Vanished Kingdoms

Review by Geoffrey Wawro

Readers will be delighted by this rambling, wayward Grand Tour of Europe. It will make you rethink all of your assumptions about history.

Davies is a marvelously fluid scholar. This book reminds the reader of Davies’ fascinating Europe (1996), which roved from the Ice Age to the Cold War, employing a method described by the author as ”a combination of picture-gallery and echo-chamber, where all the mingled images, sounds and emotions of Europe’s past interact and reverberate.” Vanished Kingdoms, like Europe, defies conventional narrative to make the point that Europe emerged spasmodically and unevenly from many sources and effects.

Vanished Kingdoms is charming and engaging. Davies’ thesis is that both academic writing and popular history tend to reinforce success. They write over and over about successful powers, kings, and “big wars,” or objects of dread fascination, like Nazi Germany. Historians (and their publishers) rarely write about the losers, because there’s no market for that.

We’re all left stunted as a result; we know a lot about China, the United States, Germany or the Romans, but we know next to nothing about failed experiments like Aragon, Burgundy, the Black Mountain of Montenegro, Galicia (“the Kingdom of the Naked of the Starving” straddling Poland and Ukraine), or even Byzantium. Our minds, Davies finds, are like checkerboards—with half the spaces empty and half of them filled in.

Davies finds this curious, for every state eventually fails. Look at the Romans, the Edwardians or today’s “exceptional Americans”; they all thought that their dominance would last forever. Davies writes a history of Europe from the far more common perspective of the losers: the empires, kingdoms and duchies that thought that they too would go on forever, and not only vanished, but often vanished without a trace!

Davies travels to all of these places—in the British Isles, Germany, Poland, the Baltic, Belarus, Turkey, Ukraine and the Balkans—and his account of the past as well as his juxtaposition of past and present is wonderful. One fine example is his visit to the oblast of Kaliningrad, the heart of old Borussia (Prussia), annexed by the Soviets in 1945, and now marooned in a Russian-run, post-Soviet hell: “a cesspool of cesspools,” where counterfeit cigarettes (for sale in Germany) are the biggest industry and living standards crawl along 65-times lower than the EU average. Could the rich burghers of old Königsberg ever have imagined such an unenviable fate? Another example: Davies rescues the poor Byzantines from neglect as well as Edward Gibbon, who, Davies points out, cruelly and permanently slandered the Byzantines from ignorance as well as necessity. Gibbon had hit a wall familiar to any author in the writing of Decline and Fall. “After forty-seven chapters, he had only reached the end of the sixth century and he had nearly nine more centuries to cover.” As a short-cut to the end, Gibbon replaced analysis with mockery and negativity and forged the lasting caricature of Byzantium as a place not of culture and refinement but of decadence and barbarism.

Vanished Kingdoms is a journey—half erudite lecture, half exquisite travelogue—from a world-class historian.