Summary of Simon Winder's Danubia

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

Sample Book Insights:

#1 The town of Pécs, Hungary, is a good place to start the history of Habsburg Europe. It is the last place heading south before the landscape gets terminally dusty, and it has a frontier atmosphere. The town was a wine colony in the fourth century, but was destroyed by Hun raiders in AD 400.

#2 The area that would become the southern zone of the Habsburg Empire was for centuries a world without writing, without towns, and only residual, short-distance trade. It was against this backdrop that the notional ancestors of Central Europe’s modern nations appeared.

#3 The search for origins became obsessive in the nineteenth century as European language nationalism took hold. The Bautzen region is interesting because it shows what was at stake in the Dark Ages, when all these nationalities could find their roots.

#4 The Germanic tribes that lived in a massive swath from the North Sea to the Balkans seem to have paused, retreated, diminished or moved to Britain as a result of attacks by Asian nomads and the failure of the Roman Empire in the fifth century.