Martyn Rady, the Masaryk Professor of Central European History at the University College London, has had a long and distinguished career as an author, translator, and editor. Although his primary specialization is medieval Central Europe with a focus on Hungary and its legal traditions, his work has ranged broadly across the region, both thematically and chronologically. Most recently, he has written a series of more popular histories of the Habsburgs. In his 2017 book The Habsburg Empire, he compressed over half a millennium of the family’s past into 100 pages as part of Oxford’s successful “Very Short Introduction” series. Basic Books, a few years later, allowed him more space for his well-paced and engaging The Habsburgs (2020). His latest book, The Middle Kingdoms, is decidedly his most ambitious work and continues in this more popular vein. Here he offers an overview of Central Europe that begins with the depressed musings of the exiled Roman poet Ovid on the Black Sea coast and carries through Putin’s brutal 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

What is Central Europe? The question itself has a long and venerable tradition of contentious debate and dispute. Thankfully, Rady gracefully slides over the unnecessary details of this scholarly turf war and simply presents a broad region that is bounded in the west by the Rhine but is more open-ended in the east with the Great European Plain and the wild steppe lands further to the south. Indeed, it is the openness of Central Europe’s eastern flank that has contributed to its turbulent past and ever-precarious present in repeated cycles of invasion, destruction, and development beginning with the Huns and continuing to the Russians. Such a process of creative destruction has also contributed to the region’s distinctive character, for as Rady tells it, Central Europe is more than a geography but is also a shared culture shaped by centuries of conflict. For Rady, the basic outline of Central Europe emerges with the Ottonian dynasty in the tenth century. They are the ones who confront and ultimately defeat yet another invader, this time the Hungarians. Building upon Charlemagne’s legacy, Otto III (980–1002) was able to secure an empire that brought together Roman, Frankish, and Byzantine elements.

To my mind, this broad view of Central Europe, both chronologically and geographically, is the most important feature of Middle Kingdoms. Finally, we have a history that examines the two great supernational polities of the region, the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, together. Rady moves easily across the Germanic and Slavic divides while not ignoring the Swedes, Ottomans, Mongols, and other outside invaders, who came, conquered, and constructed parts of that distinctive sphere of Europe’s middle lands. For Rady, what is characteristically Central European? Although Middle Kingdoms examines a wide range of human activity and cultural production from medieval Gospel books and calendrical reform to the films of Fritz Lang and the eclectic thought world of Slavoj Žižek, he pays special attention to politics. His observations are especially valuable for the region’s formative centuries of the Middle Ages. Rady singles out the emergence of robust forms of local governance. Diets, provincial assemblies, and city councils proliferated in a way that did not occur in the West. A profusion of law codes across the region added yet another level of complexity. Rady is at his strongest in a comparative assessment of these political institutions and legal traditions that range from the islands of the North Sea to the forests of Transylvania.

Rady is clearly writing for a more popular audience. Chapters are short, notes are limited, and the pace is brisk. To help the reader who may not be familiar with the landscape east of the Elbe, he includes useful reference points or helpful comparisons. He recounts the adventures of a young Henry Bolingbroke on an expedition to 14th-century Lithuania; later, when describing Enlightenment culture, he contrasts a Western form with its focus on individual liberties to a Central European variant that tended to champion the state. This type of writing, though, demands choices. How else can one possibly cover two millennia in 500 pages? It is a favorite game of academics when reviewing books of such breadth, to highlight gaps or absences, but although such criticism is fair, in some ways, it is missing the point. Here is a book that can introduce anyone to the fascinating landscape of Central Europe, and Rady is well equipped to escort a general reader (or seasoned specialist) on an extended tour of this world, point out its most important features, highlight its relevance and significance today, and entertain at the same time. Such an approach is particularly welcome today as academic prose becomes increasingly turgid and jargon-filled.