The peoples of Europe

by H. J. Fleure

Rome, through empire or through church, has spread her ideas to the eastern bounds of Europe-of-the-Sea, to the border of the Pripet Marshes in the centre, and farther north, to the surround of the Baltic Sea. On the south the boundary of Roman work persistent in the Church is largely the periphery of the Adriatic Sea, with complex interrelations between Rome and Byzantium all over South-east Europe. In the parts of the Balkan Peninsula more easily reached from Constantinople, and on the Russian plain with its prehistoric links via Kief, &c., with Byzantium and the Aegean, the Byzantine organization of the Church has persisted. In South-east Europe, the Danubian lands and the Carpathian arc, we have the debatable zone between the two organizations, the wedge of weakness into which Islam was able to penetrate, as Prof. Stanley Roberts has pointed out to me.

Even as far west as Bohemia the first arrival of Christianity was due to Byzantine work, but the conflict of Constantinople with Asia and the difficulty of communications were against the persistence of this element, and the Roman tradition established itself in Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, Croatia, and largely in Slavonia.

In the eastern Carpathians an interesting compromise was reached in the seventeenth century by the recognition of the Uniate Church acknowledging the Pope, but keeping a Slavonic ritual. The persecution of that church by Romanizers in Poland and by the Byzantine Church of Russia is a great difficulty at the present time, but it should be understood that the Roman Church does not dispute the validity of Byzantine orders of priesthood and sacraments, so that the difference between Roman and Greek Christianity does not cut so deep as that between the Roman Church and western schismatics, such as Calvinists, Lutherans, Anglicans, and so on.

On the other hand, very important divergences have grown up in organization between the two churches in ways which deeply affect the life of the people. The western church, based upon the Roman Empire, has had its waves of enthusiasm in the early Middle Ages and during the Counter-Reformation for the unity of Europe, and the differentiation of religious organizations within the various language groups of Western Europe has been checked. As a result the more distant ones have seceded from Rome, but those which remain Roman all own allegiance to the Pope, an allegiance that creates problems for many a modern state. Reference has already been made to the vast importance of the Jesuits in maintaining this 'universalist' feature of religious and social life.

In the east, Constantinople, long involved in her ultimately unsuccessful conflict with Asia and Islam, was not sufficiently strongly placed to spread analogous waves of enthusiasm. Also her lines of communication were decidedly difficult, and her ambassadors of religion depended more on local factors and local aid. Then again some of the lands reached from her knew nothing of Rome, and here her influence persisted, while others like Hungary, &c., had been for a time in the empire ruled from Rome and gravitated to the Roman Church. The case of Wallachia and Moldavia must be left for discussion later on.

The Eastern Church has thus carried the universalist idea less far than the Roman. It has developed daughter churches, sometimes with well-marked peculiarities, within the language groups, so that now allegiance to one or another branch of the Eastern Church is often made a criterion of nationality in the Balkan areas of linguistic gradation and confusion. Religious organization has tended to be within the State, and often a substitute for the State in Eastern Europe, instead of being above the State, at least in its claims, as in the west.

With these facts of situation, physiography, people, languages, and religion in mind, we may now proceed to a somewhat closer survey of the peoples in the chief natural regions of Europe east of the Teutonic and Romance areas, allowing that the Bohemian (Czechoslovak) hill people and the Poles have already been dealt with to a large extent.

To the north of the forest of autumn leaf-fall swamps spread far and wide between Petrograd and Vologda, and on their northern flanks the coldness of the soil restricts root action so much that the pines and the birch are the chief forest trees, and the forest is only here and there worth clearing for corn growing. This is a region for hunters and fishers and gatherers, with a few animals and poor crops in small patches. Its peoples include a large element related to and derived from the peoples of Arctic Asia, Samoyedes, and Lapps, and an element among the Finns, and it is this element which has provided the languages of the region in several parts. The Finn is a mixture of this Asiatic-Arctic stock of broad-headed, dark-skinned people with the tall, fair, long-headed peoples of North Europe, and as it is the former who have provided the language, it is probable that they also provided the women, i.e. that the Nordics were forest hunters and adventurers, moving about without many women. In Karelia (east of the new republic of Finland) the Finn is more Asiatic in appearance than he is in Finland itself, and for the latter people Miss Czaplicka suggests the use of the name 'Finlanders'. In Karelia and the river basins feeding the White Sea there is naturally also a considerable Slavonic admixture. The antiquity of the Asiatic immigration is a disputed point: it may be very old, as Peake once argued, but he and others incline to make the movement fairly recent, and to connect the ancient Arctic cultures of the region with old types of long-headed men. Near the Baltic coast the physical type of the people becomes practically pure Nordic in several places, and some districts on the coast speak Swedish, as do the people of the Aland Islands.

The south-west of Finland is so much influenced by the sea that it has a zone of the forest of leaf-fall, and thus can grow reasonable amounts of corn. On it stand the essentially European cities of Abo and Helsingfors, and the relation to the sea and the west is shown not only in the fact that 'Baltic' style characterizes most Finnish things, but also in the fact that Finland became Roman Catholic under the influence of missions from Sweden in the twelfth century. It thus contrasts with the regions farther east, which were Christianized by the Eastern Church. Until the rise of Russia as a power, Swedish influence was dominant in Finland, but the growth of Petrograd and the efforts of Russian power to organize itself in a western fashion altered the balance and Russia became dominant, taking Finland definitely into the Tsar's domains in 1809. In the nineteenth century long and vain attempts were made by autocratic Russia to work in double harness with Finland, which belonged so markedly to Western Europe by tradition, had seceded from the Roman Church and become Protestant at the Great Schism, and was feeling, along with Western Europe, the nationalist revival with its literary movement attempting in this case to perpetuate Finnish and develop it as a culture language. As in some other northern regions (notably Norway) the aristocracy merged itself in the people, and became the leader-element in trade and commerce. The small amount of good land has made it a precious possession, and the Finlanders are keenly interested in peasant proprietorship. In all these ways the contrast between them and Russia is strongly marked, and the new rulers of Russia have evidently recognized this in their treaty with the now sovereign state of Finland. Finland's timber is a precious asset, and her cattle are likely to bring her some wealth; her future is as a Baltic people, and it may be hoped a member of a future Baltic federation. The Alanders inhabit a maze of islands, which are a partially submerged extension of the Finnish plateau; their historic associations have been with Finland, but, like the people of some coastal regions of Finland, they speak Swedish. The League of Nations has suggested for them a scheme of local autonomy under Finland, and this is under consideration, but they seem to wish for a closer link with Sweden. Such a link educationally and religiously would be of value, and we have here merely one more example of the hampering effects of our present undue insistence on the idea of the sovereign state rather than on that of the United States of Europe. The Karelians and other Finnish peoples of the north, east of Finland, have been affected a good deal by monastic settlements made by the Eastern Church; they may get a living partly by lumbering and partly in fur trade; cultivation and even stock-raising must remain poorly developed.

Turning south of the line from Petrograd to Vologda we are, at least theoretically, in the zone of the forest of leaf-fall, that is a forest with the oak and birch, not, however, the beech. Here again the Baltic coast lands have peoples strongly marked off by culture associations from those of the interior, but, as regards the interior, the penetration of Finnish or more broadly Asiatic influences is not nearly so marked until we come to the Volga below Kazan, where are to be found the Mordva. In this eastern region are also found groups of Tatar speech and Asiatic origin, some of whom were gradually forced by past Russian governments to give up nomad pasturing and become settled cultivators. A Tatar republic now centres round Kazan (1921). An Asiatic influence may nevertheless be traced far and wide in the physique of the Russian people of Muscovy, though they owe their main inheritance to the broad-headed, dark, central European stock which has colonized the Russian forest bit by bit from the more open lands of the Polish-Galician platform, moving around the south side of the Pripet Marshes and entering the Muscovite forest via the Dnieper crossing at Kief. An important element in the life of the people has been their association with the mediaeval fur trade of the Hanse, and a study of Russian physique suggests a Nordic sprinkling all over the country, and especially among the landowners; but the villagers are mainly of the broad-headed type, characteristic of the mountain axis of Europe, albeit in the better lands taller than they are in the Alps and Cevennes, and in other ways also more like some types found in the Balkan Peninsula.