Natalia
Nowakowska, ed., Remembering the Jagiellonians. London: Routledge, 2018.
Reviewed by Anna Czarnowus (anna.czarnowus@us.edu.pl)
Remembering the Jagiellonians, a collection of articles
edited by Natalia Nowakowska, includes a captivating vision that provides the
readers not only with historical facts, but also the memory (or memories) of
these facts and how that memory has been preserved in various Central, Eastern,
and Western European countries. The long-lost world of the Jagiellonian dynasty
is preserved in the historiography, but also in the collective/ cultural/social
memory of the European countries where this dynasty ruled or where their female
members were queens. The book takes you on a journey that you may undertake
hesitatingly, but then you are taken over by how important this research is for
transnational history. The collection is very careful in explaining genealogies
and historical facts. It analyzes propagandist ideas. The visual material it
includes can sometimes not be accessible otherwise: for example, it reproduces
a page from a children’s graphic novel that includes historiographic ideas
which only Czechs are familiar with.
Nowakowska’s
contributors show the media potential of this narrative, but they also pose a
question of whose Jagiellonians would be represented in, for example, a TV show. Would they be Poles’ Jagiellonians, or those of Lithuanians, Hungarians and
Slovaks, Czechs, Germans and Austrians, Swedes and the Finnish, Belarusians,
Ukrainians, or Russians? These would be completely different stories, as
respective articles in the volume make it clear. The collection popularizes
what is mostly general knowledge in Poland as a place where the Jagiellonians ruled from 1386 to 1596, but it is
generally not so commonly known in Hungary or the Czech Republic, and it is
something forgotten in the German-speaking countries, Belarus, Ukraine, and
Russia. The case of Sweden and Finland is different in this respect, since
there is a romantic narrative there that includes Katarina/Katariina
Jagiellonica, a Jagiellonian princess.
In the "Introduction: Time, Space, and Dynasty" Nowakowska calls the Jagiellonians the
unfamiliar (or forgotten) dynasty, even though they once ruled a vast part of
Europe: the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, medieval and early modern Poland, Bohemia
and Hungary, Transylvania, lands from Zagreb to Kiev. In this sense they are
comparable to the Habsburgs and discussing them must be “a debate about space
and a debate about time” (1). Studying the Jagiellonians cannot be done
exclusively within one nation-state. The editor writes that the intention
behind the volume is to discuss Jagiellonian memory from the Renaissance to the
present. Importantly, the Jagiellonians originated as rulers of the Grand Duchy
of Lithuania and as a dynasty they were started by Jogaila/Jagiełło/Iagel, who
married Hedwig of Anjou in order to become King of Poland. The dynasty officially
ended in 1572, with Jagiellonian descendants and successors living on. The
post-1989 changes in historical thinking led to a reassessment of Jagiello, but
also to the Jagiellonians entering popular culture and even being treated as
celebrities.
Giedrė
Mikūnaitė discusses the clash between the Lithuanian understanding of Jogaila
as a traitor and the Polish perspective, which focuses on the advantages for
the duke. After all, Jogaila became King of Poland and Lithuania and converted
to Catholicism, which possibly resulted in cultural advancement in those times.
In her article Natalia Nowakowska writes that the differences in seeing Jogaila
in Poland and in Lithuania testify to the “ongoing memory wars” that were
started in the twentieth century (50) and apparently they continue till this
day. The memory of the Jagiellonians for modernity was “made” in Poland in
the nineteenth century and visual artists played an important role in this.
Nowakowska lists the uses to which the memory of the Jagiellonians have been
put: they have been present in historical knowledge in schools, research by
scholars, appropriated by towns, institutions, cookbooks, the media, recycled
in fiction, and staged as drama. It is impossible for one uniform memory of
them to be formulated.
In Hungary and Slovakia, as Stanislava Kuzmová claims, the
Jagiellonians have been treated as one of the “foreign dynasties” on the
Hungarian throne. Some events related to the Jagiellonian kings became
“reference spots” for national history, to mention the Battle of Mohács in 1526
and the tragic death of Louis II in it as an appropriate example (77). The most
recent perspective is that the rule of the Jagiellonians has been distorted,
so Hungarian historiography has “centuries of distortion” behind it (89).
In the Czech Republic in turn, to cite Ilya Afanasyev, the Jagiellonian memory
has been individualized, as they have not been conceptualized as a dynasty at
all (106). This is why he refers to the “ambiguous half-neglected place of ‘the
Jagiellonians’ in the current construction of Czech national history” (111).
In Germany the Jagiellonians are seen as one of the “unknown
ruling house[s] of Central Europe,” as Dušan Zupka indicates (121). It is like
that even though the dynasty became internationalized by the Jagiellonian
daughters, who were married into the ruling houses of the former Holy Roman
Empire. Yet there exists recent research on the Jagiellonians in
German-speaking countries, including that on the Landshut wedding of Hedwig
Jagiellon (132 et passim). In Sweden and
Finland, where Catherine Jagiellon was the Duchess of Finland and then Queen of
Sweden, there is a memory of her as a Polish-Italian princess, the only royal
consort to bear a Latinized name (142). Susanna Niiranen makes her article even
more original through detailed analyses of the Jagiellonian Chapel in the
Uppsala Cathedral, where Catherine was buried, and of Turku Castle, where
she resided.
In Belarus, as Simon M. Lewis claims, the Jagiellonians are
identified through the fourth wife of Jogaila, Sophia, a Belarusian princess.
Lewis also summarizes why the Jagiellonians have a negative image in
Belarusian historiography. It happened owing to the Soviet thinking about the
dynasty, since in Soviet historiography they were monarchs who brought the
Belarusian territories under Polish cultural influence (163). Soviet
thinking also focused on socioeconomic trends and not rulers (163).
In Ukraine the memory of the Jagiellonians could belong to Ukrainian “national history,” but Ukrainians “never saw the Jagiellonians
as their own dynasty,” to quote Tetiana Hoshko (184). She discusses the
involvement of the Cossacks in Jagiellonian politics, but concludes by
stating that “the Jagiellonians are virtually absent from both cultural memory
and public space in Ukraine” (198). Russia is similar to Ukraine in this
respect, as Olga Kozubska-Andrusiv writes, since by becoming a dynasty in
Poland the Jagiellonians also detached themselves from Russia in religious terms.
Russian historiography distanced itself from the dynasty and the trend was
continued both in Soviet historiography and later, since the Jagiellonians
are still not included in Russian discussions of the Grand Duchy of
Lithuania.
This is a very timely volume, since it demonstrates how
various nationalisms, but also nationality-oriented studies have presented
various truths about one and the same European dynasty. It may lead its readers
to the conclusion that the memory of the Jagiellonians is our common heritage
rather than material that needs to be seen in detachment from the
perspective of different countries. The collection undoubtedly will popularize
the Jagiellonians in the English-speaking countries and will be a great source
of reference for all scholars worldwide. It is very good that the collection has
been published now, in times of the growing separation of various Central
European countries from the EU and the ideas on which it was founded. The
collection shows that we are all interconnected by transnational history and we
should not think otherwise, for the sake of our own realization of who we are and
what our (common) roots are.
Anna Czarnowus
University of Silesia, Katowice (Poland)