4: The Heritage of the Tenth Century
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THE WESTERN SLAVS
Almost all European states which formed the Christian community of the Middle Ages ca
be traced back to the tenth century. That is true for both Western and Eastern
Christendom, which were not yet divided by any final schism. The only difference is that
in the East the Byzantine Empire had a much older tradition without, however, any
possibilities of political expansion, while in the West the empire,
“transferred” in 962 to the German kings, was as a matter of fact a new creation
serving the purposes of German imperialism.
These purposes included the domination of Italy and an eastern
expansion that was chiefly directed against the Western Slavs. After the fall of the
Moravian State, Germany s immediate neighbors north of the Magyars were the Czechs of
Bohemia and the Slavic tribes between the Elbe-Saale and the Oder-Neisse lines. The
conquest of the latter, who persisted in their paganism and failed to achieve any
political unity, caused the German marches that were created on their territory to advance
to the boundaries of Poland, which also was still pagan but already united under the Piast
dynasty.
When Poles and Germans clashed for the first time, probably in
the year following the imperial coronation of Otto I, the Premyslid dukes who had united
the Czechs had already accepted both Catholicism and German overlordship. Decisive in that
respect proved the reign of St. Václav, whose murder in 929 was largely the result of an
anti-German movement but did not really change the situation. On the one hand, the crown
of St. Václav remained a symbol of Bohemia’s national sovereignty, but on the other
hand, his brother and successor Boleslav I also had to recognize the feudal supremacy of
the King of Germany, so that after 962 his state naturally became part of the Holy Roman
Empire. The degree of that dependence remained, however, a controversial problem that was
frequently connected with the position of Poland and the projects of cooperation between
the two West Slavic powers.
From the beginning Poland decided to stay outside the Empire,
and in order to avoid German pressure, Duke Mieszko I in 966 voluntarily Christianized his
country, after marrying the daughter of the Duke of Bohemia the preceding year.
Poland’s first Christian ruler tried to limit the political influence of the Empire
to a tribute which he agreed to pay from part of his territory. He also wanted the first
Polish bishopric, founded in 968 in Poznan, to be directly under the Holy See, while the
separate bishopric, which was established in Prague in 973, remained for almost four
hundred years under the German Archbishop of Mainz.
Together with Boleslav II of Bohemia, who succeeded his father
in 967, Mieszko I of Poland even interfered with the internal situation in Germany after
the death of the first two emperors, Otto I and Otto II. He entered into relations with
some of the neighboring German margraves and married the daughter of one of them after the
death of his Czech wife. But neither Poland nor Bohemia was able to support the other West
Slavic tribes in their desperate resistance against German conquest, and the joint action
of both countries suffered from insufficient coordination and from territorial
controversies. It is uncertain which region Mieszko I took from Bohemia in the later part
of his reign. Most probably it was Cracow, together with the part of Little (Southern)
Poland which the Czechs had temporarily occupied. In 981, however, he lost the region east
of it (what now is called Eastern Galicia), to Vladimir of Kiev. His own interest was
primarily in the opposite direction. From Great Poland, the original center of the state
in the region of Gniezno and Poznan, he reached the Baltic coast, uniting the closely
related tribe of the Pomeranians with the Poles and making contact with the Scandinavian
world.
Toward the end of his life he placed his whole realm, at the
time of his conversion already described as the largest and best organized Slavic state,
under the immediate authority of the papacy. That donation of Poland, from the mouth of
the Oder to the borders of Baltic Prussia and Kievan Russia, was to be the best guaranty
of her independence which Mieszko I probably wanted to confirm by gaining the royal crown.
His achievements were completed by his son Boleslaw Chrobry
(the Brave), whose brilliant reign started in 992 with a strengthening of Poland s
unity and which had as its main objective the securing of a fully independent and even
leading position in East Central Europe.
Boleslaw first hoped to realize his plans in friendly
cooperation with the young Emperor Otto III who had a truly universal, supranational
conception of the Roman Empire, uniting on equal terms Italy, Gaul, Germany and Sclavinia.
In the latter—the Slavic world—the Emperor was prepared to recognize Boleslaw as
his vicar (patricius), whose friendly collaboration would promote the missionary
activities in which they were both deeply interested. Their common friend, Adalbert, the
former Bishop of Prague, having been killed in 997 on a mission in Prussia, was soon
afterwards canonized by Pope Sylvester II. At Easter of the year 1000, Otto III made a
pilgrimage to Poland’s capital, Gniezno, where Boleslaw had buried the redeemed body
of the martyr. At a solemn convention attended by a papal legate, Poland received a fully
independent ecclesiastical organization with an archbishop in Gniezno and new bishops in
Cracow, Wroclaw (Breslau in Silesia), and Kolobrzeg (Kolberg in Pomerania).
The political decisions of the congress of Gniezno made
Boleslaw —like his father a former tributarius of the Empire—a real dominus,
that is, an independent ruler to whom most probably the royal dignity was promised. Some
obscure intrigues at the Roman curia delayed the planned coronation, however, and in 1002
the death of Otto III altogether changed the situation. Fully aware of the danger of
German imperialism which reappeared under the new emperor, Henry II, the Polish duke
decided to oppose his policy by uniting all Western Slavs in some kind of federation under
Poland’s leadership.
That project included two different problems. Boleslaw wanted
first of all to save from German domination and to include in his realm as much as
possible of the Slavic territory between Germany and Poland. Therefore in 1002 he occupied
Lusatia and Misnia (Meissen), where a residuum of the Slavic population was to survive
until our day. Even more important was the idea of replacing German influence in Bohemia
by Polish authority.
Interfering with internal rivalries among the members of the
Premyslid dynasty, in the following year Boleslaw entered Prague and the creation of a
common Polish-Czech state seemed nearer than in any later period of history.
But Henry II reacted by declaring a war which, twice
interrupted by truces, lasted sixteen years. The final peace was concluded in 1018 in
Budziszyn (Bautzen), the capital of Lusatia, which definitely remained under
Boleslaw’s full sovereignty. He did not, however, succeed in gaining any other Slavic
lands between the Oder and Elbe rivers, where the strongest tribe, the Lutitians, even
cooperated with the German invaders, thus preparing their final doom. There was also a
German party in Bohemia which the Poles had to evacuate in 1004. Boleslaw kept only
Moravia, so that the state of the Premyslids was temporarily divided between the Empire
and Poland.
In 1013, in the midst of the German war, Poland was for the
first time threatened by a joint action of her western and eastern neighbors, the Emperor
having resumed earlier German relations with the Kievan State. That was probably one of
the reasons why Boleslaw, immediately after the Treaty of Budziszyn, decided to interfere
with the internal struggle among the sons of Vladimir of Kiev, supporting the one who had
married his daughter. When he occupied Kiev in that same year of 1018 and there
established the rule of his son-in-law, Sviatopolk, it seemed that even the Eastern Slavs
would be included in Boleslaw s federal system. The message which he sent from Kiev to
both emperors, Henry II of Germany and Basil II of Byzantium, was a clear expression of
his aim to keep the whole of East Central Europe free from any imperial authority.
Boleslaw’s influence reached as far as the Lithuanian
border, where another missionary whom he supported, his German admirer St. Bruno, was
killed in 1009, and also into Hungary, although it is doubtful whether he ever united any
Slovak territories with Poland. His coronation as first King of Poland which with papal
approval took place shortly before his death in 1025, finally confirmed Poland’s
position as an independent member of the European community.
The royal tradition of Boleslaw Chrobry remained alive
throughout the whole course of Polish history, although already under his son and
successor, Mieszko II (1025—1034), crowned immediately after his father s
death, Poland lost her leading position and entered a serious internal crisis that
opened the door to German intervention. Lost were also the first king s territorial
acquisitions, Lusatia and Moravia, the former coming definitely under German control and
the latter returning to Bohemia. In spite of a fierce but unorganized resistance, the
Slavic tribes west of Poland were absorbed by the Empire, which also continued to include
the state of the Premyslids.
The balance of power between Bohemia and Poland was, however,
entirely changed during and after Mieszko II s ill-fated reign. His contemporary,
Bietislav I, not only conquered the Polish province of Silesia, which was to remain an
object of endless controversies between the two neighboring countries, but he also
tried to unite them both, this time under Czech leadership. In spite of an invasion of
Poland in 1038, his plan had even less chance of success than Chrobry’s political
conceptions, and the first period of Western Slavic history resulted in the final
establishment of two states, separated by frequent rivalries, contrary to their common
interest in opposing the German pressure. They both remained, however, centers of a Slavic
culture which rapidly developed in close contact with Western Christendom, including the
distant Romance countries. German influence was naturally much stronger in Bohemia, where
German colonization also started much earlier, while Poland, never included in the Empire,
regained her freedom of action after each attempt at interference by her neighbors.
Only the Pomeranian territory along the Baltic shores,
carefully controlled by Mieszko I and his son, was not yet completely united with the
other Polish lands. It could not be reached by German expansion, however, so long as the
closely related Slavic tribes between the Oder and Elbe were struggling for their freedom,
not without temporary successes.
THE EASTERN SLAVS
The recorded history of the Kievan State in which all Eastern Slavs were united under a
dynasty of Norman origin, had started well before the consolidation of Bohemia and Poland,
thanks chiefly to early contacts with the Byzantine Empire. But conversion to the
Christian faith—a prerequisite condition for the inclusion of any country in the
European community—was delayed here much longer. Even Prince Vladimir, the son of
Sviatoslav, whom he succeeded after a few years of internal trouble, started as a pagan
ruler who was similar to his predecessors. It was only in 988 that he decided to be
baptized together with his people. Later he became a saint of the Eastern church.
He finally converted the Russians, both his Scandinavian
vikings and the East Slavic tribes known under the name of Rus, when Christendom
was not yet split by any final Eastern schism. Nevertheless Vladimir’s decision to
accept the Christian faith, not from Rome but from Constantinople—a decision
dramatically described in the Primary Russian Chronicle and easy to explain were it
only because of geographical reasons—proved of far-reaching importance. At the
beginning, the influence of Byzantium, then superior to any Western center of culture,
greatly contributed to the rise of Kiev but gradually deepened the division between
Eastern and Western Slavs. There was no danger of any inclusion of the new Christian state
in the Empire with which Russia was to be culturally associated. Far from becoming a
vassal state of Byzantium, she at once received her own ecclesiastical organization,
although many details regarding the origin of the metropolitan see of Kiev and its
relationship with the Patriarchate of Constantinople are subject to controversial
interpretation.
But notwithstanding occasional relations with Rome and the
Western Empire which appear in Vladimir’s policy even after his turn toward
Byzantium, that policy was now dominated by the necessity of settling the various problems
raised by his cooperation with Basil II, the powerful Greek emperor whose sister he
received in marriage a year after being baptized in Kiev. The agreement was completed in
Kherson, an old Greek colony in the Crimea which Vladimir besieged and conquered in 989.
When the pressure which he thus exercised upon the emperor proved successful and the
wedding with Princess Anna had taken place, Vladimir returned the city to Basil II and the
Kievan State never secured any permanent stronghold on the shores of the Black Sea. It
seems, however, that on that occasion Vladimir united with his realm the city of
Tmutorokan, across the strait of Kerch, which had probably been an earlier political and
ecclesiastical center of Russian settlers and which was to play an important role in the
history of the Kievan State during the following century.
Until Vladimir’s death in 1015, the early years of that
century were utilized by Russia s first Christian ruler in order to strengthen the Church
and to protect the southeastern frontier of the country against the invasions of the
Pechenegs, who then controlled the steppes north of the Black Sea. The defense of these
border regions remained a permanent problem, with one wave of Asiatic invaders replacing
the other. With all other neighbors Vladimir now lived in peace, and the various parts of
the Kievan State, including the colonial northeastern territory in the Volga Basin with
Rostov as its oldest center, were governed by his numerous sons.
The difficulty of maintaining the unity of the Kievan State in
spite of feuds among the members of the dynasty, which besides the Church was the only
link between the many East Slavic tribes, appeared immediately after Vladimir’s
death. After the elimination and death of Sviatopolk, supported by his Polish
father-in-law, the main rivals were Yaroslav, who in his father s time had ruled over
Novgorod, and Mstislav of Tmutorokan. In 1024 the two brothers decided to divide Russia
with the Dnieper River as frontier a first recognition of the difference between the
original territory of the state founded by Rurik’s dynasty, from Novgorod in the
north to Kiev in the south, and the practically unlimited area of eastern expansion. The
territory of Polotsk, the center of what was to be White Russia, remained outside that
arrangement under a separate branch of the dynasty.
The unity of the whole realm was temporarily restored after
Mstislav’s death in 1036, when Yaroslav became the sole ruler. Only a little later
the ecclesiastical relations with Byzantium were definitely fixed. An uninterrupted series
of metropolitan ordained by the Patriarch of Constantinople now appeared in Kiev, a city
which, thanks to Yaroslav, called “The Wise,” rapidly developed on the model of
the imperial capital. Nevertheless his reign ended in a twofold crisis in Russo-Byzantine
relations. In 1043, after a conflict in the trade relations between the two countries,
Yaroslav directed a last Russian attack against the Greek Empire, which reached
Constantinople but which ended in failure. And in 1051 an attempt was made to secure not
only political but also ecclesiastical independence from Byzantium, when the bishops of
the Kievan State elected as metropolitan a native Russian who was not recognized by the
patriarch.
It is true that in the following year relations again improved
in connection with another marriage between members of the two dynasties. But Yaroslav was
at least equally anxious to maintain contacts with western dynasties through matrimonial
ties. The marriage of his daughter Anna, who went to France in 1050 to marry King Henry I,
is particularly significant in that respect. And after interfering with the internal
troubles of Poland Yaroslav was in friendly relations with that West Slavic neighbor, in
spite of the persistent territorial dispute over the Halich region which changed its
master several times in the course of the century.
These close contacts between Kievan Russia and Western
Christendom continued in the midst of the growing tension between Rome and Constantinople
which in 1054, the year of Yaroslav’s death, resulted in a lasting schism. Russia was
not immediately affected by that fateful break. It was not before the twelfth century that
Byzantine influence also proved strong enough to raise in the metropolis of Kiev a growing
distrust and sometimes even hostility against the Latins. If 1054 is a turning point in
Russian history, it is rather because of the implications of Yaroslav’s order of
succession.
In his testament he left the throne of Kiev to his eldest son,
Iziaslav, but each of the other four received his own principality, it being understood
that after the death of the eldest they would move from one principality to the other in
the order of seniority. That system, in itself involved, was further complicated by the
fact that the line ruling in Polotsk remained outside that rotation; that the descendants
of a son of Yaroslav who had died before his father, created a separate, hereditary
principality in Halich; and that important regions distant from the Kievan
center—autonomous Novgorod, declining Tmutorokan, and, above all, the area of
colonial expansion in the Volga Basin—had their own increasingly different
development.
Under such conditions Iziaslav could hardly maintain his
leading position, and even his cooperation with two of his younger brothers did not last
longer than 1073. When he lost Kiev for the second time, and did not receive, as in 1069,
the help of Poland, he tried to save his position by turning to the leading powers of
Western Christendom. Having no success with Emperor Henry IV, he particularly turned to
Pope Gregory VII. His son went to Rome and placed the Regnum Russiae under the
protection of the Holy See. In his bull of 1075, the Pope accepted that donation, which
would have completely changed the destinies of Kievan Russia and would have created
another Catholic kingdom in East Central Europe, next to Poland. Eastern and Western Slavs
would have been united in a similar policy and in their ecclesiastical allegiance. Gregory
VII could not, however, give to Iziaslav any efficient support, and the whole project,
having hardly any backing in Russia, left no traces in her tradition. Iziaslav himself
gave it up when, thanks to the death of his main opponent, he could return to Kiev for the
last two years of his life. When he fell in a battle against his nephews, the internal
struggles among the numerous members of the dynasty continued without much respect for the
rule of genealogical seniority.
The Kievan State, the largest in Europe, situated in a crucial
position at the limits of the European community and of Christendom, therefore had no real
unity which could have made one nation out of the many East Slavic tribes. Connected
with the rest of Europe through two conflicting influences, occasional ties with the
neighboring Catholic West and the penetration of Byzantine Orthodoxy, this earliest Russia
was at the same time exposed to a permanent threat of Asiatic invasions from the South
East, but rapidly enlarged her sphere of influences through a comparatively easy expansion
in the Finnish territories of the North East.
That intermediary position between Europe and Asia was to
remain a permanent problem for the Eastern Slavs—for Russia as a whole in the sense
of the old Rus. And it was gradually leading to a division into various very
different Russias, facilitated by the dynastic divisions into principalities which,
contrary to Yaroslav’s will, practically became hereditary in various lines of
Rurik’s descendants. Without strictly corresponding to the original tribal areas,
these principalities had, in many cases, however, a different ethnic background and, in
addition to it, different political interests, dependent on their geographical situation.
Already in that earliest period of their history it became
evident that the Eastern Slavs, unable to control the shores of the Black Sea, would not
be able to reach the Baltic either. Both Vladimir and Yaroslav made expeditions against
the Lithuanian and Finnish tribes which separated the Kievan State from the sea whence the
Normans had come to Russia. But even the conquests of Yaroslav did not reach farther than
Yuriev, the city which he founded on the site of the later Dorpat (Tartu). It was Novgorod
and Polotsk, however, which remained the permanent Slavic outposts in that direction, and
the frontier between Slavic and Baltic populations remained practically unchanged.
THE FALL OF THE BULGARIAN EMPIRE AND THE RISE OF HUNGARY
The tradition of the tenth and early eleventh centuries, so important for Bohemia,
Poland, and Russia, is perhaps even more significant for the two nations formed by Asiatic
invaders in the Danubian and Balkan regions. For the Bulgarians, Slavized and
Christianized at the end of the preceding century, it was the period of their greatest,
truly imperial expansion which remained an unforgettable inspiration, although it ended in
a catastrophe with lasting consequences. For the Hungarians, never assimilated by their
Slavic neighbors and not converted before the end of the tenth century, their rapid
integration with the Western world immediately became the starting point of a brilliant
development which was to last until the end of the Middle Ages.
Boris, Bulgaria’s first Christian ruler, left to his son
Simeon (893—927) a well-established kingdom, with the Slavic language introduced into
the life of State and Church, both of which were practically independent of Byzantium. But
his successor, educated in Constantinople, had even more ambitious aims. He wanted to
conquer Byzantium and to replace the Greek Empire by a Bulgarian one. Besieging
Constantinople several times, he came very near to his goal, and even after concluding a
treaty with Emperor Romanus Lecapenus in 924, who agreed to pay tribute to the dangerous
neighbor but who stopped his invasions at a clearly determined frontier, Simeon called
himself Emperor of the Romans and the Bulgarians. He also conquered the western part of
the Balkan Peninsula, particularly the Serbs who had not yet achieved any definite
political organization.
However, Simeon’s death in 927 left Bulgaria exhausted. It
became obvious that the idea of replacing the Eastern Empire as master of the Christian
Orthodox world and of the whole Balkan region was an illusion, far beyond the
possibilities of a young nation which had to face serious internal problems. One of them
was the heretical movement started under Simeon’s son and successor, Peter, by a monk
named Bogomil. Based upon the conception of earlier Eastern sects as to a permanent
struggle between the forces of good and evil, Bogomilism spread from Bulgaria far toward
the West and its influence is even evident in the French heretical trends of the later
Middle Ages. But such a movement could hardly strengthen Bulgaria s resistance against the
Greek revenge which already, during the reign of Peter, dealt a first serious blow to the
new power.
After invasions by Magyars and Pechenegs, the main eastern part
of the country, with its brilliant capital at Preslav, became a battlefield between the
Greeks and the Russian Varangians whom Byzantium under Emperor Nicephorus Phocas used
against the Bulgarians, only to defeat them in 972 under John I Tsimisces. The result was
the occupation of Eastern Bulgaria by the Greeks. A new leader, King Samuel, however,
appeared in the western part of the country. He resumed Simeon’s struggle against the
empire and opposed it for more than thirty years.
That long Greek-Bulgarian war is one of the decisive events in
the history of the Balkan Peninsula. It might even be interpreted as the beginning of the
disintegration of Eastern Christian society, and it indeed proved the impossibility of
reconciling the imperial idea with the free development of the various nations which had
settled south of the Danube. In its first phase it was a defensive war of Byzantium
against Samuel’s invasions which reached the Adriatic and the Aegean seas. But
Bulgaria paid a heavy price for these renewed imperial ambitions. Emperor Basil II, called
the “killer of the Bulgarians,” in 1014 finally inflicted upon them a crushing
defeat, and Samuel himself died when thousands of captives were sent back to him with
their eyes gouged. Such cruelty of course exasperated the Bulgarians, who continued to
resist in the Balkan Mountains for four more years. But by 1018 their whole country was
conquered and again made a mere province of the Greek Empire.
Byzantium was wise enough to grant the Bulgarians a fairly
large degree of regional autonomy, and although they ceased to have their own patriarch,
their religious life continued to develop separately under the archbishops of Okhrida.
Therefore throughout the remaining part of the eleventh and most of the twelfth century,
Bulgaria seemed completely controlled by the empire, and not before the fall of the
Comneni dynasty in 1185 did a revolt start again, leading to what is sometimes called a
second Bulgarian Empire. There remained, however, a permanent tension between Greeks and
Bulgarians, with neither side able to satisfy its imperial ambitions, and always ready to
cooperate against the other with any new forces which might appear in the Balkan
Peninsula.
One of these forces was to be Slavic Serbia, which neither
Greeks nor Bulgarians could ever completely conquer. But here, too, a strong political
movement did not start before the end of the twelfth century, although already in 1077 one
of the Serb chieftains, Michael, in the Zeta region later called Montenegro received the
royal title from Pope Gregory VII. Though without lasting consequences, that fact is
highly significant because it indicates that even among the Serbs the influence of the
Catholic West appeared time and again throughout the Middle Ages. That influence remained
predominant among their closest kin, the Croats, where, long before Gregory VII had
granted a royal crown to Zvonimir (1076—1089), a Catholic kingdom had been
established in 924 by Tomislav.
No longer threatened by the Germans as in Carolingian times,
and only for a very short time under Byzantium, Croatia was, however, placed between two
rising powers, one of which, the Republic of Venice, wanted to occupy her Adriatic coast
in Dalmatia, while the other, Hungary, was separated from Croatia only by the Drava River.
Taking advantage of Zyonimir’s death and of ties of marriage with the Croat dynasty,
the kings of Hungary, after a first occupation of Croatia in 1091, succeeded in
establishing a permanent union of the two kingdoms under the Hungarian crown in 1102.
Croatia included both Dalmatia and Slavonia, the territory between the lower Drava and
Sava rivers, to which Syrmia, down to the Danube, was also added later. That whole Slavic
realm, however, always remained a junior partner in the union which was to last until
1918, with Dalmatia an object of Venetian claims, while the northwestern neighbors of the
Croats, the Slovenes, all came under Austrian domination.
Hungary’s great success with regard to Croatia, which made
her not only a Danubian but also an Adriatic power, can only be explained by her rapid
rise from a pagan state which raided all neighbor countries, to a Catholic and
“apostolic” kingdom, a title which in 1001 was granted by Pope Sylvester II to
the son and successor of the recently converted Géza, Stephen, the future saint. His
reign, which lasted until 1038, resulted in the consolidation of Hungary within natural
boundaries which reached the ranges of the Carpathian Mountains. The crown of St. Stephen
was to remain a symbol of Hungary’s tradition and unity up to the present.
That unity included peoples of different origin, particularly
the Slovaks in the northern part of the country and the largely Rumanian population of
Transylvania. Stephen himself encouraged the establishment of German settlers, according
to his frequently quoted statement that a country would be weak if limited to peoples of
one tongue. But according to his policy, which was continued by practically all his
successors, he was at the same time eager to maintain Hungary s complete independence of
both Empires. Though both were her neighbors, only the Western seriously threatened that
independence on various occasions. Furthermore, stressing her national unity, Hungary more
and more based her political conceptions on the idea of Magyar supremacy. Identifying
themselves with the nation at large, but not without absorbing many foreign elements also,
the Magyars, though keeping through the ages their isolated language, were culturally
Latinized very rapidly and soon considered themselves the defenders of Western culture
along the Balkan border.
After St. Stephen, whose son Emeric (also canonized a few years
later) died before the father, Hungary went through a serious crisis. Pagan reaction
opposed a king of Venetian origin who temporarily occupied the throne, thanks to his
designation by his uncle, St. Stephen. But another branch of the national Árpád dynasty
soon returned to power, and even amidst these internal troubles neither Polish
interference nor that of imperial Germany, which was much more dangerous, had any lasting
consequences. On the contrary, at the end of the eleventh century Hungarian power had
already been restored under another king who was also recognized as a saint, Ladislas I
(1077—1095), and the following century was again a particularly brilliant period in
the history of the country.
Among the kings of that period, Béla III (1172—1196),
whose achievements have been described by a first, anonymous national chronicler, deserves
special attention. He too opposed the encroachments of both German and Greek emperors
successfully, and himself exercised a noteworthy influence in Balkan affairs. Under him
and his successors, particularly Andrew II (1205—1235), that Hungarian influence also
penetrated beyond the Carpathians into the Ruthenian principality of Halich, whose
Latinized name first appeared in 1189 in a new title of the kings of Hungary: rex
Galiciae. It was in that region that Hungarian and Polish interests clashed with each
other, although the usually friendly relations between both countries were even in this
controversial issue leading to attempts at cooperation toward the turn of the century.
Thus it was precisely during the elimination of Bulgarian power
under Byzantine rule that Hungary succeeded in organizing the Danubian region north of the
Balkans as a unified kingdom which extended the sphere of Western influence without giving
up its own individuality. Such an element of stability in East Central Europe was
particularly important in a period when the other countries of that part of the continent,
after having made equally promising beginnings, were meeting with more and more
difficulty, either through internal disintegration or under the growing pressure of the
German Empire which proved so dangerous to the two West Slavic kingdoms, Bohemia and
Poland. Such a situation was to last well into the thirteenth century.
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