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Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval, I'm Matt Lewis.

Jacob Mickanowski's book, Goodbye Eastern Europe, charts the evolution

and in more modern times the decline of the idea of Eastern Europe and Eastern Europeans.

The book goes all the way up to recent history, but Jacob's joining me today

to discuss what we know about this region in the medieval period and maybe why I and I suspect

plenty of other people are guilty of overlooking a history that is both fascinating and important

to the continent as a whole. Thank you very much for joining us, Jacob.

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, Matt.

It's a pleasure to start off with, what do you think kind of defines an identity

as Eastern European? If such an identity exists, I mean, you make a point in the book that no one

would probably define themselves as being an Eastern European? I think the thing that really defines

it is the look from outside. Most Eastern Europeans' identity is either national, Polish, Czech,

Serb, or religious, Jewish, unites, or regional, sometimes East Slovak. But once you're

outside Eastern Europe, once you're in England, when you're in America, you become part of this

larger idea that people see from outside. And I think that idea is fading. And in some ways,

artificial, but in my book, I'd make a case that there is a deeper unity, a kind of shared

collection of tendencies, so not a single identity, but a bunch of identities that resemble one

another. And I think the story of how that resemblance going to be really starts in the Middle

...