I

PENINSULA

Environment and Prehistory

THERE is a marked determinism about many descriptions of Europe’s environmental history. Many Europeans have assumed that their ‘continent’ was so magnificently endowed that it was destined by Nature for world supremacy. And many have imagined that Europe’s good fortune would somehow last forever. ‘The empire of climate’, wrote Montesquieu in 1748, ‘is the first of all empires’; and he proceeded to show that the European climate had no rival. For Montesquieu, as for his many successors, Europe was synonymous with Progress.1

There has also been a good deal of national parochialism. Even the founder of human geography, the great Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845–1918), one of the intellectual ancestors of the Anuales school, was not above a touch of Gallic chauvinizing. The geography of France, he stressed, was marked by the keynote of variety. ‘Against the diversities which assail her’, he wrote, ‘France sets her force d’assimilation, her power of assimilation. She transforms everything that she receives.’ On Britain, in contrast, he quotes the doggerel lines about ‘this paltry little isle, I with acres few and weather vile’. One hundred years later one finds Fernand Braudel doing similar things.2 Variety is indeed a characteristic of France’s superb make-up. But it is not a French monopoly, it is a hallmark of Europe as a whole.

In fact, the Peninsula of Europe is not really a ‘continent’ at all: it is not a self-contained land mass. At c.10 million km2 (3.6 million square miles), it is less than one-quarter the size of Asia, one-third of Africa, one-half of each of the Americas. Modern geographers classify it, like India, as a subcontinent of Eurasia: ‘a cape of the old continent, a western appendix of Asia’. Even so, it is impossible to deny that Europe has been endowed with a formidable repertoire of physical features. Europe’s landforms, climate, geology, and fauna have combined to produce a benign environment that is essential to an understanding of its development.

Map 4. Europe: Physical Regions

Europe’s landforms do not resemble those of any other continent or subcontinent. The depressions to north and south have been flooded by the ocean to form two parallel sea-chains which penetrate deep into the interior. In the north, the North Sea-Baltic sea lane stretches 1,500 miles (2,500 km) from the Atlantic to Russia. In the south, the Mediterranean-Black Sea system stretches over 2,400 miles (4,000 km) from Gibraltar to the Caucasus. Within these protected seas lie a vast complex of lesser gulfs and a huge spangle of islands. As a result, the ratio of shoreline to landmass is exceptionally high: at c.37,000 km, or more than 23,000 miles, the European shoreline is almost exactly the length of the Equator. For early Man, this was perhaps the most important measure of accessibility.

What is more, since the shores of the Peninsula lie in the temperate latitudes of Eurasia’s western extremity, they are served by a user-friendly climate. Prevailing ocean winds blow westerly; and it is the western coasts of the great continents that stand to benefit most from the moderating influx of sea air. Yet few other west-facing continental coasts can actually enjoy the advantage. Elsewhere, if the western shore is not blocked by towering peaks or icy currents, it is lined by deserts such as the Sahara, the Kalahari, or the Atacama.

The climate of Europe, therefore, is unusually temperate for its latitude. Generally speaking, under the influence of the Gulf Stream, northern Europe is mild and moist; southern Europe is relatively warm, dry, and sunny. Central and eastern Europe enjoy elements of a true continental climate, with clear, cold winters and baking hot summers. But everywhere the weather is changeable. Extremes are usually avoided. Even in European Russia, where the difference between the mean temperatures of January and July can approach 45 °C, the range is only half what it is in Siberia. The wettest district in Europe is in western Norway, with an average annual precipitation of 3,500 mm (138 inches). The dryest district surrounds the Caspian Sea, with less than 250 mm (9 inches) per annum. The coldest spot is Vorkuta, with a mean January chill of −20°C; the hottest is disputed between Seville and Astrakhan, both with mean July roasts of +29°C. These extremes do not compare with their counterparts in Asia, Africa, or the Americas.

Europe’s temperate climate favoured the requirements of primitive agriculture. Most of the Peninsula lies within the natural zone of cultivable grasses. There were abundant woodlands to provide fuel and shelter. Upland pasture often occurs in close proximity to fertile valleys. In the west and south, livestock can winter in the open. Local conditions frequently encouraged special adaptations. The extensive coastline, combined with the broad Continental Shelf, gave fishermen rich rewards. The open plains, especially of the Danube Basin, preserved the nomadic horse-rearing and cattle-driving of the Eurasian steppes. In the Alps—which take their name from the high pastures above the tret-line—transhumance has been practised from an early date.

Europe’s climate was probably also responsible for the prevalent skin-colour of its human fauna. Moderate levels of sunshine, and hence of ultra-violet radiation, meant that moderate levels of pigmentation came to be encoded in the Peninsula’s gene pool. Certainly, in historic times pale faces have predominated, together with blond or golden hair and blue eyes in the northern regions. The great majority of Europeans and their descendants can be easily recognized as such from their looks.

Until recently, of course, it was impossible to take anything but the most superficial racial factors into consideration. The analysis of blood groups, body tissues, and DNA imprints, for example, was unknown until the late twentieth century; and it was not realized just how much genetic material all human beings have in common. As a result, racial theorists were apt to draw conclusions from external criteria such as skin colour, stature, or skull form. In reality, the racial make-up of Europe’s population has always displayed considerable variety. The tall, blue-eyed, fair-skinned, platinum blonds of the so-called ‘Nordic race’ which established itself in Scandinavia forms the only group remotely qualified for the label of ‘white’. They bore little resemblance to the squat, brown-eyed, swarthy-skinned and black-haired people of the so-called ‘Mediterranean’ or ‘Indo-Mediterranean Race’ which dominated large parts of the south. Between the two extremes there were numerous gradations. Most of the Peninsula’s population can be clearly distinguished from the Mongoloid, Indoid, and Negroid races, but not from other groups predominating in the Near East and North Africa.

Some of the most promising advances in the field of prehistory are now being made through modern genetic research. The refinement of serology, the discovery of DNA (1953), and the subsequent operation of mapping the 3,000 million ‘letters’ on human genes permit investigations of a very sophisticated nature. The correlation of genetic and linguistic records now suggests that the patterns of biological and cultural evolution may be closer than imagined. Recent studies show that the movement of genetic material into prehistoric Europe corresponded with parallel cultural trends. ‘Genes, peoples, and languages have … diverged in tandem,’ writes a leading scholar.3 Local studies show that isolated cultural communities, such as the non-Indo-European Basques, possess recognizable genetic traces of their own. There are no general conclusions. But the study of Europe’s genetic inheritance, once a pseudo-science, is now a respectable pursuit. At last, ‘we are beginning to read the messages left to us by distant ancestors’.4 [CAUCA-SIA] [TAMMUZ]

From the psychological point of view, the Peninsula presented early man with a stimulating blend of opportunity and challenge. It created a degree of stress that demanded enterprise but was still manageable. Life was hard but rewarding. Seasonal rhythms fostered activities which required routine and foresight. The changeable weather stimulated flexibility. There were plenty of natural hazards to be overcome—ocean gales, winter snows, summer droughts, and disease; yet the prospects for health and survival were good. One may surmise that the primitive settlers of prehistoric Europe felt less at risk than their descendants on the eastern seaboard of North America several millennia later.

It would be rash to state that the European Peninsula was the only location where human civilization could have developed as it did; yet most of the alternative locations had their drawbacks. Compared to the sub-tropical river valleys where mankind first flourished, the seasonal rhythms and benign moderation of the Peninsula provided an altogether more receptive setting for sustained development. The geological and biological environment is rich and varied. There are ‘young’ alpine mountains, ancient primary hills, active volcanoes; deep gorges and wide plains; racing upland torrents, broad rivers, lakes by the thousand; sub-arctic tundra, permafrost, glaciers; rocky coasts, sandy beaches, and spreading deltas. There are open grasslands, spacious deciduous woods, gloomy pine-forests, and sub-tropical palms; leached, semi-desert soils, vast marshes, and zones of deep loess and ‘black earth’. The range of plant life and fauna is large. Enough of Europe’s wildernesses have survived to show what the primeval habitat would have resembled.

Importantly, however, the scale of heights and distances is far less forbidding than elsewhere. Europe’s localities are linked by a network of natural pathways which primitive man must have found more of an invitation than a barrier. Just as one could paddle round most of the inland coasts in a dugout, one could float down any number of rivers in almost any direction. The Seine, the Rhine, the Elbe, Oder, Vistula, Niemen, and Dvina all flow to the north; the Ebro, the Rhone, the Maritsa, the Dnieper, and the Volga to the south. Tagus, Loire, and Severn flow to the west; Thames, Danube, Po, and Dniester to the east. Between them, there is an endless series of short walks and easy porterages. In the district of Auxois in upper Burgundy, for instance, one can stroll in the course of a few hours between waters that take one to the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, or the English Channel. In the central Alps, the sources of the Rhine and the Rhone rise side by side near Andermatt before flowing north and south respectively. On the Dvina-Dnieper porterage, in the vicinity of Vitebsk, one can easily haul a boat which has come from Sweden to a point that will take it to Egypt.

One should not underestimate the lengthy process whereby the highways and byways of Europe were opened up to human movement and settlement. On the other hand, there is no comparison between the relative ease of travel in Europe and that in the greater continents. Caravans on the ancient silk route from China needed a year or more to cross the body of Asia. Yet from time immemorial any fit and reasonably enterprising traveller has been able to move across Europe in a matter of weeks, if not days.

The division of Europe into ‘natural’ or ‘historic’ regions has long provided an intellectual exercise that is as entertaining as it is inconclusive. Attempts to define ‘Western Europe’, as distinct from ‘Eastern Europe’, have been as numerous as the criteria used to fix the dividing lines. (See Map 3, and Introduction, pp. 22–5.) The distinction between ‘Northern Europe’ and ‘Southern Europe’ is clear and permanent in the Peninsula’s central alpine sector. But it does not hold good to the same extent either in Europe’s far west, in Iberia, or in Europe’s far east, in the hinterland of the Black Sea. The arguments advanced to prove the pedigree of regions such as ‘Central Europe’ or ‘East Central Europe’ are as ingenious as they are contorted.5 One stands on safer ground dividing Europe into regions based on physical and geographical features.

The European Peninsula is constructed from five natural components. In historical times, these geographical units have remained largely constant, whilst the political units surmounting them have come and gone with great fickleness. ‘Earth’s proud empires’ are constantly passing away. But the plains and the mountains, the seas, peninsulas, and islands, apparently go on forever.

1. The Great European Plain stretches without interruption for over 2,400 miles (4,000 km) from the Atlantic to the Urals. It is Europe’s dominant territorial feature. Indeed, since the Urals form little more than a gentle bridge, the plain may be regarded as an extension of the still greater expanse of lowland stretching to the Verkhoyansk Ridge of eastern Siberia. At the longitude of the Urals it spans the 1,200 miles (2,000 km) between the Barents Sea and the Caspian. Between the coast and the hills in the Low Countries, it narrows to less than 200 km. Almost all the major rivers of the plain flow on a north-south axis, thereby creating a series of natural breaks to east-west traffic and dividing the traverse of the plain into six or seven easy stages. East of the Vistula, the impenetrable Pripet Marshes split the plain into two natural pathways—a northerly one, which skirts the Baltic lakeland, and a southerly one, serving as the highroad to and from the steppes, [UKRAINA]

The Plain is at its most vulnerable in the section between the Rhine and the Oder. Here, it is overborne by ranges of impenetrable, forested hills. The Ardennes, the Teutoburger Wald, and the Harz remain formidable barriers even today. They inhibit movement both laterally along the Plain and vertically from the Plain to the Alps. The map of modern Germany shows how almost all the country’s development has been channelled either onto the Plain or into the four river basins of the Rhine, Main, Neckar, and Danube.

The peoples who settled on the Plain suffered from one permanent disability: they could find no natural limits to the territory which they chose to occupy. They had to fight for it. Lowlanders tend to think of themselves as docile tillers of the soil in contrast to the ferocious, predatory men from the hills. In reality, it was the plainsmen who had to learn the arts of systematic military organization and occupation. On the plain, one learned to strike first or to be struck down oneself. It is perhaps no accident that the Plain long resisted the onset of settlement; also that in due course it nourished the most formidable military powers of European history. France, Prussia, and Russia—all grew strong from the interminable wars of the plains, and all developed a martial tradition to match their predicament. The lowlands provided the setting for many of their most titanic encounters: at Kunersdorf and Kursk, at Leipzig and Tannenberg, at Waterloo and Stalingrad.

The physical gradients of the European Plain are tipped in two different directions—on the one hand from the alpine ridge to the shore of the northern seas, and, on the other hand, from east to west, from the peak of the Urals (1,894 m) to France’s Atlantic coast. On average, the main east-west gradient falls by 6,000 ft over almost 3,000 miles, or 26 inches per mile—a gradient of only 0.04 per cent.

The idea of ‘cultural gradients’, which run across the European Plain in the opposite direction to the physical ones, developed in response to Europe’s particular patterns of settlement and of political evolution. It so happened that permanent settlement occurred first in the south and the west, later in the north and centre, and last in the east. Hence for much of the last 4,000 years, to cross the mountains from the Plain and to descend to the Mediterranean was actually to undertake a ‘cultural ascent’. Similarly, in modern times, to move along the European Plain from west to east was widely considered to involve a ‘cultural descent’.

UKRAINA

UKRAINE is the land through which the greatest number of European peoples approached their eventual homeland. In ancient times it was variously known as Scythia or Sarmatia, after the peoples who dominated the Pontic steppes long before the arrival of the Slavs, [CHERSONESOS] It occupies the largest sector of the southern European plain, between the Volga crossing and the Carpathian narrows; and it carries the principal overland pathway between Asia and Europe. Its modern, Slavonic name means ‘On the Edge’, a close counterpart to the American concept of ‘the Frontier’. Its focal point at the rapids of the Dnieper, where the steppe pathway crosses the river trade-route, was fiercely contested by all comers, for it provided the point of transition between the settled lands to the West and the open steppes to the East. Ukraine is rich in mineral resources—such as the coal of the ‘Donbass’ and the iron of Krivoi Roh. The loess of its famous ‘black earth’ underlies Europe’s richest agricultural lands, which in the years prior to 1914 were to become the Continent’s leading exporter of grain.

Yet apart from the peninsula of Crimea and the main river valleys—the Dnistro, the Dnipro, and the Din, which had served as the focus both for [KHAZARIA] and for the first East Slav state (see Appendix III, p. 1249)— much of Ukraine was only systematically settled In modern times. Until then, the wide open spaces of the ‘wild plains’ were ruled by the raids of pagans and nomads and by the wars of Cossacks and Tartars. Ottoman rule in the 15th—18th centuries drew it closer to the Black Sea and the Muslim world. Polish rule after 1569 brought in many Polish landowners and Polish Jews. Russian rule, which was steadily extended in stages between 1654 and 1945, brought in Russians and russification. The ‘Sich’ of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, on an island in the Dnieper, was destroyed by the Russian army in 1775; the Tartar Khanate of Crimea in 1783. Under the Tsars, the whole country was officially named ‘Little Russia’. The southern provinces designated for new colonization were called ‘New Russia’.

Not surprisingly, after so many twists and turns of fortune, Ukraine’s modern inhabitants are fiercely attached to their land. It features prominently in their plaintive poetry:

However, since the plain has always been the playground of power politics, the Ukrainians have rarely been allowed to control their destiny. In the twentieth century they were repeatedly suppressed. Their short-lived Republic, which in 1918–20 served as one of the main battlegrounds for Russia’s Reds and Whites, was crushed by the victorious Red Army (see pp. 928–9). They were victims of some of the Continent’s most terrible man-made disasters, and of wholesale genocide. Their casualties during the wars of 1918–20, the collectivization campaign of the 1930s, the terror-famine of 1932–3, and the devastations of the Second World War must have approached 20 million, [CHERNOBYL] [HARVEST] Some among them, frustrated by their impotence in face of Russians, Poles, and Germans, and unable to reach the source of their oppression, struck out in desperate violence against their neighbours, [BUCZACZ] [POGROM] Their population is similar in size to that of England or France, and contains important minorities; but the Ukrainians find very little place in the history books. For many years, they were usually presented to the outside world as ‘Russians’ or ‘Soviets’ whenever they were to be praised, and as ‘Ukrainians’ only when they did evil, [LETTLAND] They did not recover a free voice until the 1990s. The Republic of Ukraine eventually reclaimed its independence in December 1991, facing an uncertain future.2

This concept of the Kulturgefälle or ‘cultural gradient’ was implicit in the ideology of German nationalism, which reacted against the cultural dominance of the West whilst laying claim to the East. It can be observed in some aspects of French attitudes to Belgium and Germany, of German attitudes to the Slavs, of Polish attitudes to Russia and Ukraine, of Russian attitudes to the peoples of Central Asia. Human nature always tempts people to imagine that they inhabit the cultural upland whilst their neighbours inhabit the Styx. In the British Isles, for example, the English majority are apt to perceive all cultural gradients sloping steadily downhill from the Himalayan peaks of Oxford or Hyde Park Corner to the ‘Celtic fringe’, the ‘Scotch mist’, the ‘Irish bogs’, and the ‘Channel fog’. The English saying that ‘wogs begin at Calais’ is very close in spirit to France’s histoires beigesto Metternich’s most Viennese remark that ‘Asia begins at the Landstrasse’, or to the Polish proverb ‘Na Rusi się musi’ (in Russia, one has to). The prejudices inherent in their elastic cultural geography have undoubtedly been strengthened by fears of the instability of life on the Plain.

Thanks to the configuration of its approaches, one small branch-line of the European Plain has assumed special importance. The plain of Pannonia, now in modern Hungary, is the only extensive stretch of grassland south of the mountain chain. It is protected in the north by the main Carpathian ridge, and is bounded to the south by the middle reaches of the Danube. It has three natural gateways—one at Vienna from the west, another through the Iron Gates from the east, and a third through the Moravian Gap from the north. Its well-watered pastures offered a natural terminus for nomads moving from east to west, and a convenient springboard for many a barbarian tribe preparing to invade the Roman Empire. It was the home successively of the Gepids, the Huns (from whom it took the name of Hungaria), the Avars, the Cumans, the Slavs, and eventually the Magyars. The Magyars call it the Alfold (Lowland), and sometimes the puszta> a word of Slav origin meaning ‘the wilderness’.

2. The Mountains. The central feature of the Peninsula is to be found in the majestic chain of mountains which curve in two elegant arcs from the Maritime Alps in Provence to the Carpathian Alps in Transylvania. This impressive barrier forms the Peninsula’s backbone, creating a watershed which divides the northern Plain from the Mediterranean lands. The highest peaks in the westerly sections—Mont Blanc (4,807 m), the Matterhorn (4,478 m), or Gran Paradiso (4,061 m)—are significantly higher than those in the more easterly ranges—Triglav (2,863 m) in the Julian Alps, Gerlach (2,655 m) in the Tatras, or Moldoveanu (2,543 m) in Romania. Even so, with the eternal snows lying above the 3,200-m line on the south-facing Sonnenseite or ‘sunshine side’, and above the 2,500-m contour on the north-facing slopes, the upper ridges are impassable almost everywhere. Continental Europe’s largest glacier, the Aletsch, which runs beneath the Jungfrau in the Bernese Oberland, has no equivalent in the East. But all the highest passes are closed by snow during the winter months. For well over 1,200 miles there are only three significant gaps in the chain—the Danube Gap in Bavaria, the Elbe Gap in Bohemia, and the Moravian Gap which links Silesia with Hungary.

For obvious reasons, the peoples who settled in the high valleys kept themselves aloof from the turbulent affairs of the lowlands, regarding their mountain home as a refuge and fortress to be defended against all intruders. Switzerland, which emerged in the thirteenth century as a confederation of mountain cantons (see p. 404), has retained something of this outlook to the present day. [ALPI]

The mountains, however, have had a unifying as well as a divisive function. The critical distances across them are not very great. Bourg St Maurice on the Isère and Martigny on the Rhone are, respectively, only 62 and 88 km (39 and 55 miles) from Italian Aosta. Austrian Innsbruck is 68 km from Bressanone (Brixen) in South Tirol; Sambor on the Dniester is 105 km from Uzhgorod, on a tributary of the Danube. Once the high alpine passes were tamed, the lands on either side of the ridge acquired common links, common interests, and to a large degree a common culture. Turin, for example, is much closer to Lyons and Geneva than it is to Rome. Milan or Venice have had stronger ties with Zurich, Munich, or Vienna than with distant Sicily. Bavaria, which was long cut off from the north by the vast forests and hills of central Germany, has shared much with nearby Lombardy. The old province of Galicia on the northern slopes of the Carpathians had much to do with Hungary over the ridge to the south. As any tourist can see, the worlds of the Alpenraum or of the Carpathians have survived, notwithstanding the barriers created by modern national states,[GOTTHARD]

The presence of the mountains gave special significance to the three major gaps between them. The Bavarian Gap, which follows the corridor of the middle Danube from Passau to Krems, became a capital link between north and south. The Elbe Gap opened Bohemia to the German influences which the Böhmer Wald might otherwise have impeded. Of equal importance, especially in earlier times, was the Moravian Gap, which formed a natural south-bound funnel for many of the peoples coming from the steppes. In early medieval times it provided the site of the first Slav state, the Great Moravian Empire (see Chapter IV). In historic times it has provided a pathway for innumerable armies, for Sobieski bound for the Turkish Wars or for Napoleon bound for Austerlitz. It ultimately leads, like the routes through the Bavarian and the Elbe Gaps, to the Danube near Vienna, ‘the heart of the heart of Europe’, [SLAVKOV]

Of course, Europe possesses many mighty mountain chains in addition to its central spine. Mulhacen (3,487 m) in the Sierra Nevada, Le Pic de Néthou or d’Aneto (3,404 m) in the Pyrenees, Mt Etna (3,323 m) in Sicily, Monte Corno (2,912 m) in the Apennines, Musala (2,925 m) in Bulgaria, Korab (2,764 m) in Albania, and Olympus itself (2,917 m) are all peaks of alpine proportions. Not all Europeans are aware that the supreme summit of the Peninsula is to be found, not on Mont Blanc, but on the Elbrus Massif (5,642 m) in the Greater Caucasus.

3. The Mediterranean, that marvellously secluded sea which laps Europe’s southern coastline, forms the basis of a self-contained geographical unit. Its sea lanes provide a ready channel for cultural, economic, and political contacts. It supplied the cradle for the classical world. Under the Caesars it became in effect a Roman lake. In the Renaissance and after, it was the focus of an interwoven civilization with important material as well as cultural dimensions.6 Yet significantly, since the decline of Roman power, the Mediterranean has never been politically united. Seapower has never been sufficient to overcome the land-based empires which established themselves on its perimeter. Indeed, once the Muslim states took root in the Levant and in Africa, the Mediterranean became an area of permanent political division. Maritime and commercial powers such as Venice were incapable of uniting the whole. The European powers of the nineteenth century founded colonies from Syria to Morocco; but they were prevented by their rivalries from destroying the principal Muslim bastion in Turkey, and hence from creating a general hegemony.

ALPI

CONTRARY to first appearances, the high alpine valleys provided an excellent environment for early colonization and primitive agriculture. They possessed an abundance of sunshine, fresh water, fuel, building materials, pasture, and most importantly, security. Their remoteness was one of their assets. They were inhabited from the earliest times, and, as Hannibal discovered in the fourth century BC, fiercely defended. Traces of hearths found in the Drachenloch cave at 2,445 m in Switzerland’s Tamina Valley date from the Riss-Wurm interglacial. Evidence of transhumance goes back 12,000 years. Roman building works and settlements were well established, especially in Val d’Aosta and the mining district of Noricum.1 Villages perched on impregnable rocks, such as those in the Alpes Maritimes and Haute-Provence, were immune from bandits, invaders, and tax-collectors.

In medieval times, many alpine communities established a distinct political independence. The Swiss cantons are not the only example. The 52 communes of Briançon obtained a charter of liberties in 1343, six years before the Dauphin of Vienne sold the rest of his patrimony and his title to the King of France. They maintained their self-government until the Revolution.

Other districts avoided close control by the lack of communications. Barcelonnette, founded by the Counts of Provence and Barcelona, was ceded to France with the Pays d’Ubaye by the Treaty of Utrecht. But it could only be approached by a 15-hour mule trek until the permanent road was built in 1883. The villages of the Gorges du Verdón were not linked to the outside world until 1947. The lowest pass in the western Alps, the Col de I’Échelle, still does not possess an all-weather road on both sides.

Many roads were built for strategic reasons. An obelisk atop the Montgenèvre (1,054 m) announces in French, Latin, Italian, and Spanish that the route was opened for carriages in 1807 ‘while the Emperor Napoleon was triumphing over his enemies on the Oder and Vistula’. The highest road in Europe, over the Col du Galibier (3,242 m) was built in the 1930s as part of France’s frontier defences.

The Alpenraum was exploited most intensively in the second half of the nineteenth century, when mixed farming was pushed to high altitudes, and the rural population rose dramatically. Yet the advent of modern communications provoked a mass exodus, reflected in the old Savoyard complaint: Toujours ma chèvre monte et ma femme descend. (My goat is always going up, and my wife going down.) The trend was reaching crisis proportions in many localities until the growth of hydroelectricity and mass tourism, especially winter skiing, after 1945.2

The antiquity and peculiarities of alpine life have inspired a wealth of specialized museums. The doyen is the Museo della Montagna, founded in 1874 in Turin. The Ethnographic Museum at Geneva, like many smaller ones, specializes in the tools, buildings, ceramic stoves, and folk art of alpine communities.

GOTTHARD

THE St Gotthard Pass commands the shortest passage across the central Alps. It can fairly claim to be Europe’s most vital artery. By joining the valley of the Reuss, which flows northward into the Rhine, and the valley of the Ticino, which flows southwards into the Po, it provides the most direct link between southern Germany and northern Italy. At 2,108 m. it is significantly lower than its main rivals, which stay closed for longer periods during winter and bad weather. (See Appendix III, p. 1219.)

It is interesting that the St Gotthard route did not become a major thoroughfare until relatively late. It was not developed by the Romans, who preferred the more westerly passes, especially the Great St Bernard, the Mons Jovis. Nor was it used during the centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, despite the constant migrations from north to south. The problem lay with a short section of the upper Reuss valley, which for some three miles north of the modern Andermatt enters a precipitous rocky canyon. This Schollenen Gorge, whose upper entrance is lined with sheer cliffs, was sufficient to defy all traffic until extensive engineering works were undertaken. The works began some time after AD 1200. The entrance to the gorge was spanned by the magnificent single arch of the Devil’s Bridge, whose lofty construction must have been no less demanding than the vault of a Gothic cathedral. At the steepest passage of the defile, rock-steps known as scaliones or Schollen were cut into the cliff, together with supports for the wooden platforms which were suspended alongside the overhangs. By AD 1300, when the hospice at the summit of the pass was dedicated to St Gotthard, Bishop of distant Hildesheim, it is clear that the flow of travellers had become steady and regular.

For nearly 600 summers the St Gotthard road served from June to November as Europe’s premier north-south trail. From Altdorf at the head of Lake Lucerne to Biasca at the head of the Levantina, the stream of pilgrims, merchants, and soldiers faced 60 miles of rough climbing over four or five stages. The southern approach, through the eerie Valle Tremola or ‘Valley of Trembling’, the source of the translucent mineral called tremo-lite, was hardly less daunting than the Devil’s Bridge. The zigzag path could only be negotiated by pack mules, by litters, and by foot travellers. Before the widening of the track in 1830, the only person to cross the pass in a wheeled vehicle was the Englishman Charles Greville, who won a bet in 1775 by paying a team of Swiss guides to carry his phaeton on their shoulders all the way.

The opening of the St Gotthard had important strategic consequences. It gave a particular stimulus to the Swiss district of Uri, the guardian of the pass, and hence to the Swiss Confederation as a whole. It enabled armies to march swiftly from Germany to Lombardy and back, a facility exploited by numerous emperors, and most notably by General Suvorov’s Russians in 1799.

The construction of the St Gotthard railway in 1882 was no less remarkable than that of the St Gotthard road. It required a main tunnel of 15 km. under the summit, together with 80 others. At the famous Pfaffensprung or ‘Parson’s Leap’ above Goschenen, trains enter the spiral trackway travelling right and emerge several hundred feet higher up travelling left. It cost the lives of many workmen, among them its designer. The railway tunnel has been joined since 1980 by a 16.5 km motorway tunnel, which carries six lanes of vehicles in all weathers and all seasons. Motor cyclists, who hug their machines as they themselves are hugged by leather-suited pil-lionesses, scream over the pass in minutes.

Yet modern travellers who stop by the Devil’s Bridge can see a curious monument built into the rock beneath the modern viaduct. The inscription, in Tsarist Cyrillic, may be translated: TO THE VALIANT COMPANIONS OF FIELD MARSHAL COUNT SUVOROV-RIMNITSKY, PRINCE OF ITALY, WHO LOST THEIR LIVES DURING THE MARCH ACROSS THE ALPS IN 1799.2 Raised on the centenary of that march, it is a suitable reminder both of the unity of Europe and of the grandeur of its mountains.

Political disunity may well explain some of the cultural unities which persist across state frontiers in the Mediterranean. One deep-rooted feature has been found in the existence of‘parallel authorities’, such as that of the Mafia in southern Italy, which defy all efforts to suppress them.7 For most of recorded history, the peoples inhabiting the northern shores of the Mediterranean have outnumbered their southern neighbours by at least two to one, and hence have played a dominant role. A demographic explosion in North Africa promises to upset the traditional balance. In any case, the ‘Mediterranean lands’ have never been confined to the countries on the immediate shoreline. In Europe, the Mediterranean watershed lies far to the north, taking in Bavaria, Transylvania, and Ukraine. No power or culture, not even Rome, has ever united all of these.

Similar patterns are observable in the history of Europe’s other enclosed seas—the Baltic and the Black Sea. The Baltic came to prominence at a relatively late date. It was the focus in Hansa times for German commercial expansion, and in the seventeenth century for Sweden’s bid for glory. Yet no single Baltic power ever achieved the long dreamt-of dominium marts. German, Swedish, Danish, Polish, and Russian rivalry has kept the Baltic disunited to the present day.8 [HANSA]

The Black Sea—first known to the ancients as the Axenos or ‘Inhospitable’, later as the Euxine or ‘Hospitable’ and then as the Pontus—is the Mediterranean’s siamese twin. It has passed through phases of Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman dominance. Yet there again, the rise of a major landpower in Russia led to lasting divisions. Until the 1990s, the Soviet Union and its satellites faced NATO’s southern flank in Turkey across hostile waters. More seriously, perhaps, much of the Black Sea is anoxic—that is, it is so heavily impregnated with hydrogen sulphide (H2S) that ‘its depths form the largest mass of lifeless water in the world’. If‘turnover’ of the water strata were to occur, it would provoke ‘the worst natural cataclysm to strike the earth since the last Ice Age’.9

Since undisputed command of Europe’s seas has proved impossible, special attention has inevitably been given to their three strategic gateways. The Straits of Gibraltar, the Dardanelles, and the Danish Sound have handed inordinate power and influence to the states that control them,[SUND]

4. The mainland trunk of the Peninsula is amplified by several large sub-peninsulas which protrude into the surrounding seas. One such mountainous promontory, Scandinavia, adjoins the Baltic. Three others—Iberia, Italy, and the Balkan massif—adjoin the Mediterranean. Two more—Crimea and Caucasus—adjoin the Black Sea. Each of them, though physically joined to the Continent, has more readily been approached by sea than by land.

SUND

LIKE its southern counterpart at the Straits of Gibraltar, the Danish Sound . has been called Europe’s jugular vein. Controlling the sole point of entry to a major sea, it possessed immense strategic and commercial value.1 Its potential was first realized in 1200, when King Canute VI of Denmark imprisoned some Lübeck merchants until they paid for the right of passage into the Baltic herring grounds. From then on, the Sound Dues were exacted for as long as the Danes could enforce them. They were accepted by other medieval Baltic powers such as Poland, the Teutonic State, and the Hansa, and survived Sweden’s challenge in the seventeenth century. They declined after 1732, but continued in being until the Redemption Treaty of 1857 when British naval power finally persuaded the Danes to commute their ancient interest. Even then, the Sound remained important until Prussia acquired Kiel in 1866 and by-passed the Sound by building the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal (1895). Once aeroplanes could overfly them, all maritime straits, including the English Channel, lost much of their strategic significance. All that is left is the memory of greatness, a ferry crossing, and the shade of Hamlet’s Ghost on the battlements at Elsinore.

Scandinavia, once the site of the shrinking European ice-cap, could never support a large population. But its wild, western fiords are tempered by the Gulf Stream; the mountains are rich in minerals; and the morainic lakes left by the retreating ice are abundant in fish. What the Scandinavians lack in terms of climate, they have gained from a secure home base.

The Iberian Peninsula consists largely of a lofty tableland, separated from the rest of the Continent by the high peaks of the Pyrenees. Its eastern seaboard forms part of the Mediterranean world, and in early times was drawn successively into the Carthaginian, Roman, and Muslim spheres. But much of the arid interior is drawn through the valleys of the Douro, the Tagus, and the Guadalquivir towards the Atlantic. Hence, in modern times whilst Aragon expanded eastward into the Mediterranean, Portugal and Castile moved confidently to the western ocean. They were Europe’s first colonial powers, and they once divided the world between them.

Italy is the most perfect of peninsulas. The alpine barrier to the north is seamless. The plain of the Po forms a rich natural larder. The long, craggy ‘leg and toe’ shelter a large number of fertile, impregnable valleys with ready access to the sea. Some of these Italian localities have been rich and extrovert; one of them, Rome, gave rise to the largest empire of the ancient world. But after Rome’s decline they could so defend their independence that Italy was not reunited again for almost 2,000 years.

The Balkan Peninsula is far less welcoming than Italy. Its interior is more arid; the mountains, from the Dinaric Alps to the Rhodopes, more stony; the valleys more remote, the sea less accessible. Its main function in history has been to preserve the tenacious communities which cling to its soil, and which block the direct passage between the Mediterranean and the Danube Basin.

The peninsularity of Crimea—formerly known as Taurus—was emphasized by its hinterland on the Ukrainian steppe, which was not permanently settled until recent times. It looks to the sea, the sun, and the south, and formed part of successive east Mediterranean civilizations until conquered by the Russian Empire in 1783. [CHERSONESOS]

The Caucasus, too, has many peninsular characteristics. Although it is physically joined to land at both ends, to Europe in the north and to Asia in the south, the mountains which ring it on the landward side are so massive that its activities have inevitably been channelled seawards. The ridge of the Greater Caucasus, which tops 18,000 ft (5,486 m), is significantly higher than the Alps or the Carpathians. The Lesser Caucasus to the south attains a similar elevation on Mt Ararat (16,786 ft or 5,165 m). The inhabitants of the Caucasus are Eurasians in more senses than one.[CAUCASIA]

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

Of 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

IN 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]

Today’s prehistorians also place great emphasis on the processes of prehistoric social change. Time was when almost all new cultural phenomena were explained in terms of human migration. The emergence of new burial practices, of new rites, of new artefacts, or of a new language group was automatically linked to the presumed arrival of new peoples. Now, though prehistoric migrations are not discounted, it is well understood that material and cultural changes can be explained in terms of evolution within existing populations. Technological advances, religious conversions, and linguistic evolutions must all be taken into consideration.

European prehistory has to be related to two chronologies of entirely different orders of magnitude. Geological time, which spans the estimated 4,550 million years since the formation of the earth, is divided into eras, periods, and epochs from the Azoic to the Holocene. Human life, in contrast, is confined to the terminal tip of geological time. Its earliest origins occur in Africa in the middle of the Pliocene. It reaches Europe in the middle of Pleistocene. It does not move into the stage called ‘Civilization’ until after the end of the Quaternary. Europe in its present form is no more than five million years old; and the human presence in Europe has not lasted for more than one million years (see Appendix III, p. 1215).

VENDANGE

HISTORICAL climatology relies on records preserved in books, and on records preserved by nature herself. The former include diaries, travellers’ tales, and weather data kept by estate managers, grain merchants, or wine-growers. The latter involves the study of tree-rings, fossils, sediments, stalactites, and glaciers.1

The precision of Nature’s own records is amazing, even within historical times. The annual deposits of the great Salt Lake in Crimea have been logged to 2294 BC. Some of the great stalagmites, such as that in the cave of Aven d’Orgnac in the Jura, are over 7,000 years old. Variations in the density of their calcite deposits faithfully reflect historical rainfall patterns.

Phenology is the study of fruit-ripening, and has been widely exploited in relation to the history of wine-harvests. Every year for centuries, many French vineyards issued a public proclamation of the date for commencing the collection of grapes. An early date signified a sunny growing season; a late date signified a cool season. By listing the dates of the première cuvée in a particular location, historians can produce complete ‘pheno-logical series’ over very long periods. By collating the phenological series for different locations, they can work out the mean seasonal date for each region. These courbes de vendanges or ‘wine-harvest curves’ present precise indications of climatic change.2 (See Appendix III, p. 1220.)

The movement of glaciers provides another source of information. Glaciers advance in periods of cold, and retreat in periods of relative warmth. What is more, the length of Europe’s alpine glaciers in any particular year can often be established from eyewitness accounts, from old prints, or from official records. Archives such as those of the Chambre des Comptes de Savoie contain inspectors’ reports on glacial advances which destroyed villages or prevented the inhabitants from paying their tithes and taxes. In 1600, for example, a year of disaster at Chamonix, people on both the French and Italian side of Mont Blanc lived in fear for their future. Detailed studies of the Mer de Glace, of the Rhonegletscher in the Valais, or the Vernagt in Tyrol, all of whose termini in the late sixteenth century stood several kilometres below their current position, demonstrate the reality of Europe’s ‘Little Ice Age’. Periods of glacial maxima peaked in 1599–1600, 1640–50, 1680, 1716–20, and 1770. In 1653 local people defiantly placed a statue of St Ignatius at the base of the Aletsch glacier; and the glacier stopped. The contemporary glacial retreat has continued since 1850.3

Climatic data are most convincing when different sources produce the same results. Wildly fluctuating weather in the 1530s, for example, is confirmed both by tree-rings from Germany, and by the Franco-Swiss vendanges (see Appendix III). The coldest year for Europe’s vineyards occurred in 1816. Collection of the ruined grapes began in eastern France on All Saints Day (1 November). Mary Shelley, vacationing in nearby Switzerland, could not even go out for walks. Instead, she stayed indoors, and invented Frankenstein.

C14

40,000 years is the length of time within which isotopes of Carbon14 show measurable signs of radioactivity. This means that radiocarbon dating methods can be applied to organic materials from the late palaeolithic to the recent past. 35,000 BC is approximately the date when the Neanderthals died out and when humans lived at Cromagnon.

The value of C14, whose exploitation gave rise to a Nobel prize for chemistry in 1960, derives from the spontaneous and steady rate of its decay. It is the only one of three carbon isotopes to be radioactive, and it accumulates in all living matter through the action of cosmic rays on the atmosphere. It is present in bones, body tissue, shells, meat, hair, rope, cloth, wood, and many other materials which abound on archaeological sites. It starts to decay as soon as the organism dies, and continues to do so over a half-life of 5,730 years and a mean life of c.8,033 years. A 1 per cent decrease can be measured to c.80 years.

The calibration of results is fraught with variables. But it has been greatly improved in recent years by the discovery of complementary techniques that provide a basis for comparison. Thermoluminescence (TL) and electron spin resonance (ESR), for example, detect minute changes caused by natural radioactivity in the crystal lattice of minerals, and are specially effective in dating ceramics. The examination of carbon isotopes by Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) has extended the chronological range to c.100,000 years, throwing doubt on previous age estimates of the oldest humanoid remains.1

After three decades of development, radiocarbon dating has been used to construct impressive data collections. Archaeologists of the mesolithic, for instance, can consult catalogues which list the dates of finds from all over Europe. A piece of linear beaded pottery from Eitzum in Lower Saxony is dated 6480 ± 210; charcoal from a site at Vlasac in Serbia, 7930 ± 77; a charred pine-branch from Calowanie near Warsaw, 10,030 ± 120.2 Every new measurement consolidates the overall picture.

The most sensational challenge for C14, however, arose with the dating of the Turin Shroud. Supposedly brought to Europe from the Holy Land in the fourteenth century, the shroud bears the faint impression of a dead man’s face and body, and had been venerated as a relic of the Crucifixion. Tests undertaken in 1988–9 showed that the cloth of the shroud had been manufactured between AD 1260 and 1390. But they did not explain the dead man’s image.3

On the scale of geological time, the formation of the European Peninsula must be counted as a recent event. Eighty million years ago most of the land that was destined to constitute Europe lay half-submerged in a scattered archipelago of mid-ocean islands. After that, as the Adantic opened up to its fullest extent, the drifting African plate closed the ocean gap from the south. Five million years ago Africa was still directly joined to Eurasia, with the Alps and the Atlas mountains piled high on either side of the dry Mediterranean trench. But then ‘the natural dam at Gibraltar broke’. ‘A gigantic waterfall of sea-water, one hundred times the size of Victoria Falls’ rushed in, and completed the Peninsula’s familiar outline.12 Two final afterthoughts less than ten thousand years ago opened up the English Channel and the Danish Sound, thereby creating first the British Isles and then the Baltic Sea.

Over the last million years, the young Peninsula lived through seventeen ice ages. At its greatest extent, the ice sheet reached to a line joining North Devon, Hanover, Cracow, and Kiev. Humanoid visitors made their appearance during the warmer interglacials. The earliest traces of Man in Europe have been found at sites near Vertesszölös in Hungary and at Isernia in Italy, both dated 850–700,000 BC. At Isernia, Homo erectus ate a varied diet from the fauna of a savannah-type countryside. At Terra Amata, on the beach near Nice, a human footprint 400,000 years old was found in hard-baked fireside clay. In 1987 a cache of fossilized human remains was discovered deep in a cave chamber at Atapuerca near Burgos in Spain.

In the course of the ice ages, human evolution progressed though the stages of homo erectus, homo sapiens, and homo sapiens sapiens (modern humankind). The remains of a transitional creature were found in a quarry in the Neanderthal Valley near Dusseldorf in 1856, thereby provoking the public debate on human origins that has continued ever since, [MONKEY] The Neanderthals, with massive bones and short limbs, are thought to have been a specifically European variant adapted to glacial conditions. They used flint tools, understood the secret of fire, buried their dead, and cared for the living. Their particular brand of‘Mousterian’ stone technology was named after a site in Dordogne. They hunted in organized collectives, as shown by the sites at La Cotte de St Brelade on the island of Jersey, or more recently at Zwoleń in Poland, which was used over many millennia for the entrapment of stampeding horses and mammoths. They passed away some 40–35,000 years ago, during the last interglacial. Recent finds at St Césaire have suggested that they survived for a time alongside new immigrants who were arriving from Africa and the Middle East.13

The newcomers were slight in build, but much more dexterous, possessing finger-bones only half as thick as those of their predecessors. As shown by remains from Sungir in northern Russia, they could thread very fine bone needles and could sew clothes. They are widely known as ‘cavemen’, but caves were only one of their habitats. They roamed the plains, hunting bison and mammoth and gathering wild plants. At Mezirich in Ukraine, one ice-age encampment has survived intact. Its spacious huts were built from hundreds of mammoth bones covered with hides, [GAT-HUNTER]

The end of the last ice age was preceded by the daddy of all volcanic explosions. The pressure of the African plate had opened a fault-line running along the bed of the Mediterranean; and it created a string of volcanoes, which still exist. Some 36,000 years ago the largest of these volcanoes blew its cone, leaving a trail of volcanic ash that reached to the Volga. At Pozzuoli, near Naples, it left a caldera or crater ring some seven miles wide. It was the forerunner of all the great eruptions of historic times—at Thera in 1628 BC (see pp. 93–4), at Vesuvius in AD 79 [PANTA], at Etna in 1669. It is a sobering reminder that mankind has always been skating on the fragile crust of its geological heritage.

By convention, the human sector of European prehistory is usually related to the ‘Three-Age System’ of Stone, Bronze, and Iron. The system was first set out in 1836 by a Danish antiquary, Christian Thomsen; and it provides a framework of time based on the changing implements of primitive man. Hence, the palaeolithic (Old Stone Age) refers to the vast period before the end of the ice ages when Man worked with chipped stone tools. The mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) refers to the much more recent period following the last of the ice, c.8000–3000 BC. The two millennia which preceded the Christian or Common Era, which forms our own, arbitrary scheme of chronology [ANNO DOMINI], were taken up successively by the neolithic (New Stone Age), the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age. Each of these technological ‘Ages’ can be subdivided into early, middle, and late phases. It is essential to remember, however, that the Three-Age System is not based on any absolute scale of time. At any given moment, one place might have lingered in the neolithic whilst others had reached the Iron Age. In any given region, there could be peoples living at different stages of development, or using different forms of technology simultaneously.

The Old Stone Age reached back for a million years. It overlapped with the penultimate era of quaternary geological time, the Pleistocene, and with the last great glaciations—known respectively as Mindel, Riss, and Wiirm. Apart from Neanderthal and Le Moustier, invaluable finds have been made at Cromagnon (1868), Grimaldi (1874), Combe-Capelle (1909), Chancelade (1888), and at all points between Abbeville and Ojców, each associated with particular humanoid types, periods, or cultures. At Aurignac, Solutré, and Abri La Madeleine, sculptures of the human form first appeared in the shape of figurines such as the ‘Venus of Willendorf’ or the ‘Venus of Laussel’. With the Magdalenian period, at the end of the palaeolithic age when bone tools were in fashion, under the shadow of the last ice cap, the high point of cave art was reached. Magnificent subterranean galleries have survived at Altamira in Spain (1879) and at Lascaux in Dordogne (1940), leading some commentators to talk of a ‘Franco-Cantabrian School’. In a cave near Mentón on the Riviera, a hoard of Cassis rufa shells from the Indian Ocean was found. The shells were thought to possess life-giving powers, and their presence would seem to conñrm both a sophisticated religious system and a far-flung trading network.14 [LAUSSEL]

GAT-HUNTER

THE origins of organized political communities, or ‘states’, have rarely been sought before the neolithic period. Some theorists, including Marxists, have looked to the tribes and tribal chiefdoms of the Bronze and Iron Ages. Others have looked to the neolithic revolution in agriculture and to the associated growth of fixed settlement. According to V. Gordon Childe, for instance, the preconditions for a state organized on residence, not kinship, required territorial authority, surplus capital, symbolic monuments, long-distance trade, labour specialization, stratified society, scientific knowledge, and the art of writing. Such preconditions were first met in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and in Europe, in the city-states of ancient Greece (see Chapter II).

Analysis of the complex society of hunter-gatherers, however, projects the topic much further back in time. Hunter-gatherers or gatherer-hunters, it seems, were not saved by the advent of agriculture from the immemorial threat of extinction. On the contrary, they enjoyed many millennia of ‘unending leisure and affluence’. They were not unfamiliar with agriculture when it arose, but rejected it, except as a marginal or supplementary activity.

What is more, in the later stages of prehistory they developed social structures which permitted differentiated specialization. In addition to the far-roaming hunter-warriors and the home-based gatherers, some groups could specialize in the new labour-intensive processes of fishing, seafood collection, harvesting wild grass and nuts, or bird-trapping. Others were free to specialize as organizers or as negotiators in the formation of federations and regional alliances. In other words, the hunter-gatherer bands possessed an embryonic representative and political class. The historical problem can be addressed by analogy with the native peoples of North America, Australia, or New Guinea.

The big question about the hunter-gatherers, therefore, does not seem to be ‘How did they progress towards the higher level of an agricultural and politicised society?’ but ‘What persuaded them to abandon the secure, well-provided and psychologically liberating advantages of their primordial lifestyle?’.1

LAUSSEL

THE ‘Venus of Laussel’ dates from c.19000 BC. It is a bas-relief, sculptured on the inner wall of a cave in the Dordogne, and painted with red ochre. It shows a seated female figure with no surviving facial features, but with a large coiffe of hair drawn behind the shoulder, long pendulant breasts, and knees opened wide to display the vulva. The left hand rests on a pregnant belly. The crooked right arm holds aloft a crescent-shaped bison horn.

Like most of the human images of earliest European art, covering over 90 per cent of human history, the manifestly female gender of this artefact is both striking and eloquent. It is widely taken to represent the palaeolithic Godhead, a variant of the ‘Great Cosmic Mother’, whose cult dominated the rites of a matriarchal community. According to one interpretation, it would have presided over masked ritual dancing, where women, men, and children sought mystical communion with the animal spirits. Less certainly, it formed the pinnacle of cave-life imagery where the cave was the ‘Womb-tomb-maze of the Great Earth Mother’ and where ‘blood-woman- moon-bison horn-birth-magic-the cycle of life are analo-gised in a continuous resonance, or harmony, of sacred energies.’

The matriarchal, or ‘matrifocal’ character of prehistoric society has been accepted by most theorists, from Marx and Engels onwards. However the assumption that matriarchy only operated at the most ‘primitive’ level is not now regarded as valid. In his work on myths, the poet Robert Graves explored the origins and fate of matrifocal culture in Europe, tracing the decline of woman’s status from ancient divinity to classical slavery.2

Others have considered the female origins of speech, and hence of conscious culture. In humanity’s long ‘nursery age’, women and children may conceivably have learned to talk whilst the menfolk were away hunting. If so, the gender difference can only have been one of degree, since boy-children must surely have learned to verbalize alongside their sisters.

More convincing is the strong possibility that matriarchal and patriarchal societies overlapped, creating a wide range of hybrid forms. If the Gimbutas theory is correct (see p. 86), the advance on to the Pontic Steppes of the late neolithic ‘Kurgan peoples’ marked the arrival not only of the Indo-Europeans but also of warlike, patriarchal traditions. On the other hand, after the subsequent arrival of the Sauromatians—the first wave of the Irano-Sarmatian confederation—the matriarchal newcomers began to mingle c.3000 BC with their patriarchal predecessors. In this connection, Herodotus retailed a curious story how Amazon warriors fled the southern shores of the Black Sea and, after mating with Scythian braves, set up a new homeland ‘three days march from the Maeotian Lake’. The story was rejected as sheer invention until archaeologists began to uncover the skeletons of female warriors in Sauromatian graves. A Sarmatian princess of a still later vintage, whose tomb was found at Kolbiakov on the Don, had been buried with her battle-axe.3

Like every committed doctrine, the feminist approach to ‘preherstory’ has its extravagances. But it is not entirely implausible:

Because we have separated humanity from nature, subject from object, … and universities from the universe, it is enormously difficult for anyone but a poet or a mystic to understand … the holistic and mythopoeic thought of Ice Age humanity. The very language we use … speaks of tools, hunters, and men, when every statue and painting we discover cries out that this Ice Age humanity was a culture of art, the love of animals, and women … Gathering is as important as hunting, but only hunting is discussed. Storytelling is discussed, but the storyteller is a hunter rather than an old priestess of the moon. Initiation is imagined, but the initiate is not the young girl in menarche about to wed the moon, but a young man about to become a great hunter.4

Western civilization, however defined, is generally thought to have its roots in the Judaeo-Christian tradition and in the Classical World. Both those source cultures, whether of Yehovah or of Zeus-Jupiter, were dominated by male Godheads. Yet one should not forget that through eons of earlier time the Godhead was female. One can only presume that humankind, so long as it was a tiny vulnerable species, was more moved by the feminine role of generation and birth than by the male role of killing and death.

All sorts of people have dreamed of a long-lost paradise in the remote past. Romantics, nationalists, and Marxists have all had their idealized Gardens of Eden, their semi-mythical Golden Ages. Now feminists are doing the same.5 One thing is certain. The Venus of Laussel, and others like her, was no sex object of male gratification. In fact, she was no Venus at all.

The Middle Stone Age or mesolithic represents a transitional era when Man was adapting to rapidly improving climatic conditions. The terminal moraine of the last Finno-Scandinavian ice sheet has been dated to 7300 BC. Technological advance was characterized by the appearance of microliths—very small, pointed or bladed flints. Greatly increased supplies offish and shellfish encouraged settlement along the lakes, rivers, and coasts. Earlier cultures identified in the south, as at Mas d’Azil in the Pyrenees, were complemented by more northerly ones, such as Maglemose in Zealand or Ertebolle in Jutland, where deep-sea fishing emerged. For the first time, the mesolithic stone axe was capable of felling the largest trees.

The New Stone Age, or neolithic, was marked by the transition from food-gathering to food production. The domestication of plants and animals, otherwise known as agriculture, was accompanied by further improvements in stone technology, where grinding, polishing, and boring produced implements of far superior quality. This ‘Neolithic Revolution’ began in the Middle East in the eighth millennium BC, in northern parts of Europe as late as the second. It saw the beginnings of cattle, sheep, and pig-farming; of horse-breeding and of hybridization to produce mules; of systematic cereal production; of ploughing, weaving, pottery, mining. It also saw the principal drive for the comprehensive colonization of the Peninsula, where previously only scattered settlements had existed.

Two main lines of neolithic advance have been identified. One, which is associated with the Linearbandkeramik or ‘linear pottery’, moved rapidly up the Danube Valley into central Europe. In a brief spurt of perhaps 700 years in the fifth millennium, it crossed the 1,500 miles between present-day Romania and the Netherlands. The pioneer settlements clustered round great communal long-houses built from the largest timbers of the newly cleared forest. Problems of agricultural over-exploitation and of manpower shortages led to temporary retreats, followed by the characteristic reoccupation of abandoned sites. A second line of advance, associated with the spread of a ‘stamped-pottery’ culture, moved westwards round the Mediterranean shore. In the fourth millennium there were further extensions of agricultural settlement into the Peninsula’s western and northern extremities—into Iberia, France, and Switzerland, the British Isles, Scandinavia, and eastern parts of the Great Plain. By c.3200 BC the whole of the Peninsula below latitude 62 °N was occupied by various types of a food-producing economy.15 [GAT-HUNTER] [TAMMUZ] [VINO]

In this era lake villages were built such as those at Charavines near Grenoble, at Chalain in the Jura, on the Federsee in Württemberg, or on Lake Zurich. They are particularly valuable to archaeologists, since the mud of the lake has acted as an almost perfect preservative of everything from kitchen utensils to half-eaten apple-cores, [TOLLUND]

Overall, six principal neolithic zones have been established: an east Mediterranean and Balkan zone, under strong influences from the Levant; the Tripol’ye-Cucuteni zone on the Ukrainian steppe; the Baltic-Black Sea zone of cord-impressed ceramics and of the ‘battle-axe’ people; the central zone of linear ceramics, with its heartland in Bohemia but with outposts west of the Rhine and east of the Vistula; the northern zone of the Great Plain, dominated by funnel-necked beaker ware; and the western zone of the ‘bell beaker’ people, stretching from southern Spain to the British Isles and Scandinavia. Late neolithic cultures were often connected with vast megalith constructions varying from simple dolmens or menhirs to huge chambered tombs, stone avenues, and stone circles. The principal sites are at New Grange (Ireland) and Maes Howe in the Orkneys, at Carnac in Brittany, and at Avebury and Stonehenge in Wiltshire. The risky suggestion has been made that they owe their development to international enterprise, even to contact with Egyptian, or possibly Minoan, metal-prospectors, [DASA] [GGANTIJA]

TAMMUZ

TAMMUZ, son of Ishtar or Ashetar, Mother of the Universe, was the Corn God of ancient Babylon. At the end of the harvest, the stalks of the last sheaves were plaited into straw fans or cages, in which the god could take refuge until the next season.

These corn idols or ‘dollies’ have continued to be made wherever wheat is cultivated. In the Balkans a dolly known as the Montenegrin Fan is still fashioned in the shape of its predecessors on the Nile. In Germany and Scandinavia straw stars and straw angels are popular items of Christmas decoration.

In England a vast repertoire of corn dollies was saved by rural conservationists when the art began to die out in the 1950s. Simple designs such as the Neck and the Horseshoe, the Knot and the Cat’s Paw, the Bell and the Lantern, can be found in all the wheat-growing counties. Local specialities include the Shropshire Mare, the Derbyshire Crown, and the Cambridge Umbrella. The Kern Babby of Northumberland and the Ivy Girl of Kent are nothing other than modern versions of ‘Mother Earth’, distant daughters of Egyptian Ishtar, of Demeter of the Greeks, and of Roman Ceres.1

The world knows three major staple cereals: rice, maize, and wheat. Of the three, ‘Europe chose wheat.’ Wheat came to Europe from Mesopotamia, and wherever Europeans have settled in force, they have taken their wheat with them—first to the empty lands of the neolithic north-west, more recently to the virgin prairies of America, Australia, and southern Siberia. The process whereby ‘the choice’ was made involved an endless series of experiments over several millennia. Although the rival cereals of rye, barley, oats, buckwheat, and millet have continued to exist in Europe, the triumphal march of King Wheat is uncontestable.2

Wheat—the genus Triticum of the grain-bearing grass family—is known in more than 1,000 varieties. Its grain is extremely nutritious. It consists on average of 70 per cent carbohydrate, 12 per cent protein, 2 per cent fat, 1.8 per cent minerals. The protein content is markedly higher than that of rice, 1 lb yielding up to 1,500 calories. Wheat-based nutrition is one of the factors which has given most Europeans a clear advantage in bodily stature over most rice-eaters and corn-eaters. Wheat is a seasonal crop, which only requires intensive labour at the spring sowing and the autumn harvest. Unlike the rice-growers, who had to tend the paddy-fields in disciplined brigades throughout the year, the wheat farmer was granted time and freedom to branch out, to grow secondary crops, to reclaim land, to build, to fight, to politicize. This conjunction may well contain the preconditions for many features of Europe’s social and political history, from feudalism and individualism to warmongering and imperialism. Wheat, however, quickly exhausts the soil. In ancient times, the land could only retain its fertility if the wheat fields were regularly left fallow and manured by domestic animals. From this there arose the traditional European pattern of mixed arable and livestock farming, and the varied diet of cereals, vegetables, and meat.

In bread-making, wheat proteins have the unique property of forming gluten when mixed with water to form dough. In turn, the gluten retains carbon dioxide emitted from the fermentation of yeast. The net result is a wheaten loaf that is lighter, finer, and more digestible than any of its competitors.3 ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ is a sentiment which European civilization could share with some of its Middle Eastern neighbours, but not with Indians, Chinese, Aztecs, or Incas.

The Chalcolithic Age is a term used by some prehistorians to describe the long transitional phase when Stone and Bronze overlapped.

The Bronze Age was marked by the manufacture of a new alloy through the admixture of copper with tin. Its onset began in the Middle East c.3000 BC, in northern Europe perhaps a thousand years later. Especially in the Mediterranean, it saw the growth of urban culture: written records, specialized crafts, widespread trade. Its greatest achievements were found at Mycenae, unearthed by Heinrich Schliemann from 1876 and at Cnossos in Crete, excavated by Sir Arthur Evans in 1899–1930. These sites are roughly contemporary with the stone circles at Stonehenge, whose three phases of construction began c.2600 BC. Charcoal from the ‘Aubrey Holes’ of Phase I at Stonehenge has been carbon-dated to 1848 BC ± 275 years; an antler pick from a stone socket of Phase III to 1710 BC ± 150 years. Hence, whilst advanced civilizations akin to those of the Middle East were developing in the Aegean, the peoples of the north-west were passing through the transition from Neolithic to Bronze, [SAMPHIRE]

However, talk of ‘advanced’ or ‘backward’ cultures might well be inhibited by the skills of the engineers of Stonehenge, who contrived to transport eighty blue-stones weighing over fifty tons apiece from the distant Presceliy Mountains of South Wales, and to erect them with such precision that awestruck observers have imagined them to be the working parts of a sun-computer.16 Indeed, carvings at Stonehenge of axes and daggers resembling objects found in the shaft-graves at Mycenae gave rise once again to speculation about direct contacts with the Mediterranean.

Interregional trade, especially in minerals, is one of the important features of Bronze Age Europe. The Peninsula’s mineral resources were rich and varied, but their distribution was uneven; and a widespread network of trade-routes grew up in response to the imbalances. Salt had been sought from the earliest times, either by mining rock-salt or by evaporating brine from seaside salt-pans. Huge rock-salt mountains occur naturally in several locations, from Cardona in Catalonia to the Salzkammergut in Austria or Wieliczka in Poland. Primitive salt-pans or sali-nae were located all along the hot southern coast, from the Rhone to the Dnieper. Now, permanent ‘salt roads’ began to function. Best known among them was the ancient Via Salaria, which linked Rome with the salt-pans of the Adriatic coast. Amber, which can be found both on the western shore of Jutland and on the Baltic shore east of the Vistula, was greatly prized as jewellery. The ancient ‘amber road’ ran down the valley of the Oder, through the Moravian Gap to the Danube, and over the Brenner Pass to the Adriatic. Obsidian and lapis lazuli were also in great demand. Copper and tin were the staples. Copper came first from Cyprus— whence its name—later from the Dolomites, and above all from the Carpathians. Carpathian copper found its way northwards at an early date to Scandinavia, and was later sent south to the Aegean. Tin, which was not always distinguished by the ancients from lead, was brought from distant Cornwall. The search for copper and tin seems to have stimulated transcontinental contacts more effectively than the subsequent search for iron, which was found much more readily.

VINO

WINE is no ordinary beverage. It has always been associated with lòve and religion. Its name, like that of Venus, is derived from the Sanskrit vêna, ‘beloved’. Coming from the Caucasus, it featured in both the daily diet and the religious ceremonies of the ancient world. First cultivated by Noah {Genesis ix. 20), it inspired not only pagan bacchanalia but also the communion cup of Christianity.1

Saint Martin of Tours, born at Sabaria (modern Szombathely) near the Danube, was the first patron saint of wine-drinkers. St Urban and St Vincent (whose name offers a play on ‘reeking of wine’), became the principal patrons of wine-growers and vintners.

Commercial wine-growing in medieval Europe was pioneered by the Benedictines at Château-Prieuré in the Bordeaux region, and at locations such as the Clos Vougeot on the Cote de Beaune in Burgundy. The Cluniacs on the Côte d’Or near Macon, and the Cistercians at Nuits St Georges, extended the tradition. According to Froissart, England’s possession of Bordeaux demanded a fleet of 300 vessels to carry the vintage home. Bénédictine (1534) from the Abbey of Fécamp, and Chartreuse (1604) from the Charterhouse in Dauphiné, pioneered the art of fortified wine.

Europe’s wine zone cuts the Peninsula in two. Its northern reaches pass along a line stretching from the Loire, through Champagne to the Mosel and the Rhineland, and thence eastwards to the slopes of the Danube, and on to Moldavia and Crimea. There are very few wine-growing districts which did not once belong to the Roman Empire. Balkan wines in Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece, inhibited by the anti-alcoholic Ottomans, are every bit as ancient as those of Spain, Italy, or France.

The consumption of wine has far-reaching social, psychological, and medical consequences. It has been invoked as a factor in religious and political groupings, such as the Protestant-Catholic divide in Germany, and even in the fate of battles. ‘It was wine and beer that clashed at Waterloo. The red fury of wine repeatedly washed in vain against the immovable wall of the sons of beer…’

Nor has St Martin’s homeland lost its viticultural excellence. The volcanic soil on the slopes above Tokay, the hot summer air of the Hungarian plain, the moisture of the Bodrog River, and the most nobly rotten of ‘Aszu’ grapes, form a unique combination. The pungent, velvety, peachlikeessencia of golden Tokay is not to everyone’s taste; and has rarely been well produced in recent decades. But it was once laid down for 200 years in the most exclusive cellars of Poland, and kept for the death-bed of mon-archs. A bottle of ‘Imperial Tokay’ from the days of Francis-Joseph is still one of the connoisseur’s most prized ambitions.3

ĠGANTIJA

THE islands of Malta present two historic puzzles—their language and their megaliths. The former is Semitic, of mediaeval Arab provenance. It is the only Semitic tongue to be written in the Latin script. (Romantic philologists once linked it with ancient Phoenician.) The megaliths are far older. The principal sites at the temple of Ggantija on Gozo Island, and at the unique subterranean hypogeum or ‘collective burial chamber’ at Hal Saflieni, dating from c.2400 BC. The earliest rock-cut monuments were constructed a millennium before.1

The procession of civilizations through Malta reads like a shorthand guide to European history.2 After the neolithic cave-dwellers, who built the megaliths, and the Bronze Age Beaker Folk, came the Carthaginians (from the seventh century BC) and then the Romans (from 218 BC). Gozo is often identified as ‘Calypso’s Isle’, where Odysseus was stranded. St Paul was shipwrecked in a bay named after him, north of Valletta, in AD 60. Allocated to the Eastern (Byzantine) Empire in 395, Malta was then ruled successively by Arabs (from 870), by Normans (from 1091), by the Knights Hospitallers (from 1530), by the French (from 1798), by the British (from 1802)—and from 1964, belatedly, by the Maltese themselves.

Special prominence accrued to those districts where several of the desired commodities could be found in close proximity. One such district was the Salzkammergut (Noricum), where the salt mountains of Ischl and Hallstatt lay alongside the metal mines of Noriae. Another lay in the vicinity of Cracow, where silver, lead, iron, and salt could all be found within a stone’s throw of the upper Vistula. Most productive of all, however, were the islands of the Aegean. Melos yielded obsidian; Paros yielded pure white marble; Kythnos yielded copper; Siphnos, and Laurion on the coast of Attica, yielded silver and lead. The wealth and power of Crete, and later of Mycenae, was clearly connected with the command of these Aegean resources and with their role as the termini of the transcontinental trade routes. They were the focus of what has been called the ‘international spirit’ of the Bronze Age.

DASA

APOPULAR history of mathematics states that the advance of the Beaker Folk into neolithic Europe was accompanied by the spread both of the Indo-European languages and of the decimal system. The statement is supported by lists of number words from a selection of Indo-European languages which use the Base-10 or decimal method of numeration. The implication is that prehistoric Europe was familiar with Base-10 counting three millennia before its introduction in written form.1

It is intriguing, of course, to think that one might reconstruct modes of counting in a remote and illiterate society, for which no direct evidence is available. Yet there can be no certainty that numbers used today have remained constant since prehistoric times; and one must be careful to test the hypothesis against all the most relevant languages:

	Celtic (Welsh)	German		Latin	Ancient	Slavonic (Russian)	Sansk
1.	un	eins	I	unus	heis	odin	eka
2.	dau	zwei	II	duo	duo	dva	dvi
3.	tri	drei	III	tres	treis	tri	tri
4.	pedwar	vier	IV	quattuor	tessares	chetyre	katur
5.	pump	fünf	V	quinqué	pente	piat’	panka
6.	chwech	sechs	VI	sex	hex	shest’	shash
7.	saith	sieben	VII	septem	hepta	syem’	sapta
8.	wyth	acht	VIII	octo	octo	vosyem’	ashta
9.	naw	neun	IX	novem	ennea	devyat’	nava
10.	deg	zehn	X	decem	deka	decyat’	dasa

Sanskrit, meaning ‘perfect speech’, is the second oldest of the recorded Indo-European languages. It was the language of ancient India and, in Hindu tradition, of the Gods. It was employed c.1500 BC for the composition of Vedic literature. Its prime followed shortly after the fall of the Indus civilization, which invented the decimal system.

Sanskrit’s number words were definitely based on decimal counting. Its units 1–10 corresponded with those found in other Indo-European languages. Its teens were simple combinations of units with the word for ten, hence ekadasa (1 + 10 = 11) or navadasa (9 + 10 = 19). Its tens were combinations of units with the collective numeral for a ‘decade’, dasat(i), hence vimsati or dvimdesati (2 x 10 = 20) or trimsati (3x10 = 30). Its word for 1,000, dasasata, meaning ‘ten hundreds’, stood alongside sa-hasra, a variation used in the formation of still higher numbers. It had a single word, crore for ‘10 million’, and another, satam, to express ‘percentage’.2 Latin numbers, too, are essentially decimal. But their structure bears no relation to Roman numerals, which are based on conglomerates of units, fives, and tens.

The Celtic languages, of which Welsh is the most active modern survivor, once stretched across much of Europe. They belong to the most ancient Indo-European forms in the West. Yet Celtic numerals have preserved elements of counting in Base-5, Base-10, and especially Base-20. Modern Welsh, like Sanskrit, uses decimal units for 1–10; but in the teens it uses numbers similar in structure to Roman numerals. Sixteen is un ar bymtheg or ‘one over five and ten’ (XVI); and nineteen is pedwar ar bymtheg or ‘four over five and ten’. Above nineteen, Base-20 counting takes over. Ugain is the base, and deugain (40), trigain (60), and pedwar gain (80) are all multiples of twenty. Thirty, seventy, and ninety are expressed as ‘ten over’ a multiple of twenty. Fifty, hanner cant, means ‘half of a hundred’.

	Welsh		Latin	Sanskrit
11	un ar ddeg	XI	undecim	ekadasa
20	ugain	XX	viginti	vimsati
30	deg ar h ugain	XXX	triginta	trimsati
40	deugain	XL	quadraginta	katvarimsati
50	hannercant	L	quinquaginta	pankasati
60	trigain	LX	sexaginta	shashti
70	deg â thrigain	LXX	Septuaginta	septati
80	pedwar ugain	LXXX	octoginta	ash it i
90	deg â phedwar hugain	XC	nonaginta	navati
100	cant	C	centum	sata
1.000	mil	M	mille	dasasata/sa-hasra

Base-20 counting, which started by using toes as well as fingers, is preserved in the English word ‘score’, which derives from the mark cut into counting-sticks. It is also reflected in French quatre-vingt, meaning ‘four times twenty’, which is probably a relic of Celtic Gaul.

In all probability, therefore, Europe’s early peoples counted in twos, fives, tens, dozens, or scores as they thought fit. At some point they must also have encountered the Babylonian system of Base-60, which was adopted for counting minutes and seconds. There is little reason to assume that Indo-Europeans in general, or the Beaker Folk in particular, were decimalized from the start.

In fact, Europe had to wait until the thirteenth century AD before Base-10 numbers were widely introduced. The key step, the use of 0 for ‘zero’, had first been taken in India. From there, the decimal system found its way into the Muslim world, and through Arabic Spain into Christendom. For several centuries it operated alongside the much clumsier Roman numerals, which could not even be used for addition or multiplication. When it finally triumphed, many Europeans did not realize that their numbers were not European at all.3 (See Appendix III, p. 1242.)

Neither Crete nor Mycenae were known to the early classicists who first formed our view of the ancient world. But it is now generally accepted that Minoan culture on Crete, and Mycenean culture on mainland Greece, formed the twin peaks of ‘Europe’s first civilization’. From the day when Schliemann found a golden death-mask in one of the royal shaft-graves at Mycenae, and telegraphed the mistaken news: ‘Today I have looked on the face of Agamemnon’, it was clear that he was opening up something far more significant than just another rich prehistoric grave, [LOOT]Both the palace sites on Crete, at Cnossos, Phaestus, and Mallia, and the mainland sites at Mycenae, Tiryns, and Pylos have yielded abundant proof of art, religion, technology, and social organization of a far more sophisticated kind than anything known before. The golden age of Minoan life, in the so-called ‘palatial period’, began c.1900 BC. That of the more warlike Mycenaeans, whose fortresses commanded the Plain of Argos and the Gulf of Corinth, began three or four centuries later. Together with the Trojans, who commanded the Dardanelles, the Minoans and the Mycenaeans brought European history out of the realm of faceless archaeology, [THRONOS]

In the late Bronze Age of central Europe, a widespread group of ‘Urnfield cultures’ was characterized by cemeteries where the cremated remains of the dead were buried in urns together with elaborate grave goods. Important Bronze Age sites have been found at Terramare (Italy), El Argar (Spain), Leubingen, Buchau, Adlerberg (Germany), Unëtice near Prague in Czechoslovakia, and at Otomani in Romania.

In the last quarter of the second millennium, c.1200 BC, Bronze Age Europe suffered an unexplained breakdown from which it never recovered. Archaeologists write of a ‘general systems collapse’. Trade was disrupted; cities were abandoned; political structures were destroyed. Waves of invaders descended on the remnants. Crete, having barely withstood a series of terrible natural catastrophes, had already fallen to the Mycenean Greeks, before Mycenae itself was destroyed. Within the space of a single century, many established centres passed into oblivion. The Aegean was overrun by tribes from the interior. The Hittite Empire in Asia Minor came to an end. Egypt itself was besieged by unidentified ‘sea peoples’. The Urnfield People survived in Central Europe relapsing into a long passive era which ended with the appearance of the Celts. Greece was plunged into its archaic Dark Age which separated the legendary era of the Trojan Wars from the recorded history of the later city-states.

SAMPHIRE

Boiled Samphire…. Pick marsh samphire during July or August at low tide. It should be carefully washed soon after collection and is best eaten very fresh. Tie the washed samphire with its roots still intact in bundles, and boil in shallow unsalted water for 8–10 minutes. Cut the string, and serve with melted butter. Eat the samphire by picking each stem up by the root and biting lightly, pulling the fleshy part away from the woody core.1

Prehistoric food has long since perished, and cannot easily be studied. Modern attempts to reconstruct the menus and the gastronomic techniques of the neolithic period rely on six main sources of information. Prehistoric rubbish tips present the archaeologists with large collections of meatbones, eggshells, and shellfish remains. The kitchen areas of hut sites often reveal seeds and pollen grains which can be identified and analysed. Implements for fishing and hunting and utensils for preparing, cooking, and eating food have survived in large numbers. (Cauldrons for boiling were common; ovens for baking were not.) The total food resources of the past can be assessed by subtracting modern items—such as yeast, wine, or onions—from the vast repertoire of edible plants and fauna living in the wild. All sorts of delicacies no longer in the cookbooks are known to have been eaten: guillemots, seakale, hedgehogs, beechmast, sloes. Much may also be learned by analogy with the food technology of primitive or pre-industrial societies, whose skills in everything from wild herbs to wind-drying, salting, and preserving are by necessity very considerable. Finally, modern techniques have permitted the analysis of the stomach contents of prehistoric corpses. The Tollund Man, for example, had eaten linseed, barley, and wild plants, [TOLLUND] [VINO]

Whether, in the end, one can ever recreate an authentic neolithic meal is a matter for debate, preferably pursued whilst chasing the samphire with marrow-bones served with virpa:

Marrow-Bones. (8 oz/225 g. marrow-bones, flour, salt, dry toast) Scrape and wash the bones, and saw in half across the shaft… Make a stiff paste of flour and water, and roll it out. Cover the ends of the bones with the paste to seal in the marrow, and tie the bones in a floured cloth. Stand upright in a pan of boiling salted water and simmer slowly for about 2 hours … Untie the cloth, and remove the paste from each bone. Fasten a paper napkin round each one and serve with dry toast.2

Sowans or Virpa. (1 lb/450 g. fine oatmeal, 3 lb. wheatmeal, 16 pt./ 91, water) Put both meals into a stone crock. Stir in 14 pints or 8 litres of lukewarm water, and let it stand for 5–8 days until sour. Pour off the clear liquid … This is the swats, which makes a refreshing drink. The remainder in the crock will resemble thick starch. Add about 2 pints or 1 litre water to give the consistency of cream. Strain through a cheesecloth over a colander. The liquid … will contain all the nutritious properties of oatmeal… Gentle rubbing with a wooden spoon, and a final squeezing of the cloth … will hasten the process.3

Reconstructing the past is rather like translating poetry. It can be done, but never exactly. Whether one deals in prehistoric recipes, colonial settlements, or medieval music, it needs great imagination and restraint if the twin perils of artless authenticity and clueless empathy are to be avoided. Did neolithic cooks really serve marrow-bones in a paper napkin, or strain their virpa through a cheesecloth? And were there prehistoric Augusts, when samphire could be picked?

THRONOS

THE throne in the Palace of Knossos in Crete has been described as ‘Europe’s oldest chair’. The claim is unlikely to be correct. What is certain is that high-backed chairs with arm-rests were reserved in ancient times for ceremonial purposes. They enabled rulers and high priests to assume a relaxed, dignified, and elevated position, whilst everyone else stood at their feet. From the royal throne, the concept of the chair as a symbol of authority has passed to the cathedra or See of bishops and to the Chairs of professors.

Furniture for everyday sitting is a relatively modern, European invention. When not standing, primitive peoples sat, squatted, or lay on the floor. Many Asian nations, including the Japanese, still prefer to do so. Ancient Greeks and Romans reclined on couches. The medievals used rough-hewn benches. Individual chairs were first introduced into monastic cells, perhaps to facilitate reading. They did not join the standard household inventory until the sixteenth century, nor the repertoire of fine design until the eighteenth. They were not widely used in schools, offices and workplaces until the end of the nineteenth.

Unfortunately, flat-bottomed chairs do not match the requirements of the human anatomy. Unlike the horse-saddle, which transfers much of the rider’s body-weight onto the stirrup, leaving the natural curvature of the spine intact, chairs lift the thighs at right-angles to the trunk and disrupt the equilibrium of the skeleton. In so doing, they put abnormal stress on the immobilized pelvis, hip-joints, and lumbar regions. Chronic backache is one of the many self-inflicted scars of modern progress.1

The Iron Age brings prehistory within range of regular historical sources. Iron-working is usually thought to have been initiated by the Hittites of Asia Minor. A gold-hilted dagger with an iron blade, unearthed from the royal tombs at Alaca Hüyük, may originate from the end of the third millennium BC. From there, the use of iron spread first to Egypt c.1200 BC, to the Aegean c.1000 BC, and to the Danube Basin c.750 BC. [TOLLUND]

On the mainland of the Peninsula, the prehistoric Iron Age is customarily divided into two successive periods—that of Hallstatt (c.750–400 BC) and of La Tène (c.400–50). Hallstatt, a site in the Saltzkammergut first explored in 1846, gave its name to a period and culture which blended the traditions of the former Urnfield people with fresh influences coming from the East. La Tène, a site on Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland discovered in 1858, gave its name to the second period, where iron-working reached a very high level of competence. Longswords, beautifully wrought from a hard iron core and a soft iron cutting edge which could be fearfully sharpened, were the hallmark of a warrior society, living in great hill forts. These people were familiar with the potter’s wheel, with horse-drawn chariots, with the minting of coins, and with highly stylistical art forms that combine native, Mediterranean, and even nomadic elements. At Rudki in the Holy Cross Mountains near Cracow in southern Poland, they left traces of the most extensive iron-workings in prehistoric Europe. They were active traders, and the tombs of their princes have yielded up Celtic jewellery, Etruscan vases, Greek amphorae, Roman artefacts. Not without dissenting voices, they have been widely identified with the Celts, ‘the first great nation north of the Alps whose name we know’. Apart from La Tène itself, important sites are located at Entremont in Provence, at Alesia in Burgundy, and at Villanova in Emilia.

With the appearance of Celts, European prehistory reaches the knottiest of all problems—the matching of the material cultures defined by archaeologists with the ethnic and linguistic groupings known from other sources. Most prehistori-ans do indeed accept that those iron-workers of the La Tène period were Celts, that they derived from the formation or influx of Celtic tribes in the first millennium BC, and that they were one and the same group whom Greek and Roman literary records refer to as Keltoi or Celtae. But the most recent survey of the matter maintains that the origin of the Celtic languages may lie much further back, in the neolithic era.17 One thing is certain: modern linguistic research has proved beyond doubt that the languages of the Celts are cognate both to Latin and to Greek, and to most of the languages of modern Europe. The Celts were the vanguard of a linguistic community that can be more clearly defined than the archaeological communities of prehistory. The Celts stand at the centre of the Indo-European phenomenon.

As long ago as 1786 Sir William Jones, a British judge serving in Calcutta, made the epoch-making discovery that the main languages of Europe are closely related to the principal languages of India. Jones saw the link between classical Latin and Greek and ancient Sanskrit. It subsequently turned out that many modern Indian languages formed part of the same family as their counterparts in Europe, namely the Romance, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, and Slavonic groups (see Appendix III, p. 1232).

At the time, no one had any idea how this family of’Indo-European’ languages could have found its way across Eurasia, though it came to be assumed that they must have been carried to the West by migrating peoples. In 1902, however, a German archaeologist. Gustav Kossinna. linked the Indn-F.urnneam with a specific type of corded ware pottery, that was widely distributed in sites throughout northern Germany. Kossinna’s conclusions indicated that an ‘Indo-European homeland’ could have existed in the north European Iron Age. The idea was developed by the prominent Australian archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe (1892–1957), whose synthesis, The Dawn of European Civilisation (1925), was one of the most influential books of its day. Most recently the Lithuanian-American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas has confirmed his placement of the Indo-European homeland on the steppelands of Ukraine by identifying it with the widespread Kurgan culture of barrow-burials in that area:

TOLLUND

TOLLUND is the name of a marsh near Aarhus in Denmark, where in 1950 the whole body of a prehistoric man was-discovered in a state of remarkable preservation. It is displayed in the Silkeborg Museum. The tan-nic acid of the peat had mummified him so perfectly that the delicate facial features were quite intact, as were the contents of his stomach. Except for a pointed leather cap and waistband, he was naked, and had been strangled with a braided leather rope, apparently the victim of ritual murder some two thousand years ago. His strange fate can evoke a haunting sense of compassion, even today:

Something of his sad freedom
As he rode the tumbril
Should come to me, driving,
Saying the names
Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,
Watching the pointing hands
Of country people,
Not knowing their tongue.
Out there in Jutland
In the old, man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy, and home.

Yet Tollund Man is not alone. Similar discoveries were made thirty years later at Lindow Moss in Cheshire (England); and a particularly interesting corpse came to light in September 1991 in a glacial pocket near the Similaun Ridge of the Otztaler Alps in South Tirol. The body appeared to be that of a pre-Bronze Age hunter, fully dressed and equipped. He was 5 feet (152 cm) in height, 120 lb (54.4 kg), perhaps twenty years old, with blue eyes, a shaven face, and even a complete brain. He was very thoroughly clad in tanned leather tunic and leggings, a cap of chamois fur, birchbark gloves, and hay-lined, thick-soled boots. His skin was tattooed with blue tribal markings in four places, and he was wearing a necklace made from 20 sunray thongs and one stone bead. He was carrying an empty wooden-framed rucksack, a broken 32-inch (975 cm) bow, a quiver of 14 bone-tipped arrows, a stone-bladed axe tipped with pure copper, a short flint knife, and a body belt containing flints and tinder. He apparently froze to death whilst crossing the pass in a blizzard. Rigor mortis fixed his outstretched arm, still trying to shield his eyes. Dated to 2731 BC ± 125, he finally reached an unintended destination in the deep-freeze at Innsbruck University with some 5,000 years’ delay.2

Prehistoric bodies are clearly a valuable source of scientific information. Recent advances in ‘prehistoric pathology’ have facilitated detailed analysis of the bodies’ tissues, diseases, bacteria, and diet. But no one can entirely forget the case of Piltdown Man, whose bones were unearthed at a quarry in Sussex in 1908. In the same year that Tollund Man was discovered, Piltdown Man was shown to be one of the great master forgeries.

Constantly accumulating archaeological discoveries have effectively eliminated the earlier theories of Indo-European homelands…. The Kurgan culture seems the only remaining candidate for being Proto-Indo-European. There was no other culture in the neolithic and chalcolithic periods which would correspond with the hypothetical mother culture of the Indo-Europeans as reconstructed with the help of common words; and there were no other great expansions and conquests affecting whole territories where the earliest historic sources and a cultural continuum prove the existence of Indo-European speakers.18

The essential point here is that Gordon Childe and his successors were using the term ‘culture’ in relation to human groups defined both by material and by linguistic criteria. Yet on reflection there seems no good reason why archaeological cultures should necessarily be correlated with linguistic groups in this way. The Indo-European enigma is not really solved. It is particularly exciting to realize that languages evolve by ceaseless mutation just as living organisms do. In this case, it may become possible to correlate the chronology of language change in Europe with that of genetic change. By comparing the time-trace of ‘linguistic clocks’ with that of our ‘molecular clocks’, the story of the origins of the European peoples and their languages may one day be unravelled.19

Europe’s place-names are the product of thousands of years. They form a deep resource for understanding its past. The names of rivers, hills, towns, provinces, and countries are often the relics of bygone ages. The science of onomastics can delve beneath the crust of historical records.20 By common consent the names of rivers are among the most ancient and persistent. They are frequently the only surviving links with the peoples who preceded the present population. By a process of accretion, they can sometimes preserve a record of the successive waves of settlement on their banks. The ‘River Avon’, for example, combines two synonyms, one English, the other the older Welsh. Five Celtic root words connected with water—afon, dwr, uisge, rhe, and possibly don—supply the commonest elements in river-names right across Europe. Scholars endlessly disagree, of course. But among the best-known candidates would be the Inn and the Yonne, Avignon on the Rhodanus (‘Watertown’ on the ‘Swift River’), the Esk, the Etsch (or Adige), the Usk, and the Danube.

Celtic names abound from Portugal to Poland. The modern Welsh dwr, ‘water’, for example, has its cognates in Dee, Douro, Dordogne, Derwent (Clear Water), Durance, and Oder/Odra. Pen, meaning ‘head’ and hence ‘mountain’, appears in Pennine, Apennine, Pieniny, and Pindus; ard, ‘high’, in Arden, Ardennes, Lizard (High Cape), and Auvergne (Ar Fearanriy ‘High Country’); dun, ‘fort’, in Dunkeld (Fort of the Celts), Dungannon, London, Verdun, Augustodunum (Fort Augustus, Autun), Lugdunum (Lyons), Lugodinum (Leyden), Thun in Switzerland, and Tyniec near Cracow. All attest to the far-flung presence of the Celts, [LLANFAIR] [LUGDUNUM]

Similar exercises can be undertaken with Norse roots, Germanic roots, Slavonic roots, even Phoenician and Arabic roots. Etna is a very suitable Phoenician name meaning ‘the furnace’. Elsewhere in Sicily, Marsala has a simple Arabic name meaning ‘Port of God’. Trajan’s bridge across the upper Tagus in Spain is now known as La puente de Alcantara—al cantara being the exact Arabic equivalent of the Latin pons.

Slavonic place-names spread much further west than the present-day Slavonic population. In northern Germany, for example, they are common in the region of Hanover. In Austria, names such as Zwettl (Světly, ‘Bright Spot’), Doebling (Dub, ‘Little Oak’), or Feistritz (Bystřice, ‘Swift Stream’) can be encountered from the environs of Vienna to Tyrol. In Italy, they overlap with Italian in the province of Friuli.

The names of towns and villages frequently incorporate a record of their origins. Edinburgh was once ‘Edwin’s fort’; Paris, the city of the Parish’ tribe; Turin (Torino), the city of the Taurini; Göttingen, the ‘family home of the Godings’; Kraków (Cracow), the seat of good King Krak. Elsewhere, they record the attributes or function of the place. Lisboa/Lisbon means ‘Good Spot’; Trondheim means ‘Home of the Throne’; Munich/Mtinchen, ‘Place of the Monks’; Redruth ‘Place of the Druids’; Novgorod, ‘New City’. Sometimes they recall distant disasters. Ossaia in Tuscany, meaning ‘Place of Bones’, lies on the site of Hannibal’s victory at Trasimeno in 217 BC. Pourrières in Provence, originally ‘Campi Putridi’ (Putrid Fields), marks the slaughter of the Teutons by Marius in 102 BC; Lechfeld in Bavaria, the ‘Field of Corpses’, the scene of the Magyars’ defeat inAD955.

The names of nations frequently reflect the way they saw themselves or were seen by others. The west Celtic neighbours of the Anglo-Saxons call themselves Cymry or ‘Compatriots’, but were dubbed Welsh or ‘Foreigners’ by the Germanic intruders. Similarly, French-speaking Walloons are known to the Flemings as Waalsch. The Germanic peoples often call themselves Deutsch or Dutch (meaning ‘germane’ or ‘alike’), but are called Niemtsy, ‘the Dumb’, by their Slavonic neighbours. The Slavs think of each other as the people of the Slovo or ‘common word’, or as Serb(kinsman). They often call the Latins Vlachy, Wallachs, or Wiochy— which is another variation on the ‘Welsh’ theme. The assorted Vlachs and Wallachians of the Balkans tend to call themselves Romani, Rumeni, or Aromani (Romans).

The names of countries and provinces frequently record the people who once ruled them. The Celtic root of Gal-, indicating ‘Land of the Gaels or Gauls’, occurs in Portugal, Galicia in Spain, Gallia (Gaul), Pays des Galles (Wales), Cornwall, Donegal, Caledonia (later Scotland), Galloway, Calais, Galicia in southern Poland, even in distant Galatia in Asia Minor.

Place-names, however, are infinitely mobile. They change over time; and they vary according to the language and the perspective of the people who use them. They are the intellectual property of their users, and as such have caused endless conflicts. They can be the object of propaganda, of tendentious wrangling, of rigid censorship, even of wars. In reality, where several variants exist, one cannot speak of correct or incorrect forms. One can only indicate the variant which is appropriate to a particular time, place, or usage. Equally, when referring to events over large areas of time and space, the historian is often forced to make a choice between equally inappropriate alternatives.

Yet historians must always be sensitive to the implications. One easily forgets that ‘Spain’, ‘France’, ‘England’, ‘Germany’, ‘Poland’, or ‘Russia’ are relatively recent labels which can easily be used anachronistically. It is clearly wrong to talk of ‘France’ instead of ‘Gaul’ in the Roman period, as it is dubious to speak of ‘Russia’ prior to the state in Muscovy. Writing in English, one automatically writes of the ‘English Channel’, ignoring that ‘La Manche’ is at least half French. Writing in Polish, one automatically writes ‘Lipsk’ for Leipzig, without laying claim to the Polishness of Saxony, just as in German one says ‘Danzig’ for Gdansk, or ‘Breslau’ for Wroclaw, without necessarily implying the exclusive Germanity of Pomerania or Silesia. One forgets that official language, which presents place-names in forms preferred by the bureaucracy of the ruling state, does not always concur with the practice of the inhabitants. Above all, one forgets that different people have every reason to think of place-names in different ways, and that no one has the right to dictate exclusive forms. One man’s Deny is another man’s Londonderry. This person’sAntwerpen is the other person’s Anvers. For them, it was East Galicia or Eastern Little Poland; for others, it is ‘Western Ukraine’. For the ancients, it was the Borysthenes: for the moderns, it is the Dnipr, the Dnepr, or the Dnieper. For them, it is Oxford, or even Niu-Jin: for us, foreverRhydychen.

‘European History’ has always been an ambiguous concept. Indeed, both ‘Europe’ and ‘History’ are ambiguous. Europe may just refer to that Peninsula whose landward boundary for long stayed undefined—in which case historians must decide for themselves where the arbitrary bounds of their studies will lie. But ‘European’ can equally apply to the peoples and cultures which originated on the Peninsula—in which case the historian will be struggling with the world-wide problems of ‘European Civilization’. History may refer to the past in general; or else, in distinction to prehistory, it may be confined to that part of the past for which a full range of sources are extant. With prehistory, one is dealing with the evidence of myth, of language, and above all of archaeology. With history in the narrower sense, one is also dealing with literary records, with documents, and above all with the work of earlier historians. In either case, whether one is beckoned by the ends of prehistory or the beginning of history proper, one is brought to the terminus of Europa’s ride, to the island of Crete.

1628 BC, Cnossos, Crete. Standing on the high northern terrace of the palace, the courtiers of Minos looked out to the distant sea over the shimmering groves of olive and cypress. They were the servants of the great Priest-King, masters of the Cretan thalassokratia the world’s first ‘seaborne empire’. Supported by the trade of their far-ranging ships, they lived a life of comfort, of ritual, and of administrative order. Their quarters were supplied with running water, with drainage, and with flushed sewers. Their walls were covered with frescos—griffins, dolphins, and flowers, painted onto luminous settings of deep blue and gold. Their spacious courtyards were regularly turned into arenas for the ceremonial sport of bull-leaping. Their underground storehouses were packed with huge stone vats filled with corn, wine, and oil for 4,000 people. Their domestic accounts were immaculately kept on soft clay tablets, using a method of writing which progressed over the centuries through hieroglyphic, cursive, and linear forms. Their craftsmen were skilled in jewellery, metalwork, ceramics, faience. They were so confident of their power and prosperity that none of their palaces was fortified (see Appendix III, p. 1217).

Religion played a vital role in the life of the Minoans. The central object of their worship was probably the great Earth Goddess, later known as Rhea, mother of Zeus. She was revealed in many forms and aspects, and was attended by a host of lesser deities. Her sanctuaries were placed on mountain-tops, in caves, or in the temple-chambers of the palaces. Surviving sealstones portray naked women embracing the sacred boulders in ecstasy. Sacrifices were surrounded by the Cult of the Bull, by orgies, and by a mass of ritual paraphernalia such as altar tables, votive containers, blood-buckets, and wasp-waisted statuettes of fertility goddesses. The ubiquitous symbols of bulls’ horns and of the labrys or double-headed axe were carried on high poles in procession. In times of danger or disaster, the sacrifice of animals was supplemented by the sacrifice of human children, even by cannibalistic feasts. (After all, Rhea’s husband, Cronus, was remembered as a devourer of children, and but for a timely ruse would have eaten the infant Zeus.) Minoan ritual, therefore, was intense. But it was an important ingredient in the social cement which held a peaceable society together for centuries. Some observers have remarked on the absence of modern masculinity in representation of Minoan males.21 These remarks necessarily prompt questions about the island’s role in the transition from ‘primitive matriarchy’, and the onset of ‘patriarchal warfare’. (See Plates 3, 4.)

Minoan civilization flourished on Crete for the best part of a thousand years. According to Sir Arthur Evans, the excavator of Cnossos, it passed through nine distinct phases, each identified with a particular ceramic style, from Early Minoan I to Late Minoan HI. The zenith was reached somewhere in the middle of Minoan II, in the second quarter of the second millennium BC. By that time, unbeknown to the courtiers on the terrace, the first of the ‘great catastrophes’ was upon them.

Map 5.
The Ancient Aegean: 2nd Millennium BC

The ethnic identity of the Minoans is the subject of considerable controversy. The old assumption that they were Hellenes is no longer widely accepted. The Linear A script, which might unlock the language of the earlier periods, has not been deciphered; whilst Linear B, which was definitively identified as Greek in 1952, clearly belongs only to the final phase. Arthur Evans was convinced not only of a strong Egyptian influence on Crete but also of the possibility of Egyptian colonization. ‘It may well be asked whether, in the times… that marked the triumph of the dynastic element in the Nile Valley, some part of the older population … may not have made an actual settlement on the soil of Crete.’ However, in the course of the second millennium Crete seems to have been invaded by several waves of migrants. It can reasonably be supposed that the hellenization of the island began with one of the later waves some time after the ‘great catastrophes’.

Another possibility is that the Minoans of the middle period were Hittites from Asia Minor. The Hittites were Indo-Europeans, and spoke a language called Kanesian. Their great confederation was centred on what is now Hattusas in Anatolia, and mounted a major challenge both to Mesopotamia and to Egypt. In the fourteenth century BC their greatest ruler, Suppiluliumash or Shubbiluliuma (c.1380–1347 BC), extended his sway as far as Jerusalem. In 1269 BC they entered a treaty of alliance with Egypt. (The bilingual text of the tablet recording this event, the oldest diplomatic document in existence, is now displayed in the foyer of the United Nations Building in New York.) In 1256 BC the Hittite King Khattushilish III travelled to Egypt to attend the wedding of his daughter with the Pharaoh Rameses II. So, if Hittite influence had been spread so widely over the Middle East, there is every likelihood that it could also have been projected from the mainland to Crete. More specifically, the discovery of a bull cult at the Hittite centre of Çatal Huyuk in Anatolia suggests a connection of much greater intimacy. But nothing is certain.

According to later Greek legend, Crete was the birthplace both of Zeus and of the dreaded Minotaur. Zeus, after abducting Europa, had simply brought her to his island home. A cave on Mount Ida is still shown to tourists as the site of his birth. The Minotaur, on the other hand, was the product of a stranger passion. Pasiphaë, the queen of Minos, was said to have taken a liking to a sacrificial bull presented by the sea-god, Poseidon, and, with the assistance of Daedalus, the architect of Cnossos, had succeeded in having intercourse with it. For this purpose, Daedalus devised a hollow wooden cow, within which the intrepid queen had presumably struck a suitable pose. The resultant offspring was the monstrous Minotaur—half-man, half-beast, Vinfamia di Creti. Whereupon Daedalus was ordered to devise a labyrinth in which to keep it.

At that point, the plot thickened with the arrival of Theseus, hero of Athens. Theseus’ obsession with killing the Minotaur may well be explained by the fact that he was the child of yet another mother who had dallied with a bull. At all events, having joined the annual transport of seven boys and seven maidens which Athens paid to Crete as tribute, he managed to reach Cnossos; and, mastering the labyrinth by means of a ball of thread provided by Ariadne, Pasiphaë’s daughter, he slew the Minotaur and escaped. He then fled with Ariadne to Naxos, where he deserted her. By another lamentable lapse, on approaching Athens he forgot to give the agreed signal of success, which was to change the colour of his sail from black to white. His despairing father, Aegeus, threw himself into the sea, which was henceforth named after him. These stories clearly date from an era when Crete was the great power, and the Greek communities of the mainland were dependent tributaries.

Daedalus is also credited by legend with mankind’s maiden flight. Barred by Minos from leaving Crete, he fashioned two pairs of wings from wax and feathers and, in the company of his son Icarus, soared from the slopes of Mount Ida. Icarus flew too close to the sun, and plunged to his death. But Daedalus flew on to complete his escape to the mainland. ‘Minos may own everything,’ wrote Ovid, ‘but not the air’ (Omnia possideat, non possidet aera Minos).

Mount Ida stands 8,000 ft (2,434 m) above the sea, and one can well imagine how the thermal currents would have carried those human birds to a height where the whole of Aegean civilization was laid out like a map beneath them. Crete itself, a rocky strip some 130 miles in length, faced south to the shore of Africa and north across the Aegean. Its dominion stretched to Sicily in the west and to Cyprus in the east. To the north-west lay the Peloponnese, dominated by the city of Mycenae with its royal ‘beehive’ tombs, and its Lion Gate. To the north-east, in the angle of Asia Minor, stood the ancient city of Troy. In the centre lay the scattered islands of the Cydades, Crete’s first colonies. Nearest of all, set like a jet-black diamond in the deep blue sea, beautiful and ominous, rose the perfect cone of the island of Thera.

It is doubtful that the Minoans knew much about the lands and peoples beyond the range of their ships. They knew North Africa, of course, especially Egypt, with which they traded: Cretan envoys are depicted on the temple walls at Thebes. Cnossos at the height of its magnificence in Late Minoan II coincided with the close of the 18th Dynasty of Aminhotep III, and hence with the accession of Tutankhamun. The Minoans knew the cities of the Levant—Sidon, Tyre, and Jericho—which were already ancient, and through them the countries of the Near East. In the seventeenth century BC the Hebrews were still kept captive in Egypt. The Aryans had recently migrated from Persia to India. The Babylonians ruled over the Land of the Two Rivers, united by Hammurabi the Lawgiver. Hammurabi’s Code, based on the principle of ‘an eye for an eye, a. tooth for a tooth’, was the civilizational high point of the age. The Assyrians had recently become the vassals of Babylon. The Hittites, having formed the strongest state in western Asia, were starting to press into Palestine. (See Appendix III, p. 1216.)

The Minoans may well have had dealings with the pre-Latin peoples of Italy. There was no obstacle to their ships cruising into the western Mediterranean. They could also have met the Bell-Beaker People and the Megalith-Builders of Malta and southern Spain, and have sailed into the Black Sea, where they could have encountered the Tripolye People. The latter could have acted as middlemen on the last, southern leg of the trade routes which led from the dominant Unëtice and Tumulus peoples of the interior. The prime commodity was copper, its main source the mines of the Dolomites and the Carpathians.

Beyond that, the veil of the Minoans’ direct knowledge would have been firmly drawn. Whilst they basked in the Bronze Age, the northern lands lingered in the later stages of the neolithic. The westward march of the Indo-Europeans had undoubtedly begun. It is sometimes associated with the advent of a male-dominated warrior culture, which subdued both its peaceable predecessors and its own women. The advance guard of the Celts was already on station in central Europe. The Germanic, Baltic, and Slavonic tribes rested somewhere in the rear. The first northern trappers and merchants from beyond the ‘frontier’ may well have reached the Aegean. Both amber and jade had found their way to Crete.

The eruption of Thera (Santorini) was one of the greatest events of European prehistory. In one crack of doom, like that at Krakatoa in modern times, 30 cubic kilometres of rock, fire, and sulphuric acid were blown twenty miles into the stratosphere. At a distance of only one hundred miles, the watchers at Cnossos could not have failed to see the plume and the flashes, and then the pillar of fiery ash. With nine minutes’ delay they would have heard the boom, the rumbles, and the thuds. They would have seen the sea recede as it rushed to fill the gash in the seabed, only to recover with the dispatch of a mighty tidal wave that swamped the Cretan shore under a hundred feet of brine.

High above Cnossos, on the northern slopes of Mount Juktas, the priests of the mountain shrine busied themselves with the human sacrifice which the disaster demanded. On this occasion, the everyday offerings of fruit, seeds, or wine, or even the slaughter of a prime bull, would not suffice. In the dark central chamber of the temple, one man prepared a blood-bucket adorned with the figure of a bull in white relief. At the inner end of the western chamber, a young woman lay face down, legs apart. On a low table, a young man lay with his feet bound—on his chest a bronze-bladed knife engraved with a boar’s head. Beside him stood a powerful man of status, who wore a precious iron ring and an agate sealstone engraved with the figure of a god punting a boat. But the earthquake triggered by the eruption of Thera struck first. The temple roof collapsed. The sacrifice was never completed. The bodies of the participants remained where they lay, to be discovered three and a half millennia later.23

The dating of Thera’s eruption has largely been achieved by dendrochronology. In 1628 BC the rings of trees as far apart as the bristle-cone pines of California and the bog oaks of Ireland entered a period of stunted growth. Temperatures evidently plummeted throughout the northern hemisphere, probably in response to the Veil effect’ of high-floating volcanic dust. Confirmation of a world-wide disaster in the period 1645 BC, ± 20 years, comes from sulphuric acid deposits in the relevant ice-layers in Greenland. Recent carbon-dating at Thera itself also suggests an eruption date at least a century earlier than the original estimate of 1500 BC. Scientific doubts remain, of course; but 1628 BC is clearly ‘the best working hypothesis’.24

The palace at Cnossos escaped the later fate of Pompeii and Herculaneum. A westerly wind happened to be blowing on the day of the eruption, and the heaviest deposits of ash fell on the coast of Asia Minor. Even so, Cnossos was rocked by the quake that felled walls and pillars; and one has to assume that damage to the vital Minoan navy was extensive, if not total. In the space of a few hours the cone of Thera was reduced to a smouldering ring of black basalt cliffs round an eerie, sulphurous lagoon. Like the stump of rock in the centre of that lagoon, Crete must have been left marooned at the centre of a blasted empire.

Archaeological layering on eastern Crete shows that a clear interval of time separated the Thera eruption from a subsequent, and still unexplained, disaster which left the palace of Cnossos in ruins, with the clay tablets baked so hard by fire that they can still be read today. Thera did not destroy Cnossos, as was once proposed. But it certainly delivered the first of the blows which spelled the end of Minoan civilization. Material destruction and population loss must have been enormous, the disruption of trade crippling. A weakened Crete was left open to the mercy of Dorian warriors, and in due course was thoroughly hellenized.

The violent end of Europe’s first civilization inevitably prompts thoughts about the rise and fall of civilizations in general. One wonders whether the Minoan survivors would have blamed their misfortunes on their own shortcomings. One wonders whether the Catastrophe Theory that applies to various branches of the physical sciences can equally be applied to the long-term patterns of human affairs. One wonders whether the mathematical Theory of Chaos can somehow explain why long, tranquil periods of growth and development can be suddenly interrupted by intervals of confusion and disorder. Is it conceivable that the eruption of Thera was provoked by the fluttering wings of some prehistoric butterfly?

Archaeologists and prehistorians think in large spans of time. For them, the prehistoric, Bronze Age civilization which came to an end with Cnossos and Mycenae was but the first of three great cycles of European history. The second cycle coincided with the classical world of Greece and Rome. The third cycle, which began with the ‘systems collapse’ at the end of the Roman Empire, coincides with the rise of modern Europe. It is still with us.

Almost 3,500 years have passed since the destruction of Cnossos. In that time the face of Europe has been transformed many times over. Just as Greece succeeded to the glory that was Crete, so Rome was built on Greek foundations, and ‘Europe’ on the relics of Rome. Vigorous youth, confident maturity, and impotent age all seem to be encoded into the history of political and cultural communities as they are in the lives of individuals. Europe has no shortage of successors to the fate of Crete—of states and nations that once were strong and now are weak. Europe itself, which once was strong, is now weaker. The nuclear explosion at Chernobyl in April 1986 alerted people to the possibility of a continental disaster of Theran proportions; whilst in 1989 the explosive liberation of the nations of Eastern Europe inspired hopes of greater peace and unity. The watchers of late European III worry whether their fate will be one of terminal decline, of invasion by some new barbarians, or perhaps of catastrophic destruction. Or perhaps they will live to see the last golden summer of Late European IV.