THE GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPEAN DIVISIONS - The Revenge of Geography - page 106

Just as Roman expansion gave a certain stability to the so-called barbarian tribes of
northern Europe, Rome's breakup would lead over the centuries to the formation of peoples
and nation-states with which we are now familiar, and which was formalized by the Treaty
of Westphalia following the Thirty Years' War in 1648. As the scholar William Anthony
Hay writes, “Pressure from nomadic tribes on the steppes and European periphery started a
chain effect that pushed other groups living in more or less settled cultures into the vacuum
created by the collapse of Roman power.” 7 That is, Rome's collapse, coupled with the on-
slaught westward from the peoples of the steppe, together aided the formation of national
groups in Central and northwestern Europe.
Antiquity was, above all, defined by the geographic hold of the Mediterranean, and as
that hold “slackened,” with Rome losing its hinterlands in northern Europe and the Near
East, the world of the Middle Ages was born. 8 Mediterranean unity was further shattered by
the Arab sweep through North Africa. 9 Already by the eleventh century the map of Europe
has a modern appearance, with France and Poland roughly in their present shapes, the Holy
Roman Empire in the guise of a united Germany, and Bohemia—with Prague at its cen-
ter—presaging the Czech Republic. Thus did history move north.
Mediterranean societies, despite their innovations in politics—Athenian democracy and
the Roman Republic—were, by and large, in the words of the French historian and geo-
grapher Fernand Braudel, defined by “traditionalism and rigidity.” The poor quality of
Mediterranean soils favored large holdings that were, perforce, under the control of the
wealthy. And that, in turn, contributed to an inflexible social order. Meanwhile, in the forest
clearings of northern Europe, with their richer soils, grew up a freer civilization, anchored
by the informal power relationships of feudalism, that would be better able to take advant-
age of the invention of movable type and other technologies yet to come. 10
As deterministic as Braudel's explanation may appear, it does work to explain the broad
undercurrents of the European past. Obviously, human agency in the persons of such men
as Jan Hus, Martin Luther, and John Calvin was pivotal to the Protestant Reformation, and
hence to the Enlightenment, that would allow for northern Europe's dynamic emergence
as one of the cockpits of history in the modern era. Nevertheless, all that could not have
happened without the immense river and ocean access, and the loess earth, rich with coal
and iron ore deposits, which formed the background for such individual dynamism and in-
dustrialization. Great, eclectic, and glittering empires there certainly were along the Medi-
terranean in the Middle Ages, notably the Norman Roger II's in twelfth-century Sicily,
and lest we forget, the Renaissance flowered first in late medieval Florence, with the art
of Michelangelo and the secular realism of Machiavelli. But it was the pull of the colder
Atlantic which opened up global shipping routes that ultimately won out against the en-
closed Mediterranean. While Portugal and Spain were the early beneficiaries of this Atlant-
ic trade—owing to their protruding peninsular position—their pre-Enlightenment societies,