Ukraine's Magna Carta?

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 161-164:

WHATEVER THE LEGAL and ideological underpinnings of the Pereiaslav agreement, the tsar honored Buturlin’s promise and gave the Cossacks what the Polish king had never agreed to: recognition of Cossack statehood, a Cossack register of 60,000, and privileged status for the Cossack estate. He also recognized the liberties enjoyed by other social strata under the Polish kings.

First and foremost, however, the agreement laid the foundations for a military alliance. It established no western boundary for the Cossacks’ territory—they could go as far as their sabers would take them. The Muscovite and Cossack armies entered the war against the commonwealth on their separate fronts: the Cossacks, assisted by a Muscovite corps, led the offensive in Ukraine, within the boundaries of the Kingdom of Poland; the Muscovite troops launched an offensive near Smolensk and moved west through Belarus and then into Lithuania, north of the Lublin border between the grand duchy and the kingdom. The joint offensive of Muscovite and Cossack troops brought unexpected results. Whereas in 1654 the Polish and Lithuanian troops, assisted by the Crimean khan, had managed to resist the offensive from the east, in the summer and fall of 1655 the Polish-Lithuanian counteroffensive collapsed: the Cossacks once again besieged Lviv, and Muscovite troops entered Vilnius, the capital of the grand duchy.

This was the beginning of the era known in Polish history as the Deluge. Not only did the Muscovite and Cossack armies move deep into the commonwealth, but in July 1655 the Swedes launched an offensive of their own across the Baltic Sea. By October, both Warsaw and the ancient Polish capital of Cracow were in Swedish hands. Alarmed by the prospect of a complete Polish collapse and a dramatic expansion of Sweden, which now claimed the parts of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania conquered by Muscovite troops, in the fall of 1656 Muscovite diplomats concluded an agreement with the commonwealth in Vilnius that put an end to Polish-Muscovite hostilities. Khmelnytsky and the Cossack officials were enraged at being denied access to the negotiations. The separate peace with Poland was leaving the Cossacks one on one with their traditional enemy. As far as they were concerned, the tsar was reneging on his main obligation under the Pereiaslav agreement—the military protection of his subjects.

Bohdan Khmelnytsky ignored the Muscovite-Polish deal and sent his army to help an ally of Sweden, the Protestant ruler of Transylvania, fight the Poles. Now, even the military alliance between the tsar and the Cossacks came into question. Khmelnytsky had been looking for new allies since Sweden’s entry into the war with Poland. The Swedes seemed determined to destroy the commonwealth, which Khmelnytsky also wanted. Negotiations to conclude a Ukrainian-Swedish agreement that would put an end to the commonwealth and guarantee the inclusion not only of Ukraine but also parts of what is now Belarus in the Cossack state gained new impetus from what the hetman regarded as the tsar’s betrayal of Ukraine.

Khmelnytsky, however, did not live to see the conclusion of this new international alliance. He died in August 1657, leaving the state he had created and the Cossacks he had led at a crossroads. Although Khmelnytsky believed that his alliance with the tsar had already run its course, he formally abided by the deal he had made in Pereiaslav. Events there became an important part of the old hetman’s large and contradictory legacy. Cossack chroniclers of the eighteenth century celebrated him very much in the same vein as the professors and students of the Kyivan College had done on his entrance into Kyiv in December 1648. They extolled him as the father of the nation, the liberator of his people from the Polish yoke, and the hetman who had negotiated the best possible arrangement with the tsar: they considered the Articles of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, approved by the tsar after Pereiaslav, a Magna Carta of Ukrainian liberties in the Russian Empire.

Royals vs. Nobles, 1500s

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 107-109:

ALL OVER EUROPE, the sixteenth century was marked by the strengthening of royal authority, centralization of the state, and regularization of political and social practices. The other side of the coin was increasing aristocratic opposition to the growth of royal power, which in the Polish-Lithuanian case came from the aristocratic houses of the grand duchy, many of them deeply rooted in the princely tradition of Kyivan Rus’ and Galicia-Volhynia. But in the mid-sixteenth century, elite opposition to increasing royal power diminished in response to the growing external threat to the grand duchy, which it could meet only with the help of Poland. The threat came from the east, where in the course of the fifteenth century a major new power had been rising: the Grand Duchy of Muscovy.

In 1476 Grand Prince Ivan III, the first Muscovite ruler to call himself tsar, declared the independence of his realm from the Horde and refused to pay tribute to the khans. He also launched a campaign of “gathering the Rus’ lands,” taking Novgorod, Tver, and Viatka and laying claim to other Rus’ lands outside the former Mongol realm, including those of today’s Ukraine. In the last decades of the fifteenth century, the newly created Tsardom of Muscovy and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania entered into a prolonged conflict over the heritage of Kyivan Rus’. Muscovy was on the offensive, and by the early sixteenth century the grand dukes had to recognize the tsar’s rule over two of their former territories, Smolensk and Chernihiv. It was the first time that Muscovy had established its rule over part of what is now Ukraine.

The westward advance of Muscovy, stopped by the grand dukes at the beginning of the sixteenth century, resumed in the second half. In 1558, Ivan the Terrible, the decisive and charismatic but also erratic, brutal, and ultimately self-destructive tsar of Muscovy, attacked Livonia, a polity bordering on the grand duchy that included parts of what are now Latvia and Estonia, starting the Livonian War (1558–1583), which would last for a quarter century and involve Sweden, Denmark, Lithuania, and eventually Poland. In 1563, Muscovite troops crossed the borders of the grand duchy, taking the city of Polatsk and raiding Vitsebsk (Vitebsk), Shkloŭ (Shklov), and Orsha (all in present-day Belarus). This defeat mobilized support for the grand duchy’s union with Poland among the lesser Lithuanian nobility.

In December 1568 Sigismund Augustus, who was both king of Poland and grand duke of Lithuania, convened two Diets in the city of Lublin—one for the kingdom, the other for the grand duchy—in the hope that their representatives would hammer out conditions for the new union. The negotiations began on a positive note, as the two sides agreed to the joint election of the king, a common Diet, or parliament, and broad autonomy for the grand duchy, but the magnates would not return the royal lands in their possession—the principal demand of the Polish nobility. The Lithuanian delegates packed their bags, assembled their retinues of noble clients, and left. This move backfired. Unexpectedly for the departing Lithuanians, the Diet of the Kingdom of Poland began to issue decrees, with the king’s blessing, transferring one province of the grand duchy after another to the jurisdiction of the Kingdom of Poland.

The Lithuanian magnates who had feared losing their provinces to Muscovy were now losing them to Poland instead. To stop a hostile takeover by their powerful Polish partner, the Lithuanians returned to Lublin to sign an agreement dictated by the Polish delegates. They were too late. In March 1569, the Podlachia palatinate on the Ukrainian-Belarusian-Polish ethnic border went to Poland. Volhynia followed in May, and on June 6, one day before the resumption of the Polish-Lithuanian talks, the Kyivan and Podolian lands were transferred to Poland as well. The Lithuanian aristocrats could only accept the new reality—they stood to lose even more if they continued to resist the union. In his magisterial depiction of the Lublin Diet, Jan Matejko, a famous nineteenth-century Polish artist, portrayed the chief opponent of the union, Mikalojus Radvilas, on his knees but with his sword drawn in front of the king.

The Union of Lublin created a new Polish-Lithuanian state with a single ruler, to be elected by the nobility of the whole realm, and a single Diet. It extended the freedoms of the Polish nobility to their counterparts in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which maintained its own offices, treasury, judicial system, and army. The new state, called the Commonwealth of Both Nations—Polish and Lithuanian—was a quasi-federal polity dominated by the geographically expanded and politically strengthened Kingdom of Poland. The kingdom incorporated the Ukrainian palatinates not as a group but one by one, with no guarantees but those pertaining to the use of the Ruthenian (Middle Ukrainian) language in the courts and administration and the protection of the rights of the Orthodox Church.

Three Polities of Kyivan Rus'

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 83-86:

THE AUTHORS OF the Primary Chronicle (the laborious task of recording events and commenting on them passed from one generation of monks to another) had to reconcile three different historical identities in their narrative: the Rus’ identity of the Scandinavian rulers of Kyiv, the Slavic identity of the educated elites, and local tribal identity. While the Kyivan rulers and their subjects adopted the name Rus’, the Slavic identity associated with that name, not the Scandinavian one, became the basis of their self-identification. Most subjects of the Rurikids, who ruled their realm from the Slavic heartland, were Slavs. More importantly, the dissemination of Slavic identity beyond the Kyiv region was closely associated with the acceptance of Christianity from Byzantium and the introduction of Church Slavonic as the language of the liturgy, sermons, and intellectual discourse of Rus’. Christianity appeared in both the Slavic and non-Slavic parts of the Kyivan realm in the garb of Slavic languages and Slavic culture. The more Rus’ became Christian, the more it turned Slavic as well. The Kyivan chroniclers incorporated local history into the broader context of the development of the Balkan Slavs and, more broadly still, into the history of Byzantium and world Christendom.

On the local level, tribal identity gave way slowly but surely to identification with local principalities—the centers of military, political, and economic power associated with Kyiv. Chronicle references to the lands surrounding princely towns replaced references to indigenous tribes. Thus, the chronicler refers to the army that sacked Kyiv in 1169 as consisting of people from Smolensk instead of Radimichians, residents of Suzdal instead of Viatichians or Meria, and natives of Chernihiv instead of Siverians. There was a sense of the unity of all the lands under the rule of the Kyivan rulers, and despite conflicts and wars between Rurikid princes, the inhabitants of those lands were considered “ours,” as opposed to foreigners and pagans. The key issue was recognition of the authority of the Rus’ princes, and when some of the Turkic steppe nomads accepted that authority, they became referred to as “our pagans.”

The political and administrative unification of the diverse tribal territories entailed the standardization of their social structure. At its very top were the princes of the Rurikid dynasty, more specifically the descendants of Yaroslav the Wise. Under them were members of the princely retinue—originally Vikings but also increasing numbers of Slavs who merged with local tribal elites to form the aristocratic stratum called the boyars. They were warriors, but in times of peace they administered the realm. The boyars were the main landholding class, and depending on the principality, they had greater or lesser influence on the actions of the prince. Church hierarchs and their servants were also among the privileged.

The rest of the population paid taxes to the princes. The townspeople, who included merchants and artisans, had some political power that they exercised at town meetings, where they decided matters of local governance. Occasionally, as in Kyiv, or quite regularly, as in Novgorod, such meetings influenced the succession of local princes. The peasants, who accounted for most of the population, had no political power. They were divided into free peasants and semifree serfs. The latter could lose their freedom, usually because of debts, and reclaim it once they had paid their debts off or after a certain period. Then there were the slaves—warriors or peasants captured in the course of military campaigns. The enslavement of warriors could be temporary, but that of peasants was permanent.

...

The change in the geopolitical aims of the Kyivan princes, from Yaroslav the Wise to Andrei Bogoliubsky, reflects the reduction of their political loyalties from the entire realm of Kyivan Rus’ to a number of principalities defined by the term “Rus’ Land” and eventually to peripheral principalities that grew strong enough to rival Kyiv in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Historians look to those principality-based identities for the origins of the modern East Slavic nations. The Vladimir-Suzdal principality served as a forerunner of early modern Muscovy and, eventually, of modern Russia. Belarusian historians look to the Polatsk principality for their roots. And Ukrainian historians study the principality of Galicia-Volhynia to uncover the foundations of Ukrainian nation-building projects. But all those identities ultimately lead back to Kyiv, which gives Ukrainians a singular advantage: they can search for their origins without ever leaving their capital.

Volodymyr Goes Full Byzantine

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 67-70:

VOLODYMYR TOOK THE throne in 980. He spent the first decade of his rule on warfare, ensuring that the realm created by his predecessor stayed together. Following in Sviatoslav’s footsteps, he again defeated the Khazars and the Volga Bulgars, reasserted his power over the Viatichians in the Oka basin, and pushed westward to the Carpathians, taking a number of fortresses from the Poles, including the town of Premyshl (Przemyśl) on today’s Polish-Ukrainian border. His main concern, however, was the southern frontier, where the Rus’ settlements were under continual attack by the Pechenegs and other nomadic tribes. Volodymyr strengthened border defenses by building fortifications along the local rivers, including the Sula and the Trubizh. He settled those areas with prisoners of war and subjects from other parts of the realm. Rus’, born of conquest, now sought stability by defending its borders instead of attacking the frontiers of other states.

Under Volodymyr’s rule, Kyiv’s relations with Byzantium were also changing. Whereas his predecessor on the Kyivan throne, Helgi, allegedly had sent troops against Byzantium to obtain trade preferences, and Sviatoslav did the same to acquire new territory in the Balkans, Volodymyr invaded the Crimea in the spring of 989 in pursuit of marriage, if not love. He besieged the Byzantine town of Chersonesus, demanding the hand of the sister of Emperor Basil II. A few years earlier, the emperor had asked Volodymyr for military assistance, promising the hand of his sister Anna in return. Volodymyr sent his troops to help up the emperor. But Basil was in no hurry to fulfill his promise. After receiving this slap in the face, Volodymyr refused to turn the other cheek and instead attacked the empire. His tactic worked. Alarmed by news of the fall of Chersonesus, Basil dispatched his sister Anna to the Crimea. She arrived with a retinue that included numerous Christian clerics.

Volodymyr’s request for marriage was granted in return for an assurance that the barbarian chieftain (as the ruler of Kyiv was regarded in Constantinople) would accept Christianity. Volodymyr went along. His baptism would start the process of the Christianization of Kyivan Rus’ and open a new chapter in the region’s history. Once the wedding party had moved back to Kyiv, Volodymyr removed the pantheon of pagan gods, including the most powerful of them—Perun, the god of thunder—from a hill above the Dnieper and put the Christian clergymen to work baptizing the population of Kyiv. The Christianization of Rus’ had begun—a long and difficult process that would take centuries to complete.

Our main source on the baptism of Rus’, the Kyivan chronicler, writes that Muslim Bulgars, Jewish Khazars, Christian Germans representing the pope, and a Greek scholar who spoke on behalf of Byzantine Christianity, the religion that Volodymyr chose, had all importuned Volodymyr. The story of the choice of faith as told in the Primary Chronicle is of course naïve in many ways. But it reflects certain real alternatives facing the Kyivan ruler, for he indeed did the picking and choosing. Volodymyr chose the religion of the strongest country in the region, in which the emperor was no less important an ecclesiastical figure—more important, in fact—than the patriarch. By choosing Christianity, he gained the prestige of marrying into an imperial family, which promptly elevated the status of his house and realm. Volodymyr’s choice of Christian name sheds additional light on his reasons for accepting Christianity. He took the same name as the emperor, Basil, indicating that in Byzantium he had found a political and religious model to emulate at home. A generation later, Kyivan intellectuals such as Metropolitan Ilarion would compare him and his baptism of Rus’ to Emperor Constantine and his role in establishing Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire.

To be sure, the Byzantine political and ecclesiastical elite helped Volodymyr make the “right choice.” They were unhappy with the marriage but not with the conversion. The Byzantines had begun sending missionaries to the region soon after the Rus’ Vikings attacked Constantinople in 860. Back then, Patriarch Photius of Constantinople, the same clergyman who left us the description of the Viking attack, had sent one of his best students, Cyril of Thessalonica, to the Crimea and then to the Khazar kaganate. Along with his brother Methodius, Cyril devised the Glagolitic alphabet to transcribe Christian texts into the Slavic languages. The two men subsequently became known as the apostles to the Slavs and gained sainthood. Attempts to convert Kyivan rulers were undertaken long before Volodymyr’s conversion, as attested by the story of his grandmother, Olha, who became the first known Christian ruler and the first Christian woman in Kyiv named Helen. Apart from propagating Christianity, the Byzantine elites began to gain influence over the “barbaric” rulers and peoples, who had no fancy genealogies and little in the way of sophisticated culture but a great deal of destructive power.

After Volodymyr’s conversion, the patriarch of Constantinople created the Metropolitanate of Rus’, one of few ecclesiastical provinces named after its population and not the city where the bishop or metropolitan would reside. The patriarch reserved for himself the right to appoint metropolitans to head the Rus’ church—most of them would be Greeks. The metropolitan in turn controlled the appointment of bishops, most of whom would come from the ranks of the local elite. The first monasteries were established, using a Byzantine statute. Church Slavonic, the first literary language of Kyivan Rus’, initially functioned predominantly as a translation tool, making Greek texts understandable to local elites. Volodymyr issued regulations defining the rights and privileges of the clergy and gave one-tenth of his income to the church. Christianity in Kyivan Rus’ began at the top and moved slowly down the social ladder, spreading from center to periphery along rivers and trade routes. In some remote areas, especially northeastern Rus’, pagan priests resisted the new religion for centuries, and Kyivan missionaries who ventured there would end up dead as late as the twelfth century.

Volodymyr’s choice would have a profound impact on his realm and on the history of eastern Europe as a whole. Instead of continuing warfare with Byzantium, the new Rus’ polity was entering into an alliance with the only surviving part and continuator of the Roman Empire and thereby opening itself to the political and cultural influences of the Mediterranean world. It would prove fateful that Volodymyr not only brought Rus’ into the Christian world but also made it part of Eastern Christianity. Many of the consequences are as important today as they were at the turn of the second millennium.

Kyiv as Byzantium North

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 65-66:

FROM THE VERY first reports about the Rus’ princes on the Dnieper River, we hear of their attraction to the Byzantine Empire. The same thing that had attracted the Huns and Goths to Rome drew the Viking merchant warriors to the Byzantine capital, Constantinople: earthly riches, along with power and prestige. The Vikings never set out to topple Byzantium, but they tried to get as close to the empire and its capital as possible, launching a number of expeditions to capture Constantinople.

Sviatoslav’s death in 972 closed an important period in the history of Rus’ and its relations with its powerful southern neighbor. To the next two generations of Kyivan rulers, association with Constantinople was no less desirable than it had been for Sviatoslav. But Sviatoslav’s successors were concerned not only with money and commerce but also with the power, prestige, and high culture emanating from Byzantium. Instead of conquering Constantinople on the Bosphorus, as their predecessors had attempted to do, they decided to reproduce it on the Dnieper. This turn in Rus’ relations with the Byzantine Greeks and the new expectations of the Kyivan princes came to the fore during the rule of Sviatoslav’s son Volodymyr and the latter’s son Yaroslav. The two ran the Kyivan realm for more than half a century and are often credited with turning it into a true medieval state—one with a more or less clearly defined territory, system of government, and, last but not least, ideology. Much of the latter came from Byzantium.

As a prince of Kyiv, Sviatoslav’s son, Volodymyr, was less bellicose and ambitious than his father but turned out to be more successful in achieving his goals. Fifteen years old when his father died near the Dnieper rapids, Volodymyr had brothers who wanted the throne for themselves, and a new wave of Scandinavian arrivals eased his path to power. Before wresting the Kyivan throne from one of his brothers, Volodymyr spent more than five years as a refugee in Scandinavia, the ancestral homeland of his clan. He returned to Rus’ with a new Viking army. The Kyivan chronicler tells us that after Volodymyr took Kyiv, his soldiers asked for payment. Volodymyr promised to give them tribute from the local tribes but was unable to deliver. Instead, he recruited the Viking commanders as his local administrators in forts that he built on the steppe frontier, allowing the rest of the army to engage in an expedition against Byzantium. He also ordered his people not to let that army into their towns and to prevent them from returning.

Defining Ukraine and Ukrainian

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 24-27:

Nation is an important—although not dominant—category of analysis and element of the story that, along with the ever changing idea of Europe, defines the nature of this narrative. This book tells the history of Ukraine within the borders defined by the ethnographers and mapmakers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which often (but not always) coincided with the borders of the present-day Ukrainian state. It follows the development of the ideas and identities linking those lands together from the times of the medieval Kyivan state, known in historiography as Kyivan Rus’, to the rise of modern nationalism and explains the origins of the modern Ukrainian state and political nation. In doing so, the book focuses on Ukrainians as the largest demographic group and, in time, the main force behind the creation of the modern nation and state. It pays attention to Ukraine’s minorities, especially Poles, Jews, and Russians, and treats the modern multiethnic and multicultural Ukrainian nation as a work in progress. Ukrainian culture always existed in a space shared with other cultures and early on involved navigating among the “others.” The ability of Ukrainian society to cross inner and outer frontiers and negotiate identities created by them constitutes the main characteristic of the history of Ukraine as presented in this book.

Politics, international and domestic, provide a convenient storyline, but in writing this book, I found geography, ecology, and culture most lasting and thus most influential in the long run. Contemporary Ukraine, as seen from the perspective of longue durée cultural trends, is a product of the interaction of two moving frontiers, one demarcated by the line between the Eurasian steppes and the eastern European parklands, the other defined by the border between Eastern and Western Christianity. The first frontier was also the one between sedentary and nomadic populations and, eventually, between Christianity and Islam. The second goes back to the division of the Roman Empire between Rome and Constantinople and marks differences in political culture between Europe’s east and west that still exist today. The movement of these frontiers over the centuries gave rise to a unique set of cultural features that formed the foundations of present-day Ukrainian identity.

One cannot tell the history of Ukraine without telling the story of its regions. The cultural and social space created by the movement of frontiers has not been homogenous. As state and imperial borders moved across the territory defined by Ukrainian ethnic boundaries, they created distinct cultural spaces that served as foundations of Ukraine’s regions—the former Hungarian-ruled Transcarpathia, historically Austrian Galicia, Polish-held Podolia and Volhynia, the Cossack Left Bank of the Dnieper with the lower reaches of that river, Sloboda Ukraine, and finally the Black Sea coast and the Donets basin, colonized in imperial Russian times. Unlike most of my predecessors, I try to avoid treating the history of various regions (such as the Russian- and Austrian-ruled parts of Ukraine) in separate sections of the book but rather look at them together, providing a comparative perspective on their development within a given period.

In conclusion, a few words about terminology. The ancestors of modern Ukrainians lived in dozens of premodern and modern principalities, kingdoms, and empires, and in the course of time they took on various names and identities. The two key terms that they used to define their land were “Rus’” and “Ukraine.” (In the Cyrillic alphabet, Rus’ is spelled Pycь: the last character is a soft sign indicating palatalized pronunciation of the preceding consonant.) The term “Rus’,” brought to the region by the Vikings in the ninth and tenth centuries, was adopted by the inhabitants of Kyivan Rus’, who took the Viking princes and warriors into their fold and Slavicized them. The ancestors of today’s Ukrainians, Russians, and Belarusians adopted the name “Rus’” in forms that varied from the Scandinavian/Slavic “Rus’” to the Hellenized “Rossiia.” In the eighteenth century, Muscovy adopted the latter form as the official name of its state and empire.

The Ukrainians had different appellations depending on the period and region in which they lived: Rusyns in Poland, Ruthenians in the Habsburg Empire, and Little Russians in the Russian Empire. In the course of the nineteenth century, Ukrainian nation builders decided to end the confusion by renouncing the name “Rus’” and clearly distinguishing themselves from the rest of the East Slavic world, especially from the Russians, by adopting “Ukraine” and “Ukrainian” to define their land and ethnic group, both in the Russian Empire and in Austria-Hungary. The name “Ukraine” had medieval origins and in the early modern era denoted the Cossack state in Dnieper Ukraine. In the collective mind of the nineteenth-century activists, the Cossacks, most of whom were of local origin, were the quintessential Ukrainians. To link the Rus’ past and the Ukrainian future, Mykhailo Hrushevsky called his ten-volume magnum opus History of Ukraine-Rus’. Indeed, anyone writing about the Ukrainian past today must use two or even more terms to define the ancestors of modern Ukrainians.

In this book, I use “Rus’” predominantly but not exclusively with reference to the medieval period. “Ruthenians” to denote Ukrainians of the early modern era, and “Ukrainians” when I write about modern times. Since the independent Ukrainian state’s creation in 1991, its citizens have all come to be known as “Ukrainians,” whatever their ethnic background. This usage reflects the current conventions of academic historiography, and although it makes for some complexity, I hope that it does not lead to confusion.

Bering Strait Mission Impossible, 1879

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 141-143:

Even while the Jeannette steamed north toward the Bering Strait, another world-renowned vessel was steaming south out of it, and down the North Pacific coast of Russia. It was the Vega, Adolf Nordenskiöld’s exploring ship. The world didn’t know it yet, but the Finnish-Swedish scientist and explorer had emerged, a month earlier, from his winter quarters in northeast Siberia and was well on his way to Japan, where he would announce his considerable accomplishment: Nordenskiöld had become the first navigator to make a complete Northeast Passage—that is, a journey across the top of the entire continent of Eurasia. Hugging the land for the most part, the Vega had successfully worked its way along the eight-thousand-mile coastline of the Russian Arctic.

De Long had guessed from the start that Nordenskiöld was safe—that, indeed, he had never really been in any danger. The Scandinavian didn’t need to be “found,” any more than Livingstone had needed to be hunted down in Africa. But Bennett had wanted his “De Long meets Nordenskiöld” moment, and that was the end of it.

But the timing of Nordenskiöld’s emergence from the ice was particularly bad for De Long. He had missed Nordenskiöld by only a week. By the time De Long approached Alaskan waters, the Vega was making for the Kuril Islands of Japan. As one Arctic historian put it, “Somewhere in the fog-wreathed Bering Sea between the Aleutian Islands and Norton Sound, the USS Jeannette and the ship she was supposed to look for passed each other on opposite courses.”

Meanwhile, another bit of rotten luck was brewing in Washington. Earlier in the summer, a schooner commissioned by the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey had made its way out of the Arctic after an ambitious multiyear study of the North Pacific and the Bering Sea. The hydrographers and meteorologists hired by the geodetic survey had been conducting painstaking analyses of oceanic currents, depths, salinities, temperatures, and prevailing wind patterns. Specifically, the survey was interested in learning about the Kuro Siwo—the Black Current of Japan. Much of the data had yet to be analyzed, but already clear patterns were starting to emerge.

The Kuro Siwo, the findings suggested, was not nearly as strong or as warm or as reliable as the Atlantic’s Gulf Stream. As it swept up from the coast of Japan and out into the open ocean, the Kuro Siwo frayed into numerous subsidiary currents, and its power steadily waned. If anything, the prevailing tendency at the Bering Strait was that of cold-water currents flowing south.

The survey’s final report would be written by an eminent Harvard-trained naturalist, William Healey Dall. Dall was a scientist of wide-ranging interests—he had published papers in the fields of ornithology, anthropology, oceanography, and paleontology and had conducted numerous meteorology studies for the Smithsonian Institution. Dall had traveled extensively in Alaska, and his name would become well known throughout the region.

Dall’s report on the Black Current was unequivocal. “The Kuro Siwo sends no recognizable branch northward, between the Aleutians and Kamchatka,” he wrote. “No warm current from Bering Sea enters Bering Strait. The strait is incapable of carrying a current of warm water of sufficient magnitude to have any marked effect on the condition of the Polar Basin just north of it. Nothing in our knowledge of them offers any hope of an easier passage toward the Pole, or, in general, northward through their agency. Nothing yet revealed in the investigation of the subject in the least tends to support the widely spread but unphilosophical notion, that in any part of the Polar Sea, we may look for large areas free from ice.”

By the time these devastating findings were released, De Long had sailed from San Francisco, and thus he never saw them. They called into question nearly all the scientific theories on which the Jeannette expedition was based—theories that had been endlessly reaffirmed in the popular imagination. (After the Jeannette set sail, the Herald had declared that it was “undebatable that a warm current of water from the Pacific flows into the Arctic Ocean at Bering Strait.”) But as the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey results were showing, there was no warm current tunneling under the ice cap. There was no thermometric gateway to the pole. And, likely, there was no Open Polar Sea. The theories of Silas Bent, Matthew Fontaine Maury, and the late August Petermann were resoundingly wrong.

While the Jeannette wallowed ever northward, scientists and bureaucrats in Washington slowly digested the new data. Everything they learned seemed to suggest that De Long’s voyage, before it had even begun in earnest, was a fool’s errand.

Another scientist who would closely study the survey data was a respected physician and chemist named Thomas Antisell. Dr. Antisell, in an address before the American Geographical Society in New York, was ruthless in his conclusion. The portal De Long was aiming for offered “no real gate of entrance into the Arctic Ocean,” he said. “The North Pacific Ocean has, practically speaking, no northern outlet; Bering Straits is but a cul de sac.”

Pressure on Adm. Horthy, 1944

From The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, by Jonathan Freedland (HarperCollins, 2022), Kindle pp. 298-300:

The pope had not been able to utter the word ‘Jews’, or to make his plea public, but his meaning was clear enough. The American president, meanwhile, was not quite so squeamish. The very next day, 26 June, and just as the truth of Auschwitz was becoming ever more public thanks to the press coverage coming out of Switzerland, Roosevelt had his secretary of state deliver a message to Horthy:

The United States demands to know whether the Hungarian authorities intend . . . to deport Jews to Poland or to any other place, or to employ any measures that would in the end result in their mass execution. Moreover, the United States wishes to remind the Hungarian authorities that all those responsible for carrying out those kind of injustices will be dealt with . . .

The pressure, unleashed by the publication of the Vrba–Wetzler Report, was unremitting. On 30 June, the king of Sweden, Gustav V, wrote to Horthy with a warning that, if the deportations did not stop, Hungary would become a ‘pariah among other nations’. But it was that US warning, that war criminals would be held to account, that seemed to concentrate the regent’s mind.

‘I shall not tolerate this any further!’ Horthy told a council of his ministers the day Roosevelt’s message arrived. ‘The deportation of the Jews of Budapest must cease!’ Tellingly, that exhortation did not apply to the deportations outside Budapest. Those continued. The next day, 27 June, would see 12,421 Jews shipped to Auschwitz in four separate transports. The deportations would continue the next day and the next.

Despite his royal title, Horthy was not the master of his kingdom: issuing a command did not make it happen. There now ensued a power struggle inside the Hungarian government, as those bent on continuing to do the Nazis’ bidding, collaborating in the effort to rid the country of its Jews, sought to resist the regent’s edict. The security forces themselves were split: there was a tank division loyal to the regent, battalions of provincial gendarmes loyal to the Final Solution.

If Horthy was to prevail, he would have to move fast. Adolf Eichmann and his local fascist allies had drawn up a plan to ensnare the last major Jewish community still untouched by the hand of the SS: the 200,000 Jews of Budapest who were the last Jews of Hungary – and, in effect, the last Jews of Europe.

This is how it would work. On 2 July, thousands of Hungarian armed police would gather in Budapest’s Heroes Square on a pretext designed to arouse minimal suspicion: a flag ceremony to honour their comrades. Then, once the formalities were over, the gendarmes would quietly spend their three days of supposed leave making themselves familiar with the locations of the single-building mini-ghettos known as ‘yellow-star houses’, in particular working out how to block off potential escape routes for any Jews minded to flee. The trains carrying Budapest’s Jews to the gas chambers were scheduled for departure on 10 July.

Except events did not run to plan. On 2 July, the 15th Air Force of the United States dropped 1,200 tons of bombs in or near Budapest, killing 136 people and destroying 370 buildings. The bombs’ targets were, in fact, factories south of the capital, but that was not how it looked from inside Hungary’s ruling circles. To them, it seemed as if Roosevelt was making good his threat to hold the Hungarian political leadership responsible for the slaughter of the country’s Jews. Those at the top trembled at the prospect.

By 5 July, Horthy had installed a loyalist as the chief military commander in the capital and instructed him to take ‘all measures necessary to prevent the deportation of the Budapest Jews’. That same night, he sent in the tanks. As the army moved in, the provincial police, there to round up Jews, were pushed out.

In the clash of wills, the regent had won. To be clear, his prime motive was self-preservation and the assertion of his own authority, rather than the saving of Jews. The deportation of the Jews of Hungary had not especially troubled him until that moment. Indeed, it would continue for the next three days, at the same intense pace as it had throughout May and June: there were five transports from the provinces on 9 July alone. There was one more on 20 July.

But the rest were stopped. One train bound for Auschwitz was even turned around and sent back, on Horthy’s orders. Eichmann was livid: ‘In all my long experience, such a thing has never happened to me before,’ he raged. ‘It cannot be tolerated!’ Under Horthy, there would be no deportations from Budapest.

The Jews of the capital city were saved, for now. There were many explanations – starting with the shifting calculus of Hungarian politics, as Germany began to look like the losing side in the war – but a crucial role was played by a thirty-two-page document, written by two men, one of them a teenager, who had done what no Jews had ever done before and escaped from Auschwitz. They had crossed mountains and rivers, they had hidden and starved, they had defied death and the most vicious enemy the world had ever seen. Their word had been doubted, it had been ignored and it had been suppressed. But now, at last, it had made the breakthrough they had longed for. Rudolf Vrba and Fred Wetzler had saved 200,000 lives.

Grains of Poland

During the heyday of the Hanseatic League, Poland was the granary of Europe, and its diet remains very rich in grains. Hardly any of its many breads contain just one grain, and one of its many brands of yogurt calls itself 7zbóż '7cereals'. Here are the cereal grains listed in its jogurt z brzoskwinią, gruszką i ziarnami zbóż 'yogurt with peach, pear and cereal grains' variety: jęczmień, pszenica, żyto, owies, gryka, ryz, pszenica arkisz, otręby pszenne 'barley, wheat, rye, oat, buckwheat, rice, spelt wheat, wheat bran'.

Speaking of food labels, here is the breakdown of wartość odżywcza 100 g productu 'nutritional value in 100 g of product':
Wartość energetyczna 'energy value' 96 kcal
Tłuszcz 'fat' 2,5 g
w tym kwasy nasycone 'incl. saturated fatty acids' 1,8 g
Węglowodany 'carbohydrates' 14,7 g
w tym cukry 'incl. sugar' 13,5 g
Błonnik 'fiber' 0,6 g
Białko 'protein' 2,6 g
Sól 'salt' 0,07 g

Multiply by 3 for the 300 g tub of yogurt!

Preparing for VE Day in London

From Victory '45: The End of the War in Eight Surrenders, by James Holland and Al Murray (Grove Atlantic, 2025), Kindle pp. 169-172:

ON 7 MAY IN LONDON THE BRITISH Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was woken with the news of the surrenders earlier that morning in Reims: Jodl had signed on behalf of the Flensburg government at 2.41 a.m. Delivering the news was Captain Richard Pim, head of the map room. Churchill looked at the document and initialled it. This was the news he had been waiting so long for. He teased Pim that finally he had made up for years of bringing him bad news by delivering the best news of the war. Celebrations, though, would have to wait – a decision was made that 8 May would be ‘Victory in Europe Day’, rather than as the BBC had po-facedly decided ‘Ceasefire Day’. Even with unfinished business in the Far East, this was bigger than any ceasefire; Churchill would have his victory.

The news was impossible to contain – the Ministry of Information told the public at 7.40 p.m. that a formal announcement of the victory would be made the next day by the Prime Minister. That said, the shooting hadn’t yet stopped. The Kriegsmarine took it upon itself to sink two ships off the Firth of Forth, the Norwegian Sneland I and the Canadian Avondale Park. Nine merchant seamen were killed by U-2336, the last maritime deaths in the western theatre, drawing out the pointless killing to the very last.

Nevertheless, a national holiday was declared for 8 May. Knowing that the moment was approaching, the government made sure that the Ministry of Food had sufficient beer for the impending celebrations. Licensing hours were extended – though this conjures up the notion that they could somehow be enforced on such a day. The ministry had prepared for VE Day, instructing shops on how long they should open, reassuring people that milk would be delivered as usual and that bakers should bake enough bread for the following day. Government departments received the code words ‘Mousetrap: noon tomorrow’ to alert them to it being official.

...

Celebrations had begun on the evening of the 7th and went into the early morning of the 8th – at 2 a.m. ships in Southampton Docks sounded air horns and a searchlight flashed V for Victory.

...

The newspapers were also allowed, for the first time since war had been declared, to run a weather forecast. Weather forecasting had been a top-secret enterprise up to this point, something upon which the fate of nations, of invasions, of bombing raids and air defence hung. VE Day lifted such secrecy. The first forecast since September 1939 predicted rain for the afternoon. Fortunately it was wrong and a fine day followed, with sunshine – the ‘King’s weather’.

Polish Heweliusz Series on Netflix

My latest weekly update from Culture.pl includes a profile of a new and interesting Polish film series: Heweliusz: Netflix Revisits Poland’s Most Tragic Ferry Disaster. During our recent pilgrimage to Gdansk, we stayed in a nice hotel on Heweliusz Street not far from Gdansk Main train station. Here are some excerpts from the story on Culture.pl.

Jan Holoubek's blockbuster is more than just a solid piece of good entertainment. In this Netflix series the story of the greatest maritime disaster in post-war Poland becomes a tale of the victims of the transformation and the brutal verdicts of history.

...

It was 5:12 a.m. on January 14, 1993, when the rail-truck ferry Jan Heweliusz, operating between Świnoujście [= Ger. Swinemünde] and Ystad, capsized in the stormy winds. A few minutes earlier, Captain Andrzej Ułasiewicz had broadcast a 'Mayday! Mayday!' message, calling for help from all nearby vessels. He had 36 passengers and 29 crew members on board, all of whom found themselves in the water at a temperature of 2 degrees Celsius during a raging storm, force 12 on the Beaufort scale. Ułasiewicz didn't even try to save himself – he remained on the bridge until the end, trying to relay information to rescue units – German, Danish, and Polish. When the waters receded, he was named as the main culprit in the Heweliusz tragedy, whose story is now told in Jan Holoubek's series.

...

From its inception, the MF Jan Heweliusz was considered an exceptionally unlucky vessel. Launched in 1977 at the Norwegian Trosvik shipyard, it sailed under the Polish flag for the next 16 years, experiencing around 30 different breakdowns during that time. Its history of adventures was so rich that Swedish sailors dubbed it 'Jan Haverelius,' or 'Accident John.'

The Polish ferry capsized twice while in port (hence why one of the series' characters explicitly calls it 'a f...cking roly-poly toy'), its engines failed, and its ballast system malfunctioned. The Heweliusz also collided with a fishing boat.

...

However two other failures proved crucial to the tragic events of January 14, 1993. The first was damage to the ferry a few days before the sinking. While docking at the Swedish port, the vessel struck the quay, bending the gate securing the ferry's entrance, allowing water to enter. The shipowners, Euroafrica company, a subsidiary of Polish Ocean Lines, were aware of the defect but decided not to suspend operation until it was fully repaired. The reason was simple – a vessel sitting in port wouldn't earn any money, and the company's management wouldn't allow it. The crew members themselves were supposed to carry out makeshift repairs, but without the proper equipment and time, they could only partially repair the damage.

...

The second of the ferry's structural defects proved even more significant and far-reaching. It involved a multi-ton concrete cover on one of the decks. In 1986, during a voyage, a refrigerated truck caught fire on the ferry, spreading to other vehicles and engulfing the vessel's superstructure on one of the upper decks. The ferry was then renovated at the Hamburg shipyard, and the damaged deck was poured with a layer of concrete. Immediately after the Heweliusz tragedy, attempts were made to argue that the poured concrete weighed 'only' 30 tons (a small amount compared to the vessel's total weight), and that the reconstruction concerned one of the lower decks. However, in reality, the ferry was loaded with more than twice that weight, and the renovation only affected one of the upper decks, significantly affecting the vessel's stability. Stability, which had already been far from ideal, chiefly due to the wide captain's cabin on the bridge, which, in hurricane-force winds, turned into a veritable sail. All of this meant the ferry was unable to cope with the severe storm that struck the ship that January night, claiming the lives of 20 sailors and all of the ferry's passengers.

...

The questions that researchers of the Heweliusz tragedy have been asking themselves for years resonate powerfully, yet at the same time, seemingly incidentally, in Jan Holoubek's series. Not as a theme in itself, but as a footnote to the story of the people grappling with the consequences of the disaster. Kasper Bajon's story skillfully transports us across several timelines and between characters examining Heweliusz's case from different perspectives. Guides through this world include a crew member (Konrad Eleryk) who survived the disaster, plagued by remorse; Captain Ułasiewicz's widow (Magdalena Różczka), who must defend his memory and care for her teenage daughter; and the truck driver's wife (Justyna Wasilewska), who lives in the same neighborhood and is left destitute after his death. Finally, there is Captain Piotr Binter (Michał Żurawski), a sailor and friend of Ułasiewicz. As a juror deciding the causes of the disaster, he must choose between loyalty to his deceased friend and his career, which is threatened by the pressures of a political and business alliance.

Poland's Silver Age Ends

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 329-330:

The seventeenth century had proven a mixed bag for the Commonwealth. It began on a relatively high note, with the reign of Zygmunt III Vasa that ushered in the so-called Silver Age. Mid-century, however, the Commonwealth nearly imploded, wracked by devastating invasions, civil war, and the loss of left-bank Ukraine. The country’s recovery from the [Swedish] Deluge, although noteworthy, was only partial. The nobility clung ever more tightly to its cherished Golden Freedoms and rejected anything that smacked of political reform, particularly if it might lead to a strengthening of the monarch’s position within the country. Even the triumphant, world-historical victory of Sobieski and his forces at Vienna—the high point of the century—did more for Western Christendom than for the Commonwealth itself.

The final election of the seventeenth century did not lead to the confirmation of a new Piast (or native Sarmatian) dynasty. Despite his efforts, King Jan III Sobieski proved unable to secure for his sons the Polish succession. To the contrary, the election of 1697 would mark a reversal of recent policy, which since the Deluge had given preference to candidates of noble Piast heritage. From the vantage point of hindsight, an interesting pattern emerges. Consider the elections both preceding and following the triplet of Vasa reigns. The first two elections, limited to foreign candidates, put one regrettable (Valois) and one memorable (Batory) candidate on the Polish throne. The anti-foreign backlash following the abdication of Jan Kazimierz Vasa (which marked the end of the Polish Vasa dynasty) put two Piasts (native candidates) on the Polish throne: once again, one regrettable (Wiśniowiecki) and one memorable (Sobieski) candidate.

Despite the fact that Sobieski not only had significant military victories under his belt but also had fathered sons who could contend for the throne, the electoral pendulum swung once again—out of their reach....

This clear rejection of the Sobieski heir—and, by extension, all candidates of Polish/Sarmatian noble descent—opened the doors wide to foreign involvement. This time, the results of the election ended up demonstrating to what extent the Commonwealth elections could be used in the power struggle between the various major European players.

Social Mobility on the Great Plains

From My Ántonia, by Willa Cather (Houghton Mifflin, 1924), Book 2, Chapter IX:

THERE was a curious social situation in Black Hawk. All the young men felt the attraction of the fine, well-set-up country girls who had come to town to earn a living, and, in nearly every case, to help the father struggle out of debt, or to make it possible for the younger children of the family to go to school.

Those girls had grown up in the first bitter-hard times, and had got little schooling themselves. But the younger brothers and sisters, for whom they made such sacrifices and who have had "advantages," never seem to me, when I meet them now, half as interesting or as well educated. The older girls, who helped to break up the wild sod, learned so much from life, from poverty, from their mothers and grandmothers; they had all, like Ántonia, been early awakened and made observant by coming at a tender age from an old country to a new. I can remember a score of these country girls who were in service in Black Hawk during the few years I lived there, and I can remember something unusual and engaging about each of them. Physically they were almost a race apart, and out-of-door work had given them a vigor which, when they got over their first shyness on coming to town, developed into a positive carriage and freedom of movement, and made them conspicuous among Black Hawk women.

That was before the day of High-School athletics. Girls who had to walk more than half a mile to school were pitied. There was not a tennis court in the town; physical exercise was thought rather inelegant for the daughters of well-to-do families. Some of the High-School girls were jolly and pretty, but they stayed indoors in winter because of the cold, and in summer because of the heat. When one danced with them their bodies never moved inside their clothes; their muscles seemed to ask but one thing—not to be disturbed. I remember those girls merely as faces in the schoolroom, gay and rosy, or listless and dull, cut off below the shoulders, like cherubs, by the ink-smeared tops of the high desks that were surely put there to make us round-shouldered and hollow-chested.

The daughters of Black Hawk merchants had a confident, uninquiring belief that they were "refined," and that the country girls, who "worked out," were not. The American farmers in our county were quite as hard-pressed as their neighbors from other countries. All alike had come to Nebraska with little capital and no knowledge of the soil they must subdue. All had borrowed money on their land. But no matter in what straits the Pennsylvanian or Virginian found himself, he would not let his daughters go out into service. Unless his girls could teach a country school, they sat at home in poverty. The Bohemian and Scandinavian girls could not get positions as teachers, because they had had no opportunity to learn the language. Determined to help in the struggle to clear the homestead from debt, they had no alternative but to go into service. Some of them, after they came to town, remained as serious and as discreet in behavior as they had been when they ploughed and herded on their father's farm. Others, like the three Bohemian Marys, tried to make up for the years of youth they had lost. But every one of them did what she had set out to do, and sent home those hard-earned dollars. The girls I knew were always helping to pay for ploughs and reapers, brood-sows, or steers to fatten.

One result of this family solidarity was that the foreign farmers in our county were the first to become prosperous. After the fathers were out of debt, the daughters married the sons of neighbors,—usually of like nationality,—and the girls who once worked in Black Hawk kitchens are to-day managing big farms and fine families of their own; their children are better off than the children of the town women they used to serve.

I thought the attitude of the town people toward these girls very stupid. If I told my schoolmates that Lena Lingard's grandfather was a clergyman, and much respected in Norway, they looked at me blankly. What did it matter? All foreigners were ignorant people who couldn't speak English. There was not a man in Black Hawk who had the intelligence or cultivation, much less the personal distinction, of Ántonia's father. Yet people saw no difference between her and the three Marys; they were all Bohemians, all "hired girls."

I always knew I should live long enough to see my country girls come into their own, and I have. To-day the best that a harassed Black Hawk merchant can hope for is to sell provisions and farm machinery and automobiles to the rich farms where that first crop of stalwart Bohemian and Scandinavian girls are now the mistresses.

The Black Hawk boys looked forward to marrying Black Hawk girls, and living in a brand-new little house with best chairs that must not be sat upon, and hand-painted china that must not be used. But sometimes a young fellow would look up from his ledger, or out through the grating of his father's bank, and let his eyes follow Lena Lingard, as she passed the window with her slow, undulating walk, or Tiny Soderball, tripping by in her short skirt and striped stockings.

The country girls were considered a menace to the social order. Their beauty shone out too boldly against a conventional background. But anxious mothers need have felt no alarm. They mistook the mettle of their sons. The respect for respectability was stronger than any desire in Black Hawk youth.

Our young man of position was like the son of a royal house; the boy who swept out his office or drove his delivery wagon might frolic with the jolly country girls, but he himself must sit all evening in a plush parlor where conversation dragged so perceptibly that the father often came in and made blundering efforts to warm up the atmosphere. On his way home from his dull call, he would perhaps meet Tony and Lena, coming along the sidewalk whispering to each other, or the three Bohemian Marys in their long plush coats and caps, comporting themselves with a dignity that only made their eventful histories the more piquant. If he went to the hotel to see a traveling man on business, there was Tiny, arching her shoulders at him like a kitten. If he went into the laundry to get his collars, there were the four Danish girls, smiling up from their ironing-boards, with their white throats and their pink cheeks.

The three Marys were the heroines of a cycle of scandalous stories, which the old men were fond of relating as they sat about the cigar-stand in the drug-store. Mary Dusak had been housekeeper for a bachelor rancher from Boston, and after several years in his service she was forced to retire from the world for a short time. Later she came back to town to take the place of her friend, Mary Svoboda, who was similarly embarrassed. The three Marys were considered as dangerous as high explosives to have about the kitchen, yet they were such good cooks and such admirable housekeepers that they never had to look for a place.

The Vannis' tent brought the town boys and the country girls together on neutral ground. Sylvester Lovett, who was cashier in his father's bank, always found his way to the tent on Saturday night. He took all the dances Lena Lingard would give him, and even grew bold enough to walk home with her. If his sisters or their friends happened to be among the onlookers on "popular nights," Sylvester stood back in the shadow under the cottonwood trees, smoking and watching Lena with a harassed expression. Several times I stumbled upon him there in the dark, and I felt rather sorry for him. He reminded me of Ole Benson, who used to sit on the draw-side and watch Lena herd her cattle. Later in the summer, when Lena went home for a week to visit her mother, I heard from Ántonia that young Lovett drove all the way out there to see her, and took her buggy-riding. In my ingenuousness I hoped that Sylvester would marry Lena, and thus give all the country girls a better position in the town.

Sylvester dallied about Lena until he began to make mistakes in his work; had to stay at the bank until after dark to make his books balance. He was daft about her, and every one knew it. To escape from his predicament he ran away with a widow six years older than himself, who owned a half-section. This remedy worked, apparently. He never looked at Lena again, nor lifted his eyes as he ceremoniously tipped his hat when he happened to meet her on the sidewalk.

So that was what they were like, I thought, these white-handed, high-collared clerks and bookkeepers! I used to glare at young Lovett from a distance and only wished I had some way of showing my contempt for him.

Denmark Dumps the Nicobars, 1868

From The Rise and Fall of the Danish Empire, by Michael Bregnsbo and Kurt Villads Jensen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Kindle p. 337:

Although Tranquebar and Serampore were sold in 1845, the colonial experience in Asia was not quite over. The Nicobar archipelago was not included in the sale. However, due to malaria, these islands were uninhabitable, and a last Danish colonization attempt was abandoned in 1848. Thereafter, there was no Danish connection with these islands. The islands were subsequently used as bases for pirates: therefore the British envoy approached the Danish government in 1868 with a request that it, as the holder of sovereignty, would intervene against the pirates and restore law and order, or alternatively hand over the sovereignty to Great Britain. The Danish government astonished the British envoy by not demanding any payment at all for such a transfer. After 1864, Denmark was not willing to risk anything.

Denmark Becomes a Nation-State

From The Rise and Fall of the Danish Empire, by Michael Bregnsbo and Kurt Villads Jensen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Kindle pp. 330-332:

The cession of the duchies [Schleswig, Holstein, Lauenburg] in 1864 meant that Denmark now became a nation-state. A nation-state is defined as a state where there is one common culture, one common language, one common history, etc. There were certainly still other nationalities within the Danish empire, namely Icelanders, Faroese, and Greenlanders along with the nationally and ethnically diverse population of the West Indies. However, the relationship cannot be compared at all with the Danish-German united monarchy. When tallied both separately and together the above-mentioned groups represented such a small proportion of the inhabitants of the empire, whereas those that were German-affiliated had made up a third of the inhabitants in the united monarchy. On the other hand, this did not mean that all Danes lived in Denmark. There were around 200,000 Danish-minded southern Jutlanders in Schleswig, who after 1864, became German citizens against their will.

For Prussia, 1864 had been a stepping-stone in a longer process towards a united Germany under Prussian rule. This goal was met in 1870 when Germany became a unified, centralized empire. This put the Danish state in a completely new historical situation. Previously it had been a medium-sized European state, and while Germany had been an empire or later a confederacy, it was relatively decentralized and consisted of many different and both large, medium, and small states. The Danish empire had been larger than many of these German states. Now the balance of power was markedly different: Denmark had in 1814 and even more so in 1864 become a smaller state, while Germany had become the continent's largest power. Denmark's position was thereby extremely vulnerable and threatened. For Denmark, there was nothing to do but pursue a policy of neutrality, but in practice take extensive account of its overpowering neighbor. During World War I in 1914–1918, Denmark managed to remain neutral by adapting to its great neighbor to the south.

Internally in Denmark, 1864 represented a trauma that had an effect on Danish politics and the general way of thinking for a very long time. Together with Germany's unification in 1870, widespread concern was raised about the extent to which it would ultimately be possible to preserve Denmark as an independent state.

The nation-state of Denmark was the successor to a much larger empire. Copenhagen remained the capital. It was a legacy of the far greater empire that this smaller state should be organized as a highly centralized state with all of its important institutions gathered in the capital rather than following a federal state structure with considerable independent, regional decision-making power. When virtually all nationwide institutions and organizations of importance were also located in Copenhagen after 1849, and that Copenhagen is by far the largest city in Denmark, was a result of Copenhagen’s status in the empire transferring to the smaller state of Denmark's capital. It can thus be compared to an overcoat that is several sizes large. The historian Steen Bo Frandsen has written on these conditions: “The construction of a national economy placed Northern Jutland in the role of supplier of raw materials and of people for Copenhagen's expansion. Denmark was designed entirely on the capital's premises and Copenhagen became, if possible, even more than ever the Danish state … Everything of importance was located in Copenhagen. Industrialization strengthened the city's dominance” (Frandsen 1996, 566).

A new constitution was adopted in 1866.

Rise of Nationalism in the Danish Empire

From The Rise and Fall of the Danish Empire, by Michael Bregnsbo and Kurt Villads Jensen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Kindle pp. 272-274:

It appears that distinctive Norwegian and German (Holstein) identities can be traced during this period. Furthermore, an unmistakable Danish identity arose in the second half of the eighteenth century. The government in Copenhagen at the time of Frederik V was, as before, dominated by many foreign-born who had entered the service of the Danish king. The majority of the members of the King's Council as well as the heads of the administration and at the court were born outside the Danish king's kingdoms and countries, especially in Germany. Often they did not speak Danish at all. This internationally oriented aristocratic elite, which formed the leadership of the state, pursued an ambitious and cosmopolitan cultural policy. This included convening foreign-born cultural personalities to hold illustrious positions in Denmark (i.e. the educator Basedow and the poet Klopstock). Furthermore, it awarded civilian and military posts as well as business privileges to foreign-born protégés. This international orientation had been the case for a long time, but it was increasingly perceived by the growing middle class, especially in Copenhagen, as an omission and oversight of local talent. The middle class was growing, and as it became more involved in foreign trade, it gained increased weight in society during the flourishing trade period, particularly in opposition to the great aristocratic landowners. After the middle of the eighteenth century, the middle class began to cultivate the Danish language, culture, and history as a protest against the internationally oriented aristocratic state leadership. The German-born Struensee, who in his short reign from 1770 to 1772 introduced radical reforms, which, however, had been ill-prepared and revealed his lack of knowledge of Danish conditions and traditions, just as his relationship with Queen Caroline Mathilde had aroused public indignation. His actions further fueled the development of nationalism. Unlike Struensee, his successors, Frederik V’s Dowager Queen Juliana Maria, her son, the king’s half-brother, Prince Frederick and her closely connected statesman, Ove Høegh-Guldberg, understood that they had to appeal to public opinion and to win the favor of the frustrated urban middle class.

Immediately after coming to power, they made Danish the administrative language for Denmark and Norway rather than German, and the following year Danish was made the command language in the army and in 1775 Danish was made a formal subject in the grammar schools. The crown jewel of their efforts was the Naturalization Act of 1776, which stated that only those who were born within the Danish king’s kingdoms and countries, i.e. the empire, could in the future hold public offices. This law seems to have been met with spontaneous enthusiasm in Copenhagen and other cities across the country. How should this Danish identity be interpreted? The question is whether the Danish-German national antagonisms that tore apart the entire Danish state in the nineteenth century can be traced as far back as the eighteenth century. Perhaps in the eighteenth century it was first and foremost a matter of contradictions between an aristocratic and internationally oriented upper class and a more domestically oriented bourgeoisie (middle class), whose importance in social and economic was growing. Germans made up approximately a fifth of the capital's population, a representation of the fact that Copenhagen was the center of the entire empire and not just the kingdom of Denmark. Yet, the Naturalization Act was not aimed against these people since it was applying to everyone in the empire and was aimed at foreign-born, in practice Germans, but—significantly—not at German-speaking Danish citizens from the duchies or Copenhagen. In 1790, however, a heated debate unfolded: the so-called “German feud.” The German-speaking fellow citizens and their alleged dominant position were conceptualized as a threat. The feud, however, ceased again, presumably because other problems on the political agenda took precedence, such as agricultural reforms. These national identities ultimately led to the dissolution of the empire, but the question is whether secession from the empire was an idea that originated in the eighteenth century or, whether the dispute at that point solely concerned the distribution of rights, duties, burdens, and privileges between the various nationalities within a perennial empire. There was not necessarily anyone at the time who thought nor desired that these schisms would eventually lead to dissolution, although in hindsight it may certainly seem the case. The development towards an identification with those whose nationality, language, culture, and country one shares, rather than identification by status and as a subject in a particular territory under a particular prince, and where the language was secondary, was an expression of the unitary state. Here, as in the conglomerate state, the empire was not held together by the subjects’ duty of obedience to their prince, but by the loyalty of the citizens to their fatherland, state, and nationality (Feldbæk 1992).

Iceland's Dark 18th Century

From The Rise and Fall of the Danish Empire, by Michael Bregnsbo and Kurt Villads Jensen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Kindle pp. 260-262:

While the eighteenth century in Denmark and Norway was considered a period of peace, progress and prosperity as reflected in expressions such as “the flourishing trade period” in Danish history and “the golden age” in Norwegian history, Iceland’s eighteenth century became a dark time. All land in Iceland was owned either by the crown, the church, or an elite mainly consisting of civil servants leasing it to the peasants: in other words, an agricultural system that did not differ much from that known in the Kingdom of Denmark. The country was characterized by social and occupational stagnation, which the trade monopoly that Iceland was subject to greatly contributed. When Bishop Ludvig Harboe 1741–1745 resided on the island, attributes of the unitary state were increasingly introduced. His work led i.e. efforts to increase the population’s literacy, but also with increased social control, i.e. restrictions on people’s right to move. But by the middle of the eighteenth century, factories were set up by Icelandic initiative, but with financial and other support from the royal power in Copenhagen, to promote Iceland's economic and social development. These were mainly wool processing factories. However, there were many initial difficulties: deliveries did not occur, deficits necessitated large subsidies from Copenhagen, until the factories were for a time transferred to a private trading company headquartered in Copenhagen, before taken over by the state. Nevertheless, this initiative was of great importance for the modernization of Icelandic society. A factory was built near Reykjavik, and around this a settlement grew, which in 1786, when it had approx. 300 inhabitants, received a municipal charter. Iceland had thus gained its first city. The central government in Copenhagen intervened again in the early 1770s and sought to secure the social and legal rights of the peasant population vis-à-vis Iceland’s elite landowners. It was also a result of these efforts that in 1774 the state took over the monopoly of trade from a private company. 12 years later in 1786, the monopoly was abolished, trade was now free, but admittedly only to the king's subjects. But between 1774 and 1786 something terrible also happened in Iceland. In 1783, the island was hit by a volcanic eruption that has been characterized as “one of the largest volcanic eruptions in recent millennia of Earth's history.” (Thorsteinsson 1985, 190). Large areas were flooded by lava, toxic ash rained down over most of the island and the sky was covered with volcanic mists. All this, together with violent earthquakes, destroyed the vegetation and thus Iceland’s agriculture in the following years. It is estimated that approx. 20% of the population died as a result of these natural disasters, and a smallpox epidemic in 1785 deepened the crisis. All the previous decades’ attempts to commercially develop Iceland were now in ruins. It was in that context that the trade monopoly was abolished. The following decades saw the sale of land to tenant farmers, an action that was also done in the Kingdom of Denmark. This, too, can be seen as an attempt to bring the social and occupational structures within the Danish empire closer together, although there were undeniably large differences and the basic conditions were highly disparate. The old Althing (unicameral legislature in Iceland) was moved from the historic Tingvellir to Reykjavik in 1798, and in the year 1800 the Althing was abolished in favor of a national court and judicially trained judges. Thereby, a century-old institution had been erased. Both the move and the abolition two years later were justified with practicalities. Reykjavik was considered easier to reach than Tingvellir, and the replacement with a national court can be seen as an expression of bureaucratization and another attempt to streamline the systems throughout the different parts of the empire. Iceland in the eighteenth century came to witness first-hand the intrusive unitary state, but compared to other parts of the empire there were hardly other places where the opportunity for growth of the unitary state was greater.

Danish Empire Shrinks, 1536-1720

From The Rise and Fall of the Danish Empire, by Michael Bregnsbo and Kurt Villads Jensen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Kindle p. 240:

During the short 200 years from 1536 to 1720, the Danish empire experienced a considerable weakening and serious land divisions. From being a medium-sized European power, enjoying supremacy over Sweden, the dominant power in the Baltic Sea and Northern Germany as well as in the North Sea, Denmark’s positions in the Baltic Sea region and in Northern Germany were overtaken by Sweden. Moreover, the more vital interests of Britain and the Netherlands in the trade and shipping in the Baltic Sea meant that the conditions became internationalized, and both the Danish Empire and Sweden had to submit to the dictates of super powers. This is also seen in the Danish empire's failure to recapture the Scanian territories or its numerous futile attempts to solve the Gottorp problem, although this was otherwise Denmark’s primary security priority. The prolonged conflict that the empire engaged with Sweden led to extensive efforts to strengthen the Danish empire inward and outward through the introduction of the tax and military state, of an active and multifaceted business policy and of royal absolutism in 1660. But all in all, both the empire and Sweden (despite conquests from Denmark and Norway) were in the long term weakened by their continuous rivalry. Perhaps the efforts to maintain the position of power that the Danish Empire still had in 1536 were simply too great a burden: the empire was thinly spread geographically, had relatively small resources, and a small population. Perhaps this was an inevitable situation, because the trade and shipping on the Baltic Sea were so vital to the larger naval forces. At the very least, by 1720 both the Danish Empire and Sweden had been transformed into actors (albeit not puppets) in an international system in which Britain and Russia set the bar.

Denmark's Top-Down Reformation

From The Rise and Fall of the Danish Empire, by Michael Bregnsbo and Kurt Villads Jensen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Kindle pp. 201-203:

Thus, in the conglomerate state, there were large differences between the various state entities, as well as within each territory. But the regime seems not to have found an issue with this, let alone display any desire to unify and harmonize conditions. Only at one point did the government actively intervene and seek to create uniform conditions: in the political and religious spheres of the Lutheran Reformation. In the duchies [Schleswig and Holstein], especially in Schleswig, the Reformation movement had grown in strength as early as the 1520s, through the support and promotion by Frederick I, and especially his son, the later Christian III. The Reformation Movement was supported by several local priests as well as members of the nobility and the town's citizens. The movement spread to the kingdom in the 1520s. In some parts it was met with great enthusiasm among the priests and other sections of the population (Viborg, Copenhagen, Malmø), but other parts were untouched (Ribe) by the movement. After Christian's victory in the Count's Feud in 1536, the Reformation was officially completed. The organization of the old church was purged, the bishops imprisoned, monasteries and church property were expropriated by the Crown, but the clergy in the ministry remained, now as Lutheran clergymen. In 1537, the church ordinance was issued, which was the legal basis for the new Evangelical-Lutheran State Church.

Thus, both in the duchies and in the Kingdom of Denmark, the Reformation was carried out with a top-down approach, but it was done with considerable assistance from large sections of the clergy and the lay population. The introduction of the Reformation in other parts of the empire was a different case. The Danish church ordinance of 1537 was extended to Norway that year, which had come under Danish control. The Catholic priests remained in their positions, while new bishops and eventually also new Lutheran clergymen—virtually all Danish-born—joined.

In the Faroe Islands, the Lagting—the parliament—recognized Christian III in 1535, and when the bishop objected to the new church ordinance, he was dismissed and replaced by a Lutheran. In 1557 the Faroe Islands ceased to be a separate diocese and were placed under the Diocese of Bjørgvin in Norway. It was far more elaborate and dramatic when the Lutheran Reformation was introduced in Iceland. In an attempt to bring ecclesiastical lands to the crown, one of the king's prominent officials was assassinated in 1538. In 1541, an armed expedition was sent to Iceland, which imprisoned one of the two Icelandic Catholic bishops and enabled the Reformation to gradually actualize. But in 1549, the second Catholic bishop succeeded in reintroducing Catholicism by a coup, imprisoning his Lutheran colleague and banishing a prominent representative of the king. In 1551, therefore, a significant military expedition was sent from Denmark to Iceland, but when it arrived, everything was in chaos. The Catholic bishop had clashed with the local Icelandic grandee, who had seized and executed him. Order was now restored and the reformation introduced—even in Iceland.

Early Danish Explorers

From The Rise and Fall of the Danish Empire, by Michael Bregnsbo and Kurt Villads Jensen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Kindle pp. 183-184:

In Europe, the fifteenth century was the period of the great explorers. This led, among other things, to a collaboration between Portugal and the Danish Empire to find a route to India (Jensen 2007). The Portuguese Prince Henry the Navigator had written to Christopher of Bavaria about the project, and a Danish nobleman Vallarte arrived in Portugal in 1448 and participated with the Portuguese Order of Christ in a long expedition south of Africa to Cape Verde, where he lived the rest of his life in captivity of the local tribal chief, who turned out not to be Christian, as the expedition had expected. In 1461, King Afonso V of Portugal wrote to Christian I and warmly recommended Christian’s herald Lolland. Heralds could function almost as ambassadors and were often named after provinces or landscapes (i.e. Lolland). Lolland had participated in the Portuguese crusades and voyages of discovery to North Africa, and Afonso was so impressed by his bravery that the king knighted him when he returned to Portugal. These connections between Denmark and Portugal were later expanded. Around 1471, when Christian presented his grand crusade plan to the imperial diet in Regensburg, an expedition to the north embarked, led by well-known captains Didrik Pining of Denmark, Hans Pothorst of Iceland, and João Vaz Corte-Real and Alvaro Martins Homem from Portugal. They reached Greenland, where they erected a large memorial on one of the more recognizable mountains. From there, they proceeded to America and reached Newfoundland, which was known among Portuguese fishermen as “terra do bachalau,” the land of the stock fish. The goal was to find the northwest passage to India. This was reattempted later. In 1519, Christian II equipped a new expedition under the leadership of the notorious pirate and admiral Søren Norby: prior to this, he had wrought papal bulls that authorized the raid as a true crusade. The goal was to win Greenland back from the pagans, which would only be the beginning. At the time of Christian II it was believed that Greenland was the outermost peninsula of the great Asian continent, and if one could lead a crusade there, one would be able to confront the Muslims with a two-front war. At the same time, Christian's army would land in the Far East near where the legendary Christian priest-king Prester John was supposed to live in a giant kingdom ready to support Christian Western Europe in the fight against Islam. During the fifteenth century, it was said that Prester John was descended from Holger the Dane, hero to Charlemagne, and thus King Christian's distant ancestor. The Danish empire was so large that it included not only huge areas of the north with diverse peoples, but also a bridgehead to Asia. However, the Great Crusade to Greenland and Asia never commenced, because Christian II became preoccupied with problems in Sweden [trying to maintain the Kalmar Union].