Europe: A History (3 page)

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.

Map 2. Queen Europe (Regina Europa)

An engraving from an edition of Sebastian Müntzer’s
Cosmography
(Cosmographia Universalis
lib. vi; Basel 1550–4) courtesy of Bodleian Library

History Today

H
ISTORY
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
ĽEvolution de Ľhumanité
, whose content was over 90 percent European, was planned after the First World War with no 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.

Yet no historian can compete with the poets for economy of thought:

If Europe is a Nymph,
Then Naples is her bright-blue eye,
And Warsaw is her heart.
Sebastopol and Azoff,
Petersburg, Mitau, Odessa:
These are the thorns in her feet.
Paris is the head,
London the starched collar,
And Rome—the scapulary.
³

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 europâischen 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 Ralegh, 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 simplifica-teurs
, 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 oudines 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.