Chapter XI: The Baltic Lands (3)

It was the Poland thus formed, a state which answered much more nearly to the Poland of the fourteenth than to the Poland of the eighteenth century, which, by the arrangements of the Vienna Congress, first received a Russian sovereign. ♦Danzig and Posen restored to Prussia.♦ Prussia now again rounded off her _West-Prussian_ province by the recovery of Danzig and Thorn, and she rounded off her southern frontier by the recovery of Posen and Gnesen, which had been part of her _South-Prussian_ province. The _Grand Duchy of Posen_ became again part of the Prussian state. ♦Cracow a commonwealth. | Annexed by Austria. 1846.♦ _Cracow_ became a republic, to be annexed by Austria thirty years later. ♦Kingdom of Poland united to Russia. 1831-1863.♦ The remainder of the Duchy of Warsaw, under the style of the _Kingdom of Poland_, became a separate kingdom, but with the Russian Emperor as its king. ♦Russia takes old Polish territory for the first time.♦ Later events have destroyed, first its constitution, then its separate being; and now all ancient Poland, except the part of Great Poland kept by Prussia and the part of Little Poland kept by Austria, is merged in the Russian Empire. Thus the Russian acquisition of strictly Polish, as distinguished from old-Russian and Lithuanian territory, dates, not from the partitions, but from the Congress of Vienna. It was to the behoof of Prussia and Austria, not of Russia, that the old kingdom of the Piasts was broken in pieces.

The changes of the nineteenth century with regard to the lands on the European coasts of the Euxine have been told elsewhere.[77] ♦Fluctuation of the Russian frontier towards Moldavia. | 1812-1878.♦ They amount, as far as the geographical boundaries of Russia are concerned, to her advance to the Pruth and the Danube, her partial withdrawal, her second partial advance. ♦Advance in the Caucasus.♦ Meanwhile the Russian advance in the nineteenth century on the Asiatic shores of the Euxine and in the lands on and beyond the Caspian has been far greater than her advance during the eighteenth. It is in our own century that Russia has taken up her commanding position between the Euxine and the Caspian seas, one which in some sort amounts to an enlargement of Europe at the expense of Asia. The old frontier on the Caspian, which had hardly changed since the conquest of Astrakhan, reached to the _Terek_. The annexation of Crim made the _Kuban_ the boundary on the side of the Euxine. ♦Incorporation of Georgia. 1800.♦ The incorporation of the _Georgian_ kingdom gave Russia an outlying territory south of the Caucasus on the upper course of the _Kur_. ♦Advance on the Caspian. 1802.♦ Next came the acquisition of the Caspian coast from the mouth of the Terek to the mouth of the Kur, the land of _Daghestan_ and _Shirwan_, including part of the territory which had been held for a few years in the eighteenth century. ♦Advance in Armenia and Circassia. 1829.♦ The Persian and Turkish wars gave Russia the Armenian land of _Erivan_ as far as the _Araxes_, _Mingrelia_ and _Immeretia_, and the nominal cession of the Euxine coast between them and the older frontier. ♦1859.♦ But it was thirty years before the mountain region of _Circassia_ was fully subdued. ♦1878.♦ The last changes have extended the Trans-Caucasian frontier of Russia to the south by the addition of _Batoum_ and _Kars_.

♦Advance in Turkestan. 1853-1868.♦

In the lands east of the Caspian the new province of Turkestan gradually grew up in the lands on the Jaxartes, reaching southward to Samarkand. ♦1875.♦ _Khokand_ to the south-east followed, while _Khiva_ and _Bokhara_, the lands on the Oxus, have passed under Russian influence. The Turcoman tribes immediately east of the Caspian have also been annexed. The Caspian has thus nearly become a Russian lake. Hardly anything remains to Persia except the extreme southern coast which was once for a moment Russian.

♦Advance in Eastern Asia. 1858.♦

Far again to the east, Russia has added a large territory on the Chinese border on the river Amoor. ♦Extent and character of the Russian dominion.♦ All these conquests form the greatest continuous extent of territory by land which the world has ever seen, unless during the transient dominion of the old Mongols. No other European power in any age has, or could have had, such a continuous dominion, because no other European power has ever had the unknown barbarian world lying in the same way at its side. Nowhere again has any European power held a dominion so physically unbroken as that which stretches from the gulf of Riga to the gulf of Okhotsk. The greater part of the Asiatic dominion of Russia belongs to that part of Asia which has least likeness to Europe. It is only on the Frozen Ocean that we find a kind of mockery of inland seas, islands, and peninsulas. Massive unbroken extent by land is its leading character. And as this character extends to a large part of European Russia also, Russia is the only European land where there can be any doubt where Europe ends. The barbarian dominion of other European states, a dominion beyond the sea, has been a dominion of choice. The barbarian dominion of Russia in lands adjoining her European territory is a dominion forced on her by geographical necessity. The annexation of Kamtschatka became a question of time when the first successors of Ruric made their earliest advance towards the Finnish north.

♦Russian America.♦

Alongside of this continuous dominion in Europe and Asia, the Russian occupation of territory in a third continent, an occupation made by sea after the manner of other European powers, has not been lasting. The Russian territory in the north-west corner of America, the only part of the world where Russia and England marched on one another, has been sold to the United States.

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♦Final Survey.♦

To return to Europe, the events of the nineteenth century have, in the lands with which we are dealing, carried on the work of the eighteenth by the further aggrandizement of Russia and Prussia. The Scandinavian powers have withdrawn into the two Scandinavian peninsulas and the adjoining islands, and in the southern peninsula the power of Denmark has been cut short to the gain of Prussia. The Prussian power meanwhile, formed in the eighteenth century by the union of the detached lands of Prussia and Brandenburg, has in the nineteenth grown into the imperial power of Germany, and has, even as a local kingdom, become, by the acquisition of Swedish Pomerania, Holstein, and Sleswick, the dominant power on the southern Baltic. The acquisition of the duchies too, not only of Sleswick and Holstein, but of Bremen and Verden also, as parts of the annexed kingdom of Hannover, have given her a part of the former oceanic position both of Denmark and Sweden. Russia has acquired the same position on the gulfs of the Baltic which Prussia has on the south coast of the Baltic itself. The acquisition of the new Poland has brought her frontier into the very midst of Europe; it has made her a neighbour, not merely of Prussia as such, but of Germany. The third sharer in the partition has drawn back from her northern advance, but she has increased her scrap of Russia, her scrap of Little Poland, her scrap of Moldavia,[78] by the suppression of a free city. The southern advance of Russia on European ground has been during this century an advance less of territory than of influence. The frontier of 1878 is the restored frontier of 1812. It is in the lands out of Europe that Russia has in the meanwhile advanced by strides which look startling on the map, but which in truth spring naturally from the geographical position of the one modern European power which cannot help being Asiatic as well.

FOOTNOTES:

[51] See above, pp. 160-162.

[52] See above, p. 163.

[53] A common name for these closely allied nations is sometimes needed. _Lettic_ is the most convenient; _Lett_, with the adjective _Lettish_, is the special name of one of the obscurer members of the family.

[54] See above, p. 130.

[55] See Einhard, Annals A. 815, where we read, ‘trans Ægidoram fluvium in terram Nordmannorum ... perveniunt.’ So Vita Karoli 12: ‘Dani ac Sueones quos Nortmannos vocamus,’ and 14, ‘Nortmanni qui Dani vocantur.’ But Adam of Bremen (ii. 3) speaks of ‘mare novissimum, quod Nortmannos a Danis dirimit.’ But the name includes the Swedes: as in i. 63 he says, ‘Sueones et Gothi, vel, si ita melius dicuntur, Nortmanni,’ and i. 16, ‘Dani et ceteri qui trans Daniam sunt populi _ab historicis Francorum_ omnes Nordmanni vocantur.’

[56] See above, p. 131, 159.

[57] See Adam of Bremen, iv. 16.

[58] The origin of Samo and the chief seat of his dominion, whether Bohemia or Carinthia, is discussed by Professor Fasching of Marburg (Austria) in the _Zweiter Jahresbericht der kk. Staats-Oberrealschule in Marburg_, 1872.

[59] See Schafarik, _Slawische Alterthümer_, ii. 503.

[60] See above, p. 198.

[61] The Poles claim Boleslaf the First as the first king. But Lambert (1067), who strongly insists on the tributary condition of Poland, makes Boleslaf the Second the first king. The royal dignity was certainly forfeited after his death.

[62] There can be no doubt that the Russian name strictly belongs to the Scandinavian rulers, and not to the Slavonic people. See Schafarik, i. 65; Historical Essays, iii. 386. The case is parallel to that of the Bulgarians and the Franks, save that the name _Rus_ is said to be, not a Scandinavian name, but a name applied to the Swedes by the Fins.

[63] See above pp. 365, 436.

[64] This document, granted at Metz in 1214, will be found in Bréholles’ _Historia Diplomatica Friderici Secundi_, i. 347. It reads like a complete surrender of all Imperial rights in both the German and the Slavonic conquests of Waldemar. It may be that it seems to have that meaning only because the retreating of Terminus was deemed inconceivable.

[65] Vratislaf, who reigned from 1061 to 1092, is called the first king of Bohemia, but his royal dignity was only personal. The succession of kings begins only with Ottocar the First, who reigned from 1197 to 1230.

[66] See above, p. 437.

[67] See above, p. 448.

[68] Conquered by Sweden 1643, restored to Denmark 1645. Ceded to Sweden 1658, but recovered the same year.

[69] See above, p. 467.

[70] There is no doubt that the title of _Czar_, or rather _Tzar_, borne by the Russian princes, as by those of Servia and Bulgaria in earlier times, is simply a contraction of _Cæsar_. In the Treaty of Carlowitz Peter the Great appears as Tzar of endless countries, but he is not called _Imperator_, though the Sultan is.

[71] See above, p. 212.

[72] See above, pp. 319, 437.

[73] It is however to be regretted that, in bringing back the old names into these regions, they have been so often applied to wrong places. Thus the new _Sebastopol_ answers to the old _Cherson_, while the new _Cherson_ is elsewhere. The new _Odessa_ has nothing to do with the old _Odêssos_, and so in other cases.

[74] See above, p. 208.

[75] See above, p. 228.

[76] See also p. 222.

[77] See above, p. 449.

[78] See above, p. 441.