A BRIEF INTERLUDE ON THE HISTORY OF TAIWAN in keeping with other such interludes on places which maybe aren’t well known to my usual readers, and which will provide helpful context to forthcoming posts on both the CKS and Dutch Tainan.
Tag: historical interludes
among the wars and the waters
A BRIEF INTERLUDE ON THE HISTORY OF TALLINN from which, at a glance, the most impressive thing about the place is that it’s independent at all. The Estonian state in its modern incarnation has existed for less than 45 years, in two non-consecutive periods, and already has two independence days, both celebrating getting away from Russia (the first in February, celebrating the 1918 independence; the second, in August, celebrating the 1991 independence, in a “for real this time” sort of way.)
Tallinn has been around for a long time, as raiders’ outpost, Hanseatic trading port, fortified naval base, and eventually capital of its own country. But it is mainly a history of being batted about, invaded and occupied by the dominant regional power of the time, and there have been a lot of those in the Baltic. The extensive and wonderful medieval city walls surrounding the Old Town, the enormous trace italienne fortifications surrounding them, the monstrous coastal ex-fortress (“Patarei” means “battery”) and the fancy seaplane hangars are all parts of the Baltic power game.
Estonians are related ethnically and linguistically to Finns (and thus, going a very long way back, to Hungarians) – the ancient Estonians existed as one of the many seafaring, sometimes-trading sometimes-piratical groups operating in the Baltic through the Dark Ages, which we English inelegantly give the catch-all name “Vikings”. They were one of the last pagan groups in the Baltic, principally because neither the Catholics on one side nor the Orthodox on the other wanted to set off a holy war with the other, and fought variously with Danes, Swedes and the Republic of Novgorod (the northern proto-Russian state which was later subsumed into the Grand Duchy of Moscow) as well as ignoring and, er, possibly eating various luckless Catholic missionaries from the German states. They built hill forts and stone castles, including the basis for the later Toompea Castle on the Tallinn citadel. In the 13th century the Christianised Danes, sick of Estonian raiders, allied with the Teutonic Order to launch a Northern Crusade into the area, slaughtering the loosely confederated pagan tribes, wrecking their hill forts and eventually (in the face of some violent revolts) establishing a state called Livonia, run by a Christian knightly order called the Livonian Order, or Sword Brethren.
A variety of horrible wars – Sweden, Denmark, Muscovy and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth being the main players – swept over Livonia for the next three centuries, but Tallinn itself mostly did fine. Known as Reval at the time, it had become part of the Hanseatic League, an immensely influential semi-formal association of merchant towns, which ran most trade in northern Europe from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century. Serving as a natural point for trade between Muscovy and everywhere else, Reval was coining it, and this period was when the town hall and the main late-medieval fortifications, including Fat Margaret and the Kiek in de Kök, were built – both protecting the city’s wealth, and displaying how rich they were to be able to afford this sort of martial bling. Fancy walls and Hansa status weren’t an invincible defence, however, and with the rest of Estonia Tallinn mostly-voluntarily came under the power of Sweden in 1561. The Swedes, then an up-and-coming power who cemented their Baltic pre-eminence in the apocalyptic Thirty Years War of 1618-1648, considered Reval an excellent base to bottle up the Russians, and invested a staggering amount of money into defensive upgrades – the enormous bastions, redoubts and ravelins that surround the medieval walls to this day.
Sweden’s Baltic dominance and ownership of Tallinn lasted until the Great Northern War (1700-1721), when Peter the Great of Russia kicked the shit out of the Swedes and took all of Estonia as war booty. (True to form, Britain involved itself on the weaker side for postwar concessions, switched sides halfway through and generally enjoyed watching everyone get wrecked.) The improved fortifications were never tested – the horrific plague outbreak that ravaged the Baltic during that war reached Tallinn in 1710, just before a Russian army did, and after losing two thirds of their population to the plague the survivors collectively went “sod this, not worth it” and opened the door to Ivan.
Tallinn was part of the Russian Empire for the next two centuries, and went through the same general developmental upheaval as the rest of Europe, but retained its prosperous trade, its medieval old town and its German mercantile-urban elite, the last only leaving in the 1890s. British and French ships blockaded it during the Crimean War, but didn’t attack. In the run-up to the Great War, it was a key component of the enormous Russian effort to block off St Petersburg from the sea with coastal fortresses in Estonia and Finland, and Royal Navy submarine squadrons used the port for raids on iron ore convoys from Sweden to Germany; and, during the utter chaos of the Russian civil war, the Eestis took advantage of everything falling apart to declare an independent state, with its own democratic government and adorable little excuse for a military.
Russia invaded again in the 40s, twice: the first time, in the aftermath of Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, they annexed the Baltic states, abducted the existing governments, military, police etc and deported them to Siberia in cattle cars to die, set up puppet governments claiming to be “popular fronts” and legitimised them through rigged elections, shot anyone who resisted, and generally made such a horror of themselves that when the Nazis attacked in ’41 they were welcomed as liberators. The Nazis, of course, did their usual thing with Jews (not that there were many in Estonia by that point) then, as the Eastern Front moved so decisively westward in 1944, the Soviets returned, kicked the Nazis out and killed or deported everyone who had cooperated with them and anyone else they found slightly threatening. They again installed a puppet government as the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, then carried on doing their general repression thing until the mid 50s, breaking resistance through mass deportations, conscripting the young men for forced labour, sending dissenters and people with money to the gulag etc – all of which was partially reversed with the Khrushchev thaw. Then, when the USSR collapsed, Eesti got independence again in 1991, and threw in with the EU and NATO as quickly and enthusiastically as it could; you spend Euros in the shops now, and there are semi-permanent NATO deployments there. I didn’t get any impression of tension while there – Tallinn has a huge Russian-speaking minority, most tourists there are Russian, and if anything we got treated better having a Russian friend than we did just speaking English – but the country is clearly on Putin’s shopping list, and sabres are being rattled on both sides of the border.
Tallinn 2015
Old Town and Toompea – Linnahall, Patarei Prison, Seaplane Museum – A Brief Interlude on the History of Tallinn – St Olaf’s, Fat Margaret, Old Hansa
the land beyond the forest
A BRIEF INTERLUDE ON THE HISTORY OF TRANSYLVANIA
for anyone wondering why I keep talking about Germans and Hungarians. Wasn’t I in Romania?
In ancient days, the place we now call Transylvania was part of the Kingdom of the Dacians, of which much is claimed. In the early second century, Trajan’s legions overthrew the last king of the Dacians, Decebal (“strong as ten men”) and made it part of the Roman Empire for a few centuries. When the Romans withdrew, Transylvania (as with most of Europe) was overrun by a succession of large groups of violent nomads who didn’t leave many written records. Last in this sustained sequence were the Magyars, proto-Hungarians, who settled in the Carpathian basin under István I, but over the next few hundred years it spent as much time acting independently as it did as being part of the various Kingdoms of Hungary. This put it in an interesting position throughout the eons of horrible warfare between Christendom and the Ottomans, and Transylvania took both sides at various times (Vlad the Impaler’s modern-day rep is firstly Dracula shit and second his penchant for killing tens of thousands of people and sticking them on spikes, but he was also famously a highly canny and effective operator who played both sides) but largely falling within the Ottoman sphere of influence as a generally-unreliable vassal state.
The Ottoman Turks, who once occupied almost all the Balkans, went steeply downhill after the enormous Battle of Vienna in 1683 (which also featured a real-life version of that ridiculous cavalry charge in LOTR) and were cleared out of half the Balkans in the next few decades, although there would be centuries of fighting before the issue was completely settled. So for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Transylvania was part of the Habsburg empire, a highly multi-cultural, multi-ethnic entity notable for its enormous longevity and great stability despite a legendarily inbred ruling family and a habit of haemorrhaging money, men and power by losing wars against basically everyone, basically all the time.*
The Habsburgs encouraged craftsmen from all over their vast holdings to settle everywhere, so as well as a majority of ethnic Romanians (known as Wallachs at the time), Transylvania had a substantial population of Hungarians and Germans, and countless minority groups of Serbs, Croats, Poles, Jews etc etc etc. These were largely concentrated in the cosmopolitan towns, or alone in small monoglot villages.
The modern Romanian state is a successor of the Socialist Republic of Romania, which itself was created from the Kingdom of Romania. This kingdom, like the countries of Italy and Germany, came about in the romantic-nationalist wave of the mid-late 19th century,** built around a shared language, a largely invented folk history, and a German prince. Due to shared Wallach heritage, it always had its eyes on Transylvania, and its chance came at the end of the Great War; Romanian troops seized the area from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which had been militarily ruined by the Russians, and the occupation was formalised by the 1920 Treaty of Trianon (which gutted Austria-Hungary and [literally] Balkanised the resulting territory).
Modern Romanians, for reasons varying from basic Wallach ethno-linguistic majority to claimed kinship with the Kingdom of Dacia, claim Transylvania is and has always been theirs by moral right. But all over Transylvania there are towns which frontiers have swept across dozens of times, towns with five or six names in five or six languages, the graves of people called Schmidt and Esterhazy in the churchyards, echoes of Saxony in the architecture, a long, long history of complex and frequently violent racial tensions (most of which were only really resolved, and the “solution” here usually had a certain final quality, in the Second World War) and, above all, an absolute shedload of fortifications everywhere. This was for centuries the happy hunting ground of raiding parties, the Military Frontier in the war for the soul of southern Europe, and the playground of noble rivalries, ethnic rebellions and local wars in the off-season.
* It contained the hundreds of little independent states that made up most of modern Germany until Napoleon tore the Empire apart in the 1800s. After his defeat, they were courted by both Austria and Prussia, eventually snapped up by Prussia in the 1860s and 70s for German unification.
** For the casual reader: in the 19th century most of Europe was swept up in nationalist movements, cultural memes where everyone decided that the language you spoke and ancestors you claimed added up to a collective National Identity, and as with most group identities, everyone decided to celebrate it by attacking different identities. This wasn’t much of an internal issue in places like England and France, where the dominant ethnic/linguistic group had long ago destroyed or overwritten local smaller groups like Cornish or Breton and created fairly homogenous “countries”, but a lot of Europe – especially in the East – was far more messily diverse and state boundaries had little to do with ethnic/linguistic ones. The upheaval led, eventually to a very different (generally simpler) map, a lot of attractive nationalist bling, a lot of fakey fake folklore, a lot of murderous, violent sectarian tension, and the occasional apocalyptic war. Some of the most brutal excesses of the world wars resulted from small ethnic groups left on what had become the “wrong side” of some border or other, and it’s echoed in recent ethnic cleansing in the Balkans; same shit, different decade.
Romania 2015
Night Drive through Oltenia – Severin, Iron Gates, Baile Herculane – Roman Sarmizegetusa, Castelul Corvinilor, Alba Iulia – Turda salt mines, Sighi?oara, Bra?ov – A Brief Interlude on the History of Transylvania – Black Church, Pele?, Bran Castle