CENTRAL EUROPE REVISITED (Part 2) By Mike McPhee [This is the text of an Address at the Sydney Unitarian Church on 21 October 2018.] As we noted in Part 1, the Czech Republic and Slovakia are too entangled, historically and geographically, with Austria and Hungary to be dealt with in isolation. The historical connections go back much further than the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the central geographical tie is the Danube River, on which three of the four national capitals are located. Before we start our tour (meeting some fellow Unitarians along the way), it may be useful to have a quick look at the topography of the region. The Czech Republic is largely low level, though hilly in many areas, and it has low mountain ranges on its borders with Germany. Much of Slovakia has the Tatra mountain ranges which, while hardly comparable to the Alps, are the highest part of the Carpathian mountains that extend into Romania. Both countries have a continental divide on their northern borders that causes most of their rivers to drain into the Danube and others to flow north into Germany and Poland. Indeed, the Elbe and Oder Rivers rise in the Czech Republic, as does the Morava River, which joins the Danube before it forms a small part of the border between Slovakia and Hungary. As we saw last time, the inhabitants of what are now Austria and Hungary were Celts at the time the Romans arrived in those regions. The same is true of the former Czechoslovakia, though the Celts in those regions had, at most, indirect contact with the Romans. More importantly, many historians believe that Central Europe was the original Celtic heartland and that their Hallstadt culture in Austria initiated the Iron Age in the 8th Century BCE and enabled them to spread rapidly across most of Europe. In any case, the Celts in former Czechoslovakia were displaced over time by migrating Germanic tribes from the east. They, in turn, moved into what is now Bavaria and were replaced by Slavs, who arrived in Slovakia from the 4th Century CE and in the Czech Lands (now known as Bohemia and Moravia ) by the 6th Century. (It should be noted that ‘Bohemia’ is derived from the name of the Celtic Boii people who lived there at first.) The first Slavic state in the region formed in the late 7th Century along the Morava River (a tributary of the Danube), for which reason it became known as Moravia. Over the next 300 years, it became the dominant force in Bohemia, most of Slovakia and parts of Poland and Hungary. At its peak in the late 900s, the Great Moravian Empire may have encompassed the whole of Hungary, more of Poland, parts of Germany, Austria, Romania, Slovenia, Serbia and even Ukraine. The Moravians were already aware of Christianity but, when the Roman Church declined King Rastislav’s request, he asked the Orthodox Church in Constantinople to send teachers to introduce literacy and a legal system. In 863, Saints Cyril and Methodius arrived and they developed an alphabet for the Slavic language which was used to translate holy scripture. A later king went over to the Western Church and expelled the Orthodox missionaries, but their disciples went to Bulgaria and developed the Cyrillic alphabet that is still used there, as well as in Serbia, Macedonia, Russia and some other former states of the Soviet Union. Moravia collapsed in 907 under attacks from Hungary and the Eastern Franks of Germany. Bohemia became the new centre of power, though its rulers were subordinate to the Franks and, later, to the Holy Roman Empire. After a decisive defeat of the Hungarians by Bohemian and Empire forces in 955, the dukes of Bohemia were given possession of Moravia. Their Přemyslid dynasty started calling themselves kings from 1085 and it became their practice to put Moravia under the governance of their eldest sons. Under King Wenceslaus I, Bohemia repelled the Mongol invasion that had devastated much of Central Europe (including Moravia) in the mid-1200s. Such was the loss of life in that period that Germans were encouraged to settle along Bohemia’s borders, which would have long-term consequences. Shortly after that, King Ottokar II briefly conquered eastern Austria and Slovenia, forming an empire that reached the Adriatic Sea. His son, Wenceslaus II, became the king of Poland and his grandson, Wenceslaus III, succeeded him and was also elected king of Hungary. The dynasty changed in 1310, when Count John of Luxembourg married Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia. This was actually a recognition of the kingdom’s power, as he was the eldest son of Holy Roman Emperor Henry VII. His son, King Charles I, became Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV in 1355, who brought Bohemia to its greatest extent ever. He made Prague his imperial capital and accomplished great works in that city (more about that later). His son, Sigismund, succeeded him as Holy Roman Emperor in 1433, after first becoming the king of Hungary and Croatia, but the Bohemian leadership refused to recognise him as their king. During the 1400s, the Bohemian nobility and many of its population embraced the Protestantism of Jan Hus, an academic from Prague who was burned at the stake during the Council of Constance in 1415. No less than five papal crusades were launched against Bohemia between 1420 and 1431, all of which were repulsed by the Hussites. A negotiated settlement affirmed freedom of religion in the kingdom and this enlightened arrange- ment lasted long after Bohemia came under the rule of the Austrian Habsburgs in 1526. In 1618, the Bohemian nobility revolted against Catholic encroachment on their rights, but they were crushed at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620. Their leaders were either executed or exiled, and their estates were given to Catholic magnates from elsewhere in the Habsburg’s realms. Slovakia, meanwhile, had been under Hungarian control since 1000 CE, though the populace retained its Slavic language and culture. After the Ottoman invasion of 1526, only Upper Hungary remained free and Pozsony (Bratislava) became the capital from 1536 to 1783. The Habsburgs ascended to the Hungarian throne in 1570 and all future kings of Hungary were the Holy Roman Emperors of the day. When the Empire was dissolved in 1806, that position was held by the Emperors of Austria. Bohemia (with Moravia) remained a nominal kingdom under the same rulers as Hungary until the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Industrial Revolution started there in the 1800s and, possibly because of their proximity to Germany, the Czech Lands became the most developed region in the Empire. In contrast, the Hungarian territories remained largely agrarian – except for some mining in Slovakia’s mountain ranges. By the mid-1800s, there were nationalist rumblings in many provinces of the Empire. In both the Czech Lands and Slovakia, linguistic and cultural revivals emerged that were strongly influenced by Pan-Slavism. The turn of the century saw the formation of overtly nationalist parties that won seats in the Austrian and Hungarian parliaments. Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (left), a philosophy professor at Charles University in Prague, served two terms in Vienna but, after World War I broke out, he went to various Allied countries to campaign for an independent Czechoslovakia. He was assisted by Edvard Beneš, a fellow Czech, and Milan Štefánik (right), a Slovak former student of his who had become an astronomer in France and then a pilot in the French air force. The three met in Paris in 1915 and formed the Czechoslovak National Council in the next year, which became recognised by all of the Allies as the provisional government by the summer of 1918. Masaryk had spent most of that year in the US, gathering the support of President Woodrow Wilson’s government and that of the one million Czech and Slovak immigrants there. He declared the independence of the Republic of Czechoslovakia from Philadelphia on 18 October 1918 and was elected president before he arrived in Prague in December. The new nation had its teething troubles, as its population consisted of Czechs (51%), Slovaks (16%), Germans (22%), Hungarians (5%) and Rusyns (4%). Most people don’t know about that last group, as they lived in a little territory in the far east known variously as Ruthenia, Carpatho-Ukraine or Sub-Carpathian Rus. Also part of Hungary until 1918, that polyglot region joined Czechoslovakia in 1919. It was annexed by Hungary during World War II and became part of the Ukrainian SSR after that. (Also with the map, Silesia is the region on the border between Moravia proper and Poland. In those days, the German region also known as Silesia took up most of that border.) There were also attempts by Austria to gain the largely German-inhabited borderland and by Hungary to retain Slovakia and Ruthenia, but the former was rebuffed and the latter was defeated militarily. Czechoslovakia went on to become a prosperous democratic nation with many progressive social policies, especially in the field of education. Although Slovakia and Ruthenia had a degree of autonomy, the Czechs had the numbers and the industrial advancement to be the dominant force in the country’s development, which led to some disaffection in those regions. Marasaryk was re-elected as president twice, in 1927 and 1934, but he retired in 1935 on grounds of age and health, dying in 1937. His successor was the aforementioned Edvard Beneš, who formed the Czechoslovak government-in-exile after the infamous Munich Agreement. Czechoslovakia was the last democracy left in Central Europe when that happened.