out
Till in the open sea he bore his prize.
Fear filled her heart as, gazing back, she saw
The fast receding sands. Her right hand grasped
A horn, the other lent upon his back.
Her fluttering tunic floated in the breeze. 2
Here was the familiar legend of Europa as painted on Grecian vases, in the houses of Pompeii (See Plate no. 1), and in modern times by Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens, Veronese, and Claude Lorrain.
The historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, was not impressed by the legend. In his view, the abduction of Europa was just an incident in the age-old wars over women-stealing. A band of Phoenicians from Tyre had carried off Io, daughter of the King of Argos; so a band of Greeks from Crete sailed over to Phoenicia and carried off the daughter of the King of Tyre. It was a case of tit for tit. 3
The legend of Europa has many connotations. But in carrying the princess to Crete from the shore of Phoenicia (now south Lebanon) Zeus was surely transferring the fruits of the older Asian civilizations of the East to the new island colonies of the Aegean. Phoenicia belonged to the orbit of the Pharaohs. Europa’s ride provides the mythical link between Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece. Europa’s brother Cadmus, who roamed the world in search of her, orbe pererrato , was credited with bringing the art of writing to Greece, [CADMUS]
Europa’s ride also captures the essential restlessness of those who followed in her footsteps. Unlike the great river valley civilizations of the Nile, of the Indus, of Mesopotamia, and of China, which were long in duration but lethargic in their geographical and intellectual development, the civilization of the Mediterranean Sea was stimulated by constant movement. Movement caused uncertainty and insecurity. Uncertainty fed a constant ferment of ideas. Insecurity prompted energetic activity. Minos was famed for his ships. Crete was the first naval power. The ships carried people and goods and culture, fostering exchanges of all kinds with the lands to which they sailed. Like the vestments of Europa, the minds of those ancient mariners were constantly left ‘fluttering in the breeze’— tremulae sinuantur flamine vestes. 4
Europa rode in the path of the sun from east to west. According to anotherlegend, the Sun was a chariot of fire, pulled by unseen horses from their secret stables behind the sunrise to their resting-place beyond the sunset. Indeed, one of several possible etymologies contrasts Asia, ‘the land of the Sunrise’, with Europa, ‘the land of the Sunset’. 5 The Hellenes came to use ‘Europe’ as a name for their territory to the west of the Aegean as distinct from the older lands in Asia Minor.
At the dawn of European history, the known world lay to the east. The unknown waited in the west, in destinations still to be discovered. Europa’s curiosity may have been her undoing. But it led to the founding of a new civilization that would eventually bear her name and would spread to the whole Peninsula.
Map 2. Queen Europe (Regina Europa)
An engraving from an edition of Sebastian Müntzer’s Cosmography
(Cosmographia Universalis lib. vi; Basel 1550–4) courtesy of Bodleian Library
I
PENINSULA
Environment and Prehistory
T HERE is a marked determinism about many descriptions of Europe’s environmental history. Many Europeans have assumed that their ‘continent’ was so magnificently endowed that it was destined by Nature for world supremacy. And many have imagined that Europe’s good fortune would somehow last forever. ‘The empire of climate’, wrote Montesquieu in 1748, ‘is the first of all empires’; and he proceeded to show that the European climate had no rival. For Montesquieu, as for his many successors, Europe was synonymous with Progress. 1
There has also been a good deal of national parochialism. Even the founder of human geography, the great Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845–1918), one of the intellectual ancestors of the Anuales