Medieval East Central Europe has increasingly shifted from the margins to the mainstream of international medieval studies; in this context, Continuity and Change in Medieval East Central Europe serves as a manifesto. In his Introduction, Dušan Zupka reminds us that the region’s early and high medieval history was shaped by a continuous dialogue between the universal forces of continuity and transformation. While seemingly commonplace, the point neatly captures the volume’s agenda: rather than exoticizing the region as a periphery, it situates East Central Europe within currents of political consolidation, Christianization, and participation in a common cultural sphere. Zupka buttresses his case with a recent spate of handbooks and reference works that have brought the region into broader scholarly focus and encouraged dialogue across linguistic divides. The present volume springs from this scholarly momentum: it grew out of the Fifth Biennial MECERN Conference (Bratislava, April 2023) and extends the trajectory set by two earlier Routledge collections, Medieval East Central Europe in a Comparative Perspective (Jaritz and Szende, eds., 2016) and The Medieval Networks in East Central Europe (Nagy, Vadas, and Schmieder, eds., 2019).
The five essays gathered in Part I, “Early and High Medieval Transformations,” strike the keynote of the volume: rather than perpetuating teleological narratives of “state formation,” the authors deploy more fluid categories--power networks, renegotiated social statuses, and landscapes of memory—and in this respect, the first section fulfils the editor’s promise. In the opening chapter, Daniel Ziemann confronts the “Dark Age” label attached to the decades around 900, arguing that the bleak view of the late Carolingian era stems less from genuine stagnation than from a hiatus in narrative sources: even as chroniclers fall silent, archaeology reveals an upsurge in fort-building along the Elbe and Oder. By juxtaposing the Western discourse of decline with the Hungarian narrative of the conquest period and the relative continuity of state-formation processes in Bohemia, he demonstrates that the year 900 functioned as a corridor--a juncture at which the collapse of Great Moravia, the onset of Hungarian rule, and the crystallization of the German and French kingdoms sketched the enduring political map of Europe. He argues that the proposition of a documentary lacuna itself is a historical fact that scholars must interrogate rather than reproduce; in this sense, Karl Jaspers’s concept of an “Axial Age” serves as a heuristic device. Although Ziemann might have drawn more extensively on climatic and economic data, the essay offers a persuasive revision of the tenth-century stagnation myth and situates the region firmly within the pan-European debate on the genesis of medieval “statehood.”
Ágnes Ritoók shifts the debate from political entities to the materiality of clay and peat. By analyzing the role of Mosaburg/Zalavár, she demonstrates that the longevity of Carolingian structures depended as much on the hydrology of the Zala River as on the Hungarian conquest. Consequently, the fortress’s eleventh-century revival appears less as a straightforward triumph of Christianization than as a deliberate reuse of earlier landscape engineering. Ritoók deftly interweaves dendrochronological data with hagiographic testimony to propose a model of flexible continuity, in which the construction of dykes and the translation of relics function as parallel acts of state-craft. Compelling is her claim that water management constituted a form of symbolic authority, complemented by her nuanced treatment of the continuity/discontinuity of the local cult of St Adrian. The essay stands as a model case study, illustrating how micro-archaeological evidence can recalibrate macro-narratives and providing a valuable counterpoint to the volume’s more text- centred chapters.
Piotr Pranke revisits the classic problem of the Piast monarchy’s genesis but dismantles conventional “tribe-to-state” narratives by proposing a power-network mode--a dynamic consortium of military elites, long-distance trade, and sacral symbolism. Deploying an array of evidence, from Arabic dirhams to the Gesta of Gallus Anonymus, he contends that Piast rulership crystallized through trans-regional do ut des transactions and political manoeuvring within the Ottonian sphere, rather than via an isolated evolution. Pranke deftly exposes the anachronisms of Romantic historiography, though the erudite breadth of his discussion occasionally feels detached from the primary data. Even so, the essay stands as an invigorating manifesto for a network-oriented approach, situating the Piasts within broader debates on early medieval state formation.
Pavol Hudáček shows that the social topography of the Árpádian kingdom was far more porous than traditional estate ladders imply. Using Liptov as a case study, he traces how the royal populi--people confined to a semi-servile status that demanded tribute and obligatory forest labour--were gradually “fished out” by the crown, granted hereditary land, and absorbed into the filii iobagionum, a conditional nobility obliged to serve under the royal banner. By weaving together a close reading of thirteenth-century charters with a reconstruction of the northern frontier’s forest province, Hudáček demonstrates that militarizing the border went hand-in-hand with promoting royal dependents. The study dazzles with its command of the diplomatic evidence, though its comparative edges occasionally blur—leaving open how far the Liptov model extends beyond this particular royal enclave. Even so, it offers a valuable window onto the micro-mechanisms of social ascent and underscores that continuity often masked hidden vectors of mobility.
Franciszek Dąbrowski plunges the reader into the dense thicket of debates over the origins and evolution of Poland’s castellany system, contending that it was not the ironclad longue durée championed by Buczek and Modzelewski but rather waves of modernization—from the era of territorial fragmentation through the reception of the iura regalia and German law highlighted by Gawlas—that most decisively refashioned the strongholds’ functions and their elites. He deftly pairs the “hard” archaeology of the castellany network with a “soft” analysis of legal imaginaries, while candidly admitting that the latest historiographical models are now more often juxtaposed with one another than rigorously tested against the material. The essay offers a valuable roadmap—useful not only for the outside reader—through these historiographical twists and turns and shows how indispensable it is to examine sources and models in tandem if we wish to grasp why institutions persisted, albeit in ever-changing guises.
The volume’s remaining two sections are less thematically coherent than the first. Christian Raffensperger inaugurates Part II, “Elites and Rulers,” with a proposition at once simple and iconoclastic: the so-called “peripheries” must be brought to the very centre of any narrative, for it is the zones at the margins—from Scandinavia to Rus and Byzantium--that reveal how diverse forms of power could be once we abandon the centralized kingdom as the default model. Using co-rulership as his test case, he argues that collective governance—from the Capetians, through the Piasts and Árpáds, to the Byzantine emperors—was the rule rather than the exception. Raffensperger also dismantles the trope of the “silence of the sources” as a tool for marginalizing the East, demonstrating that the exclusion of Rus or Byzantium from the canon “Middle Ages” owes more to scholarly choices than to any lack of evidence. At times the sheer breadth of erudition strains the chapter’s frame, and the promised notion of an “Arc of Europe” would benefit from sharper conceptual definition. Nonetheless, Raffensperger’s essay offers a refreshing shift in perspective, compelling us to rethink what medieval Europe actually was, and stands out as one of the most programmatic contributions.
Yanina Ryier argues that the key to understanding Lithuania’s passage from Mindaugas’s chieftain-style dominance to the institutional monarchy of Gediminas lies in the language of power: shifts in diplomatic formulas, successive variants of the title rex Lethwinorum, and the evolving functions of seals and a permanent court. Drawing on papal letters, trade privileges, and Rus chronicles, she demonstrates that only a stable network of castles and an expanding demand for written legitimation forced a transition from a charismatic war-leader to a kingship defined by administration and law. The chapter’s tight focus on specific terms lends welcome clarity. Its single shortcoming is the limited comparison with parallel developments in Rus or Poland, which might have reinforced the broader claim about peripheral paths to statehood; nonetheless, it offers a solid, source-rich contribution to the debate on Lithuania’s monarchical origins.
Cosmin Popa-Gorjanu offers a nuanced account of the evolution of knezes in Hungary between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, presenting them as an exemplary case of the dialectic between continuity and change: while they persisted as traditional leaders of rural communities, they moved—at varying speeds and with divergent outcomes—either upward into the stratum of nobiles Valachi or downward into the dependent class of villici. Drawing on an impressive corpus of charters and engaging the major historiographical contributions, the author shows that the chief catalysts of transformation--Angevin centralizing reforms, frontier-defence imperatives, and anti-Ottoman mobilization—never entirely severed entrenched local power structures. The chapter thus provides not only a synthetic typology ofknezes but also an explanation of how the institution could wither as a legal category while enduring as a social practice embedded in communal memory.
Paweł Figurski introduces into the volume a genuinely intriguing zoon politikon: the rhinoceros invoked in an eleventh-century Kraków Pontifical prayer, which he fashions into a key for reinterpreting the celebrated clash between Bishop Stanisław and King Bolesław the Bold. With verve, he sets this liturgical text alongside Gregory the Great’s exegesis in the Moralia in Iob and the demonstrable Kraków reception of Gregory’s writings to argue that a war rite--rather than a coronation ceremony--supplied the cathedral clergy with theological ammunition against a ruler construed as an “untamed beast.” The essay’s erudite construction, marrying liturgics, animal symbolism, and the political history of ideas, impresses by its range of sources and ingenuity, yet its central claim—a concrete link between the prayer and the events of 1079--remains a hypothesis grounded more in contextual convergence than in direct evidence.
Attila Bárány reinserts the neglected Hungarian moment into the debate on the Fifth Crusade, arguing that King Andrew II’s 1217 expedition—usually dismissed as a failure--was instead a reconnaissance-cum-logistics operation that bolstered Árpádian prestige and paved the way for the later thrust on Damietta. Meticulously collating Latin and Muslim narratives, Bárány shows that Arabic sources portray Andrew as the effective commander of three royal contingents who pushed as far as the Jordan, whereas previous scholarship too readily ceded primacy to John of Brienne. Reading the campaign as a forced scouting mission that stockpiled supplies amid drought, he overturns the charge of futility and demonstrates that the mere presence of a crowned king in Acre coordinated Latin efforts. Nonetheless, the chapter remains the least closely connected to the volume’s overarching theme.
Beatrix F. Romhányi opens Part III, “Church and Culture,” by dismantling the static image of Saint Stephen’s “ten dioceses.” She argues that Hungary’s parish grid and diocesan borders grew incrementally, tracking population shifts and economic cycles, rather than via a single legislative fiat. Her multi-layered model—combining sparse charters, the spread of eleventh- and thirteenth-century churches, and demographic curves—shows how Transdanubian patronage and Balaton’s pre-Christian infrastructure upset the kingdom’s supposed symmetry. Romhányi shows that the early-thirteenth-century parish boom was a regional experiment that, only after the Mongol invasion, coalesced into the four-thousand-parish network attested in papal tithe records—casting 1241 not as a catastrophe but as a catalyst. Throughout, she insists that documentary lacunae constitute historical facts in their own right, not mere inconveniences to scholars. Her chapter demonstrates that ecclesiastical organization in Hungary was the site of complex negotiations between continuity and change, and that its map tells a subtler story than royal hagiography ever could.
Béla Zsolt Szakács examines the striking concentration of sacred buildings on Wawel Hill, situating it within the wider phenomenon of “double cathedrals” and, more broadly, “church families” in East Central Europe. Drawing on Tomasz Węcławowicz’s hypothesis that Kraków may once have housed two cathedrals—St Wenceslas and St Gereon—he sets this case against early Christian precedents in Italy and Gaul, as well as later parallels from Cologne, Milan, and Aquileia. Although ultimately cautious about applying the double-cathedral model to Poland or Hungary, Szakács shows that clusters of episcopal chapels, collegiate foundations, and funerary churches around cathedrals were a common and enduring feature of the region. His chapter, based on architectural and archaeological analysis, underscores the need to view episcopal centres not as isolated monuments but as evolving complexes whose liturgical and symbolic functions emerge only in relation to one another.
Anna Adamska casts medieval literacy as a transdisciplinary meta-field that evolves through methodological continuity and ever-shifting questions. She overturns two clichés--the alleged scarcity of sources and Eastern backwardness versus monarchies like England--arguing that scholarly selectivity, not empty archives, shapes such views. Her key contribution is mapping new paths--fragmentology, loci scribendi, and “textual communities”--that shift focus from document production to users and the region’s multilingual networks. Although the sketch’s brevity leaves one wishing for more local case studies, as a programmatic manifesto it invites scholars to abandon hegemonic comparisons in favour of more apt parallels (Finnish or Scandinavian, for example) and to treat the silence of the sources as a historical phenomenon in its own right, not merely a research deficit.
Gábor Barabás offers a penetrating study of how the fourteenth-century Franciscan (Minorite) Chronicle of Buda fashioned its portrait of papal legates active in Hungary around 1300, arguing that the oft-repeated trope of their “failures” reflects not only an alleged anti-Angevin slant but also the friars’ conflict with John XXII’s curia and their frustration at the papacy’s tepid backing of Charles Robert. Combining diplomatic work with a critical reading of the chronicle, Barabás exposes its chronological slips, selective reporting, and the anonymous author’s considerable learning. The chapter’s chief strength lies in its lucid juxtaposition of the actual missions of Philip of Fermo, Niccolò Boccasini, and Gentilis de Montefiore with their depiction in the chronicle, as well as in its recontextualization of the “fictional” legations of Benvenuto of Gubbio and John of Jesi--offering fresh insight into long-standing debates over their authenticity.
Florin Curta closes the volume with a strikingly “fractal” afterword that, drawing on Leibniz and Karr’s maxim plus ça change..., asks whether the history of East-Central Europe might be read as an unbroken sequence of micro-transformations concealed beneath an illusion of continuity. With sparkling erudition, he braids together case studies from across the collection--from Lithuania’s shifting royal titulature and Romhányi’s parish “heat maps” to Hungary’s filii iobagionum—to query whether structural resemblances indicate genuine institutional persistence or merely scholar-imposed models. His verdict is deliberately ambivalent: the historian must both trace the “curve” of change and expose the narrative sleights of hand that render it deceptively linear, lest they succumb to the very “illusion of unity” that Curta dismantles with refined irony.
Dušan Zupka’s new edited volume is a timely and welcome undertaking that responds well to contemporary historiographical needs—especially when viewed from the “outside” of the still-standing disciplinary barricade, though not only from there. Its chief value lies in a programmatic determination to dismantle entrenched interpretative moulds, a goal furthered by situating individual case studies within broader contexts and by an explicit awareness of larger historical processes. The book’s openness to interdisciplinary approaches and its consistent effort to bridge the micro- and macro-levels of analysis are additional strengths.
Certain shortcomings are nevertheless apparent. Most chapters operate largely in isolation, engaging in little thematic or methodological dialogue with one another. There is no shared conceptual vocabulary or common source base that might have served as a set of reference points, and in several contributions the theme of continuity versus change is only loosely sketched or treated marginally. This lack of cohesion stems in part from the volume’s conference origins—diversity of approaches and uneven stages of research are built into such a format—yet more could have been done to mitigate the resulting fragmentation.
Even so, the book assembles a series of solid essays, each offering fresh perspectives and findings. Many chapters open avenues for further inquiry and signal new research directions. Taken as a whole, the volume undeniably advances the integration of East-Central European studies into international historiography—an outcome that is, in the long run, of considerable benefit.