makingShortest History of Europe极简欧洲史英文原版

Praise for The Shortest History of Europe

‘Beautifully and spar’ely constructed, yet rich in fact, feeling and detail, sweeping,challenging and funny JAMESBUTTON

‘A wise, illuminating little book’ Sydney Morning Herald

‘Crisp, lucid and evocative prose…The balance’ of analysis and description, generalisationand specific instance, is beautifully maintained WILFRIDPREST , ABR

‘an entertaining, learned piece of historical compression’ The Age

‘great stuff, the book as a whole is constantly thought-provoking’ The Courier Mail

ContentsTitle Page

INTRODUCTION

SHORTEST HISTORY

Chapter 1. Europe Classical and Medieval

Chapter 2. Europe Modern

INTERLUDE The Classic Feeling

LONGER HISTORY

Chapter 3. Invasions and Conquests

Chapter 4. Forms of Government I

Chapter 5. Forms of Government II

Chapter 6. Emperors and Popes

Chapter 7. Languages

Chapter 8. The Common People

CONCLUSION What Is It about Europe?

List of Maps & List of Images

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

IF YOU LIKE TO SKIP TO THE END OF A book to see what happens, you will enjoy this book. Theendings start soon after it begins. It tells the history of Europe six times, each from adifferent angle.

These were originally lectures designed to introduce university students to European history. Idid not start at the beginning and go through to the end. I quickly gave the students anoverview and then returned later with more detail.

The first two lectures sketch out the whole of European history. This is truly the shortesthistory. The next six lectures take a particular theme. The aim is to deepen understanding byreturning and more deeply examining.

A story has a plot: a beginning, a middle and an end. A civilisation does not have a story inthis sense. We are in thrall to narrative if we think a civilisation must have a rise and fall,though it will have an end. My aim here is to capture the essential elements of Europeancivilisation and to see how they have been reconfigured through time; to show how new thingstake their shape from old; how the old persists and returns.

History books deal with many events and people. This is one of history’ s strengths and ittakes us close to life. But what does it all mean? What are the really important things? Theseare the qu’estions I always have in mind. Many people and events that get into other historybooks don t get into this one.

The more detailed lectures in the second part of the book stop around 1800—and this simplybecause when I designed this course of lectures there was another course dealing with Europesince 1800. So how muc’h history does this leave out! I have looked forward occasionally, but ifmy approach works you ll recognise the world we now live in, whose lineaments were laid downlong ago.

After classical times, the book deals chiefly with western Europe. Not all parts of Europe areequally important in the making of European civilisation. The Renaissance in Italy, theReformation in Germany, parliamentary government in England, revolutionary democracy in France:these are of more consequence than the partitions of Poland.

I have relied heavily on the work of historical sociologists, particularly Michael Mann andPatricia Crone. Professor Crone is not an expert on European history; her specialty i‘s Islam.But in a l’ittle book called Pre-Industrial Societies she included one chapter on The Oddityof Europe . This is a tour de force, a whole history in thirty pages, almost as short as myshortest history. It provided me with the concept of the making and reworking of the Europeanmix, as set out in my first two lectures. My debt to her is that great.

For some years at La Trobe University in Melbourne I was fortunate to have as a colleagueProfessor Eric Jones, who was a great encourager of the big-picture approach to history andupon whose book The European Miracle I have heavily relied.

I claim no originality for the book except in its method. I first offered these lectures tostudents in Australia who had had too much Australian history and knew too little of thecivilisation of which they are a part.

John Hirst

CHAPTER 1. Europe Classical and MedievalEUROPEAN CIVILISATION IS UNIQUE because it is the only civilisation which has imposed itself onthe rest of the world. It did this by conquest and settlement; by its economic power; by thepower of its ideas; and because it had things that everyone else wanted. Today every country onearth uses the discoveries of science and the technologies that flow from it, and science was aEuropean invention.

At its beginning European civilisation was made up of three elements:

European civilisation was a mixture: the importance of this will become clear as we go on.

* * *

IF WE LOOK FOR THE ORIGINS of our philosophy, our art, our literature, our maths, our science,our medicine and our thinking about politics—in all these intellectual endeavours we are takenback to Ancient Greece.

In its great days Greece was not one state; it was made up of a series of little states: city-states, as they are now called. There was a single town with a tract of land around it;everyone could walk into the town in a day. The Greeks wanted to belong to a state as we belongto a club: it was a fellowship. It was in these small city-states that the first democraciesemerged. They were not representative democracies; you did not elect a member of parliament.All male citizens gathered in one place to talk about public affairs, to vote on the laws andto vote on policy.

Ancient Greek cities and colonies. Greek civilisation thrived in trading and agriculturalcolonies around the Mediterranean and Black Seas.

As these Greek city-states grew in population, they sent people to start colonies in otherparts of the Mediterranean. There were Greek settlements in what is now Turkey, along the coastof North Africa, even as far west as Spain, southern France and southern Italy. And it wasthere—in Italy—that the Romans, who were then a very backward people, a small city-statearound Rome, first met the Greeks and began to learn from them.

In time the Romans built a huge empire that encompassed Greece and all the Greek colonies. Inthe north the boundaries were two great rivers, the Rhine and the Danube, though sometimesthese were exceeded. In the west was the Atlantic Ocean. England was part of the Roman Empirebut not Scotland or Ireland. To the south were the deserts of North Africa. In the east theboundary was most uncertain because here were rival empires. The empire encircled the

Mediterranean Sea; it included only part of what is now Europe and much that is not Europe:Turkey, the Middle East, North Africa.

The extent of the Roman Empire around the second century AD.

The Romans were better than the Greeks at fighting. They were better than the Greeks at law,which they used to run their empire. They were better than the Greeks at engineering, which wasuseful both for fighting and running an empire. But in everything else they acknowledged thatthe Greeks were superior and slavishly copied them. A member of the Roman elite could speakboth Greek and Latin, the language of the Romans; he sent his son to Athens to university or hehired a Greek slave to teach his children at home. So when we talk about the Roman Empire beingGreco-Roman it is because the Romans wanted it that way.

Geometry is the quickest way to demonstrate how clever’ the Greeks were. The geometry taught inschool is Greek. Many will have forgotten it, so let s start with the basics. That is howgeometry works; it starts with a few basic definitions and builds on them. The starting pointis a point, which the Greeks defined as having location but no magnitude. Of course it doespossess magnitude, there is the width of the dot on the page, but geometry is a sort of make-

believe world, a pure world. Second: a line has length but no breadth. Next, a straight line isdefined as the shortest line joining two points. From these three definitions you can create adefinition of a circle: in the first place, it is a line making a closed figure. But how do youformulate roundness? If you think about it, roundness is very hard to define. You define it bysaying there is a point within this figure, one point, from which straight lines drawn to thefigure will always be of equal length.

Along with circles, there are parallel lines that extend forever without meeting, and trianglesin all their variety, and squares and rectangles and other regular forms. These objects, formedby lines, are all defined, their characteristics revealed and the possibilities arising fromtheir intersectio and overlapping explored. Everything is proved from what has been establishedbefore. For example, by using a quality of parallel lines, you can show that the angles of atriangle add up to 180 degrees (see box) .

Geometry is a simple, elegant, logical system, very satisfying, and beautiful. Beautiful? TheGreeks found it beautiful and that they did so is a clue to the Greek mind. The Greeks didgeometry not just as an exercise, which is why we did it at school, nor for its practical usesin surveying or navigation. They saw geometry as a guide to the fundamental nature of theuniverse. When we look around us, we are struck with the variety of what we see: differentshapes, different colours. A whole range of things is happening simultaneously—randomly,chaotically. The Greeks believed there was some simple explanation for all this. Thatunderneath all this variety there must be something simple, regular, logical which explains itall. Something like geometry.

GEOMETRY IN ACTION

Parallel lines do not meet. We can define this characteristic by saying that a line drawnacross them will create alternate angles that are equal. If they were not equal, the lineswould come together or they would diverge—they would not be parallel. We use letters from theGreek alphabet to identify an angle—and on the diagram on the left α marks two angles thatare equal. The use of letters from the Greek alphabet for the signage in geometry reminds us ofits origins. Here we use the first three letters: alpha, beta and gamma.