Norman Stone

History of a Troubled Region

The History of Transylvania. Béla Köpeczi, General Editor; Gábor Barta, István Barna, László Makkai and Zoltán Szász, Editors. Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, 1994. XVI + 806 pp, 125 black&white, 29 colour photos + 21 maps.

It was one of those slightly surreal English academic occasions. In 1970 or thereabouts, Ceaus‚escu of Romania was courting the West, and a delegation came to Cambridge. There was a lunch, presided with perfect style by Professor Sir Owen Chadwick, the Grand Seigneur of British historians. Those of us who knew something about Central Europe were invited, and some others, to make up the numbers. The Romanian team was just what you expected from Iron Curtain countries on such occasions. The head was a cunning old pig, and there were two or three fairly obvious representatives of secret organizations, double-chinned, gold-toothed and monosyllabic; there were also two or three nervous-looking, thin, diffident scholars, speaking decent French or English. Conversation resembled a large boulder, needing to be pushed uphill, but the Grand Signor was exceedingly good at it, and the lunch puttered along, not disagreeably. At the end, time for speeches. Sir Owen performed with aplomb. Then the old pig stood up and talked for about half an hour in Romanian. There was no interpreter; there did not have to be, because the man's gestures did the work, and phrases such as "Great and Indivisible Romania" do not need translation. In most cases, the British listeners had no idea what the man was on about.

The point was, just the same, clear enough: Showing off nationalism, Ceaus‚escu would persuade the West that he was really another Tito, anti-Soviet even though Communist; in that way, he could build up credits. In this, he was quite successful, and even spent a night at Buckingham Palace, to receive a knighthood from the Queen. Our little number in Cambridge was part of the parade. Of course, back home in Romania, the history that was being taught reflected this.

Much of it bears on Transylvania, the largest and, scenically, easily the outstanding part of the country. It had belonged to Hungary until 1918, but had had, for centuries, a very mixed population - Romanians the chief element in terms of numbers, but with large Hungarian and German populations as well. There were various nationalist versions of the history.

[...]

This present, excellent, history of the place is a large, one-volume, abridgement of a three-volume original, produced by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1986. The original, outstandingly well-illustrated, caused something of a scandal, and was banned in Romania. British readers of The Times were bemused to find a full-page advertisement taken out, denouncing the book for obscure misdeeds, in Balkan English (the advertisement was apparently placed by someone in Athens). I reviewed the book for The Times Literary Supplement and could not see what, in a sane world, the fault was. It is true that the authors are learnedly dismissive of the old line that Romania descended in a straight line from Ancient Rome, but this is very far from being straight-forward Hungarian nationalist history. It is sometimes so fair-minded that it just misses out mention of some well-documented Romanian atrocities in, for instance, the rebellion of 1848, when, on the whole, the nascent Romanian nationalists took against the Hungarian liberals.

Transylvania's history is exceedingly complicated. In the very first place, a vast amount of it followed external events - invasions from outside, from Trajan's Romans to Stalin's Russians. Romanian patriots said that they descended from the Romans, but this book shows (and convinces me) that the story is a great deal more complicated and interesting than that. The Romans were in "Dacia" for too short a time to take root properly, and the Latin-speaking population fled south; in the next centuries, as Greek was re-asserted under Byzantium and various barbarians swept in, the Latin-speakers became poor shepherds, their language infiltrated by various Albanian words pertaining mainly to agricultural activities. Their descendants are still there, in north-western Greece, as "Koutzo-Vlachs", but other branches of them moved northwards across the Balkans again, eventually re-establishing themselves in Transylvania in the early thirteenth century, where, for the first time, they are noticed by Hungarian chroniclers.

This sensible and eruditely-argued version angered official Romania - Ceausescu's affinity with the later Roman Empire being such that he even employed food-tasters to make sure that he was not being poisoned. Maybe this version is wrong: if so, proving that would be formidably difficult. Unfortunately, the account of the origins of the "Saxons" has not
survived the abridgement. Many were not really German at all, but Dutch or "Flemings". In the high Middle Ages, they were used in Central and Eastern Europe because they understood how to drain land: thus, there is a place called "Fläming" in Brandenburg, and I have sometimes wondered if "Flamaůnda" in Moldavia has the same root.

Another truncation was probably, in these ecumenical times, inevitable. You can in fact treat Transylvania not just as a football between two or more nationalisms but as a little epic in the history of Protestantism, much as John Motley did for the Dutch. Like the Dutch, the Scots and the Swiss, Transylvanian Protestants became, despite their size, poverty and remoteness, something of a great European power, their influence, later on, far greater than their numbers warranted. They preserved Hungarian culture at a time when, under the Habsburg, it languished. Their cultural contribution to Central Europe is, again, surprising - it even includes non-Euclidian geometry, or, if you like, the foundations of Relativity, although, as it happens, the man who did this, Farkas Bolyai, was a Catholic. Why is it that, even now, Hungarians hit the jackpot in the world's tables of mathematicians? This Transylvania might have said more on these points. However, as an overall account of a wonderful subject, it triumphs, just the same.

Norman Stone,

who now teaches International Relations in Ankara, Turkey, was for many years Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford. As one of Mrs Thatcher's academic speech writers, he was a major figure of the British intellectual Right. His review, in The Times Literary Supplement, on the original three-volume History of Transylvania in Hungarian annoyed Ceaus‚escu and his minions as much as the work itself.