András Vadas is István Deák Visiting Professor in the Department of History. He is an associate professor with tenure in medieval history at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. He holds a Ph.D. from the same institution (2015) and the Central European University (2020). He was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholarship at Georgetown University. He authored and edited about a dozen books in English and Hungarian on the environmental, urban, and economic history of premodern Central Europe. His first English-language monograph, “The Environmental Legacy of War on the Hungarian-Ottoman Frontier, c. 1540-1690” was published in 2023 with Amsterdam University Press and he is currently preparing his second book under contract with Routledge. His most recent book publication is “A Global History of Hungary,”co-edited with Ferencz Laczó and Bálint Varga (in Hungarian).
Harriman: Can you please tell us a bit about your background — where you grew up and how that shaped your career trajectory?
András Vadas: I’m Hungarian. I was born in Budapest and my family has lived in the city for at least a century. My grandmother was an elementary school history teacher, a local historian, and a really enthusiastic person. She took me all around Budapest and showed me a lot of things. It made me interested in history, and so I chose to study history and geography and [eventually] pursued a Ph.D. in, in medieval history. Because I also studied geography, I became interested in climate history and environmental history, which is my primary focus.
Harriman: Are any aspects of your work related to contemporary environmental developments?
Vadas: The questions I’m pursuing are relevant to the present, but I’m mostly studying pre-modern environmental history. Certainly, this whole field of environmental history stems from the current environmental crisis that we all experience. Historians ask how different crises — wildfires, floods, climate change — were tackled by past societies, what kind of responses were made by societies top down or bottom up.
My Ph.D. research dealt with environmental change in the early modern times, in the Kingdom of Hungary, and in the border region between Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. I studied how a lasting war [between the Kingdom of Hungary and the Ottoman Empire] changed the landscape in the area I was focusing on, which is part of Western Hungary today.
Harriman: What sorts of things have you learned in your research that can help us to today, particularly in the context of the full-scale war in Ukraine and its environmental impact?
Vadas: It’s a very different warfare that we see in Ukraine, so it’s difficult to say what kind of direct lessons we can learn. But one of the things that we keep seeing in past records is how landscapes — barren landscapes, destroyed landscapes, post-scorched earth landscapes — are repurposed into plow lands and resettled with new agricultural techniques. For instance, areas that were previously wooded became barren, while areas dominated by villages turned into extensive agricultural complexes organized around large manors.
So, what we see is that when there is a cataclysmic event like the war in Ukraine, it will certainly change how land is used, but war does not necessarily mean that the landscape will be destroyed forever. It means that different practices will prevail afterward, because the same ways can’t be applied to a devastated landscape.
And there will be some landscape elements that can never be restored and these landscapes will actually become wild again, which has been studied, for instance, in the context of Chornobyl. In the long run, we might see similar processes in some of the wetland landscapes in Ukraine.
Harriman: And, looking back to your doctoral research, what prompted you to start looking at the environmental impact of such a long-ago war [between the Ottomans and the Kingdom of Hungary]?
Vadas: I was never interested in political history, nor in military history. I got into this topic because I was looking at private letters sent by 16th– and 17th– century local land stewards to their landlords in a Western Hungary. There were a few topics that seemed of extreme importance to them — they recorded, almost on a daily basis, whether the rivers were flooding, heavy rainfalls, and how difficult it was to cross rivers and other areas.
Of course, the environment was part of military tactics — both the Hungarian armies and the Ottomans intentionally modified landscapes to prevent military campaigns and to deal with the environmental, impacts of the war.
They tried to modify flood patterns, they backed-up waters in order to hinder river crossings. The military tactics were, of course, in conflict with local economies in many cases. I was really interested in the dynamics between the opposing interests of the local economy and the military.
Harriman: And what were some of the most surprising discoveries you made as you studied this topic?
Vadas: In Hungarian historical thinking, everything that is bad in Hungary goes back to the Ottoman Wars — an almost 200-year long warfare. And part of this narrative is that the barren (‘puszta’) landscape is a product of the Ottoman wars. The book I published two years ago, and the dissertation it is based on, shows that this landscape is not necessarily the product of the Ottoman wars, and if it is a product of the Ottoman wars, it is just as much a product of the Hungarian military engineers and military leaders as that of the Ottomans.
We have to reconsider this idea that the Ottomans came to destroy the landscape — they wanted to utilize the landscape, not destroy it, because it was actually the most profitable area of the Ottoman Empire in Europe.
Harriman: Was there any backlash when you published research that countered the popular historical mythology?
Vadas: Certainly not everyone was fond of it. But there hasn’t been a clearcut refutal of the idea.
Harriman: What courses are you teaching this semester?
Vadas: One is an environmental history course that looks at Central European environments — focused mostly on Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary — and environmental history from the state foundation period, which would be around the end of the first millennium in the region, up to the fall of Communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This is a longer-term perspective on how landscapes were modified, and what kind of environmental pressures people in this region experienced.
The other course is a global history of the same region during pre-modern times. This stems from a project I’ve been working on with two colleagues, including Ferenc Laczó, who was at the Harriman Institute last year, and with whom and Bálint Varga from Graz University I co-edited a book, “The Global History of Hungary.”
Harriman: What are you most looking forward to about your semester at the Harriman Institute?
Vadas: I’ve taught at English-language universities, but I have never taught in a such an international environment like Columbia. I already see that students signed up for my classes are from very different backgrounds, both geographically, and in their areas of interest.
How will someone in international relations, sociology, social anthropology, or environmental biology contribute to classes like these, what kind of perspective might they carry? I am also really interested in how Central Europe is portrayed — what is the place of our region in U.S. academia.
Visit CU Directory of Classes for more information on Professor Vadas’s courses: “Resources and Regimes: Environmental History” and “A Global History of Central Europe.”
