reading

Norman Davies C. M. G., F. B. A. is Professor Emeritus of the University of London, a Supernumerary Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, and the author of several books on Polish and European history, including God’s Playground, White Eagle, Red Star, The Isles, Microcosm and Europe: East and West.

From the Ice Age to the Cold War, from Reykjavik to the Volga, from Minos to Margaret Thatcher, Norman Davies here tells the entire story of Europe in a single volume. Chosen ten times as Book of the Year, it is the most ambitious history of the continent ever undertaken.

1. The Peninsula, c.10,000 BC

2. Queen Europe

3. East–West Fault Lines in Europe

4. Europe: Physical Regions

5. The Ancient Aegean: 2nd Millennium BC

6. Prehistoric Europe

7. Rome—Sicily—Carthage, 212 BC

8. The Roman Empire, 1st Century AD

9. Constantinople

10. Europe: Migrations

11. Pope Stephen’s Journey, AD 753

12. Europe, c. AD 900

13. The Low Countries, 1265

14. Europe c.1300

15. The Growth of Muscovy

16. Europe, 1519

17. Rome, Ancient and Modern

18. Europe, 1713

19. Mozart’s Journey to Prague, 1787

20. Europe, 1810

21. Revolutionary Paris: (a) The City; (b) The Campaign of 1814

22. Europe, 1815

23. Europe, 1914

24. Europe during the Great War, 1914–1918

25. The New Europe, 1917–1922

26. Europe during the Second World War, 1939–1945

27. Post-War Germany, after 1945

28. Europe Divided, 1949–1989

29. Europe, 1992

THIS book contains little that is original. Since most aspects of the subject have been thoroughly worked over by previous historians, primary research was rarely required. The book’s originality, such as it is, lies only in the selection, rearrangement, and presentation of the contents. The main aim was to map out a grid of time and space for European history and, by introducing a sufficiently comprehensive range of topics into the framework, to convey an impression of the unattainable whole.

The academic apparatus has been kept to a minimum. There are no notes relating to facts and statements that can be found in any of the established works of reference. Among the latter, special mention must be made of my twenty-nine volumes of The Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th edn., 1910–11), which far surpasses all its successors. Endnotes are only provided to substantiate less familiar quotations and sources of information beyond the range of the standard textbooks. One should not assume that the text necessarily agrees with interpretations found in the works cited: ‘On ne s’étonnera pas que la doctrine exposée dans le texte ne soit toujours d’accord avec les travaux auxquels il est renvoyé en note.’^fn1

The academic considerations which underlay the writing of the present volume have been set out in the Introduction. But its design may need some explanation.

The text has been constructed on several different levels. Twelve narrative chapters pan across the whole of Europe’s past, from prehistory to the present. They gradually zoom in from the distant focus of Chapter I, which covers the first five million years, to the relatively close focus of Chapters XI and XII, which cover the twentieth century at roughly one page per year. Each chapter carries a selection of more specific ‘capsules’, picked out, as it were, by telephoto, and illustrating narrower themes that cut across the chronological flow. Each chapter ends with a wide-angle ‘snapshot’ of the whole Continent as seen from one particular vantage-point. The overall effect may be likened to a historical picture album, in which panoramic tableaux are interspersed by a collection of detailed insets and close-ups. One hopes it is understood that the degree of precision attainable at these different levels will vary considerably. Indeed, a work of synthesis cannot expect to match the standards of scientific monographs that have rather different purposes in mind.

The twelve main chapters follow the conventional framework of European history. They provide the basic chronological and geographical grid into which all the other topics and subjects have been fitted. They concentrate on ‘event-based history’: on the principal political divisions, cultural movements, and socio-economic trends which enable historians to break the mass of information into manageable (though necessarily artificial) units. The chronological emphasis lies on the medieval and modern periods, where a recognizably European community can be seen to be operating. The geographical spread aims to give equitable coverage to all parts of the European Peninsula from the Atlantic to the Urals—north, east, west, south, and centre.

At every stage, an attempt has been made to counteract the bias of ‘Eurocentrism’ and ‘Western civilization’ (see here). But in a work of this scope it has not been possible to extend the narrative beyond Europe’s own frontiers. Suitable signals have been made to indicate the great importance of contingent subjects such as Islam, colonialism, or Europe overseas. East European affairs are given their proper prominence. Wherever appropriate, they are integrated into the major themes which affect the whole of the Continent. An eastern element is included in the exposition of topics such as the Barbarian invasions, the Renaissance, or the French Revolution, which all too often have been presented as relevant only to the West. The space given to the Slavs can be attributed to the fact that they form the largest of Europe’s ethnic families. National histories are regularly summarized; but attention has been paid to the stateless nations, not just to the nation-states. Minority communities, from heretics and lepers to Jews, Romanies, and Muslims, have not been forgotten.

In the last chapters, the priorities of the ‘Allied scheme of history’ have not been followed (see here). Nor have they been polemically contested. The two World Wars have been treated as ‘two successive acts of a single drama’, preference being given to the central continental contest between Germany and Russia. The final chapter on post-war Europe takes the narrative to the events of 1989–91 and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The argument contends that 1991 saw the end of a geopolitical arena, dubbed ‘the Great Triangle’, whose origins can be dated to the turn of the twentieth century (see here), and whose demise offers a suitable hiatus in a continuing story. The approach of the twenty-first century sees the opening of a new opportunity to design a new Europe.

The capsules, of which there are some 300 (see Map 30 and Appendix I), perform several purposes. They draw attention to a wide variety of specifics which would otherwise find no place among the generalizations and simplifications of synthetic history-writing. They sometimes introduce topics which cross the boundaries of the main chapters; and they illustrate all the curiosities, whimsies, and inconsequential sidestreams which over-serious historians can often overlook. Above all, they have been selected to give as many glimpses as possible of ‘the new methods, the new disciplines, and the new fields’ of recent research. They provide samples from some sixty categories of knowledge, which have been distributed over the chapters in the widest possible scatter of period, location, and subject-matter. For arbitrary reasons of the book’s length, the publishers’ patience, and the author’s stamina, the original capsule list had to be reduced. None the less, it is hoped that the overall pointilliste technique will still create an effective impression, even with a smaller number of points.

Each capsule is anchored into the text at a specific point in time and space, and is marked by a headword that summarizes its contents. Each can be tasted as a separate, self-contained morsel; or it can be read in conjunction with the narrative into which it is inserted.

The snapshots, of which there are twelve, are designed to present a series of panoramic overviews across the changing map of Europe. They freeze the frame of the chronological narrative, usually at moments of symbolic importance, and call a temporary halt to the headlong charge across enormous expanses of time and territory. They should help the reader to catch breath, and to take stock of the numerous transformations which were progressing at any one time on many different fronts. They are deliberately focused from a single vantage-point, and make no attempt to weigh the multiplicity of opinions and alternative perspectives which undoubtedly existed. To this extent, they are shamelessly subjective and impressionistic. In some instances, they border on the controversial realm of ‘faction’, combining known events with undocumented suppositions and deductions. Like several other elements in the book, they may be judged to exceed the conventional bounds of academic argument and analysis. If so, they will draw attention not only to the rich variety of Europe’s past but also to the rich variety of prisms through which it can be viewed.

The book has been largely written in Oxford. It owes much to the rich and ancient resources of the Bodleian Library, and to that Library’s rich and ancient standards of service. It was also helped by scholarships kindly provided by the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna and by Harvard University’s Ukrainian Research Institute. It has been coloured by several visits to the mainland of Europe during its writing, notably by impressions garnered in Belarus and Ukraine, on the road from Bavaria to Bologna, in the French and Swiss Alps, in the Netherlands, in Hungary, and in the Vendée.

I wish to acknowledge a period of one year’s study leave which was granted by the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London, on the condition that private funds were raised against the cost of replacement teaching. At other times, when leave was not granted, the book has possibly benefited from the discipline of writing in every sort of inspiring locale—on trains, in planes, in canteens, in hospital waiting-rooms, on Hawaiian beaches, on the back row of other people’s seminars, even in a crematorium car park. I also acknowledge a special subsidy provided by Heinemann and Mandarin in order to speed the preparation of auxiliary materials.

I wish to express my thanks to colleagues and friends who have served as readers for particular chapters or sections: Barry Cunliffe, Stephanie West, Riet van Bremen, David Morgan, David Eltis, Fania Oz-Salzburger, Mark Almond, and Timothy Garton Ash; to a legion of helpers and consultants including Tony Armstrong, Sylvia Astle, Alex Boyd, Michael Branch, Lawrence Brockliss, Caroline Brownstone, Gordon Craig, Richard Crampton, Jim Cutsall, Rees Davies, Regina Davy, Dennis Deletant, Geoffrey Ellis, Roger Greene, Hugo Gryn, Michael Hurst, Geraint Jenkins, Mahmud Khan, Maria Korzeniewicz, Grzegorz Król, Ian McKellen, Dimitri Obolensky, Laszlo Peter, Robert Pynsent, Martyn Rady, Mary Seton-Watson, Heidrun Speedy, Christine Stone, Athena Syriatou, Eva Travers, Luke Treadwell, Peter Varey, Maria Widowson, and Sergei Yakovenko; to a team of secretarial assistants, headed by ‘Kingsley’; to Sarah Barrett, copy-editor; to Sally Kendall, designer; to Gill Metcalfe, picture researcher; to Roger Moorhouse, indexer; to Ken Wass and Tim Aspen, cartographers; Andrew Boag, illustrator; to my editors at OUP and at Mandarin; to the project manager Patrick Duffy; and especially to my wife, without whose support and forbearance the project could never have come to fruition. There is no prize for finding the black cat.

There is strong reason to believe that European history is a valid academic subject, which is solidly based on past events that really happened. Europe’s past, however, can only be recalled through fleeting glimpses, partial probes, and selective soundings. It can never be recovered in its entirety. This volume, therefore, is only one from an almost infinite number of histories of Europe that could be written. It is the view of one pair of eyes, filtered by one brain, and translated by one pen.

In preparing the corrected edition of Europe: a history, the amendments have been addressed solely to errors of fact, nomenclature and orthography. No attempt was made to re-enter the realm of historical interpretation. In addition to the original team of consultants, most of whom have offered a second round of advice, I wish to convey my special thanks to:

J. S. Adams, Ann Armstrong, Neal Ascherson, Timothy Bainbridge, Tim Blanning, Tim Boyle, Sir Raymond Carr, James Cornish, J. Cremona, M. F. Cullis, I. D. Davidson, H.E. the Ambassador of Finland, H.E. the Ambassador of Italy, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, J. M. Forrester, Robert Frost, Michael Futrell, Graham Gladwell, Richard Hofton, Hugh Kearney, Noel Malcolm, Velibor Milovanović, B. C. Moberly, Jan Morris, W. Schulte Nordolt, Robin Osborne, Steven Pálffy, Roy Porter, Paul Preston, Jim Reed, Donald Russell, David Selbourne, Andrew L. Simon, N. C. W. Spence, Norman Stone, Alan H. Stratford, Richard Tyndorf, John Wagar, Michael West, B. K. Workman, Philip Wynn, and Basil Yamey.

^fn1 ‘One will not be surprised when the doctrine expounded in the text does not always accord with the works to which reference is made in the notes’; Ferdinand Lot, La Fin du monde antique et le début du Moyen Âge (Paris, 1927), 3.

IN the beginning, there was no Europe. All there was, for five million years, was a long, sinuous peninsula with no name, set like the figurehead of a ship on the prow of the world’s largest land mass. To the west lay the ocean which no one had crossed. To the south lay two enclosed and interlinked seas, sprinkled with islands, inlets, and peninsulas of their own. To the north lay the great polar ice-cap, expanding and contracting across the ages like some monstrous, freezing jellyfish. To the east lay the land-bridge to the rest of the world, whence all peoples and all civilizations were to come.

In the intervals between the Ice Ages, the Peninsula received its first human settlers. The humanoids of Neanderthal, and the cave people of Cromagnon, must have had names and faces and ideas. But it cannot be known who they really were. They can only be recognized dimly from their pictures, their artefacts, and their bones.

With the last retreat of the ice, only twelve thousand years ago, the Peninsula received new waves of migrants. Unsung pioneers and prospectors moved slowly out to the west, rounding the coasts, crossing the land and the seas until the furthest islands were reached. Their greatest surviving masterwork, as the Age of Stone gave way to that of Bronze, was built on the edge of human habitation on a remote, offshore island. But no amount of modern speculation can reveal for certain what inspired those master masons, nor what their great stone circle was called.¹

At the other end of the Peninsula, another of those distant peoples at the dawn of the Bronze Age was founding a community whose influence has lasted to the present day. By tradition the Hellenes descended from the continental interior in three main waves, taking control of the shores of the Aegean towards the end of the second millennium BC. They conquered and mingled with the existing inhabitants. They spread out through the thousand islands which lie scattered among the waters between the coasts of the Peloponnese and of Asia Minor. They absorbed the prevailing culture of the mainland, and the still older culture of Crete. Their language distinguished them from the ‘barbarians’—the ‘speakers of unintelligible babble’. They were the creators of ancient Greece. [BARBAROS]

Later, when children of classical times asked where humankind had come from, they were told about the creation of the world by an unidentified opifex rerum or ‘divine maker’. They were told about the Flood, and about Europa.

Europa was the subject of one of the most venerable legends of the classical world. Europa was the mother of Minos, Lord of Crete, and hence the progenitrix of the most ancient branch of Mediterranean civilization. She was mentioned in passing by Homer. But in Europa and the Bull, attributed to Moschus of Syracuse, and above all in the Metamorphoses of the Roman poet, Ovid, she is immortalized as an innocent princess seduced by the Father of the Gods. Wandering with her maidens along the shore of her native Phoenicia, she was beguiled by Zeus in the guise of a snow-white bull:

Here was the familiar legend of Europa as painted on Grecian vases, in the houses of Pompeii (See Plate no. 1), and in modern times by Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens, Veronese, and Claude Lorrain.

The historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, was not impressed by the legend. In his view, the abduction of Europa was just an incident in the age-old wars over women-stealing. A band of Phoenicians from Tyre had carried off Io, daughter of the King of Argos; so a band of Greeks from Crete sailed over to Phoenicia and carried off the daughter of the King of Tyre. It was a case of tit for tit.³

The legend of Europa has many connotations. But in carrying the princess to Crete from the shore of Phoenicia (now south Lebanon) Zeus was surely transferring the fruits of the older Asian civilizations of the East to the new island colonies of the Aegean. Phoenicia belonged to the orbit of the Pharaohs. Europa’s ride provides the mythical link between Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece. Europa’s brother Cadmus, who roamed the world in search of her, orbe pererrato, was credited with bringing the art of writing to Greece. [CADMUS]

Europa’s ride also captures the essential restlessness of those who followed in her footsteps. Unlike the great river valley civilizations of the Nile, of the Indus, of Mesopotamia, and of China, which were long in duration but lethargic in their geographical and intellectual development, the civilization of the Mediterranean Sea was stimulated by constant movement. Movement caused uncertainty and insecurity. Uncertainty fed a constant ferment of ideas. Insecurity prompted energetic activity. Minos was famed for his ships. Crete was the first naval power. The ships carried people and goods and culture, fostering exchanges of all kinds with the lands to which they sailed. Like the vestments of Europa, the minds of those ancient mariners were constantly left ‘fluttering in the breeze’—tremulae sinuantur flamine vestes.⁴

Europa rode in the path of the sun from east to west. According to another legend, the Sun was a chariot of fire, pulled by unseen horses from their secret stables behind the sunrise to their resting-place beyond the sunset. Indeed, one of several possible etymologies contrasts Asia, ‘the land of the Sunrise’, with Europa, ‘the land of the Sunset’.⁵ The Hellenes came to use ‘Europe’ as a name for their territory to the west of the Aegean as distinct from the older lands in Asia Minor.

At the dawn of European history, the known world lay to the east. The unknown waited in the west, in destinations still to be discovered. Europa’s curiosity may have been her undoing. But it led to the founding of a new civilization that would eventually bear her name and would spread to the whole Peninsula.

HISTORY can be written at any magnification. One can write the history of the universe on a single page, or the life-cycle of a mayfly in forty volumes. A very senior and distinguished historian, who specializes in the diplomacy of the 1930s, once wrote a book on the Munich Crisis and its consequences (1938–9), a second book on The Last Week of Peace, and a third entitled 31 August 1939. His colleagues waited in vain for a crowning volume to be called One Minute to Midnight.¹ It is an example of the modern compulsion to know more and more about less and less.

The history of Europe, too, can be written at any degree of magnitude. The French series L’Évolution de l’humanité, whose content was over 90 percent European, was planned after the First World War with 110 main volumes and several supplementary ones.² The present work, in contrast, has been commissioned to compress the same material and more between two covers.

For some reason, whilst historical monographs have become ever narrower in scope, general surveys have settled down to a conventional magnification of several hundred pages per century. The Cambridge Mediaeval History (1936–9), for example, covers the period from Constantine to Thomas More in eight volumes.⁴ The German Handbuch der europäischen Geschichte (1968–79) covers the twelve centuries from Charlemagne to the Greek colonels in seven similarly weighty tomes.⁵ It is common practice to give greater coverage to the contemporary than to the ancient or the medieval periods. For English readers, a pioneering collection such as Rivington’s eight-volume ‘Periods of European History’ moved from the distant to the recent with ever-increasing magnification—442 years at the rate of 1.16 years per page for Charles Oman’s Dark Ages, 476–918 (1919), 104 years at 4.57 pages per year for A. H. Johnson’s Europe in the Sixteenth Century (1897), 84 years at 6.59 pages per year for W. Alison Phillipps’s Modern Europe, 1815–99 (1905).⁶ More recent collections follow the same pattern.⁷

Most readers are most interested in the history of their own times. But not all historians are willing to indulge them. ‘“Current Affairs” cannot become “History” until half a century has elapsed,’ runs one opinion, until ‘documents have become available and hindsight [has] cleared men’s minds.’⁸ It is a valid point of view. But it means that any general survey must break off at the point where it starts to be most interesting. Contemporary history is vulnerable to all sorts of political pressure. Yet no educated adult can hope to function efficiently without some grounding in the origins of contemporary problems.⁹ Four hundred years ago Sir Walter Raleigh, writing under sentence of death, understood the dangers perfectly. ‘Whosoever in writing a modern history shall follow the Truth too near the heels,’ he wrote, ‘it may haply strike out his teeth.’¹⁰

Given the complications, one should not be surprised to find that the subject-matter of studies of ‘Europe’ or of ‘European civilization’ varies enormously. Successful attempts to survey the whole of European history without recourse to multiple volumes and multiple authors have been few and far between. H. A. L. Fisher’s A History of Europe (1936)¹¹ or Eugene Weber’s A Modern History of Europe (1971)¹² are among the rare exceptions. Both of these are extended essays on the dubious concept of ‘Western civilization’ (see below). Probably the most effective of grand surveys are those which have concentrated on one theme, such as Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation,¹³ which looked at Europe’s past through the prism of art and painting, or Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man (1973),¹⁴ which made its approach through the history of science and technology. Both were the offshoots of opulent television productions. A more recent essay approached the subject from a materialistic standpoint based on geology and economic resources.¹⁵

The value of multi-volume historical surveys is not in question; but they are condemned to remain works of reference, to be consulted, not read. Neither full-time history students nor general readers are going to plough through ten, twenty, or one hundred and ten volumes of general European synthesis before turning to the topics which attract them most. This is unfortunate. The framework of the whole sets parameters and assumptions which reappear without discussion in detailed works on the parts.

In recent years, the urgency of reviewing the general framework of European history has grown in proportion to the fashion for highly specialized, high-magnification studies. A few distinguished exceptions, such as the work of Fernand Braudel,¹⁶ may serve to prove the rule. But many historians and students have been drawn into ‘more and more about less and less’ to the point where the wider perspectives are sometimes forgotten. Yet the humanities require all degrees of magnification. History needs to see the equivalent of the planets spinning in space; to zoom in and observe people at ground level, and to dig deep beneath their skins and their feet. The historian needs to use counterparts of the telescope, the microscope, the brain-scanner, and the geological probe.

It is beyond dispute that the study of history has been greatly enriched in recent years by new methods, new disciplines, and new fields. The advent of computers has opened up a whole range of quantitative investigations hitherto beyond the historian’s reach, [RENTES] Historical research has greatly benefited from the use of techniques and concepts derived from the social and human sciences. [ARICIA] [CEDROS] [CHASSE] [CONDOM] [EPIC] [FIESTA] [GENES] [GOTTHARD] [LEONARDO] [LIETUVA] [NOVGOROD] [PLOVUM] [PROPAGANDA] [SAMPHIRE] [VENDANGE.] A trend pioneered by the French Annales school from 1929 onwards has now won almost universal acclaim. [ANNALES] New academic fields such as oral history, historical psychiatry (or ‘psycho-history’), or family history, or the history of manners, are now well established. [BOGEY] [MORES] [SOUND] [ZADRUGA] At the same time, a number of subjects reflecting contemporary concerns have been given a fresh historical dimension. Anti-racism, environment, gender, sex, Semitism, class, and peace are topics which occupy a sizeable part of current writing and debate. Notwithstanding the overtones of ‘political correctness’, all serve to enrich the whole. [BLACK ATHENA] [CAUCASIA] [ECO] [FEMME] [NOBEL] [POGROM] [SPARTACUS]

None the less, the multiplication of fields, and the corresponding increase in learned publications, have inevitably created severe strains. Professional historians despair of ‘keeping up with the literature’. They are tempted to plunge ever deeper into the alleyways of ultra-specialization, and to lose the capacity of communicating with the general public. Much specialization has proceeded to the detriment of narrative history. Some specialists have worked on the assumption that the broad outlines need no revision: that the only route to new discovery lies in digging deep on a narrow front. Others, intent on the exploration of ‘deep structures’, have turned their backs on ‘the surface’ of history altogether. They concentrate instead on the analysis of ‘long-term, underlying trends’. Like some of their confrères in literary criticism, who hold the literal meaning of a text to be worthless, some historians have seen fit to abandon the study of conventional ‘facts’. They produce students who have no intention of learning what happened how, where, and when.

The decline of factual history has been accompanied, especially in the classroom, with the rise of ‘empathy’, that is, of exercises designed to stimulate the historical imagination. Imagination is undoubtedly a vital ingredient of historical study. But empathetic exercises can only be justified if accompanied by a modicum of knowledge. In a world where fictional literature is also under threat as a respectable source of historical information, students are sometimes in danger of having nothing but their teacher’s prejudices on which to build an awareness of the past.¹⁷

The divorce between history and literature has been particularly regrettable. When the ‘structuralists’ in the humanities were overtaken in some parts of the profession by the ‘deconstructionists’, both historians and literary critics looked set not only to exclude all conventional knowledge but also to exclude each other. Fortunately, as the wilder aspects of deconstructionism are deconstructed, there are hopes that these esoteric rifts can be healed.¹⁸ There is absolutely no reason why the judicious historian should not use literary texts, critically assessed, or why literary critics should not use historical knowledge. [GATTOPARDO] [KONARMYA]

It would now seem, therefore, that the specialists may have overplayed their hand. There has always been a fair division of labour between the industrious worker bees of the historical profession and the queen bees, the grands simplificateurs, who bring order to the labours of the hive. There will be no honey if the workers take over completely. Nor can one accept that the broad outlines of ‘general history’ have been fixed for all time. They too shift according to fashion: and those fixed fifty or one hundred years ago are ripe for revision (see below). Equally, the study of the geological strata of history must never be divorced from doings on the ground. In the search for ‘trends’, ‘societies’, ‘economies’, or ‘cultures’, one should not lose sight of men, women, and children.

Specialization has opened the door to unscrupulous political interests. Since no one is judged competent to offer an opinion beyond their own particular mine-shaft, beasts of prey have been left to prowl across the prairie unchecked. The combination of solid documentary research harnessed to blatantly selective topics, which a priori exclude a full review of all relevant factors, is specially vicious. As A. J. P. Taylor is reputed to have said of one such work, ‘it is ninety per cent true and one hundred per cent useless’.¹⁹

The prudent response to these developments is to argue for pluralism of interpretation and for ‘safety in numbers’: that is, to encourage a wide variety of special views in order to counter the limitations of each and every one. One single viewpoint is risky. But fifty or sixty viewpoints—or three hundred—can together be counted on to construct a passable composite. ‘There is no one Truth, but as many truths as there are sensitivities.’²⁰

In Chapter II, below, mention is made of Archimedes’ famous solution of the problem of π, that is, of calculating the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Archimedes knew that the length of the circumference must lie somewhere between the sum of the sides of a square drawn outside the circle and the sum of the sides of a square drawn inside the circle (see diagram). Unable to work it out directly, he hit on the idea of finding an approximation by adding up the length of a 99-sided polygon contained within the circle. The more sides he gave to his polygon, the nearer it would come to the shape of the circle. Similarly, one is tempted to think, the larger the number of sources of illumination, the smaller the gap will be between past reality and historians’ attempts to reconstruct it.

Elsewhere, the impossible task of the historian has been likened to that of a photographer, whose static two-dimensional picture can never deliver an accurate representation of the mobile, three-dimensional world. ‘The historian, like the camera, always lies.’²¹ If this simile were to be developed, one could say that photographers can greatly increase the verisimilitude of their work—where verisimilitude is the aim—by multiplying the number of pictures of the same subject. A large number of shots taken from different angles, and with different lenses, filters, and films, can collectively reduce the gross selectivity of the single shot. As movie-makers discovered, a large number of frames taken in sequence creates a passable imitation of time and motion. By the same token, ‘history in the round’ can only be reconstructed if the historian collates the results of the widest possible range of sources. The effect will never be perfect; but every different angle and every different technique contributes to the illumination of the parts which together make up the whole.

Distortion is a necessary characteristic of all sources of information. Absolute objectivity is absolutely unattainable. Every technique has its strengths and its weaknesses. The important thing is to understand where the value and the distortions of each technique lie, and to arrive at a reasonable approximation. Critics who object to the historian’s use of poetry, or sociology or astrology, or whatever, on the grounds that such sources are ‘subjective’ or ‘partial’ or ‘unscientific’, are stating the obvious. It is as though one could object to X-ray pictures of the skeleton, or ultra-sound scans of the womb, on the grounds that they give a pretty poor image of the human face. Medical doctors use every known device for prying open the secrets of the human mind and body. Historians need a similar range of equipment for penetrating the mysteries of the past.

Documentary history, which has enjoyed a long innings, is simultaneously one of the most valuable and the most risky lines of approach. Treated with incaution, it is open to gross forms of misrepresentation; and there are huge areas of past experience which it is incapable of recording. Yet no one can deny that historical documents remain one of the most fruitful veins of knowledge. [HOSSBACH] [METRYKA] [SMOLENSK]

Lord Acton, founder of the Cambridge school of history, once predicted a specially deleterious effect of documentary history. It tends to give priority to the amassing of evidence over the historian’s interpretation of evidence. [We live] ‘in a documentary age,’ Acton wrote some ninety years ago, ‘which will tend to make history independent of historians, to develop learning at the expense of writing.’²²

Generally speaking, historians have given more thought to their own debates than to the problems encountered by their long-suffering readers. The pursuit of scientific objectivity has done much to reduce earlier flights of fancy, and to separate fact from fiction. At the same time it has reduced the number of instruments which historians can use to transmit their discoveries. For it is not sufficient for the good historian merely to establish the facts and to muster the evidence. The other half of the task is to penetrate the readers’ minds, to do battle with all the distorting perceptors with which every consumer of history is equipped. These perceptors include not only all five physical senses but also a complex of pre-set intellectual circuits, varying from linguistic terminology, geographical names, and symbolic codes to political opinions, social conventions, emotional disposition, religious beliefs, visual memory, and traditional historical knowledge. Every consumer of history has a store of previous experience through which all incoming information about the past must be filtered.

For this reason, effective historians must devote as much care to transmitting their information as to collecting and shaping it. In this part of their work, they share many of the same preoccupations as poets, writers, and artists. They must keep an eye on the work of all the others who help to mould and to transmit our impressions of the past—the art historians, the musicologists, the museologues, the archivists, the illustrators, the cartographers, the diarists and biographers, the sound-recordists, the film-makers, the historical novelists, even the purveyors of ‘bottled medieval air’. At every stage the key quality, as first defined by Vico, is that of ‘creative historical imagination’. Without it, the work of the historian remains a dead letter, an unbroadcast message. [PRADO] [SONATA] [SOVKINO]

In this supposedly scientific age, the imaginative side of the historical profession has undoubtedly been downgraded. The value of unreadable academic papers and of undigested research data is exaggerated. Imaginative historians such as Thomas Carlyle, have not simply been censured for an excess of poetic licence. They have been forgotten. Yet Carlyle’s convictions on the relationship of history and poetry are at least worthy of consideration.²³ It is important to check and to verify, as Carlyle sometimes failed to do. But ‘telling it right’ is also important. All historians must tell their tale convincingly, or be ignored.

‘Postmodernism’ has been a pastime in recent years for all those who give precedence to the study of historians over the study of the past. It refers to a fashion which has followed in the steps of the two French gurus, Foucault and Derrida, and which has attacked both the accepted canon of historical knowledge and the principles of conventional methodology. In one line of approach, it has sought to demolish the value of documentary source materials in the way that literary deconstructionists have sought to dismantle the ‘meaning’ of literary texts. Elsewhere it has denounced ‘the tyranny of facts’ and the ‘authoritarian ideologies’ which are thought to lurk behind every body of information. At the extreme, it holds that all statements about past reality are ‘coercive’. And the purveyors of that coercion include all historians who argue for ‘a commitment to human values’. In the eyes of its critics, it has reduced history to ‘the pleasure of the historian’; and it has become an instrument for politicized radicals with an agenda of their own. In its contempt for prescribed data, it hints that knowing something is more dangerous than knowing nothing.²⁴

Yet the phenomenon has raised more problems than it solves. Its enthusiasts can only be likened to those lugubrious academics who, instead of telling jokes, write learned tomes on the analysis of humour. One also wonders whether conventional liberal historiography can properly be defined as ‘modernist’; and whether ‘post-modernist’ ought not to be reserved for those who are trying to strike a balance between the old and the new. It is all very well to deride the authority of all and sundry; but it only leads in the end to the deriding of Derrida. It is only a matter of time before the deconstructionists are deconstructed by their own techniques. ‘We have survived the “Death of God” and the “Death of Man”. We will surely survive “the Death of History” . . . and the death of post-modernism.’²⁵

But to return to the question of magnification. Any narrative which chronicles the march of history over long periods is bound to be differently designed from the panorama which co-ordinates all the features relevant to a particular stage or moment. The former, chronological approach has to emphasize innovative events and movements which, though untypical at the time of their first appearance, will gain prominence at a later date. The latter, synchronic approach has to combine both the innovative and the traditional, and their interactions. The first risks anachronism, the second immobility.

Early modern Europe has served as one of the laboratories for these problems. Once dominated by historians exploring the roots of humanism, protestantism, capitalism, science, and the nation-state, it then attracted the attention of specialists who showed, quite correctly, how elements of the medieval and pagan worlds had survived and thrived. The comprehensive historian must somehow strike a balance between the two. In describing the sixteenth century, for example, it is as misguided to write exclusively about witches, alchemists, and fairies as it once was to write almost exclusively about Luther, Copernicus, or the rise of the English Parliament. Comprehensive history must take note of the specialists’ debate, but it must equally find a way to rise above their passing concerns.

‘Europe’ is a relatively modern idea. It gradually replaced the earlier concept of ‘Christendom’ in a complex intellectual process lasting from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The decisive period, however, was reached in the decades on either side of 1700 after generations of religious conflict. In that early phase of the Enlightenment (see Chapter VIII) it became an embarrassment for the divided community of nations to be reminded of their common Christian identity; and ‘Europe’ filled the need for a designation with more neutral connotations. In the West, the wars against Louis XIV inspired a number of publicists who appealed for common action to settle the divisions of the day. The much-imprisoned Quaker William Penn (1644–1718), son of an Anglo-Dutch marriage and founder of Pennsylvania, had the distinction of advocating both universal toleration and a European parliament. The dissident French abbé, Charles Castel de St Pierre (1658–1743), author of Projet d’une paix perpétuelle (1713), called for a confederation of European powers to guarantee a lasting peace. In the East, the emergence of the Russian Empire under Peter the Great required radical rethinking of the international framework. The Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 provided the last major occasion when public reference to the Respublica Christiana, the ‘Christian Commonwealth’, was made.

After that, the awareness of a European as opposed to a Christian community gained the upper hand. Writing in 1751, Voltaire described Europe as:

a kind of great republic divided into several states, some monarchical, the others mixed . . . but all corresponding with one another. They all have the same religious foundation, even if divided into several confessions. They all have the same principle of public law and politics, unknown in other parts of the world.²⁶

Twenty years later, Rousseau announced: ‘There are no longer Frenchmen, Germans, and Spaniards, or even English, but only Europeans.’ According to one judgement, the final realization of the ‘idea of Europe’ took place in 1796, when Edmund Burke wrote: ‘No European can be a complete exile in any part of Europe.’²⁷ Even so, the geographical, cultural, and political parameters of the European community have always remained open to debate. In 1794, when William Blake published one of his most unintelligible poems entitled ‘Europe: A Prophecy’, he illustrated it with a picture of the Almighty leaning out of the heavens and holding a pair of compasses.²⁸

Most of Europe’s outline is determined by its extensive sea-coasts. But the delineation of its land frontier was long in the making. The dividing line between Europe and Asia had been fixed by the ancients from the Hellespont to the River Don, and it was still there in medieval times. A fourteenth-century encyclopedist could produce a fairly precise definition:

‘Europe is said to be a third of the whole world, and has its name from Europa, daughter of Agenor, King of Libya. Jupiter ravished this Europa, and brought her to Crete, and called most of the land after her Europa . . . Europe begins on the river Tanay [Don] and stretches along the Northern Ocean to the end of Spain. The east and south part rises from the sea called Pontus [Black Sea] and is all joined to the Great Sea [the Mediterranean] and ends at the islands of Cadiz [Gibraltar] . . .’²⁹

Pope Pius II (Enea Piccolomini) began his early Treatise on the State of Europe (1458) with a description of Hungary, Transylvania, and Thrace, which at that juncture were under threat from the Turks.

Neither the ancients nor the medievals had any close knowledge of the easterly reaches of the European Plain, several sections of which were not permanently settled until the eighteenth century. So it was not until 1730 that a Swedish officer in the Russian service called Strahlenberg suggested that Europe’s boundary should be pushed back from the Don to the Ural Mountains and the Ural River. Sometime in the late eighteenth century, the Russian government erected a boundary post on the trail between Yekaterinburg and Tyumen to mark the frontier of Europe and Asia. From then on the gangs of Tsarist exiles, who were marched to Siberia in irons, created the custom of kneeling by the post and of scooping up a last handful of European earth. ‘There is no other boundary post in the whole world’, wrote one observer, ‘which has seen . . . so many broken hearts.’³⁰ By 1833, when Volger’s Handbuch der Geographie was published, the idea of ‘Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals’ had gained general acceptance.³¹

None the less, there is nothing sacred about the reigning convention. The extension of Europe to the Urals was accepted as a result of the rise of the Russian Empire. But it has been widely criticized, especially by analytical geographers. The frontier on the Urals had little validity in the eyes of Halford Mackinder, of Arnold Toynbee, for whom environmental factors had primacy, or of the Swiss geographer, J. Reynold, who wrote that ‘Russia is the geographical antithesis of Europe’. The decline of Russian power could well invoke a revision—in which case the views of a Russian-born Oxford professor about a ‘tidal Europe’, whose frontiers ebb and flow, would be borne out.³²

Geographical Europe has always had to compete with notions of Europe as a cultural community; and in the absence of common political structures, European civilization could only be defined by cultural criteria. Special emphasis is usually placed on the seminal role of Christianity, a role which did not cease when the label of Christendom was dropped.

Broadcasting to a defeated Germany in 1945, the poet T. S. Eliot expounded the view that European civilization stands in mortal peril after repeated dilutions of the Christian core. He described ‘the closing of Europe’s mental frontiers’ that had occurred during the years which had seen the nation-states assert themselves to the full. ‘A kind of cultural autarchy followed inevitably on political and economic autarchy,’ he said. He stressed the organic nature of culture: ‘Culture is something that must grow. You cannot build a tree; you can only plant it, and care for it, and wait for it to mature . . .’ He stressed the interdependence of the numerous sub-cultures within the European family. What he called cultural ‘trade’ was the organism’s lifeblood. And he stressed the special duty of men of letters. Above all, he stressed the centrality of the Christian tradition, which subsumes within itself ‘the legacy of Greece, of Rome, and of Israel’:

‘The dominant feature in creating a common culture between peoples, each of which has its own distinct culture, is religion. . . . I am talking about the common tradition of Christianity which has made Europe what it is, and about the common cultural elements which this common Christianity has brought with it. . . . It is in Christianity that our arts have developed; it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe—until recently—have been rooted. It is against a background of Christianity that all our thought has significance. An individual European may not believe that the Christian Faith is true; and yet what he says, and makes, and does, will all . . . depend on [the Christian heritage] for its meaning. Only a Christian culture could have produced a Voltaire or a Nietzsche. I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith.’³³

This concept is, in all senses, the traditional one. It is the yardstick of all other variants, breakaways, and bright ideas on the subject. It is the starting-point of what Mme de Staël once called ‘penser à l’européenne’.