Gone Medieval - Medieval Eastern Europe

Episode Date: July 7, 2023

From the Baltics to the Balkans, from Prague to Kiev, Eastern Europe is more than the sum total of its annexations, invasions and independence declarations.In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis meets Jacob Mikanowski, author of Goodbye Eastern Europe, to discuss what can be found out about the region in the Medieval period - a history that is fascinating and often overlooked.This episode was edited by Joseph Knight and produced by Rob Weinberg.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians including Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code MEDIEVAL. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up here > You can take part in our listener survey here. If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here: https://insights.historyhit.com/signup-form Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. Jacob Mikkenowski's book, Goodbye Eastern Europe, charts the evolution and in more modern times the decline of the idea of Eastern Europe and Eastern Europeans. The book goes all the way up to recent history, but Jacobs joining me today to discuss what we know about this region in the medieval period and maybe why I, and I suspect,

plenty of other people, are guilty of overlooking a history that is both fascinating and important to the continent as a whole. So thank you very much for joining us, Jacob. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, Matt. It's a pleasure. To start off with, what do you think kind of defines an identity as Eastern European, if such an identity exists? I mean, you make a point in the book that no one would probably define themselves as being an Eastern European. I think the thing that really defines it is the look from outside. For most Eastern Europeans, the identity is either national, Polish, Czech, Serb, or religious, Jewish, Uniate, or regional sometimes, East Slovak. But once you're outside Eastern Europe, once you're in England, when you're in America,

you become part of this larger idea that people see from outside. And I think that idea is fading. And in some ways, artificial. But in my book, I'd make a case that there is a deeper unity, a kind of shared collection of tendencies. not a single identity, but a bunch of identities that resemble one another. And I think the story of how that resemblance can be really starts in the Middle Ages. It's kind of when Eastern Europe joins Europe and also when it develops some of those singular characteristics. And how do you think that Eastern European sort of identity differs from both a Western European identity and a kind

of Eurasian identity on the other side as well? That's interesting, especially bringing Eurasia into it, because Eastern Europe is, especially in the Middle Ages, is kind of poised between, Western Europe on one end and Eurasia on the other. It takes part and grows into Western Christendom on one side and the Greek Orthodox Byzantine Commonwealth, but it's also buffeted by these great storms from Eurasia. It's really shaped by invasions of Mongols and Katzenaks and Tartars and Cummins. Tartars are still raiding in Poland in the 18th century. So that process of kind of these waves of Eurasia crashing on the shores of Europe is really absorbed in Eastern Europe. So it's poised between both.

I think the two major things that define Eastern Europe against Western Europe and also against Russia, China, around those Eurasian enemies, is a sense of an incredible mixture that they're not uniform countries. They're not homogenous. Almost all of them are religiously diverse and ethnically diverse and linguistically diverse and that their history of statehood states that come into being, usually in the Middle Ages, and get absorbed by larger entities, by empires, mostly the entire region of Eastern Europe. belongs to an empire by the 18th century, or early 19th century. And what impact do you think religion in particular has on that region and the development of societies and cultures there? You mentioned that it's religiously diverse. I guess Western Europe, we tend to think of as just being fully Christianized, for the most part.

But Eastern Europe, in particular, paganism lasts a long time in Eastern Europe. It survives much longer than anywhere else in Europe. And yet we seem to know so little about it. So what part do you think kind of those differing religions played in the development of an Eastern European identity? I think they're crucial. And that's kind of one of the major points in my book. I can start by laying out the religious traditions, pagan, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim, that they're all present in Eastern Europe. And in the Middle Ages, it almost said the history of Western Europe is the history of increasing homogenization.

The history of Western European countries expel their Jews, especially the North in England and France. And in the south, they expel or convert for Muslims out of Sicily, out of Spain, Crete even. And in the east, Jews are arriving, Jews are increasing. Muslims arrive and settle permanently or conquer parts of Eastern Europe and settle then for hundreds of years. The religious diversity actually increases just as it's decreasing. And the Western paganism is maybe the most fascinating element in the medieval history of Eastern Europe. I'm Polish by background.

And I grew up reading the Middle Ages is really a history of Poland versus the Teutonic Knights. As a little kid, I didn't know anything about the War of the Roses. I don't know anything about Long as Conqueror. None of that meant anything to me. What really excited me was Poland and Lithuania versus the Teutonic Knights. And I think it's so little known that paganism lasts in Eastern Europe into the 14th century. There's a giant organized pagan kingdom. Actually, Henry VIII, I think, went to fight them on behalf of the Teutonic Knights.

they were already converted, but he took part of the siege of Vilnius and took the probably already Christian Lithuanians to be baptized. But it lasts right under the Cusp of the Renaissance, a large pagan state. And we know very little about the details of what paganism was, especially compared to Norse or Celtic traditions. Yeah, it is odd that, as you said, we don't know anything about the pagan traditions of Eastern Europe. Norse pagan mythology and traditions we know quite well. And I guess that's partly because it's written down, but paganism lasts for so long in Eastern Europe, yet we know so little about it. I mean, I don't know whether that's just a side effect of Christianity has a tendency to kind of wash those things away and no longer talk about them as soon as it takes over. But yes, Henry IV of England famously before he was king, headed off to Lithuania to fight with the Teutonic Knights.

It was part of what made him a really famous knight in Western Christendom. So do you think that religious groups kind of mixed more readily in Eastern Europe? Is there any kind of reason for that, do you think? Was it just the fact that they were all pushed in that direction and had to get on? Or was there something about the peoples of Eastern Europe who were more ready to accept different religions? I think there was something about the rulers of Eastern Europe. We've got the history of the Middle Ages, there's an internal development of Western Europe, of cutting down the forests and building villages, that internal frontier.

And in the east, there's a real frontier. There's a real frontier with Eurasia, and there's just a lot of empty space and not a lot of manpower. So for rulers and also magnets, local rulers and kings, religious minorities were a resource, not a threat. Polish kings, Bohemian dukes, a lot of Eastern European rulers saw Jews as an economic resource. Their banking, but also their trade, their craft, as on Lithuania, for instance, moving east, settling virgin land. but very unsettled, open forested country, cutting down villages, creating new land. It would settle Christians as peasants and Jews as townsmen, which they could tax very easily. So there was some groups were militarily useful, some groups are economically useful,

and that usefulness persisted until the early modern period into almost modern period. So I guess it's slightly odd when we put our more modern hats on for a little while. We tend in the 20th century to have a view of Eastern Europe as a dark, place under communism, whereas Western Europe is the vibrant capitalist region. But it almost sounds like in the Middle Ages, it was almost reversed, that Western Europe was this kind of undiverse, locked down region that was driving out things that it viewed as a threat, whereas Eastern Europe was kind of absorbing all of those things and seeing the opportunities rather than the threat.

There is something to that, that Western European, the power of the church and the power of the inquisition is increasing, and that multicultural tapestry keeps being on unraveled. Another great finishing moment, you could say, is 1492 when the Spanish conquest is ended, and the Moors and the Jews are expelled out of what used to be Andalus, which used to be this really multicultural place. And that diversity comes transplants itself to the east, the actual Spanish Jews, many of them end up in the Balkans, settled in the Ottoman Empire.

So you have pockets of Latino speaking, so Spanish-speaking Jews in Macedonia and in Greece until the 20th century until the Holocaust really. And then while Spain is expelling its Morisos, expelling its moors, Poland's actually settling Muslim Tartars on its land, giving them titles, giving them villages. And they're still there's a very small minority now. I've visited some of the Tartar villages in Eastern Poland, also in Belarus and Lithuania. But there is a way that that seesaws, looking from the east, Western Europe is this kind a totalitarian Catholic state, and Eastern Europe is this real mix of different churches, different religions.

It also helps that there are a lot of weak states, so there isn't that royal hegemony that there isn't like a Philip the Fair in France who can kick out all the Jews in one night. There's no one with that kind of sinful authority, so it's much more catch-as-kitch can. Yeah, I just think for anyone who grew up around 20th century, Cold War history kind of thing, It's a very different view of Eastern Europe from what we have now. Why do you think that we overlook Eastern European history so much in particularly Western Europe where I am? You know, I sit here in England being very Anglo-centric. And I don't know enough about this really rich, interesting Eastern European history.

Why do you think that is? I mean, is it laziness? Is it prejudice? Is it to do with lack of sources? Is it to do with, as you said, lots of small states? So nobody really builds up a big power block. that attracts attention? I think it's a mix.

Everything Eastern European is complicated about the fact that there's no one Eastern Europe. So everything is really a collection of national histories. I just have a book in front of me. That's a good kind of prime around Eastern European history and the Middle Ages is actually called Central Europe and the Middle Ages. There's also another problem is that what we say Eastern Europe,

it's also often Central Europe. This is specific about Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland. So terms overlap. Countries divide up the history. I think it's also something that, our idea what the Middle Ages is often formed by the West as something that created, incubated, especially in northern France, southern England, a certain pattern of feudalism, royal authority, Catholic Church cathedral building that kind of spreads from there.

And Eastern Europe has some of that. I think the Easternmost gothic cathedral in Europe is in Koshita in Slovakia. It's about an hour's drive from Ukraine. I was there two summers ago, really splendid, classically Gothic cathedral. The Balkans are really part of a Byzantine world. It's also a Slavic world. To master, you have to know both Church Slavonic and Greek, but also Latin. The sources are complicated.

The stories are intricate. And it's hard to find a single guy. I mean, I think there's some great narratives. There's some great English language narratives about the Northern Crusades. Often the Hussite wars or there are places that you can grab onto. But the overall picture is very complex. It's unfamiliar and it kind of departs from that stereotype version of what medieval history is supposed to look like. Yeah, I think it's very true.

There is a tendency, as I say, you know, sit here in the UK and you think everything was a kingdom that had Christianity and there was very little diversity and tended to hate the Jews and drive them out and that kind of thing. And you kind of project that all the way across the continent when clearly there is a divide. There is a point at which that stops and something very different is happening further east of that. point. The Habsburgs, for example, are incredibly famous, but I don't know that we connect them enough with Eastern Europe. They tend to enter the historical consciousness a bit more in Western Europe when they arrive in Western Europe, and we sort of lose that connection to them as Eastern Europeans. They're interesting because they're kind of border crossers. They're sort of prototypical Central Europeans who find the fortune in the East. And for me, Central Europe

and Eastern Europe kind of overlap, but Central Europe also that big, confusing German-like language world of tons of tiny states held together in the Holy Roman Empire. That's where they start their rise, is in the edge of the Holy Roman Empire. And they make a career in the East. The big jackpot they hit is the Battle of Mohatch in 1526 when the King of Hungary foolishly rushes into combat against the Ottomans is killed, and there's a complex double marriage pact and the Habsburgs. In that moment, they get both bohemia and Hungary. And they don't let go till World War I. So they all of a sudden, they've been maneuvering and they've been intermarrying, and they've actually been thwarted in Bohemia. They keep trying to get a put hold in Eastern Europe.

And then in one kind of swoop, thanks a lot, they get this enormous beachhead. And then they start becoming an empire. Before that, they're really these often bankrupt, scheming, second-rate Holy Roman Empire maneuverers. They're asleep by the wheel. And it's when they get these Eastern European possessions that they start becoming an actual continental power. I'm Professor Susanna Lipskin, and on not just the Tudors from History Hit,

my guests and I run through the full gamut of human emotion and experience. From the heartbreak of the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth, not being able to marry, arguably the only man in the world she ever really wanted to marry, may have, for that reason, not married anyone else. To a prenatal battle of the sexes. A male and a female seed meet in the womb at conception, and whichever one is stronger determines the sex of the unborn child.

From Lady Jane Gray facing her executioner. You can't help but feel just the utmost sympathy for this young girl. To why the Laughing Cavalier is, well, laughing. He strikes me as someone who goes off on a sort of swaggering booze up. Subscribe now to not just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. And you mentioned before as well the Slavs, and they're an example that you give in the book of a people whose origins are largely unknown, but they suddenly appear and seem to dominate the entire region. What do you think the arrival of the Slavs and our lack of understanding

of them tells us about Eastern Europe or perhaps about Western attitudes to Eastern Europe? I think the biggest thing it tells us is that there's a lot left to learn about Eastern European history. I actually don't think that this is a question of Western prejudice. We know now, looking at a map of Europe, there's a huge part of the continent is Slavic speaking. The majority of Eastern Europe. And it used to be even bigger. Slavs used to extend into. Most East Germany was Slavic speaking, former East Germany up that Baltic coast. So it was even the larger Slavic realm. And we, such as that, we don't know where the Slavs come from. We have too many answers. You ask any kind of regional archaeological tradition, they'll say Poles have often said it's from

Poland, Ukraine, says it's from Ukraine. Russians will say it's from Russia. Where did they come? How did they spread? And there's been a lot of recent, very interesting, very counterintuitive historical work, live by a guy named Florin Kerta, who's Romanian, that sees the emergence of the Slavs as something that happens along the edge of the Byzantine empire, or that they emerged out of contact when they're militarizing the frontier

and the Danube and on the edge of Romania, Bulgaria, that Byzantine investment helps create out of unsettled peasantry, something we call Slavs. And that's a very countertive theory because Romania is not Slavly speaking. So imagining that's where Slavs' ethnogenesis happens. runs against everything everyone has said before.

But it is such a puzzle. It is such a unclear narrative. Yeah, fascinating. All just adds to the mystery and the difficulty of understanding it, I guess, if you don't entirely know where the vast majority of the people there originally came from and came to be coalesced as a people. To what extent do you think that Eastern European identity was the result of being surrounded by empires without ever really being an empire. So you make the point in the book that Vienna, Istanbul,

and St. Petersburg sort of dominate the story of Eastern Europe. But really the story of Eastern Europe is what happens outside of those capitals to the people sort of ruled by those empires. In the Middle Ages, you have this pretty diverse collection of kingdoms, Poland, Lithuania, Bohemia, Arabia times, Hungary, but also Serbia, first and second Bulgarian empire. And all of the Middle Ages, and all of those ceased to exist as independent countries by 1800. And most of them before that, by the 16th century, most of them either subsumed by the Habsburgs or the Ottomans, Poland, the Hsuania pulls out for a long time.

Ultimately, it's dismembered in the 18th century. It's kind of the last of those medieval kingdoms. And after that, the political history of Eastern Europe is written in those imperial capitals. It's written in Vienna. It's written in St. Petersburg, it's written in Istanbul. And our history, the history we read off. is written from the point of view of those capitals in terms of dynasties, Ottoman Emperor,

Romanov, after, Romanovna, November, Habsburg, November, that's the narrative. But the Eastern Europe is kind of happening outside of that, that there are these submerged states, these submerged memories of identity, memories of communal organization or of statehood that are in some ways waiting to emerge. And also that complex society, that interwoven world of to Muslim, Christian, Orthodox, Catholic that was really settled in the Middle Ages, settled before there's a kind of heavy overarching imperial authority. That's the kind of social fabric. And it becomes a problem for different empires.

The Ottomans have to figure out how to manage their Christian subjects. The Russians actually have all these Jews when they acquire Poland, and they try and cordon the moth that's the pale of settlement. And the Habsburgs, it's a never-ending mess for them politically, just even dealing with Hungary, is the nonstop headache, revolts, and then they have to give it a separate autonomy. But that legacy is a problem for empire, and it's that anti-imperial fight and resistance that creates a lot of the modern identity. Yeah, and you mentioned that it's a lot of small kind of submerged states, but there is also the Polish-Lithuanian state there, which was absolutely massive. So how did

that come about as a kind of single block and how powerful was it at its height? It's a heavyweight fighter that doesn't fight well. Poland is a Lithuania, a little bit like England, Scotland is a royal merger. Very famous, in 1386, Poland at that time has just emerged of an area of disunity and chaos into a newly coherent state. Country, Christian, Catholic, and its dynasty dies out. Its dynasty has only one female member left. And Lithuania is a sprawling, huge, pagan realm that is much bigger than modern-day Lithuania. It's most of Belarus, parts of Ukraine, it's part of Russia, pretty loose sovereignty, but a large pagan state.

And they're both threatened by the Teutonic Knights, this crusading German order that is out to ostensibly Christianized the pagan Lithuanians. It's already Christianized other pagan Baltic people. And it's also fighting the Poles just for really for territorial gain. And so there's a merger. The Polish Queen Yadiviga marries the pagan Lithuanian Duke, Yagaila, renamed Vwadiswav. and that creates a royal merger. And from then up the next 200 years, there's a Poland-Lithuania. The Lithuanian dynasty rules over a joint Polish-Lithuanian kingdom.

And it's big. It's as big as really any European state by the 16th century. It's as big as must be and pro to Russia. It holds its own in wars against certainly Russia and Sweden, but it's less powerful than you would think it would be. It's more decentralized. It retains that division between Poland, Lithuania. Great magnets, the powerful nobles, have great power in it.

And so when the Yagulonian dynasty fails, power really reverts to the nobles. And it becomes an electoral monarchy that's very large and has occasionally strong armies. But is that the mercy of its parliament, really? It goes the other way from when Europe is going towards absolutism. It goes towards noble rule. I don't want to say democracy, but noble democracy with all its. freedoms, it's enormous freedom for the nobles, but a really difficult governmental structure when you're fighting a Russia or a Prussia.

So if it's a heavyweight boxer, it's a big lad, but it's out of shape. And also Hungary, I mean, it was another powerful nation, an important influential nation. What prevented kind of imperial expansionism for places like Hungary? Why do we never see, you know, them becoming vast empires? There's another place. There's a kind of Eastern European tradition of instead of powerful dynasties, powerful aristocracies. So these Eastern European kingdoms bloom when the aristocrats make a good choice of king. So in the 15th century, the Hungarians choose a great king, Matthias Corvina's, his great warrior, our true Renaissance prints also, one of the great book collectors of all time, wonderful Luminary manuscripts, builder of beautiful libraries, beautiful Renaissance style, royal palaces. And he has a run for about close to 40 years of holding everyone in faith, the Transylvanians, the Ottomans, Hungary gets one of the best armies in Europe. And one of the reasons it has a great army, because it has a great opponent, the Ottoman Turks on a southern border.

He fights essentially to a draw. But then when he dies, there's no dynasty. We get an imported Luxembourg prince who a generation later throws it all away on a foolish battle, and then it gives a half-sper rule. So you don't have that consistency of dynastic rule. And you're also hemmed in by the great military empire of the late Middle Ages, early in the Sun. So there's the Ottomans. That's the great military power.

That's the unbeatable army. That means that the fight is almost always defensive. There isn't that room to expand because the Ottomans are actually advancing. And there's hardly anyone in Europe that can really stop them. The Hungarians would turn into the Romanians, hold them at bay at moments. But that is the steamroller military machine. It is not any Western European power. is the Ottoman Emperor, and that kind of limits any kind of imperial ambition.

And it sounds a bit like that's another big difference between Western Europe and Eastern Europe in the medieval period, that Western Europe tends to be monarchy, as you say, sometimes moving towards absolutism, and so a monarch will want to drive expansion, can harness and bring together all of the nobility because they're utterly reliant on the monarch. Whereas in Eastern Europe, you seem to have elements of elected monarchy there. and a much more powerful nobility that perhaps spread the power out. So it's never driven by one person's desire to go and conquer a neighbor because there's perhaps more consensual rule, or am I imagining things?

Yeah, I think that's true of Central Europe too. It's kind of hard to understand Holy Roman Empire, the joke that it's not Holy Roman or an Empire, but that also has that electoral tradition. And it does limit any kind of royal ambitions. And Poland is winning. In fact, the same, the Parliament did not. want the king to conquer beyond a certain point because he become too powerful. And if he's too powerful, he can tax. He can establish his family and start quashing the nobles. And so there's a

real urge to restraint. It's kind of European tradition that's more prominence in Europe. Spain had that. It had its Cortez. England is supposed to have it with parliament. The idea of a king ruling in concert with a nobility. But in Western Europe, there is a tendency toward with these strongly centralizing royal states, I think helped by geography, helped by being an island or being a little isolated like France, having good natural frontiers,

that they're able to suppress that noble liberty. And in Eastern Europe, it really blossoms. And it blossoms ultimately to the detriment of these countries. It dooms Poland, Lithuania. And in the short term, kind of dooms Hungary and Bohemia. And then the other Balkan states are just steamrolled by the Ottomans.

They aren't as noble drips. They try to be miniature versions of Byzantium, but they're small and disunity, and they also have that problem of disunity. The story of Kosovo, the story of the Serbs versus the Ottomans, is told as this heroic tale of Serbian resistance, which was also a Serbunserved battle. Some served nobles side of the Ottomans, some resisted them. The Ottomans, as they're going into Eastern Europe, into the Balkans, one of the things that really is to the benefit is that in each state, there are plenty of nobles who are willing to side with them against their nominal. sovereigns. So that internal disunity makes it much easier for that penetration to happen. It sounds like one of those historical oddities that we would probably think that the way central and eastern Europe was structured during this period is better. It's almost closer to

democracy. There is an absolute power in one person's hand that isn't rampant, imperial expansionism everywhere, but not behaving that way is perhaps part of the reason that those states are less well known and less well understood? I think that's right. And I think that's a feature of history is that we like a strong family narrative, a series of strong personalities to fix a narrative around. It's difficult to follow factional politics among a nobility. It's kind of more flexible in some ways, more accommodating of social difference. So we now do find that attractive. It's not real democracy, but it is flexibility, it's accommodation. But it also does leave them weaker

compared to these ultimately centralizing empires the hapsor was a kind of interesting intermediate case there's a great line from a historian RGW Evans who describes the Habsburg Empire

he has a wonderful phrase a mildly centripetal agglutination of bewilderingly heterogeneous elements and that's the kind of Eastern European Central European story

of you get a family that can for a while hold on to all these different bits and pieces but it's a jumble It's not the kind of France, Spain, England, this kind of central authority. It's a bunch of local authorities held together with the smallest amount of a dynastic glue. Yeah, almost like the king is the one who's just given all the sticks a little spin to keep all the plates up in the air.

You know, you can never afford to take his eye off it too much. And your book is called Goodbye Eastern Europe. To end with, what do you think we lose if we were to lose Eastern Europe? I'm not talking about it disappearing off a map, but if we lose the idea, the culture, the identity of Eastern Europe, what would we lose? I think we've been losing it for over 100 years. The story of the book in Wenway is it's genesis, its emergence, and then a story of dissolution that the 20th century, the wars of the 20th century, especially World War II, then the aftermath, have done a lot to destroy that idea of the multi-ethnic, multi-religious Eastern Europe. It hasn't completely vanished, but it's much more in memory than in the present, especially that very complex social on the ground web of diversity has gone away to a large degree.

And now even that sense of difference, of sense of uniqueness from the West, I think is receding. I don't think it's vanishing, but it's receding to pockets. I think what we lose, we've lost a lot already. And I'm from a mixed Polish Jewish family. So it touches on my own family background. Is that that world of my grandparents, world of my grandfather especially, who grew up in Jewish towns surrounded by Catholic farmers on the border between Poland and Belarus and Lithuania, so that multi-religious, multi-ethnic, multilingual, that's almost gone.

There are pockets of it. You can see in Transylvania, you can see in Albania. But as even that idea vanishes, we don't have to be ruled by the nation state. The nation state isn't the only template for how to live. And that is kind of a Western European medieval legacy, is that we sort of default to what is a country. A country is one language, one people, one religion with some outsiders coming in and out. It's about establishing homogen, whereas it's this heritage that even the nation states of Eastern Europe try to do something about and tried to homogenize, but they really couldn't. But they still functioned that even if they didn't function perfectly, they could accommodate serious.

degrees, difference, seriously large minorities on the linguistic side, on the religious side, sometimes, often, usually both. And now that seems extremely, I think, strange. You know, there are pockets of it, like the Basques or the pronouns, but it seems the exception. In that part of the world, it used to be the rule, and that's something I think at least worth remembering that multilingual, multilingual, religious, multi-ethnic collaboration or cohabitation was a possibility and could be a possibility. The book is part your family stories, as you mentioned there.

Was it your grandparents? You mentioned trying to get married three times and ended up having to give away money to someone to buy a kettle the first time. That's actually my grandfather's sister, who I knew pretty well. That grandfather died before I was born, but his sister was my kind of main relative in the United States and was the great rapporteur and storyteller and family home. post, my mom's aunt. So I actually didn't know that grandfather, but I knew the family history

through her, and she tried to get married three times. And history kept getting in the way. They tried to get married three times, and each time it was either the Germans invading the Soviet Union or the total lack of tea kettles in Soviet Central Asia, or just suddenly the new laws imposed by the Soviet Union on Poland that kept them from tying the knot until finally they did it without her there. They just got a rubber stamp after 10 years of waiting and trying. It was just an incredible human story that spoke so much about kind of attitude, you know, the idea that someone borrowed their marriage fee because there was electric kettles in the shop and who knows when kettles will be around again, you know, you can get married any day,

but who knows when a kettle will arrive. So they gave the money for their marriage to a friend who wanted a kettle. There's such warm human stories mixed in with the history as well. It really is a great book. Thank you. Yeah. That's kind of the, The goal is to bring history down to a personal level, and I try to use my family to illustrate some things, and also try to find a lot of characters across time. So you see history happening on a kind of individual basis instead of that level of kings and emperors that I'm less concerned with. That's been wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us, Jacob. I've really enjoyed

that brief tour of Eastern Europe. Thank you. It's been a wonderful chat. Jacob's book Goodbye Eastern Europe is out now if you'd like to explore this part of the continent with him and his family a little more. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcasts from and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you have a moment, please do drop us a review or write us anywhere that you listen to your podcasts. It really does help new listeners to find us. If you're enjoying this and looking for a bit more medieval goodness in your life, you can subscribe to our Medieval Monday's newsletter by following the links in the show notes below. Anyway, I've better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone

medieval with history hit.