Vanished Kingdoms

October 24, 2011
European history as an academic subject concerns itself with England, France, and Germany, or Athens, Rome, and Moscow. But the real map of Europe has always been more complicated, with countless peoples and cultures struggling for self-determination, then disappearing. Historian Davies, professor emeritus at London University (Europe: A History), sets out to rescue the voices of these lost nations, presenting brief portraits of 15 European countries that have ceased to exist, from Tolosa, the ancient kingdom of the Visigoths, to the U.S.S.R., including two, Montenegro and Ireland, which have at least partially re-emerged from the dark. Even residents of present-day Britain or France are unlikely to have heard of Alt Clud, the Welsh kingdom now in Scotland, or of the various kingdoms of Burgundia, which regularly vanished and reappeared around the map of west-central Europe. Though the prose is dry at times and reliable sources for some countries are thin on the ground, readers will find this a useful corrective to the common misperception that history’s losers represent “a squabbling mix of obscure ethnic groups; a mass of near-unpronounceable names in unfamiliar languages; a brew of ‘fanatical nationalisms’; and a tragi-comic outcome for which the alone need be blamed.” Illus., maps.