There are some worrying symptoms. A generous publisher’s advance took him and his wife to Toulouse, Florence, Istanbul, Nice, Rome, Sardinia, and several other delectable destinations. Each of his fifteen chapters begins with snitches of trivial information gleaned from tourist guide books and websites. Some brief and often trenchant comments on current politics follow before he gets down to his real business, which is to trace the rise and demise of several European states, ranging from the early medieval period to modern times. These he presents in roughly chronological order. Davies’ somewhat cute strategy is to make his chosen subjects seem very strange through the use of obscure chapter titles. Thus his piece on early medieval Glasgow is called ‘Alt Glud’; his chapter on Prussia is titled ‘Borussia’. Savoy is labelled ‘Sabaudia’ and Montenegro is called ‘Tsernagora’. He does not explain why these fifteen deceased states have been selected. The result is a book resembling a bulging cabinet of curiosities. No narrative thread links the chapters, so each can be read as a free-standing essay. Those that seem hard going can be set aside for another day or skipped altogether.

Approached in this fashion, Vanished Kingdoms can be casually enjoyed by anyone who relishes the vagaries of times past and the intricate interrelationships of Europe’s great ruling families. Brilliant illustrations punctuate the text. Without question, Davies ranks among the masters of historical prose. His finely chiselled sentences flow ever smoothly onward, never marred by repetition or convolution. His attention to factual detail commands respect. Every time I thought I had caught him out on some minor point, a Google check showed that he was right and that my recollection was wrong.

Since the late nineteenth century, professors have been telling students that history is more than kings and queens, names and dates. Davies rises majestically above that truism, piling on the family trees and chronologies. While detailing the intricacies of Burgundian dynastic descent, he pauses briefly to caution, ‘at this point, faint-hearted readers are advised to take a break’. It is as if he has uploaded the entire contents of Debrett’s Peerage and all its Continental counterparts to his capacious brain. The scholar’s instinct is to push this antiquarian chocolate box aside and pick up more nourishing fare. Norman Davies fans who plough on will find that under the shiny wrapping the author plays a deeper game.

It is, in actuality, the same game he has been at since he first bounded from the halls of academe into the public spotlight in the 1990s. His early work on Poland awakened him to the full implications of the revolution in thinking about nations and nationalism that had been going on in many different fields since the 1970s. For the better part of two centuries, European historians took the nation to be the fundamental unit of analysis. They traced its ethnic roots to ancient times, analysed the processes by which it took shape around expanding monarchies, and followed the emergence of a few great powers during the jostling warfare and diplomacy of later centuries. The new currents of thought viewed the whole enterprise as a convenient fairy tale that served the interests of modern states. The so-called ethnic cores of European nations were cobbled together from scraps of Roman texts, folk tales, legends, and just plain wishful thinking. Far from bringing together people with a shared past and a common destiny, the leading nation-states of modern times employed ruthless programs of schooling and propaganda in order to instil national feeling. Local languages like Cornish, Provençal, Sicilian, and Catalan perished beneath the steamroller of official English, French, Italian, and Spanish.

In his scintillating book The Isles: A History (1999), Davies showed a broader non-professional audience that there was nothing natural or inevitable about the emergence of English supremacy in what came to be called the United Kingdom. Welsh, Scottish, Irish, and a multitude of lesser local identities had been merged into the broader, quite artificial construction of Britain. What had once been joined together could yet be put asunder. In subsequent books about Europe, Davies used his formidable erudition to unsettle conventional ideas concerning other modern nations.

It is often difficult to discern how the author views the processes of state creation and destruction that he chronicles with such consummate skill. This is especially true of Vanished Kingdoms. At times he affects the wryly cynical posture of an Edward Gibbon, gazing with superior detachment upon the wars, follies, and misfortunes of mankind. Indeed, he resorts to acknowledged imitation of Gibbon in his chapter called ‘Byzantion’. The shortest chapter in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire romped through the history of Constantinople from the eighth to the fifteenth century. Davies shoeboxes his coverage of the Eastern Roman Empire from 330 to 1453 into thirteen pages, roughly one per century. He treats the House of Windsor from Victoria to Elizabeth in an equally playful manner, concluding that, but for an Act of Parliament, ‘the Windsor-Mountbatten wedding of 1947 would otherwise have seen a Saxe-Coburg-Gotha marrying a Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg’.

At other times he bristles with righteous indignation when empire builders stretch their maws to swallow principalities, duchies, and city-states. An absorbing chapter traces the process whereby the Teutonic Knights created a realm in East Europe that gave its name – Prussia – to the expanding dominion of the Brandenburg house of Hohenzollern in the eighteenth century. This gradually develops into a diatribe against nationalist historians of the Bismarck era who propagated their version of a predestined united Germany under Prussian leadership. Other chapters deviate into trite and unproductive discussions of who killed the most people, Hitler or Stalin. Raised as he was in the hothouse of Cold War studies of East Europe, Davies inevitably awards the palm to Stalin.

The Red Army occupying Tallinn, Estonia

Similar indignation informs his discussion of the little kingdom of Montenegro, which vanished into a Serb-dominated Yugoslavia at the Versailles Peace Conference after World War I. Davies’ gripe is that a legitimate monarch allied to the winning side had his land and people swept aside by realpolitik. Behind this lurked a casual Western contempt for Eastern European polities and nationalisms, which led in turn to their treatment as laughable, unimportant Ruritanias. Davies’ lifelong cause has been their right to equal dignity and respect. This has a personal dimension as well. As a Welshman, he noticed similar dismissive attitudes displayed by mainstream history towards the peoples of Britain’s ‘Celtic fringe’.

An unresolved contradiction lives at the heart of this Cook’s Tour of vanished kingdoms. On the one hand Davies knows that, upon close examination, every ethnic and national identity will dissolve into thin air, even the so-called Celts. On the other, he invariably backs the underdog against the big bullies. No matter how far he appears to stray from his starting point, he is never far from the sorrows of modern Poland. Partitioned by the rising powers of Russia, Prussia, and Austria in the eighteenth century, briefly reconstituted in 1920, then gobbled once more by Nazis and Soviets, Poland exemplifies both the emotional highs and the deep troughs of national feeling.

As an unreconstructed Cold Warrior, Davies exults that the USSR can now be numbered among the deceased while Poland lives. As a proud Welshman he confidently predicts that the same fate awaits the United Kingdom. Elizabeth II – should she live long enough – may find herself simply queen of England. In this moment of uncharacteristic absent-mindedness, Davies forgets her other realms, including the kingdom that dare not speak its name: Australia.