Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Moorish infidels in their ships at piracy on the Mediterranean, and that the horse-
riding Turks from Asia raided thus into the very heart of the Christian peninsula
when it was clasped by hostile sea-power, we have some idea of the pounding, as
between pestle and mortar, which went into the making of modern Europe. The
pestle was landpower from the Heartland.
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Meanwhile, Russia, protected by forest glades against many a rampaging host, nev-
ertheless fell prey in the thirteenth century to the Golden Horde of the Mongols. Thus
would Russia be denied access to the European Renaissance, and branded forever with the
bitterest feelings of inferiority and insecurity. The ultimate land-based empire, with no nat-
ural barriers against invasion save for the forest itself, Russia would know forevermore
what it was like to be brutally conquered, and as a result would become perennially ob-
sessed with expanding and holding territory, or at least dominating its contiguous shadow
zones.
Whereas the Mongol invasions out of Central Asia decimated and subsequently changed
not only Russia, but Turkey, Iran, India, China, and the northern reaches of the Arab Middle
East, Europe in many parts knew no such level of destruction, and thus was able to emerge
off from almost all of Africa, the macro-destiny of medieval Europe up until the Columbian
epoch, according to Mackinder, was to be generally conditioned by what happened on the
Asian steppe. And it wasn't only the Mongols that we are talking about; the Seljuk Turks,
bursting out of the heartland steppe in the tenth and eleventh centuries, overran much of the
Middle East, and it was their ill treatment of Christian pilgrims at Jerusalem that ostensibly
led to the Crusades, which Mackinder considers the beginning of Europe's collective mod-
ern history.
Mackinder goes on in this vein, laying out for the reader a Eurasia bounded by ice to the
north and tropical ocean to the south, which has four marginal regions at its extremities,
all of them positioned under the shadow of the vast and pivotal expanse of Central Asia
and its Mongol-Turkic hordes. These four marginal regions, as he informs us, correspond
not coincidentally to the four great numerical religions: for faith, too, in Mackinder's judg-
ment, is a function of geography. There are the “monsoon lands,” one in the east facing
the Pacific Ocean, the home of Buddhism; the other in the south facing the Indian Ocean,
the home of Hinduism. The third marginal region is Europe itself, watered by the Atlantic
to the west, the hub of Christianity. But the most fragile of the four outliers is the Middle
East, home of Islam, “deprived of moisture by the proximity of Africa,” and “except in the
oases … thinly peopled” (in 1904, that is). Devoid of forest, dominated by desert, and thus
wide open to nomadic invasions and to subsequent upheavals and revolutions, the Middle
East is, in addition—because of its propinquity to gulfs, seas, and oceans—particularly vul-
