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BORDERLANDS of WESTERN CIVILIZATION a His Tory of East

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BORDERLANDS of WESTERN CIVILIZATION a His Tory of East BORDERLANDS OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION A His tory of East Cen tral Eu rope by OSCAR HALECKI Second Edition Edited by Andrew L. Simon Copyright © by Tadeusz Tchorzewski , 1980. ISBN: 0-9665734-8-X Library of Congress Card Number: 00-104381 All Rights Reserved. The text of this publication or any part thereof may not he reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission in writing from the publisher. Published by Simon Publications, P.O. Box 321, Safety Harbor, FL 34695 Printed by Lightning Source, Inc. La Vergne , TN 37086 Con tents PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION 1 PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION 4 1 THE GEOGRAPHICAL AND ETHNOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND 9 2 THE SLAVS AND THEIR NEIGHBORS 19 3 TOWARD POLITICAL ORGANIZATION 33 4 THE HERITAGE OF THE TENTH CENTURY 51 5 INTERNAL DISINTEGRATION AND FOREIGN PENETRATION 67 THE REPERCUSSIONS OF THE FOURTH CRUSADE IN THE BALKANS 77 6 THE HERITAGE OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY 93 7 THE NEW FORCES OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY 107 8 THE TIMES OF WLADYSLAW JAGIELLO AND SIGISMUND OF LUXEMBURG 135 9 THE LATER FIFTEENTH CENTURY 151 10 FROM THE FIRST CONGRESS OF VIENNA TO THE UNION OF LUBLIN 167 11 THE LATER SIXTEENTH CENTURY THE STRUGGLE FOR THE DOMINIUM MARIS BALTICI 197 12 THE FIRST HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 219 13 THE SECOND HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 239 14 THE END OF THE ANCIEN REGIME 261 15 THE PARTITIONS OF POLAND AND THE EASTERN QUESTION 289 16 THE NAPOLEONIC PERIOD 309 17 REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENTS UNTIL 1848 325 18 FROM THE CRIMEAN WAR TO THE CONGRESS OF BERLIN 353 19 TOWARD WORLD WAR I 373 20 THE CONSEQUENCES OF WORLD WAR I 395 21 THE PEOPLES OF EAST CENTRAL EUROPE BETWEEN THE WARS 417 22 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS BETWEEN THE WARS 457 23 HITLER’S WAR 479 24 STALIN’S PEACE 499 BIBLIOGRAPHY 519 INDEX 537 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION Polish born Oscar Halecki (1891 - 1973) was Professor of History at Cracow and Warsaw universities between the two world wars. His research specialty was the history of Poland during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. After the Nazi attack on Poland he escaped to France and taught at the Polish University in Paris. He was Professor of History at Fordham University in New York when he wrote this volume. It was originally published in 1952 in New York by the Ronald Company. His other books included History of the Jagellonian Union (1920), Limits and Divisions of European History (1950), History of Poland (1958 and 1993), and Pius XII, Eugenio Pacelli , Pope of Peace . Halecki’s intention was to introduce the history of East Central Europe to Western readers. Most English language history books treat European history almost entirely as an English, Latin and Teutonic domain. He attempted to show how far Western civilization expanded in the Eastern direction. His work introduced the history of the nations that occupy the lands between the Russians and the Germans, peoples whose aggregate number—as he pointed out—exceeds the either the German and the Russian populations. At the time of writing, the future looked dim for the nations discussed in this book. From the Soviet occupied Baltic countries through Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary to most counties of the Balkans the brutal Communist oppression was at its peak. Prisons and internment camps were full, political show trials on drummed up charges were routinely held, torture and executions of leading intellectuals and others suspected of anti-Communist inclinations were common. Elsewhere, the world was in turmoil. The Cold War was on. The French still fought the Viet-Minh, the Korean war was not yet settled, Stalin was still alive, the Bolshevik dream of world revolution was very much on the agenda. In America newspapers headlines dealt with the Rosenbergs’ spy case and with Senator McCarthy’s hearings on un-American activities. Liberation of the East Central European countries was nothing but a dream. 1 Halecki was prophetic in the last sentences of his book. He wrote about the Communist-enslaved nations of East-Central Europe thus: “...they are more eager than ever before to join that [free] world in the spirit of their own democratic tradition and cultural heritage.” Indeed, that spirit, steeped in the same cultural traditions that are shared by the nations of Western Europe—the Renaissance, Enlightenment, Reformation—soon made itself recognized. Nations established one thousand years earlier by the great dynasties—Bohemia’s Premyslids , Hungary’s Árpáds and Poland’s Piasts ,— and were integral parts of Western Civilization throughout their history, were not willing to live under the tyrannic yoke of the Soviet Union. Regardless of the military occupation by the Red Army and the barbaric oppression by their own Muscovite, Quisling type governments, they manifested their willingness to fight—and even die—for their freedom. In 1956, anti-Communist riots in Poland were followed by the full-scale armed revolution in Hungary— the thirteen days that shook the Kremlin 1—then the ‘Prague Spring’ in 1968, and in 1981the establishment of the Polish independent trade union Solidarity. These were the precursors of the ceremonial cutting of the barbed wire between Austria and Hungary by Hungarian Communist authorities in 1989, that opened the Iron Curtain in front of tens of thousands of East German refugees escaping to the West. Within weeks the Berlin Wall was but a memory. Nations of Orthodox Christianity never experienced the great intellectual movements that define Western civilization. Peoples who were subjected to the oppressive Ottoman rule for 500 years learned to accept corruption, intolerance and despotism and appeared to be quite willing to live under Communism to its end, without a trace of resistance. These countries needed no occupying Soviet armies to keep them in line. Ethnic or religious intolerance and despotism led to systematic rampages of genocide: the slaying of 8,000 Jews in Jassy on June 29 of 1941 by the 1 Ti tle of a 1959 bestseller writ ten by Tibor Meray . 2 Romanian authorities, the murder of 7,000 Bosnian Moslems in Srebrenica by the Serbs in July of 1995 were driven by the same hyper-nationalistic and xenophobic mentality characteristic of the east. The borderline separating Western and Slavic-Orthodox civilizations — within Halecki’s Borderlands — became clearly defined in the latter half of the 20th century . By the year 2,000 Halecki’s concerns for the future of East Central Europe’s nations are largely answered. Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic are now parts of NATO. Their entry into the European Union is forthcoming. Yet their history is not better known by Western readers than in Halecki’s time. Just to give an example, in the five competing textbooks —encompassing a combined total of over 5,000 pages— for a standard American college course on Western Cultural Traditions, the Árpád dynasty that ruled Hungary for over 300 years, is unmentioned. The histories of neighboring countries fare even worse. To overcome this deplorable fact, reviving Halecki’s Borderlands of Western Civilization was much overdue. An drew L. Si mon Pro fes sor Emer i tus The Uni ver sity of Ak ron 3 PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION Having studied and taught Eastern European history for many years, I had of course always tried to include the history of all the countries that lie east of Germany. But in doing this I became more and more aware that three distinct fields of study have to be treated and differentiated. Two of these, which are universally recognized, are familiar to many scholars of various lands and are covered in numerous textbooks and historical surveys. These are the history of the Byzantine Empire in the Middle Ages, which was later replaced by the Ottoman Empire, and the history of the Russian Empire, which was created by Moscow in the course of the modern period. There remains, however, the history of the numerous peoples which in both mediaeval and modern times have lived between Germany and these empires, sometimes in independent states of their own, sometimes submerged by their powerful neighbors. The third field is equally as interesting and important as the other two because of its internal diversity. In spite of such great variety, however, it represents a clearly distinct unity which occupies a special place in the development of mankind, as I attempted to show briefly in my recent book on The Limits and Divisions of European History. Yet that whole region of Europe is neglected in the writing and teaching of general and European history, as well as in the interpretation of the subject matter. No textbook is available to the student which helps him to understand the past of that large area as a whole, nor is there any synthesized survey at the disposal of the reader who feels that a broad historical background is badly needed for grasping the implications of contemporary events. Therefore, it remained difficult to realize the significance of all the many peoples between Germany and Russia, peoples whose collective population exceeds that of either the Germans or even the Russians. 4 To fill such a gap within the compass of a single volume is no easy task for an individual historian. Obliged to make a strict selection among countless facts, he is unavoidably influenced by the chief directions of his own research work. And even in the case of those facts which are incidentally mentioned in the outlines of world history or in the histories of contiguous or neighboring regions, the task of coordinating them into a picture which is inspired by an entirely different approach naturally raises new and complex problems.
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