Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations

By Norman Davies

(Viking, 830 pp., $40)

There is a well-worn story that is told in one form or another in all European history textbooks. In 824, ten years after the death of Charlemagne, Agobard, Archbishop of Lyon, hailed a new Christian imperial ambition to unite all the peoples and lands of the Western Holy Roman Empire by reformulating Galatians 3:28: “There is now neither Gentile nor Jew, Scythian nor Aquitanian, nor Lombard, nor Burgundian, nor Alaman, nor bond, nor free. All are one in Christ.” But the dream did not come true. Charlemagne’s son, Louis the Pious, followed the Frankish laws of inheritance, dividing Charlemagne’s empire among his three sons. He bequeathed the western kingdom of Aquitaine (roughly France) to Pepin. Louis the German received the Kingdom of the Eastern Franks. And ruling over them, in the middle, was the eldest son, Lothar, who retained the title of Holy Roman Emperor, but direct control only over his middle kingdom, which stretched from Utrecht and the Imperial city of Aachen through the Burgundian kingdoms and into the Mediterranean lands of Provence. When Louis the Pious died in 840, the imperial pact collapsed, the brothers went to war, and the ideal of a Christian Pax Romana vanished into the foggy forests of early feudalism.

Lothar’s middle kingdom would endure in one form or another, but mainly under the title of the Kingdom of Burgundy. Wedged in between what is today France and Germany, wealthy Burgundy was the backbone of Charlemagne’s Holy Frankish Roman Empire. With its verdant forests, its vineyards, its rich cities and fantastically rich monasteries, it was linked to Flanders and the Baltic in the north with its fairs and sea trade, and to the Alps and Savoy, and via the Rhône river to the kingdom of Provence and the Mediterranean sea. This coveted wealth would grow over time, and by the nineteenth century coal spilled from the hills of Lorraine and helped cause three wars between France and Germany. It is no accident that the European parliament now stands in Strasbourg, in Alsace-Lorraine, a point of contention between Franks, Bourbons, Hapsburgs, Bonapartes, Hohenzöllerns, free Republics, Nazis, and the U.S. Army.

In his new book, Norman Davies repackages the old story of Burgundy as a model of what he calls a “vanished kingdom”—a shadow of a chivalric world that once existed in Europe, populated by “those whom historians tend to forget.” Davies’s vanished kingdoms include the Visigoth realm, ancient Britannia, the Burgundian kingdoms and dukedoms, Aragon, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Byzantium, Belarus, Savoy, Napoleonic Tuscany, Thuringia, Montenegro, the one-day republic of Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia, Ireland, and Estonia under the Soviet Union. It is hard to understand what holds this group together aside from the map of Easy Jet flights from London. But their history, Davies conspiratorially claims, is shrouded in mystery. Like a magician about to perform a historical hat trick, he announces that “appearances” shroud “reality” and “things never are quite like they seem.” Defying his own expectations, however, Davies makes no revelations. Instead he presents a mix of poorly documented high-Tory historiettes about kingdoms and places that have not vanished, along with a litany of platitudes about the worlds lost to World War II and a disturbing series of omissions about Muslim and Jews in European history.

In Davies’s Europe, valiant tribes and knights roam across forgotten borders speaking lost languages like British, Angle, Old Welsh, Aragonese, and Byzantine Greek. They inexorably vanished or fell, Davies claims. Following them, hundreds of years later, good Poles, Estonians, Belarusians, some Jews (whose national status is never established), and even the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (the subject of his own inexplicable chapter) fell victim to the decline of monarchy, and to “vengeful” Nazis and Soviets. But never to each other: it seems that most of the vanished kingdoms are good.