War and peace and war, p.24
War and Peace and War, page 24
The conversion of Hungary nevertheless was an important turning point. Hungary became part of Latin Christendom, and even though the Hungarians and the Germans fought many wars after 1100, and mutual enmity lingered on all the way to the nineteenth century, a metaethnic divide no longer existed between the two nations. They now belonged to the same civilization.
For three centuries, Austria was the Frankish march against the steppe invaders (and before that, this region was the Roman frontier province of Noricum). The centuries on the metaethnic fault line created a highly solidary nation with its own distinct identity (which is one of the reasons why Austria is still outside Germany). The rise of Austria as a great power was slow but steady. It acquired the status of an independent duchy in 1156, and in 1282 became the core of the budding Habsburg Empire. The Habsburgs acquired Carinthia and Carniola (Slovenia) in 1335 and Tirol in 1368. In 1438, they became emperors of the German (“Holy Roman”) Empire, and kept the imperial crown until the dissolution of the empire in 1806. Of course, the Holy Roman Empire was a pretty ramshackle construct, but nevertheless it gave the emperor a good deal of soft power. The big spurt of territorial expansion came in 1526, after the Ottoman Turks smashed the Hungarian army at the battle of Mohacs and conquered two thirds of the Hungarian Empire. The Habsburgs grabbed the unconquered Hungarian possessions of Croatia, Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia, and Silesia. (Silesia was lost to Prussia in 1742.)
With the arrival of the Turks on the Hungarian plains, Austria again found itself on an intense metaethnic fault line. Vienna became a frontier fortress and was besieged by the Turks twice, in 1529 and 1683. During this period all expansion ceased and the Austrians dug themselves in, repelling one wave of Muslim invaders after another. Finally, after the second siege of Vienna the Austrians went on the offensive. The conquest of Turkish Hungary and Transylvania in 1699 doubled the Austrian territory and made it into a great power of the first rank. During the eighteenth century, Austria took over the Spanish possession in Italy and the Netherlands, participated in the partitions of Poland, and continued to expand at the expense of the Ottoman Empire.
In the nineteenth century, Austria was undoubtedly a member of the great powers club, but it was probably the weakest—not because of lack of territory or manpower, but because of the centrifugal tendencies of various nationalities within the empire. The main problem was the Hungarians. As noted before, any political construction that contains two distinct imperial nations is unstable. Either there must be amalgamation into one ethnic core nation, or separation. During the reign of Charles V (1519-58), the Habsburg Empire had two cores, the Castilians and the Austrians. This arrangement was not workable, and the empire peacefully separated when Charles abdicated. The Spanish part went to Charles’s son Philip II, and the German to his brother Ferdinand I. When Hungary was reconquered in 1699, the Habsburg Empire again enfolded two imperial nations. The Hungarians chafed under the Austrian tutelage. Even though the Austrians tried to propitiate them by reformulating the empire as the double monarchy of Austria-Hungary, and assigning such Slavic lands as Slovakia and Croatia to the Hungarian crown, it was not enough to satisfy the Hungarian ruling class, who still dreamed of past imperial glories. That the Austrians and Hungarians were born on the opposite sides of the metaethnic frontier was also a factor, even though that was centuries in the past. Not only did the Hungarians refuse to assimilate to German, as the logical common language of the empire, they embarked on a program of assimilating their subject Slav populations to the Hungarian. The tension between the two nations encouraged centrifugal tendencies on the part of smaller nationalities of the empire. For example, Hungarian persecution of the Slovak language and culture played an important role in feeding the nascent national identity of this small Slavic people. In any case, the nineteenth century was the age of nationalism, and this ideology infected all subject nations of the Habsburg Empire—Italians, Czechs, and South Slavs—with the disastrous consequences for the internal cohesion of the state. The end came when the Habsburgs overextended themselves with the occupation of Bosnia in the late nineteenth century. It was formally annexed in 1908, which led directly to the fateful shots fired by Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo six years later, World War I, the Austrian defeat, and dismemberment at the hands of the victors.
The collapse of the Habsburg Empire in 1918 should not, however, make us forget the Austrian achievement in the preceding centuries. All empires collapse, sooner or later. The remarkable thing about the Austrians was that they managed to keep their multinational empire for so long, given that they were only 10 percent of the total population! How did they make it work? For one thing, they sacrificed more than any other people within the empire. The Germans paid heavier taxes than anybody else. Second, and more important, was the arrival of the Turks on the doorstep of Vienna in 1529. For the next three centuries, the struggle against the Muslim Ottomans became the raison-d’etre of the Habsburg Empire. The Ottoman thrust reawakened the defensive mechanisms engraved on the national psyche when Austria was on the steppe frontier with the Avars and the Magyars. It also enhanced the cohesion of the multinational empire. When confronted with the Muslim threat, Germans, Czechs, Italians, and even Hungarians knew that they were on the same side, and had to hang together.
I NOW RETURN TO THE QUESTION that I asked at the beginning of the chapter. Why did Europe stay disunited in the post-Carolingian period? A current answer to this question, offered by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, is that European geography was not conducive to imperial unification. “Europe has a highly indented coastline,” the explanation goes, “with five large peninsulas that approach islands in their isolation, and all of which evolved independent languages, ethnic groups, and governments: Greece, Italy, Iberia, Denmark, and Norway/Sweden.” Diamond contrasts Europe with China, whose coastline is much smoother. The geographic unity of East Asia, argues Diamond, was responsible for the longest-running empire in the world—from the Chin unification in 221 B.C. to the present.
But this explanation cannot be correct. Seas are not always moats; they can also unite. The Roman Empire unified three of the peninsulas that Diamond mentions, plus Britain, Anatolia, the rest of the Mediterranean, and half of continental Europe. The Mediterranean Sea knitted together the Roman Empire, instead of isolating its provinces from each other. People are divided by mountain chains, not by internal seas and narrow straights. China has more mountainous terrain than Europe. (Those Chinese landscape paintings are not fantasies!) By contrast, Europe has a broad plain running all the way from Aquitaine through Germany, Poland, Belarus and Ukraine, to Russia. This huge plain offers no significant barriers to expansion. History shows that life there was always precarious—just look at how often the capitals located on the plain have been overrun by enemies. Moscow was destroyed by the Mongols, occupied by the Poles, burnt by the Tatars and the French of Napoleon, and came within a hair of falling to Nazi Germany in 1941. Paris was occupied by the Russians at the end of the Napoleonic wars, and captured twice by the Germans since then. Berlin was captured and burned by the Russians during the Seven Year War, and again stormed in 1945. But the most graphic example of how precarious existence can be on the North European Plain is Poland—dismembered in three stages by Prussia, Russia, and Austria in the eighteenth century, then once again divided between Germany and Soviet Union in 1939. There must be some other reason than geography that would explain why these conquests never took, why the North European Plain was never unified since the days of Charlemagne.
In fact, it is not Europe that is exceptional, it is China. No other region in the world has had such a long history of imperial rule. Perversely enough, the reason, ultimately, is geographic or, more precisely, ecological. The distribution of rainfall within eastern Asia creates a sharp ecological boundary between the drier steppe and wetter agricultural regions. Ever since humans learned predatory nomadism, this ecological boundary coincided with a metaethnic frontier between nomadic pastoralists and settled agriculturalists. Under pressure from the steppe, Chinese agriculturalists built one empire after another. On the steppe side, the nomads united in one imperial confederation after another. The Chinese made forays into the nomad territory, but never could make it their own, because they could not grow crops there. Nomads repeatedly conquered China, but in the process assimilated and merged into the Chinese. The fault line between the Chinese and nomadic civilizations was anchored by the geography of eastern Asia. That is why one universal empire repeatedly followed another in China. A universal empire is a state that unifies all, or virtually all, of a civilization.
The western part of Eurasia also saw two universal empires, that of the Romans and of the Carolingians. Both of these empires arose on metaethnic frontiers. And in that they were similar to China. But unlike China, the Roman and the Carolingian empires moved the frontiers away from their cores. After centuries away from the frontier, Roman and Carolingian cores became asabiya black holes—regions where people are unable to cooperate on a scale large enough to build functioning states.
After the Carolingian decline, the Frankish core went through another centralization-decentralization cycle (under the Ottonian and Salian emperors), and then disintegrated for good. This configuration of the collapsed core ringed with outward-facing marches predetermined a “centrifugal” orientation of the new centers of power. The rising powers fought over the core area constantly, but their efforts repeatedly stalemated each other. (The Mediterranean was never unified in the post-Roman times for exactly the same reason.) Expansion proved to be much easier in the directions away from the core. Many centuries passed before the great powers finally divided the core among themselves—France getting Lorraine and Alsace, the Habsburgs grabbing the Netherlands, and the Prussians gobbling up most of the rest, leaving just a few fragments such as Luxemburg.
The Carolingian Empire was the embryonic form of what we now call Western civilization. The main bulk of Latin Christendom, that part of medieval Europe that was Roman Catholic, rather than Orthodox or non-Christian, consisted of the Carolingian successor states (for example, France and the German Reich). To this core were added regions that were conquered (Spain and Prussia, for example) or proselytized (for example, Denmark and Poland) from the formerly Carolingian lands. Although never united politically, the inhabitants of Latin Christendom knew that they belonged together in a certain, supranational sense. They were unified by their common faith, headed by the pope in Rome, by shared culture, and by the common language of literature, liturgy, and international diplomacy, Latin. As the historian-medievalist Robert Bartlett argued in The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950-1350, the outsiders were also aware of this metaethnic identity, and called Latin Christians collectively “the Franks” (Faranga in Arabic, Fraggoi in Greek). The minstrel Ambroise wrote about the First Crusade, “When Syria was recovered in the other war and Antioch besieged, the great wars and battles against the Turks and miscreants, so many of whom were slaughtered, there was no plotting or squabbling, no one asked who was Norman or French, who Poitevin or Breton, who from Maine or Burgundy, who was Flemish or English ... all were called ‘Franks’, be they brown or bay or sorrel or white.” Latin Christendom was the direct predecessor of Western civilization, and even the religious schism of the Reformation, despite the rivers of blood that it undammed, turned out to be a quarrel within family. It did not destroy the metaethnic identity whose roots go back to the Carolingians.
Even today, it is easy to see the traces of this identity. The first members of the European Union were, and the most enthusiastic proponents of the European Union are, France, Germany, the countries of Benelux, and Italy—almost precisely the regions that were part of the Carolingian Empire. Any region that during the Middle Ages was Roman Catholic, whether it is now Catholic or Protestant, is welcome within the European Union. Poles, Croatians, and the Czechs were eagerly encouraged to join, as soon as they freed themselves from Soviet domination. By contrast, Muslim Turkey, even though a part of NATO for more than half a century, is not a member yet, and it is doubtful that it will become one. Formerly Orthodox Ukraine and Belarus are most emphatically not welcome. Even Greece was accepted in the European Union only as a result of heavy-handed American pressure.
Latin Christendom, and its successor, Western civilization, never developed a universal empire. Not because of Europe’s indented coastline, its lack of unity was due to the centrifugal orientation of the empires born on the Carolingian marches, away from its fragmented core. There is nothing particularly unusual in Europe’s inability to achieve unity. Almost all other regions of comparable size were unified for only a portion of their history. The only exception to this rule is China, in which one universal empire replaced another soon after the previous one collapsed. And the reason for the Chinese exceptionalism is its location on a permanent metaethnic frontier with steppe nomads.
The permanency of the Chinese steppe frontier is unusual, but in other ways the case of China provides yet another confirmation of the macrohistorical regularity that imperial nations are born on intense and prolonged metaethnic frontiers. That is the essential history of the rise of all world empires.
Part II
IMPERIOPATHOSIS
The Fall of Empires
Chapter 8
The Other Side of the Wheel of Fortune
From the Glorious Thirteenth Century into the Abyss of the Fourteenth
“I am in Paris, in the royal city where abundance of natural wealth not only holds those who live there, but also attracts those from afar. Just as the moon outshines the stars in brilliance, so does this city, the seat of monarchy, lift her head above the rest.” Thus wrote Gui de Bazoches, a chronicler from Champagne who visited Paris during the reign of Philip II Augustus (1180-1223).
The thirteenth century was the golden age of medieval France. The territory controlled directly by the French crown tripled between 1200 and 1300. The territorial explosion of France began under Philip Augustus, who took away all French possessions of the Plantagenets, except Aquitaine. Southern France was acquired under his successor Louis IX (St. Louis) as a result of the Albigenisan crusades. By 1300, France came to dominate Western Europe militarily, politically, and culturally. To the east, the once formidable German Empire had disintegrated, leaving a multitude of city-states and tiny principalities. To the south, the resurgent Castile was still preoccupied with its Reconquista against the Iberian Moors. Castile’s time of greatness was still two centuries in the future. France’s only significant rival was England. But the population of England was only one fourth of France’s, and the income of the English Plantagenets was a fraction of that of the French Capetians. The population of France was more than 20 million—every third inhabitant of Western Europe owed allegiance to the French king.
The city of Paris with its 230,000 people was by far the largest and most splendid city of Latin Christendom. The cultural predominance of France during the High Middle Ages cannot be overstated. The Gothic style of architecture, known to the contemporaries as the French style, developed in Ile-de- France and spread from there to England, Germany, Spain, and northern Italy. During the thirteenth century, the University of Paris became the main center of learning and philosophy in Europe, attracting the best thinkers of the age: Albertus Magnus of Germany, Thomas Aquinas of Italy, and Duns Scotus of Scotland. Although Latin still reigned as the language of learning and international diplomacy, French became the most important vernacular language in Europe. It was spoken by the nobilities of England, Flanders, the kingdom of Naples and Sicily, in the remnants of the kingdom of Jerusalem, and, after 1310, in Hungary
When the fourteenth century opened, wrote the historian Barbara Tuchman in A Distant Mirror, the superiority of the French in chivalry, learning, and Christian devotion was taken for granted. Gerald of Wales acknowledged that “the fame of French knights dominates the world.” The Spanish knight Don Pero Ninõ described the French as “generous and great givers of presents ... very gay, giving themselves up to pleasure and seeking it. They are very amorous, women as well as men, and proud of it.” Knights and even monarchs from all over Europe assembled at the royal court of France—“the most chivalrous sojourn in the world,” according to the blind King John of Bohemia, who preferred the French court to his own. French monarchs were accorded the formula of “Most Christian Kings.”
Yet despite its brilliant opening, the fourteenth century was to plunge France into the depths of wretchedness. During the next 150 years, France would experience famine, pestilence, incessant war, political disintegration, brigandage, and a widespread social mood of pessimism and despair. At the nadir, France was going to find herself without a crowned king and capital, and with most of her territory occupied by foreign troops. When the Italian humanist Francesco Petrarch visited France in 1360, he lamented, “I could scarcely recognize anything I saw. The most opulent of kingdoms is a heap of ashes; there was not a single house standing except those protected by the ramparts of towns and citadels. Where is now Paris that was once such a great city?”
PEOPLE IN THE MIDDLE AGES knew very well that power, riches, and glory were impermanent. A common visual expression of this idea, found in Gothic cathedrals and illustrated manuscripts, was the “Wheel of Fortune.” A typical representation showed a goddess of Fortune standing by a large wheel. At the top a man is seated, his head crowned and a scepter in hand. Little does he know that his moment of power and glory is transient. When Fortune turns the wheel, the king descends and his crown falls off. By the time he reaches the bottom, he is dressed in rags. But then Fortune gives the wheel another crank, and he who was at the bottom is carried high to glory again.
