Except for the southern part of the Hungarian kingdom, all of central-eastern Europe in the late Middle Ages was outside the limes Romanus (the Roman border). There was no ancient heritage in material form here, only imports and acculturation processes.
The first wave of the western Latin tradition came with baptism, which depended on the decisions and choices of local rulers. Bohemia’s bond with the west was already seen as a foregone conclusion when Otto Ill’s idea of a universal empire emerged. The opportunity to join this empire was extended to the Polish Piasts and Hungarian Arpads as well as to the Polabian Slavs. The Poles and Hungarians accepted, but without also accepting a feudal allegiance to the empire. Two kingdoms were thus formed, the Polish and the Hungarian, and two archbishoprics, in Esztergom and Gniezno, marked the eastern boundary of Latin Europe for centuries.
Kievan Rus treated the Byzantine model with equal freedom, accepting baptism (988/9) and thus opening itself up to the ancient heritage. If the existence of this state had not been interrupted by the Mongol invasions, it might have ended up with an interesting Latin-Greek subculture (Szucs 1985). Such a tradition was in fact later revived in the Ukraine.
Becoming part of the Roman church, these three new Christian kingdoms effected radical changes in social structure, turning to political and organizational forms developed by the first generation (fifth to eighth centuries) of peoples in postRoman western Europe and, in the case of Poland and Hungary, selecting some elements from the proposed model and rejecting others. This way of taking advantage of the ancient heritage, which was received here exclusively as a part of medieval Christian culture, was implemented within three increasingly far-reaching waves of occidentalization.
The first, from the tenth to the eleventh centuries, was limited to the kings and powerful lords as well as their courts. They adopted western organizational models for public life, traveled abroad, and organized the import of manuscripts and art works. One needs to appreciate the importance of the decision of the Poles and Hungarians to offer their states to the patrimonium (patrimony) of St. Peter while bypassing the empire, which underlined the distinctiveness of their own political communities from the populus Romanus (Roman people) of the empire.
The second wave, in the twelfth century, brought major royal and aristocratic foundations, the expansion of churches and convents, and the birth of local literature and historiography. Romanesque art reached the Vistula River via Hungary, and the activity of the Cistercians and Norbertines developed the sense of belonging to European prehumanism.
The third wave of occidentalization involved fourteenth-century humanism. The gateway for the most intensive penetration was Hungary under the Anjous, but Charles IV also elevated Prague to the status of a leading European metropolis.
From the thirteenth century, the transfer of western culture, including its reception of antiquity, was greatly facilitated by German-language immigration into Transylvania,
Poland (starting from Silesia), Bohemia, western Pomerania, and Prussia. The German civil law of urban communities thus linked the whole region to the west.
From the thirteenth century, Poles, Hungarians, and Czechs studied at Italian (chiefly Bologna and Padua), German, and French universities. Universities were established in Prague in 1348, then in Krakdw (1364, reestablished in 1400), and then in the Hungarian kingdom, in Pecs (1367) and Presburg (Academia Istropolitana, 1467).
World History
