Part I
Origins of a Continent
In this part . . .
Europe offers much more than a summer backpacking around the Eiffel Tower and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Europe is the smallest of the worldâs continents but itâs one of the most varied. This part introduces you to Europe and its history and gives you some idea of why Europeâs had such an impact on the world. Youâll see something of Europeâs long, fascinating Stone Age, with its mysterious cave paintings and stone circles, and you can consider the strange case of Neanderthal Man â the advanced form of life that just didnât seem to go anywhere.
Youâll also consider the idea of Europe. General De Gaulle used to talk about âa certain idea of Franceâ, but you can say the same of the whole continent. Europeans have a strong idea of their separate national identities, but they are also aware that they are part of a much wider unit, with its own distinctive culture.
Chapter 1
Not So Much a Continent, More a Way of Life
In This Chapter
Defining European culture and identity Identifying what European history has in common Tracing Europeâs impact on the world One thing that hits you very quickly about Europe is how varied it is. In some areas, you can take a two-hour drive and go through three or four different language zones, sometimes with different alphabets to write them with. General de Gaulle once said that you could not unite a nation like France that had 265 different types of cheese; itâs even harder for Europe, a small continent that canât decide which language to speak, which religion to follow, which money to use, or even where exactly it begins and ends.
Where Is Europe?
Most continents have a pretty obvious land mass, but Europeâs a bit different. Because Europeâs part of the same land mass as Asia, you could make a case for saying that, geographically, itâs not really a separate continent at all. The border between Europe and Asia is usually taken as the Ural mountains in Russia, but that line is a bit arbitrary.
The border becomes even more arbitrary in the Mediterranean region. The city of Istanbul sits officially at the meeting point between Europe and Asia, with just a narrow waterway, the Bosphorus, between them. But if youâre expecting to find yourself in a different world as soon as you step off the ferry, you may be disappointed. Much of Turkey looks pretty similar to much of Greece, which is not surprising because they were both part of the same culture. Cyprus is part of âEuropeâ, but it has a lot more in common with âAsianâ Turkey than it has with other European islands, such as Iceland, Ireland, or the islands of the Baltic. In fact, for much of Europeâs history, the Mediterranean world has operated as a single unit, with trading ships going back and forth from one coast to another and mighty empires seeking to rule the whole area, without anyone making too much of the fact that, strictly speaking, three separate continents come together there.
How Many Europes?
Once you start looking for similarities that hold Europeans together, you end up with some unexpected results. For one thing, you soon find that more âEuropesâ have existed than you may have thought.
A Christian Europe?
The idea of Europe as a Christian continent works, up to a point. However, Europe has a substantial Muslim population, and not just post-war immigrants but communities first created when the Ottoman Turks overran eastern Europe back in the 15th century. Much of Spain used to be ruled by Muslims from North Africa, who established what they called the Caliphate of Cordoba; you can still get a sense of their rich cultural legacy in the beautiful Alhambra Palace in Granada. Christianity did spread across Europe, so much so that talk focused on Christendom, a sort of united Christian Europe. However Christendom split into two geographic and theological camps: the Catholic Church based at Rome and the Orthodox Church based at Constantinople.
Medieval Catholics regarded Orthodox Christians as little better than infidels (that is, non-believers), and in 1204, an army of western Crusaders on its way to Jerusalem decided to teach them a lesson by trashing the great Christian city of Constantinople. (You can find out more about this deplorable episode in Chapter 8.)
Fast forward three centuries, and you find Europe tearing itself in two over the religious ideas of Martin Luther and John Calvin. This period is called the Reformation (Chapter 11 has the details), and it divided Europe into Protestant (England, Scotland, northern Germany, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, parts of Switzerland) and Catholic (Italy, France, Spain, Poland, Hungary, southern Germany, Ireland), not to mention eastern Orthodox (Russia, Greece, the Balkans). Christian Europe? Take your pick: there were three!
A royal Europe?
When religious leaders werenât claiming divine fiat over parts of Europe, European royals claimed â or tried to claim â their own divine right to rule.
Royal flush . . .
Does it make sense to think of Europe as a continent that, historically at any rate, relates easily to monarchy? Europe has thrown up a lot of kings who were born to rule and knew it. Among these men were:
Medieval kings, such as St Louis IX of France or Henry II of England, who held all the lands of their kingdoms, so that everyone else, even the most mighty nobles, were their tenants. Holy Roman Emperors who ruled Germany and saw themselves as the leaders of Christian Europe, like Henry IV, known as âStupor Mundiâ, the âWonder of the Worldâ. The Tsars of Russia, such as Ivan IV âthe Terribleâ; autocrats of a vast empire who could expect their every word to be obeyed. King Philip II of Spain, who ruled a worldwide empire from a simple bedsit inside the vast bureaucratic palace he built for himself outside Madrid, El Escorial. Louis XIV of France, the âSun Kingâ, so called because his court at Versailles was meant to be as magnificent as the sun itself. He believed in the divine right of kings to rule â absolutely. You could say â and some historians have said it â that all those dictators in 20th-century Europe were simply following a pattern set by their royal predecessors. Stalin sometimes gets called a Red Tsar, and Mussolini certainly saw himself as a latter-day Roman Emperor (he ended up like some of them, too).
. . . and royals flushed
But history records another Europe that has never believed in the divine right of kings and is rather proud of having kept its rulers under tight control. The English forced King John to accept Magna Carta in 1215, and by the end of the 17th century, they had cut off one kingâs head, kept another in exile for years, and forced a third to flee for his life. The Swiss banded together to kick out the Austrians back in the 13th century and have been fiercely proud of their republican tradition ever since. The Italians set up a series of city republics in the middle ages and were forever on their guard â not always successfully, it has to be said â against would-be rulers who might try to take them over. The Dutch and the Germans have very strong traditions of city republics, banding together to defend their independence. All these countries looked for inspiration to the city states of ancient Greece, and to the big daddy of them all, the ancient Roman Republic.
The danger, as the Romans and later the Italians were to find out to their cost, didnât come from foreign enemies but from their own successful generals. The Roman word for an army commander was imperator; itâs no coincidence that it gave us the word emperor, because thatâs what Roman imperators turned into. (Head to Chapters 4 and 6 to find out what went wrong with the Romansâ noble experiment in republican government.)
A democratic Europe?
The Council of Europe, which was set up after the Second World War, likes to promote the idea that to be properly European...
