common ground for agreement.10 This consensus was supported by a discourse that accentuated external threats, first in the wake of the conflict over Neuchâtel in 1856, then, with increasing intensity, during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.11 This discourse presented Switzerland as being threatened by foreign powers, and returned to the virtues in battle, the willingness to sacrifice oneself and the trust in God of the ‘Old Confederates’, and sought to derive from them optimism for the future. While it had a reassuring effect on the Swiss, it reduced the historical image of their past to the military aspect. In comparison to the mythicization of the tradition surrounding the founding of the Confederation and the ‘Wars of Liberation’ – as the time between the ‘founding’ and the Sempach War was beginning to be called – other topics, and the self-critical tradition also contained in the Swiss historical image, became marginalized.12 This development climaxed before and during the Second World War during the so-called ‘cultural defence of the homeland’ (Geistige Landesverteidigung), with which Switzerland sought from 1938 onwards to respond with cultural means to foreign influence, especially from the totalitarian systems. At the beginning of the Cold War, the discourse of being endangered still retained some of its actuality. As the historical image of the ‘Old Confederates’ was however reduced to the military preparedness to respond with arms and had become irrevocably disconnected from the other values it had once encompassed, it became increasingly less relevant during a period of economic expansion and the political development of Western Europe. Various elements, such as the invocation of the country’s national heroes, the battles and the Rütli oath, could still lead to acrimonious public altercations at the end of the twentieth century, and continued to be important in the twenty-first century. This is because they continue to be conducive to politics of history in the form of slogans (see below), though disconnected from the now forgotten overall context of this image of history.

3 Historiography First it has to be said that the development of Switzerland’s politics and selfconsciousness caused a confederate chronicle tradition to come into being only towards the beginning of the sixteenth century. Previously regional chronicles alone or those of particular localities existed.13 This means that historiographical efforts to write an inclusive history of the Swiss regions only began at a time when an awareness of the Confederation as a distinctive constitutional entity within the European context gained currency. That was the case in the

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second half of the fifteenth century. Only this nascent awareness made possible the question of how it all began. It was portentous that among all the options which were then canvassed, the emancipatory tradition drawing on the Rütli and Tell was the one which established itself as the founding event. From then onward Swiss history took this imprecisely dated episode as its starting point. The fact that this occurred with the first published and therefore generally accessible Swiss chronicle, written by Petermann Etterlin in 1507, is likely to have had an additional effect on the way a Swiss perspective of history was forged. In the second half of the sixteenth century, Aegidius Tschudi incorporated contemporary knowledge as well as his own, new research in a monumental Swiss Chronicle. Tschudi was first to merge the history of the founding of the Confederation – which he dated to 1307 – with a coherent history of Switzerland, ranging from 1000 till 1470.14 That Tschudi’s opus only appeared in print in 1734–6 as the Chronicon Helveticum, thereby becoming generally available for the first time, had far-reaching consequences in that it appeared almost at the same time as the proto-national efforts of the Enlightenment were gaining momentum. Johannes von Müller accepted Tschudi’s account without qualifications and made extensive use of it for his epic and idealizing Geschichten schweizerischer Eidgenossenschaft (1786–1808), which he refashioned into the history of a ‘nation’ with an ‘unquenchable national character’, with its own place among the peoples of Europe. This ‘unquenchable national character’ consisted of ‘that which is engrained in the spirit, and is passed on from generation to generation’. Therefore, the Swiss – as Müller put it – ‘in the face of the rest of Europe had no other choice … than to be who we are meant to be’. This laid the foundation not only for the central significance of the medieval ‘Old Confederates’ in the imagination of a Swiss national identity, but also for Switzerland as a ‘natural community’ (Wesensgemeinschaft), which developed naturally over time, but in essence always remained the same.15 In its content, Müller’s ‘national character’ bore within it essentially the same values that had been traditionally ascribed to the ‘Old Confederates’ and had been promoted by Enlightenment writers. Tradition and Müller’s opus, which was soon popularized by abridged and generally accessible, reworked editions, particularly that by Heinrich Zschokke, contributed, after the demise of the Old Confederation, to the fact that the invocation of the Middle Ages assumed a central role in the imminent conflicts surrounding the foundation of the Swiss federal state in 1848.16 The example of the biography of the Lucerner, Joseph Eutych Kopp, helps to demonstrate that the new critical examination of primary sources, which he initiated, came into being as a reaction against the tradition of self-representation, which was meant to suggest an unbroken continuity from the medieval Eidgenossenschaft to the contemporary state.17 Especially the projection of continuity was criticized as

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the result of a way of writing history which gilded and nurtured prejudices: ‘The Old Confederation is gone; the Holy Roman Empire collapsed likewise. (…) Empire and alliances are to the historian no more than something that lies behind him’ and which he now had the obligation to analyse by means of critical methodology.18 Kopp and the critical school therefore bypassed Müller and Tschudi and relied on source material based on charters, which led not only to the elimination of the tradition of liberation, encompassing Tell and the Rütli oath, from the history of proven facts. Legal inconsistencies were likewise purged, while the role of the Habsburg Monarchy was judged in a more differentiated way. This led again and again to violent clashes between the traditional and increasingly popular vision of history on the one hand and the young science of history on the other. When towards the end of the nineteenth century the next wave of large-scale narrative accounts of Swiss history appeared – that written by Karl Dändliker and particularly the one by Johannes Dierauer – Johannes von Müller’s lively account of liberation, including its heroes such as Winkelried, was consigned to the realm of myths. The essential component – the narrowing of perspective towards the early founding of the Swiss state – was kept, however, and now conceived afresh in the context of the modern predominantly liberal federal state. This is most clearly evident in the writings of the mastermind of liberal historiography, Carl Hilty. He conceived in 1875 the image of a national will (Volkswille), resting from the earliest alliances and at all times on an ‘ideal federal unit’ (ideale Bundeseinheit). In what he conceived as a goal-orientated development, in which the great Leitideen, the leading ideas, of the confederate state became successively manifest already during the Middle Ages, Swiss history moved consistently towards the modern federal state. These Leitideen were those of the ‘natural freedom of old’, then those of the ‘natural expansion’ of the ‘sphere of power’ (Machtkreis) as the ‘necessary basis’ of the state, which led to ‘natural enmity’ with Austria and Switzerland’s extraordinary military prowess. The ‘natural development’ towards the federal state was however impeded for centuries by legal and constitutional differences between the sovereign Orte, by their divergent interests and by the creation of subject territories. First the resulting lack of an idea of a contingent, united state, then Switzerland’s confessional division had made active external politics impossible and thus led to the Leitidee of neutrality. To Hilty, the current Leitidee had to be ‘nationality’, and he therefore judged the traditional conflict between federalism and centralism to have been completely superseded. Only where the body politic and the national spirit converged could a strong nationality prosper. In principle, this orientation towards progress guided the large-scale liberal narratives of Dändliker and Dierauer, an idea further consolidated by the medievalist studies of Wilhelm Oechsli.19 When, on 1 August 1891, a grand national celebration of the 600-year existence of the Swiss Confederation took place, with the first Dreiländerbund of

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the beginning of August as the date of reference, word was of a ‘victory celebration of the sciences’.20 After all, academic history had, so it seemed at the time, recognized the Bundesbrief – which had been lost for centuries – as the act of foundation of Switzerland, thereby exposing as false the idea initiated by Tschudi and Müller of the Rütli oath and the Tellentat, claimed to have taken place in 1307, as the birth of the Confederation. Academic history had replaced the narrative of chronicles with a history based on primary sources, a process of reconstruction reliant on documentation, which, in the climate of the general faith in the sciences of the time, was assumed to yield definitive truths. The publication of two Festschriften, in which in a prearranged fashion Wilhelm Oechsli first supplied a historical exposition, followed then by Carl Hilty’s treatment of the constitutional development from its beginnings to the present day, more or less canonized this new concept.21 Swiss national identity was now seen to be founded on a voluntary understanding of political community, and not any more as the deterministic ‘natural community’ championed by Johannes von Müller.22 From its inception, Switzerland had always been a ‘nation of will’ (Willensnation), as Hilty had already claimed in 1875. A ‘scientific myth’ had thus been created, which did not necessarily stand in opposition to the traditional and already generally accepted vision of history, but could be treated as a parallel narrative: moreover, the ‘scientific myth’ described the beginning as a struggle for liberty. In public consciousness, the Rütli oath and the Bundesbrief were seen to mean the same thing. The Middle Ages played the role of underlining in public consciousness the constitutional legitimacy of the newly founded state. This interpretation of national history had therefore established itself as a master narrative, especially as, with the ‘nation of will’, it offered a strong argument for a Swiss special case (Sonderfall) within the context of the European discussion of nationalities, which sought to derive the nation from shared race, language and history.23 It is of great significance that in the period that followed, the Middle Ages became central within the quarrels about the interpretation of Swiss history. When Robert Grimm in 1920 published a Marxist account of Swiss history, whereas he naturally began with the story of foundation, he interpreted it not as a fight for liberation, but as class struggle of the peasants against the ruling class. While the liberal historians interpreted the legal inequality and the existence of subjects since the beginning of the fifteenth century as a transient failure in the long run, Grimm judged them to be phases of the ruling class’s preservation of power within the dialectic progression of history according to Marxist theory. When in 1928 Gonzague de Reynold presented his neoconservative counter-concept of national history, suggesting a fundamental break between the original Confederation and contemporary Switzerland, he based his argument exclusively on the Middle Ages, with the fifteenth century as an apex (Blütezeit). Just as his work was an expression of unease with

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democracy, the whole of Europe, and of course also Switzerland, saw itself confronted in the 1930s with alternatives to the seemingly inefficient system of democracy in contrast to corporatist and totalitarian forms of state which presented themselves as modern. In Switzerland, a crucial part of this ideological conflict was fought with arguments referring to the Middle Ages. Richard Feller accentuated as a Leitidee for Switzerland the concept of the cooperative association. Contemporary understanding of the term saw them as corporations which had been founded in the Middle Ages and which were based on free association, in a dialectic relationship to lordship. The cooperative appeared not only to be in this context a legal construct, but a ‘reality full of life’, which embraced the human being and was an expression of a certain kind of humanity even within the modern state. Even if the cooperative had succumbed to the ‘superhuman’ state in secular conflict, it nonetheless continued its influence as a ‘healing force’ within Swiss society. During the Second World War, passionate debates could develop about the interpretation of medieval liberty. In opposition to Theodor Mayer’s espousal of the theory of the Königsfreie, Karl Meyer vehemently defended the theory of the Gemeinfreie, which had been especially well received in Switzerland. It saw the Germanic ‘Freie’ as free peasant landowners, who, in cooperation with the nobility, supported the state in an ideal democracy, and who were thus seen as the ancestors of the Confederates. The theory of the concept of Königsfreiheit, developed in Germany as a freedom determined by lordship and the distribution of privilege, appeared at this time to be a totalitarian encroachment upon the core of the liberal understanding of Swiss history.24 Karl Meyer correspondingly forged through his numerous works the historical image of the ‘cultural defence of the homeland’. This image dominated his description of the Middle Ages, during which Switzerland still appeared as a ‘living monument of a proud epoch of humanity, of the communal movement towards freedom during the Christian Middle Ages’.25 It can be said that, in general, the academic discipline of medieval history was akin to a Leitwissenschaft, a leading sector, in national history until the middle of the twentieth century. After the Second World War, national history increasingly lost its significance as a ‘master narrative’. This was caused not only by the surrounding circumstances, but also by the development of history as a discipline, which took place in the environment of an immense increase in student numbers, its consolidation as a subject in content as well as in an institutional sense, and the alignment of Swiss historiography with the international mainstream. Medieval studies no longer gave support to national self-perception: not only were ways found of targeting the great national myths (Marcel Beck and his pupils in the 1960s), which had assumed great potency in the first half of the century, but research disentangled itself from perspectives of national history and treated questions related to current international debates. It goes without saying that

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this process led to a questioning and abortion of the goal-orientated interpretations of medieval events and sources that Swiss national historiography had pursued. This caused public opinion on history to drift apart from an academic history critical of ideology. The majority of the population still favoured the ‘master narrative’ described above, while academic history took place in a forum internum and was received only very partially by the public. The new, scientifically validated general accounts, such as the scholarly Handbuch der Schweizer Geschichte (1972–6), which summarized the expertise of the 1960s, the History of Switzerland and the Swiss (1983), which, published simultaneously in the three national languages, sought to acquaint the general public with the new type of questions asked by academic historians, and finally the publication Innerschweiz und frühe Eidgenossenschaft (1990), which was focused specifically on the period of foundation and reflected newest research, can nonetheless not be considered to have succeeded in providing the foundation for a new, revised national ‘master narrative’. By the 1990s, the Middle Ages had thus lost their former significance in the context of Swiss national history. This needs to be seen in the context of the debates about the role of Switzerland in the Second World War, which stimulated research on contemporary history immeasurably, the latter thereby replacing medieval studies as the Leitwissenschaft of national history.26

4

Political instrumentalization

The focus of the following section is the premeditated and conscious usage of medieval history for the motivation and legitimization of political arguments, as well as the techniques employed for this instrumentalization.27 This kind of exploitation drew on a long-standing tradition. The confederate captains already motivated their warriors with references to their ancestors during the Burgundian Wars.28 In Basel, the intentional adoption of an ‘Old Confederate’ prayer tradition, adapted to liturgical use, sought to tap into confederate selfperception of God’s chosen people.29 Early modern peasant revolts repeatedly referred to Tell, while during the peasant war of 1653, three lads dressed as Tell (‘die Drei Tellen’) would commonly act as the symbol of resistance.30 In a (proto-)national sense, Enlightenment authors of the Helvetic Society (Helvetische Gesellschaft) first instrumentalized Swiss medieval history for the sake of the education of the populace. This was done predominantly through the medium of songs, for which Johann Kaspar Lavater created the template with his ‘Schweizerlieder’, which were continuously added to. After the demise of the Old Confederation, every new regime sought to derive its legitimization by referring to the ‘founding fathers’ of the medieval Confederation. As much as the Helvetic Republic, that central state enforced by French arms, contradicted Swiss political tradition, a new Rütli oath was nonetheless now envisaged to

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support the ‘one and indivisible republic’ and it sought a direct connection to the ‘Old Confederates’ both rhetorically and in the imagery used.31 In the nineteenth century, the large-scale instrumentalization of the historical image of the medieval Confederation ensued, with a view to utilizing it for purposes of national integration. The media employed in this enterprise ranged from shooting competitions (Schützenfeste) to military training camps, anniversary celebrations, the erection of monuments, historical pageants and national exhibitions. At the Schützenfeste, regular events since 1824 attended by delegations from all regions of the country, the targets were frequently named after confederate battles and heroes. In the military training camps, which for the first time brought together young men from all regions, the recruits were acquainted with old confederate values through song collections and especially army sermons. The following section is concerned first and foremost with anniversaries and the attached pageants, as here the politics of history are at their most apparent. Again, this tradition reaches back further than is commonly assumed. In Bern in 1791, the planning of a pageant as part of the six-hundredth anniversary of the town’s founding (1191), was already far advanced. In Lucerne in 1786, the town council considered ideas of organizing celebrations for the four-hundredth anniversary of the battle of Sempach (1386) with a view to educating the populace. As late as 1832, the idea of an anniversary of the Lucerne alliances (1332) remained in currency.32 These initiatives all succumbed to the rapid development of events in the wake of the French Revolution and the constitutional struggles in the first half of the nineteenth century. After the foundation of the federal state in 1848, an attempt was made to celebrate the anniversaries of the alliances of Zurich (1351) and Bern (1353) as national festivities, thereby also celebrating the reconciliation of the former enemies of the Sonderbund War. This attempt did not meet with success, as in Zurich the Urkantone (Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden) and in Bern the canton Freiburg failed to take up the invitation. A first step towards the celebration of national reconciliation was made in what one might at first believe to be a completely different context, namely that of literature. The cause was the centenary of Friedrich Schiller’s birth on 10 November 1859, in particular the ceremonious inauguration on 21 October 1860 of the so-called ‘myth stone’ (Mythenstein) in its new converted form as a monument to the author.33 At first, the reception of Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell had been hesitant in Switzerland. Apart from incomplete and highly faulty theatrical productions, stagings by lay actors in village settings (Landschaftstheater) – of the kind so picturesquely described in Gottfried Keller’s Der Grüne Heinrich – are documented from 1824 onwards. Only gradually did the play become recognized as the play of the Swiss nation.34 Now, in 1859–60, the former Sonderbund cantons of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden invited the other cantons

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to erect a monument for ‘Tell’s singer’, and all attended. On close inspection it becomes apparent, however, that Friedrich Schiller was dwelt on neither in the speeches of these posthumous birthday celebrations, nor in other statements relating to them. It was the achievement of the Confederation’s founders that was celebrated, as well as the defence of freedom the medieval Confederates had fought for in so many battles, and which had been preserved until the present day. There was an urge to be united again like the forefathers, for there was ‘after all only one Rütli, one Switzerland, only one fatherland’. It was not Schiller who was celebrated at the Mythenstein. The literary anniversary had been converted into a projection of national unity under Schiller’s patronage. The play has remained tainted by this political instrumentalization ever since. After 1899, the newly erected Tellspielhaus in Altdorf (Uri), which, in the spirit of the ‘cultural defence of the homeland’, temporarily assumed the character of a place of national worship during the 1930s, became the setting for artistically ambitious stagings of the play by the Urner Tellspielgesellschaft.35 As recently as 2004, the literary event of Wilhelm Tell’s 200-year anniversary was harnessed to current political ends by right-wing conservative circles when the play was staged at the Rütli by the Weimar Theater (see below). This usurpation of Schiller’s play for the purpose of national politics has at times made up the strength, and at times the weakness, of its reception in Switzerland. The Schiller celebrations at the Mythenstein were a unique episode. In everyday politics, national integration continued to progress slowly in the wake of further constitutional controversies, the industrial revolution and the Kulturkampf. It was only during the 1880s that reconciliation appeared imminent, finding its expression predominantly in the active participation of the Catholic-conservative party in federal politics. Under this omen, the five-hundredth anniversary in 1886 of the battle of Sempach (1386) therefore developed into a major national manifestation. The overwhelming celebration on the Sempach battlefield was seen as a Swiss ‘Olympia’ that participants had reached by ways of a ‘national pilgrimage’. At the heart of the celebration was for the first time a pageant (Siegesfeier der Freiheit) performed by a choir of 800 singers and 1500 participants, who re-enacted scenes from the era of Sempach. The performance ended with an apotheosis of Winkelried, the hero of the battle, who had sacrificed himself for ‘the women and children’. Significant about the festivities was the fact that reconciliation and unity were no longer an issue. They were gladly taken as a given. Politicians now rather addressed the social problems triggered by industrialization, demanded a response from economic policy-makers and entrepreneurs in order to address this problem, and declared they would fight socialism, all the while invoking the myth of Winkelried. This stress on social and economic issues is of far greater importance than the discourse centred on an external threat one could expect in the context of the invocation of a battle, which called for ‘doing one’s best in

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organizing our military and national defence’ in the light of the ‘possible clash of mighty empires prepared for war’.36 The pageant, in the form it was first organized at Sempach, was obviously the right medium at that time for national integration, because it staged the common identification with the glorious ancestors. It made the audience acquainted with the popular narrative of history, and was enacted by common people for common people. Within the framework of anniversary celebrations, it presented a glamorous image of the past. Critical views were only evident to the extent that dangers to national unity were shown, and only as long as they were surmounted. This message was finally converted into a message for present-day Switzerland, most often by including in one way or another all participants of the celebrations. This message was presented in the form of a resolution to live up to the virtues of the ancestors, but also included – as did the whole of the celebrations with their sermons and speeches – responses to contemporary problems. The pageant was thus, in conjunction with the anniversary celebrations of historical events, one of the most effective instruments of the national politics of history. In 1889, the Swiss Society for Public Benefit (Schweizer Gemeinnützige Gesellschaft) expressed its worry about the ‘moral strength of the fatherland’, under the impression of what it considered to be domestic and foreign political pressure. In response, the organization founded a ‘commission for the preservation of the national spirit’, the prime place in its planned endeavours being taken by celebrations in the form of popular festivities ‘as breeding places for the national spirit’. In this context, the grand anniversary in 1891 of the confederation of Schwyz (1291) and its pageant were only the last stage of a long- standing development. Its main result was the achievement of harmony between discourses in academic and popular history, and the strengthening of a sense of national identity founded on the kind of historical arguments we encountered above. The eminent significance of the Middle Ages in the representation of Swiss identity is further corroborated by the ambivalent constellation of the 1898 anniversary. Two modern dates were to be remembered, which affected both winners and losers of recent history: 1798 had seen the demise of the old Orte and the birth of new cantons where the subject lands had been; 1848 evoked again the memory of the split between the Sonderbund and the Confederation, only very recently overcome with the help, among other things, of the common memory of the Middle Ages. In response to this difficult situation, the anniversaries were celebrated on the cantonal level, and were acutely monitored by the other Confederates, who feared potential dissonances. The political elites who organized the festivities were apparently aware of the problem from the beginning and intentionally ranked cantonal remembrance lower in their actions than the collective memory of the nation. As this memory had its root in the Middle Ages, the new cantons already

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tried to emphasize their common destiny with the Old Confederation at such an early stage. In the cantons which had not been victorious in 1798 and in 1848, painful memories were glossed over, wherever it was psychologically possible, through the invocation of the lasting achievements of the medieval forefathers. The various commemorative celebrations were therefore exploited throughout in order to further national cohesion. All in all this was a process that was politically engineered, and which makes the constellation of these anniversaries look like the fulfilment of the programme commissioned in 1889 by the Schweizerische Gemeinnützige Gesellschaft. Through target-oriented politics of history, the shared identity of the Swiss was projected back on the Middle Ages, even, and especially poignantly, in canton Neuchâtel, which had only joined the Swiss Confederation in 1848. In the 1930s, the invocation of the Old Confederates had special significance as a part of the defence against the totalitarian neighbouring states which surrounded Switzerland. One such example was Karl Meyer’s transposition in 1941 of the current situation of endangeredness back to the period of foundation, so that the Habsburgs seemed to have had the same aggressive intentions as the current dictatorships. At the same time, the federal councillor Philipp Etter, within the context of the ‘cultural defence of the homeland’, shaped the six-hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Bundesbrief of 1291 into a ‘unio mystica’ with the first Confederates. The Bundesfeuer, lit on the Rütli on 31 July, was carried to all main localities of the cantons by torch relays and used to light the fires to celebrate the first of August. Radio, the most modern of communication media, added to this symbolism of fire on 1 August, as it made it possible for the whole Swiss audience to sing the national anthem together at exactly the same time and in all languages of the Confederation. The central celebrations in Schwyz, the pageant and the speech by Federal Councillor Etter, were all dominated by the spirit of willingness for sacrifice and endurance to the good of the fatherland, by the idea of faithful trust in God’s assistance and the union with the founding fathers, who were seen to have been in the same situation and whose success in the face of adversity yielded hope for the present condition. The readiness to defend oneself was demonstrated by a grand défilé in front of the Bundesbriefarchiv in Schwyz, which was understood as the ‘tabernacle of the nation’, as it held the Bundeslade like the biblical Ark of the Covenant with the charter of 1291. The instrumentalization of history within the staging of this event is especially evident if one considers the actual mood of despondency prevalent in the country at the time.37 The national exhibitions turned out to be another medium for the exploitation of medieval history, even though they were primarily meant to serve the purpose of displaying cultural, commercial and industrial achievements. Already during the first national exhibition (Landesausstellung) of 1883 in

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Zurich, a connection was made between the Old Confederates and the workers, who now fought ‘with a new set of arms’ and ‘in other domains’ than their valiant forefathers. In the industrial hall at the national exhibition at Geneva in 1896, the machines on display became ‘trophies of the greatest victories of the Swiss, which are worthy of pride even more than Morgarten and Murten’. That in both cases such a connection was made had the purpose of including the effects of industrialization – the creation of a proletariat as well as the economic and industrial achievements of the time – into the national presentation of identity, which already possessed a strong historicizing component. The national exhibition of 1939, which assumed its place in history under the nickname Landi, was significant not just because of the astonishingly modern display of achievements of a progressive Switzerland. It also presented a unique kind of thoroughly ideological self-representation, dominated by the ‘cultural defence of the homeland’ on the so-called ‘Höhenweg’, where history was present everywhere: an immense mural, commented upon by a historian carrying banners, presented the history of Switzerland with its battles and great men in one great swathe from the Rütli oath through to the present under threat of war. In a dark room, immediately identified by observers as the ‘crypt of the nation’, the brightly illuminated monumental representation of the Bundesbrief – abbreviated by Karl Meyer – reminded the visitor of the ‘root of the Confederation’ and of ‘650 years of freedom’ and ‘loyalty to the Confederation’ (Bundestreue). Also shown were ‘650 years of military preparedness’, without which the ‘Confederation would neither have been created nor survived’.38 In a rare instance of unity, a direct connection was established for citizens between the medieval ‘struggle for liberation’ and the present, linked at the same time by a memorable lesson on their state, with the declared goal of making them ‘capable of devoting themselves gladly to the community’ at this time of external threat. This exercise was successful: contemporaries considered the Landi to be a ‘confederal religious service, before our army moved out to the border’. The suggestive might of this self-representation – sometimes called ‘the spirit of the Landi’ – continued to be effective under the influence of the Cold War into the 1960s, though with decreasing strength. Military circles still attempted to employ the patriotic and nationalist instrumentalization of medieval history in reaction to a certain leftist criticism of the army.39 It could not stop the popular image of history, as well as the self-assurance which had traditionally positioned itself against other states, being questioned increasingly critically. The climax of this development was the boycott of the confederal celebration (Bundesfeier) of 1991, declared by intellectuals and artists who tried to react in this way to the atmosphere of domestic political crisis. Apart from ideological critique of the occasion – 1291 as the founding year of the current state – this boycott was principally motivated by the divergence of Switzerland’s selfrepresentation from the country’s political reality.40 Even if the boycott proved

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not to be particularly successful, conservative circles considered it to be a further deconstruction of the traditional historical image by intellectuals and the political left, and in turn reasserted this image as their own in its most exclusive and xenophobic sense. A marked polarization between the political left and right factions had first occurred in connection with the Swiss representation of the country’s own identity and history.41 In particular the Swiss People’s Party (Schweizerische Volkspartei: SVP), which existed under this name from 1971 and which increasingly developed into a right-wing populist party, recognized the unused, and still accessible, potential of an understanding of history along the lines of the ‘cultural defence of the homeland’. The frequent and well-developed invocation of the federal Middle Ages has, in the meantime, become the trademark of the party. If one wishes to demonstrate the manipulation of the Middle Ages, this example of a party making an increasingly exclusive claim to Swiss authenticity as a means of self-representation, especially in relation to the traditional historical picture, is an obvious one. Let us look at two cases of this: on the one hand the bitterly fought referendum about the treaty of Schengen; on the other hand the conflict about the celebrations of the first of August at the Rütli in 2007. By contrast with the commemorations and festivities, where history acquired an explicit political weighting, we are dealing here with an implicit employment of history, which an outsider cannot automatically connect with; so it is necessary in what follows to draw out the interpretational background. Even the meeting place, the Schützenhaus Albisgüetli, was given particular significance when delegates were invited to the special session of 26 June 2004 meant to settle the referendum against the treaty of Schengen: ‘Already in 1939, this hall, as the Landi-Halle, became a symbol for an independent and neutral Switzerland. In addition to this, the SVP decided here thirteen years ago to stand against the EEA, an important decision in the history of Switzerland.’42 These two sentences are worthy of close inspection, as they exemplify a particularly potent modality of the instrumentalization of the past. Symbolical references, which are meant to align the meeting of delegates with a certain tradition, are made quite clearly. The contentious term Landi evokes the set of memories and attitudes briefly described above. As has been demonstrated, the Landi is closely connected to the historical image of a federal period of foundation, and has, in popular memory, become part of the national patrimony. Worthy of note is the fact that the second sentence quoted above transfers the symbol of the Landi-Halle into the history of the party. It is the venue where the SVP decided against entering the EEA in 1991. This decision by the party – not the plebiscite of 1992 – is seen to be ‘an important decision in the history of Switzerland’. The same can be said of the symbolical venue of the event: the Albisgüetli is generally seen to be the stronghold of the SVP. If the text now reminds us

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that the Schützenhaus Albisgüetli is equivalent to the Landi-Halle, then it is not only the continuity of the situation of endangerment from outside which is suggested here. Most importantly, the Landi, a national site of memory (Gedächtnisort; lieu de mémoire), is made equivalent to the Albisgüetli, a place of significance particularly for the memory of the party. The history of the party is made equivalent to the history of Switzerland. The two sentences can be read, in the spirit of Roland Barthes,43 as two semiological systems, connected via the link of the Landi-Halle = Albisgüetli. The national meaning of the primary system tied together in the term Landi is within the secondary system hidden through the term ‘Albisgüetli’ from the meaning of party politics. It is now the SVP that appears as the active party in defence of genuine Swiss identity against external threat and not, as in the primary system, the nation. The party is, within the secondary semiological system, equivalent with the Swiss people. This treatment of symbols as well as rituals which serve the presentation of national identity, is especially potent because of the general ambivalence of symbols. All meanings are present within the symbol at all times. However, according to the situation of its usage, one meaning hides the others within an area of multivocality.44 Even if the symbol Landi is used by the party as its own symbol, the meaning which forges national identity nonetheless shines through. This oscillation between national meaning and that specific to the party defines the potency of the kidnapping of symbols relating to the ‘nation’ and the ‘homeland’, for from it the suggestion easily derives that the SVP represents Switzerland. Thus the party’s president could dismiss criticism of his party’s standpoint at a platform discussion with the lapidary sentence: ‘We are Switzerland.’45 One needs to keep this backdrop in mind if one wishes to understand the violence of the clashes surrounding the celebrations of the national holiday on the first of August on the Rütli in the election year of 2007. Some preliminary explanations are necessary: the Rütli, this meadow on Lake Uri, where according to the ‘tradition of liberation’ the conspirators met, is widely seen as the ‘cradle of the nation’. It is an extremely ‘deep’ national symbol, one to which a great variety of meanings have been attached.46 Possibly the deepest meaning is that of a historical legitimization. More specifically, this meaning is one that is created by the claim to authenticity at the Rütli, underlined by the direct invocation of the Old Confederates, where the cause at hand was one of current and future politics. The first time the Rütli was considered in such a nationalistic way occurred in 1798, when the Helvetic regime thought of assembling prominent representatives to swear on the Rütli an oath to the new Republic. For the first time, a Swiss government had considered the Rütli in such a nationalist way for such a swearing of oaths,47 and for the first time such a nationalist aspect had drawn Swiss patriots to it. This way, the novel shape of the constitution, one that completely diverged from previous political

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tradition, was meant to be given broad acceptance.48 Since the early nineteenth century – also under the influence of romanticism – an emotional perception of the prototype of the ‘native landscape’ (heimatliche Landschaft) and a patriotic ‘awareness of the Heimat’ had been connected to the symbol of the Rütli. This is particularly evident in the French-speaking west of Switzerland, whose inhabitants have little in common with the Urschweiz. Often, they have never seen the Grütli (as it is called in French), but nonetheless, or possibly exactly because of this, cherish the Rütli and the premier pacte as symbols that the whole of present-day Switzerland belongs together. During the Second World War, the Rütli became a very strong symbol of all Swiss standing together in the face of threat from outside, of the will to defend themselves and to persevere in the face of the ‘malice of the times’. An expression of the significance of the symbolic value of the Rütli was General Guisan’s Rütli Report, which in 1940 ordered a plan of defence centred on the Alpenréduit, and the aforementioned anniversary celebrations of 1941 along the lines of the ‘cultural defence of the homeland’. As the view of history cultivated by the latter faded, the meaning of the Rütli associated with a positioning against an outside threat ceased to be invoked, except as a part of military manifestations.49 On the Rütli during the seven-hundredth jubilee of 1991, the meadow’s meaning was reversed: while it remained a symbol of freedom and self-assertion, this symbol was now seen to be applicable also to an openness towards Europe, as a ‘symbol of a breakout and a new beginning, of a journey towards a united Europe’.50 It was representatives of the bourgeois and liberal parties who in their speeches suggested this rebranding of the symbolism of the Rütli in the context of a national debate over Switzerland joining the EEA, an initiative rejected in 1992. While inclusive interpretations of the symbol of the Rütli had occurred before and would occur again later on,51 the symbolism of a union meant to defend against an outside threat, initiated by the tradition of liberation, albeit at a completely different point in time, seems to have remained dominant. It is for this reason that the Rütli is so readily invoked both by the SVP and the Aktion für eine Unabhängige und Neutrale Schweiz (AUNS). Extreme right-wing groups likewise claim a special relationship to the Rütli. This became clear, for instance, during the literary bicentenary of Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell in 2004. The staging of the play on the Rütli was sponsored by a federal councillor from the SVP, while the AUNS elevated the play to the status of the Swiss ‘state myth’ (Staatsmythos) in the context of the conflict over Switzerland joining Schengen, while a group of right-wing extremists re-enacted the oath after the celebrations had ended. The Rütli appeared to be henceforth a patrimonium of the political right, leading to embarrassing manifestations during festivities at the Rütli of right-wing extremists against opinions that diverged from their own.

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When in 2007 the federal councillor, Micheline Calmy-Rey from Geneva, became president of the Swiss Confederation, and the national council member, Christine Egerszegi from Aargau, became speaker of the National Council and consequently of the United Federal Assembly, the highest political functions in Switzerland were for the first time in history exercised by two women. Calmy-Rey and Egerszegi decided to organize the festivities of the first of August on the Rütli as a celebration for Swiss women and families. Coming from different political camps – Calmy-Rey from the Social Democrats (SP), Egerszegi from the Radicals (FDP) – and linguistic regions, they wished to demonstrate what a Switzerland that was open towards the world stood for, namely unity in diversity, and that what was shared outweighed differences in mentality and culture.52 This is not the place to describe the unexpectedly violent response to this initiative, as a result of which the Rütlifeier of 2007 was temporarily cancelled. Attention will only be devoted to the clash of opinions over the meaning of the Rütli and the corresponding history of Switzerland’s foundation. Now 2007 was an election year, and right-wing political circles, such as the SVP and the AUNS, reacted in a particularly nervous way. They considered the fact that suddenly the political left wanted to enter the Rütli to be a provocation, and apparently also an attack on the right’s claim to judge on matters of genuine ‘Swissness’. On the one hand, they sought to discredit the political left and their right to make use of the Rütli, in that they disqualified them as ‘neo-patriots’ who merely wished to abuse the national anniversary for their election campaign. On the other hand, they tried to diminish the relevance of the initiative, in that they claimed that, as a geographical locality, the Rütli had no meaning whatsoever: the Rütli was declared to be a mere ‘meadow with cow shit’. The SVP solved the resulting logical problem of having traditionally invoked the symbolical meaning of this place by claiming that the spirit of the Rütli was everywhere, where freedom and independence – in the sense that Switzerland was to seal itself off from its neighbours – were celebrated on the first of August. While the celebrations on the Rütli, according to all reports very successfully, celebrated a Switzerland that was open towards the world,53 the SVP exploited the date according to their own ideology: in a campaign leaflet sent to all Swiss households, which greeted the reader with a flowing Swiss flag and the heading ‘For the First of August’, the party reminded the Swiss of their country’s origins as they saw them. ‘The Rütli oath of the Confederates stands for the will to independence: we will look after ourselves – we need no foreign judge.’ As joining the EU would mean that the ‘people’ would have no power any more, those who wanted Switzerland to join the EU were destroying the union of the Rütli. The ‘people’ were called upon to stand up to ensure ‘a safe, independent, successful Switzerland’ and support the SVP’s

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Ausschaffungsinitiative directed against criminal foreigners – problematical under the law of nations for its concept of kin liability (Sippenhaft), an initiative whose placard with the expelled black sheep attracted dubious international celebrity. The speech for the first of August, held at different locations by the Bundesrat deputy Blocher, minister of justice and the SVP’s leader, invoked the Middle Ages even more clearly. In his speech, Blocher referred exclusively to the Bundesbrief of 1291, allegedly the subject of the Rütli oath. In a nebulous interpretation of the Bundesbrief that was intended to bolster his argumentation, Blocher emphasized particularly the article excluding foreign judges, and transferred it to the relationship between the law of nations (Völkerrecht) and the law of the people (Volksrecht). The ‘foreign judge’ was, among other things, the law of nations, which was seen to be breaking Swiss national law in that it constituted ‘superordinate law’, which sidelined law that had been decided upon democratically and by the people, and therefore endangered Swiss freedom.54 The tradition of liberation, including the ‘Rütli oath’ and the Bundesbrief – which had already ceased to be significant in the fifteenth century and was lost55 – was instrumentalized on the one hand for the current discourse of Switzerland being endangered by the EU (concerned with the current jurisdictional practice). On the other hand, it was instrumentalized to comment on the Swiss judiciary which adhered to the law of nations, as the SVP also considered the federal judiciary to be ‘foreign judges’. Finally during the SVP’s extraordinary party congress on 19 August, the Rütli was brought to life in the Basel Musical-Theater according to the wishes of the party: scenes from Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell were staged, a speech repeated the party’s theses on the law of nations and, after the national anthem was sung, a new ‘treaty with the people’, similar in appearance to the Bundesbrief of 1291 and sealed three times, was solemnly signed by all the candidates for the coming election.56 The treaty’s content – ‘will not join the EU’, ‘will deport criminal foreigners’ and ‘lower taxes for all’ – demonstrates in its simplicity, more than anything else, in what random fashion associations have been evoked with the Bundesbrief of 1291 and medieval Swiss history in general. It took a former president of the federal courts to remind the minister of justice in his speech for the first of August that Switzerland had been a modern constitutional state since 1848, and that the fundamentally reformed constitution of 1991 had been sanctioned by the very ‘people’ the SVP kept referring to. It was this constitution which bound the Confederation and the cantons into accepting the law of nations.57 The relationship between the Old Confederation and the modern federal state, a relationship alluded to at the beginning of this chapter and which constitutes one of the main parameters of the Swiss national historiographical tradition, had thus suddenly become the topic of daily politics.58 What needs to be remembered in conclusion here is that academic historians might

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differentiate and point out discontinuities in the development of Swiss history and the fundamental differences between the constitutional structures of medieval and contemporary Switzerland. In the popular understanding of history, however, an uninterrupted connection between the medieval Confederation and the current state continues to exist. The perseverance of this concept stems from a long tradition of self-perception and self-understanding, which at times served the purpose of preserving the state. The Middle Ages are therefore likely to continue to play a significant role in the representation of Swiss identity in comparison to their perception in other countries, despite the fact that ideas about them have largely become patchy and disjointed. As long as this is the case, the Middle Ages will continue to be the domain of all imaginable forms of instrumentalization.

Notes * This chapter has been translated by Alan Ross. 1. Eduard Fueter, Die Schweiz seit 1848. Geschichte, Wirtschaft, Politik, vol. i (Zurich/ Leipzig, 1928). 2. William E. Rappard, L’individu et l’Etat dans l’évolution constitutive de la Suisse (Zurich, 1936). 3. See now: Roger Sablonier, Gründungszeit ohne Eidgenossen. Politik und Gesellschaft in der Innerschweiz um 1300 (Baden, 2008). 4. The concept of the weak state has been adapted from Thomas Maissen, ‘Demokratie und Konfession. Zur Bedeutung der Religion in der politischen Kultur der Eidgenossenschaft’ (unpublished lecture). 5. The best brief introduction can be found in Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, vol. iv (Basel, 2004), 114–21: ‘Eidgenossenschaft’ (Andreas Würgler). 6. For the following (including references) see Guy P. Marchal, Schweizer Gebrauchsgeschichte. Geschichtsbilder, Mythenbildung und nationale Identität (Basel, 2006, 2nd edn 2007). 7. Andreas Suter, Der schweizerische Bauernkrieg von 1653. Politische Sozialgeschichte – Sozialgeschichte eines politischen Ereignisses (Tübingen, 1997). 8. Daniel Guggisberg, Das Bild der ‚Alten Eidgenossen’ in Flugschriften des 16. bis Anfang 18. Jahrhunderts (1531–1712). Tendenzen und Funktionen eines Geschichtsbildes (Bern, etc., 2000). 9. Eric Godel, Die Zentralschweiz in der Helvetik, 1798–1803. Kriegserfahrungen und Religion im Spannungsfeld von Nation und Region (Münster, 2009). 10. Hansjörg Siegenthaler, ‘Hirtenfolklore in der Industriegesellschaft. Nationale Identität als Gegenstand von Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte’, in Guy P. Marchal and Aram Mattioli (eds), Erfundene Schweiz. Konstruktionen nationaler Identität – La Suisse imaginée. Constructions d’une identité nationale (Zurich, 1992), 23–36; id., Regelvertrauen, Prosperität und Krisen. Die Ungleichmäßigkeit wirtschaftlicher und sozialer Entwicklung als Ergebnis individuellen Handelns und sozialen Lernens (Tübingen, 1993). 11. Irène Herrmann, Les Cicatrices du passé. Essai sur la gestion des conflits en Suisse, 1798–1918 (Bern, etc., 2006).

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12. See also Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, vol. ii (Basel, 2002), 152–4, ‘Befreiungstradition’ (Peter Kaiser). 13. Regula Schmid, Geschichte im Dienst der Stadt. Amtliche Historie und Politik im Spätmittelalter (Zurich, 2008). 14. Richard Feller and Edgar Bonjour, Geschichtsschreibung der Schweiz (Basel, 1962, 2nd edn 1979); Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, vol. v (Basel, 2005), 326–9: ‘Geschichte. Mittelalter bis 18. Jahrhundert’ (Ernst Tremp). 15. Oliver Zimmer, ‘Competing Memories of the Nation: Liberal Historians and Reconstruction of the Swiss Past, 1870–1900’, Past and Present, 168 (2000), 194–226, at 213f. 16. Also Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, v.329–34: ‘Geschichte. Aufklärung bis 20. Jahrhundert’ (François Walter). 17. Guy P. Marchal, Geschichtsbild im Wandel, 1782–1982. Historische Betrachtung zum Geschichtsbewusstsein der Luzerner im Spiegel der Gedenkfeiern zu 1332 und 1386 (Lucerne, 1982), 23–36 ; also Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, ‘Kopp, Joseph Eutych’ (Heidi Bossard-Borner) (www.hls-dhs-dss.ch – Kopp, Joseph Eutych [26.10.2007]). 18. Joseph Eutych Kopp, Urkunden zur Geschichte der eidgenössischen Bünde (Lucerne, 1835), p. x. 19. Sascha Buchbinder, Der Wille zur Geschichte. Schweizergeschichte um 1900 – die Werke von Wilhelm Oechsli, Johannes Dierauer und Karl Dändliker (Zurich, 2002). 20. Harry Bresslau, cited ibid., 151. 21. Ibid., 127–52. 22. Zimmer, ‘Competing Memories’, 214f. 23. The decisive role of the Alps (Gotthard) for this conception cannot be entered into here: Marchal, Gebrauchsgeschichte, 429–79; Oliver Zimmer, ‘In Search of Natural Identity: Alpine Landscape and the Reconstruction of the Swiss Nation’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 40 (1998), 637–65. 24. Karl Meyer, ‘Vom eidgenössischen Freiheitswillen. Eine Klarstellung’, Zeitschrift für schweizerische Geschichte, 23 (1943), 371–429, 481–578. (This ‘clarification’ was so much orientated towards national history that Hans K. Schulze’s informative research report did not even consider it: ‘Rodungsfreiheit und Königsfreiheit. Zu Genese und Kritik neuerer verfassungsgeschichtlicher Theorien’, Historische Zeitschrift, 219 (1974), 529–50.) 25. Karl Meyer, Aufsätze und Reden (Zurich, 1952), 466, similarly 93. 26. Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, v.334 (François Walter); Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, ‘Politische Geschichte’ (Christoph Maria Merki) (www.hls-dhs-dss.ch – Politische Geschichte [26.10.2007]). 27. Detailed evidence in Marchal, Gebrauchsgeschichte. Cf. Georg Kreis, ‘Nationalpädagogik in Wort und Bild’, in Monika Flacke (ed.), Mythen der Nationen. Ein europäisches Panorama (Berlin, 1998), 446–75; Oliver Zimmer, A Contested Nation. History, Memory and Nationalism in Switzerland, 1761–1891 (Cambridge, 2003). 28. Claudius Sieber-Lehmann, Spätmittelalterlicher Nationalismus. Die Burgunderkriege am Oberrhein und in der Eidgenossenschaft (Göttingen, 1995), 215–17. 29. Marchal, Gebrauchsgeschichte, 402–12. 30. Suter, Bauernkrieg, 295f., 301–9, 512–15 and passim. 31. Herrmann, Les Cicatrices, 221–8. 32. Marchal, Geschichtsbild im Wandel, 14–36; id, ‘1353 in der Rezeption. “Ohne Bern keine Schweizerische Eidgenossenschaft”’, in Rainer C. Schwinges (ed.), Berns mutige Zeit. Das 13. und 14. Jahrhundert neu entdeckt (Bern, 2003), 528–34.

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33. Place name of a rock on Lake Lucerne which stands opposite the Mythen mountains (in the thirteenth century ‘Mitun’), thus has nothing to do with myths. 34. Barbara Piatti, Tells Theater. Eine Kulturgeschichte in fünf Akten zu Friedrich Schillers Wilhelm Tell (Basel, 2004), 188–92. 35. Adolf Hüppi, ‘Die Tellspiele in Altdorf und wir Schweizer’, Schweizerische Rundschau, 34 (1934–35), 471–8; www.tellspiele-altdorf.ch/tellspiele/THS_tellspielhaus.htm [10.8. 2007]. 36. Marchal, Geschichtsbild, 37–52. 37. André Lasserre, La Suisse des années sombres. Courants d’opinion pendant la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, 1939–45 (Lausanne, 1989); Marchal, Gebrauchsgeschichte, 162–6 (diagnosis by Karl Barth). 38. Quotations from Eugen T. Rimli, Das goldene Buch der LA 1939, ed. Julius Wagner (Zurich, 1939). 39. Guy P. Marchal, ‘Être l’historien d’un jubilé. Sempach 1386–1986: 600 Jahre Stadt und Land Luzern: une expérience’, in Franziska Metzger and François Vallotton (eds), L‘Historien, l’historienne dans la cité (Lausanne, 2009). 40. Rémy Pithon, ‘Le 700e anniversaire de la Confédération Helvétique. Heurs et malheurs d’une commémoration’, Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’Histoire, 38 (1993), 13–23. 41. Also Hans Ulrich Jost, ‘L’historiographie du mouvement ouvrier suisse: sous l’emprise de l’histoire des vainqueurs’, in Brigitte Studer and François Vallotton (eds), Histoire sociale et mouvement ouvrier. Un bilan historiographique, 1848–1998 – Sozialgeschichte und Arbeiterbewegung. Eine historiographische Bilanz, 1848–1998 (Lausanne/Zurich, 1997), 21–31. 42. www.svp.ch [15.06.04]. 43. Roland Barthes, Mythen des Alltags (Frankfurt a. Main, 1964). 44. Cf. the processual symbol analysis of Victor Turner: Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. Anthropological Perspectives (New York, 1978). 45. Ueli Maurer in a podium discussion of the Berner Politgespräche, 30 May 2007, N[eue] Z[ürcher] Z[eitung], 31.05.2007; cf.: http://www.berner-politgespraeche.ch/ index.cfm/fuseaction/show/temp/default/path/1-280-274.htm [04. 08. 2007]. 46. Georg Kreis, Mythos Rütli. Geschichte eines Erinnerungsortes (Zurich, 2004). 47. Herrmann, Les Cicatrices, 223–8. 48. Marchal, Gebrauchsgeschichte, 426. 49. Kreis, Rütli, 27–35 (Rütli report). 50. Ibid., 45f. 51. Ibid., 44f. 52. Micheline Calmy-Rey, ‘Warum ich aufs Rütli gehe’, Basler Zeitung, 29 May 2007. 53. Calmy-Rey’s speech: www.eda.admin.ch/eda/de/home/dfa/head/speech/speech.html [2.8. 2007] 54. www.ejpd.ch/ejpd/de/home/dokumentation/red/2007 [2.8.2007]). For the legal problem: NZZ, 15 Aug. 2007, ‘Gegen die direkte Geltung des Völkerrechts’, ‘Gefahren der absoluten Volkssouveränität’. NZZ am Sonntag, 5 Aug. 2007 www.nzz.ch/nachrichten/schweiz/hier_werden_volksrechte_ausgehebelt [6.8.2007]. 55. Bernhard Stettler, ‘Tschudis Frage nach Entstehung und Wesen der Eidgenossenschaft’, Schweizer Zeitschrift für Geschichte, 41 (1991), 320–9. Marc Sieber, ‘Johann Heinrich Gleser (1734–73) und die Wiederentdeckung des Bundesbriefes von 1291’, Basler Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Altertumskunde 91 (1991), 107–28. 56. NZZ, 20 Aug. 2007, ‘Mythische Offensive’; http://www.svp.ch/img1/vertragmitvolkd-g.jpg [20.08. 2007].

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57. Tages-Anzeiger Online, 1.8.2007 (www.tagesanzeiger.ch/dyn/news/schweiz/777062. html [2.8.2007]). 58. Marchal, Gebrauchsgeschichte, 203–29; id., ‘National Historiography and National Identity. Switzerland in Comparative Perspective’, in Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz (eds), The Contested Nation: Ethnicity, Class, Religion and Gender in National Histories (Basingstoke, 2008), 311–38.

13 The Public Instrumentalization of the Middle Ages in Austria since 1945* Herwig Wolfram

1 For several reasons, this topic can only be treated in the format of an essay. The most noble of these reasons is the fact that the question of how the Austrian public instrumentalized ‘its’ Middle Ages since 1945 has not – with one exception – been subjected to a thorough investigation. Synthetic accounts of this topic are therefore missing. The exception concerns the jubilee years of 1946 and 1996, which were meant to celebrate the first documented mention of Austria on 1 November 996, respectively 950 and 1000 years previously.1 It can therefore only be hoped that the uses made of the Middle Ages in Austria since 1945 will soon receive the investigation they deserve. How fruitful it is to pursue such a question has been proved by the 318-page monograph Das Jubiläum 950 Jahre Österreich. Its author Stefan Spevak studied a wide range of written and oral sources and has shown how a medieval event could assume a controversial topicality within a certain political and social context. Spevak not only conducted the necessary studies in archives and registries, mainly of the federal state, the regions, the parishes and the media, but also interviewed key personalities.2 How necessary it would be to conduct study in the field in conjunction with public opinion polls, including interviews of school pupils and teachers, is evident when we consider the following example. A 13-year-old Viennese Gymnasiast (3. Klasse = British year 8) diligently – though through the filter of his own imagination – copied down the headings which the teacher had written on the blackboard. In the evening, his father found the following in the boy’s notebook: ‘Middle Ages – Papacy – Licentiousness – many dishonest children’ (unehelich was mistaken for unehrlich). What the teacher was attempting to teach in full earnestness, though through unsuitable means, is reminiscent of the not completely serious statement from the ‘Compulsory Preface’ in Sellar and Yeatman’s 1066 and All That: ‘History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember.’ 221

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The lack of interest in, and understanding of, the Middle Ages evident among teachers, probably not only in Austria, is not only caused by the fact that academic teacher training has allowed students to choose subjects of their own interest, but is also traditional, especially in Vienna. The author himself attended school there and was taught by an unusually good teacher at his Gymnasium, who nonetheless took the liberty of omitting the Middle Ages completely from his otherwise excellent history curriculum. This is likely to be one of the reasons why the author devoted himself to the study of the Middle Ages at university. In his selectivity, his ‘fuga et electio’, this teacher, however, followed the hallowed humanists. By having the only 16-year-old pupil do a classroom presentation on Jacob Burckhardt’s Renaissance in Italy, he followed Petrarch, who considered the medium aevum to have been dark not because there was nothing known about it, but because it was unnecessary to know anything about it.3 It needs to be said, however, that the school inevitably just follows public opinion, which again mirrors attitudes common in Viennese politics and society. To put it colloquially: the former capital and Residenzstadt of the Danube Monarchy has a problem with the Middle Ages. The first reason for this is the ambiguity of the term ‘Austria’, which makes it hard to identify with it, much in contrast to ‘la dulce/dolce France’, hailed already in the Song of Roland around 1100, and which ‘survived the monarchy as the personification of the country’.4 In contrast, many different Austrias existed already in the Middle Ages. The term ranges from the mark, the duchy, through to the fictitious as well as the real archduchy and finally the ‘dominion of Austria’ (Herrschaft zu Österreich) and the house of Austria. At the beginning of the early modern period, an Austrian circle was established. Around the middle of the seventeenth century the term Monarchia Austriaca gained currency, a term which is first documented in Babenberg Austria around the year 1200. From 1804 onwards, the Austrian Empire was finally established in constitutional law, as was the Austrio-Hungarian Monarchy in 1867. When the argument over the name was ended in 1918, the Monarchy was first succeeded by the Republic of Austria in 1918, and then by the authoritarian Federal State of Austria in 1934. Between 1938 and 1945, Austria disappeared from the map. From the rubble of the Second World War emerged the Second Austrian Republic. Its story of increasing success allowed many Austrians to identify with their country for the first time in an unrestricted fashion.5 Nonetheless, some strange throwbacks do remain. A stranger, driving through the country attentively, can still spot a reference to an Austrian border in the middle of Austria. He only need drive from the Lower Austrian capital St Pölten across the pass of Saint Egidius (St. Ägyder Gscheid) through to the Styrian pilgrimage centre Mariazell, to reach Styria just after the locality of Terz. Here, two inns still face each other, one called ‘The Styrian Border’, one ‘The Austrian (not Lower Austrian!) border’. For the Styrians, their northern neighbours were the Austrians, who only

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came to be differentiated into Lower and Upper Austrians in the early modern period, in fact, officially speaking, only with the constitution of 1920. Hence, in the Terz landlords’ choice of name for their inns, the fact lives on that the Babenberg dukes of Austria received Styria as a fief in 1192 without their new fiefdom becoming a part of Austria.6 Secondly, the argument over Austria’s past seems to be insurmountable. It is carried out by what is colloquially, but highly fittingly, called the ‘left and right half of the Reich’, that is the two large political camps, made up principally by the Austrian People’s party (Österreichische Volkspartei [ÖVP]) and the Socialist (now: Social Democratic) party of Austria [SPÖ]. The year 2008 was generally proclaimed to be the year of medial remembrance. The years initially meant to be remembered were 1968, 1938, 1933, 1918, and maybe also the year of the ‘bourgeois revolution’, 1848. However, it quickly became evident that the two parties could not agree, or did not want to agree, on the meaning of these anniversary years.7 It is little wonder, then, that a date from the distant Middle Ages was not even considered. It was hence up to the little Lower Austrian locality of Weißenkirchen in the Wachau and the Bavarian Regensburg to celebrate the conversion of the Bavarian mark into an independent dukedom 850 years ago.8 It is very unlikely that the eight-hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the death of Otto of Freising, who died on 22 September 1158 in Morimond, will have been commemorated publicly. The Babenberger Otto, son of the sainted margrave Leopold III and a brother to the first Austrian duke, Heinrich II, was not only instrumental in forging the compromise that permitted the creation of the duchy of Austria, but also surpassed all other medieval historians due to the philosophical thought evident in his writings. He was first in making the Germans acquainted with the works of Aristotle, but also first in elevating history – contrary to Aristotelian tradition – to the rank of an independent scientific discipline. Rahewin, who had been his secretary for many years, called him ‘the first or among the first of German bishops’.9 The hesitant stance of official authorities in Austria towards the instrumentalization of the Middle Ages was, thirdly, no doubt also caused by the ambivalent experiences of 1946 and 1996, when an attempt was made to celebrate on a federal level the nine-hundred and fiftieth and thousandth anniversaries of the first mention of the name ‘Österreich-Ostarrîchi’. In 1946, the conflict over the independence and the sovereignty of the state ‘created a situation in which the demonstration of independent national identity and a simultaneous dissociation from any sort of Germanness (Deutschtum) appeared to be a political necessity’. The general celebrations of that first mention of Austria in Otto III’s diploma of 1 November 996 were also meant to surmount the differences which had divided Austrian society during the first Austrian Republic. However, in one fundamental question, namely that of the Austrian nation, significant antagonisms remained. On the one hand, the ÖVP and the Communists

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[KPÖ] – two parties whose general aims could not be more different – agreed on this question. Within the large SPÖ, its left-wing faction still had the problems it had developed during the interwar period in considering the Austrian nation to be a reality and not a reactionary construct. The Socialist and president of state Karl Renner was also right in pointing out that the Ostarrîchi charter stressed Austria’s membership of the German Reich rather than its independence, coveted so much in 1946.10 This line of thought is applicable, by the way, also to Austria’s elevation to the rank of duchy on 17 September 1156, which by no means established a separation of the region from the Regnum Teutonicum, but the separation from Bavaria under feudal law.11 Moreover, the meaning of the word ‘Ostarrîchi’, which denoted the eastern regions of Bavaria, remained in currency. The term ‘Ostarrîchi’ is on the one hand documented in the ninth century as describing the whole of Ludwig’s eastern Franconian holdings. However, the Bavarian eastern territories are highly likely to have carried the same name during the Carolingian period. With the occupation of Pannonia by the Hungarians, these Bavarian eastern territories lost half of their extent around the year 900. The elevation of Karantania to the rank of a duchy in 976 and the fact that the Carinthian duke was entrusted with the region of Krain, formerly a part of the Bavarian eastern territories, eventually reduced the latter to little more than the small strip of land to the east of the River Enns through to the Vienna Woods and between the Danube and the Lower Austrian/Styrian Kalkalpen, which already belonged to Karantania. Therefore, the political–geographical term ‘Ostarrîchi’ became reduced to the Bavarian mark on the Danube, which had, however, already formed the heartland of the duchies of the eastern territories’ prefect during Carolingian times. This only allows one conclusion: during the tenth century, Ostarrîchi became ‘what is left’, or, if one wishes to vary the dictum of 1919 attributed to Clemenceau, already ‘l’Ostarrîchi c’était ce qui restait’. For us alive today, this is not a bad omen, though it was not intended as such either for the Austria of the twentieth century or for that of a thousand years previously.12 Let me add a small anecdote. When in 1996 the Austrian Millennium was being celebrated, a well-known and influential Viennese journalist visited the author in order to inform himself about the meaning, creation and descent of the name Austria. The explanation that ‘Öster-reich’ referred to eastern territories of Bavaria profoundly disturbed my visitor. He could not accept that the name Austria came from a compass point, moreover one defined in relation to German Bavaria. This was all that my visitor was interested in. In contrast to this, a large number of public figures had agreed in 1946 despite all caveats that every opportunity, hence also that of the first mention of Austria, should be seized to ‘supply the cultural memory of Austrians with a new foundation’, and to ‘strengthen the cohesion of society and thereby give a perspective for the future’. This consensus was missing in 1996, and the

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celebrations surrounding the ‘1000 years of Austria’ were quietly left to the ‘middle federal administration’ of the Lower Austrian Landeshauptmann.13 However, the evaluation that Gerhard Rill attached to his obituary of Christiane Thomas was highly significant: ‘She was like the soul of all exhibitions that the Haus- Hof- und Staatsarchiv participated in.’ One of the high points of her labours was the exhibition ‘1000 Jahre Österreich’ in St Pölten, ‘where, in a separate room, which was refreshingly different from the diffuse concept of the rest of the “Austria Show”, she documented the constitutional–dynastic evolution of our country’.14 What Austria signifies and how it is meant to be presented, can therefore only be shown by the central government (Zentrale), embodied in this instance by the Haus- Hof- und Staatsarchiv. Fourthly, however, and most significantly, the central government does not wish to be disturbed by the applied Middle Ages. And this is what happens when the periphery starts a medieval fight with international complications. In the summer of 1991, the establishment of a Slovenian state was fought over for 11 days. The whole of Austria, but especially the Styrian and Carinthian neighbours, followed these events with great sympathy and willingness for support. With Slovenian independence and sovereignty only just secured, especially the heimattreue Carinthians felt severely provoked by a decision by the Slovenian national bank, and a noisy discussion within the media ensued. On 24 October 1991, the programme Club 2 on national Austrian radio was devoted to the event. It was hosted by the historian Horst Friedrich Mayer, and as specialists on the topic there were invited the Ljubljana medievalist Bogo Grafenauer, the director of the Carinthian archives Alfred Ogris, and the author of this essay. What had happened? Slovenia had ‘usurped’ the ‘Fürstenstein’, the oldest extant sign of sovereignty anywhere in Europe. The artefact, an inverted base of an Ionian pillar presumably from the Roman city of Virunum, was of course still on display in the Klagenfurt Landesmuseum.15 But the Slovenian national bank had depicted the Fürstenstein on its tolar banknote. When in 2007 a Slovenian 2-cent coin featured the Fürstenstein, the echo in the media was relatively subdued. In 1991, however, tempers ran high north of the Karawanken mountains over this – historically problematic – usurpation of the Carinthian regional symbol.16 It needs to be added that the Fürstenstein was instrumentalized by Tito partisans before 1945 and by the Yugoslav government after 1945 to ideologically underline their claims to the Slovenianspeaking area of Carinthia.17 Historically, however, the ‘Krain’, the heartland of contemporary Slovenia, had never belonged to Karantania. The Krainer or Carniolans (Carniolenses) are already differentiated unmistakably from the Karantanians in the Franconian Reichsannalen for the year 820.18 With goodwill, a symbol, as the name suggests, is, however, divisible and transferable. The Greek symbolon was a whole made up of cut-up pieces, which made it possible for a friend to recognize his friend even after many years, and which the son

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of the friend used to make himself known to the son of his father’s friend. It would be nice, even sensible, if a consensus could be reached south of the Karawanken – one that concluded that the Karantanian Fürstenstein, which possesses meaning not only for the history of Carinthia and Styria, but also for the Slovenian Štajerska19 – should be understood as a symbolon that unites rather than separates.20 Fifthly, seeing the Middle Ages as a part of the unloved past of the Republic of Austria is also a tradition from the Habsburg Monarchy: ‘Austria’s applied Enlightenment’, as Grete Klingenstein so fittingly called the Austrian eighteenth century and thereby also Josephinism,21 wished to surmount the Middle Ages for the benefit for the whole of the Monarchy and its people. What was wanted the least was a romanticization of the Middle Ages. Empress Maria Theresa is claimed to have said that ‘the exaggerated freedom that has become endemic per abusum is to blame more than anything for the deterioration of my ancestral lands’.22 Correspondingly, the rights of the territories were abridged in favour of the authority of the central government, and the patriotism of the territories (Landespatriotismus) came to be seen as a hindrance to the idea of a unified state (Gesamtstaatsidee). This political tenor at times led to petty bureaucratic decisions. For instance, in 1839 the Upper Austrian town of Enns wished to erect – on its own territory – ‘a memorial on the Georgenberg to the Handfeste of 1186, by which in relation to the ensuing cession of Styria to the Babenbergs the rights of the ministerials were confirmed in writing’. This attempt, as well as others in 1886 and 1894, failed due to resistance from the ruling family.23 There was evidently a considerable amount of chagrin within the central government that the ‘periphery’, a mere crownland, laid claim to the Georgenberg Handfeste as an Austrian, in fact narrowly Styrian Magna Carta Libertatum, and compared it to its better-known but younger English equivalent.24 How far the Habsburgs still resented their subjects’ resistance in the past is evident in the fact that the Styrian mining town Schladming, which was burnt down due to its involvement in the Great Peasant War of 1525 and in addition lost its municipal charter (Stadtrecht),25 only received it again after the end of the Monarchy. The Republic of Austria, which came into being both in 1918 and again in 1945 only thanks to the agreement of the provinces (Bundesländer), laid stress on the principle of federalism, which is often considered a continuation of the ‘freedom of the estates’.26 The Statthalter, put into office directly by the central government, was replaced by the elected Landeshauptmann, who took on the ‘middle federal administration’ on behalf of his Bundesland.27 However, as far as ‘red’ Vienna is concerned – from 1 January 1922 onwards, a Bundesland in its own right – the city continues the heritage of Habsburg centralism and administrative Josephinism with its own higher administration, and as the seat of the government and the federal ministries. Moreover, the first mention of Vienna

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only occurred – though there is doubt about this date – in 881, and with certainty as late as 1030.28 Pope Innocent III called the city ‘one of the better cities of the Reich, after Cologne’ in 1208.29 Nonetheless, Vienna is young, very young indeed in comparison to other cities such as Bregenz, first mentioned at the beginning of the seventh century, and Salzburg, first mentioned at the end of that century. Also, these two cities retained their names from antiquity into the early Middle Ages,30 while a great hiatus gapes between ‘Vienna’ and ‘Vindobona’, its name in post-antiquity deriving from the Slavonic *Veidinia, a forest creek (Waldbach).31 Therefore, if the ‘provinces’ invoke the Middle Ages, this is still today interpreted in the Haupt- und Residenzstadt as being ‘provincial’ behaviour, or even as a potential danger to Viennese interests, equated all too often with the interests of the state as a whole. One must not forget that the Austrian Anschluss of 1938 ‘took place as a revolt of the provinces against the metropolis’, and that the Ostmark laws of 14 April 1939 pleased Hitler by demolishing ‘Vienna’s position of prevalence (Sonderstellung)’.32 However, the central government frequently has good reason for its bad conscience in relation to the ‘provinces’. Most of the manuscripts from the Carolingian period in the National Library, for instance, are from Salzburg, whence they were brought to Vienna between the secularization of the Erzstift in 1803 and the division of the territory between Bavaria and Austria in 1816.33 For this, Salzburg ‘takes revenge’ in the form of exhibitions and scholarly publications which stress the fact that Salzburg was already an archbishopric with its own printing presses, architecture and crafts at a time when the region surrounding Vienna still belonged to the Avars, ‘a wild and irrational people, certainly uneducated and without a written language’, with at best a handful of clerici illiterati.34 To put it less elegantly: We in Salzburg were already a people of culture (Kulturvolk) and the seat of the Bavarian metropolis at a time when you, the Viennese, still sat in the trees of the Wienerwald, which at the time was called ‘Cumeoberg’ or Tulln Mountain, as your city did not even exist.35 If one examines the relationship between Vienna, the Austrian central government and the Middle Ages more closely, however, one finds a glaring contradiction, which, as an exempli causa, was already evident to Franz Grillparzer. The ‘Old Hofrat’, the director of the Hofkammerarchiv, a silently rebellious bureaucrat of His Apostolic Majesty and ‘probably the greatest poet ever to come out of Austria’,36 writes: Occidental raw force, combined with an orientally devious-ascetical religion; brutality, moderated by absurdity; within this formula, the whole of the Middle Ages is encapsulated, to the extent that all complicated modern research on it appears to be pure luxury. That does not mean, however, that there was nothing good in this transitional period. Man is always from God, the times always from the devil.

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Or: ‘Placing man-made values above natural ones is the prevalent character of the Middle Ages.’37 If one ignores König Ottokars Glück und Ende, by which Grillparzer actually meant Napoleon Bonaparte,38 his ‘classical’ comedy, Weh dem, der lügt, and his Libussa treat topics from the (early) Middle Ages, that is material from Gregory of Tours’ Historiae Francorum and Cosmas of Prague’s Chronica Boemorum.39 Grillparzer actually gets positively enthusiastic in his discussion of Lope de Vega’s Rey Bamba:40 ‘The miracle of Catholicism and the great achievements of Spanish antiquity, the mythical in its history was so familiar to his audience, that he [Lope de Vega] could expect his work to be understood and to be received enthusiastically by everyone who came across it.’41 Following this Grillparzer tradition (one undoubtedly unknown to those involved), there are a fair number of highly educated but also ambivalent men who are lovers of, or at least knowledgeable in, medieval studies among Austrian politicians of education and top-flight bureaucrats.42 Their institutions and departments still support academic medieval studies to an extent that is exceptional for the whole of German-speaking Europe. Thus the Institute for Austrian Historical Studies (Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung), established in 1854 by the imperial ministry for culture and education, and which became an internationally renowned centre for medieval studies beyond its initial focus on ancillary research disciplines (Hilfswissenschaften), retains its status of independence in relation to Vienna University, and is still directly subject to the federal ministry.43 It was likewise counter to contemporary trends for the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 1998 to found its own Institute for Medieval Studies (Institut für Mittelalterforschung), a name that, at the time, was criticized for suggesting a specialization on ‘studies of mid-life or “middle-age” crises’. In any case, this institute very swiftly established for itself a profound and permanent reputation and international recognition, and its existence was welcomed also by the federal ministry.44 The 15-volume Österreichische Geschichte (Vienna, 1994–2006) edited by the present author, which runs to more than 8000 pages, contains five volumes exclusively devoted to the Middle Ages.45 While it did receive funds from the Bundesländer and dioceses, it was the more than generous funding proffered by the federal ministry and the department of culture of the city of Vienna that made it possible to embark on the project. And a final, rather personal example: the Kuenringer exhibition, which also treated the life of the common people during the Middle Ages and which took place in the Cistercian monastery of Zwettl in 1981, impressed the federal minister responsible, Dr Herta Firnberg, to such an extent that she established a professorship at the Viennese faculty of history for the former Dozent Karl Brunner, who had been chiefly responsible for the exhibition.46

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2 While this essay needs to be ruthlessly selective, that is not such a bad thing as far as the affirmative public exploitation of the Middle Ages is concerned, since the latter is determined by a basic pattern that has repeated itself and, though less and less so, still repeats itself, despite regional and chronological differences. After the catastrophic destruction in the intellectual sphere and the criminal perversions left behind by National Socialism, the nationwide establishment or, if they had survived the Nazi period, strengthening of Austrian identities was a matter of great urgency. Established historians employed principally at universities and archives were to devise a methodologically unimpeachable scientific foundation that would permit the writing of an account of Austrian history which would stand the test of time and be open to international debate.47 Among the Austrian historians who focused on the Middle Ages and worked toward this goal in the years after the Second World War, Alphons Lhotsky (1903–68) takes the place of honour. He represented the study of Austrian history at Vienna University and the Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung between 1946 and his death.48 Lhotsky was an exceptionally well-educated scholar, an unsurpassed master of critical method, a restless researcher and an inspiring teacher for his highly select group of pupils. Long before the demand for a ‘relevant’ writing of history, voiced in the year of his death, he strove to demonstrate the relevance of history to present-day Austrian society, and thereby excelled in works of interpretation and description.49 On 23 September 1949, the first ‘Austrian Archive Day’ took place in Vienna. Lhotsky was asked to lecture on ‘The State of Austrian Historical Writing and its Next Goals’. One of his central statements was: Already during World War I, Dopsch pointed out in a small article that the Austrian ancestral lands,50 as they stood around 1500 under Maximilian I, were the natural outcome of a medieval development – a unit which had managed to survive through the centuries with relatively minor changes. If we think this thought further, then the four hundred years of Austria as a great power in conjunction with Bohemia and Hungary between 1526 and 1918 seem a mere interlude, at the end of which recently this natural result of the Middle Ages has emerged again, a unit that is geographically almost identical, and thereby has shown that it has true content (Wesenhaftigkeit). Does it therefore not seem logical to gain our knowledge of the historical substance of our present state first and foremost by the study of the medieval process of state formation? Thereby, the investigation of the Austrian Middle Ages as a whole becomes one of the most important set of goals not only for a historical science working for itself,

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but for a profession which serves the education of the population (staatsbürgerliche Erziehung).51 Lhotsky repeated this idea several times, and was also criticized for it – albeit posthumously – as, in fact, the late medieval territorial complex of the ‘house of Austria’ and the Republic of Austria had very little overlap in several areas. Contemporary historians would also refrain from calling any historical process ‘natural’ or from ascribing ‘Wesenhaftigkeit’ to it. However, it is fair to say that Lhotsky’s critics missed two key points. First, Lhotsky freely acknowledged that he was making subjective interpretations; it was not rare for him to say: ‘Only he can be subjective who is himself a subject.’ Secondly, it was Lhotsky’s aim to encourage Austrians – now permanently confined to existence in a Kleinstaat – by providing them with an identity founded on that of the individual Bundesländer.52 For it has to be said that, after 1945, bidding farewell to the Empire and to membership of a Reich was not a matter of course, despite the terrible experiences of previous years. One could still find statements such as ‘the empire of the Carolingians [fell apart] to the detriment of the peoples affected by it’ in a school textbook from the 1970s. Its author was convinced that the ‘small expanse’ (Kleiner Raum) was a bad thing, and neglected the fact that the ‘affected’ peoples were not only the victims of the empire having fallen apart, but themselves a party to this process. Also in reference to the year 1978, when the defeat of the Bohemian king Přemysl by Ottokar II was being commemorated, the textbook author states: ‘In the battle at Dürnkrut and Jedenspeigen (26 August 1278) the Roman-German king was victorious over the Bohemian king. A concept of the trajectory of our Länder that was both universal-historical (universalhistorisch) managed to prevail against a regional, east-central-European one.’53 Following Lhotsky’s example and his active encouragement – often benefiting from his scholarly supervision – it has been first and foremost the Länder which have concerned themselves with the Austrian Middle Ages. Conferences, Festschriften and exhibitions were organized to commemorate anniversaries and jubilee years,54 where possible of millennia or even numerically larger anniversaries. In 1955, Lhotsky commemorated the 1000-year anniversary of the battle on the Lechfeld in a paper given to the Verein für Landeskunde von Niederösterreich, while on 29 August 1965 he caused a stir with his lecture at the Burgtheater during the Twelfth International Congress of Historians. The Congress had been invited to Vienna as it was the six-hundredth anniversary of ‘the oldest university in the German-speaking world’, and had convened at Vienna University.55 Further notable events – to name just a few – were the millennium in 1976 of the duchy of Carinthia and that of the elevation of the Babenbergs in the Danubian mark,56 which ‘can be seen as ushering in the Preludium to Austrian history’.57 In 1983 – without apparent reason – 1000 years

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of Upper Austria were celebrated,58 and in 1996 the millennium of the first reference to Austria, already mentioned above.59 In 1986 Salzburg commemorated the teacher of the Slavs Methodius, who had died 1100 years previously.60 The 1200-year existence of Salzburg cathedral had already been celebrated in 1974;61 in 1977, the monastery at Kremsmünster founded by the Bavarian dukes Tassilo celebrated that it had reached the same age.62 Also 1200 years had passed in 1984 since the death of Virgil of Salzburg and in 1988 since Charlemagne’s deposition of Tassilo III.63 No one, however, could beat the archabbey of St Peter’s, in Salzburg, ‘the oldest monastery in the German-speaking world’, which in 1982 celebrated the 1400-year anniversary of its foundation with a large-scale international conference and the third Salzburg Landesausstellung. Though the historically more or less certain date of the foundation of Salzburg’s church is 696 – according to Jean Mabillon – the monastery followed its own historia liturgica, which, due to an amateur-historically false interpretation of dates according to the years of rule of the Merovingian kings, placed the year of its foundation in 582.64 Nonetheless, in 1996 the monastery participated in an exhibition held in St Peter’s and the cathedral on ‘St Rupert of Salzburg, 696–1996’, together with the archbishopric of Salzburg, which also correctly dated its foundation to the year 696. The celebrations of the 1300-year anniversary took place on the day of St Rupert (24 September), accompanied by a festive service at the cathedral and a formal event at the residence.65 Nor did the Salzburgers forget that on 20 April 798, bishop Arn received the pallium from Pope Leo III and thus became the first archbishop of Salzburg. No one seemed to care that, again, this was only a 1200-year, not a 1400-year, anniversary.66 The other Länder celebrated anniversaries which were all and sundry below the 1000-year mark, though their younger years certainly did not and still do not affect their regional pride. Worth mentioning are the three years important to Styria: 1180, elevation to the rank of a duchy; 1186, Georgenberg Handfeste; and 1192, the acceptance of the Austrian duke as territorial overlord, which however is by no means seen as an Anschluss to Austria.67 Regional pride is just as strong in Tyrol, though here – given the time it took to become a Land – one could only celebrate a ‘mere’ 700 years. The Tyrolean Landesausstellung of 1995 chose the title ‘The Dream of a Duke. Meinhard II (c.1238–95) – the Emergence of Tyrol’. The exhibition took place in Schloss Tirol, close to Meran, and in the Cistercian monastery of Stams, and was staged jointly by the Autonomous (Italian) Province of Bozen-South Tyrol and the Austrian Land Tyrol. It was organized by the South Tyrolese regional museum in Schloss Tirol and the Tirolese Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum in Innsbruck. Both institutions were also responsible for editing the sizeable catalogue, which appeared simultaneously in Bozen and Innsbruck in 1995. The project was coordinated by the joint Tyrolese Landesinstitut Innsbruck-Bozen. It was financed by the

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autonomous province of Bozen-South Tyrol, the Land Tyrol, the Cistercian monastery of Stams and various private and institutional sponsors in North and South Tyrol. Neither the Republic of Austria nor the Italian state participated in the event. The words of introduction to the catalogue were printed in three languages (Italian, German and Ladin), all three versions standing next to each other. First among the contributors were Landeshauptleute Luis Durnwalder (South Tyrol) and Wendelin Weingartner (Tyrol). While the bishops of Innsbruck and Bozen-Brixen were missing, the abbot of Stams, the host of the North Tyrolese exhibitions, contributed an introductory message. The monastery of Stams was founded in 1273 by Meinhard II and his wife Elisabeth of Wittelsbach. Elisabeth was the widow of the Staufen king Konrad IV, and the mother of Konradin, executed in 1268. Her daughter, also called Elisabeth, was the wife of Albert I. The foundation of the monastery could therefore serve both the commemoration of Meinhard and Elisabeth, and the Staufer and Habsburg families.68 When Meinhard II died at the end of October 1295, he had succeeded in establishing through force, good fortune and money a Land which would endure the course of centuries to come and would be acquired by the Habsburgs in 1363.69 For both parts of Tyrol, the significance of the passing of lordship over Tyrol to the Habsburgs cannot be exaggerated. After all, this connection lasted until 1918, and gave completely new impulses in the history of the Land. Significant in its own right was already the fact that Tyrol affiliated itself with a west–east sphere of influence, rather than the formerly dominant north–south one. It needs to be emphasized that 1363 does not yet embody an Anschluss to Austria, nor in any way at all an immersion of the hitherto independent Land into a large-scale common weal (großes staatliches Gemeinwesen). This would only occur as the result of a process which would take several centuries, and would be caused primarily by the success of absolutism and centralism from the eighteenth century onwards. Even under Habsburg suzerainty those fundamental structures of the Land would remain intact, in the rough form that had been established by Meinhard II in the second half of the thirteenth century.70 These selected examples already show that the Austrian Middle Ages increasingly became a resource for Länder and communal governments, including the clerical and monastic institutions located in their area. Occasions such as anniversaries and jubilees are always celebrated in a way that takes full advantage of the means at hand, elaborate exhibitions being organized as well as conferences.71 To this end, large-scale catalogues – almost without fail on a high scholarly level – are commissioned. The fact that such celebrations also have economic aims and receive support especially from economically struggling regions, also needs to be noted. The exhibition on the Kuenringer at the Cistercian monastery of Zwettl is an especially good example of how current

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economic interests and a ‘backward-looking’ historical interest could be joined together. This Lower Austrian Landesausstellung of 1981 was preceded by significant investments in the renovation of the monastery, but also in the infrastructure of the surrounding region. For instance, the monastery’s tavern was converted into a restaurant that has remained highly popular. About 100,000 visitors had been expected, but 400,000 came, a number that was celebrated as a sensation in the press and which has had a permanent effect on the region. Already in 1982, the number of guests in the economically struggling region on the Czech border – that is close to the former Iron Curtain – had risen by 40 per cent. The event also increased public knowledge of how Lower Austria had come into being, like the Babenberger exhibition in the Cistercian monastery of Lilienfeld in 1976.72 Today, Lower Austria likes to think of itself as the heartland of Austria. Here, the future name of the country was already in popular usage by 996, and for a long time to come remained restricted to parts of today’s Bundesland.73 In contrast to this, the Lower Austrian sense of regional awareness had, however, paled in contrast to that of Vienna and other Bundesländer, especially those to the west. This was to change: at Lilienfeld, the 1000-year anniversary of the appointment of the Babenbergs as rulers of the Danube mark was commemorated, that is, of the noble family which in 1156 succeeded in establishing the independence of Austria as a dukedom.74 The exhibition in Zwettl, on the other hand, was devoted to the Kuenringer. Thereby, a group of families was meant to be commemorated which, first as margraves and, from 1139–56 onwards, as dukes, pushed forward the Austrian border in the ‘Northern Forest’75 between the Danube and the Vltava beyond the continental watershed toward the north. The ‘leyenda nera’ has made brigand-knights out of the Kuenringer, one of whose members was instrumental in the capture and imprisonment of the English king and crusader Richard the Lionheart.76 During a heated debate in the Lower Austrian Landtag in 1978, the Social Democratic opposition accused the Conservative party, which was in the majority, of ‘Kuenringer methods’, and it, in turn, decided to enlighten the opposition on the ‘truth’ about this noble family. The Kuenringer Hadmar I founded Zwettl on New Year’s Day 1137, settling it with 12 brothers from Heiligenkreuz. The Kuenringer Hadmar II, who died in 1217, has the reputation of being the second founder of the monastery. The search for a scientific director of the exhibition project went on for a long time, until the author of this essay and his assistant at the time, Karl Brunner, took on the assignment.77 And what can be said about the Burgenland? The area to the east of the rivers Leitha and Lafnitz belonged to the kingdom of Hungary until the peace of Trianon in 1920. Strictly speaking, the Austrian Middle Ages are therefore not part of Burgenland history, and vice versa. Hence a history of the Austrian Middle Ages planned in the 1980s by the Austrian Academy of Sciences still suggested

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omitting the Burgenland region completely.78 As with many plans of such ambition, it was not realized; on the other hand, Maximilian Weltin has shown in a trail-blazing study that it is possible – ‘with all necessary caution’ – to speak of a ‘prefiguration’ of the Burgenland region already in the thirteenth century.79 Thereby, Weltin has described a process, but has not provided a date which could be publicly celebrated. A similar thing can be said of the fact that the Burgenland region, together with the west of Austria, belonged to Bavaria between the end of the eighth and the beginning of the tenth centuries.80 In any case, the Burgenlanders show their affiliation with Austrian historical research in a wide range of ways. Worth mentioning are, among other things, their financial support of all volumes of the Österreichische Geschichte81 and the Urkundenbuch des Burgenlandes, published by the Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung.82 The prefaces and introductions of the exhibition catalogues and academic conferences provide more than just exhaustive information on the didactic goals of the anniversary events. To be on the safe side, the 1988 Bavarian-Salzburg exhibition on the Bajuvarians, in the organization of which Heinz Dopsch was prominent, wisely omitted statements by politicians and other sponsors,83 as these often contain terminology, generalizations and historical interpretations which – to put it mildly – do not correspond to the up-to-date state of historical research. For example, Josef Klaus, at the time Landeshauptmann of Salzburg and Austrian federal chancellor between 1966 and 1970, wrote in 1958: Not far from Diocletian’s military border that divided the Danube into the Eastern and Western Roman Empires, the ‘no less fateful’ military line forged by Prince Eugene is said to have been situated 1,500 years later. And similarly close to the Roman division of provinces [Ratia, Noricum, Pannonia equated with western, central and eastern Austria], Austria was divided into the French, English, American and Russian zones of occupation. And the so-called Iron Curtain still stands close today [1958] to the former limes and the military border. The area thereby assumed the function of a bridge as well as a fortress, a thought that had been applied to the whole of Austria in 1946, and especially to Styria in the 1980s.84 The Christianization of the Danube lands took place, fatefully, from both directions. From the West came Rupertus and Virgilius, the patrons of Salzburg, who elevated it to the rank – with implications still tangible in present times – of a south-eastern pillar of occidental Christianity and culture. From the East came Cyril and Methodius, Severin and Hermagoras.

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And also their influence is still tangible today.85 A conference was held in Salzburg in 1985, commissioned by the Land and archdiocese of Salzburg and the foundation Pro Oriente, which was devoted to the topic ‘Salzburg and the Slavonic Mission. The 1100th Anniversary of the Death of St Methodius’. As a part of this event, the Salzburg archbishop Dr Karl Berg held a festive service in the cathedral. In his sermon, he, as ‘the 72nd successor to Archibishop Adalwin, expressed his regret about the treatment St Methodus received in the year 870’.86 In the preface to the catalogue of the Landesausstellung ‘Baiernzeit in Oberösterreich’ of 1977, the Landeshauptmann Dr Erwin Wenzl wrote about the fatefulness of the region between Enns and Inn, and described it as being the region from which the ‘Scythian leader Odoacer’ set forth to ‘topple the last of the Roman Emperors’. Apparently, a remnant of Roman-Christian culture survived despite the fall of the Roman Empire, until – alas – the Avars came. Soon after, however, the region ‘provided strong support to the state-building force of the Bavarians and the ducal family of the Agolfingians’. Here, ‘a strong common weal based on an agrarian structure [of society] developed’; here, Kremsmünster was founded; here the Avar enemy from the East was repelled.87 ‘The succession of lordship from Noricum through Bavarians to Austria symbolizes more than words are able to describe the European pre-determination of purpose for this region, which has become our beloved home in the form of Upper Austria.’ And, to the Upper Austrian Referent for culture, Landesrat Dr Josef Ratzenböck, who was to become Wenzl’s successor as Landeshauptmann, the most important thing was to refer to the ‘Baiern’ and not the ‘Bayern’. Though many Bavarians (Bayern) were expected to visit the exhibition, the point was to be made that they might have shared the Baiern as their ancestors with the Upper Austrians, but no more.88 This insistence on the i instead of the y had its roots in linguistics, and has become an explicit tool to differentiate oneself from the neighbouring Bavarians, not just in Upper Austria,89 though it has no historical foundation or meaning whatsoever. He who studies the early period of the region has, however, no choice but to begin with the history of the Bavarians.90 This does not apply to the Alemannic Vorarlberg, which does not need to lay claim to the ‘old freedom of the Rhaetians’ in order to document a tradition of independence and self-confidence. Vorarlberg can afford to do both things also because of the fact that the economic prowess of the Ländle became highly impressive very soon after 1945, and has remained so despite the decline in fortunes of the textile industry, mainly located in Dornbirn. A history of Vorarlberg, which, for a long time, was highly influential, however, stylized the freedomloving and agrarian, down-to-earth Rhaetians who knew ‘neither monarchy nor hereditary nobility’ as the immediate forebears of the Vorarlbergers. The Rhaetians seem to have continued to play this role once they had become

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Romanized and had sufficiently resisted the onslaught of the south-thrusting Germanic Alemannians.91 It is hard to explain how the Vorarlbergers nonetheless managed, despite all this Rhaeto-Roman heritage, to become confident Alemannians themselves, so that, during the Appenzell wars in the first decade of the fifteenth century (in fact during one of 60 peasant revolts), they almost succeeded in staging a kind of French Revolution avant la lettre.92 In a way, this ‘master narrative’93 of interchangeable heritage is reminiscent of Bruno Kreisky’s statement that the forebears of the Bavarians, and hence also the Austrians on the other side of the Arlberg, were not the Germanic tribes, but the Celts. ‘Their successors in Brittany, Wales, or Ireland,’ as Erich Zöllner ironically put it in 1976, ‘do not threaten anybody with Anschluss or war. The Celtic origins, therefore, fit Austrian neutrality perfectly well.’94 Very well, but why do not present-day Vorarlbergers speak Rhaetian, and the remaining Austrians Celtic? Something must have happened in between the old days and now.

3 This parade de richesse could be continued; but what we have seen allows us to pause for a conclusion. Not everything related here could be documented; much of it is based on what I have heard, found out and have experienced myself. This contribution, as was stressed at the beginning, has taken the shape of an essay, a first attempt. Historians are not good prophets. If I nonetheless venture to suggest how the Middle Ages might be instrumentalized in the future, then this is because clear tendencies have made themselves felt for a number of years. The times of the large-scale anniversaries, which were most often celebrated in the form of expensive cultural–historical exhibitions and celebrations, are over. While an exhibition could once expect between 400,000 and 500,000 visitors to come, every curator is now content to have half or even a third of that number. Likewise over is the time of dominant personalities, who seemingly ex cathedra extolled the meaning of Austrian history and/or that of the individual Länder. This development is an especially fortunate one, though the mass media would love to have access to such gurus on select occasions. Nowadays, the Austrian identity of the individual Bundesländer does not need to be especially staged by means of quoting from history. For this, the economic success of the country is all too clear. Least of all does one need the Middle Ages to prove one’s identity.95 The European Union, its enlargement as well as worldwide globalization, while causing criticism and anxiety, have awakened the population’s interest in what not too long ago was foreign to it. On the Schallaburg, a popular Lower Austrian exhibition space to the southeast of Melk, the Mongols rode in 2006, no longer as the ‘Enemies from the East’,96 and attracted a large audience. Quite possibly, Styria will celebrate its

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nine-hundredth anniversary in 2022 or Vienna the millennium of its first undisputable mention in 2030.97 It is also possible that Vienna University will commemorate the seven-hundredth anniversary of its foundation in 2065. The organizers are advised, though, not to retrieve from the archives and take as a blueprint for seeking subsidies the first such application from 1965. Then, the desire was expressed to celebrate a mere 500 years of the university, founded in 1365, whereupon the responsible ministerial bureaucrat rejected the application with a note that the form had reached the ministry 100 years too late, and could therefore not be vouchsafed. One cannot be sure these days, however, that such anniversaries will continue to be celebrated. What, then, are the Middle Ages still good for?98 Certainly not as the stuff of one of the usual master narratives or historical myths.99 By realizing and analysing the fact that these stories and myths are themselves part of history, strategies can be developed to overcome them. For this task, the historian has a good and faithful ally: Jewish–Christian tradition. In Greek, both logos and mythos mean ‘word’. But as mythos is without telos, and hence does not have any beginning, every myth of creation presupposes other myths of origin. In stark contrast to this stands the logical beginning from nothing. Only in Genesis did God create the heavens and the earth from nothing; this was such a revolutionary thought that the most Christian of emperors, Charlemagne, asked his court theologians if this ‘nothing’ really meant nothing, and did not at least have a border.100 That occurred 700 years after John the Evangelist concluded, on the basis of his religious convictions and insight, that the history of God and Man must begin with the Logos if it is to have a beginning and an end, a source and a destination. If, therefore, one wishes to invoke beginnings in our present day and age, it needs to be the logical beginnings and not the myths of ‘eternal recurrence’ that are actively sought. And this demand applies to all historical criticism, as well as to biblical exegesis, which has, after all, taught us our trade. Today, no one would make use of the myth of Zeus as bull and the Phoenician princess Europa to try to justify European unification. It has simply come to be seen as a logical solution to meaningless suffering, devastating wars and inhuman ideologies. Nonetheless, many European historians continue to devise national history myths comparable to that of the story of Europa, and have not arrived in contemporary Europe. It is, however, possible to write a common history that motivates, maybe even legitimates. But it has to be logical, that is, it needs to be goal-oriented, freed from its mythical baggage and isolation, and become scientific through the objectivity developed during the Enlightenment. First, this entails the differentiation between ‘doing’ and ‘being’, between the recognizing subject and the recognized object. The question whether the Germans are the descendants of the Germanic people, the Austrians those of the Bavarians and Celts, the Albanians those of the Illyrians

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and the Hungarians those of the Huns, is wrongly put from the outset. For the legitimate, even necessary question of where we come from requires the historian to give a much more complex answer than the limitation of selecting epochs and peoples of a very distant past can provide. But the history of these peoples and epochs, as a whole, represents a logical preliminary stage to our world. To provide information about it as a condition humaine of the past, as an alternative order of life (Lebensordnung) to the present, is the task of the historian in general, but, especially, of medievalists.

Notes * This chapter has been translated by Alan Ross. 1. Stefan Spevak, Das Jubiläum ‛950 Jahre Österreich’. Eine Aktion zur Stärkung eines österreichischen Staats- und Kulturbewußtseins im Jahre 1946 (Vienna, 2003). For the millennial jubilee of 1996 see ibid., 242ff. and 268f. Both events were also treated in the concise and highly informative contribution by Walter Pohl, ‘Ostarrîchi Revisited: the 1946 Anniversary, the Millennium and the Medieval Roots of Austrian Identity’, Austrian History Yearbook, 27 (1996), 21–39. The author also wishes to thank Walter Pohl for various suggestions and corrections. The millennium occasioned the publication of a large number of contributions. In alphabetical order, the most relevant of these publications were: Heide Dienst, ‘Ostarrîchi-OriensAustria. Probleme “österreichischer” Identität im Hochmittelalter’, in Richard G. Plaschka et al. (eds), Was heißt Österreich? Inhalt und Umfang des Österreichbegriffs vom 10. Jahrhundert bis heute (Vienna, 1995); Othmar Hageneder, ‘Die Herrschaft zu Österreich und ihre Länder im Mittelalter’, Carinthia I, 186 (1996), 219–35; Reinhard Härtel, ‘Das Ostarrîchi-Millennium und Innerösterreich’, Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, 106 (1998), 328–47, cf. Carinthia I, 186 (1996), 237–50 (unann.). Josef Riedmann, ‘“Vorderösterreich”’, Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, 106 (1998), 348–64. Though not exclusively so, these contributions to the topic ‘take the Ostarrîchi charter as the starting point for an interpretation of affairs during the high and later Middle Ages’ and ‘tend not to concentrate on the occasion itself’: see Härtel, ‘OstarrîchiMillennium’, 330. 2. Spevak, Jubiläum, esp. 281–4 and 286. 3. See Alphons Lhotsky, ‘Fuga und Electio’, in his Aufsätze und Vorträge, vol. 1 (Vienna, 1970), 82–91. On Petrarch, see Theodor E. Mommsen, ‘Der Begriff des “Finsteren Zeitalters” bei Petrarca’, in August Buck (ed.), Zu Begriff und Problem der Renaissance (Darmstadt, 1969), 151–79, esp. 166f. Cf. Fritz Wagner, Der Historiker und die Weltgeschichte (Freiburg, 1965), 33ff. 4. František Graus, Lebendige Vergangenheit. Überlieferung im Mittelalter und in den Vorstellungen vom Mittelalter (Cologne, 1975), 139ff. and 186 (Song of Roland). 5. Erich Zöllner, Der Österreichbegriff. Formen und Wandlungen in der Geschichte (Vienna, 1988); Pohl, ‘Ostarrîchi Revisited’, 38. See ibid., 35 with n. 65 on a ‘heated debate in the late 1980s’ about the question of the autonomy of an Austrian identity, and 37 (allegiance to the Republic). 6. Zöllner, Österreichbegriff, esp. 29ff., 49. Heinz Dopsch et al., Die Länder und das Reich. Der Ostalpenraum im Hochmittelalter (Vienna 1999, 2nd edn 2003), 302f.

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7. Hans Werner Scheidl, in Die Presse, 29. Dec. 2007, 35. Andreas Koller, ‘Geschichte als Waffe’, Salzburger Nachrichten, 2 Feb. 2008) 1 (leading art.). 8. Die Geburt Österreichs. 850 Jahre Privilegium minus, ed. Peter Schmid and Heinrich Wanderwitz (Regensburg, 2007). This volume contains the contributions to a symposium of German and Austrian historians, held in Regensburg on 8 and 9 September 2006, financed by several Bavarian, but not a single Austrian institution. The volume was, however, presented by the Austrian Consul-General Dr Senta Wessely-Steiner on 19 February 2008, in rooms in the Bavarian State Archives, Munich. On 2 September 2006, an exhibition devoted to the topic was inaugurated in Weißenkirchen, which had been created by teachers and pupils at the Gymnasium in Krems, and had been initiated by Mayor Bodenstein. 9. Alphons Lhotsky, ‘Das Nachleben Ottos von Freising’, in his Aufsätze und Vorträge, i.29, 30, and id., ‘Otto von Freising: seine Weltanschauung’, ibid., 64. 10. Spevak, Jubiläum, 257–9. See also ibid., 72: ‛The SPÖ was not in evidence as organizing any “950-Jahre-Österreich” festivities of its own. A large manifestation of the Austrian trades union council (Gewerkschaftsbund) announced for 24 September 1946 is not mentioned in any daily newspaper and probably never took place.’ 11. Heinrich Appelt, Privilegium minus. Das staufische Kaisertum und die Babenberger in Österreich (Vienna, 1973, 2nd edn 1976), 81–94. Cf. Herwig Wolfram, ‘Einleitung’, in Probleme der Geschichte Österreichs und ihrer Darstellung, ed. Wolfram and Walter Pohl (Vienna, 1991), p. xx. 12. Herwig Wolfram, ‘Salzburg, Bayern, Österreich. Die Conversio Bagoariorum et Carantanorum und die Quellen ihrer Zeit’, Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, Ergänzungsband 31 (Vienna, 1995), 49, 84–6 and 183–6. 13. Härtel, ‘Ostarrîchi-Millennium’; Hageneder ‘Herrschaft zu Österreich’; Riedmann ‘Vorderösterreich’; Spevak, Jubiläum, 269. 14. Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, 106 (1998), 452. 15. Herwig Wolfram, Grenzen und Räume. Geschichte Österreichs vor seiner Entstehung (Vienna, 1995, 2nd edn 2003), 301–4 (with picture). 16. See, most recently, Peter Štih, ‘Die Nationswerdung der Slowenen und damit verknüpfte Geschichtsvorstellungen und Geschichtsmythen’, Carinthia I, 197 (2007), 365–81, esp. 365f. and 379–81. 17. Alfred Ogris, ‘Fürstenstein und Herzogsstuhl – Symbole der Kärntner Landesgeschichte im Widerstreit ethnischer und territorialer Tendenzen in der slowenischen Geschichtsschreibung, Publizistik und Politik’, Carinthia I, 183 (1993), 729–67. 18. Wolfram, ‘Salzburg, Bayern, Österreich’, 82f. 19. Ibid., 100–2. 20. Herwig Wolfram, ‘Armes einsprachiges Land. Karantanische Gedanken’, Die Furche, 30 Aug. 2006, 13. 21. For the concept, see Karl Vocelka, Glanz und Untergang der höfischen Welt. Repräsentation, Reform und Reaktion im habsburgischen Vielvölkerstaat (Vienna, 2001, 2nd edn 2004), 368–71. 22. Hageneder, ‘Herrschaft zu Österreich’, 234 and n. 68, after Hans Sturmberger, ‘Der absolutistische Staat und die Länder in Österreich’, in his Land ob der Enns und Österreich, Aufsätze und Vorträge (Linz, 1979), 297. 23. Hageneder, ‘Herrschaft zu Österreich’, 234. 24. Dopsch, Die Länder und das Reich, 298–302, esp. 301: comparison with Magna Carta. Gerhard Pferschy and Peter Krenn (eds), Katalog der Landesausstellung 1986.

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25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45.

Die Steiermark: Brücke und Bollwerk (Graz, 1986); Härtel, ‘Ostarrîchi-Millennium’, 332, 338. Thomas Winkelbauer, Ständefreiheit und Fürstenmacht. Länder und Untertanen des Hauses Habsburg im konfessionellen Zeitalter (2 vols, Vienna, 2003, 2nd edn 2004), i.43. Hageneder, ‘Herrschaft zu Österreich’, 235 with n. 71f., rightly warns against any oversimplificatory and thus anachronistic assumption of continuities. Ibid., 234. Wolfram, ‘Salzburg, Bayern, Österreich’, 123, and id., Conrad II, 990–1039. Emperor of Three Kingdoms (University Park, PA, 2006), 231f. Urkundenbuch zur Geschichte der Babenberger in Österreich, vol. 4, pt 2, ed. Christian Lackner (Vienna, 1997), 50, Z. 8; n. 1000. Wolfram, ‘Salzburg, Bayern, Österreich’, 113 and 117f. Peter Wiesinger, ‘Probleme der bairischen Frühzeit in Niederösterreich aus namenkundlicher Sicht’, in Herwig Wolfram et al. (eds), Die Bayern und ihre Nachbarn, vol. 1 (2 vols, Vienna, 1985), i. 321–67, esp. 336ff. Ernst Hanisch, Gau der guten Nerven. Die nationalsozialistische Herrschaft in Salzburg 1938–45 (Salzburg, 1997), 9. For general information, see Friederike Zaisberger, ‘Salzburg in napoleonischer Zeit und die Verschleppung seiner Kunstschätze’, Informationsblatt. Arbeitsgemeinschaft Alpenländer. Kommission Kultur, 11(1985), 82–114. Ingonda Hannesschläger, ‘Die “geraubten” Salzburger Kunstschätze’, in Gerhard Ammerer and Alfred S. Weiss (eds), Die Säkularisation Salzburgs 1803 (Frankfurt, 2005), 242–81. For the manuscripts, see Karl der Große und die Wissenschaft. Ausstellung karolingischer Handschriften der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek zum Europa-Jahr 1993, ed. Eva Irblich (Vienna, 1993). Walter Pohl, Die Awaren (Munich, 1988, 2nd edn 2002), 204f. and 319, incl. n. 45. Wolfram, ‘Salzburg, Bayern, Österreich’, 54 with n. 257f. Lhotsky, ‘Otto von Freising: Seine Weltanschauung’, 64–81, esp. 78. Franz Grillparzer, Werke, ed. Stefan Hock, vol. 13 (Berlin, n.d.), 320, 343. Dopsch, Länder und das Reich, 441. See also Ottokar-Forschungen, ed. Max Weltin and Andreas Kusternig (Vienna, 1978–9). Origo gentis. Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, 22 (Berlin, 2nd edn 2003), 174–210, esp. 175, 189. Alheydis Plassmann, Origo gentis. Identitäts- und Legitimitätsstiftung in früh- und hochmittelalterlichen Herkunftserzählungen (Berlin, 2006), 116ff., 321ff. For Libussa, see also Graus, Lebendige Vergangenheit, 89ff. For the Visigothic king Wamba (672–80), see Alexander P. Bronisch, ‘Wamba’, in Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, 33 (Berlin, 2nd edn 2006), 164–8. Grillparzer, Werke, 115. See recently Kurt Scholz, ‘Im Mittelalter’, Die Presse, 22 Jan. 2008, 37. Alphons Lhotsky, Geschichte des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, 1854–1954 (Vienna, 1954, repr. Lisse, 1984), esp. 27: the imperial missive contains a rebuke, caused by a misunderstanding, of the responsible minister Leo Graf Thun-Hohenstein: Manfred Stoy, Das Österreichische Institut für Geschichtsforschung, 1929–45 (Vienna, 2007). Almanach der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 156 (Vienna, 2006), 385–7. In chronological order: Wolfram, Grenzen und Räume; Karl Brunner, Herzogtümer und Marken. Vom Ungarnsturm bis ins 12. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 1994, 2nd edn 2003);

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46. 47.

48. 49.

50. 51. 52.

53.

54.

55.

56.

57.

58. 59.

60.

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Dopsch, Länder und das Reich; Alois Niederstätter, Die Herrschaft Österreich. Fürst und Land im Spätmittelalter (Vienna, 2001, 2nd edn 2004); id., Das Jahrhundert der Mitte. An der Wende vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit (Vienna, 1996, 2nd edn 2004). See n. 77. This long-standing need, already recognized during the imperial period, was honoured by the Österreichische Geschichte in 15 Bänden, ed. Herwig Wolfram (Vienna, 1994–2006). Stoy, Das Österreichische Institut für Geschichtsforschung, 392. More than anything else, it is the five volumes of Alphons Lhotsky, Aufsätze und Vorträge, ed. Heinrich Koller and Hans Wagner (Vienna, 1970–76), which betray and document his understanding of history. Alphons Dopsch, Österreichs geschichtliche Stellung (Vienna/Leipzig, 1918). Alphons Lhotsky, ‘Der Stand der österreichischen Geschichtsforschung und ihre nächsten Ziele’, Aufsätze und Vorträge, iii.85–95, at 91f. See the intelligent and nuanced statement on this matter by Hageneder, ‘Herrschaft zu Österreich’, 219–21. Cf. Härtel ‘Ostarrîchi-Millennium’, 334. On the common exercise of telling the history of the individual Länder only from the point of their Anschluss to Austria onwards – Salzburg, grotesquely, only being treated from 1816 – see Wolfram, ‘Einleitung’, p. xxx. For this quote see Appelt, ‘Zur Einleitung’, in Ottokar-Forschungen, p. xvi. The description of the battle, its participants and its consequences in Dopsch, Länder und das Reich, 478–83, contradicts Appelt’s assessment. Alphons Lhotsky, ‘Gotik in Österreich’, ‘Gotik in Niederösterreich’, ‘Klosterneuburg im Zeitalter der Gotik’, in Aufsätze und Vorträge, i.283–314. Cf. Gotik in der Steiermark, Landesausstellung im Stift St. Lambrecht, Katalog, ed. Kulturreferat der Steiermärkischen Landesregierung (Graz, 2nd edn 1978). For the sense and the nonsense involved in the organization of such ‘events’, see Michael Mitterauer’s work on the topic, esp. ‘Anniversarium und Jubiläum. Zur Entstehung und Entwicklung öffentlicher Gedenktage’, in Emil Brix and Hannes Stekl (eds), Der Kampf um das Gedächtnis. Öffentliche Gedenktage in Mitteleuropa (Vienna, 1997), 23–90. However, Lhotsky had already voiced his thoughts in 1955 on how anniversary celebrations come about in his ‘Die Schlacht auf dem Lechfelde’, Aufsätze und Vorträge, v.11–22. Lhotsky, ‘Das Nachleben Ottos von Freising’; id., ‘Otto von Freising: seine Weltanschauung’; id., ‘Die Universitäten im Spätmittelalter’, Aufsätze und Vorträge, v.34–50. Härtel, ‘Ostarrîchi-Millennium’, 336. Heinz Dopsch, ‘Adel und Kirche als gestaltende Kräfte in der frühen Geschichte des Südostalpenraums’, Carinthia I, 166 (1976), 21–49. 1000 Jahre Babenberger in Österreich. Katalog des Niederösterreichischen Landesmuseums, ed. Erich Zöllner et al. (Vienna, 1976). Babenberger-Forschungen, ed. Max Weltin (Vienna, 1976). For this quote, see Appelt, ‘Zur Einleitung’, in Ottokar-Forschungen, pp. viii–xvi, esp. viii. Tausend Jahre Oberösterreich. Das Werden eines Landes, ed. Amt der Oberösterreichischen Landesregierung, Abteilung Kultur (2 vols, Linz, 1983). See n. 1 above, and Ostarrîchi-Österreich. Menschen – Mythen – Meilensteine. Katalog des Niederösterreichischen Landesmuseums, ed. Ernst Bruckmüller and Peter Urbanitsch (Horn, 1996). Salzburg und die Slawenmission. Zum 1100. Todestag des hl. Methodius (Salzburg, 1986).

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61. 1200 Jahre Salzburger Dom. Festschrift zum 1200jährigen Jubiläum des Domes zu Salzburg, ed. Metropolitankapitel (Salzburg, 1974). 62. 1200 Jahre Kremsmünster. Stiftsführer, ed. Amt der oö. Landesregierung, Abteilung Kultur and Benediktinerstift Kremsmünster (Linz, 3rd edn 1977). Mitteilungen des Oberösterreichischen Landesarchivs, 12 (1977), and Die Anfänge des Klosters Kremsmünster, ed. Siegfried Haider (Linz, 1978). Baiernzeit in Oberösterreich, ed. Gunter Dimt et al. (Linz, 1977). Cf. Helmut Windl (ed.), Das erste Jahrtausend nach Christus. Katalog zur Ausstellung des Niederösterreichischen Landesmuseums (Vienna, 1977). 63. Virgil von Salzburg. Missionar und Gelehrter, ed. Heinz Dopsch and Roswitha Juffinger (Salzburg, 1985). Hermann Dannheimer and Heinz Dopsch (eds), Gemeinsame Landesausstellung des Freistaates Bayern und des Landes Salzburg ‘Die Bajuwaren’ (Munich/Salzburg, 1988). See also Wolfram, ‘Salzburg, Bayern, Österreich’, 252ff., 338ff., and id., Grenzen und Räume, 113ff., 154ff. 64. St. Peter in Salzburg. Katalog zur 3. Salzburger Landesausstellung (Salzburg, 1982). On the liturgical, not historical year of foundation 582, see Heinz Dopsch and Herwig Wolfram, ‘Neubeginn oder Kontinuität. Probleme um die Anfänge von St. Peter’, ibid., 20–1. Cf. also Wolfram, ‘Salzburg, Bayern, Österreich’, 245ff., and id., Grenzen und Räume, 107ff. 65. Herwig Wolfram, ‘Iuvavum-Salzburg vor dem Auftreten des heiligen Rupert’ in Hl. Rupert von Salzburg, 696–1996. Katalog zur Ausstellung im Dommuseum zu Salzburg und in der Erzabtei St. Peter, ed. P. Petrus Eder and Johann Kronbichler (Salzburg, 1996), 15–37. Herwig Wolfram, ‘Rupert – der Gründerheilige Salzburgs’, Verordnungsblatt der Erzdiözese Salzburg, 10 (October 1996), 206–13. 66. 1200 Jahre Erzbistum Salzburg. Die älteste Metropole im deutschen Sprachraum, ed. Heinz Dopsch et al. (Salzburg, 1999). See also Wolfram, ‘Salzburg, Bayern, Österreich’; id., Grenzen und Räume, 172; and id., ‘20. April 798. Warum wird Salzburg zur bayerischen Metropole?’, Verordnungsblatt der Erzdiözese Salzburg, 4/3 (April 1998), 1–24. 67. Das Werden der Steiermark. Die Zeit der Traungauer. Festschrift zur 800. Wiederkehr der Erhebung zum Herzogtum, ed. Gerhard Pferschy (Graz, 1980); Katalog der Landesausstellung 1986: Die Steiermark. Brücke und Bollwerk; 800 Jahre Steiermark und Österreich, 1192–1992. Der Beitrag der Steiermark zu Österreichs Größe, ed. Othmar Pickl (Graz, 1992); Härtel, ‘Ostarrîchi-Millennium’, 338. 68. Josef Riedmann, ‘Das entscheidende Jahrhundert in der Geschichte Tirols, 1259–1363’, in Eines Fürsten Traum. Meinhard II. Das Werden Tirols. Katalog der Tiroler Landesausstellung 1995 (Innsbruck/Bozen, 1995), 27–58. 69. Ibid., 50. 70. Ibid., 56ff. 71. Cf. Spevak, Jubiläum, 296. 72. See above, n. 12. 73. Zöllner, Österreichbegriff, 27ff. 74. See above, n. 57. 75. On this geographic term, which has been documented since the ninth century, see Wolfram, ‘Salzburg, Bayern, Österreich’, 52. 76. Dopsch, Länder und das Reich, 156–8. 77. Die Kuenringer. Das Werden des Landes Niederösterreich, ed. Herwig Wolfram et al. (Vienna, 1981). See Herwig Wolfram, ‘Zisterziensergründung und Ministerialität am Beispiel Zwettls’, in Andreas Kusternig and Max Weltin (eds), Kuenringer-Forschungen (Vienna, 1981), 1–39.

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78. Wolfram, ‘Einleitung’, p. xxx. 79. Maximilian Weltin, Der Kampf um das westungarische Grenzgebiet – das heutige Burgenland, in Dopsch, Länder und das Reich, 262–9, quoted at 269. 80. Wolfram, Grenzen und Räume, 252, 371. 81. See above, n. 12. 82. Urkundenbuch des Burgenlandes, ed. Hans Wagner et al. (5 vols, Graz/Vienna/ Eisenstadt, 1955–99). 83. Die Gemeinsame Landesausstellung des Freistaates Bayern und des Landes Salzburg ‘Die Bajuwaren’, 7, only mentions the exhibition’s patrons Franz Josef Strauß, Ministerpräsident of the Freistaat Bayern, and Wilfried Haslauer, Landeshauptmann of Salzburg. 84. Pohl, ‘Ostarrîchi Revisited’, 36, 38; Härtel, ‘Ostarrîchi-Millennium’, 338; Spevak, Jubiläum, 44f. See esp. Katalog der Landesausstellung 1986: Die Steiermark. Brücke und Bollwerk. 85. Josef Klaus, Österreichs europäische Funktion. Weltweite Wissenschaft vom Volk (Vienna/ Wiesbaden, 1958), 141–7, esp. 141f. (quoted). 86. Heinz Dopsch, ‘Vorwort’, in Salzburg und die Slawenmission. Zum 1100. Todestag des hl. Methodius (Salzburg, 1986), 7. For the historical background of the apology see Wolfram, ‘Salzburg, Bayern, Österreich’, 193–7, and id.,, Grenzen und Räume, 259–66. 87. On the ideology of the ‘Enemy from the East’, see Pohl, Awaren, 331. 88. Baiernzeit in Oberösterreich, pp. xi, xv. 89. Cf. the table of contents of Die Gemeinsame Landesausstellung des Freistaates Bayern und des Landes Salzburg ‘Die Bajuwaren’, 5f. 90. Wolfram, ‘Salzburg, Bayern, Österreich’, and id., Grenzen und Räume. 91. Benedikt Bilgeri, Geschichte Vorarlbergs, vol. 1 (Vienna, 1971), esp. 20, 77, 80, 83, 131 (here the Rhaetians are already Romans). I wish to thank Alois Niederstätter, Bregenz, for the quotes. On the ‘rätische Freiheit’, see also Wolfram, Grenzen und Räume, 300. On this topic and on the ‘origins of the Leitbild related to the Rhaetians’, see Robert Rollinger, ‘Zum Räterbild in der Vorarlberger Landesgeschichtsschreibung. Dargestellt an ausgewählten Beispielen’, Ostarrichi – Österreich. 1000 Jahre – 1000 Welten, ed. Hermann J. W. Kuprian (Innsbruck, 1997), 179–242, esp. 180ff., 195ff. 92. See Alois Niederstätter, ‘“…dass sie alle Appenzeller woltent sin”. Bemerkungen zu den Appenzellerkriegen aus Vorarlberger Sicht’, Schriften des Vereins für die Geschichte des Bodensees und seiner Umgebung, 110 (1992), 10–30, esp. 10f. and 29f. 93. Herwig Wolfram, ‘Terminologisches’ in Uwe Ludwig und Thomas Schilp (eds), Nomen et Fraternitas: Festschrift für Dieter Geuenich zum 65. Geburtstag (Berlin, 2008), incl. n. 55. 94. Herwig Wolfram, ‘Austria before Austria. The Medieval Past of Polities to Come’, Austrian History Yearbook, 38 (2007), 1–12, esp. 1, based on Erich Zöllner, ‘Zusammenfassung: Noricum und Raetia I’, in Von der Spätantike zum frühen Mittelalter. Aktuelle Probleme in historischer und archäologischer Sicht, ed. Joachim Werner and Eugen Ewig (Sigmaringen, 1979), 255–67, esp. 257. 95. Elisabeth Lichtenberger, Austria. Society and Regions (Vienna, 2002). 96. See above, n. 87. 97. Brunner, Herzogtümer und Marken, 340f. On Vienna, see above, n. 28. 98. Cf., on the instrumentalization of the Middle Ages after the Napoleonic Wars, Alois Zauner, Tausend Jahre Oberösterreich, 17f.: ‘The population reacted to the French

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wars with national and patriotic feelings. In our land too people concerned themselves increasingly with the past, above all with the Middle Ages.’ 99. See above, n. 93. 100. Epistolae variorum Carolo Magno regnante scriptae, ed. Ernst Dümmler (Berlin, 1895, repr. 1994), 552ff. (Fridugis).

14 ‘Old Czechs Were Hefty Heroes’: the Construction and Reconstruction of Czech National History in its Relationship to the ‘Great’ Medieval Past František Šmahel 1 Introduction In Shakespeare’s England it was held that the kingdom of Bohemia lay by the sea. While this was not true, at least people knew about Bohemia. How could they not? Prague was at this time the seat of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, whose portrait was so impressively painted by Robert Evans; the Czechs had their own homeland, language, state, literature and, last but not least, the freedom of their Utraquist, predominantly Protestant, religion. By the beginning of the nineteenth century little remained of this ancient fame: Prague was a sleepy, provincial town; German was spoken in government offices, university lecture halls and burgher homes; Roman Catholicism was the state religion and the other three confessions were merely tolerated. The provincial diet still met in Prague, but was entirely dependent on Vienna. Coronation with the St Wenceslas crown was essentially a formality, such that after 1836 it could be neglected by the Habsburgs. The support for the Czech patriots of the ‘national revival’ or ‘national awakening’ could, and did, come from history and literature; they hearkened back to the patron saint Wenceslas, the Přemyslids, the great Emperor Charles IV and, carefully, to the reformer Jan Hus and the invincible warrior Jan Žižka. This, however, was not enough. In competition with the European nations of the south and west, but mainly with the Germans, they longed for a famous past; and since one was not available, they had to create it.

2 Counterfeit manuscripts, a counterfeit past The generation of Czech intellectuals that appeared around the turn of the nineteenth century did not step into a void. Their teachers, brought up in ‘enlightened’ rationalism and criticism, left behind them the specialist works 245

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from which modern philology and historiography hatched. F. M. Pelzel published what were for their time first-rate historical tracts, while in his scientific discussion Josef Dobrovský was second to none of his German colleagues, who elected him a member of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. It would long be true that ‘Sanctus amor patriae dat animum’,1 but Europe was already beginning to fill with the fluid of a romantic fondness for ancient things, with a fantastic, unhealthy nationalism and with an uncritical enthusiasm for ancient mythology and folk poesy. Romanticism was patriotic everywhere, in Bohemia as elsewhere. For this reason the paradox could arise that Czech Romanticism was rooted in Germany – and not only in Herder’s Heidelberg, but also in Jena, where two of the leading awakeners of Slavic fame, Jan Kollár and Pavel Josef Šafařík, were educated. While the Hungarian Slovak Kollár in his Slávy dcera (‘Daughter of Slavia’) sonnets glorified the ideal Slavic people,2 Šafařík, another Slovak, began ardently collecting national songs even before finding a base in Prague. Both, however, were overtaken and for a while overshadowed by Václav Hanka (1791–1861), the Scottish Macpherson, Russian Sulakadzev and southern Slav Verkovič in one person. Just the mention of these famous authors of literary mystification must suffice to place the Czech fakes into a broader European context. It was only slightly later that in Bohemia, too, suitable conditions arose for wellregarded frauds, which could neither previously nor subsequently have been successful. However much this was a phenomenon of a broader nature, all that it required was a certain pathological trait in the nature of the fraudsters themselves. Two figures must be seen at the forefront, who sacrificed their own literary works on the altar of their mother tongue and homeland. The spiritus agens was Václav Hanka, who even while still studying in Vienna had sworn to direct all his efforts towards ‘the awakening of the Czech national consciousness’.3 He attempted this through his own poems, translations of southern Slav folk songs and the publication of surviving relics of Old Czech writing. It was into the first volume of these ‘ancient compositions’ that in 1817 he incorporated the Old Czech Song beneath Vyšehrad, supposedly discovered the previous year by his friend and room-mate Josef Linda (1789 or 1792–1834).4 The 17 verses recorded of a love song with an apostrophe to Vyšehrad, which stands on a high rock above the Vltava to strike fear into strangers, appeared in its script and language to date to the thirteenth century, so much so that at first it took in even Dobrovský.5 This experiment went well, and the time had arrived for further discoveries. This time it was Hanka himself who was to be the successful party, discovering on 16 September 1817 two narrow parchment sheets and six parchment double sheets in the church cellars at Dvůr Králové. From the surviving fragments it was possible to deduce that these were merely part of a much larger

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whole; even so, the six epic poems, six lyric poems and two poems of a mixed character, 1261 verses in all, represented an undreamt-of expansion of the treasury of Old Czech poetry. The two friends had worked hard. Although Linda never admitted his part in the forgery, the critical literature has been, and remains, in agreement that it was he who lent his not inconsiderable poetic talent to the enterprise. While the parchment fragments themselves suggested the thirteenth century, some of the compositions indicated by their refinement that they had originated soon after the events that they described. The very first of the fragments referred to the expulsion of the Poles from Prague by the Bohemian princes Oldřich and Jaromír in 1004. The other epic compositions too are primarily celebrations of the heroism of the old Czechs, for the most part in battle against aliens from abroad. These latter were not necessarily neighbours – the longest composition describes a victory over Tatar raiders near Olomouc by the Bohemian prince Jaroslav, supposedly in 1241. It is no wonder that it was the Czechs who had saved Europe from the Tatars: after all, they had been heroes even in pagan antiquity. Patriotic nationalism, it should not be forgotten, is entirely defensive in nature. The Czechs defend themselves against foreign usurpers, who speak a foreign language, introduce foreign morals and violently enforce a foreign religion. Even in peace it is necessary to prepare for war, as one of the Bohemian remarks that ‘after all, we have Germans for neighbours’.6 In addition to bravery, old Czechs were graced by other praiseworthy characteristics. They themselves understood that they were pious in thought. They prayed both before battle and after it, irrespective of whether they were still pagans or already Christians. Their talents with the sword were equalled by their cultural maturity. Almost all of these warriors were bards, and had a sophisticated love of nature – people of every kind from among them could speak with the trees, birds or flowers. Such poetry matched the period liking for romanticism, and must therefore have found favour. These newly discovered old Czech songs were warmly received even by some indigenous Germans – a Prague professor of aesthetics, Johann Dambeck, was not alone in reading the spirit of Homer or Ossian into them.7 Even before the Dvůr Králové manuscript could become more generally known, two further parchment double sheets were found in November 1818 that in their script and language seemed to date to the ninth or tenth century. Evidently, the audacity of the two forgers was increasing. A longer, epic fragment described the judgement of the mythical Princess Libuše, while the second in a few verses outlined her verdict. Because of this, the new putative literary landmark was first termed the ‘Judgement of Libuše’, but it later came to be named, after its place of supposed discovery, the Zelená Hora manuscript.8 The Czechs finally had a truly ancient past of which they could be proud, all

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the more so since even under Princess Libuše they had had a written law. It was for this reason that the closing verse was of unusual relevance: Pohanou by bylo hledat v Německu právo, když u nás je svatým zákonem od dob kdy ho naši otcové přinesli do této úrodné vlasti.9

It would be a disgrace to seek law in Germany, when among us is a holy statute from the time when our fathers were brought to this fertile home.9

While at home and in Russia the ‘Judgement of Libuše’ provoked an enthusiastic reaction, Dobrovský termed the fragment ‘a miserable patchwork’ (ein elendes Machwerk).10 For Linda, such crushing criticism was a humiliation of his poetic talent, and thereafter, until his untimely end, he sought recognition as a translator, author of historical prose and dramatist. Hanka, however, had no intention of giving in, and when after Dobrovský’s death in 1829 Czech patriots could include the ‘Judgement of Libuše’ in the national treasury without obstacle, he ventured on a new counterfeit. Without Linda’s poetic talents to draw on, he had to limit himself to a more philological forgery, in the form of an interlinear gloss written on to an original manuscript. It was remarkable that although Hanka published all of these glosses in 1833, over time they multiplied in the MS Mater verborum. Given that the authenticity of the manuscripts was supported by such leading lights of the national revival as Josef Jungmann, František Palacký and Šafařík, any passing doubts had no chance of success. This veneer of untouchability was dented in October 1858 by a series of five articles under the common title ‘Manuscript Lies and Palaeographic Truths’, appearing in the Prague German-language daily Tagesbote aus Böhmen. With the agreement of Vienna, the Prague police chief Anton Päuman commissioned palaeographic and chemical analyses of two manuscript fragments from the librarian Antonín Zeidler. All of the circumstances only came to light much later, but the dubious origin of this campaign was so obvious that once again Palacký sprang to the defence of the manuscripts. The polemic was already of considerable magnitude when Heinrich von Sybel’s student Max Büdinger, writing in the newly founded Historische Zeitschrift,11 entered the fray, and when shortly afterwards serious objections to the historical authenticity of these supposedly Old Czech monuments were raised by the Viennese literary historian Julius Feifalik.12 Given that both of these writers were Germans, the reaction from the Czech side was all the stronger.13 Those who dared to place scientific truth above the interests of the nation became its betrayers. In the conflict over the authenticity of the manuscripts, only the last decades of the nineteenth century confirmed the courage and ability of Czech medievalists to put an end to the wishful deceit of national mystification. Moreover, in the dispute over the manuscripts the

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approaches of history, the auxiliary historical sciences, legal history, literary history, aesthetics and last but by no means least linguistics were combined at a hitherto unseen interdisciplinary level.14 Before science had triumphed over mystification, however, the heroes, events and places of the forged songs deeply influenced nationally awakened Czech art of the whole of the nineteenth century. The majestic bluffs with the ruins of Vyšehrad never ceased to inspire painters and graphic artists, while in music this legendary site was to be enshrined unforgettably in a symphonic poem of the same name by Bedřich Smetana. The heroine of Smetana’s opera Libuše became ‘an incarnation of the Czech nation and of Czech glory’.15 The warriors, bards and other figures of the manuscripts continued to live their second lives in the paintings of Josef Mánes, the designs of Mikuláš Aleš for the National Theatre and the monumental sculptures of Václav Myslbek. The Czech manuscript forgeries began in the nineteenth century and ended in timeless artistic inspiration.

3 The contribution of Hussite Bohemia to the development of ‘humanity’ The Czechs in the romantic era already had heroic songs. Ancient times were of greater importance to them than the dark Middle Ages, and they thus had no need to seek greatness in their history where it could easily have been found – in Hussitism. Recollections of Jan Žižka and other famous warriors appeared here and there; the reformist ideal of Jan Hus for which they fought, however, remained taboo under the strict oversight of Austrian censorship. Modern European literature thought otherwise, and from the beginning of the 1840s began to see in the Hussites warriors for religious freedom, without which there would have been no subsequent political freedom. This radically democratic tendency was effectively expressed in particular by the French writer George Sand (1804–76); her cycle of novels with its defence of Hussite warriors was taken up by the historian of the French Revolution, Louis Blanc, when he dedicated the first section of his introductory chapter on the Reformation to Jan Hus.16 In Protestant Germany sympathy for the Hussites was strengthened by Nikolaus Lenau; in this sense, his Albigenser was perhaps even more effective than his cycle on Jan Žižka. A single strophe suffices to make the point: Den Albigensern folgten die Hussiten und zahlten blutig heim, was jene litten. Auf Huss und Žižka folgten Luther, Hutten, die dreissig Jahre, die

After the Albigenses came the Hussites, who paid bloodily at home for the sufferings of others. From Hus and Žižka came Luther and Hutten, the Thirty Years War, the warriors

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Cevennestreiter, die Stürmer der Bastille und so weiter.17

of the Cevennes, later the takers of the Bastille and so on.17

Among the readers of Sand in Bohemia were two poets from the ‘Young Germany’ circle, Moritz Hartmann (1821–72) and Alfred Meissner (1822–85). The former was a Jew, the latter a Protestant, and both were liberals of a cosmopolitan stripe who had little interest in a linguistically Czech culture that for them was contaminated with distasteful pan-Slavism. This, however, did not prevent them from praising the Hussites and annoying the Austrian censor to such a degree that they were threatened with imprisonment and exile. Hartmann’s poetic elegy of 1844 had the emblematic title Kelch und Schwert [Chalice and Sword], while two years later Meissner published a lengthy epic poem with the shorter but no less telling title of Žiška. The poets’ subjective harmony with the Hussites and their democratic and social programme can be heard at a number of points. The Hussites simply gave mankind an example, so that their message could be understood by the majority from these works, which were thus conspicuously more audacious than the predominantly fainthearted approach of the Czech public. At the same time as Meissner was writing, a monumental work on Hussitism was being completed by František Palacký (1798–1876), likewise a Protestant but a Moravian Czech, who despite his youth was already the official historiographer of the kingdom of Bohemia. Palacký began to publish his Geschichte von Böhmen in German as early as 1836, the Czech translation of the first part following only in 1848. The Czech edition, with its telling title Dějiny národu českého v Čechách a v Moravě [A History of the Czech Nation in Bohemia and Moravia], was regarded by the author himself as the culmination of his efforts to provide his nation with a faithful picture of its past. The first volume of the third part, dealing with Hussitism in the years 1403–19, which was published in 1845, could have been used by Meissner only after the second edition of his Žižka, so that it seemed to him that he was the first who had described Hussitism in a new light. Palacký, of course, would not accept this, and years later wrote that he was the first historian ‘der den Hussiten im Detail der Geschichte Gerechtigkeit widerfahren lassen konnte’.18 In publishing the third part of his Geschichte, dealing with the Hussite period, Palacký had to come to terms not only with the censors, but also with the disfavour of German historians and journalists. It was for this reason that in 1848 he decided to write his History first in Czech, in order that in a period when Czechs were struggling to have national equality recognized he did not give priority to a different language. Acting in this way went against the will of the provincial council, which even in March 1851 still requested that henceforth his be a ‘German original work’. The changes that appeared in translation were

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quite significant in nature. While space prevents going into detail here,19 it is enough to note that not only was the language the subject of subsequent disputes, but also the supra-confessional position of the author. Palacký systematically refused to assess the disputes between Catholicism and Protestantism at the level of right and wrong, correct or incorrect. His thinking was summarized in the famous phrase: ‘If history is to be our teacher, we cannot make her our whore.’20 Palacký in his literary endeavours had from the outset regarded the writing of a history of the Hussite period as a primary aim. His interest had actually grown over time, particularly when during the 1840s, as already noted, Hussitism was finding a favourable response in foreign radical circles. It is typical of Palacký, too, that he saw Hussitism from the broader perspective of European developments. This is reflected in particular in his evaluative judgements. The leader of the Czech reform movement is in his eyes not only an outstanding preacher, but also ‘the founder of Protestantism, the representative of spiritual freedom, and the reviver of the fundamentals of the right of personal conviction in matters of faith’.21 The ‘communist and socialist’ fundamentals applied by the radical Hussite community on the fortified hilltop at Tábor22 were to Palacký an augury of the philosophical basis behind the French Revolution: ‘Their source was, however, here and there, suddenly and completely released, and people taken out from under the authority that over the ages had come to be too much to bear.’23 Experience soon brought the Taborites to the realization that the theoretical fundamentals could not be achieved in practice, and that absolute freedom, equality and fraternity would remain an unattainable longing and illusion. For this reason, too, they later had to make do with a restoration of the old Slavic democratic order. Towns, freeholders and peasants, and ‘the democratic vein in general’ were in 1434 defeated and enfeebled, so that from the political point of view Bohemia was brought back to its old course. ‘It was on the grave of democracy that feudalism later grew, ever more overwhelming.’24 Nevertheless, its reformational and nationalist aspirations assured Hussite history a global importance and attraction. ‘Czechs of this time set themselves the task of developing humanity in general: if this was to their credit and fame, there can be no doubt that it was charged with victims and terrible pain.’25 While the volumes of Palacký’s History dealing with Hussitism and the subsequent era of the Calixtine King George of Poděbrady were greeted abroad with respect,26 the opposite was true in official Prague circles. With the support of those in government and the local administration, polemic opposition to Palacký’s conception of Hussitism came from first the Prague German historian Josef Alexander Helfert (1820–1910)27 and later the senior university professor Constantin Höfler (1811–97). Palacký, who had been responsible for Höfler’s being called to Prague, was offended even by the foreword to the

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Geschichtschreiber der husitischen Bewegung in Böhmen of 1856, in which Höfler had rather clumsily announced his intention to do away with the fashionable wave of rhetorical compilations that had recently embellished such historical figureheads as Jan Hus.28 From 1862 objections to Palacký were also published by Höfler’s students in issue after issue of the newly established Mittheilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Deutschen in Böhmen.29 When in 1864 Höfler himself made public a rather tendentious piece on Master John Hus and the departure of German professors and students from Prague, Palacký remained silent. He could not, however, overlook the completion of Höfler’s three-volume edition two years later, as he would otherwise not have been defending his earlier work. Palacký published his own defence in German in 1868 under the telling title Die Geschichte des Hussitenthums und Prof. Constantin Höfler.30 The polemics from the side of local German historiography were not limited merely to the question raised in the title of Höfler’s work. The Czechification of the Bohemian towns was regarded by, for example, Julius Lippert as the result of a war of plunder, in which the Hussites had seized the property of German burghers.31 The reduction of Hussitism to a nationalist element was emphasized even more by Ludwig Schlesinger, according to whom Hus became the leader of an extermination campaign directed towards indigenous Germans.32 These are merely examples of the domestic conflict over Hus and Hussitism which, as the process of emancipation of the Czech nation reached its culmination, necessarily had a topical social context.33 Despite the clear patriotic and confessional backdrop, the increasing interest in the study of Hussitism in the field of scientific historiography brought not insignificant results in the form of interpretations and editions.34 While in the higher spheres of historical reflection the conflict over Hussitism grew into a conflict over the meaning of Czech history,35 in the area of everyday life it sometimes took on ingenuous or even light-hearted forms. In the revolutionary atmosphere of 1848 in Prague, for instance, a song spread with the lyrics: Kdo jest Čechem, srdcem duchem, nejen ústy aneb sluchem. Komu Hus a Žižka platí vice nežli všichni svatí.36

Who is a Czech, heart and soul, not merely in words or hearing. To whom Hus and Žižka mean more than all the saints.36

In the town of Tábor, which had hitherto not overly promoted its Hussite past, street parades began to be organized in pseudo-Hussite costumes, while the more entrepreneurial started to make ‘Žižka’ sticks and pipes, which they decorated with the head of the unconquerable, one-eyed warrior.37 Tábor became the name of a worker’s demonstration and the leitmotif of one of the symphonic poems in Smetana’s Má vlast. There was perhaps no branch of cultural and artistic life in which both of the great Jans, Hus and Žižka, and

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their brothers and sisters in faith and battle, were not the centre of attention.38 Relics of this nationwide, albeit not nationally shared, Hussite wave include the monumental sculptures of both the great men in Prague and other Czech towns.39 A later echo is Hus’s motto Pravda vítězí (Truth wins out), which appears on the standard of the Czech (and previously of the Czechoslovak) Republic.

4 To whom did the ‘Father of the Country’ belong? Difficulties with the old Czechs can be illustrated in a third way by the figure of the ‘Father of the Country’, the king of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV (1316–78). On his father John’s side he was a Luxembourg, while his mother Eliška was a scion of the domestic Czech Přemyslid dynasty. Charles, thanks to his upbringing in France and long sojourns in Italy and France, spoke not only excellent Czech and Latin but also several other languages, such that within his kingdom he was able to speak fluently with both Czechs and Germans. Charles’s subjects, despite a high degree of bilingualism, found mutual understanding rather more difficult, so that it was not unusual for Latin to be their intermediary. Under these circumstances, when even some Germans spoke Czech, it was hard to say who was by nature a Czech, with a right to claim primacy in the home kingdom. In this sense the Czechs learned from the Lusatian Germans, who required a similar origin through both the paternal and maternal lines over several generations. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the situation in Prague and Bohemia was similar: everyone spoke German, whether or not in origin or disposition a Czech. So much for an introduction to the debate about whom the ‘Father of the Country’ belonged to. In the period when the heretic Hus could not be emphasized, the place of most significant and greatest figure was taken by the Emperor Charles IV. Such an accolade, received by Charles already in 1780 in the introduction to a monograph by F. M. Pelzel,40 remained valid even for František Palacký. ‘Even today, the pronouncement of his name’, he wrote in 1842, ‘causes every Czech heart to beat faster, and from every mouth comes reverence and gratitude for a monarch who in the memory of the nation inextricably represents the greatest heyday and affluence of the homeland.’41 In defiance of this, or at least so it appears on the basis of available knowledge, the nationally awakened Czech literati did not overly praise the Father of the Country, which was more or less the case for Czech musicians and artists as well. Charles IV was, of course, deservedly ever present in Prague in the monumental architecture of St Vitus’ Cathedral, a range of other structures including the bridge over the Vltava, and assorted monuments and their names. The figure of the emperor had for ages gazed down at Praguers from the Old Town

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Bridge Tower, and they thus felt no need to erect other memorials to him. This is shown by the prehistory of the only monument to Charles established in the city during the whole of the nineteenth century, the unveiling of which in 1848 was drowned out by the revolutionary riots. The idea of building a memorial to Charles had indeed appeared at the beginning of the 1830s, but it was only the approaching five-hundredth anniversary of the foundation of Charles University that had hastened its realization on Křižovnické námĕstí on the approach from the Old Town to the Stone Bridge.42 The quotation from Palacký above was cut off too soon – the words that follow are also not lacking in deeper significance: … by contrast in the list of German emperors he was held to be one of the weakest and most unsuited. … We cannot reject the idea that in all this there is nothing more than envy, caused by the flourishing state of Bohemia at the time as compared to the excessive spiritual decline in the German Empire, of which some German patriots slanderously complain in voice and pen even today. They cannot forget that Charles IV did not do for all the German lands what he achieved in Bohemia.43 Against the ‘Bohemian Father’ (Böhmens Vater) there had from ancient times stood the ‘Arch-stepfather of the Holy Roman Empire’ (des heiligen römischen Reichs Erzstiefvater) or the ‘Popish King’ (Pfaffenkönig), who to his own benefit had neglected the higher interests of the German state polity.44 For the most part German historians at home or working in Bohemia neither glorified nor disparaged the role of Charles IV. An unusually high appreciation of Charles’s efforts and in particular his ecclesiastical policies in the Empire came from Constantin Höfler, and – slightly later – from his pupil Ludwig Schlesinger.45 The five-hundredth anniversary of Charles’s death, in 1878, was recalled in timely fashion more by Czechs than local Germans. Of the range of articles and editions marking the occasion,46 only a small booklet by university professor Josef Kalousek, with the pointed title ‘Charles IV, the Father of the Country’ met with widespread acclaim47 – both for its apologetic tendency and for its range of relevant, contemporary allusions. Kalousek touched on particularly sensitive questions by his emphasis on Charles’s love of the Czech language and his characteristic Czecho-nationalist feelings. The jubilee was, given the exact date of Charles’s death, to peak at the end of November and beginning of December 1878. Memorial articles in the daily press and lectures in various learned and patriotic societies followed quickly one after another. While on the Czech side every historian, writer or public figure took it as their responsibility to contribute to the jubilee, the reaction from the German side was rather indifferent. Although at the ceremonial wreath-laying at Charles’s memorial on 29 November one ribbon was inscribed

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‘To the founder of the Czech University’ and the other ‘To the founder of the first German University’, only the Czech students riotously proclaimed the great Luxembourg celebration, while their German colleagues preferred the public houses.48 The aforementioned historian and leading light of the Association of German Historians in Bohemia, Ludwig Schlesinger, did not wish to leave the Czech-oriented campaign unchallenged, and thus on 8 December requested in writing a scholarly consideration of the question of Charles IV’s mother tongue from his colleague Johann Loserth, professor at Czernowitz (Chernivtsi) in Bukovina. ‘In these days’, he writes, ‘the Czechs have completely annexed Charles to themselves on the basis of a few documents where he describes himself as a Slav and the Slavic language as his mother tongue etc.’49 Loserth granted his request, and in his article ‘On the Nationality of Charles IV’ set forth no small number of arguments that cast doubt upon, or refuted, Kalousek’s line of reasoning. In the heat of the discussion Loserth erred here and there, which gave Kalousek an opportunity to respond with proper emphasis.50 The struggle over the nationality of Charles IV ended without a victor. In later times it was above all German historiography that advanced conspicuously in understanding the personalities and times of Charles IV.51 In the nineteenth century, the Czechs did not allow their father to be appropriated, and were content.

5 Conclusion Three great issues of contention in turn occupied the whole of the nineteenth century. Their echoes can still be heard today. Adherents of the Zelená Hora and Dvůr Králové manuscripts survived the Socialist era, using their subsequent freedom to establish a Czech Manuscripts Society and special interest publishing house (Neklan), and continue to publish defences of these forgeries.52 They are not, however, taken seriously. Hussitism paid better under the previous regime, as the Communists declared themselves the heirs and continuators of its advanced tradition. In the current historical consciousness there is a predominant feeling that the Hussites, like the Communists, merely demolished and destroyed all that their predecessors had built: the primacy and broader impact of the Bohemian Reformation have fallen into obscurity. And because we live in a time of surveys and television game shows, only the winner takes all: Charles IV, who in June 2005 won a televised contest to find the greatest figure of Czech history.53 A survey in January 2006 ended no differently, when a full 40 per cent of those asked regarded the reign of Charles IV as the apex of Czech history;54 whether they would actually have wanted to live at that time is not clear. What more could one ask for? The Czechs have finally not only forgiven, but even appreciate, the efforts and works of local

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and other Germans who during the reign of this emperor were in no small part responsible for the prosperity of the kingdom of Bohemia, its university and its monumental art.

Notes 1. The device from the MGH emblem. 2. Jaroslav Vlček, Z dějin české literatury (Prague, 1960), 315. 3. For information on the life and works of Václav Hanka, see his entry in the Lexikon české literatury. Osobnosti, díla, instituce, vol. 2, pt 1 (Prague, 1993), 57–63. For the broader period context cf. Vladimír Macura, ‘Problems and Paradoxes of the National Revival’, in Mikuláš Teich (ed.), Bohemia in History (Cambridge, 1998), 182–97. 4. See the entry on Josef Linda, in the Lexikon české literatury, vol. 2, pt 2 (Prague, 1993), 1185–7. 5. The song itself was printed as early as in 1818 in the Geschichte der böhmischen Sprache und älteren Literatur, and six years later declared a fraud. This was definitively shown by later palaeographic and chemical analyses that showed that it was a palimpsest – a text in a thirteenth-century script had been written over a scraped-off text of the fifteenth century. For more on this, see J. Hanuš, Rukopisové Zelenohorský a Kralovodvorský. Památka z XIX. věku (Prague, 1911), 55–7. 6. ‘V mířě válku múdro ždáti / vezdy nám súsědé Němci’: Báseň V, vv. 39–40. See Hanuš, Rukopisové, 160. 7. On the first reaction, see Vlček, Z dějin české literatury, 477–8. 8. More on the circumstances of the find in Hanuš, Rukopisové, 69–72. The enormous body of literature on the forgers of Hanka’s school was listed by Miroslav Laiske, ‘Bibliografie RKZ’, in Mojmír Otruba (ed.), Rukopisy královédvorský a zelenohorský. Dnešní stav poznání (2 vols, Prague, 1968–69), ii.323–408. It is also worth noting the entry ‘Rukopisy královédvorský a zelenohorský 1817 a 1818’ in the Lexikon české literatury, vol. 3, pt 2 (Prague, 2000), 1329–38. For the most recent examination of this, see the penetrating study by R.J.W. Evans, ‘“The Manuscripts”: the Culture and Politics of Forgery in Central Europe’, in G.H. Jenkins (ed.), A Rattleskull Genius. The Many Faces of Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff, 2005), 51–68. 9. ‘The Judgement of Libuše’, vv. 109–12, in Hanuš, Rukopisové, 102. 10. More on Dobrovský’s assessment in Vlček, Z dějin české literatury, 480. 11. Max Büdinger, ‛Die Königinhofer Handschrift und ihre Schwestern’, Historische Zeitschrift, 1 (1859), 127–52. In detail on the whole affair and its context, Jiří Kořalka, František Palacký, 1798–1876. Životopis (Prague, 1998), 383–8. 12. Julius Feifalik, Über die Königinhofer Handschrift (Vienna, 1860). 13. See, amongst others, Josef Boček, ‛Die Königinhofer und Grünberger Handschriften als Gegenstand politischer Auseinandersetzungen in Böhmen, 1858–1938’, in K. Kaiserová (ed.), Němci v českých zemích. Zprávy Společnosti pro dějiny Němců v Čechách (Ústí nad Labem, 2001), 13–119. 14. Cf. Jaroslav Mezník, ‘Rukopisy z hlediska historie’, in Rukopisy královédvorský a zelenohorský, ed. Otruba, ii.147–77. 15. Thus František Graus, ‘Kněžna Libuše – od postavy báje k národnímu symbolu’, Československý časopis historický, 17 (1969), 817–43, quoted at 842. 16. George Sand published her four novels (‘Consuelo’, ‘Jean Zyska’, ‘La comtesse de Rudolstadt’ and ‘Procop le Grand’) in the years 1842–4 in the Revue Indépendante.

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17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

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See further Jiří Kořalka, ‛Nationale und internationale Komponenten in der Hus- und Hussitentradition des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Jan Hus und die Hussiten in europäischen Aspekten (Trier, 1987), 48–50. Quoted after Arnošt Kraus, Husitství v literatuře, zejména německé, vol. III: Husitství v literatuře devatenáctého století (Prague, 1924), 120. František Palacký, Die Geschichte des Hussitenthums und Prof. Constantin Höfler. Kritische Studien (Prague, 1868), 132. Cf. on this Jiří Kořalka, ‘Palacký a Frankfurt, 1840–60: husitské bádání a politická praxe’, Husitský Tábor, 6–7 (1983–4), 239–360, here esp. 312–31; id., František Palacký, 348–61. František Palacký, Dějiny národu českého v Čechách a v Moravě, pt 3 (3 vols, 3rd edn, Prague, 1877), 10. Ibid., 226. For an initial look at Hussitism, see František Šmahel, ‘The Hussite Movement: an Anomaly of European History?’, in Teich (ed.), Bohemia in History, 79–97, and John Klasen, ‘Hus, the Hussites and Bohemia’, in Christopher Allmand (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. VII: c. 1415 – c. 1500 (Cambridge, 1998), 367–91. Palacký, Dějiny národu českého, pt 3, ii.10–12. Ibid., iii, p. xxx. Ibid., iii.311. For more on this see Kořalka, ‘Palacký a Frankfurt’, 324–31, and id., ‘Palacký, Sybel a počátky Historische Zeitschrift’, Husitský Tábor, 9 (1987), 199–247. In particular in his tract Hus und Hieronymus. Studie (Prague, 1853). Constantin Höfler, Geschichtschreiber der husitischen Bewegung in Böhmen, pt 1 (Vienna, 1856), p. viii. On Höfler’s teaching activity, see Blanka Zilynská, ‛Karl Adolf Constantin Ritter von Höfler jako univerzitní profesor’, in Německá medievistika v českých zemích do roku 1945 (Prague, 2004), 193–224. On the origins of the association named, see Eduard Mikušek, ‛Verein für Geschichte der Deutschen in Böhmen und Leitmeritz in den 60. Jahren des 19. Jahrhunderts’, Germanoslavica, 2 (7) (1995), 83–92. See n. 18 above. For the wider context, see Kořalka, František Palacký, 471–8. Julius Lippert, ‘Die Čechisierung der böhmischen Städte im XV. Jahrhundert’, Mittheilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Deutschen in Böhmen, 5 (1868), 174–95. Ludwig Schlesinger, Geschichte Böhmens (Prague/Leipzig, 1870), 417. From the extensive literature, see amongst others František Graus, Lebendige Vergangenheit. Überlieferung im Mittelalter und in den Vorstellungen vom Mittelalter (Cologne/Vienna, 1975), 307–38, and more recently Robert Novotný, ‛Husitství v pojetí českoněmecké historiografie – věda či politikum?’, in Německá medievistika, 119–33. Synoptically see František Šmahel, Die Hussitische Revolution (3 vols, Hanover, 2002), i.15–41. Essential articles are now accessible in the anthology Spor o smysl českých dějin, ed. M. Havelka (2 vols, Prague, 1995–2005). Jiří Rak, Bývalí Čechové. České historické mýty a stereotypy (Prague, 1994), 51 (quoted), and 51ff. passim. See Jiří Kořalka, ‛Výzkum husitského Tábora v počátcích táborského muzea’, Husitský Tábor, 2 (1979), 108–10. A selection from the enormous literature: Kamil Krofta, Mistr Jan Hus v životě a památkách českého lidu (Prague, 1915); Sborník Žižkův, 1424–1924 (Prague, 1924);

258 The Uses of the Middle Ages in Modern European States

39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50.

51. 52.

53.

54.

Rudolf Urbánek, Žižka v památkách a úctě lidu českého (Brno, 1924); František Kavka, Husitská revoluční tradice (Prague, 1953); and contributions to the volumes of Husitský Tábor, 1–14 (1978–). On this memorial, see Zdeněk Hojda and Jiří Pokorný, Pomníky a zapomníky (Prague/ Litomyšl, 1996), esp. 79–91 (Hus) and 150–63 (Žižka). F. M. Pelzel, Kaiser Karl der Vierte, König in Böhmen, vol. I (Prague, 1780), ‘Vorbericht’. Franz Palacky, Geschichte von Böhmen, vol. ii, pt 2 (Prague, 1842), 403; in unchanged form also in the Czech version of 1877, Dějiny národu českého, vol. ii, pt 2, 206. The memorial, to a design by E. J. Hähnel, was realized by Daniel Burgschmiedt. See on this Pavel Vlček et al., Umělecké památky Prahy. Staré Město – Josefov (Prague, 1996), 544. Palacky, Geschichte von Böhmen, ii, pt 2, 403, 405; id., Dějiny národu českého, ii, pt 2, 206–7. The title ‘Father of the Country’ (pater patriae) was bestowed upon Charles IV in an oration at his funeral in December 1378 by Vojtěch Raňkův of Ježov. The speech was published by Ferdinand Tadra in Fontes rerum bohemicarum, vol. iii (Prague, 1882), 433–41, quoted at 437. For more on the figure of Charles IV in domestic and foreign historiography, see Josef Petráň, ‘Obraz Karla jako hlavy státu v dějepisectví šesti století’, in Karolus Quartus (Prague, 1984), 77–104, and Beat Frey, Pater Bohemiae, vitricus imperii. Böhmens Vater, Stiefvater des Reichs. Karl IV. in der Geschichtschreibung (Bern, 1978). Constantin K. A. Höfler, Die Zeit der Luxemburgischen Kaiser (Vienna, 1867), and Ludwig Schlesinger, Geschichte Böhmens (Prague, 1868). A list appears in J. Petráň, ‘Obraz Karla jako hlavy státu’, 102, n. 63. Karel IV. Otec vlasti (Prague, 1878). A detailed description of the 1878 celebrations is given in Pavel Soukup, ‘Čech, nebo Němec? Spor o národní příslušnost Karla IV.’, Dějiny a současnost, 27, 1 (2005), 38–40. Quoted after Soukup, ‘Čech nebo Němec?’, 40. Johann Loserth, ‘Über die Nationalität Karls IV.’, Mittheilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Deutschen in Böhmen, 17 (1879), 291–305. Josef Kalousek reacted in a serialized article that appeared in the daily press: ‘Über die Nationalität Karls IV.’, Politik, no. 9–94, 1–4 Apr. 1879. More on this in Petráň, ‘Obraz Karla jako hlavy státu’, 92–4. Of the most recent defences of the manuscripts, it is sufficient to mention Julius Enders, Rukopis Zelenohorský a Královédvorský: vznik, styl a básnická hodnota staročeské orální poesie (Prague, 1993), and the Almanach[y] rukopisné obrany, vols i–v, ed. Jiří Urban (Prague, 1991–2000). In a televised context and final vote on 10 June, Czech television viewers declared Charles IV the greatest Czech; he received 68,713 of the more than a quarter of a million votes cast. According to a report in Lidové noviny, 31 Jan. 2006.

Conclusion R.J.W. Evans

As has been shown in the preceding chapters, medievalism yielded a vital set of themes for the national historiographies which came into vogue from the earlier nineteenth century onwards. That process – so at least we argue in this volume – was not only, and not particularly, a feature of large and well-established states and their cultures. Rather it coincided with the emergence of the small and new states which have become so characteristic of modern Europe. Initially the dominant structures of composite and imperial rule were undermined after 1800 at the two extremes of the continent. In the south-east, the first fissures appeared in the Ottoman carapace. The Serbs entered into a series of confused revolts which yielded self-government in stages. Then the Greeks were able to found a core principality which could pursue the ‘great idea’ of full national statehood. They were followed after mid-century by Romanians and Bulgarians. Meanwhile in the north-west the Norwegians, in the course of their transfer from one Scandinavian empire to another, managed to assert such a degree of political autonomy as would lead organically to full independence 90 years later. That experience was loosely paralleled by the experience of the Finns, though their status in tsarist Russia had to be defended through decades of struggle before they could break free in 1917. Elsewhere on the western seaboard, the Belgians gained emancipation in two stages: by handover in 1815 to a United Netherlands which proved so intolerable that they broke free of it in a revolution 15 years later. Further stages of fragmentation later yielded the grand duchy of Luxembourg and the republic of Iceland. Thereby the older and more ambitious states of the Netherlands and Denmark were themselves progressively reduced to modest proportions. That could not yet be said of the United Kingdom, but Britain’s gradual loss of control in most of Ireland generated a classic paradigm of small-state liberation. The centre of Europe was already the locus for the most important longstanding small state, Switzerland, which now, in the decades after 1800, transformed itself from a loose congeries of miscellaneous territories into a coherent 259

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confederation. Thus Switzerland too became effectively a new country in the nineteenth century. Far more explosive were contemporary national strivings further east, in the Habsburg lands. Here the Czechs afforded another classic paradigm (in fact partly modelled on the Irish one in its first phase), moving from cultural self-assertion through strong support of the Monarchy (in the so-called Austro-Slav programme) to disillusion and the gradual espousal of separatism. In central Europe too, collapsed imperial structures left diminutive new polities as their residue, most dramatically in the case of rump Austria after 1918. And in that region there was also a reversed nineteenth-century paradigm: the unification into the two incorporative monarchies of Prussia and Savoy of smaller semi-independent entities, which yet retained important reminiscences of their separate statehood when they were subsumed into the new Germany and Italy. Whereas Germany, despite Prussia’s preponderance, was a more genuinely federal construction than Italy, it was the latter – lacking such preponderance – where localist medieval traditions remained more conspicuous, and which is thus more apt to our purpose here. These cases then, marked in bold in the two paragraphs above, have formed the subject matter for the present book. Of course the Middle Ages were invoked all over nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, by cultural establishments in the major powers too. In Victorian Britain, for example, there was a conspicuous vogue for the Anglo-Saxons, while the French developed a national cult of Jeanne d’Arc. The Second German Reich looked back to some aspects of the First in its heyday, as through the operas of Wagner and the architectural heritage of the Teutonic knights. Russia celebrated the princes Igor Svyatoslavich and Alexander Nevsky and, officially at least, the roots of autocracy under Ivan III and IV. The Spanish Reconquista and the early Portuguese discoveries decisively affected public awareness in Iberia. Moreover, we can find some common themes which rendered the medieval past relevant for historians as an increasingly self-sufficient grouping in countries both great and small. Notable in that respect is the appeal of the Middle Ages as an apparently more neutral subject for academic and authoritative judgements. Besides, much of more recent history was still often widely perceived as ‘current affairs’, with a quite different set of discursive expectations and higher levels of official mistrust, including severe restrictions on access to archive materials of recent provenance. In general the workings of medievalism are comparatively well known and understood in those larger polities where it remained ultimately peripheral to the purposes of the state. What our authors have shown is how the Middle Ages could take centre stage with countries seeking to bolster their pedigrees and reconnect to former glories. They could function as such precisely in an age of increasingly professionalized national history, and in association with new learned institutions established on a national base, such as universities,

R.J.W. Evans

261

academies and record societies. The case studies presented here speak for themselves; but I should like to underline a few recurrent, overlapping themes. Firstly, and most obviously, we have a series of appeals to the same kind of medieval political and military antecedents: significant pristine states, or at least dynastic configurations, typically with powerful rulers, extended territories and heroic combats. The range of virtues attributed to those ancestors may be various and even contradictory. In particular we find an uncertainly about stressing aggressive or rather defensive features – the valiant or the peaceable, the chivalrous or the bucolic – which probably matched small states’ unease about their international vulnerability in the modern period. Secondly, this remote, but usable, political past went with allegedly superior cultural values which, quite apart from anything else, yielded the sources, literary but perhaps also archaeological, that allowed later historians to reconstruct the given medieval society. The Catholic Church, in its still universal phase, evidently had to be accorded a dominant share in that achievement across most of the continent; but its role needed to be portrayed in national colours, particularly in countries where Protestantism had subsequently come to replace it. Thirdly, and in explicit contrast, there had been an intervening period, the age which we would nowadays designate ‘early modern’, when the lands in question lost their integrity and perhaps their very existence. They endured centuries of conquest, foreign occupation, decline, decadence. Only the nineteenth century brought scope to reconnect with earlier splendours. Yet it also yielded modern liberal and socialist parties and programmes which across Europe had little patience with medieval values, except in so far as they had bred rebels who sought to emancipate themselves from the associated hierarchy, duress and subordination. Fourthly, there was also an intrinsic factor which came to undermine the place of serious medievalism in public life. The very consolidation of the historical profession, and of the academic status of the Middle Ages within it, gradually brought an inevitable disjunction between learned and popular discourse, with the latter taking on a life of its own in literature, art, the press, textbooks, and then eventually the modern mass media. The process was under way in some places by the mid-nineteenth century, in others not until the later twentieth. At the same time the rising vogue for commemorations and monuments, however much it might draw on the results of erudition, automatically yielded political and cultural distortions in the competition for official sponsorship, public funds and media attention. Fifthly and finally, alternative historical sources of patriotic pride emerged to rival the medieval vision: on the one hand recourse to the ancient world or the early Christian centuries; on the other hand discovery of what came to be called the Renaissance, or a new or renewed emphasis on the coming of the

262 The Uses of the Middle Ages in Modern European States

Reformation as the decisive step in the formation of nationhood. Indeed in some areas, as is shown here for the Netherlands and south-east Europe, that was largely true from the outset. Above all, in the fullness of time the new modern states progressively achieved a maturity of their own and could serve as a repository of national values and source of those attributes which made for a national ‘heritage’. As with all collections of this kind, there are of course gaps in our coverage too. Most conspicuous perhaps is the absence of Lithuania, as a small state with a very large eponymous predecessor. Hungary and Poland both evince features of continuity with, and disruption from, their medieval antecedents. Wales and Scotland could, in their different ways, be set alongside Ireland; Romania and Bulgaria and even Albania display elements of the Serbian paradigm. Croats and Slovaks celebrate obscure but inspiriting medieval heroes, as our cover illustration indicates. But we hope to have shown some of the ways in which ‘young states’ could build on ‘old nations’, and how limitations of power and influence in the modern world might be explained, excused or compensated for, by appeal to that store of pristine model and exemplar which was bequeathed by the European Middle Ages.

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Index* Acropolis, architectural changes, 146 Adelsten, king of Norway, 21 Adrian VI, pope, 123 Aðils, Jón Jónsson, 53 Agolfingians, 235 Aho, Juhani, 47 Aktion für eine Unabhängige und Neutrale Schweiz (AUNS), 214–15 Alaric, 142 Albania and Albanians, 140, 143, 149, 237, 262 possible future membership in EU, 139 Alemannians, 236 Aleš, Mikuláš, 249 Alexander the Great as Hellenic hero, 148 as Illyrian and proto-Albanian, 140 Alexander II, Russian emperor, 40 Alter Zürichkrieg, 198 Alþingi (Icelandic parliament), 56–7, 61 Amari, Michele, 182, 186–7 Aminoff, Torsten, 39 Ammian, 142 Anderson, Benedict, 49 Andersson, Theodore M., 61 Angevins in Italy, 184, 189 Anglo-Saxons, Victorian fashion for, 260 Annals of the Four Masters, see Four Masters Anschluss, 227, 231–2, 236 antiquarians and antiquarianism, 10 in Belgium, 117, 124 in Finland, 33–8, 45–7, 49, 50 in Iceland, 55 in Ireland, 10–15 in Italy, 192–3 reconstruction of Acropolis, 146 Arabs in Greece, 148 in Sicily, 184, 187 Archivio Storico Italiano, 182 Arendt, Charles, 96 aristocracy Dutch opposition to, 79

of Italy, 185, 192–3 of Norway, 21, 24–5, 27: weakness and eventual disappearance, 22 of Serbia, 155, 158: movement north and west, 161 Arnamagnæan, Collection, Foundation, and Institute, 55, 57, 63–6, 68 Árni Magnússon Institute, 66, 68 Artevelde, Jacob van, 120–1 cult of, 121 Le siècle des Artevelde, 127 monument, 121 Artifoni, Enrico, 177 Ashik Pasha, 158 Augustine, 141 Austria, Austrian, and Austrians, 2, 221ff. Belgium and effects of Austrian dominance, 113, 122 censorship in, 249–50 Luxembourg and Austrian dominance, 99, 115 propaganda against Swiss, 199 rump, 260 Serbia leaves Austrian sphere of influence, 147 S. Netherlands and Austrian regime, 115 Switzerland: propaganda against, 199; ‘natural enmity’ of, 203 Zurich’s alliance with, 198 Austro-Hungarian Empire, see Habsburg Monarchy Avars, as enemies of Bavaria, culture and Austria, 227, 235 Bagge, Sverre, 20, 68 Bakhuizen van den Brink, Reinier, 76, 116, 120 Balbo, Cesare, 177–8, 182–5 Baldwin IX of Flanders, and Latin emperor, 119 Balkan War, first, 148, 163 Barbarossa, and Frederick I, Holy Roman emperor, 77, 189 Baring-Gould, Sabine, 52–3, 66

284

Index

Barthes, Roland, 213 Battini, Constantino, 183 Bavaria, and Bavarians, 227, 235 as precursors of Austria, 223–4, 234–7 Bayezid, sultan, 156, 157 Bech, Joseph, 101–2 Beck, Marcel, 205 Becker, Reinhold von, 37 Belgium, and Belgians, 2, 93, 97, 113ff. Belgian Revolution, 93–4, 113–15, 119 separation from the Netherlands, 75 Benedict XV, pope, 100 Benjamin, Walter, 178 Berbers in Sicily, 187 Berg, Karl, 235 Bern, alliance of, 207 Bertels, Jean, 90 Bertholet, Jean, 90–1, 92 Bertolini, Francesco, 190 Bethune, Jean-Baptiste, 125 Biermann, Pierre, 98 Bilec´a, battle of, 154 Billig, Michael, 49 Bilmark, Johan, 34–5 Black Death, see plague Blanc, Louis, 249 Blanc, Pierre, 96 Boch-Buschmann, Jean-François, 93–4 Bohemia, see Czech lands Bopp, Franz, 39 Borgnet, Adolphe, 115 Bosnia, 154–5, 157, 159, 167 war in 1990s, 139 Božic´, Ivan, 163 Brankovic´, see Vuk Brethren of the Common Life, 81 Breydel, Jan, 128 Broek, Hans van den, 171 Brøndsted, Mogens, 64 Brunner, Karl, 228 Büdinger, Max, 248 Bugge, Sophus, 21 Bulgaria, and Bulgarians, 139, 143, 145, 154, 262 founding of modern Bulgaria, 259 and Greece, 147–9 Bull, Edvard, the elder, 24 Burckhardt, Jacob, 179, 222 Byzantine Church, 155

285

Byzantines, 147 in Italy, 184 Byzantium, 2, 126, 139–49, 153–4, 184, 187 Calmy-Rey, Micheline, 215 Calvin, John, 81 Calvinism, and Calvinist, 28, 77, 79, 81–2 Cammarano, Salvadore, 190 Capei, Pietro, 182 Carducci, Giosue, 180, 191, 193 Carolingian period in Austria, 224: manuscripts, 227; representation of, 230 Italian representation of, 186 Casnedi, Raffaele, 188 Cassioli, Amos, 190 Castrén, Matthias Alexander, 39 Catholics, and Catholicism, 228, 251, 261 Belgian Catholics and national identity, 96–7, 114, 120–1, 123–8 Czech lands, 245 Dutch Catholics and national identity, 28, 75–6, 80–6 Finns and Catholicism, 42 Irish Catholics and national identity, 8–10, 12, 14–15: prohibition on Catholic printing, 10 in Italy, 177–8, 180, 182, 184 Luxembourg, 97 Norwegian, 28 in Switzerland, 200, 208 Cattaneo, Carlo, 182, 184, 185–7 Ceasair, 7 Celts, depicted as ancestors of Austrians, 236–7 Celtic Society, 13–14 censorship in Austria (and Czech lands), 249–50 in Finland, 45–6 Charlemagne, 237 as Belgian hero, 122 coronation of, 126 deposition of Tassilo III, 231 nationalization of his memory, 189 Charles IV, Holy Roman emperor, 98, depiction of, in Czech historiography, 245, 253–5 nationality of, 255 Charles XII, king of Sweden, 23 Charles the Bold, 116

286

Index

Charlotte, grand duchess of Luxembourg, 100–2 chosen people Dutch as, 119 Finns as, 42 Romans as, 141–2: refutation of, by St Augustine, 141 Swiss as, 119, 199–200, 206 Christ Byzantine emperor as heir to, 142 Dutch history and, 78, 81, 85 Godfrey of Bouillon and, 119 Christian III, king of Norway, 28 Christianity and civilization, 126 and clash with Islam, 153 and Dutch identity, 79–81 introduction of (conversion): to Belgians, 121; to Danubian lands, 234; to Finns, 43, 47; to Norse, 19, 21, 26 Irish, 8 Roman restoration of, 185 sacrifice for Christianity of Serbian prince Lazar, 153 civil war Finnish, 48 in Norway, 21 Spanish, 102 Clarendon, first earl of, 52 Clemenceau, Georges comment on Austria, 224 Clément, Frantz, 97 Clovis, king of the Franks, 121 Club War, 32 Cold War, 1, 201, 211 collective memory, or ethnic/national memory Austrian, 224 of Balkan peoples, 140, 149 Belgian, 116–17, 121 Czech, 253 Dutch, 75: Catholic, 84–5 Icelandic, 54, 65 Irish, 12–13, 15: familial, 7 Italian, 177, 185, 193 Jewish, 144 Luxembourger, 88–9, 98, 106 Serbian, 117, 152, 154, 160, 164–5 Swedish, 33 Swiss, 199ff., 209, 212–13 Collège de France, 76

College of St Anthony of Louvain, 9 communalism, and communes Dutch, 79 ideal, in Italy, 178, 180, 183–6, 189–90, 192 in Switzerland, 205 of medieval times, contrasted with individualism, 124 peasants in Norway, 23 Commune of Paris, 188, 192 communist ideals, projected onto Czech past, 251, 255 Party of Austria (KPÖ), 223–4 Party of Yugoslavia, 163, 165: turn to nationalism, 163, 165, 169 rule, 164 Comnena, Anna, 142 Congress of Berlin, and independence of Balkan lands, 147, 161 Congress of Vienna, 91, 99, 184 Coninck, Pieter de, 128 Conrad I, count, 104 Conscience, Hendrik, 115, 117–18, 121 Constance lake, 198 peace of, 181 Constant, Benjamin, 183 Constantine the Great, emperor, 142 Constantine the Philosopher, 158 Constantinople, 142, 146–7, 154 Islamic conquest, 145 and Megali idea, 147–8 occupation by Baldwin IX, 119 and Orthodox Church, 145 Cosmas of Prague, 228 Counter-Reformation and education in Italy, 184 in Ireland, 8 Crécy, battle, 93, 97, 98 Crimean War, 147 Croatia, 139 Serbs of, 167 war in, 139 Croce, Benedetto, 178 crusades, 35, 42, 193 and Belgium, 118–20 fourth crusade, 143 curriculum, see education Cuypers, Pierre, 75, 84 Czech lands, Czechs, and Bohemia, 1, 2, 90, 92, 105–6, 229, 233, 245ff.

Index

D’Andrade, Alfredo, 191 d’Anly, Jean, 90 D’Azeglio, Massimo, 190 Da Brescia, Arnaldo, 191 Da Giussano, Alberto, 190 Daa, Ludvig Kristensen, 21 Dambeck, Johann, 247 Dändliker, Karl, 203 Danes, and Denmark, 259 and Iceland, 54–9, 63–4, 66 and Norway, 18–19, 21–3, 26–7: immigrants, 22 Daniil, abbot, 143 Danilo, Serbian patriarch, 160 Dante Alighieri, 185, 191 Dasent, George Webbe, 52–3 David, Jan-Baptist, 115 de Gerlache, Etienne, 121 De Gids, 116 de Keyser, Nicaise, 117 Delfico, Melchiorre, 193 Dempster, Thomas, 9 Denmark, see Danes devil, as spirit of every age, 227 Dierauer, Johannes, 203 Dinic´, Mihailo, 163 divine master plan, judgement, mission, or purpose European mission and Belgium, 130 in Finnish history, 42–3 Godfrey of Bouillon fulfils mission, 119 judgment for Switzerland, 199 of Rome, 185 Dobrovský, Josef, 246, 248 Domentian, 143 Dopsch, Alphons, 229 Dopsch, Heinz, 234 Dositheos, patriarch, 144 Dragoumis, Ion, 148 Ðuretic´, Veselin, 166–7 Ðuric´, Vojislav, 168 Dušan, Serbian emperor, 153 Dutch Republic, and people, 28, 75ff., 113, 115 historians, 22, 28 Dynter, Edmond van, 123 Éber, 7 Eburones, 115 Echternach, 101–2 Eddas, 21, 59

287

education (esp. history), and curriculum in Austria, 221–2, 229 of Balkan peoples, 144 in Belgium, 125 in Finland, 44, 46, 49 in Greece, 148 in Ireland, 13 in Italy, 184, 191 in Luxembourg, 92, 96, 101 in Switzerland, 200, 206 Egerszegi, Christine, 215 Einarsson, Sigurður, 65 Ekman, Robert Wilhelm, 40 Elisabeth of Wittelsbach, 232 Engelbrektson, Olav, bishop, 28, Engels, Michel, 96 England, and the English, 2, 77–8, 120, 185, 245 Dutch defeat of, 75 and the Irish, 8, 10, 12 Erasmus, 78, 81 Eremón, 7 Ermesinde, countess, 89, 96, 101–2 Etter, Philipp, 210 Etterlin, Petermann, 202 Europa (rape of), 237 Europe Czechs as saviours of, 247 Serbs as defenders of, 171 European Community, 27–8, 103 European Union (EU), 28, 88, 105, 139, 171, 236 debate about EU in Austria, 236 debate on accession: in Norway, 27–8; in Switzerland, 215–16 Eustache of Wiltheim, 90 Evans, Robert J.W., 245 Feifalik, Julius, 248 Feller, Richard, 205 Fennomans, 41–2, 45 Ferdinand, Bulgarian tsar, 147 Ferrari, Giuseppe, 185 Fiannaíocht, 15 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 59 Finnish Literature Society, 38 Finno-Geatic theory, 33–5, 37, 39 Finno-Ugrian, languages and peoples, 35–7, 39–40, 44 Finns/Finland, 2, 23ff., 259 Fir Bolg, 7 Firnberg, Herta, 228

288

Index

Flanders, 75, 116–18, 120, 122, 128, 130 see also Gwijde and Baldwin IX Flavius Josephus, 145 Flemings Flemish autonomy/independence movement, 118, 128 supplant Belgians (with Walloons), 127 tension with Walloons, 129–30 folklore in Finland, 32, 38 in Greece, 147 among Serbs, 160 Forsman, Georg Zacharias, 41–2 Four Masters, 9–10, 12 France, 1–2, 88, 90, 147, 179, 185, 186, 200, 253 Belgium and, 122 Flemings and, 117–18 Luxembourg and, 97–9, 106 Franciscan order, 9 Franco-Prussian War (1870), 97, 201 Frederick I, see Barbarossa Frederick II, emperor, 178 Frederick VI, king of Denmark, 19 Frederick William IV, king of Prussia, 103 as crown prince, removes and reburies the remains of John of Bohemia, 93–4 French Revolution (1789), 120, 236 development in Switzerland after, 207 histories of, 249 Palacký’s interpretation, 251 revolutionary army, 93 Froissart, Jean, 93 Frye, Northrop, 22 Fueter, Eduard, 178, 197 Gachard, Louis-Prosper, 122–4 Gallait, Louis, 119, 122 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 188 Gauls, as ancestors of Belgians, 115 Geary, Patrick, 141 Geert Grote, 78, 81 Gellner, Ernest, 27, 140 Gelre, count of, 117 Gerald of Wales, 8 Germania, 188 Germans, and Germany, 1–2, 52, 88, 91, 93, 94, 102, 106, 114, 130, 139, 147, 166, 188, 205, 249, 252–4, 256, 260 ancestry of, 237 Austrian symbolic separation from, 223–4

and Belgium, 117 and Czechs, 245–9 historical school, and historians, 21, 61, 105, 124, 129, 130, 146, 181–2, 223, 246–8, 250–2, 254, 255 immigrants to Norway, 22 and Italy, 184–5, 187, 189 and Luxembourg, 99, 102, 106: Luxembourg’s economic dependency, 98 nationalism, 77, 97 occupation: of Belgium, 130; of Denmark, 54; of Luxembourg, 97–100 theology, 80–1 Gibbon, Edward, 182 Gilbert, J. T., 12 Gioberti, Vincenzo, 182 Gioia, Melchiorre, 177 God, 80–1, 157–8, 201 and Dutch nationalism, 79 as font of Swiss history, 199–201, 210 grace of, in Finnish history, 42 his chosen people – Swiss and Dutch, 119, 199–200, 206 his creation of all things, 237 his ways neglected in medieval times, according to Protestant Dutch historians, 77–8 leads Belgians to crusades, 119 rejected by Protestants, according to Catholic Dutch historians, 83 Romans as elected people of, 141 as source of mankind, 227 Godfrey of Bouillon, duke, 119–20 golden age Dutch, 22, 76 Finnish: pre-historic, 35; at fin de siècle, 46, 49 Icelandic, 53, 65 Italian, 177 Serbian, 153 Golden Bull of Charles IV, 98 Golden Spurs, battle of, and battle of Courtrai, 117–18 commemoration of, 128 Flemish cult, 118, 128 Gothic style, and neo-Gothic movement in Belgium, 125–7 in Italian histories, 183 in The Netherlands, 75, 84 Goths, as ancestors of Swedes and Danes, 21

Index

grace, 42, 141 Grafenauer, Bogo, 225 Graus, František, 1, 2 Great Famine in Ireland, 12 Great Peasant War (1525), 226 Great War, see World War I Greece, and Greeks, 114, 146–9, 154 ancient, 53, 61, 67, 140, 142: as model of modern Greece, 145–6, 148; Roman conquest (depiction of), 145 founding of modern Greece, 259 and Macedonia, 139, 148–9 Greenland, 19, 59, 66 Gregorovius, Ferdinand, 179 Gregory of Tours, 228 Grillparzer, Franz, 227–8 Grimm, Jacob, 39 Grimm, Robert, 204 Groen van Prinsterer, Guillaume, 77–9 Grønbech, Kåre, 59, 64 Grønbech, Vilhelm, 58 Grundtvig, Nikolaj Frederik Severin, 64 Guizot, François, 180–2 Gunnar of Hliðarendi, 64 Gustav Vasa, king of Sweden, 23 Gwijde, count of Dampierre, 117 Habsburg dynasty, 89–90, 198, 210, 226, 245 commemoration of founding, in Tyrol, 232 Habsburg Monarchy and rule, and Austro-Hungarian Empire, 91, 198, 222, 226, 260 absolutism, 91 and Czech lands, 245 and Italy, 189 and Low Countries, 89, 100 relations with Serbia, 163 and Spain, 89 and Switzerland, 198–9, 203 Hackman, Alfred, 45 Hagia Sophia, 147 Håkon (Håkonson) IV, king of Norway, 18 Håkon V, king of Norway, 18 Hallam, Henry, 182 Hamartolos, Georgios, 143 Hamlet, 62 Hanka, Václav, 246, 248 Hanseatic League, 25 Hartmann, Moritz, 250 Hasselt, André van, 127

289

Hasund, Sigvald, 24 Hatzidakis, Georgios, 147 Hayez, Francesco, 189 Heelu, Jan van, 122 Helfert, Josef Alexander, 251 Helgason, Jón, 65 Helge, 64 Helleputte, Joris, 125 Henry IV, Holy Roman emperor, 77 Herchen, Arthur, 99, 100, 102 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 41–2, 59, 246 Herodotus, 142 Hilty, Carl, 203–4 Himmelsthür, meeting at, 166 Historisk tidsskrift (Norwegian), 21 Hitler and Vienna, 227 Hobsbawm, Eric, 27, 140 Höfler, Constantin, 251–2, 254 Hofstede de Groot, Petrus, 80–1 Holland, 75, 77–9, 81, 84 Holmsen, Andreas, 24 Holy Alliance, 80 Holy Roman Empire, 76, 105, 203, 254 Homer, 38, 142, 247 Honiatis, Nikitas, 144 Hrafnkell, 62 Hugo, Victor, 92 Hume, David, 52, 62 Hungarians, and Hungary, 92, 105, 139, 229, 262 and Burgenland, 233 as descendants of Huns, 238 as ethnic kin of Finns, 35 King Tvrtko’s attacks on, 156–7 occupation of Pannonia, 224 Hus, Jan, 245 and Austrian censorship, 249 as Czech national hero, 249, 252–3 Hussites, and Hussitism, depictions of, in Czech history, 249–53, 255 as primitive communism, 255 Iceland, 2, 19, 26, 33, 52ff., 259 Icelandic sagas, and manuscripts, 35, 52–68 identity, national and ethnic, 2–3, 32 in Austria, 223, 226, 229–30, 236 in Balkan lands, 140, 144, 145 Belgian, 114, 117–20, 127–8: of parties, 127 in Czech lands, 245–8, 252, 254

290

Index

identity, national and ethnic – continued Danish, 64 Dutch Catholic, 82, 85 Finnish, 32–4, 36–7, 41–3, 48–9 Icelandic, 53–4, 67 Irish, 15 in Italy, 177–9, 184, 191–2 Jewish, 145 in Luxembourg, 88ff., esp. 91–2, 94, 95, 97, 99, 103, 105–6 in The Netherlands, 82–3 Norwegian, 19, 21, 24, 26–8 Serbian, 152–4, 160–3, 169, 154, 171–2 in Sweden, 33–4 Swiss, 197 ff., esp. 200–2, 204, 209–14, 217 Illyrians, as ancestors of Albanians, 140, 237 industrial revolution, 208 Ingemann, Bernard Severin, 64 Innocent III, pope, comments on Vienna, 227 Ír, 7 Ireland, 2, 7ff., 236, 259, 262 Irish Academy, 10–11, 13 Irish Archaeological Society, 11, 13 Irish Texts Society, 13–14 Iron Curtain, 139, 233–4 Isaac II, Byzantine emperor, 144 Islam, and Muslims in Jerusalem, 118 and Serbia, 153, 160 and Sicily, 186–7 Italia, 188 Italy, 2, 102, 120, 177ff., 222, 253, 260 Ivan III, Russian tsar, 260 Ivan IV, Russian tsar, 260 Japheth, 33 Jaromír, prince, 247 Jaroslav, prince, 247 Jeanne d’Arc, 260 Jensen, Johannes V, 64 Jerusalem crusades and, 118–19 patriarch of, 144 Jesuit order, 91 Jevtic´, Anastasije, bishop, 166, 172 Jews, 141 as metaphor for oppression of Finns, 43 of Thessaloniki, 148 Jirecˇek, Konstantin, 162

Johannes Magnus, 33 Jóhannesson, Alexander, 55 John I, duke of Brabant, 117 John ‘the Blind’, king of Bohemia and count of Luxembourg, 89, 99–100 death of, 98 as a European, 105 as a French prince, 97–8 as a German prince, 94 memorial to, 94–5, 103 remains of, 93–5, 102–3 as the subject of art, histories, or literature, 96 Joris, Jean, 99 Josephinism, 226 Julius Caesar, 115 Jungmann, Josef, 248 Juslenius, Daniel, 33–6, 38–9 Juste, Théodore, 115, 120, 126 Kalevala, 34, 38–40, 44–5, 47 Kalmar union, 27 Kalousek, Josef, 254–5 Karantania, 224–6 Karawanken mts, 225–6 Karelia, 36, 39, 47 Karelia Society, 43 Karelianism, 36, 46 Kearney, Michael, 10 Keating, Geoffrey, 9–10, 12–14 Keller, Gottfried, 207 Kervyn de Lettenhove, baron Joseph, 118, 121 Keyser, Nicaise de, 117 Keyser, Rudolf, 21, 59–61 Kievan Rus, historiography of, 143 Kingdom of God, its disappearance, 141 Klaus, Josef, 234 Klingenstein, Grete, 226 Kluit, Adriaan, 77 Koht, Halvdan, 24 Kollár, Jan, 246 Kopp, Joseph Eutych, 202–3 Köppen, F. T., 39 Korais, Adamantios, 145 Kosovo, battle and place, 117, 155, 172 play and film, 168–9 Slobodan Miloševic´’s speech, 145 Koštunica, Vojislav, 172 Kovacˇevic´, Ljubomir, 162 Kritoboulos, Michael, 145 Krumbacher, Karl, 142

Index

Kruševac, 163 Kuenringer, and their depiction in Austria, 233 Kumanovo, battle, 163 Kunst- en Letterblad, 116 Kurth, Godefroid, 124–6 Kyffhäuser monument, 189 Lala Shahin Pasha, 154 Lampe, John, 140 Lamprecht, Karl, 129, 130 Lapps, see Saami Lárusson, Ólafur, 67 Lavater, Johann Kaspar, 206 Lazar, Serbian prince, 153–5, 163, 165 his cult, 153, 159–60, 162, 168, 171 his death, 157–9, 171 histories about, 167–8, 172 his remains, 163 his sacrifice, 172 his vow/oath, 153, 171 Le Sage ten Broek, Joachim, 83 Leabhar Gabhála, 7 Leabhar na hUidhre, 10 Lechfeld, battle commemoration, 230 Lega Lombarda, 190–1 Lega Nord, 190 legends, and legendary figures or places Belgian, 119, 122 Czech, 249 Finnish, 38 Irish, 7, 13–15 Italian, 190, 192 on Kosovo battle, 145, 152ff., esp. 158–63, 166, 168–72 in Luxembourg, 106 Norwegian, 60 Legnano, battle of, 189 bicycle, 190 Verdi’s opera, 190 Lehmann, Orla, 65 Lenz, Pierre-Albert, 94 Leo III, pope, 126, 231 Leo, Heinrich, 179, 182, 184 Leopold I, king of Belgium, 114 Leopold III, count of Austria, 199–200, 223 Lhotsky, Alphons, 229–30 Libuše, opera, 249 Libuše, princess and ‘Judgement of’, 247–8

291

Liestøl, Knut, 62 lieux de mémoire Icelandic manuscripts as, 58 of Luxembourg, 89, 96 limes and Austrian borders, 234 Limburg War of Succession, 117 Linda, Josef, 246–8 Lippert, Julius, 252 Loke, 64 Lombards in Italy, 184–7 Lönnrot, Elias, 36–8, 40 Lope de Vega, 228 Loserth, Johann, 255 Lothar I, king of Franks, 129 Lucerne, 198, 207 alliances, 207 Luther, Martin, 81, 249 Lutheran, and Lutheranism, 28, 41, 65 Luxembourg, 2, 88ff., 119, 253, 255, 259 Lynch, John, 10 Mabillon, Jean, 91, 231 Macedonia, 154 Greek depictions of, 139, 148–9 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 179–80, 184 Macpherson, James, 246 Maerlant, Jacob van, 128 Magog, 33, 35 Magna Carta, as point of reference in Austrian history, 226 in Italian history, 181 Magnússon, Árni (Arnas), 55–7, 66 Malalas, Joannis, 143 Mánes, Josef, 249 Manzoni, Alessandro, 180, 182–5 Margherita, queen of Italy, 191 Margue, Nicolas, 103 Maria Theresa, Austrian empress, 226 Marie-Adelaide, grand duchess of Luxembourg, 100 Maritsa river, battle at, 154 Marko, Serbian king, 161 Maurer, Konrad, 61 Maximilian I and Austria, 229 manifesto of, 199 Mayer, Horst Friedrich, 225 Mayer, Theodor, 205 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 181, 188 Mehmed II, the Conqueror, sultan, 145 Meijer, Jonas Daniël, 79

292

Index

Meinhard II, commemoration in Tyrol, 231–2 Meissner, Alfred, 250 Melas, Pavlos, 148 Memling, Hans, 125 Messager des Sciences Historiques, 124 Messenius, Johannes, 33–4, 39 Metternich, prince, 181 Meyer, Karl, 205, 210–11 Meyers, Joseph, 98, 100 Michelet, Jules, 76, 179, 186–7 Mihaljcˇic´, Rade, 160, 163, 167–8 Míl Espáine, 7 Milesians, 7 Miloš Obilic´ [Kobila], 158, 162 popular legend, 170–1 Miloševic´, Slobodan, 145, 164, 169–70, 172 Mischkultur Belgium as, 130 Luxembourg as, 97, 105 mission, see divine master plan Mitsotakis, Konstantinos, government of, 139 Moke, Henri, 115, 120 Mongols, see Tatars Montenegro, 161, 169 Mouskès, Philippe, 123 Müller, Johannes von, 202–4 Munch, Peter Andreas, 59 Murad I, sultan, 154–5, 157 accounts of his death, 157, 170 Muratori, Ludovico Antonio, 181–3, 190 Muslims, see Islam Myslbek, Václav, 249 myth, and mythology, 1, 32, 76, 178, 237, 246–7 Belgian, 115 Czech (see Libuše), 246–7 Dutch, ‘God–Holland–Orange’, 79 of Europa, 237 Finnish, 32–6, 38, 40, 45, 48–50 Icelandic, 53, 64 Irish, 8, 13, 15 Italian, 188–91: of liberty, 193; of the Risorgimento, 189 of last Byzantine emperor, 145 Luxembourger, 88ff., esp. 103–4 of Macedonia, among Greeks, 148 Serbian, 152: Kosovo, 161–2, 168, 171–2

Spanish, in Lope de Vega’s work, 228 Swiss, 200–1, 203–5, 207–8, 214 Nansen, Fridtjof, 20 Napoleon Bonaparte, 113, 228 his regime, 83: in Italy, 178 Napoleonic Wars, 19 national anthem Belgian, 11 Swiss, 210, 216 national awakening, 145 Czech, 245 Finnish, 31 national character, 261 nation-building, 2, 26, 38, 76, 140, 145–6 Nazis, and Nazi period, 26, 99, 229 Nemed, 7 Nemanjid dynasty, 143 Nervii, 115 Netherlands, 2, 75ff., 91–2, 113–16, 119, 122, 127, 259, 262 Nevsky, Alexander, prince, 260 New Testament, 40 New York, 12 Nibelungenlied, 38 Nicholas V, pope, 78 Njáls Saga, and Njal, 52, 64 Noah, 7, 33 Noppeney, Marcel, 97 Nora, Pierre, 58 Nordal, Sigurður, 56, 60–2, 65 Nordic, see Scandinavian Normans in Belgium, 122 in Ireland, 9 in Italy, 184, 187 Norway, and Norwegians, 2, 18–28, 59–62, 67 independence of modern Norway, 259 Novakovic´, Stojan, 167 Ó Cléirigh, Michael, 9 O’Curry, Eugene, 11 O’Donovan, John, 11 O’Mahony, John, 12 Obrenovic´ dynasty, 161 Oechsli, Wilhelm, 203–4 Oehlenschläger, Adam, 64–5 Ogris, Alfred, 225 Olaf (Tryggvason) I, king of Norway, 64 Ólason, Vésteinn, 68 Olaus Magnus, 33

Index

Old Testament, 7–8 Oldrˇich, prince, 247 Ólsen, Björn M., 61 Olympic Games, 61, 140 Orange-Nassau, house of, 92, 100 Orbini, Mavro, 160 Orthodox Church, and its adherents, 141, 144–5, 147–9, 161 Greek, 144, 149 Serbian, 159, 172: conference in Germany, 166; integration into communist system, 163; nationalism of, 164–5, 171–2 Ossian, 38, 247 Österreichische Volkspartei (ÖVP), 223 Otto of Freising, non-commemoration in Austria, 223 Ottokar II, king, 230 Ottoman Empire, 145, 147–9, 153, 157 decline of, 161–2, 259 expansion of, 143, 144, 152, 154–6, 159 historical sources, 155, 158 language of, 144 memory of, 22, 145–6, 166, 170 system of rule, 144–6, 153, 160 Overbeck, Johann Friedrich, 188 Oxford Movement, 77 Pachymeres, George, 143 Paisij Hilandarski, 145 Palacký, František, 248, 250–4 Palamas, Kostis, 147 pan-Slavism, 250 papacy, see popes Paparrhigopoulos, Konstantinos, 147 Paquet, Joseph, 98 Parthalo´n, 7 patriotism, see identity, national peasant revolts, 206, 236 peasantry, peasants, 22–4, 38, 40, 66, 199–200, 204–6, 236, 251 Pelzel, F. M., 246, 253 Pétain, Philippe, French field marshal, 98 Peter I (the Great), tsar of Russia, 147 Peter II, king of Serbia, 163 Peter of Aspelt, 105 Peter of Zittau, 93 Peter the Hermit, 119 Petrarch, 222 Petrie, George, 11 Philip the Good, duke of Brabant and Luxembourg, count of Holland, 116

293

Philip of Macedon, 148 Piedmont, 178, 182 Pierret, François, 90 Pirenne, Henri, 129–30 plague, and Black Death, 24–5, 27 Poland, 105, 262 Polidori, Luigi Filippo, 191 Politika, newspaper, 168, 171 Politis, Nikolaos, 147 Pontida oath, 190 popes, and papacy, 28, 76–8, 80, 100, 123, 126, 180, 185–6, 221, 227, 231 and decline of Western Roman Empire, 141 Popovic´, Miodrag, 163 Porthan, Henrik Gabriel, 34–9 Portugal, 114 Prˇemysl, king of Bohemia commemoration of his defeat, 230 Prˇemyslid dynasty, 245, 253 Procopios, 142 Protestantism, and Protestants, 10, 14, 28, 42, 76–83, 85, 261 and Czech identity, 245, 249–51: Hussites as original Protestants, 251 Protestant–Catholic divide, 81–2, 251 Swiss, 200 Prussia, 92–4, 106, 189, 260 Puymaigre, Théodore de, 97 Pyrrhos, as Illyrian and proto-Albanian, 140 Quinet, Edgar, 179 Raedts, Peter, 28 Ragnarok, 64 Ranke, Leopold von, 181–2 Rappard, William, 197 Rask, Rasmus, 39 Ratzenböck, Josef, 235 Red¯ep, Jelka, 163 Reformation, 262 Catholic views of, and spread of (as a plague), 83, 85, 183 in Czech lands, and its representation, 249, 255 in Ireland, 8 in Norway, 23 results of, in Dutch lands, 77–8, 81–3 Réim Ríoghraidhe, 7–8 Renaissance, 126, 261 interest in, in Italy, 179

294

Index

Renan, Ernest, 186 Renner, Karl, 224 Reumont, Alfred von, 182 revolutions of 1848, and effects in Czech lands, 252, 254 in Finland, 40, 42 in Italian lands, 178, 190 memory of: in Austria, 223; in Switzerland, 197, 209, 210, 216 in Switzerland, 197, 202, 207 Reynold, Gonzague de, 204 Rhaetians, as ancestors of Austrians, 235 Ricasoli, Bettino, 192 Richard I, the Lionheart, king of England captivity in what would become Lower Austria, 223 Rijksmuseum, 75, 84 Rijnsburg abbey, 78 Rill, Gerhard, 225 Risorgimento myths, 189 Roar, 64 Robertson, William, 182 Rolf Krake, 64 Romania, and Romanians, 139–41, 143, 149, 262 founding of modern Romania, 259 Romanov dynasty, 147 Rubbiani, Alfonso, 192 Rudolf II, emperor, 245 Runciman, Steven, 141 Runeberg, Johan Lundvig, 36–7 Ruskin, John, 193 Russia, 48–9, 141, 147, 248, 259–60 Swedish wars with, 32 Rütli meadow, 202, 208, 210, 212–16 oaths of, 200–4, 206, 208, 211, 213, 215–16 report, 214 spirit of, 215 Ruvarac, Ilarion, 162 Saami (Lapps), 35, 44 Šafarˇík, Pavel Josef, 246, 248 Said, Edward, 140 St Boniface, 85 St Cyril, the philosopher, 234 St Methodius, 234 commemoration of, 231, 235 St Olaf, 64 St Patrick converts the Irish, 8 his day, 11

St St St St

Paul, 148, 199 Rupert of Salzburg, 231 Sava, 153 Vitus Cathedral in Prague, 253 day, 163 St Wenceslas, 245 Sajnovics, János, 35, 39 Salvemini, Gaetano, 179, 193 Samaras, Antonis, 139 San Stefano, treaty, 148 Sand, George, 249–50 Santer, Jacques, 105 Sardinia, 181–2 Sars, Ernst, 22–3 Savigny, Friedrich Carl von, 182 Savoy, dynasty, 188, 192–3, 198, 260 Saxo Grammaticus, 33 Scandinavian, and Nordic, 22, 25, 33, 52–3, 56–9, 61, 63, 65, 67 Scandinavism, 27 Scarin, Algot, 34–5 Schengen agreement/zone, 88 debate in Switzerland, 212, 214 Schiera, Pierangelo, 187–8 Schiller, Friedrich, 207–8, 214 centenary of his birth, 207–8 Schlesinger, Ludwig, 252, 254–5 Schoetter, Jean, 96, 98 Schreiner, Johan, 18, 25 Schuman, Robert, 105–6 Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP), and its use of Swiss national mythology, 212–16 Scotia, 9 Scotland, 262 Scott, Walter, 182, 184 Seip, Jens Arup, 28 Sejersted, Francis, 22 Sempach, battle, 199–201 anniversary of, 207–9 Serbia, and Serbs, 2, 117, 139, 143, 145, 147, 149, 152ff., 259 Serbian Academy (SANU), 164 Memorandum, 164 Serbian Orthodox Church, 159, 163–5, 169, 171–2 Serbian uprisings, 161 Serrure, Constant-Philippe, 124 Servites, 183 Sestan, Ernesto, 188 Setälä, Eemil Nestor, 31

Index

Shakespeare, William, 62, 245 Shroud of Turin, chapel, 192 Sibelius, Jean, 47 Sicily, 184, 186–7 anti-French revolt, 186 government, 186 Muslim rule, 186–7 Norman rule, 187 Sigefroid, count and European Union, 103–4 and foundation of Luxembourg, 89, 96, 99, 104 Sigismund, king of Hungary, 157 Sigurd Fáfnisbani, 64 Silent Ambulation, 85 Simeon I, Bulgarian tsar, 147 Simovic´, Ljubomir, 168 Sismondi, Jean-Charles-Léonard Simonde de, 179, 181, 183–4, 189 Sjögren, A. J., 39 Skanderbeg, 143 Skoutariotes, Theodoros, 144 Slavs, 148, 231 Slovenia, and Slovenes, 171 offend Austrian nationalists, 225–6 Smetana, Bedrˇich, 249, 252 Smith, Anthony D., 27, 32 Smith, George, 11–12 Snellman, Johan Vilhelm, 41–2 Snorri Sturluson, 26 Social Democrats, 48, 215, 223, 233 socialism, and socialists, 48, 50, 121, 124, 128, 164, 188, 208, 251, 261 birth of Socialist Party, 192 revolution, 164 Socialist Party of Austria (SPÖ), 223–4 Société d’Emulation pour l’Histoire et les Antiquités de la Flandre Occidentale, 123 Sonderbund War, 207 Souliotis-Nikolaidis, Athanasios, 148 Spain, 8, 76, 79, 82 Spevak, Stefan, 221 Spinelli, Matteo, 191 Srec´kovic´, Pantelija, 162 Stille Omgang, see Silent Ambulation Sulakadzev, Alexander, 246 Svecomans, 41 Sveinsson, Gísli, 54 Sverre, king of Norway, 21, 28 Svjatoslavich, Igor, prince, 260 Swabians in Italy, 184, 187

295

Sweden, and Swedes, 18–19, 21, 23, 26–7, 33–6, 37, 40–2, 59 Switzerland, 2, 113, 119, 197–217, 259–60 Sybel, Heinrich von, 248 Symonds, John Addington, 179 syphilis, 183 Tabacco, Giovanni, 184 Tacitus, 52 Tagesbote aus Böhmen, reveals Czech forgery, 248 Tagsatzung, 198 Tanzimat reforms, 147 Taranger, Absalon, 21, 24 Tatars, and Mongols, 236, 247 Tell, William [Wilhelm], 120, 200, 202–3, 206 anniversary of, 208 play, by Schiller, 207–8, 214, 216 Temple of the Ark, effects of its destruction on Jewish history-writing, 145 Teutonic knights, 260 The Times, 52 Thessaloniki accord, 139 Thessaly, 147 Thierry, Augustin, 182, 184 Thijm, Joseph Alberdingk, 84 Thomas, Christiane, 225 Thomas à Kempis, 78, 81–2 Thor, 64 Thucydides, 52, 62, 142 Tito, 225 Todorova, Maria, 140 Topelius, Zacharias, 41–4 Topographia Hiberniae, 8 Trausch, Gilbert, 88 Trifunovic´, Ðord¯e, 167 Troya, Carlo, 185 Tschudi, Aegidius, 202–4 Tuatha dé Danann, 7 Turks, 119, 143–4, 146, 148, 153, 156, 161, 163 Tvrtko, king of Bosnia and Serbia, 155–7, 159 Uglješa, John, despot, 154 United Kingdom, 259 perceptions of Ireland’s treatment in, 12 Uroš, Serbian emperor, 155

296

Index

Väinämöinen, 37–8 Vanderkindere, Léon, 127 Velika Škola, 162 Venice, and Venetians archives of, 181 castles throughout Greece, 149 informed about battle of Kosovo, 157 take parts of Byzantium, 143 Venturi, Franco, 179 Verdi, Giuseppe, 186, 189–90 Verkovic´, Stefan, 246 Vico, Giambattista, 181 Victor Emmanuel, Italian king, 188 Victor Emmanuel II, Italian king, 188 Vidovdan, see St Vitus’s Day Vidovic´, Žarko, 166 Vignati, Cesare, 190 Vikings, 19, 23, 26, 42 Villari, Pasquale, 179, 193 Vindiciae Fennorum, 33–4 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène, 125 Visigoths, 141 Vlachs, 148 Vlatko, duke, 155–6 Volksgeist, 32, 42–3, 59–60 Volpe, Gioacchino, 179 Volund the Smith, 64 Vuk Brankovic´, 155–6, 159–60, 162, 168, 171 Vukašin, Serbian king, 154 Wagner, Richard, 260 Wales, and Welsh, 262 as kin of Austrians, 236 Walloons supplant Belgians (with Flemings), 127 tensions with Flemings, 129–30 Walsh, Peter, 12 Warnkoenig, Leopold-August, 124 Wassebourg, Richard de, 90–1 Weber, Batty, 97 Weltin, Maximilian, 234 * Compiled by Eric Beckett Weaver.

Wenzl, Erwin, 235 Wergeland, Henrik, 22 Werling, Ernest, 96 Werveke, Nicolas van, 97 White, Hayden, 22 Wilkinson, Henry R., 141 William I, king of The Netherlands, 80, 92, 95, 115 William II, king of The Netherlands, 95 William III, king of The Netherlands, 75 Winkelried, Arnold von, 200 myth of, 203, 208 Woeringen, battle, 117 World War I, 23, 48, 103, 113, 128, 130, 188, 229 effects on Luxembourger identity, 97–100 in Luxembourg, 97–8 World War II, 23–4, 48–9, 57, 102, 106, 164, 172, 201, 205–6, 222, 229 effects on Swiss identity, 214 Würth-Paquet, François Xavier, 95–6 Yakub, son of Sultan Murat I, 155 Yerushalmi, Yosef H., 144–5 Young Germany circle, 250 Yugoslavia, 27, 163–7, 169–72 break-up/dismemberment of, 139, 164, 167, 169, 172 sanctions against rump of, 171 war in, 139, 170–1 Zeidler, Antonín, 248 Zelená Hora manuscript, see Libuše, ‘Judgement of’ Zeus, and abduction of Europa, 237 Žižka, Jan, 245 his depiction and cult, 249–50, 252 Zosimos, 142 Zschokke, Heinrich, 202 Zurich, 198, 211 alliance of, 207