GEOG202 reading 7 Europe PDF

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Reading Assignment 7 Europe Geographers think in terms of shapes and connections. Looking at physical map of Europe, a geographer notices first that it is a peninsula of peninsulas, and he asks himself what this means for the connections (and disconnections) of the European peoples. Looking at a political map of Europe, a geographer notices first that it is composed of many countries that are very small by world standards, and he asks why there exists in this place such striking cultural and linguistic diversity. Finally, drawing back and taking a larger view, the geographer sees that Europe stands is adjacent to two other continents, Africa and Asia. In the case of Africa, connections to the larger part of that continent have been weak, owing to the great barrier of the Sahara. However there are close connections to the northern shore of Africa (Barbary Coast) by way of the Iberian and Italian peninsulas. Turning to Asia, the geographer sees that no natural barrier separates Europe from that vast continent—indeed he sees that Europe is nothing more than the far western end of that continent. This raises questions about historic invasions of Europe from that direction. All of these themes are addressed in the following chapter excerpted from a book by Edward August Freeman. Freeman was an English historian, the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, and the author of 239 books and articles. The last section of this essay contains some outdated ideas, but taken as a whole, it is a masterful sketch of the basic geographical facts of the continent. He emphasizes the peninsular character of Europe, the role of central states such as Rome and Germany, the significance of north-south connections, and the effect that location has had on the history of individual countries. The final section on the races of Europe sets out a theory of successive invasions of Europe from Asia. As explained in a footnote, this picture has been significantly modified by more modern research, but the significance for Europe of repeated onslaughts from the east remains. INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE1 Edward Augustus Freeman 1882 1. Geographical Aspect of Europe. Our present business is with the historical geography of Europe, and with that of other parts of the world only so far as they concern the geography of Europe. But we shall have to speak of all the three divisions of the Old World—Europe, Asia, and Africa—in those parts of the three which come nearest to one another, and in which the real history of the world begins. These are those parts which lie round the Mediterranean Sea, the lands which gradually came to form the Empire of Rome.

1) Edward A. Freeman, Historical Geography of Europe, second edition (London: Longman and Green, 1882), vol. 1, pp. 5-17.

In these lands the boundaries between the three great divisions are very easily marked. Modern maps do not all place the boundary between Europe and Asia at the same point; some make the river Don the boundary and some the Volga.2 But this question is of little importance for history. In the earliest historical times, when we have to do only with the countries round the Mediterranean sea, there can be no doubt how much is Europe and how much is Asia and Africa. Europe is the land to the north of the Mediterranean Sea and of the great gulfs which run out of it.3 If an exact boundary is needed in the barbarous lands north of the Euxine [Black Sea], the mouth of the Don is clearly the boundary which should be taken. In all these lands the Mediterranean and its gulfs divide Europe from Asia. But the northern parts of the two continents really form one geographical whole, the boundary between them being one merely of convenience. A vast central mass of land, stretching right across the inland parts of the two continents, sends forth a system of peninsulas and islands, to the north and south. And it is in the peninsular lands of Europe that European history begins. Alike in Europe and in Asia, the southern or peninsular part of the continent is cut off from the central mass by a mountain chain, which in Europe is nearly unbroken.4 Thus the southern part of Europe consists of three great peninsulas of Spain, Italy, and what we may, in a wide sense, call Greece [i.e. Balkan]. These answer in some sort to the three great Oceanic peninsulas of Asia, those of Arabia, India, and India beyond the Ganges [i.e. Southeast Asia]. 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. We may thus say that Europe consists of two insular and peninsular regions, north and south, with a great unbroken mass of land between them. But there are some parts of Europe which seem as it were connecting links between the three main divisions of the continent. Thus we said that the three great peninsulas are cut off from the central mass by a nearly unbroken mountain chain. But the connection of the central peninsula, that of Italy, with the eastern one or Greece, is far closer than its connection with the western one, or Spain. Italy and Spain are much further apart than Italy and Greece, and between the Alps and the Pyrenees the mountain chain is nearly lost. We might almost say that a piece of central Europe breaks through at this point and comes down to the Mediterranean. This is the southeastern part of Gaul; and Gaul may in this way be looked on as a land which joins together the central and the southern parts of Europe.5 But this is not all; in the northwestern corner of 2) The Don and Volga rivers are both in Russia. The Don is the easternmost river flowing into the Black Sea, which is why ancient geographers made it the boundary of Europe. The Volga flows into the Caspian Sea. 3) The Aegean and Black Seas, the Adriatic Sea. 4) In Europe the mountains are the Alps and Pyrenees. In Asia they are the Anatolian Highlands, Hindu Kush, and Himalaya. 5) Gaul is the ancient name of the territory we know as France. In writing his historical geography, Freeman always used the ancient name to denote a geographical territory, and

Europe lies that great group of islands, two large ones and many small, of which our own Britain is the greatest. The British islands are closely connected in their geography and history with Gaul on one side, and with the islands and peninsulas of the North on the other. In this way we may say that all the three divisions of Europe are brought closely together on the western side of the continent, and that the lands of Gaul and Britain are the connecting links which bind them together. 2. Effect of Geography on History. Now this geographical aspect of the chief lands of Europe has had its direct effect on their history. We might almost take for granted that the history of Europe should begin in the two more eastern among the three great southern peninsulas. Of these two, Italy and Greece, each has its own character. Greece, though it is the part of Europe which lies nearest to Asia, is in a certain sense the most European of European lands. The characteristic of Europe is to be more full of peninsulas and islands and inland seas than the rest of the Old World. And Greece, the peninsula itself and the neighboring lands, are fuller of islands and promontories and inland seas than any other part of Europe. On the other hand, Italy is the central land of all southern Europe, and indeed of all the land round the Mediterranean. It was therefore only natural that Greece should be the part of Europe in which all that is most distinctively European first grew up and influenced other lands. And so, if any one land or city among the Mediterranean lands was to rule over all the rest, it is in Italy, as the central land, that we should naturally look for the place of dominion. The destinies of the two peninsulas and their relations to the rest of the world were thus impressed on them by their geographical position. If we turn to recorded history, we find that it is a working out of the consequences of these physical facts. Greece was the first part of Europe to become civilized and to play a part in history; but it was Italy, and in Italy it was the most central city, Rome, which came to have the dominion over the civilized world of early times—that is, over the lands around the Mediterranean. These two peninsulas have, each in its own way, ruled and influenced the rest of Europe as no other parts have done. All the other parts have been, in one way or another, their subjects or disciples. The effect of the geographical position of these countries is also marked in the stages by which Rome advanced to the general dominion of the Mediterranean lands. She first subdued Italy; then she had to strive for the mastery with her great rival Carthage,6 a city which held nearly the same central position on the southern coast of the Mediterranean which she herself did on the northern. Then she subdued, step by step, the peninsulas on each side of her and the other coast-lands of the Mediterranean—European, Asiatic, and African. Into the central division of Europe she did not press far, never having any firm or lasting dominion beyond the Rhine and the Danube. Into Northern Europe, properly so called, her power never reached at all. But she subdued the lands which we have seen act as a kind of connecting link between the different parts of Europe,

modern names to denote the various peoples and political units who have occupied that territory over the course of history. So Gaul is, for Freeman, the name of the territory presently occupied by France. Likewise Britain is, for him, the name of the island territory presently occupied by England. 6) Near present-day Tunis.

namely Gaul and the greater part of Britain. Thus the Roman Empire, at its greatest extent, consisted of the lands round the Mediterranean, together with Gaul and Britain. For the possession of the Mediterranean lands would have been imperfect without the possession of Gaul, and the possession of Gaul naturally led to the possession of Britain. In this way the early history of Greece and Italy, and the formation of the Roman Empire, were affected by the geographical character of the countries themselves. The same was the case with the other European lands, when they came to share in that importance which once belonged to Greece and Italy only. Thus Germany, as being the most central part of Europe, came at one time to fill something like the same position which Italy had once held. It came to be the country which had to do with all parts of Europe, east, west, north, and south, and even to be a ruling power over some of them. So, as France became the chief state of Gaul, it took upon it something like the old position of Gaul as a means of communication between the different parts of Western Europe. Meanwhile, as the Scandinavian and Spanish peninsulas are both cut off in a marked way from the mainland of Europe, each of them has often formed a kind of world of its own, having much less to do with other countries than Germany, France, and Italy had. The same was for a long time the case with our own island. Britain was looked on as lying outside the world. Thus the geographical position of the European lands influenced their history while their history was still purely European. And when Europe began to send forth colonies to other continents, the working of geographical causes came out no less strongly. Thus the position of Spain on the Ocean led Portugal and Castile to be foremost among the colonizing nations of Europe. For the same reason, our own country [Britain] was one of the chief in following their example, and so was France also for a long time. Holland too, when it rose into importance, became a great colonizing power, and so did Denmark and Sweden to some extent. But an Italian colony beyond the Ocean was never heard of, nor has there ever been a German colony in the same sense in which there have been Spanish and English colonies. Meanwhile, the northeastern part of Europe, which in early times was not known at all, has always lagged behind the rest, and has become of importance only in later times. This is mainly because its geographical position has almost wholly cut it off both from the Mediterranean and from the Ocean. Thus we see how, in all these ways, both in earlier and in later times, the history of every country has been influenced by its geography. No doubt the history of each country has also been largely influenced by the disposition of the people who have settled in it, by what is called the national character.7 But then the geographical position itself has often had something directly to do with forming the national character, and in all cases it has had an influence upon it, by giving it a better or a worse field for working and showing itself. Thus it has been well said that neither the Greeks in any other country nor any other people in Greece could have been what the Greeks in Greece really were. The nature of the country and the nature of the people helped one another, and caused Greece to become all that it was in the early times of Europe. It is always useful to mark the points both of likeness and unlikeness of the different nations whose history we study. And of this likeness and unlikeness we shall always find that the geographical character, though only one cause out of several, is always one of the chief causes.

7) As Mackinder argued in the article you read earlier, geography influences the course of history, but it does not wholly determine the course of history.

3. Geographical Distribution of Races.8 Our present business then is with geography as influenced by history, and with history as influenced by geography. With ethnology, with the relations of nations and races to one another, we have to deal only so far as they form one of the agents in history. And it will be well to avoid, as far as may be, all obscure or controverted points of this kind. But the great results of comparative philology may now be taken for granted, and a general view of the geographical disposition of the great European races is needful as an introduction to the changes which historical causes have wrought in the geography of the several parts of Europe. In European ethnology one main feature is that the population of Europe is, and from the very beginnings of history has been, more nearly homogeneous, at least more palpably homogeneous, than that of any other great division of the world. Whether we look at Europe now, or whether we look at it at the earliest times of which we have any glimmerings, it is an eminently an Aryan continent. Everything non-Aryan is at once marked as exceptional. We cannot say this of Asia, where, among several great ethnical elements, none is so clearly predominant as the Aryan element is in Europe. There are in Europe non-Aryan elements, both earlier and later than the Aryan settlement; but they have, as a rule, been assimilated to the prevailing Aryan mass. The earlier non-Aryan element consists of the remnants which still remain of the races which the Aryan settlers found in Europe, and which they either exterminated or assimilated to themselves. The later elements consist of non-Aryan races which have made their way into Europe within historical times, and in their case the work of assimilation has been much less complete. It follows almost naturally from the position of Europe that the primeval non-Aryan element has survived in the west and in the north, while the later or intrusive non-Aryan element has made its way into the east and the south. In the mountains of the western peninsula, in the borderlands of Spain and Gaul, the non-Aryan tongue of the Basque still survives. In the extreme north of Europe the non-Aryan tongue of the Fins and Laps still survives. The possible relations of these tongues either to one another or to other non-Aryan tongues beyond the bounds of

8) The scholarship in this section is dated, but it nevertheless contains valuable information. In Freeman’s day most theories regarding the prehistoric movements of people were based on the study of “comparative philology,” meaning the words and languages. It was recognized that most European languages were related and had sprung from a common ancestor language, which they called Aryan and we call Indo-European. By analyzing this language, scholars proposed that the original population of Europe was overrun by invaders from central Asia, known as Aryans, and that it survived only in pockets such as the Basque. As Freeman describes it, these Aryans came in waves, first the Celtic, then the Teutonic (or German), and finally the Slavonic. The descendants of the first wave are now found in far western Europe, the descendants of the third wave in far eastern Europe, and the descendants of the second wave in between These were (again following Freeman) followed by invasions by non-Aryan peoples from Arabia (Semitic) and Central Asia (Turanian). Modern genetic research has undermined some of this theory, so its should be read critically. The invasions were not invasions of peoples who replaced the original inhabitants, but of ruling elite minorities who imposed their language and culture on existing populations, and were in short order inbred with them. Freeman basically understands, as he repeatedly notes earlier populations may have been “displaced or assimilated.”

Europe is a question of purely philological concern, and does not touch historical geography. But historical geography is touched by the probability, rising almost to moral certainty, that the isolated populations by whom these primitive tongues are still spoken are mere remnants of the primitive races which formed the population of Europe at the time when the Aryans first made their way into that continent. Everything tends to show that the Basques are but the remnant of a great people whom we may set down with certainty as the pre-Aryan inhabitants of Spain and a large part of Gaul, and whose range we may, with great probability, extend over Sicily, over part at least of Italy, and perhaps as far north as our own island. Their possible connection with the early inhabitants of northern Africa hardly concerns us. The probability that they were themselves preceded by an earlier and far lower race concerns us not at all. The earliest historical inhabitants of southwestern Europe are those of whom the Basques are the surviving remnant, those who, under the names of Iberians and Ligurians, fill a not unimportant place in European history. When we come to the Aryan settlements, we cannot positively determine which among the Aryan races of Europe were the earliest settlers in point of time. The members of the great race which, in its many subdivisions, contains the Greeks, the Italians, and the nations more immediately akin to them, are the first among the European Aryans to show themselves in the light of history; but it does not necessarily follow that they were actually the first in point of settlement. It may be that, while they were pressing through the Mediterranean peninsulas and islands, the Celts were pushing their way through the solid central land of Europe. The Celts were clearly the vanguard of the Aryan migration within their own range, the first swarm which made its way to the shores of the Ocean. Partially in Spain, more thoroughly in Gaul and the British Islands, they displaced or assimilated the earlier inhabitants, who, under their pressure and that of later conquerors, have been gradually shut up in the small mountainous region which they still keep. Of the Celtic migration we have no historical accounts, but all probability would lead us to think that the Celts whom in historic times we find on the Danube and south of the Alps were not emigrants who had followed a backward course from the great settlement in Transalpine Gaul, but rather detachments which had been left behind on the westward journey....