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I. Classical Antiquity

The delimitation of East and West within Europe has long been a conventional one for historians. It goes back, in fact, to the founder of modern positive historiography, Leopold Von Ranke. The cornerstone of Ranke’s first major work, written in 1824, was a ‘Sketch of the Unity of the Latin and Germanic Nations’, in which he drew a line across the continent excluding the Slavs of the East from the common destiny of the ‘great nations’ of the West which were to be the subject of his book. ‘It cannot be maintained that these peoples too belong to the unity of our nations; their customs and constitution have ever separated them from it. In that epoch they exercised no independent influence, but merely appear subordinate or antagonistic: now and then lapped, so to speak, by the receding waves of the general movements of history.’¹ It was the West alone which had participated in the barbarian migrations, the mediaeval crusades, and the modern colonial conquests – for Ranke, the drei grosse Atemzüge dieses unvergleichlichen Vereins, ‘the three deep breaths drawn by that incomparable union’.² A few years later, Hegel remarked that ‘the Slavs have to some extent been drawn within the sphere of Occidental Reason’, since ‘sometimes, as an advanced guard – an intermediate nationality – they took part in the struggle between Christian Europe and unchristian Asia.’ But the substance of his view of the history of the eastern region of the continent was closely similar to that of Ranke. ‘Yet this entire body of peoples remains excluded from our consideration, because hitherto it has not appeared as an independent element in the series of phases that Reason has assumed in the world.’³ A century and a half later, contemporary historians normally avoid such accents. Ethnic categories have given way to geographical terms: but the distinction itself, and the dating of it from the Dark Ages, remain virtually unaltered. Its application, in other words, starts with the emergence of feudalism, in that historical era when the classical relationship of regions within the Roman Empire – advanced East and backward West – began for the first time to be decisively reversed. This change of signs can be observed in virtually every treatment of the transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Thus, the explanations proposed for the fall of the Empire itself in the most recent and monumental study of the decline of Antiquity, Jones’s The Later Roman Empire, revolve constantly round the structural differences between the East and West within it. The East, with its wealthy and numerous cities, developed economy, smallholding peasantry, relative civic unity and geographical distance from the main brunt of barbarian attacks, survived; the West, with its sparser population and weaker towns, magnate aristocracy and rent-racked peasantry, political anarchy and strategic vulnerability to the Germanic invasions, went under.⁴ The end of Antiquity was then sealed by the Arab conquests, which sundered the two shores of the Mediterranean. The Eastern Empire became Byzantium, a political and social system distinct from the rest of the European continent. It was in this new geographical space which emerged in the Dark Ages that the polarity between East and West was to permute its connotation. Bloch pronounced the authoritative judgment that ‘from the 8th century onwards there was a sharply demarcated group of societies in Western and Central Europe, whose elements, however diverse, were cemented solidly together by profound resemblances and constant relationships’. It was this region which gave birth to mediaeval Europe: ‘The European economy in the Middle Ages – in the sense in which this adjective, borrowed from the old geographical nomenclature of the five “parts of the world”, can be used to designate an actual human reality – is that of the Latin and Germanic bloc, edged by a few Celtic islets and Slav fringes, gradually won to a common culture … Thus understood, thus delimited, Europe is a creation of the early Middle Ages.’⁵ Bloch expressly excluded the regions that are today Eastern Europe from his social definition of the continent: ‘The greater parts of the Slav East in no way belonged to it … It is impossible to consider their economic conditions and those of their Western neighbours together, in the same object of scientific study. Their wholly different social structure and very special path of development forbid such a confusion absolutely: to commit it would be like mixing Europe and Europeanized countries with China or Persia in an economic history of the 19th century.’⁶ His successors have respected his injunctions. The formation of Europe, and the germination of feudalism, have generally been confined to the history of the Western half of the continent, excluding the Eastern half from survey. Duby’s commanding study of the early feudal economy, which starts in the 9th century, is already entitled: Rural Economy and Country Life in the Mediaeval West.⁷ The cultural and political forms created by feudalism in the same period – the ‘secret revolution of these centuries’⁸ – are the main focus of Southern’s The Making of the Middle Ages. The generality of the title conceals an ellipse, implicitly identifying a specific time with a certain space; the first sentence declares: ‘The formation of Western Europe from the late tenth to the early thirteenth century is the subject of this book’.⁹ Here, the mediaeval world becomes Western Europe tout court. The distinction between East and West is thus reflected in modern historiography right from the outset of the post-classical age. Its origins, in effect, are coeval with those of feudalism itself. Any Marxist study of differential historical development within the continent must thus initially consider the general matrix of European feudalism. Only when this is established, will it be possible to see how far and in what way a divergent history is traceable in its Western and Eastern regions.

1. Leopold Von Ranke, Geschichte der Romanischen and Germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514, Leipzig 1885, p. XIX.

2. Ranke, op. cit., p. XXX.

3. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, London 1878, p. 363

4. A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 282–602, Oxford 1964, Vol. II, pp. 1026–68.

5. Marc Bloch, Mélanges Historiques, Paris 1963, Vol. I, pp. 123–4.

6. Bloch, op. cit., p. 124.

7. Georges Duby, L’économie Rurale et la Vie des Campagnes dans l’Occident Médiéval, Paris 1962; English translation, London 1968.

8. R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages, London 1953, p. 13.

9. Southern, op. cit., p. 11.