The Historical Geography of Europe, Vol. I, Text

by Edward A. Freeman

[CHAPTER XI.]

THE BALTIC LANDS.

♦Lands beyond the two Empires.♦

Our survey of the two Empires and of the powers which sprang out of them has still left out of sight a large part of Europe, including some lands which formed part of the elder Empire. It is only indirectly that we have spoken of the extreme north, the extreme east, or the extreme west, of Europe. ♦Quasi-Imperial position of certain powers.♦ In all these regions powers have risen and fallen which might pass for shadows of the two Empires of Rome. ♦The British islands.♦ Thus in the north-west lie two great islands with a following of smaller ones, of which the elder Empire never held more than part of the greater island and those of the smaller ones which could not be separated from it. Britain passed for a world of its own, and the princes who rose to a quasi-Imperial position within that world took, by a kind of analogy, the titles of Empire.[51] ♦Scandinavia.♦ In the extreme north are a larger and smaller peninsula, with their attendant islands, which lay wholly beyond the elder Empire, and of which the later Western Empire took in only a very small part for a short time. ♦Empire of Cnut.♦ The momentary union of these two insular and peninsular systems, of Britain and Scandinavia, formed more truly a third Empire of the North, fully the fellow of those of the East and West.[52] ♦Spain.♦ In the south-west of Europe again lay another great peninsula, which had been fully incorporated with the elder Empire, parts of which—at two opposite ends—had belonged to the Empire of Justinian and to the Empire of Charles, but whose history, as a whole, stands apart from that of either the Eastern or the Western Roman power. And in Spain also, as being, like Britain, in some sort a world of its own, the leading power asserted an Imperial rank. ♦Castilian Emperors.♦ As Wessex had its Emperors, so had Castile.

♦History of the lands beyond the Empires.♦

Britain, Scandinavia, and Spain, thus form three marked geographical wholes, three great divisions of that part of Europe which lay outside the bounds of either Empire at the time of the separation. But the geographical position of the three regions has led to marked differences in their history. Insular Britain is wholly oceanic. ♦Geographical comparison of Scandinavia and Spain.♦ Peninsular Spain and Scandinavia have each an oceanic side; but each has also a side towards one of the great inland seas of Europe—Spain towards the Mediterranean, Scandinavia towards the northern Mediterranean, the Baltic. But the Baltic side of Scandinavia has been of far greater relative importance than the Mediterranean side of Spain. ♦Position of Aragon in the Mediterranean.♦ Of the three chief Spanish kingdoms Aragon alone has a Mediterranean history; the seaward course of Castile and Portugal was oceanic. Of the three Scandinavian kingdoms Norway alone is wholly oceanic. ♦Position of Sweden in the Baltic.♦ Denmark is more Baltic than oceanic; the whole historic life of Sweden lies on the Baltic coasts. The Mediterranean position of Aragon enabled her to win whole kingdoms as her dependencies. But they were not geographically continuous, and they never could be incorporated. Sweden, on the other hand, was able to establish a continuous dominion on both sides of the great northern gulfs, and to make at least a nearer approach to the incorporation of her conquests than Aragon could ever make. ♦Growth and decline of Sweden.♦ The history of Sweden mainly consists in the growth and the loss of her dominion in the Baltic lands out of her own peninsula. It is only in quite modern times that the union of the crowns, though not of the kingdoms, of Sweden and Norway has created a power wholly peninsular and equally Baltic and oceanic.

♦Eastern and western aspects of Scandinavia.♦

This eastern aspect of Scandinavian history needs the more to be insisted on, because there is another side of it with which we are naturally more likely to be struck. Scandinavian inroads and conquests—inroads and conquests, that is, from Denmark and Norway—make up a large part of the early history of Gaul and Britain. When this phase of their history ends, the Scandinavian kingdoms are apt to pass out of our sight, till we are perhaps surprised at the great part which they suddenly play in Europe in the seventeenth century. But both Denmark and Sweden had meanwhile been running their course in the lands north, east, and south of the Baltic. And it is this Baltic side of their history which is of primary importance in our general European view.

♦The Baltic lands generally.♦