Historical
Maps of CEE (in German)
Map of Central Europe 1890
(Austro - Hungarian Empire, Habsburg Empire)
Size: 91 x 68 cm (35.5 x 26.5 inches)
An ideal gift for anybody with an interest in European history.
Highly decorative
Condition: New/Original/Sealed Packaging
Premium Reprint
Language: English
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SELECTION OF LEARNING MATERIAL, BOOKS AND DVDs on CEE!!
CEE
HISTORY SERIES (inluding historical maps):
Historical Maps The
Ottoman Empire (english
/ german)
Historical Maps The
Balkans (english
/ german)
Historical Maps The
Black Sea (english
/ german)
Historical Maps Poland
(english / german)
Historical Maps Austria
(english
/ german)
Historical Maps Czech
Republic (english
/ german)
Historical
Maps Ukraine
(english
/ german)
A
SHORT HISTORY OF CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE:
English
Estonian
Czech
Croatian
German
French
Hungarian
Italian
Japanese (coming soon)
Polish
Romanian
Slovak
Slovenian
Spanish
Turkish
SLAVS
(BEFORE AD 800)
With the exception of Hungary, Romania and the Baltic
countries, the CEE countries are populated primarily by Slavic
peoples, who constitute the largest ethnic and linguistic
group in Europe. Believed to have originated in Asia, the
Slavs migrated to Eastern Europe during the 3rd or 2nd millenium
BC. The movement of ancient tribes westward in the 5th and
6th centuries AD sparked the Great Migration, during which
Slavs penetrated deeply into Europe. Over time, the Slavs
tended to mix with other peoples who came to their lands.
In Bulgaria, for instance, the Slavic majority assimilated
the Turkic-Bulgar ruling class around the 8th century. The
Slavs of present-day Ukraine similarily assimilated the Varangians
(Vikings) and in the mid-9th century established Eastern Europe´s
first major civilization, Kyivan Rus.
Despite shared roots, the Slavic peoples have never enjoyed
any natural unity.The division of Christendom in 395 into
the Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire split the Slavs
into two culturally distinct groups. The fault line between
the two religious groups cuts directly through the Balkans:
the Croats and Slovenes were tied to Rome, while the Bulgarians,
Romanians, and Serbs were loyal to Constantinople. Since the
split, the political and social history of Western Slavs,
like the Czechs and Poles, has been linked to Western Europe,
while the southern and eastern Slavs have been influenced
far more by their eastern neighbours, especially the Ottoman
Turks.
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OTTOMANS
AND HABSBURGS (800-1914)
Beginning in the 9th century, several short-lived kingdoms
rose and fell in Eastern Europe, such as the Empire of Great
Moravia, which included Bohemia, Hungary, Moravia, and Slovakia
at its peak in 830. The Hungarian Kingdom, one of the few
Eastern European empres to achieve longevity, first came to
power it the early 11th century. With the exception of a year-long
Tatar occupation in 1241, the kingdom grew for more than 500
years and eventually reached north to Polish Silesia, south
to Croatian Pannonia, and east to Romanian Wallachia. The
kingdom met its end at the 1526 Battle of Mohács at
the hands of the Ottomans fell into Austria´s rising
Habsburg dynasty.
The Russians came into their own by the end of the fifteenth
century, when Ivan III finally threw off the Mongol yoke.
Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire firmly established itself in
southeastern Europe when it crushed the Serbs in 1389 at the
Battle of Kosovo. The empire expanded to control vast tracts
of southeastern Europe and became one of the most powerful
regimes in the world. Polish king Jan III Sobieski turned
back the tide of Ottoman advance into the heart of Europe
when he defeated the Ottoman Turks at the Siege of Vienna
in 1683. A series of losses to Russia from the seventeenth
to the nineteenth century compounded the Ottoman imperial
decline that set in after the failed Siege of Vienna.
As the Ottoman Empire was floundering, the Russian Empire
was rapidly expanding east to the Pacific and west into Poland
and Ukraine. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569-1795)
had been one of the largest realms in Europe and the first
modern democratic state. In a series of three partitions of
Poland (1772-1795), the commonwealth was dissolved as Polish
territory was divided among Austria, Prussia and Russia. The
Russians also wrested Baltic territory from Sweden. In 1794,
the Russian-Ottoman Treaty of Kücük Kaynarca granted
the Russian tsar authority over all Orthodox Christian subjects
of the Ottoman Empire. By 1801, the Russians controlled Estonia,
Latvia, Lithuania, eastern Poland, and Ukraine, but further
expansion was halted by the mid-nineteenth century. The 1878
Congress of Berlin marked the end of the Russo-Turkish Wars
and severely curtailed the Ottoman sphere of influence.
During this period, the colossal Austrian Empire, under the
control of the Habsburg family, swallowed most of Central
and Eastern Europe. The Habsburgs came to dominate Central
Europe after the Battle of Mohács and gained control
of all of Hungary by 1699. The Hungarians remained restless
subjects, however, and in 1867 the Austrians entered into
a dual monarchy with the Hungarians, creating the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, in which Hungary was granted autonomy. Until 1918,
Austria-Hungary controlled what are now the Czech and Slovak
Republic, Croatia, Slovenia, and parts of Poland, Romania
and Ukraine. By the 19th century, nearly all of Eastern Europe
was controlled by the Ottoman, Russian, or Austro-Hungarian
Empires. Following Napoleon´s brief dominion over Europe,
a surge of Pan-Slavism, a movement for the unity of Slavic
peoples, swept through the subordinated nations.
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DEATH
OF THE GREAT EMPIRES (1914-1938)
World War I began with an attempt by the Serbs to free
the South Slavs from the clutches of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire. Serb nationalists of the illegal Black Hand movement
believed that their cause would best be served by the death
of Archduke Franz Ferdinand d´Este, the likely heir
to the Austro-Hungarian throne. On June 28, 1914, Bosnian
Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip assassinated Ferdinand and
his wife Sophia in Sarajevo. Exactly one month later, Austria-Hungary
declared war on Serbia, and soon full-scale war broke out
as France, Germany, Russia, Great Britain, Montenegro, Serbia,
and the Ottoman Empire came to the aid of allies. As they
were under the control of Austro-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire,
most Eastern Europeans fought alongside the Central Powers.
The Baltic nations were controlled by both the Germans and
Russians and remained divided in their alliances between the
Allies and the Central Powers. Ukraine became a hotly contested
battleground and eventually fell to German wartime occupation.
As the war dragged on and catastrophic losses caused the death
toll to skyrocket, the Russian people became increasingly
frustrated with their inefficient government. Coupled with
a crippled wartime economy, the tension finally erupted in
the Russian Revolution. Riots over foot shortages began in
March 1917 and led to the Tsar´s abdiction. In November,
the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, took power and
established the world´s first communist government.
Nationalist independence movements emerged througout the Russian
Empire on the heels of the March 1917 revolution, and the
empire crumbled. With support from the West, Estonia, Latvia,
and Ukraine won brief independence from Russia, and Lithunia
likewise freed itself from German rule. Poland became an independent
state for the first time since 1792.
While the Russian Empire disintegrated, victorious powers
dismantled the defeated Austria-Hungary. The Czechs and Slovaks
united to create Czechoslovakia. Romania´s size doubled
with the acquisition of Bessarabia, Bucovina and Transsylvania.
Finally, in keeping with the vision of South Slav nationalism
that had sparked the war, 1918 saw the creation of the Kingdom
of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later known as Yugoslavia.
In 1922, the Bolsheviks declared the Union of Soviet Socialist
Rebublics (USSR), which included Belarussian, Russian, Transcaucasian,
and Ukrainian territories. The interwar period was a turbulent
time, as many states, independent for the first time in centuries,
struggled to establish their own governments, economies, and
societies in a period made even more unstable by the global
depression of the 1930s.
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“PEACE
IN OUR TIME” (1938-1945)
Just
two decades after WWI ravaged the continent, World War II
rose out of its many lingering conflicts. Adolf Hitler was
determined to reclaim the “Germanic” parts of
Poland and Czechoslovakia that Germany had lost in the Treaty
of Versailles. He claimed that the 3 million Germans living
in the Czechoslovak Sudetenland were being discriminated against
by their government. Hoping to avoid another war, France and
Britain ignored Hitler´s glaring aggression against
a sovereign country and adopted their infamous policy of appeasement.
France and Britain sealed Czechoslovakias fate on September
30, 1938, by signing the Munich agreement with Germany, which
ordered all non-German inhabitants of the Sudetenland to vacate
their homes within 24 hours and permitted the German army
to invade. Upon his return from Munich, British Prime Minister
Neville Chamberlain mistakenly believed that he had secured
“peace in our time”. Hitler, however, ignored
the stipulations of the agreement and proceeded to annex the
remainder of Czechoslovakia, which he turned into the Bohemian-Moravian
Protectorate in March 1939. Hitler and Stalin shocked the
world in August, 1939, by signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Nonagression
Pact, forging an uneasy alliance between the two historical
enemies. Secret clauses detailed a dual invasion of Poland
– Germany would contron the the western two-thirds,
while the USSR would keep the eastern third. In September
1919, Hitler annexed Poland, sparking WWII.
The Nonagression Pact lasted only until June 1941, when Hitler
launched Operation Barbarossa, a surprise invasion of the
Soviet Union. The German army advanced as far as the gates
of Moscow before being turned back, as much by the harsh winter
as by Stalin´s army. Following the 1941 Anglo-Soviet
Agreement, the USSR joined the Allied forces. This was a major
turning point in the war, as were the Allies decisive victories
in 1942. The people of Eastern Europe suffered greatly in
WWII. Of approximately 60 million total war casualties, Soviet
troops and civilians accounted for 20 million, the largest
loss of life that any country suffered. Poland, however, lost
the largest percentage of its population; the 6 million Poles
who died in the war accounted for a staggering 20% of the
country´s pre-war population. More than half of the
estimated 6 million Jews murdered in Nazi concentration camps
were Polish. Before World War II, Eastern Europe had been
the geographical center of the world´s Jewish population,
but Hitler´s “final solution” succeeded
in almost entirely eliminating the Jewish communities of Czechoslovakia,
Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine through both genocide
and forced emigration.
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THE
RUSSIANS ARE COMING (1945-1989)
The
wartime alliance between the Soviet Union and the West had
been an uneasy one. Plans for postwar division of power in
Europe were sketched out as early as 1944 and were sealed
at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. Germany was divided
into four zones, administered by Britain, France, the USSR,
and the United States. The Soviets also oversaw newly liberated
Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania, a
plan that the Allies accepted with the expectation that these
countries would be allowed to hold free elections –
a detail that Stalin´s government ignored. Between 1945
and 1949, the USSR established a ring of satellite People´s
Democracies in Eastern Europe. The American, British, and
French zones of Germany coalesced into capitalist West, and
the Soviet zone became the satellite state of East Germany.
With the consolidation of a capitalist West and a communist
East, the Iron Curtain descended and the Cold War began.
To counter the American Marshall Plan, which funneled aid
to European countries in an attempt to preserve democratic
capitalism, communist nations created the Council for Mutual
Economic Assistance (COMECON), an organization meant to facilitate
and coordinate the growth of the Soviet Bloc, in 1949. Later
that year, the West established the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO), a military alliance meant to “keep
the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.”
In 1955, the Eastern Bloc retaliated with a similar alliance,
the Warsaw Pact, which maintained military bases throughout
Eastern Europe and tightened the USSR´s grip on its
satellite countries. The only communist country never to joint
the Warsaw Pact was Yugoslavia, where former partisan Josip
Broz Tito broke from Moscow as early as 1948 and followed
his own vision of combining communism with a market economy.
After Stalin´s death in 1953, and Nikita Khrushchev´s
denunciation of him in the so-called Secret Speech of 1956,
the Soviet Bloc was plagued by chaos. In Hungary and Poland,
National Communism, or the belief that the attainment of ultimate
communist goals should be dictated internally rather than
by orders from Moscow, gained popularity, threatening Soviet
domination. The presence of Russian troops throughout Eastern
Europe, however, enabled Moscow to respond to rising nationalist
movements with military force. The Soviets violently suppressed
the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and workers´ strikes in
Poland, and executed renegade Hungarian leader Imre Nagy in
1958. The Berlin Wall was erected in 1961, creating a physical
symbol of the economic, political, and ideological divide
between East and West. The Prague Spring of 1968 witnessed
another wave of violent suppression as the Czechoslovakian
dissident movement demanded freedom and attention to human
rights and was instead met with Soviet tanks. Political repression
coupled with the economic stagnancy of the Leonid Brezhnev
years (1964-82) increased unrest and resentment toward Moscow
among the satellites. The 1978 selection of Polish-born Karol
Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II further undermined Soviet control
in Eastern Europe: the Polish Solidarity movement, the first
Eastern Bloc dissident movement in which elite intellectuals
and industrial workers joined together to oppose Soviet rule,
was ignited by the new pope´s 1979 visit to Poland and
provided a model for dissident movement across the region
for the next decade.
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THE
WALL FALLS (1989 ONWARD):
When
Mikhail Gorbachev became Secretary General of the Communist
Party of the USSR in 1985, he began to dismantle the totalitarian
aspects of the Soviet regime through is policies of glasnost
(openness) and perestroika (restructuring). The new freedom
of political expression gave rise to increasing displays of
dissidence, which finally erupted in 1989 with a series of
peaceful revolutions throughout Eastern Europe. In June, Poland
voted the Communists out of office, electing Lech Walesa and
the Solidarity Pact to create a new government. This Polish
victory was swiftly followed by a new democratic constitution
in Hungary in October, the crumbling of the Berlin Wall on
November 9, the resignation of the Bulgarian communists on
November 10, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia on November
17, and the televised execution of Romania´s communist
dictator, Nicolae Ceaucescu, on December 25. Almost all the
Warsaw Pact countries had successfully – and almost
bloodlessly – broken away from the Soviet Union.
The USSR crumbled shortly ofter its empire. By June 1990,
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania all declared independence from
Moscow. Ukraine followed suit at the end of 1991. In an attempt
to keep the USSR together, Gorbachev condoned military force
against the rebellious Baltic republics. A conflict erupted
in Vilnius, Lithuania, in January 1991, killing 14. By September,
the USSR had dissolved and all of its constituent republics
and satellite nations had achieved full independence.
Following Tito´s death in 1980, Yugoslavia slowly disintegrated.
Economic inequality among its different republics brought
suppressed nationalist sentiments to the surface. Inspired
by the developments in the rest of Eastern Europe, both Croatia
and Slovenia declared independence on June 25, 1991; the Serb-controlled
government responded with military force. The conflict in
Slovenia lasted only 10 days, but Croatia´s attempts
to secede resulted in a protracted, genocidal war that continued
until the signing of the US-negotiated Dayton Peace Agreement
in November 1995.
Today, the former Soviet satellites are moving, with varying
degrees of success, toward democracy and market economies.
In March 1999, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland joined
NATO. May 2002 saw the formation of the NATO-Russia Council,
a strategic alliance between Russia and the organization originally
established as a military alliance against it. Bulgaria, Estonia,
Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, the Slovak Republic, and Slovenia
were welcomed as new members of NATO in April 2004. The following
month, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania,
Poland, the Slovak Republic, and Slovenia became part of the
European Union (EU). Bulgaria and Romania joined in 2007.
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