Customer Reviews

Lithuania Ascending: A Pagan Empire within East-Central Europe, 1295-1345 (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought: Fourth Series)

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This is an extraordinary scholarly work. It clarifies the obscurities and subtleties of the Lithuanian situation in the last decades of official paganism when the Lithuanian state rivaled in geographic extent and ethnic diversity the greatest European nations ever known. The book primarily covers the rise and reign of Gediminas, the grand duke who was most responsible for Lithuania's astonishing growth in the fourteenth century. The subject in English has been covered only in popular and inaccurate general histories by Lithuanians influenced by the politics and mythologizing of the nation's first independence period. The author wrote the book while serving as Professor at the Centre for West Lithuanian and Prussian History at the University of Klaipeda, and it represents the first fruit of Lithuania's second independence in this century. The chapters include information on the importance of the region's peculiar landscape, the economic situation, pagan beliefs and their diplomatic usefulness, the role of Lithuanian princesses in forming marital alliances with Rus'ian and Polish principalities, the exploits of Lithuanian arms in expanding the realm, Gediminas's brilliant campaign in conquering Western Ukraine, its Rus'ian allies against the growing threat of Muscowy, and the attempt to develope a Lithuanian Orthodox Church in Vilnius are fascinating. One can only hope that S. C. Rowell will publish a sequel on the next sixty years of Lithuanian history to include the rise of Gediminas's grandson, the controversial Jogaila Gediminaitis, who became King of Poland-Lithuania, the first federated state in Europe and the largest in its history, Christianized his pagan people, despite their notorious (and admirable) cultural conservatism, and managed, with the help of carefully nurtured alliances first developed by Gediminas, to defeat the Teutonic Order, the military superpower of the day, using a NATO style army, Oriental strategy and technology, and Lithuanian ambush tactics. This book lays the groundwork for understanding the roots of the Jagiellonian dynasty of Poland-Lithuania and its political and philosophical accomplishments, fondly referred to by the present Pope John-Paul in the text of his speech to the UN a few years ago. The book's extensive footnotes, maps, geneological charts, and huge bibliography, to say nothing of the densely informative text, make the book worthwhile to anyone seriously interested in East European history.

S. C. Rowell has written an excellent account of the rise of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a pagan empire within Europe that embraced such supposedly "modern" virtues as religious and ethnic tolerance, multiculturalism and multiconfessionalism, although Lithuania's leaders were all pagans who practiced something closer to Hinduism than Christianity, and this at a time when the rest of Europe was winding down from a series of failed cruscades in the Levant and winding up for the domestic cruscades and the Inquisition.

What Rowell fails to touch on is how the Lithuanians managed to defeat the Mongols, who ravaged almost everyone else who stood in their path. In doing so Lithuania gained an empire that stretched from Bessarabia and Bukovina in the south to Estonia and east to the suburbs of modern Moscow. Rowell claims the Lithuanian leadership played a careful and calculated, perhaps cynical game of diplomacy with her rivals in the east and west, Russia and Germany respectively. One wonders if the bane of independent small states and nations in this part of the world, "Spheres of Influence," wasn't started by the Lithuanians themselves in interaction with the Mongols.

The other thing that left me unsatisfied was the lack of clear reasons for the decline of the Lithuanian empire. Traditionally Lithuanians blame Jogaila, or Jagiello as he was known in Krakow, for selling out Lithuanian territorial gains to the Polish after he married their child queen Jadvyga. The truth may also point closer to home than is comfortable for most Lithuanians: perhaps Lithuanians simply learned early what the British and Russians learned much later (and the Americans have yet to really learn): empire costs its masters much more than it does its conquered (i.e. as in the Red Hot Chili Peppers' song, they gave it away then).

In any case, Rowell has written an excellent book with fresh and original takes on the entire subject. By actaully living among the Lithuanians of today's Lithuania (he taught at Klaipeda and may still), he has avoided errors almost always taken as gospel in the history of Lithuania as written, ultimately, by a Poland which has never forgiven Lithuania for being an independent entity after Czarist Russia fell and both nations emerged again as something like equals. Strange turn of history it be that people in the west somehow imagine Poland's independence as built of sturdier stuff than Lithuania's, while both nations have undergone almost exactly the same history of conquest, domination and reemergence since their leaders formed the joint kingdom. If the Soviet Union has fallen, does that mean that its juridical rules haven't held good, or are they still binding, if only on academia in the west? That is to ask, is it true to say Soviet Poland was less Soviet than Soviet Lithuania, or is that only a distinction the apparatchiks in Moscow and American campuses are capable of making? Rowell makes you wonder...

As a Lithuanian-American, it's wonderful to finally find an account of my national history that is written in English. This is an academic book, so I find it easier to dip into it rather than read it from cover to cover, but the writing is generally clear and straightforward. For any first-generation Lithuanian-American who wants to remember what they learned long ago during Lithuanian Saturday school, this book is well worth the price.

I heard people praise S. C. Rowell for this book, but spending $100 on a book that dealt only with 50 years of Lithuanian history seemed way too much. However, eventually I bought it -- and that's the best history book I have ever read.

Most histories are just chronological narrative of wars, battles, and other events. What Rowell did was taking extremely scanty historical sources and piecing together a full view of history: wars, diplomacy, succession disputes, religion (paganism vs Catholicism vs Eastern Orthodoxy), culture, etc. and how everything inter-relates. His scholarship is rock-solid and you just pray for a sequel.

It is very different from usual over-generalized histories that are available. This one takes down to the very core of such claims as "Gediminas arranged shrewd marriages for his children." While you can easily find a list of these marriages elsewhere, the real appreciation comes only after reading Rowell's analysis. You can actually start understand what it was like to be sent over to an enemy's son to establish Lithuanian interest in some far-away region. Amazingly, it is done using not empty rhetoric but historical facts and documents.

So go ahead any buy this book. Hopefully, you will also learn how to write histories and conduct academic research.