Europe: A History by Norman Davies Read Free Book Online Page A

one of the great dividing I lines of the European Peninsula. Established as the frontier of the Roman Empire in the 1st century AD, the Latin Danuvius , or Greek Ister divided civilization from barbarity.
    In later times, however, the Danube was to develop into one of Europe’s major thoroughfares, an open boulevard linking West and East. 1 In Bernini’s famous composition for the Fountain of the Four Rivers in the Piazza Navona in Rome, it is the Danube which is taken to personate Europe alongside Africa’s Nile, Asia’s Ganges, and America’s Plate.
    In its upper reaches, as the Donau, the river flows through the heart of the Germanic world. A plaque in the Fürstenberg Park at Donaueschingen in the Black Forest marks its source: HIER ENTSPRINGT DIE DONAU . Passing the castle of Sigmaringen, home of the Hohenzollerns, the river passes Ulm and Regensburg, chief cities of the Holy Roman Empire, and after Passau enters the ‘eastern realm’ of Oesterreich. In Austria, it guided the route of the [NIBELUNG] . It passes Linz, where the Emperor Frederick III was buried under his motto of A-E-I-O-U , meaning Austria erit in orbe ultima- , Amstetten, where Franz Ferdinand is buried; Kierling, where Kafka died; and Eisenstadt, which is Haydn’s last resting-place:
Himmel habe Dank!
E in harmonischer Gesang
War mein Lebenslauf
(Heaven, receive our thanks!
My life’s course
Was one harmonious hymn.)
    Vienna, as Metternich remarked, is where ‘Europe’ meets ‘Asia’.
    In its middle reaches as the Duna, the broadening stream enters Hungary, the land of the Magyars driven like a wedge through the lands of the Slavs on either side. At Bratislava/Pozsony/Pressburg, it laps the sometime capital of ‘Upper Hungary’, now the capital of the Slovakian Republic. Fertoód was the site of the Eszterházy’s ‘second Versailles’; Esztergom, the home of the Hungarian Primates. Szentendre (St Andrew), once a refuge for Serbian exiles, is now a meccà for bohemian artists. At Buda and Pest, a Turkish Castle on one bank faces an English-style Parliament on the other, [BUDA]
    In the lower reaches, beyond the Iron Gates, the river flows from Catholicism into Orthodoxy, [NIKOPOLIS] is where Wulfila translated the Greek bible into Gothic, ‘the starting-point of Germanism’, [BIBLIA] Romania on the left side claims to be a descendant of Trajan’s Dacia. Serbia and Bulgaria on the right bank, long occupied by the Ottomans (who called it the Tuna), were founded on top of Byzantine provinces. Chileavecche was once a Genoese outpost. The last landing-stage is at Sulina in the Delta, in Europe’s largest bird reserve, in a world not of civilization but of eternal Nature. 2
    Rivers to the geographer are the bearers of sediment and trade. To the historian they are the bearers of culture, ideas, and sometimes conflict. 3 They are like life itself. For 2,888 kilometres from Donaueschingen to the Delta, the flow never stops.
    Environmental change is taken for granted in all aspects of physical geography. Yet traditional disciplines such as geology give the impression that the pace of change is so slow as to be marginal within the human time-frame. Only recently has the realization dawned that the modern environment is far less fixed than was once supposed.
    Climate, for example, is constantly on the move. In Civilisation and Climate (1915), the American scholar Ellsworth Huntington published the fruits of his ingenious research into the giant redwoods of California. It was the starting-point of historical climatology. Since the redwoods can live for more than 3,000 years, and since the annual rings of their trunks vary in size according to the warmth and humidity of every year that passes, the cross-section of a redwood trunk provides a systematic record of climatic variations over three millennia. Huntington’s technique, now called dendrochronology, inspired a ‘pulsatory theory’ of alternating climatic phases which could be applied to