Free Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations by Norman Davies

records and material remains, however, do not tell the whole story. Some people, by religious analogy, might believe that the grand duchy had a soul or spirit as well as a mortal body. For the grand duchy continues to generate all manner of intangibles – myths, legends, stories and literary echoes – that many observers notice, and some try to analyse.
One of the best known poetical statements about life in the twentieth century proposes that the modern world was built on ‘a heap of broken images’. And one of the very first of many enigmatic fragments scattered through T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land refers to Lithuania. ‘Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch,’ says an unidentified female voice. (‘I’m no sort of Russian woman: I come from Lithuania, pure German.’) The words are so deliberately obscure and enigmatic they come close to nonsense, and they inevitably invite speculation. They might refer, as the poet’s widow has proposed, to a real woman encountered in Paris. Alternatively, they could well be a sly and deliberately distorted reference to a character in H. G. Wells’s New Machiavelli (1911), who was not a Lithuanian but a Lett from Courland. ‘The line is not a direct quote,’ says the latest of literary detectives, ‘but a transposition made… to hear all the voices as one voice, all the women as one woman.’ 115 The historian refrains from joining in. The important point is that echoes of something called ‘Lithuania’, but very different from modern Lithuania, continued to circulate long after its death, and that, as the poet was aware, Russia was something else. The grand duchy is one of the countless ‘broken images’ which contribute to our imperfect understanding of European civilization.
    * Boyar meaning ‘warrior’ is a term that can be found in Kievan Rus’, in the grand duchy and later in Muscovy. It refers to a military elite who over time also formed the circle of the prince’s senior political advisers.
    * The Livonian Knights of the Sword were a crusading order founded in Riga in 1202 and merged with the Teutonic Knights in 1236, thereby forming the Livonian province of the Teutonic State.
    * Ukraina , very roughly the territory between Kiev and the Black Sea coast, was Europe’s equivalent of the later American frontier. It was dominated by wide open steppes, and, except for the river valleys of the Don, the Dniepr and the Dniester, it was not permanently settled until early modern times under Polish rule.
    * Until 1699 the Russian calendar calculated the years since the date of the Creation of the World, and placed New Year’s Day on 1 September. After 1699 the Julian not the Gregorian Calendar was adopted.
    * Given the Polish–Swedish conflict of 1621–35 during the continental campaigns of Gustavus Adolphus, Polish usage prefers to call the conflict of 1654–60 the ‘Second Northern War’. Robert Frost ( The Northern Wars: War, State and Society in North-eastern Europe, 1558 – 1621 (Harlow, 2000)) concurs.
    * Notably Frederick the Great of Prussia and Catherine the Great of Russia, whose rational approach to state-building was lavishly praised by apologists living at a safe distance from their habitual depredations and warmongering.

Byzantion
    The Star-lit Golden Bough
    (330–1453)
     



III
    Describing or summarizing Europe’s greatest ‘vanished kingdom’ is almost too much to contemplate. Like European history in general, the story is too long, too rich and too complex; and if Orhan Pamuk is typical of his compatriots, it is virtually forgotten among the Byzantines’ most immediate successors. Despite their hard-won achievements, professional historians struggle with the enormity of their task. Summary evocations are perhaps best left to poets, especially to one who was once the pupil of J. B. Bury:
The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor’s drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night-walkers’ song
After