Vanished Kingdoms: the History of Half-forgotten Europe - Hardcover

Norman Davies was for many years a professor at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London University. He is the author of the acclaimed Vanished Kingdoms and the number one bestseller Europe: A History. His previous books, which include Rising '44, The Isles: A History and God's Playground: A History of Poland, have been translated worldwide. He has researched at universities from Harvard to Hokkaido, and is a Fellow of the British Academy, an Honorary Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, and a visiting scholar at Pembroke College, Cambridge.

A dozen-plus examples from European history constitute this ruminative disquisition on the impermanence of polities. Struck by popular amnesia about the existence of his selections, some of which endured for centuries (although one, the Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine, lived but one day), Davies, from a traveler’s viewpoint, describes the contemporary appearance of each former state’s territory or principal city, then applies engrossing clarity to the history of its origin, ascent, and decline. Two states en route to expiration, Prussia and Savoy, left traces in contemporary Germany and Italy, but the rest are gone, submerged by dynastic politics, as were the duchy of Burgundy and the kingdom of Aragon, or hacked away and conquered by aggressive neighbors, as was the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. Despite the subject of extinction, pessimism does not pervade Davies’ accounts, which detect a persistence of popular memory about each vanished state, encouraging advocates for its revival, as occurred in the cases of Poland and Lithuania. Having current relevance especially to the UK and Montenegro, Davies’ fascinating work harbors insights and discoveries for avid history readers. --Gilbert Taylor