By geographical position, Asiatic Turkey is the junction of land thoroughfares which trend from south to north as well as from east to west. Its aboriginal population came inevitably into contact with the races whose migrations are known to have begun about 4,000 B.C. A second group of peoples is thus obtained in which the old strain is considerably modified. Armenians, Turks, upland Greeks, Jacobites, Nestorians and most of the Kurds represent this mixed element. A third group consists of lowlanders who never made the ascent of Turkish mountains and consequently carry no traces of Hittite ancestry. Maritime Greek populations and Arabs fall under this classification.
In the main we see that the mountain bears in its central part a homogeneous and coherent people. Distance from the core has slight effect upon the physical characteristics of the mountaineers, as long as they do not forsake the upland for the lowland. Their ideas, however, undergo modifications which can be interpreted as concessions to the views of more powerful peoples with whom contact is established. Customs, however, generally remain unchanged even if they have to be maintained in secrecy.
Nevertheless, relief alone cannot account for the variety of peoples and religions in Asiatic Turkey. The easternmost fringe of Christianity emerging sporadically out of an ocean of Mohammedanism discloses, by the variety of its discordant elements, the extent to which distance from Constantinople, the religious capital of the eastern church, had weakened the power of ecclesiastical authority. Armenians, Nestorians, Chaldeans, Jacobites and Maronites, one and all heretics in the eyes of Orthodox prelates, were merely independent thinkers who relied on the remoteness of their native districts in order to protest, without peril to themselves, against the innovations of Byzantine theologians, or to stand firm on the basis of the rites and doctrines of early Christianity.
From the social standpoint the eastern half of Asiatic Turkey deserves investigation as the seat of an immemorial conflict between nomadism and sedentary life. Every stage of the transition between the two conditions may be observed. The feuds which set community against community in Turkey often originate in the divergent interests of nomad and settled inhabitant, and are enforced by economic factors. As an example the Kurds of the Armenian highlands may be mentioned. The perpetuation of nomadism in their case is the result of extensive horse-breeding[267]—their chief source of revenue—which compels them to seek low ground in winter.
Viewed as a whole, Asiatic Turkey has changed from an ideal nursery of hardy men to a land of meeting between races and peoples as well as between their ideals. It may be safely predicted that the future of its inhabitants bids fair to be as intimately affected as their past by the remarkable situation of the country and its physical features. One can only hope, for their sake, that a thorough invasion of highland and lowland by the spirit of the west will not be delayed much longer. This much may be said now, that the establishment of Christian rule in the land would probably be attended by wholesale conversions to Christianity in many so-called Mohammedan communities, where observance of Islamic rites has been dictated by policy, rather than by faith.
In dealing with the varied influences which engage attention in a study of linguistic areas the student is frequently compelled to pause before the importance of economic relations. Inspection of a map of Europe suggests strikingly that zones of linguistic contact were destined by their very location to become meeting-places for men speaking different languages. They correspond to the areas of circulation defined by Ratzel.[268] The confusion of languages on their site is in almost every instance the result of human intercourse determined by economic causes. Necessity, far more than the thought of lucre, compels men to resort to intercourse with strangers. In Belgium, after the Norman conquest, the burghers of Flanders were able to draw on English markets for the wool which they converted into the cloth that gave their country fame in the fairs of Picardy and Champagne.[269] We have here a typical example of Ratzel’s “Stapelländern” or “transit regions.”
In very small localities the spread of language brought about by economic changes has occasionally come under the scrutiny of modern observers. At Grimault, in the ancient land of Burgundy, the deterioration of the local patois due to intensive working of quarries between 1860 and 1880 has been studied by E. Blin.[270] Laborers from remote districts were attracted by the prospect of work. Some intermarried with the natives. The influx of the foreign element was followed by the replacement of the locality’s vernacular by French.
In west-central Europe the line of traffic along the Rhine at the end of the twelfth century ran from Cologne to Bruges along the divide between French and Flemish. Lorraine, a region of depression between the Archean piles of the Ardennes and Vosges, invited access from east and west and was known to historians as a Gallo-Romanic market place of considerable importance.[271]
In our time the river trade between Holland and Germany along the Rhine has caused expansion of Dutch into German territory as far as Wesel and Crefeld. The intruding language, however, yields to German wherever the latter is present.[272] Prevalence of French in parts of Switzerland is generally ascribed to travel through certain Alpine passes.[273] The area of human circulation between Lake Constance and Lake Geneva has endowed Switzerland with 35 different dialects of German, 16 of French, 8 of Italian and 5 of Romansh.[274] The penetration of German into the Trentino has already been explained. In Austria the entire valley of the Danube has provided continental trade with one of its most important avenues. Attention is called elsewhere to the Balkan peninsula as an intercontinental highway. In a word, language always followed in the wake of trade and Babel-like confusion prevailed along channels wherein men and their marketable commodities flowed.
This retrospect also leads to the conclusion that the influence of physical features in the formation of European nationalities has been exerted with maximum intensity in the early periods of their history. This was at the time when man’s adaptation to environment was largely blind and unconditioned by his own will. Freedom from this physical thralldom is attained only through man’s practical knowledge of human necessities and a sound vision of the welfare of his descendants. Manifestations of nature can then be made subservient to the human will. In this regard historians may eventually be induced to divide their favorite study into two main periods characterized respectively by man’s submission to, or his intelligent control of, environment. A proper understanding of this conception may contribute to the establishment of frontiers with a view to eliminating conflicts due to relics of national or historical incompatibility.