Over the centuries – even in the present – how have the people living in Europe developed a separate “European” identity by contrasting themselves with an external (and/or internal) “other”, defined religiously, culturally, racially, or any other way?
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BurkeDidEuropeExistbefore1700.docxDid Europe Exist Before 1700?
Peter Burke
History of European Ideas 1 (1), 1980
What is this entity “Europe”? A landmass, but a landmass without natural frontiers, offering plenty of room for disagreement over what territory should be included or excluded. Europe has never been an economic or political unit (whatever the future may hold). The landmass has never had a common culture distinct from other parts of the world. Not even Christianity has ever quite filled this role, for there were Christians outside Europe and Muslims in Andalusia, Bosnia and elsewhere. Europe is not so much a place as an idea. “Europe” is not only a neutral geographical term but a word expressing a sense of group identity, a form of collective consciousness not unlike national consciousness, class consciousness, or the sense of belonging to a particular generation. The sense of belonging to Europe was strongly felt and clearly expressed by a number of eighteenth-century intellectuals: the Genoese philosopher Paolo Mattia Doria described “our Europe” as like “one great family”; Montesquieu declared that “L’Europe est un état composé de plusieurs provinces”, and Burke proclaimed that “no European can be a complete exile in any part of Europe.” Did anyone think in these terms before 1700?
Historians, who like the language of “firsts”, have variously described Cicero, Charlemagne, Pope Pius II, the emperor Charles V and Montaigne as “the first European”. This disagreement is a useful reminder that although Europe has meant a great deal to many people, it has not always meant the same thing. But how is the historian to trace changes in anything so elusive and insubstantial as collective consciousness? It is natural to begin with the history of particular terms, such as “Europe” and “European”. But the historian will want to establish the frequency with which different people used the terms and the contexts in which they used them. We need to place them within what might be called the “repertoire” of concepts available for expressing group identity in different places and times. Did the fellow-citizens of Dante think of themselves primarily as Florentines, Tuscans, Italians, Christians, Westerners or Europeans? Each of these terms derives its meaning and overtones from its place in the repertoire, a system in which it is associated with some concepts and opposed to others. As in the case of other terms that distinguish “us” from “them”, what Europe excludes is as important as what it includes. It is defined by opposition. At different times “Europe” has been opposed to the barbarians, the heathen, despotism, slavery, coloured skin, the tropics and the “East”. It has been identified with civilization, Christianity, democracy, freedom, white skin, the temperate zone and the “West”.
In ancient Greek texts, Europa appears not only as the name of one of the three known continents but also, occasionally, as a term like Hellas, distinguishing “us” from “them”, where “they” are the Asians, the barbarians, the Persians. In Aeschylus and Herodotus we also find the expression of a contrast that was to have a long career, the contrast between the despotic East and the liberty-loving West; the occidental notion of oriental despotism. These passages are interesting, but it is difficult to decide whether they expressed common attitudes. The context for these statements was invasion, when it is natural for people to associate themselves with a larger group than they normally do. In more peaceful times, the Greeks do not seem to have identified themselves with Europe. Aristotle did not think of the Greeks as European at all, but rather as midway between Europe and Asia, the mean between the hot, despotic and overcivilized East and the cold, free and savage West.
For the Romans, “Europe” seems to have meant even rather less than it did to the Greeks. This is hardly surprising, since the Roman Empire spanned three continents. As with the Greeks, the important distinction was that between Romans and barbarians. In late classical Latin the term europeenses can be found, but its use was limited to armies. In the early Middle Ages, the term “Europe”, like the term “West”, occurs every now and then, especially in the context of invasion. When Charles Martel defeated a Muslim army at the battle of Tours in 732, a contemporary chronicler described the Christian side as the europeenses, using the Latin word in its traditional military context. About the year 800, Charlemagne was described by the grandiloquent phrase pater europae. Here the contrast between “them” and “us was” surely that between two different Christian emperors, ruling respectively from Constantinople and from Aachen.
Other medieval examples exist, but all the same, the term “Europe” does not make a frequent appearance in the texts until the thirteenth century, yet another age of invasion from the east, this time by the Mongols. Dante made thirteen references to Europe in his Latin works, and Petrarch also used the term quite frequently. The importance of the increasingly frequent use of the term “Europe” in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries has quite rightly been emphasized by historians, however, we must be careful not to exaggerate. Dante made three references to Europe in his Divine Comedy, compared to eleven references to Italy, fifteen to “Christian” or “Christianity”, and twenty-two to Florence or “florentine”. The central distinction between “them” and “us” in the Middle Ages was between pagans and Christians, and the fact that the invading Huns, Arabs, Vikings, Magyars and Mongols were not Christians must have reinforced the distinction still further. Thus, for nearly two thousand years, the term “Europe” was in sporadic use without carrying very much weight.
From the later fifteenth century, however, it came to be taken rather more seriously. When Pope Pius II heard the news that the Turks had taken Constantinople, he remarked: “now we have really been struck in Europe, that is, at home”. Pius frequently used not only the old noun “Europa” but also the new adjective Europaeus. The situation in which Pius was writing was the traditional one for the use of the term – invasion. The advance of the Ottoman forces, like earlier attacks from the east, seems to have made westerners more conscious of their collective identity. This time, however, the term “Europe” did not drop out of use as quickly as usual, and from the late fifteenth century on, we can at last stop counting instances of the word on our fingers. In the sixteenth century, most leading writers used the term: Erasmus, Machiavelli, Ariosto, Tasso, Ronsard, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Vives. Histories of Europe began to be written, starting with the Florentine Pierfrancesco Giambullari’s Historia dell’ Europa, published in 1566.
In the seventeenth century, references multiply still further. Francis Bacon uses the phrase “We Europeans”, which may sound odd in the mouth of an Englishman. In the course of the century, noun and adjective occur so frequently as to make counting as impossible as it is by now unnecessary. The titles of books and journals are some kind of indicator: Theatrum europaeum, Diarium europaeum, The State of Europe, L’Europe esclave, not forgetting the “heroic comedy” Europe by Jean Desmarets (1643), or the ballet L’Europe galante by Houdar de la Motte (1697).
What does need discussion at this point is rather the changing significance of the terms “Europe” and “European”, the contexts in which they usually occur and the kind of people who use them. It may be useful to distinguish three different contexts. In the first place, the Ottoman threat. It is in no way my intention to present the Turks as hordes (or that favourite of Gibbons, “swarms”) of predators on an essentially peace-loving Europe. The invaders were as fearsome to westerners as the Huns or the Mongols had been, but there was one important difference — the Ottoman threat lasted longer. The Turks (and their Christian allies) defeated the (other) Christians at Kosovo in 1389, at Nicopolis, on the Danube, in 1396, and at Varna, in Bulgaria, in 1444, before taking Constantinople in 1453. A pause of two generations was followed by another wave of victories and conquests: the capture of Belgrade (1521), Rhodes (1522), the victory of Mohacs (1526), the taking of Buda (1541). The Turks came close to taking Vienna in the 1520s and Malta in the 1560s, and did in fact take Cyprus in 1570. We know now that Ottoman expansion was to halt at this point, but seventeenth-century Europeans continued to fear the Ottoman Empire, especially in the 1680s, when the Turks besieged Vienna once more.
The Grand Turk did as much as anyone to create the consciousness of Europe in the early modern period. A common danger encouraged a sense of solidarity, even among enemies. While Pius II was organizing a crusade, his old adversary, the Hussite king of Bohemia, had a plan drawn up for a league of princes to maintain the peace of Christian Europe, the better to fight off the Turks. That Europe needed to unite in order to deal with this threat was the message of humanists like Erasmus and Vives, who published his dialogue De Europae dissidiis et bello turcico in the year of the battle of Mohacs. So “Europe” was defined by contrast to “Turk”. The Turks were infidels, so “European” meant Christian. The Turks were ruled by a despot, but Europe (as Machiavelli and others pointed out) was a region of limited monarchies and republics. The Greek idea of oriental despotism was revived and displaced from the Persians to their Turkish neighbours. The Turks were seen as barbarians, while Europeans defined their own way of life as “civilisation”.
If the first context in which people became aware of themselves as Europeans was that of being invaded by other cultures, the second was that of invading other cultures. Columbus and Vasco da Gama helped the Grand Turk to create European self-consciousness. Europe was defined by contrast not only to the Ottoman Empire but also to India, China, Peru and Brazil. Whether they liked or disliked the lands they visited, travellers in other continents were forced into awareness of what it meant to be European, and printing spread this awareness to others. Visitors to Brazil, for example, were struck by the difference in culture – or as they put it in the sixteenth century, the difference in “manners” – between the local inhabitants and themselves. The most articulate early visitors were Frenchmen, André Thevet and Jean de Léry. Thevet, a Franciscan missionary, organized his discussion of the “savages” around a set of contrasts with “nostre Europe”. The savages are naked, the Europeans clothed; the savages lack reason and the knowledge of God, while “we” have both; the savages eat their enemies, we do not; the savages live like beasts” “brutalement”, while we live like men. So far Thevet offers a classic example of one culture defining itself as human and others as subhuman.
Jean de Léry, another missionary, but a Calvinist, was somewhat more sympathetic to the non-European world. He too calls the Brazilians “barbarians”, “savages”, living in the darkness of ignorance, cursed and abandoned by God, however, he emphasizes their peace and harmony, which should put Christians to shame. If they are cannibals, he says the French are as bad or worse. He is of course thinking about the French religious wars, which broke out between his visit to Brazil and his book about it. Léry’s criticisms of Europe were soon taken up and developed by Montaigne. Neither Léry nor Montaigne uses the word “Europe” very much, preferring to say “us”, but they reveal Europeans learning to stand outside their own culture for a moment and so to see it in a clearer and less flattering light.
In the later seventeenth century, the major internal threat to the peace of Europe came not from the Habsburgs but from Louis XIV, so that it is the enemies of France who now talk most about Europe. The Hapsburg pamphleteer Lisola accused Louis XIV of trying to dominate Europe, William of Orange described himself as the defender of “European freedom” (der Europese vrijheid), and an English pamphlet of 1677 is entitled Europe a slave unless England break her chains. It looks as if by the year 1700 Europeans were more ready to talk about Europe, to see it as a whole, and to contrast it with the rest of the world than they had been in 1500, let alone the Middle Ages. Consciousness of being European was now an important social and political fact.
At this point a simple but crucial question needs to be asked: whose consciousness are we talking about? Was awareness of Europe restricted to a few intellectuals and politicians or was it extended more widely? It is not easy to answer this question. My own impression, based on rather unsystematic reading, is that the late seventeenth century was the time when ordinary people, at least in towns, began to be aware of Europe, because the term occurred in broadside ballads that they could hear sung in the streets. For example, a German street ballad of 1684 is called Europa, freue dich, and celebrates the raising of the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683. An English ballad of 1691 is called “Hogan Mogan” or “the wise men of Europe”. “Hogan Megan” is an attempt to reproduce the Dutch for “High Mightinesses”, the official term for the States-General of the Dutch Republic. The context of this ballad is the Anglo-Dutch alliance against Louis XIV, as it is the context for a Dutch satire of 1701, Esopus in Europa, an allegorical pamphlet in which the different countries are represented as lion, tiger, unicorn, cat and so on.
However, more direct evidence of popular attitudes can be found in a diary of events kept by a poor clothworker of Lille called Pierre-Ignace Chavatte in the 1680s and 1690s. He has most to say about Lille itself, but in 1684 he mentions “Europe” twice. In each case he was writing about a fortress, one in Luxembourg and the other in Pécs, on the frontier between the Hapsburgs and the Turks. Thus, at the very end of the period with which we have been concerned, there are some fragments of evidence suggesting that the term “Europe” was beginning to mean something to urban craftsmen. How much it meant to them is another matter: to answer that question it would be necessary to place the term within the whole repertoire of concepts available for expressing group identity in the early modern period.
To conclude with a few remarks on this question, the most obvious thing to say is that although the term “Europe” was coming in, the more traditional concept of “Christendom” was slow to go out. It was often used in contexts that had nothing to do with religion. Thus Titian could be described as “the leading man in Christendom” for painting: il primo uomo della christiantà. “Christendom” is a term quite often used in political contexts until 1700 or even a little later. In the treaty of Utrecht of 1714, the phrase “the Christian commonwealth” (respublica Christiana) can still be found. Still more important is the fact that men identified themselves far more in local or regional terms than as members of a nation, let alone as Europeans. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, even the upper classes considered themselves as Bretons or Yorkshiremen, Catalans or Swabians, rather than as part of larger units. Erasmus, who was as cosmopolitan as a sixteenth-century European could be, liked to describe himself as “Erasmus of Rotterdam”; Ronsard, who used the term “Europe” so often in his poems, identified himself on the title page as “gentilhomme Vandomois”; Montaigne regarded himself as a Gascon. As for Pierre-Ignace Chavatte, his diary reveals his identification not with Europe or France but with Lille, and his hostility to the men of the neighbouring countryside or “plat pays”. At this point in European history the province was still a meaningful unit, economically, politically and culturally: its individuality and independence had not yet been eroded by the nation-state. And so, although the term “Europe” was making frequent appearances by the year 1700, European consciousness was still weak.
