Southeastern Europe

“ It is when we come into south-eastern Europe, that is, in a large part of the Austro-Hungarian and in the whole of the Ottoman dominions, that we come to those phenomena of geography, race, and language, which stand out in marked contrast with anything to which we are used in western Europe. We may perhaps better understand what those phenomena are, if we suppose a state of things which sounds absurd in the West, but which has its exact parallel in many parts of the East. ”

“ Thus, in Spain and Italy, the men who ought to serve the people, prey upon them, and the direct and chief reason why the northern nations of Europe surpass the southern is, that in the north the superior minds are turned to account, and in the south they have been entombed in the Church or paralyzed by titles of nobility. ”

“ South-eastern and central Europe are complementary economic areas in a special degree. The industries of central Europe will draw upon the raw products of the south-east to an increasing extent, and the south-east will absorb in turn increasing quantities of manufactured plant from central Europe for the development of its own natural resources. ”

“ At times we are content to look down upon the wild ways of East and South-east Europe, forgetting that in many respects, such as the exposure of severed heads recently commented upon as happening in the Balkans, we were not long ago at least as wild as they seem to be now. But we must also guard against the thought that they are merely some steps behind us on the path we all are treading; that concept of human evolution as a procession along a path is a wrong and very misleading one. {9} We must reach the broader view which thinks of East Europe not as undeveloped West, but as diverse. ”

“ We notice first of all the commonness or community of Neolithic feeling and life, its almost monotonous uniformity, over Europe, eastern [Pg 273] Asia, and probably even far wider areas. We may easily exaggerate this. The cultures of the Mediterranean basin, of Spain and France, of the Danube valley, of northern Germany and Scandinavia, not to mention smaller, more isolated provinces, showed well-marked differences. ”

“ If we glance at the map of Eastern Europe, we perceive at once that the great uniformity of this immense region makes it quite impossible to apply to Eastern Europe as a criterion the division of Western or Central Europe. It is not seas and mountains that separate the natural [5] regions and anthropogeographical units of Eastern Europe, but imperceptible morphological transitions, hydrographic and climatic boundaries, petrologic and floral conditions. ”

“ For thousands of years the great mountain chains of mid-Europe cut off the man in the North from the man in the South, as completely as the barren steppes of Eastern Europe and Western Asia divided East from West. ”

“ This has given Europe a character exactly opposite to that of Asia: its North and its South are united, its East and its West; they are not like antagonistic poles, but extend to each other friendly hands. ”

“ The steppes of Asia in older centuries proved the nurseries of hordes of rude warriors, powerful only for spoliation. The evidence of the isolation of the nations of Europe in early centuries is unmistakable. Scarcely any feature in the history of the ancient world is more strange to us now than the absence of all direct intercourse between countries separated only by the Alps, or even by the Danube or the Rhine. ”

“ The grand movement of the barbarian races of Northern Europe in the fifth and following centuries is spoken of as the wandering of the nations. The natural barriers of the continent seemed for a time to have given way, and the unknown tribes from beyond the Baltic and from the shores of the North Sea poured into the valley of the Danube, and swept beyond the Alps and the Pyrenees to the furthest shores of the Mediterranean Sea. ”

“ The Slav branch of the Central race was making its way into Europe long before the Neolithic phase of culture there. It passed north of the Black Sea via Poland. But at the end of the Neolithic phase there were two streams of other branches of the race—the true Alpine subdivision passing from Anatolia into the Carpathians and the Alps, to Switzerland, Bavaria, Savoy, and Brittany, and the Maritime division passing round the coasts to the Iberian Peninsula, the British Isles, and Western Europe. ”

“ That, I incline to fancy, is the real difference that a man come from the west of Europe feels in the east of Europe, it is a gap or a void. It is the absence of the grotesque energy of Gothic, the absence of the experiments of parliament and popular representation, the absence of medieval chivalry, the absence of modern nationality. ”

“ The other point is that each little patch of country in the south is still far more self-supporting, has had its economic conditions far less disturbed by modern rearrangements and commercial necessities, than in Northern Europe. ”

“ Having traced the stream of warlike immigration from Eastern Asia westward, and thence to Central Europe, and still westward and southward to the shores of the Atlantic, and even across the Mediterranean into Africa, overwhelming the Roman Empire of the West in its course,—observe this tide of human movement, as wave followed wave for centuries, rolling peoples against and over one another, confounding them together, and leaving them upon the same soil, or in close proximity to each other ”

“ It has been said that whosoever would see the Eastern world before it turns into a Western world must make his visit soon, because steamboats and omnibuses, commerce, and all the arts of Europe, are extending themselves from Egypt to Suez, from Suez to the Indian seas, and from the Indian seas all over the explored regions of the still farther East. ”

“ The coming of broad-headed men, probably from Asia Minor, then less divided from Europe, is characteristic of this period of change, and the mountain axis of Europe has ever {13} since been a region of broad-headed men, separating provinces of long-headed men to the north around the Baltic and (for a time) in Russia, and to the south around the western Mediterranean, then becoming increasingly cut off from tropical Africa by the supervention of desert conditions, in place of grassland, in what we now call the Sahara. ”

“ Throughout this long epoch western Europe is to be viewed as a peninsula, surrounded on all sides by the sea and stretching westward from the great land mass of eastern Europe and of Asia, which was the chief theatre of evolution both of animal and human life. ”

“ The massive, unbroken continents of the South, shut in by immense oceans and impassable mountain ranges, are the seats of immobility and the home of despotic power; but the deeply indented and elaborately articulated continents of the North, with their inland seas and large navigable rivers, are the theatre of activity, of progress, and of liberty. 3. The sunny skies and glowing landscapes and inspiring scenery of the south of Europe are most congenial to poetry and music, and painting and sculpture, and all that is graceful in expression and action ”

“ After every important war in South-East Europe in recent times there has been a shrinking of the area of chronically disturbed territory, a stiffening of frontier lines, an intrusion of civilised monotony. ”

“ The civilisation which had already grown up around the Mediterranean Sea while the classic nations were in their infancy, extended its influences not only to what was strictly regarded as transalpine Europe, but beyond the English Channel and the Baltic, centuries before the Rhine and Danube formed the boundary of the Roman world. ”

“ We find a certain art in the East. We trace the different channels of communication with Europe. We find Greece touching Asia Minor, trade binding Phœnicia with every port in the Mediterranean, Etruria bringing to her own ports the manufactures of Eastern experts, colonies settling in all manner of places and coming from many sources. It has been plainly demonstrated that the lines of intercourse cross and recross in a hundred different ways and directions. ”

“ Among historians and anthropogeographers it is a much used commonplace that the northern peoples always appear as conquerors who subjugate the southern peoples, and that they are always the founders of states in their particular climatic zones. The Germans overthrew the Roman Empire, the Northern Frenchmen founded the French state, the Northern Spaniards the Spanish, the Northern Italians, the Italian state, and the North Germans united Germany. It is natural, therefore, that this commonplace should be applied also in Eastern Europe. ”

“ Asia, the Orient, is wholly unlike Africa. On three sides it is entirely sea-girt—the south, the east, and the north; on the west only partly, about 1400 miles. On the west, too, it is connected with Africa, but not in a way to insure any necessary relations between the two continents. But with Europe it stands in the most intimate connection, forming a single body with it, of which Europe is really but a great western peninsula. Europe, [190] the Occident of the Old World, is therefore for less widely severed from its Orient than from its real South or Africa. ”

“ Every century is marked by renewal of the age-long clashes between the northern and southern races which have been thrown in contact along the western end of the line which separates the plains of northern Europe from the mountainous southland of the continent. ”

“ The real or western Europe, which the Roman Empire gradually added to the narrow Europe of the Greeks, and which is strikingly contrasted to Asia in point of size, relief, contour, climate and races, only served to maintain the distinction between the two continents in men's minds. ”

“ The indomitable race that emerged from the Scandinavian peninsula, and the islands and shores of the Baltic, and overran and conquered the deserted Roman world, supplied the maritime energy of Europe from the fifth to the tenth century; and colonised northern Italy with the element to which we must assign the rise of its great maritime republics, including the one that was to furnish the discoverer of America in the fifteenth century. Genoese and Spaniards could not have made for themselves a home either in Greenland or Iceland. ”

“ Servia, Hungary, Russia, have taken their definite position among the Christian powers of Europe. So have Poland and Bohemia on the borders of the Western Empire. Prussia, Lithuania, and the Finnish lands to the immediate north of them remain heathen. ♦Spain.♦ In Spain, the Christians have won back a large part of the peninsula. Castile and Navarre are already kingdoms; Aragon, though not yet a kingdom, has begun her history. ♦The Scandinavian kingdoms.♦ In Northern Europe, the three Scandinavian nations are clearly distinguished and firmly established. ”

“ It therefore seems more useful to sketch in broad outline the physical and vegetational facts of East-Central and Eastern Europe in order to bring out the essentials of the setting of human life and the variation of that setting with the region so that peoples of diverging outlook and traditions have grown up in those regions. ”

“ The evolution of character which the race has undergone has been northwards from the tropics." From the Mediterranean region, where the world's civilization, its commerce and its power were long centered, westward through Spain and Portugal, the migration continued farther and farther north in Europe, until Holland, and then England, became the dominant power. ”

“ These men trained to solitude in small bands, owing to the geographical exigencies of their northern country, become the founders of the particularist or individualistic nations, Great Britain and the United States among others. Those who had gone south, driven by pressure from behind, follow the Danube to the north and west, find the Rhine, and push on into what is now southwestern Europe. ”

“ But the part of Asia which has historically had most to do with Europe is its Mediterranean peninsula, the land known as Asia Minor. In the northern part of each continent we find another system of great gulfs or inland seas; but those in Asia have been hindered by the cold from ever being of any importance, while in Europe the Baltic sea and the gulfs which run out of it may be looked on as forming a kind of secondary Mediterranean. ”

“ The rest of Western Europe must be postponed, as neither the Spanish, the British, nor the Scandinavian kingdoms rose out of the break-up of the Empire of Charles the Great. In our next Chapter we must trace the historical geography of the states which arose out of the gradual dismemberment of the dominion of the Eastern Rome, a survey which will lead us to the most stirring events and to the latest geographical changes of our own day. ”

“ The South was a sealed land in comparison with the rest of the world. Opinion spoke loudest in Europe, and though they knew that they were faithfully, gallantly, and marvellously serving their country in her sore need, the absence of any immediate comfort, either physical or moral, helped to make them keenly sensitive to virulent criticism, even to that of avowed and clamorous enemies. ”

“ New cultures and new waves of migration of peoples were pouring into Europe, especially into the Baltic region now left free of ice, enjoying a mild climate, and offering an abundance of food along the shores of its rivers, lakes, and seas. The Tardenoisian culture had spread northward from the Mediterranean. ”