Question 1

Which empires ruled Eastern Europe, and when?

Accepted Answer

Between 700 BC and 1918 the ground now held by Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Serbia, Ukraine and Moldova passed through Greek colonies on the Black Sea, Thracians, Dacians and Illyrians, Celts, Scythians and Sarmatians, Rome and then Byzantium, the Goths, the Huns, the Gepids and the Avar Khaganate, the Slavic settlement of the sixth century, the Bulgarian empires, Kyivan Rus, the Pechenegs and Cumans, the Kingdom of Hungary, the Mongols and the Golden Horde, the medieval Serbian state, Wallachia and Moldavia, Poland and Lithuania, the Cossack Hetmanate, the Crimean Khanate, the Ottoman Empire, the Habsburg Monarchy and the Russian Empire. Most of them held only part of one country, and several held ground in four or five at once — which is what the combined map is for.

Question 2

How long was each of these countries under Ottoman rule?

Accepted Answer

There is no single answer, and the differences are the point. Bulgaria was under direct Ottoman administration longest: Thrace from 1364 and the Danubian plain from 1393, both until 1878, while the Rhodopes and Pirin stayed Ottoman until 1912 — five and a half centuries. Serbia went piece by piece, from Niš in 1386 and Smederevo in 1459 to the uprising of 1804, with Kosovo and the Sanjak of Novi Pazar held until 1912. Hungary lost only its centre, from 1541 to 1686, roughly 145 years, while the west and north stayed Habsburg throughout. Wallachia and Moldavia were never annexed at all: they paid tribute from 1417 and the 1450s until 1878 and kept their own princes, churches and courts — though Dobruja, next door, was annexed and administered for the same four and a half centuries. In Ukraine and Moldova the Ottoman presence ran through the Crimean Khanate and a handful of directly held ports and fortresses, from 1475 and 1484 to the Russian conquests of 1774 to 1812.

Question 3

What do direct rule, suzerainty, hegemony and settlement mean here?

Accepted Answer

They are the four ways a power can hold ground, and the outline of each region on the map says which one applies. Direct rule means administered as part of the state, with its officials and its law. Suzerainty means a tributary that kept its own ruler and institutions. Hegemony means dominance without administration — tribute, raiding, control of movement. Settlement means a population was present without holding the state, which is how the Transylvanian Saxons, the Rusyns, the Danube Swabians and the Lipovans appear. Drawing these as one band would be the most misleading thing these maps could do: Ottoman Dobruja and Ottoman Wallachia were not the same arrangement, and neither were Habsburg Transylvania and Habsburg Bukovina.

Question 4

Which of these six changed hands most often?

Accepted Answer

Ukraine, by a distance: fifty-one different powers held ground inside its present borders, more than any of the other five, and in 1680 eight of them held part of it at the same time — the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Muscovy, the Zaporizhian Sich, the Ottomans in two separate places, the Crimean Khanate, Hungary and Moldavia. The country is 600,000 square kilometres and its west and its south spent six centuries in empires that never met. At the other end, Moldova is the smallest and the most consistently divided: for most of three centuries the Prut and the Dniester had a different power on each bank.

Question 5

Why are the maps drawn on modern regions and borders?

Accepted Answer

Because those are the only lines that can be drawn honestly. Historical frontiers did not follow modern administrative boundaries, and often were not lines at all — the Roman limes, the Ottoman frontier in Hungary and the partition of 1541 all cut across regions rather than between them, and the frontier could move every campaign season. Colouring today’s regions by who held them is clear about that limit. Drawing a crisp historical border would look more precise and be less true. It also means each map answers one question only: who held that particular ground. The medieval Kingdom of Hungary was three times the size of modern Hungary, so Transylvania under that kingdom appears on the Romanian map, not the Hungarian one.

Question 6

When did these six countries become independent?

Accepted Answer

Serbia first, in stages: an uprising in 1804, an autonomous principality from 1815, and recognition at the Congress of Berlin in 1878. Romania was recognised at the same congress in 1878, after the war of 1877, and became a kingdom in 1881. Bulgaria became an autonomous principality in 1878 and declared full independence in 1908. Hungary was a half of Austria-Hungary from 1867 and separate from 1918, with its borders settled at Trianon in 1920. Ukraine and Moldova both declared republics in 1917: Moldova’s united with Romania in 1918, and Ukraine’s was partitioned between Poland and Soviet Russia by 1921.

Question 7

Why do the maps stop in 1918?

Accepted Answer

Because that is where the question changes. Up to then, asking who held a given piece of ground has a complicated answer almost every year; afterwards it is one state for most of a century, and the interesting part moves to politics rather than territory. The six do not all stop in the same year — the earliest ends in 1918 and the latest in 1921 — because their settlements came at different moments, from the union of 1918 to the Peace of Riga in March 1921. On the combined map the slider stops at 1918, where the first of them stops, and a country is drawn grey before it begins or after it ends, because unrecorded and empty are not the same thing.

Question 8

How reliable is this, and what happens where historians disagree?

Accepted Answer

Every entry names its source and carries one citation you can check, drawn deliberately from more than one national tradition — Romanian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Austrian, Russian, Byzantine and Anglophone scholarship all describe this ground and do not always agree. Where they disagree, the map says what is disputed instead of picking a winner, and marks the entry contested: the year Rome withdrew from Dacia, how far Bulgarian rule reached north of the Danube, when and how the Magyars reached Transylvania. Nothing here is settled by being written down; the citation is where an argument starts, not where it ends.