The Middle Kingdoms by Martyn Rady

The Middle Kingdoms: A New History of Central Europe
By Martyn Rady
Basic Books 2023

Martyn Rady, professor emeritus of Central European History at University College London, covers 1500 years of history in his new book, The Middle Kingdoms: A New History of Central Europe, which races in 600 pages through the Holy Roman Empire, the Mongols, the age of Charlemagne, the rise of the Habsburgs, the Reformation, the reach of the Ottoman Turks, the revolutions of 1848, the politics of Bismarck, the First World War, the Second World War, the rise of Communism, dozens of nations, and hundreds of rulers. When he opens his narrative, the old Roman Empire is wobbly but still standing, and when he brings his story to an end, Vladimir Putin is watching the reader with beady eyes. 

It looks like the product of long experience delivering hour-long lectures on European history to rooms full of students feverishly taking notes, and it reads like that as well, and it’s lucky for Rady’s readers that the class they’re auditing was a genuinely interesting one. Rady peppers his chapters with pithy gems like “Monks schooled in the Irish tradition were the shock troops of Merovingian Christianity” or pointed reminders, like the fact that Charlemagne was both illiterate and not exactly getting any younger: “We are told that he kept a wax tablet and stylus beneath his throne and tried painfully to inscribe letters in his spare time, but the task was beyond him (rheumatism cannot have helped).”

As episodic as the book is, Rady still works threads through the whole of it, always careful with too-easy generalities. “The further east from the Rhine, the greater were the loads on the peasantry,” Rady writes, for instance, adding: “This cannot be an exact statement, but it is a convenient one.” Another generality: that these centuries we so readily associate with monarchies were never entirely autocratic. “However much dynasties swapped crowns and kingdoms, power never belonged to monarchs alone,” Rady writes. “Medieval society was never democratic, but in a large part of Central Europe popular participation in adjudication, law making, and the local workings of government was both widespread and intense.”

This is a wide-ranging, terrifically readable overview of Central European history, both the deep roots and some of their latest growths. It won’t have any revelations for specialists, but it’ll make a good deal of fascinating reading for everybody else.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.