Page 259 - Berkshire Encyclopedia Of World History Vol Two

608 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

Revolutions are not made for export. • Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971)

Sephardim numbered 193,000 in 1900, most in cities Political History
such as Sarajevo and Salonika.The Ottoman expansion During the medieval period, independent kingdoms in
into Southeastern Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth Eastern Europe rivaled states to the west and east. Under
centuries also brought Islam into the region. According Czar Simeon (reigned 893–927), Bulgaria dominated the
to the Ottoman census of 1520–1530, Muslims were lands south of the Danube, from the Black Sea to the
18.8 percent of the population in the empire’s European Adriatic. During the reign of Charles IV as Holy Roman
lands. Muslims also congregated in towns: the popula- Emperor (reigned 1346–1378), Prague became the lead-
tion of Sofia, for instance, was over 66 percent Muslim, ing city of the region, and the site of the first university
while the surrounding district was only 6 percent Mus- north of the Alps. And the Hungarian court at Buda,
lim. These Muslims included Turkish officials, soldiers, under Matthias Corvinus (reigned 1441–1490), was a
and artisans, as well as converted Greeks,Albanians, and center of art and learning in the early Renaissance. In the
Slavs. Conversions were due largely to Islam’s adapt- early modern period, however, the independent states of
ability to local folk religion, rather than firm conviction, Eastern Europe ceased to exist, as the region came under
and many Muslims of Southeastern Europe maintained the political control of rival empires.The threat of Protes-
ties to Christianity. In some rural areas, peasants went to tantism in the Czech lands and the Ottoman Turks in
the mosque on Friday and church on Sunday. Hungary led to the consolidation in the early seventeenth
The Reformation and the Counter-Reformation further century of an empire ruled by the Catholic Habsburgs. In
stirred the region’s religious waters. Martin Luther 1683 the Ottoman Turks’ final advance into Europe was
acknowledged the influence of early reformer Jan Hus (c. halted at the Habsburgs’ seat,Vienna, and, less than two
1372–1415), a Czech priest and critic of Catholic doc- decades later, the Habsburgs had seized Hungary and
trine. Although the church executed Hus as a heretic, Transylvania from the Ottomans. At the same time, new
Catholic armies failed to suppress his followers in the expansionist powers were emerging in the east (Russia)
Czech lands. With the ground prepared by the Hussite and the northwest (Prussia). In the early 1700s, under
challenge, branches of the Protestant Reformation found Peter the Great (Peter I, reigned 1682–1725), Russia
adherents in the Czech lands, as well as in other areas of pressed south into Ukraine; and at the end of the century,
Eastern Europe, in the early 1500s. Lutheranism ad- under Catherine the Great (Catherine II, reigned 1762–
vanced into the Czech lands, Slovenia, and Poland in the 1796), the empire partitioned the territory of the weak-
1520s.The Reformed (Calvinist) movement spread rap- ened Polish kingdom among Habsburg Austria, Prussia,
idly in Hungary and the Ottoman vassal state ofTransyl- and itself. Following the Napoleonic wars, these imperial
vania. Calvinism also gained adherents in Poland and powers—Austria, Prussia, Russia, and the Ottoman
Lithuania, where Reformed universities were founded in empire—claimed all the lands of Eastern Europe.
the 1620s. Anabaptist and Anti-Trinitarian (Unitarian) Yet, at the same time as the neighboring powers cul-
sects also took root in Poland, Lithuania, and Transylva- minated their advance into Eastern Europe, local move-
nia. In Transylvania, Prince István Báthory (reigned ments began to challenge imperial power. Over the
1571–1586) recognized the Unitarian, Catholic, Lu- course of the nineteenth century, these initiatives devel-
theran, and Reformed faiths as accepted religions of the oped into mass nationalist movements. Motivated by
state.This toleration was unusual in Eastern Europe—and ideas imported from Western Europe—the French idea of
in Europe as a whole. By the late 1500s and 1600s, in the the nation as a source of sovereignty and the German
Czech lands, Poland, Hungary, and Slovenia, Jesuits and conception of the nation as a community united by lan-
Catholic nobles succeeded in reestablishing Catholic guage and culture—regional elites assembled the compo-
dominance and outlawing Protestantism throughout nents of national communities: codified languages, books
much of Eastern Europe. and periodicals in those languages, national histories,