Customer Reviews

Croatia in the Early Middle Ages: A Cultural Survey (Croatia & Europe, Culture, Art)

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An excellent and easy to read book that should be available in all universities and libraries world-wide for scholars and anyone interested in studying the history of Europe's Middle Ages. Croatia as a country and nation has been sadly ignored by most historians, even though it is one of the oldest continuously existing countries in Europe. There has been a Croatia since its people appeared in the 7th century and settled in about the same land as today's Croatia. First a Principality, then a kingdom in the Middle Ages, it kept its identity and a Parliament throughout its history, in spite of the take-over, first by Hungary, then Austro-Hungary and finally by incorporation into Yugoslavia in the last century. Today Croatia is a sovereign country again and its history should finally be acknowledged. This book serves as an important part of such confirmation.

This massive, impressively illustrated tome is the first in a projected series, begun in the late 1990s. The origins of the work -- that is, its commissioning by the Croatian Academy of Arts and Sciences during the Tudj'man years and the immediate aftermath of the break-up of Yugoslavia -- are crucial to understanding the book's central purpose. That purpose is to demonstrate that there has 'always' (OK, since the early Middle Ages) been a 'Croatian nation'. The reading of the past is designed to provide an undergirding for modern Croatian statehood and nationalism.

The result is a book full of fascinating antiquarian information, yet significantly blighted by a didacticism scarcely less dreary than that of the Academy's immediate Communist predecessors. To be fair, the interpretation of the data presented can be interesting, at the micro-level, at least. But the reader must bear constantly in mind that he/she is being led by the hand to read back modern nationalist categories into a distant past that was, in actual fact, innocent of them.