Contesting Conquests: Nineteenth-Century German and Polish Historiography of the Expansion of the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Union

Abstract

SummaryThe problem of conquests and territorial expansion, including their interpretation, evaluation, and legitimisation, has been crucial for European national historiographies. Consequently, attempts by the Holy Roman emperors, particularly of the Saxon and Hohenstaufen dynasties, to control Italy and Burgundy were hotly debated among nineteenth-century German historians, while Poland's union with Lithuania, and the annexation of the vast territories of the east which followed, was a central topic for Polish historians of the time. Modern historians of historiography in both countries have carefully analysed these narratives, emphasising their ideological and political contexts, such as their involvement in the Grossdeutsch versus Kleindeutsch controversy and the controversy between the so-called Cracow and Warsaw historical schools. In this paper I propose a comparative analysis of these two discourses which dealt with analogical issues and, as I demonstrate, developed with a parallel dynamic. Such an analysis, I argue, allows an escape from the paradigm of national exceptionalism, and the discovery of what was typical or, perhaps, constitutive of the discourse on territorial expansion of the time, instead of focusing on the uniqueness of the national context. This analysis embraces the conceptualisation, argumentation, and rhetoric of those nineteenth-century German and Polish historians discussing the expansion of the medieval Holy Empire and early-modern Poland. Moreover, it locates their interpretations within an international context of a broader Western historiographical tradition, involving issues of domination, cultural transfer, and colonialism. Finally, it examines the parallel mechanism of searching for, advocating, and perpetuating the idea of uniqueness of national history.