Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
traumatized by the proximity of (and occupation by) North African Muslims, lost ground
eventually to the Dutch, French, and English in the oceanic competition. So just as Charle-
magne's Holy Roman Empire succeeded Rome, in modern times northern Europe has now
succeeded southern Europe, with the mineral-rich Carolingian core winning out in the form
of the European Union: in no small measure because of geography.
The medieval Mediterranean was itself divided between the Frankish west and the Byz-
antine east. For it wasn't only divisions between north and south that both define and
plague Europe today, but also those between west and east and, as we shall see, between the
northwest and the center. Consider the migration route of the Danube valley that continues
eastward beyond the Great Hungarian Plain, the Balkans, and the Black Sea, all the way
along with the flat, unimpeded access to Russia further north, forms the basis for the waves
of invasions of mainly Slavic and Turkic peoples from the east that Mackinder details in
his “Geographical Pivot of History” article, and which have, as we know, greatly shaped
Europe's political destiny. So just as there is a Carolingian Europe and a Mediterranean
Europe, there is, too, often as a result of these invasions from the east, a Byzantine-Otto-
man Europe, a Prussian Europe, and a Habsburg Europe, all of which are geographically
distinct, and that live today through somewhat differing economic development patterns:
differing patterns that cannot simply be erased by the creation of a single currency.
For example, in the fourth century
A.D
., the Roman Empire itself divided into western
and eastern halves. Rome remained the capital of the western empire, while Constantinople
became the capital of the eastern one. Rome's western empire gave way to Charlemagne's
kingdom further north and to the Vatican: Western Europe, in other words. The eastern
empire—Byzantium—was populated mainly by Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians, and
later by Muslims, when the Ottoman Turks, migrating from the east, captured Con-
stantinople in 1453. The border between these eastern and western empires ran through the
middle of what after World War I became the multiethnic state of Yugoslavia. When that
state broke apart violently in 1991, at least initially the breakup echoed the divisions of
Rome sixteen centuries earlier. The Slovenes and Croats were Roman Catholics, heirs to a
tradition that went back from Austria-Hungary to Rome in the West; the Serbs were Eastern
Orthodox and heirs to the Ottoman-Byzantine legacy of Rome in the East. The Carpathians,
which run northeast of the former Yugoslavia and divide Romania into two parts, partially
reinforced this boundary between Rome and Byzantium, and later between the Habsburg
routes existed through these formidable mountains, bringing the cultural repository of
Mit-
teleuropa
deep into the Byzantine and Ottoman Balkans. But even if the Carpathians were
not a hard and fast border, like the Alps, they marked a gradation, a shift in the balance
from one Europe to another. Southeastern Europe would be poor not only compared to
