Abstract
The cities and towns of early modern East Central Europe have long been consigned to the periphery of urban history, categorized as recipients of European forms rather than innovators or contributors. As Kevin O’Connor rightly observes, cities such as Riga rarely figure in larger, sweeping accounts of Europe despite their role in such central events as the Northern Crusades and the Hussite Wars. In decades past, when individual cities in East Central Europe did merit mention in broad surveys, such attention served invariably to demonstrate the region’s “backwardness” or “underdevelopment” in relation to the so-called west. Partially, one can explain this situation as the result of the different urban structure in Central and Eastern Europe, where, as Jaroslav Miller observes, small and medium-sized towns predominated and urban networks became progressively less dense as one moved east. Prague and Danzig, among the largest cities in the region, never topped 60,000 to 70,000 inhabitants prior to the seventeenth-century crises, and a city of 5,000 people would have been considered a major urban center. The average urban experience was less metropolitan and more local than in the coastal west, and there often existed an overlap between urban and rural professions that city walls conspicuously failed to separate.
Another important factor in the neglect of East Central Europe’s early modern history, and not just the urban component, results from the imperial legacy of the nineteenth century. All cities discussed in the volumes surveyed here belonged either to the Habsburg or the Russian Empire by the end of the eighteenth century, and their populations (as well as nomenclature) reflected the region’s continually shifting borders and imperial rivalries. Prague was dominated by Germans; Poszony (today’s Bratislava) served as the capital of Hungary under Habsburg rule; Riga’s upper class remained German long after Russian annexation, and Wilno (today’s Vilnius) featured a Polonized Belarusian upper class but trade rested largely in the hands of Jewish merchants. In the nineteenth century, when French historians could with confidence write a history of Paris that would have been recognizable to all their fellow citizens, rival nationalist movement employed histories of cities in East Central Europe to stake territorial claims and prove rightful ownership to cities located within imperial borderlands. Germans in Riga, for example, had ample reason to legitimize their control over the city’s institutions and enterprises in an increasingly Russifying empire, while the Latvian underclass sought evidence to justify Riga as a future capital of a Latvian nation-state. Similar stories could be told in relation to Vilnius, L’viv, and Bratislava. Moreover, since none of these cities belonged to existing nation-states, the competing claims dinned locally without resonating to the broader historiographic consciousness of pan-European scholars for whom the nation-state was the primary, if not exclusive, object of study.
Perhaps, though, the principal obstacle to a greater awareness of the region’s urban history can be found in the formidable linguistic barriers cast before anyone who would venture into the relevant archival and historiographic materials. During the early modern period East Central Europe developed into an extraordinarily complex, multinational landscape, with the greatest diversity found in the region’s cities and towns. Slavs of both western and eastern linguistic branches, along with native Baltic and Magyar speakers, all of whom used Latin as their written language throughout much of the period, mingled early on with German settlers and Ashkenazi Jews fleeing persecution in the Holy Roman Empire. French and Italian diplomats, including papal nuncios, often appeared in the cities of Bohemia, Poland-Lithuania, and Hungary as advisers and consultants, and their records and correspondence shed light on problems of urban coexistence and infrastructure (or its absence). One could also add Scots, who settled in Polish Prussia and the Baltic littoral, as well as Armenians and Tatars. The principle of parity power-sharing and community self-government for each legally designated corporation resulted in record-keeping in multiple languages by various parties; often the scribes of a given nation-cum-estate would employ more than one language or alphabet in a single document. To give an example, the official language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the seventeenth century was Old Belorussian written in the Cyrillic alphabet; magistrates of Vilnius began employing Polish earlier since the compendium of urban regulations had been translated into Polish, often heavily mixed with formulaic Latin phrases. To this mix, as David Frick shows, Lithuanian words heard on the streets were often added, creating documents of mixed linguistic and alphabetical conventions. I have not even mentioned all the languages employed in the area’s historiography, which since 1991 has blossomed particularly in the newly independent states of the Soviet Union.
Fortunately, a new generation of historians has risen to the challenge of placing the urban centers of East Central Europe on the map of historiographic consciousness. Some, like Jaroslav Miller and Kateřina Horníčková, have taken advantage of the former Communist world’s integration into the European Union and the consequent spread of English as the academic lingua franca to address formerly distant audiences and explain their histories to European and North American colleagues. Others such as David Frick and Kevin O’Connor have mastered the requisite languages necessary to do justice to their respective urban subjects. In the case of Frick, I counted at least seven languages other than English employed by the author, and I fear that reckoning does not do full justice to his abilities. As a result of this native and nonnative research, readers outside the region can now better appreciate the extraordinary diversity of East Central European towns in terms of religion, nationality, and language, as well as the rather impressive span of peaceful coexistence between seemingly hostile groups. Nationality, class, and religion frequently overlapped, reinforcing group identity, but nonetheless elites from all sides found ways to compromise even in the face of profound differences over timekeeping, public ritual observance, and tax allocation. Outside of the medieval Spanish states, few cities in western Europe had to contend with managing such diverse populations, and, though coexistence presumed inequality, peace remained the rule for centuries. In fact, inter-ethnic violence became more prominent only after the conquest of these cities by imperial powers. The Habsburgs, who grudgingly tolerated the compromises that allowed Catholics, Protestants, and Utraquists to coexist in Prague and other Bohemian towns, exploited their victory at White Mountain in 1620 to expel Protestants, transfer real estate to German Catholics, and remake the urban landscape to reflect the values of the Counter-Reformation. Similarly, the unequal modus vivendi in Riga and Wilno between Germans, Slavs, Balts, and Jews transformed into intolerance and nationalist chauvinism only after the Russian Empire challenged both the dominance of the German elites and the aspirations of the Baltic underclass. Russian authorities, though not wholly responsible for local anti-Semitism, did vilify Jewish traders and prevented Jewish integration into urban society through a series of restrictive laws, a policy with devastating consequences in the twentieth century.
The four books discussed here, though, focus on the period prior to the eighteenth century, and the approaches of the authors to discussing urban life can be grouped into two categories. Miller and O’Connor follow a broad chronological approach, spanning centuries of history and focusing on longue durée evolution and noteworthy events. Miller’s Urban Societies in East Central Europe is essentially a textbook, which attempts to find broad patterns in the urban history of Poland, Ukraine, and today’s Czechia from the Renaissance to the beginning of the Enlightenment. The book features chapters that discuss demography and urban immigration as well as trade and citizenship. He contends that urban populations were “closed societies” that gradually lost awareness of their corporate rights and privileges as populations became more diverse while the state, particularly in Bohemia, began to exercise more power. He writes, “While Bohemian and Moravian urban centers were eventually integrated into the structures of [a] centralized state, their Polish counterparts saw their medieval autonomy and political ambitions subverted on behalf of the concept of a highly decentralized noble republic” (p. 158). I disagree with the second contention, as I have elsewhere argued that urban citizens retained much of their autonomy and even more of their civic consciousness until the end of the eighteenth century. 1 This is particularly apparent when one examines the urban history of France, Prussia, or Bohemia, where the territorial state came to play a much more prominent role in urban management and regulation by the end of the seventeenth century. I would rather contend that as in Bohemia, cities in Poland-Lithuania lost their urban autonomy in favor of territorial authorities once the central government began to adopt the assumptions and habits of its Austrian neighbor, as happened in the middle of the eighteenth century.
O’Connor also follows a broad approach in tackling the urban history of Riga from its medieval beginnings as a Crusader outpost until the Russian annexation of the region known as Livonia in 1710. This broad overview aims to provide English-language readers with a comprehensive yet accessible introduction to the history of a seemingly peripheral city. O’Connor, who describes himself somewhat incongruously as a specialist in “Russian History,” employs German, Latvian, and Russian sources, and he provides an overview of not only the major events in the city but also explains how different nationalist camps have instrumentalized particular events to claim the territory as their own. The study is a work of synthesis, making use of scholarly literature and some published sources, and the book’s style is accessible and even entertaining as the author recounts quarrels between the burghers, the bishop, and the Teutonic order, as well as the diverse policies of Polish and Swedish rulers. The problem with O’Connor’s approach is twofold. In the first place, his understandable desire to make the text engaging and accessible often results in the subject, Riga, receding into the background of a more traditional accounting of the actions of kings, bishops, and tsars. We end up with something more like a history “in Riga” rather than a history of Riga. Some of the main characters—bishops, urban patriarchs, and commandants—appear in the book’s dramatis personae (a list of which the author provides), but the reality of daily interaction in the town rarely comes into focus. A major omission is the city’s Jewish community, which appears only once in a footnote, despite a recorded presence dating to 1638. The author rightly critiques the imperial-era German historiography of the city for its exclusive focus on Germans, while also noting that interwar Latvian historians pursued a similar agenda of seeking to discover the Latvian character of the city. Both tendencies undoubtedly downplayed the Jewish presence, and O’Connor may have unintentionally followed their lead.
Since cities in East Central Europe such as Riga belonged to so many different political entities over time, one must be conversant with several “national” histories to properly recount the events of a single place. Collating such information, often outside of one’s own area of specialization, means that mistakes inevitably arise that a specialist will notice. In O’Connor’s case, there are a number of minor mistakes and inconsistencies, which should serve to reinforce the difficulty of examining such territories. King Sigismund August is referred to as a “German” ruler (he was Lithuanian with an Italian mother) and his death date is incorrectly given. Albrecht, Duke of Prussia, who secularized the Teutonic Order and submitted as a vassal to the king of Poland, appears as Albrecht of Brandenburg (suggesting, incorrectly, that his branch of the family had already become margraves of Brandenburg), rather than the more common Albrecht of Hohenzollern. Much more problematic than minor mistakes are a number of assumptions that the author incorporates from the older, state-centered generation of historiography. For example, O’Connor refers to Riga in the Ordenstaat period as “an outpost of a declining Empire.” New research on the Holy Roman Empire by scholars such as Peter Wilson and Karin Friedrich has shown that the empire’s institutions were in fact robust and effective, if limited and subordinated to consensus-based policy making. 2 Riga’s urban liberties, and the balance of power between burghers, bishop, and knights discussed by O’Connor, reflected the institutional decentralization and overlapping power structure of the Empire. I was also surprised when O’Connor described the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which ruled over the city from 1581 to 1620, as an “alien form of government.” The Commonwealth’s decentralized structure and tradition of urban autonomy mirrored the structure of the Empire, whereas the absolutist Swedish monarchs who retained control over Riga through the beginning of the eighteenth century pursued a much more “alien” form of direct rule, arbitrary interference, and increased tax extraction. Later reminiscences about the “good, old Swedish days” arose only from comparison with the period of the Northern War and Russian annexation, as the author observes. O’Connor could have done more justice to his subject by interrogating such categories as “progress,” “modernity” and “decline” more sharply.
Frick’s study of seventeenth-century Wilno and the collection of articles edited by Horníčková embody a second approach to the urban history of Central Europe, one rooted in deep examination of ground-level interaction over much more limited time periods. Such micro-examinations of individual and communal interactions in urban space serve to unmask the stereotypes about “underdevelopment,” “backwardness,” and “peripherality” as external categorizations rather than “objective” descriptions. Kith, Kin and Neighbors has already become a classic for historians of Central and Eastern Europe, and Frick’s detailed, philological examination of everything from intimate housing arrangements to calendar disputes and urban satirical verse has set a high standard for the examination of urban life that should inspire many future authors. Frick knows seventeenth-century Wilno so well that he was able to compose a city map with street addresses, and he placed virtually every person mentioned in the text at an address in a particular neighborhood (I attempted a similar feat for much-smaller Niasvizh in Belarus and could not produce such accurate data). Among other purposes, this retroactive map-making demonstrates the degree to which most neighborhoods and even individual homes were confessionally mixed. In particular, the official requirement for Jews to reside on the “Jewish Street” was widely flouted with the obvious connivance of Christian landlords and renters. In such an claustrophobic environment, where one might have to cross a neighbor’s bedroom to return home, where guilds often housed members of different religions, and where non-Catholics might serve as godparents to Catholics, Vilnians used such devices as witchcraft and treason accusations (the latter relating to the Muscovite occupation of 1655-1661) to redraw boundaries that for outsiders had become hopelessly blurred. Even the witchcraft accusations, though, do not seem to have resulted in any formal trial or interrogation but rather, Frick suggests, served as a preemptive defense for the accuser to avoid blame for crossing boundaries, much as David Nirenberg shows that accusations of miscegenation served to police religious differences in confessionally mixed, medieval Spain. 3
Though Horníčková’s edited collection does not cite Frick specifically, the volume shares similar concerns about the local, urban manifestations of broader political and religious divisions. The subtitle of Central Europe is a bit misleading, as the overwhelming focus of the book involves Bohemia and Moravia, with Prague itself the subject of a number of chapters. Material culture forms the primary object of inquiry for each article, with studies devoted to guild insignia, executioners’ weapons, sarcophagi, procession costumes, and architectural transformations. Given the focus on the lands of the Bohemian Crown, most articles are organized around the impact of the Hussite Wars and the Battle of White Mountain. As a result of the violent re-Catholicization and Germanification policies of the Habsburgs in the aftermath of their victory in 1620, Hussitism’s material traces largely disappeared; some pieces of Hussite-era artwork, such as the Prague painter’s guild altarpiece discussed by Michal Šroněk, survived the Counter Reformation by claiming an earlier, pre-Hussite provenance. More typically, the Prague Lesser Town (Mala Strana) under the Castle found itself radically refashioned by the Habsburg governors and the Jesuits, a fact which accounts for the area’s baroque aesthetic, preserved to this day. Elsewhere in Bohemia, more local changes such as the construction of Tabor as a fortified city by radical Hussites or the transferal of seigneurial ownership over private towns between Catholics and Protestants, left traces in material culture often reflecting uneasy compromises between, for example, Catholic owners and Protestant burghers. Royal Hungary more effectively resisted the Counter-Reformation due to its position on the Ottoman border, so unsurprisingly the one article devoted to this territory—Blanka Szeghyová’s study of symbols of justice in Poszony—avoids discussion of confessional conflict altogether. Instead, Szeghyová examines the various representations of justice in town hall decorations, statues, and clothing for the condemned, which reinforced a message defending the urban community’s judicial autonomy and right to impose capital sentences. Even the executioner’s sword, which carried a message wishing salvation upon the victim, served as a symbolic means of separating judicial execution from ignoble murder.
Horníčková’s collection represents an impressive production of archival and artifact-based research, though the individual papers could have benefited from a more comparative element. The uniqueness of the Czechs’ experience as subjects of perhaps the most rapid and brutal re-Catholicization campaign in Europe should not detract from the obvious similarities with other cities of East Central Europe, in which residents of different confessions and languages had to negotiate compromises, both written and unwritten, on a daily basis in order for commerce and the machinery of government to function. Another difficulty with a study on representations and artifacts lies in the puzzle of perception, which in many cases remains elusive due to the paucity of written impressions. Horníčková’s own article on Tabor serves as an exception as she located the account of a hostile, papal legate visiting the town during its Hussite heyday. Otherwise, we may know the intention of the creators of some of the several artifacts described, but how outsiders perceived or reinterpreted (or ignored) the message remains a mystery. Nonetheless, this collection, as with all the books discussed here, should alert historians that the urban experience in cities such as Vilnius, Prague, and Riga deserves incorporation into general European historical surveys on the merits of their own contributions to pan-European developments, as well as for their models of coexistence and power-sharing. Hopefully, these studies will contribute to a broadening of horizons in European urban history.