Europe: A History (16 page)
5. Europe was endowed by Nature with ten thousand islands. The largest of them—Iceland, Ireland, Great Britain, Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, and Crete—have been able at various times to develop distinct cultures and political entities of their own. One sceptred isle, in exceptional circumstances and for a very brief
period, was able to amass the largest empire in world history. They are all part of Europe, yet physically and psychologically separate. As the twin slots on the post-boxes in Messina and Syracuse rightly indicate, there are two different worlds—
Sicilia
and
Continente
.
Many of the lesser islands, from Spitzbergen to Malta, stand like watchmen in the lonely sea. But others are grouped in comforting archipelagos that support a sense of mutual interest and identity. The Shetlands, Orkneys, and Hebrides off Great Britain; the Balearios off Catalonia, and, above all, the Ionians, the Sporades, the Cyclades, and the Dodecanese off Greece all have their collective as well as their individual characters,
[FAROE]
Nowadays, however, insularity is shrinking fast. Great Britain, for example, built its overseas empire in an era when naval power could provide effective insulation from continental affairs. But the same degree of separation is no longer possible. Naval power has been superseded by aeroplanes, and aeroplanes by ICBMs, that render surface features such as the English Channel almost irrelevant. The British Empire has disappeared, and Britain’s dependence on her continental neighbours has correspondingly increased. The opening of the Channel Tunnel in 1994 was an event of more than symbolic importance. It marked the end of Britain’s island history.
Given the principal divisions of the Peninsula, three sub-regions have gained functions of particular importance: the Midi, the Danube Basin, and the Volga corridor.
The Midi or ‘South’ of modern France abuts the Mediterranean coast between the Pyrenees and the Alps. For anyone cruising the Mediterranean, it offers the only painless passage to the northern Plain. A landing in the Midi offers the immediate prospect of an easy journey to the main part of the Continent. From ancient Marseille, or from Aries at the mouth of the Rhone, one can move without hindrance either across the lowland of Languedoc to the Atlantic or round the flank of the Massif Central to the headwaters of the Loire and the Seine. The Rhone’s main tributary, the Saône, leads straight to the Belfort Gap and a gentle descent to the Rhine. At every other point between Gibraltar and the Dardanelles, the early northbound traveller would be faced with alpine passes, dead ends, or lengthy detours.
The felicitous location of the Midi, bridgeland between the Mediterranean and the Plain, had important consequences. It provided the most effective setting for the fusion of the ancient civilization of the south with the ‘barbarian’ cultures of the north. For the Romans it offered, as Cisalpine Gaul, the first major province beyond Italy. For the Franks, the first of the barbarians to establish a major empire of their own, it offered the promise of the sun, and of high culture. They established a foothold in
AD
537, a century after the fall of Roman power, and never let go. The resultant Kingdom of France, partly northern, partly Mediterranean, developed the most influential and the most universal culture of the Continent.
The Danube Basin, like the Midi, links the Plain with the Mediterranean; but in this case the link lies west-east. The Danube rises in the Black Forest, crosses
the mountain line in the Bavarian Gap at Passau, and flows east for 1,500 miles to the Black Sea. For peoples approaching from the east it offered the simplest route to the interior; for the peoples of the Plain, the most tempting itinerary to the southern seas. For most of its length, it constituted the principal frontier line of the Roman Empire and hence of ‘civilization’. In modern times, its catchment area supplied the territorial base for the great multinational empire of the Habsburgs, and the scene for the principal confrontation in Europe between Christianity and Islam,
[DANUVIUS]
FAROE
O
F
all Europe’s many islands, none can match the lonely grandeur of the Faroes, whose high black basalt cliffs rise from the stormy North Atlantic midway between Iceland, Norway, and Scotland. Seventeen inhabited islands, centred on Stremoy and the principal harbour of Tórshavn, support a modern population of 45,464 (1984), mainly from fishing. Descended from Norsemen who settled in the eighth century, the Faroese answered to the
Gulating
, the assembly of western Norway, and to their own local
Loegting
.
[DING]
Their language is a dialect of Norwegian; but they have their own sagas, their own poets and artists, their own culture. Yet from 1814, when Norway was annexed to Denmark, ‘Europe’s smallest democracy’ was subjected to a Danish governor and to Danish interests.
As a result, the Faroese national movement came to be directed against Denmark, ‘the one Scandinavian country with which they have least in common’.
1
In this the Faroese followed in the steps of Iceland, aiming above all to preserve their identity. The big moment came in June 1940, when, with Copenhagen under Nazi occupation, a British warship ordered a Torshavn skipper to hoist the Faroese flag in place of the Danish one. The referendum of 1946, which opted for unlimited sovereignty, preceded the compromise settlement of 1 April 1948. Faroe accepted home rule within the Danish realm. In 1970 it was granted independent membership of the Nordic Council. The
Norôurlandahusiô
or ‘Nordic House’ in Tórshavn was built with Swedish wood, Norwegian slate, Danish glass, and Icelandic roofing, and was equipped with Finnish furniture.
Of all the bridgelands, however, none is more vital than that through which the Volga flows. By modern convention, the Continental divide is taken to lie on the line of the Ural Mountains and the Ural River. To the west of the Ural, in the Volga Basin, one is in Europe; to the east of the Ural, in Siberia or Kazakhstan, one is in Asia. On the banks of the Volga, therefore, at Saratov or Tsaritsyn, one stands truly at the gate. For the Volga marks the first European station on the highroad of the steppe; and it fills the corridor which joins the Baltic with the
Caspian. Until the seventeenth century the Volga also happened to coincide with the limit of Christian settlement, and hence with an important cultural boundary. It is Europe’s largest river, and a worthy guardian of the Peninsula which stretches ‘from the Atlantic to the Urals’.
DANUVIUS
I
N
ancient times, the River Danube represented one of the great dividing I lines of the European Peninsula. Established as the frontier of the Roman Empire in the 1st century
AD,
the Latin
Danuvius
, or Greek
Ister
divided civilization from barbarity.
In later times, however, the Danube was to develop into one of Europe’s major thoroughfares, an open boulevard linking West and East.
1
In Bernini’s famous composition for the Fountain of the Four Rivers in the Piazza Navona in Rome, it is the Danube which is taken to personate Europe alongside Africa’s Nile, Asia’s Ganges, and America’s Plate.
In its upper reaches, as the Donau, the river flows through the heart of the Germanic world. A plaque in the Fürstenberg Park at Donaueschingen in the Black Forest marks its source:
HIER ENTSPRINGT DIE DONAU
. Passing the castle of Sigmaringen, home of the Hohenzollerns, the river passes Ulm and Regensburg, chief cities of the Holy Roman Empire, and after Passau enters the ‘eastern realm’ of Oesterreich. In Austria, it guided the route of the
[NIBELUNG]
.
It passes Linz, where the Emperor Frederick III was buried under his motto of
A-E-I-O-U
, meaning
Austria erit in orbe ultima-
, Amstetten, where Franz Ferdinand is buried; Kierling, where Kafka died; and Eisenstadt, which is Haydn’s last resting-place:
| Himmel habe Dank! E in harmonischer Gesang War mein Lebenslauf | (Heaven, receive our thanks! My life’s course Was one harmonious hymn.) |
Vienna, as Metternich remarked, is where ‘Europe’ meets ‘Asia’.
In its middle reaches as the Duna, the broadening stream enters Hungary, the land of the Magyars driven like a wedge through the lands of the Slavs on either side. At Bratislava/Pozsony/Pressburg, it laps the sometime capital of ‘Upper Hungary’, now the capital of the Slovakian Republic. Fertoód was the site of the Eszterházy’s ‘second Versailles’; Esztergom, the home of the Hungarian Primates. Szentendre (St Andrew), once a refuge for Serbian exiles, is now a meccà for bohemian artists. At Buda and Pest, a Turkish Castle on one bank faces an English-style Parliament on the other,
[BUDA]
In the lower reaches, beyond the Iron Gates, the river flows from Catholicism into Orthodoxy,
[NIKOPOLIS]
is where Wulfila translated the Greek bible into Gothic, ‘the starting-point of Germanism’,
[BIBLIA]
Romania on the left side claims to be a descendant of Trajan’s Dacia. Serbia and Bulgaria on the right bank, long occupied by the Ottomans (who called it the Tuna), were founded on top of Byzantine provinces. Chileavecche was once a Genoese outpost. The last landing-stage is at Sulina in the Delta, in Europe’s largest bird reserve, in a world not of civilization but of eternal Nature.
2
Rivers to the geographer are the bearers of sediment and trade. To the historian they are the bearers of culture, ideas, and sometimes conflict.
3
They are like life itself. For 2,888 kilometres from Donaueschingen to the Delta, the flow never stops.
Environmental change is taken for granted in all aspects of physical geography. Yet traditional disciplines such as geology give the impression that the pace of change is so slow as to be marginal within the human time-frame. Only recently has the realization dawned that the modern environment is far less fixed than was once supposed.
Climate, for example, is constantly on the move. In
Civilisation and Climate
(1915), the American scholar Ellsworth Huntington published the fruits of his ingenious research into the giant redwoods of California. It was the starting-point of historical climatology. Since the redwoods can live for more than 3,000 years, and since the annual rings of their trunks vary in size according to the warmth and humidity of every year that passes, the cross-section of a redwood trunk provides a systematic record of climatic variations over three millennia. Huntington’s technique, now called dendrochronology, inspired a ‘pulsatory theory’ of alternating climatic phases which could be applied to the past of all the continents. This in turn produced a special brand of environmental determinism. The growth of classical civilization in the Mediterranean could be attributed to the onset of a moist phase which permitted the cultivation of wheat in North Africa, for instance, whilst northern Europe floundered under an excessive deluge of rain, fog, and frost. The decline of the ancient world could be attributed to a climatic shift in the opposite direction, which brought Mediterranean sunshine north of the Alps. The migrations of the Mongols, which directly affected the history both of China and of Europe (see pp. 364–6), could be attributed to an extended drought in the oases of Central Asia. In his later work,
The Mainsprings of Civilisation
(1945), Huntington explored other factors of the physical environment such as diet and disease, and their interplay with human heredity.
10
Crude linkages gave the subject a bad name, and attempts have since been made to refine the earlier findings.
Nevertheless, periodicity theories continue to have their advocates. ‘Cyclomania’ is not yet dead: the rise and fall of civilizations has been linked to everything from sunspots to locust swarms. Whatever their particular preference, scholars are bound to be drawn to the phenomenon of environmental variation, and to its impact on human affairs. After all, it is a matter of simple fact that climate
does
vary. Parts of the Roman world which once supported a flourishing population now find themselves in desert wasteland. Viking graves were once dug in plots in Iceland and Greenland, which permafrost renders impenetrable to pick or shovel. In the seventeenth century, annual fairs were held on the winter ice of the Thames in London; and armies marched across the frozen Baltic in places where similar ventures would now be suicidal. The European environment is not a fixed entity, even if its subtler rhythms cannot always be exactly measured.
[VENDANGE]
Arnold Toynbee’s
A Study of History
(1933–9), which offered a comprehensive theory of the growth, breakdown, and disintegration of civilizations, is but the most prominent of environmental histories. After discussing the genesis of civilizations in terms of mankind’s response to the ‘challenge of the environment’, he propounds his law on ‘the virtues of adversity’. The Roman Campagna, the semi-desert of Judah, the sandy wastes of Brandenburg, and the hostile shore of New England are all cited as dour environments that have generated a vigorous response. One might add the backwoods of Muscovy. After outlining ‘the stimuli of blows, pressures, and penalisations’, he comes to the concept of the ‘golden mean.’ If the Slavs in Eastern Europe suffered from a lack of early stimuli, the Celts and the Scandinavians suffered from excessive adversity. According to Toynbee, the nearest thing to ideal conditions was experienced by the Hellenic civilization of ancient Greece—‘the finest flower of the species that has ever yet come to bloom’.
11
Nowadays, though the impact of the environment on man is by no means discounted, special attention is also paid to the impact of man on the environment.
[ECO]
Historical ecology emerged as an academic subject well before the onset of the ‘greenhouse effect’ alerted everyone to its importance. It calls on a wide range of technological wizardry. Aerial archaeology has revolutionized our knowledge of the prehistoric landscape. Sedimentology, which studies the patterns of riverine deposits, and glaciology, which studies the patterns of ice formation in glaciers, have been mobilized to give new precision to environmental change over centuries and millennia. Geochemical analysis, which measures tell-tale phosphates in the soil of ancient habitations, has given archaeologists another potent tool. Palynology, or pollen analysis, which analyses ancient grains preserved in the earth, permits the reconstruction of former plant-life spectra. Specialists debate the evidence for ‘the great elm decline’, for the crops of prehistoric agriculture, or for the chronology of forest clearances. Peat analysis, which depends on the composition and rate of accumulation of peat bogs, has identified five major climatic ‘deteriorations’ in the period between 3000
BC
and
AD
1000. The science of prehistory has moved far from the time when archaeologists could only dig objects out of the earth, and struggle to match their finds with fragmentary references in the writings of the ancients. [c14]
