Within the window, however, this part of the world
possessed several
geographical advantages. Like the northern Mediterranean, it had a
highly indented shoreline that encouraged navigation; like China, it
had good navigable rivers. North of the Alps and the Pyrenees it was
clear of massive mountain ranges; the hills and plateaus of France and
Germany, and still more those of the far northwest, were a great deal
older than the Alps and thus heavily eroded Plains were in generous
supply. Those that had been covered by glaciers in the last ice age
tended to have poorer soils, but they lay mainly to the northeast; much
of the northwest was free of this, and its soils included considerable
areas of loess, just as in the Yellow River valley of China. At the
same time the region did not suffer the disadvantage of being remote
from the Near East. It was less distant from it than China, and unlike
sub-Saharan Africa it was linked to it by the Mediterranean, not
separated from it by desert.
Yet, in the history of civilization, northwestern Europe
appears as a
laggard. It never developed a civilization of its own; nothing that
emerged on the northern plains in the course of the Bronze Age could
compare with Shang China or the even older civilization of the Indus
Valley. Nor did northwestern Europe import an alien civilization of its
own free will, as did Southeast Asia. There were, of course, contacts
with the more advanced cultures that appeared in the western
Mediterranean in the first millennium B.C., but the Hellenization of
the Gauls of southern France does not seem to have extended
significantly into the hinterland. When the Romans conquered Gaul in
the first century B.C., they conquered tribes, not city-states; and
like the Britons in the next century, the Gauls then had civilization
thrust upon them. Farther to the east were the Germans. They showed the
same lack of interest in adopting the civilization of the Romans, and
the Romans did not force it on them. What joy could there have been in
attempting to conquer a land of "forbidding landscapes and unpleasant
climate," as the Roman author Tacitus described Germany in the first
century A.D., "thankless to till and dismal to behold"?
