Vanished Kingdoms
Page 27
By then, further resistance was pointless, and compromise was impossible. The Treaty of Utrecht signalling the general European peace had already been signed. ‘Don Carlos’ had left for Vienna. The French candidate, Philippe de Bourbon, was already installed in Madrid as King Felipe V, and his officials were busy preparing the Nueva Planta or ‘New Order’, whereby uniform Castilian laws and practices would be introduced throughout Spain.124 The Catalan separatists were totally isolated and capitulation was unavoidable. The French marshal-duke of Berwick marched in to install a military government. The pillars of the Crown’s autonomy, the Diputación and the Generalitat of Catalonia, together with the mint and the university, were closed down; the system of provincial tariffs was abolished. Leaders of the ‘rebellion’ were executed or exiled, and a Spanish captain-general took command. The Catalan language was banned. Henceforth Castilian customs, Castilian speech and Castilian rule were to enjoy a monopoly. The name of Aragon remained as a little more than a Spanish administrative unit. The dying embers of the Crown of Aragon were extinguished for ever.
III
The ‘Crown of Aragon’ has not fared well on the fields of remembrance. Ultimately a loser in the competition with Castile, and a mere ghost in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when most foundational historical works were compiled, it is a frequent absentee in the resultant narratives. It tends to be presented as ‘a historical region of Spain’, not, like its sometime counterpart, Portugal, as a sovereign state. As often as not, its legacy is treated with indifference, if not with hostility, and it is left as a codicil to the main Castilian story. Most Spaniards today have lost all sense of the Crown of Aragon’s separate and extraordinary past.
The attitudes of those who might seemingly have the strongest interest in the subject give the greatest cause for reflection. For today’s Aragonese and Catalans do not share a common outlook; the historic marriage of their two countries has dissolved into mental divorce. The Aragonese – inhabitants of the ‘Autonomous Spanish Community’ of Aragon – do not dance the Joca Aragonese in order to stress the historic link with Catalonia: quite the opposite. And for many Catalans, the very name of Aragon sticks in the throat. In place of the ‘kingdom-county’, monuments and textbooks in Catalonia refer to the ‘medieval Catalan state’, or to the ‘Catalan Empire’ or sometimes to some unidentified ‘kingdom’. The concept of a multinational ‘Crown of Aragon’ is distinctly out of fashion. In academic circles, it is often replaced by the dubious neologism of the ‘Catalan-Aragonese Federation’. Modern politics, in fact, plagues almost all attempts to recall the Crown of Aragon with accuracy and affection. The dual kingdom-county, with its long chain of dependencies, lived and died long before the age of modern nationalism; and its ethos was ill matched to modern enthusiasms. Its memory has not been espoused by Spanish nationalism, by Catalan nationalism, nor even by provincial Aragonese particularism.
Memories of the former Crown of Aragon have in effect been carefully compartmentalized. People remember only what they want to remember. They suffer from a lack of benevolent but impartial concern; and quarrels can be easily provoked. In the 1980s, for example, when the province of Aragon was seeking a new flag for the post-Franco era, it adopted a design based on the medieval standard of the Crown of Aragon,125 where the Cross of St George is joined by the ‘four carmine bars on a field of gold’. In Zaragoza, the design no doubt felt perfectly innocent and appropriate. In Barcelona, it caused outrage.126 Protests and pamphlets proliferated. For, as every good Catalan knows, the ‘carmine and gold’ belongs exclusively to the national flag of Catalonia, the Senyera, that was awarded to Wilfred the Hairy more than a thousand years ago. As the legend goes, the hirsute warrior was lying wounded on the battlefield. The Emperor Louis dipped his fingers in the count’s own gore and drew four bloody stripes on the coverlet’s cloth-of-gold. Aragon, at the time, had yet to be born!127
Regional anthems aimed at restoring the identity of long neglected communities form another feature of post-Franco Spain. One might have expected a strong historical flavour, yet the lyrics adopted in provinces once belonging to the Crown of Aragon show little interest in the realities of the past. They may well be conditioned by animosities and inhibitions generated during the Civil War of 1936–9, and still not healed. As a result, they tend to reinforce the prevailing amnesia. In Catalonia, for example, ‘Els Segadors’, ‘The Reapers’, has been raised from a popular song to an official hymn. Composed in the nineteenth century to recall the insurrection of 1640, it breathes defiance against foreign domination, but has nothing to say about Catalonia’s former Aragonese partner:
Catalunya triomfant
Tornarà a ser rica i plena,
Endarrera aquesta gent
Tan ufana i tan superba.
Bon cop de falç!
Bon cop de falç,
Defensors de la terra!
Bon cop de falç!
(‘Triumphant Catalonia / will return to wealth and plenty, / and will drive out those people / so mean and arrogant. / A good sickle’s blow! / A good sickle’s blow, / oh defenders of the land! / A good sickle’s blow!’)128 One suspects that the Aragonese are now subsumed among ‘those mean and arrogant’ people.
In the Autonomous Community of Aragon, the official Himno combines an old melody with modern words, praising ‘the flowers of our fields’, ‘the snowy peaks of our mountains’, and the hopes and dreams for a future of freedom and justice. Yet its highly poetic lines contain not a single historical echo of the Crown of Aragon’s ancient past:
Luz de Aragón, torre al viento, campana de soledad!
Que tu afán propague, río sin frontera, tu razón, tu verdad!
Vencedor de tanto olvido, memoria de eternidad,
Pueblo del tamaño de hombres y mujeres, i Aragón, vivirás!
(‘Light of Aragon, Tower in the Wind, Bell of Solitude! / Your confidence will spread, a river without bounds: so, too, your reason, your truth! / Victor over so much oblivion, memory of eternity, / a people of so many men and women, Aragon, you will live!’)129
In Valencia, they still sing a Himno which has not changed since the regional Valencian Exhibition of 1909. Many consider the words to be redundant, but a recording made in 2008 by Plácido Domingo in both Castilian and Valencian has restored the anthem’s fortunes:
Per ofrenar noves glòries a Espanya,
Tots a una veu, germans, vingau.
Ja en el taller i en el camp remoregen
Càntics d’amor, himnes de pau!
Nostra Senyera!
Glória a la Pátria! Visca Valencia!
Visca! Visca! Visca!
(‘To offer up new glories to Spain / all with one voice, brothers, gather around. / In the workshops and in the fields / songs of love already resound, and hymns of peace. / Our Lady! Glory to the Fatherland, Long live Valencia! Viva! Viva! Viva!’)130
And in Mallorca, the authorities have adopted a charming but incongrous song about a spider:
La Balanguera misteriosa,
Com una aranya d’art subtil,
Buida que buida sa filiosa,
De nostra vida treu el fil.
Com una parca bé cavilla,
Tixint la tela per demà.
La balanguera fila, fila,
La balanguera filerà.
(‘The mysterious Balanguera, / like a subtle and artistic spider, / empties and empties her distaff, / and draws out the thread of our lives. / Like fate she ponders well, / weaving the cloth for tomorrow. / The Balanguera spins and spins, / the Balanguera will always spin.’)131
The musical landscape in Perpignan is necessarily rather different. The French Region of Languedoc-Roussillon has so far resisted the temptation of commissioning an official anthem. But several songs circulate as rousing examples of local patriotism. At USA Perpignan, they roar out the lines of ‘L’Estaca’, ‘The Stake’.* In the bars and in the backstreets of the festivals, the Montanyes Regalades or the Montanyes de Canigou float
gently on the evening air. But the crowds predominantly speak French, and it is the French words of ‘Le Hymne à la Catalogne’ that constitute the most frequent refrain:
Perpignan, Perpignan,
Chante, chante les catalanes.
Perpignan, Perpignan,
Danse, danse la Sardane!
(‘Perpignan, Perpignan, / sing, sing to the Catalan girls. / Perpignan, Perpignan, / dance, dance the sardane!’)132
Sometimes, it seems, history can best be invoked by dispassionate outsiders. Concluding his description of the Crown of Aragon, a foreign scholar strikes a note of serene resignation: ‘The old stones are quiet now. They tell… of fighting and protecting and exploiting: of rural toil and herding: of praying and endowing: of trading and talking, and of links and aspirations across sunny seas.’133
* The name ‘Aragon’, like nearby ‘Aran’, is usually linked etymologically to the Basque word for ‘valley’. In modern Basque it is ‘Aragoa’. The territory from which the river springs was variously known in the earliest times either as Aragon after the river or as Jaca after its only sizeable settlement. In the same way, the adjacent territory to the west was variously known either as Navarra after the Basque word for ‘plain’ or as Pamplona after its only city. The clear implication is that Basques once lived far beyond their modern limits.
* The House of Barcelona adopted the custom of alternating the names of the counts in each generation in order to distinguish fathers from sons. Hence the son and heir of Berenguer Ramón I became Ramón Berenguer I (r. 1035–76). When the latter’s countess gave birth c. 1053 to twin sons, therefore, the problem was solved by calling the elder twin Ramón Berenguer and the younger one Berenguer Ramón. In due course when the twins succeeded their father, Ramón Berenguer II ruled in uneasy tandem with his brother, Berenguer Ramón II El Fratricida. The sole rule of the surviving twin came about through the death of his brother in a suspicious hunting accident, very similar to that of their contemporary, William Rufus of England.
* The Catalans, because of their former subjection to Frankish overlordship, were still identified here as Franks.
* ‘L’Estaca’ is a liberation song from the Franco era, composed in 1968 by the Catalan singer, Lluís Llach. It became popular in many countries, not least in Poland, where an adaptation by Jacek Kaczmarski – ‘Mury’, ‘The Walls’ – caught on as the unofficial anthem of the Solidarity movement; anti-Fascist sentiments inspired anti-Communist lyrics. The key stanza reads: ‘Wyrwij mury żeby krat, / Zerwij kajdany, polam bat. / A mury runa˛, runa˛, runa˛ / i pogrzebia˛ stary świat’ (‘Tear down the bars of the cage, / Snap the chains, and break the lash. / The walls will crumble, crumble, crumble / And hasten the old world’s crash’).
5
Litva
A Grand Duchy with Kings
(1253–1795)
I
Belarus does not attract visitors. There are so few of them that the country fails to feature in the published International Tourism Rankings. One might be tempted to think that there is little to see, nothing of interest and no history worth mentioning. Yet Belarus, which for most of the twentieth century was known to the outside world as Byelorussia, is not boring; nor is it tiny or geographically remote. Its area of 81,000 square miles is similar to that of Scotland, Kansas or Minnesota, and prior to 1991 put it in sixth position among the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union. Its population, 10.4 million in 2007, is similar to that of Belgium, Portugal or Greece, Michigan or Pennsylvania: it is only one-third the size of its southern neighbour, Ukraine, but larger than the three Baltic States put together. Since 2004 it has been bordered by three states of the European Union, which in large part are separated by Belarus from its giant eastern neighbour, Russia. The capital Miensk, or Minsk, lies on Europe’s main east–west railway line between Paris, Berlin and Moscow, or can be reached by direct flights from London Heathrow in around three hours.1
Low-lying and landlocked – surrounded by Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Ukraine and Russia – Belarus has many rivers but no mountains. Its highest point at Dzyarzhynska Hara or ‘Dzherzhynsky Hill’ reaches a mere 1,132 feet (346 metres). Its main physical axis runs from south-west to north-east across the great European plain and along a section of the continental divide. All the rivers above the divide, the Nyoman (Nieman) and Dvina and their tributaries, flow to the Baltic; all rivers below the divide, like the Pripyat’ and Berezina, flow south towards the Dniepr and the Black Sea.
The country’s problems, patently severe, can best be summarized by four ‘I’s – Infrastructure, Image, Irradiation and, above all, Istoriia. As a showpiece of the infrastructure, the Belarusian tourist industry can recommend no hotels in the higher international categories, no scenic routes served by modern roads and service stations, and no holiday resorts. Furthermore, despite some stunning tracts of primeval forest, this cannot be described as unspoiled territory.
On the surface at least, the capital Minsk is peculiarly uninteresting. It was virtually levelled in 1944 during a frontline German–Soviet battle, which caused horrendous loss of life, and the ruins were then repopulated by rootless migrants, mainly Russians. Its Soviet-style urban design emphasizes extra-large boulevards with little traffic, grandiose public buildings for officialdom, and shoddy, decaying tower blocks for the populace.
The overall image of Belarus, in fact, is catastrophic. It scores lower than all other European countries in almost all fields. In the most recent (but somewhat out-of-date) Quality of Life Index available (2005), where Ireland came top and Zimbabwe bottom, Belarus occupied the 100th place out of 111. In the Corruption Percentage Index (CPI, 2007), it was 150th out of 179, and in The Economist’s Democracy Index (2007), it is the only entirely European country still classified as ‘Not Free’.2 Three-quarters of its Soviet-planned economy remains in state hands. Its population, which steadily rose in the post-war decades, is now declining. It is ruled by the pseudo-democratic dictatorship of Alexander Grigoryevich Lukashenko, which analysts place in the none too savoury company of other ex-Soviet regimes in Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan.3 The official languages are Russian and Belarusian, but the latter operates at a severe disadvantage. Lukashenko, like the rest of the ex-Soviet elite, normally speaks only Russian in public. Confusion reigns over the question whether his name should not be written and spoken in the Belarusian form of ‘Alyaksandr Lukashenka’.
Belarusian publicity makes no secret of the fact that the country has been blighted by the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in April 1986. Indeed, great efforts have been made to inform the world about the damage and the costs. Chernobyl’s deadly, Soviet-era reactor lies just over the border in Ukraine, but 75 per cent of the radioactive fallout drifted north, and it was Belarusian villages, Belarusian agriculture and Belarusian children which bore the brunt. The by-products of the 1986 explosion will remain active for hundreds of thousands of years. Half a century at least must pass before all fish, fungi and forest berries will be fit for human consumption. The closure of the offending reactor is nowhere in sight.4
The misfortunes of Belarus, however, did not begin in 1986, but recurred with painful monotony throughout the last century. The Byelorussian National Republic (BNR) of 1918, which emerged from the collapse of the Tsarist Russian Empire, was crushed by the Bolsheviks. In the 1930s up to 60 per cent of the native intelligentsia was killed in Stalin’s Purges; the mass-murder site in the Kuropaty Forest near Minsk between 1937 and 1941 has still to be properly investigated.5 In 1941–5, during the German occupation and the accompanying Holocaust, one-quarter of the entire population perished. Post-war ethnic cleansing caused the exodus of similar numbers. Soviet reconstruction was slow, and Marshall Aid was excluded.6 Quite apart from the terrible human costs, these multiple tragedies have resulted in many Belarusians having a weak sense of their national identity.
So ‘Lukashenkism’ can only be rated as the country’s most recent blight; it is the product of what political scientists might call
‘failed transition’. The politico-socio-economic system of the USSR collapsed in the 1990s, and was not replaced by a viable alternative; Lukashenko (b. 1954) rocketed to power by filling the vacuum. In 1991 he had been a man of purely local consequence, an ex-officer of the Soviet border guard and director of a sovkhoz or ‘state collective farm’, but not a prominent member of the ruling Communist Party. He came to notice as the only deputy of the Byelorussian SSR’s last assembly to vote against the abolition of the Soviet Union, and gained his foothold on power by heading a corruption commission, which promptly discredited the country’s first post-Soviet leaders. Within three years, he was president.
In four terms of office – in 1994–2001, 2001–6, 2006–10 and from 2010 to the present – Lukashenko has calmly created a legal dictatorship, achieving his goals through a dubious referendum, a purpose-built constitution, and a hand-picked legislature. A police state operates, the ‘president’s men’ enforcing obedience at all levels. The opposition is harassed. The media are shackled. Foreign protests are ignored. Western governments are courted for investment, but not for advice. In short, the president-dictator does as he likes. Fifty new ‘universities’ are busy training the cadres that will project Lukashenkism into the future, while several parts of the University of Minsk can only function in exile.7 Careless talk characterizes the president as ‘a would-be Putin with no missiles and no oil’; it is not a good comparison, and it underestimates his tenacity.8 His henchmen call him ‘Batka’, the ‘Daddy of the Nation’. Their slogan proclaims: Batka Is, Batka Was and ‘Batka Will Be.’ ‘My position and the state will never allow me to become a dictator,’ he says of himself, ‘but an authoritarian ruling style is my characteristic.’9