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What's So Eastern About Eastern Europe?
Twenty Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall
By Leon Marc Oldcastle Books
Copyright © 2010 Andy Richards
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84243-430-7
CHAPTER 1
St Ferghal and the Globalisation of the Middle Ages
In 1994, in the small village of Vrhpolje in western Slovenia, only a dozen miles from the Italian border, there was a rather unusual public event, attended even by a high-ranking national politician. On a rock just outside the village, the villagers erected a monument, remembering a battle that took place exactly 1,600 years earlier between the Roman (Byzantine) Emperor Theodosius and the western usurper Eugenius. Although probably unknown to the reader, the battle was of considerable significance for the advancement of Christianity in the Roman Empire, since Theodosius was (at least formally) Christian and Eugenius was pagan, and the encounter is regarded as an important milestone in late Antiquity.
The high profile of the celebration shows how even remote historical events are sometimes used by people in so-called Eastern Europe to claim the early participation of their lands (not even of their people in this case, as the Slavs would have not entered modern-day Slovenia until at least the sixth century!) in the development of Christendom and therefore, by implication, their stake in Europe. One may find such attempts rather desperate, especially if they involve a 1,600-year-old battle. But something else is also striking: how is it possible that villagers living in a place less than two hours drive away from Venice need so much to prove that they really belong to Europe? And what happened on the other side of the divide, in so-called Western Europe, to make territory only a few kilometres away seem so distant, so culturally different, that it deserves a special name – Eastern Europe?
Although the example of, say, the Czech Republic and Germany is very similar, the situation is particularly shocking when one looks at Slovenia and Italy. Except in the years immediately after World War II, there was never really an Iron Curtain between Italy and Slovenia. In 2004, on EU Enlargement Day, Western media, hungry for iconic images of the Iron Curtain, repeatedly used photo-shots of the rather unthreatening fence between Italian Gorizia/Gorica and Slovenian Nova Gorica, a kind of mini-Berlin wall, but this was much to the amusement of the locals who were used to commuting daily through a nearby border post even in Communist times. (The purpose of that particular fence was more to mark the borderline than to prevent trespassing, and the most controversial event associated with it occurred in the 1950s, when a mob threw a high-ranking Slovenian clergyman over it into Italy, in an act masterminded by the Communist authorities.)
The truth was that, from the 1970s onwards, when Yugoslavia liberalised its border regime to allow for the development of its tourist industry and access to hard currency, Yugoslavs were free to travel anywhere they wished and as often as they wished. We were the privileged ones in the Communist world. Coming from a nearby town, I remember well how, in the years of my childhood, we used to go shopping in Italy almost every fortnight, bringing home items that were not available in Yugoslavia or were cheaper in Italy, like washing powder, fruits, coffee, etc.
I will return to the deeper significance of 'washing-powder tourism' later, but let me describe one more aspect of Cold War history at the border between Italy and Yugoslavia/Slovenia. Italians also came over to Slovenia in almost the same numbers to buy petrol and fresh meat or to indulge in Slovenian restaurants, casinos and good-value dental repairs. (In return, Yugoslav dinars, though not officially a convertible currency, were accepted in the shops of Trieste/Trst and Gorizia/Gorica.) Those Italian shoppers, gamblers and patients seemed almost completely ignorant about the country (Slovenia) they were visiting and of the fact that it used to be a part of Italy and, before that, of the Venetian Republic. They seemed to know nothing of the centuries of shared history, as if Communist rule had simply erased them. In other words, during the Communist era it began to seem perfectly normal that Gorizia/Gorica or Trieste/Trst, with its Slovenian ethnic minority, should be labelled Western European, but that the immediate hinterland of Slovenia should be called an Eastern European land. And yet nobody was able to explain what exactly – other than Communism – made the Slovenian hinterland Eastern European and Trieste/Trst Western European.
In any account of European history, East and West first appear in connection with the eastern and western Roman Empire, i.e. the Byzantine Empire (called 'Roman' by Ottomans and Greeks and 'Greek' by the West) and the Latin Roman Empire (later referred to as the Frankish Empire). In 285 AD, the then Roman Emperor Diocletian moved the centre of the Empire to the East and divided it in two, drawing the dividing line across the province of Illyricum (now commonly known as the Western Balkans) roughly where Bosnia-Herzegovina is today. This delimitation, with slight changes, continued to mark political divisions – albeit by new and different polities – right up until the First World War. It also features prominently in Samuel Huntington's acclaimed work on the clash of civilisations.
Diocletian's aim was certainly not to create Eastern Europe – he did not think of East and West in those terms, nor, of course, did he think of Europe. He decided to divide the great empire to improve its management and above all its protection against various barbarians, mostly Germanic tribes and peoples – in other words (ironically) the future Europeans. Yet his choice of the division line was not purely arbitrary: he drew it where Latin influence faded and gave way to predominantly Greek influence. (The delimitation line was a couple of hundred miles east of Castra ad Fluvium Frigidus, the Roman outpost near modern Vrhpolje, the Slovenian village mentioned above.) The division only concerned Mediterranean Europe; the vast areas north of it, where today lie other regions that are part of Eastern Europe, were not included in this mapping, as they were out of Roman military control. As we shall see, the Greek half would later play a very important role in the formation of Eastern Europe.
In the times with which we are concerned at this point, Europe as a political entity did not yet exist but the Roman and Greek worlds – as the spiritual foundations of Europe – did. In fact, with the demise of the Western Roman Empire, it was the Byzantine Empire which took over the role of 'Europe'. With Constantine, the capital of the Roman Empire was formally moved to the East. From then on, it was Byzantium, which regarded itself as the true Rome, as the 'world super-power', and, as such, it continued to intervene militarily not only in the Apennine Peninsula (one of the most splendid achievements of Byzantine art can be found in Ravenna, an Italian city just south of Venice) but even in the Iberian one. And the power of Byzantium began to gain additional momentum once the pagan West had been subdued by barbarians. The city, known also as Constantinople, was at the heart of a Christian Empire and it continued to flourish.
There have been ongoing attempts to define what made – or makes – Europe and its peoples European. The answer to this question proves not only to be far from obvious but also, and at the same time, highly divisive. In 2005, the draft European Constitution sparked some bitter exchanges on the issue of the role of Christianity in the formation of Europe. In the end – and this appeared to be done under the strong influence of French views on the relationship between Church and State – only a vague reference to 'religious inheritance' remained in the preamble of a document that was later to be abandoned anyway. Indeed, it seemed that the biggest problem for those who framed the EU Constitution was to name the sources that inspired the listed European values (rights of the individual, freedom, democracy, equality and the rule of law, justice and solidarity, diversity, pride in national identity and history, etc). The preamble specifically mentioned only 'cultural, religious and humanist inheritance', but failed to say which religion(s) were referred to. It did, however, mention Humanism as a particular philosophical view. But, some asked, if Humanism is there, why not mention Christianity too? The usual explanation at the time was that mentioning one religion would discriminate against the others. Moreover, the Crusades, the Inquisition, alleged Church tolerance of right-wing dictators and the like seemed to suggest that it would be politically incorrect to mention Christianity and its philosophical underpinning of Europe, even in such a benign text as the draft European Constitution.
Some Eastern Europeans, notably the Poles, were particularly unhappy about this omission of Christianity. The truth is that Humanism, which was mentioned, could only have taken root in an originally Christian environment. Moreover, it was mostly a Western and Central European phenomenon. In what I will later call 'Eastern Europe proper' (i.e. Orthodox Eastern Europe), Humanism only made an appearance from the late eighteenth century, and was even then seen as a Western importation. For an important part of Eastern Europe then, it was Christianity which provided the basic link with the rest of the Continent.
Christianity was spread across the Roman Empire, both east and west, well before the arrival of the barbarians. In the east, the emperors were smart enough to abandon the ancient gods and to opt for the Christian God – be it out of genuine personal conversion or political convenience or both. They probably did so also because of the strong philosophical tradition they had inherited from classical Greece, which greatly influenced the first Church. The Western Roman Empire, on the other hand, did not recognise the expediency of Christianity and, arguably, this cost it its own existence.
Christianisation (or the creation of Christendom) was a cultural, political and also 'technological' and military process, a sort of globalisation of the early Middle Ages. The Western Roman Empire did not really care about it and disappeared; the Eastern Empire embraced it and survived much longer. The Roman (western) legacy was taken over by the Franks, who did recognise the political value of Christianity, while the Eastern Empire took over the legacy of the ancient Greeks. Thus, in the early Middle Ages, the Frankish Empire and the Byzantine Empire each stood at its own end of the European continent, fighting to subdue – in a political and religious sense – the peoples in-between, above all the Slavs, who entered Europe about that time and who were to become central to what would be known as Eastern Europe.
What was at stake for these early 'Eastern Europeans' in this process? Of major political importance in the region at that time were two peoples: the Bulgars, i.e. the early Bulgarians (actually of non-Slav origin) and Moravians (that is to say, the ancestors of the Czechs and the Slovaks), and both sought to manoeuvre between the two superpowers of the day, the Byzantine Empire and the Franks. Contrary to what geographical position might suggest, the Bulgars first sought Christian missionaries from the Franks, and the Moravians from the Byzantium. The Bulgars' approach to the Franks was not well received by the Byzantines and Constantinople reacted militarily. The final solution to what was, at first examination, a religious issue was reached at the ecumenical council in Constantinople where a majority of Eastern bishops decided that Bulgarians should fall under the religious rule of Constantinople rather than Rome. This left a profound mark on Bulgaria for the rest of its history: it acquired the Greek-influenced Cyrillic script and it remained in the realm of what later came to be known as Orthodox Christianity. The move also facilitated the Christianisation of Russians – the so-called Kiev Russians, i.e. the early ancestors of modern Russians and Ukrainians, who accepted Christianity in 987 AD.
In Moravia, the arrival of two Greek preachers, Cyril (also known as Constantine) and Methodius challenged the plans of Frankish missionaries and politicians. Under some pressure, the disciples of these two brothers were expelled and Moravia, together with Caranthania to the south (a principality of early Slovenians that covered roughly the same territory as the Austrian province of Carinthia today), came under Bavarian political influence. The Bavarians themselves had already been subdued by the Franks. (Both Bavarians and early Slovenians were converted about the same time and an excellent account of this in Latin has been preserved which is why we know so much about it.) Christianisation was interrupted for a while by the arrival of the Avars (one of the ancestors of the Magyars) but Frankish help to the Slavs as they defended themselves against the new arrivals tightened the Bavarian/Frankish grip. After a brief but very important Irish mission (St Ferghal was bishop of Salzburg and he is still regarded as the Apostle of the Caranthanians, i.e. the early Slovenians), Caranthanians as well as other Slavs in Central Europe came under Germanic ecclesiastical control.
Further to the north, the early Bohemian rulers were looking westward too. Magdeburg became the centre for the Christianisation of western Slavs. In 964, Poles acquired Christianity from Bohemians through royal marriage. Later on, Poles and Czechs would be among the few Slavic nations able to establish their own church provinces directly reporting to Rome, which would enable them to maintain, at least for some time, a fair degree of political independence.
The Hungarians, one of the non-Slavic nations of the Eastern Europe, initially came under Greek influence but German clergy prevailed after AD 980. Christianity was firmly established in the whole of Eastern Europe by the early years of the eleventh century. The exception was Lithuania, which only ceased to be formally pagan in 1385 when, again through marriage, its rulers accepted the Roman Catholic faith from Poles.
For the purpose of our further discussion it is important to note that Europe, in these early centuries, the Christendom of Charlemagne already included a great part of what today is popularly called Eastern Europe. By the fourteenth century, when 'Europe' got an even better-defined shape and the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (a union of small, principalities that were mostly but not exclusively German -speaking and that much later gave birth to what is today known as Germany) was firmly established, the political inclusion of the vast majority of modern Eastern Europe was even more evident.
Of course, there was no Western or Eastern Europe in the time of Charlemagne. To the Franks, the Slavs and Magyars were simply those (usually violent) invaders that needed to be dealt with in some way. Christianisation – even though in part carried out at sword-point – was a surprisingly civilised method of containing the Slavic (and later Magyar) menace, at least by the standards of the early Middle Ages. It was akin to the 'Stabilisation and Association Process' of the European Union in the Balkans today. To Christianise Slavs also meant turning them into allies, and allies – at least Christian allies – do not fight against each other. This stopped the advance of the Slav hordes but also made violence against them, now they were Christian, less acceptable morally. The new alliances also implied that, sooner or later, since they were at a lower level of political organisation, Slavs would be subdued by those who had already achieved a higher version of statehood, as the Franks had. It would, of course, be very premature to see in this any form of nationalism: the world of Charlemagne was not a world of ethnicities and even less so one of nations. It was a simple fact that, at a point when Christianity was gaining popularity, the Franks (as proto-Germans or proto-French or proto-Europeans) were at a stage of political organisation, which allowed the use (and misuse) of Christian religion for political purposes. For the Slavs to opt for Christianity may have meant an uncertain political future (although would there be any more certainty in confronting the Franks militarily?) but it also meant becoming a part of 'Europe'; a part of the globalisation of the Middle Ages.
One can only speculate about how much this globalisation was controversial at the time. How far the decision to accept Christianity was a conscious one is difficult to say, even for the Slavic rulers. On the other hand, some historians believe that it was not all about worldly interests, and that leaders such as Charlemagne were guided by genuine religious zeal.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from What's So Eastern About Eastern Europe? by Leon Marc. Copyright © 2010 Andy Richards. Excerpted by permission of Oldcastle Books.
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