The Origins of Europe

Abstract

This paper begins with an accusation of theft. 'The fall of the Roman empire' is a common, indeed standard, phrase used to refer to the effects of events such as the sack of Rome in 4io, and the deposing of Emperor Romulus Augus tulus in 476. Yet these events are relevant only to the fall of the western Roman empire. Of course everyone knows this; some authors even using the first formu lation and then changing to the second. What makes this self-deception of 'the fall of the Roman empire' possible, especially as we also all know that the eastern Roman empire continued beyond the fifth century, via Justinian in the sixth, until I453? Part of the answer seems to be that we-or at least those of us writing within the anglophone tradition-obscure the Roman status of the eastern empire by referring to it as the Byzantine empire, a term never as far as I know used by the rulers of that empire themselves. The combined effect of using 'Roman empire' for 'western Roman empire' and 'Byzantine empire' for'eastern Roman empire' is to deprive the eastern Roman empire of its romanitas (the 'theft' of my introduction) and, in turn, to make the West appear the sole inheritor of the Roman tradition. I have introduced the paper with this observation because the end of antiquity in the West is a fulcrum in arguments about the origins of Europe, and because any discussion of those origins involves well-known terms and phrases which may allow more than one meaning. In fact, it is likely that there is not a single concept of any importance in this paper which has not been the subject of debate. This is so not least with the concept of the continent of Europe, since Europe is not a con tinent (in the sense of being separate and contained), but rather a region of Eurasia. Europe is never referred to as a subcontinent, as India is, despite the vastly greater barrier represented by the Himalayas than by the Urals or the Don. Taking Europe to mean the culture identified with Europe for the last few centuries and in the modern world, the most prominent candidates for its origins are the Bronze Age, ancient Greece, the Roman empire, late antiquity in the West, the Carolingian dynasty, the Ottonian dynasty, and finally the Renaissance (or, after prehistory, one might say, the Greeks, the Romans, the barbarians, the Franks, the Saxons, and the Italians). All have been proposed as originators at various points over the last century; deciding between them is not a matter of establishing one right answer and six wrong ones, so much as weighing different criteria against one another. To me the evidence suggests that three criteria in particular are crucial, namely (a) cultural characteristics that are identifiable over an extended length of time; (b) an awareness of the concept of Europe; and (c) signs of a coherent process leading to the culture of present-day Europe.