![]() It’s the story of people whose names you may have heard, but don’t know much about. There are knights, castles, pogroms, insane monarchs, endless political intrigue, war after war after war, peasants galore, Catholics dominating religious beliefs, and, generally, miserable lives for the people who lived there until very, very recently. It is here that the vague and changeable boundaries of Prussia take shape and shape-shift, where Poland is and then is not a country, where unimaginable violence was the rule for many of the centuries covered in this 500+ page volume, and where Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin and Western classical music originated and continues to thrive. Roughly, Central Europe seems to be what is now Germany to the West, what is now Russia to the East, not quite Scandinavia to the North, and down into what was once Yugoslavia to the South, but sometimes, parts of what is now Italy, Ukraine, and Greece, too. Depends upon when, of course, because countries keep expanding and contracting, and gaining/losing parts of their territory. Where, exactly, does Central Europe begin and end? That question is difficult to answer. He is specific: “One ninth-century account tells of how a missionary bishop in what is now Austria denied a place at the table to visiting pagan chieftains, instead laying out bowls on the floor.” A few centuries later, Turks were “described as agents of Satan, with an insatiable taste for blood…and all sorts of extravagances including bestiality and sexual relations with fish… but from the very first, they, too, were associated with dogmen.” Rady begins long ago, when early Christian scholars debated the existence of dogmen - creatures with canine and human characteristics who lived on the margins of the known world. ![]() Along the way, I’ll place Rady pretty high on my list of historian / storytellers - and I hope he will write another book that is equally wide-ranging. He is also a leading expert on the history of Central Europe, which happens to be one of the regions of the world that is, for many people, myself included, very difficult to capture as a coherent idea. He is a Professor Emeritus of Central European History at University College London. Martyn Rady is a historian and a very good storyteller. The castle and the surrounding landscape are magnificent, so I thought I would begin with a big picture.
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