But their history, Davies conspiratorially claims, is shrouded in mystery. It is hard to understand what holds this group together aside from the map of Easy Jet flights from London. In his new book, Norman Davies repackages the old story of Burgundy as a model of what he calls a “vanished kingdom”-a shadow of a chivalric world that once existed in Europe, populated by “those whom historians tend to forget.” Davies’s vanished kingdoms include the Visigoth realm, ancient Britannia, the Burgundian kingdoms and dukedoms, Aragon, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Byzantium, Belarus, Savoy, Napoleonic Tuscany, Thuringia, Montenegro, the one-day republic of Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia, Ireland, and Estonia under the Soviet Union.
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It is no accident that the European parliament now stands in Strasbourg, in Alsace-Lorraine, a point of contention between Franks, Bourbons, Hapsburgs, Bonapartes, Hohenzöllerns, free Republics, Nazis, and the U.S. This coveted wealth would grow over time, and by the nineteenth century coal spilled from the hills of Lorraine and helped cause three wars between France and Germany. With its verdant forests, its vineyards, its rich cities and fantastically rich monasteries, it was linked to Flanders and the Baltic in the north with its fairs and sea trade, and to the Alps and Savoy, and via the Rhône river to the kingdom of Provence and the Mediterranean sea.
Wedged in between what is today France and Germany, wealthy Burgundy was the backbone of Charlemagne’s Holy Frankish Roman Empire. Lothar’s middle kingdom would endure in one form or another, but mainly under the title of the Kingdom of Burgundy. When Louis the Pious died in 840, the imperial pact collapsed, the brothers went to war, and the ideal of a Christian Pax Romana vanished into the foggy forests of early feudalism. And ruling over them, in the middle, was the eldest son, Lothar, who retained the title of Holy Roman Emperor, but direct control only over his middle kingdom, which stretched from Utrecht and the Imperial city of Aachen through the Burgundian kingdoms and into the Mediterranean lands of Provence. Louis the German received the Kingdom of the Eastern Franks. He bequeathed the western kingdom of Aquitaine (roughly France) to Pepin. Charlemagne’s son, Louis the Pious, followed the Frankish laws of inheritance, dividing Charlemagne’s empire among his three sons. All are one in Christ.” But the dream did not come true.
In 824, ten years after the death of Charlemagne, Agobard, Archbishop of Lyon, hailed a new Christian imperial ambition to unite all the peoples and lands of the Western Holy Roman Empire by reformulating Galatians 3:28: “There is now neither Gentile nor Jew, Scythian nor Aquitanian, nor Lombard, nor Burgundian, nor Alaman, nor bond, nor free. There is a well-worn story that is told in one form or another in all European history textbooks. Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations