#it’s a world undone by g. j. meyer

[quotesfrommyreading]

Mobilization in 1914 was a cumbersome, difficult, expensive undertaking. It required calling up and organizing hundreds of thousands of reserve troops, commandeering entire national railroad systems for the movement of soldiers and supplies, and getting the most enormous and mechanized military machines the world had ever seen into motion according to timetables so intricate that years had been required for their development. Either of the Austro-Hungarian mobilization plans (Vienna was unusual in having two such plans, one for war against Serbia only and the other for war in conjunction with Germany against Serbia and Russia) would take weeks to implement. Part of the problem was that many thousands of soldiers had been sent home, as was customary each summer before the mechanization of agriculture, to help bring in the harvest. Conrad feared that calling them back to their units earlier than planned would alert Serbia and Russia to what was in process.

  —  A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (G. J. Meyer)

[fictionadventurer]

tagged by @dhufflebee. Thanks!

rules: tag nine people you’d like to get to know better

top 3 ships: Anne/Wentworth, Amy/Rory and Peter/Harriet

last song: “Letters from the Atlantic” by The Arcadian Wild

last movie: I’m halfway through a rewatch of Tangled

currently reading: Set the Stars Alight by Amanda Dykes, Piccadilly Jim by P.G. Wodehouse, A World Undone: A Story of the Great War 1914 to 1918 by G. J. Meyer, and the Book of Genesis.

what food am I craving right now: More peas from the garden.

Tagging: Anyone who has eaten a vegetable today

[spdk1]

REVIEW: A World Undone - The Story of the Great War 1914 to 1918 (2006)

REVIEW: A World Undone – The Story of the Great War 1914 to 1918 (2006)

A book by G. J. Meyer After my double shot of trips to the National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, I kind of got onto a kick learning about that particular period in world history. First I read The Great War by Hew Strachan, and found it to be an unpolished mess that was trying to hard to showcase the author’s hot-takes on the war rather than actually inform. I held my breath,…

[gjj5hn8z-blog]

The Borgias Rent Books On Tape

Get now >> The Borgias Rent Books On Tape

The Borgias Rent Books On Tape

The startling truth behind one of the most notorious dynasties in history is revealed in a remarkable new account by the acclaimed author of The Tudors and A World Undone. Sweeping aside the gossip, slander, and distortion that have shrouded the Borgias for centuries, G. J. Meyer offers an unprecedented portrait of the infamous Renaissance family and their storied milieu. THE BORGIAS They burst out of obscurity in Spain not only to capture the great prize of the papacy, but to do so twice. Throughout a tumultuous half-century as popes, statesmen, warriors, lovers, and breathtakingly ambitious political adventurers they held center stage in the glorious and blood-drenched pageant known to us as the Italian Renaissance, standing at the epicenter of the power games in which Europe's kings and Italy's warlords gambled for life-and-death stakes. Five centuries after their fall a fall even more sudden than their rise to the heights of power they remain immutable symbols of the depths to which humanity can descend: Rodrigo Borgia, who bought the papal crown and prostituted the Roman Church; Cesare Borgia, who became first a teenage cardinal and then the most treacherous cutthroat of a violent time; Lucrezia Borgia, who was as shockingly immoral as she was beautiful. These have long been stock figures in the dark chronicle of European villainy, their name synonymous with unspeakable evil. But did these Borgias of legend actually exist? Grounding his narrative in exhaustive research and drawing from rarely examined key sources, Meyer brings fascinating new insight to the real people within the age-encrusted myth. Equally illuminating is the light he shines on the brilliant circles in which the Borgias moved and the thrilling era they helped to shape, a time of wars and political convulsions that reverberate to the present day, when Western civilization simultaneously wallowed in appalling brutality and soared to extraordinary heights. Stunning in scope, rich in telling detail, G. J. Meyer's The Borgias is an indelible work sure to become the new standard on a family and a world that continue to enthrall.Praise for The Borgias A vivid and at times startling reappraisal of one of the most notorious dynasties in history . . . If you thought you knew the Borgias, this book will surprise you. Tracy Borman, author of Queen of the Conqueror and Elizabeth's Women The mention of the Borgia family often conjures up images of a ruthless drive for power via assassination, serpentine plots, and sexual debauchery. . . . [G. J. Meyer] convincingly looks past the mythology to present a more nuanced portrait. Booklist Meyer brings his considerable skills to another infamous Renaissance family, the Borgias [and] a fresh look into the machinations of power in Renaissance Italy. . . . [He] makes a convincing case that the Borgias have been given a raw deal. Historical Novels Review Fascinating . . . a gripping history of a tempestuous time and an infamous family. Shelf AwarenessFrom the Hardcover edition. The Borgias Rent Books On Tape

[quotesfrommyreading]

Now there was once again a Kingdom of Serbia, a rugged, mountainous, and landlocked little country surrounded by the whole boiling ethnic stew of the Balkans. Its neighbors were Europe's only Muslims, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians some of whom thought of themselves as Serbs and some of whom did not. Among those neighbors were Magyars, Bulgars, Croats, Albanians, Macedonians, Romanians, Montenegrans, Greeks, and – just across the border in Bosnia – brother Serbs suffering the indignity of not living in Serbia. Despite the inconvenient fact that Serbs were only a minority of the Bosnian population (fully a third were Muslims, and one in five was Croation and therefore Roman Catholic), the incorporation of Bosnia into an Orthodox and Slavic Greater Serbia became an integral part of the Serbs' national dream. The fact that under international law Bosnia was the possession of two of the great powers – officially of the Ottomans but actually of the Austrians in recent years – mattered to Serbia not at all.

  —  A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (G. J. Meyer)

[quotesfrommyreading]

On July 5 and 6 Wilhelm and Germany's deputy foreign minister, Arthur Zimmermann, met separately with emissaries from Vienna. Wilhelm made no effort to tell the Austrians what to do. What he did tell them, emphatically, was what they wanted to hear: that this time something had to be done about Serbia, that action should be taken soon, and that the Austrians could count on Germany's support whatever they decided. “It was his opinion that this action must not be delayed,” the Austrian ambassador said of Wilhelm II immediately after their meeting. “Russia's attitude will no doubt be hostile, but for this he [Wilhelm] had been for years prepared, and should a war between Austria-Hungary and Russia be unavoidable, we might be convinced that Germany, our old faithful ally, would stand at our side. Russia at the present time was in no way prepared for war, and would think twice before it appealed to arms.” This report became famous as the “blank check” – the promise that Berlin would be with Vienna no matter what.

  —  A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (G. J. Meyer)

[quotesfrommyreading]

As it became clear that the assassins were Bosnian Serbs who had been prepared for their mission in Belgrade, Wilhelm went into one of his belligerent moods. It was his practice to write in the margins of diplomatic dispatches as he read them, and his comments were often wildly dramatic; it was a way of blustering, of playing his beloved role of All-High Warlord, and also of letting the foreign office know where he stood. “Then he's a false rascal!” he would soon be saying of Britain's foreign secretary in one such note. “He lies!” “Rot!” When at the beginning of July he received a wire in which the German ambassador in Vienna reported having urged the Austrians not to be too quick in moving against Serbia, Wilhelm exploded. “Who authorized him to act that way?” he wrote. “Serbia must be disposed of, and that right soon!”

  —  A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (G. J. Meyer)

[quotesfrommyreading]

By the summer of 1914 the Balkans were a region in which nobody was satisfied and everyone found reason to be angry and afraid. The Turks had lost almost everything they had ever possessed in the region; Bulgaria had lost much of its spoils from 1913; and although Greece had kept its gains, it did not think it had been given enough. The region was as unstable as it had ever been.

Russia and Austria both were aggrieved as well: Russia because it was seen as having failed the states whose patron it wanted to be; Austria because, only five years after it let slip its best opportunity to crush Serbia, it had been able to do nothing while the part of the world where it felt most threatened was reshaped to Serbia's advantage. Certain that their credibility would be destroyed if they permitted any such thing to recur, both empires resolved never to be so weak and passive again.

The Austrians concluded also that the international conferences that ended both Balkan wars had done them no good. Only their ultimatum to Serbia, their direct threat of war, had made a difference. They had learned to regard peace conferences as traps.

Finally, the Austrians were disgusted by Germany's failure to support them. Germany knew this; it was something that Berlin now had to take into account. Feeble though it might be, Austria-Hungary was the only even marginally dependable ally that Germany had in all of Europe. If the Germans again failed to support Austria-Hungary in a crisis, if they lost their junior partner as a result, they would be alone and surrounded by enemies. The conclusion, for Berlin, was obvious. Never again must Vienna have reason to doubt the value of its alliance with Germany.

Never again. For three weeks and more following the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, that was the German position.

  —  A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (G. J. Meyer)

[quotesfrommyreading]

Austria-Hungary had become a paradox, simultaneously obsolete and ahead of its time. In an era of nationalism run rampant, it was not a nation at all but a cobbled-together assortment of thirteen nationalities that spoke sixteen languages, belonged to five major religions, and were organized into seventeen “lands” served by twenty parliaments. But it had the potential to provide a model for a Europe in which diverse peoples could live together in peace and might even, one day, think of uniting. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, as much as Franz Joseph disliked him, had appeared to understand that potential. His murder left the empire without the one man who might possibly have been strong and canny enough to lead it through the crisis of 1914. The archduke had always disliked Conrad's lust for military adventures and almost certainly would have restrained him. He was “a man,” as Berchtold would observe sadly amid the ruins of postwar Europe, whom “the monarchy needed.”

  —  A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (G. J. Meyer)

[quotesfrommyreading]

When the governor, seated in front of Franz Ferdinand and Sophie, discovered that they were going the wrong way, he ordered their driver to stop. The driver brought the car to a halt, shifted gears, and prepared to turn around. By a coincidence that has reverberated down the decades, he had stopped less than five feet from Gavrilo Princip, nineteen years old, the one remaining member of the assassination gang and its leader. Princip pulled our his revolver, pointed it at the stopped car, and fired twice.

Husband and wife remained upright and calm in their seats. The governor, seeing no signs of injury and thinking that they must have escaped harm, shouted again at the driver, telling him to turn around.

Suddenly a thin stream of blood came spurting out of Franz Ferdinand’s mouth.

“For heaven’s sake!” cried Sophie. “What’s happened to you?” Then she slumped over, her head falling between her husband’s knees. The military governor thought she had fainted, but somehow the archduke knew better.

“Sophie dear, Sophie dear, don’t die!” he called. “Stay alive for our children!” Other members of the party surrounded him, struggling to open his tunic to see where he had been shot. “It’s nothing,” he told them weakly. “It’s nothing.”

  —  A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (G. J. Meyer)

[quotesfrommyreading]

Everything known about Kaiser Wilhelm and his closest associates indicates that in early July they saw little possibility of a general European war. Falkenhayn's skepticism about whether Vienna would in the end actually do anything reflected widespread German doubt, based on much experience, about the Hapsburg empire's ability to take action to save itself. Recent experience also encouraged the Germans to be equally skeptical – scornful, perhaps – about Russia. Evidently it was all but inconceivable to them that this time, unlike 1908 or 1912 or 1913, the Russians would feel not only capable of taking military action but compelled to do so. Almost immediately after his talks with the Austrians, when Falkenhayn asked the kaiser if military preparations were necessary, Wilhelm said no. He soon returned to his boat-racing vacation off Norway, telling one of his admirals before departing that “I don't believe we are headed for a great war. In this case the tsar's views would not be on the side of the prince's [Franz Ferdinand's] murderer. Besides this, France and Russia are not ready for war.”

  —  A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (G. J. Meyer)

[quotesfrommyreading]

In 1866 Prussia defeated Austria and forced it to abandon its ancient claim to leadership over Germany. At this point, fearful of further losses, Franz Joseph entered into a compact under which Hungary became not merely one of the empire's possessions but an equal partner in a new and peculiar kind of dual monarchy. The ruler would be not only emperor of Austria but also “apostolic king” of Hungary. Austria and Hungary each would have its own prime minister and parliament, though the war, finance, and foreign affairs ministries would be centralized in Vienna. This arrangement was successful insofar as it gave the Magyars, who dominated Hungary, a more powerful and secure position in European politics than they could possibly have had otherwise. It gave them a reason to want the empire to survive. But it also created problems. It greatly complicated the process of making policy: all the most important decisions had to be approved not only in Vienna but in the Hungarian capital of Budapest as well. It also gave Hungary reason to oppose anything that might weaken its position within the empire. Thus Hungary would resist the transformation of the dual monarchy into a three-cornered arrangement that included the Slavs. It would do so despite the fact that by 1914 fully three-fifths of the empire's subjects were Slavic: Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Serbs, and others.

  —  A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (G. J. Meyer)

[quotesfrommyreading]

The Hapsburgs were not warriors or adventurers; rather, they were congenitally risk-averse. They expanded their holdings less by the sword than by matrimony. In the days when every educated European knew Latin, a saying about the Hapsburgs became famous: Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube. “Let others wage wars; you, happy Austria, marry.”

  —  A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (G. J. Meyer)

[quotesfrommyreading]

Almost two millennia the dividing line between the Eastern and Western Roman Empires ran through the Balkans, and so the dividing line between the Catholic and Orthodox worlds has run through the region ever since. Later, after the Turks forced their way into Europe, the Balkans became another of the things it continues to be today: the home of Europe's only indigenous Muslim population, the point where European Christendom ends and Islam begins. Through many generations the Balkans were a prize fought over by Muslim Turkey, Catholic Austria, and Orthodox Russia. By 1914, Turkey having been pushed almost entirely out of the region, the contest was between Russia and Austria-Hungary only, with Turkey waiting on the sidelines in hope of recovering some of what it had lost.

The Russians wanted Constantinople above all. In pre-Christian times it had been the Greek city of Byzantium, and it then became the Eastern Roman capital until falling to the Turks. It dominated the long chain of waterways – the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara, the Bosphorus – that linked Russia's Black Sea ports to the Mediterranean. Possession of Constantinople would make the tsar – the words means “caesar” in Russian, as does kaiser in German – what Russia's rulers had long claimed to be: rightful leader of the whole Orthodox world, rightful heir to the old eastern empire. It was largely with Constantinople in mind that the Russians anointed themselves patrons and protectors of the Slavic and Orthodox populations in the Balkans, the Serbs included. As the nineteenth century unfolded and the Turkish empire entered a terminal state of decay, it was mainly Britain that kept the Russians from seizing Constantinople. The British were motivated not by any affection for the Turks but by simple self-interest. They feared that Russian expansion to the south would threaten their own position in the Middle East and ultimately their control of India.

  —  A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (G. J. Meyer)

[quotesfrommyreading]

German chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, an intelligent and conscientious servant of the crown but a statesman of limited vision, also went on vacation. Army Chief of Staff Helmuth von Moltke had not even been called back from the spa where he was recovering from a bronchial infection, and the head of the German navy went off to a spa of his own. Thus scattered, the principle figures in the German government and military were incapable of making or coordinating plans, of responding to anything done by other countries, or even of staying abreast of developments. At the July 5-6 meetings, they had shown less interest in the Serbian problem than in Berchtold's arcane scheme for using Bulgaria as a lever to pry Romania out of its alliance with Russia.

  —  A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (G. J. Meyer)

[quotesfrommyreading]

There was no need for delay, however, in securing Germany's support, and soon there seemed no need for concern about the extent of that support. Kaiser Wilhelm had liked and admired Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who understood the dangers of the Balkans and had been more restrained, more thoughtful, than [Franz] Conrad. The kaiser and the men around him needed no reminding that, with Russia and France allied against them and Britain leaning the same way, Germany needed Austria and needed to help Austria defend itself against the centrifugal force that was Balkan nationalism. The Germans were far more ready to support Austria-Hungary than they had been during the Balkan wars of the preceding two years, more conscious of being surrounded by enemies who were growing in strength.

  —  A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (G. J. Meyer)