13. THE CRISIS OF THE WEST.
In the shards of the defeated Roman Empire and in the ashes cooling down after the Great Migration of the Germans to the West, from the 6th to the 7th century there was an irreversible process of declining passionarity, which entailed the collapse of morality, culture, economy, political power. But in the ninth century the situation changed radically. There was a "feudal revolution", when the vassals turned into counts, broke the "sacred empire" into three parts, and officially began to speak their own languages. It was then French and German appeared as state languages (the Strasbourg Oath of 842).
But the division of the country was artificial, and so the unviable kingdoms continued to fall apart. The new revolution was essentially ethnic. The former Neustria broke up into France, Burgundy (county), Aquitaine, Brittany and the Toulouse Palatinate in accordance with the ethnic features of the new ethnoses that emerged from the mixture of the Welsh and Teutons. The formation of the new ethnoses was completed in 888,
Obviously, just as some chemical reactions proceed only at high temperature and in the presence of catalysts, so the ethnic hybridization proceeds differently with different degrees of passionate tension (heat). With weak degrees, individuals are inert, and the combination of two stereotypes in the offspring gives internal discord, a kind of cacophony that breaks the psychophysiological structure of the organism. But at high degrees the organism becomes malleable, due to which new, hitherto non-existing stereotypes were created, and thus new ethnoses emerged. This phase of ethnogenesis can be called creative, although no cultural monuments are usually preserved from it.
In the western part of the empire the population was more mixed, and therefore the changes were more significant and the process was more intense. In the east, where there was a solid Germanic population, the old tribal associations persisted longer: the Saxons, Franks, Thuringians, Swabians, Bayerns, which was reflected in the long trend towards fragmentation of Germany, when Saxons, Bavarians, Francons, etc. already appeared. The same process and at the same time touched the Western Slavs, from which the Poles and Czechs crystallized, while the Bodricians and Luticians entered into a deadly battle with the neighboring Germans and lost it.
The most revealing in this respect is Scandinavia, a poor country, which was in obscurity for a long time. From the eighth century a new phenomenon began suddenly there and developed in the ninth century - the "Viking" movement.
These phenomena coincided with the first wave of the Reconquista in Spain. The Asturians, who until then had kept to their mountains, pushed the Arabs beyond the Tajo. True, they were soon repulsed, but the attempt itself shows that they had a renewed will to fight and win.
The young Scandinavians could fight only with their kinsmen, but they did not dare to wage open war and preferred emigration. In the ninth century they became a nightmare for all the coastal regions of Europe, using the rivers to penetrate the countries that beckoned them with their accumulated wealth. And not only Europe but also the Americas were victims of the "rage of the Normans," but nowhere could they gain a foothold except in Northern France, now called Normandy. So their strength was not so great; rather, the resistance to them in the ninth century was way too weak.
The reason for the sudden and brief - only 300 years - ferocity of the Normans was not yet clear to their contemporaries. The first hypothesis explained the phenomenon as the punishment of God for the sins of men. However, before the ninth century and after the ninth century people also deserved punishment, but the Normans did not take part in it. According to another theory, the harsh climate of Scandinavia caused the eviction of people who could not feed themselves. This Malthusian theory immediately runs into insurmountable difficulties. Scandinavia's climate is mild, thanks to the Gulf Stream. It is still poorly populated, and 1,000 years ago the question of overpopulation could not even arise. And finally, why did the peasants, who wanted to work the land, suddenly make plundering connected with the risk of death their profession? No, something is wrong!
According to the third theory, in the north of Europe the house and land went to the eldest son, and the youngest was given the sea. Right, but there were herring migrations in the North Sea, which were easier, safer and more profitable to catch than laying heads in France, England and Ireland. After all, most of the Vikings were dying in foreign lands. And it was also impossible to return home with the spoils: a young man who went to a "vik" - a fortified Viking settlement - broke all ties with family and clan completely and irrevocably. He was more forgotten than dead, and there was no way home.
But there was a roundabout way that led to the right solution. The emergence of Scaldic poetry around 800 is connected with the movement of the Vikings, who opposed the well-to-do and hard-working Hevdings. This is regarded by literary scholars as "a kind of mutation."[1] True, but the skalds sang for the Vikings. Hence, mutants were both. And passionarity is a mutation that arises suddenly and disappears due to natural selection, which corresponds entirely to the factual side of the observed phenomenon.
Despite much work done by many scientists of various specialties, the question of the causes of the Viking campaigns remains unclear. Some historians believe that it is impossible to explain this explosion of activity and aggressiveness satisfactorily at all. [2] Others underestimate the importance and the scale of the Viking campaigns in every possible way, and want to reduce them to normal activities of the Early Middle Ages [3] Many books on the Viking raids give only passing reference to their causes. The authors limit themselves to general observations about the scarcity of land in their homeland or "their thirst for adventure and booty"[4]. The latter has proved to be true. There was a passionate push in Scandinavia.
A.J. Gurevich describes this phenomenon in the following way: "There was a sharp shift in the life of the Scandinavians at the end of the 8th - first half of the 9th centuries, a break in gradual development. A new type of people appeared among them - daring navigators, seekers of booty, adventurers and impressions, having connections in different countries...". In short, the former and customary system of life was broken, made impossible-and this not for the few, not only for outcasts or outlaws who had to seek residence as far from home as possible, but for many nobles and Bonds. Is it enough simply to point to all the reasons for the Viking raids listed above to get a convincing explanation for such a profound upheaval in the lives of the Scandinavians? Obviously, there is at least one more link missing which would turn these causes or preconditions into internal stimuli for the people's movements. But is it possible to discover a mediating "link"? [5]
Of course, if one considers Scandinavia as something unique, without analogies, one cannot find this link. But if we broaden the range of observation, the riddle will find a solution. Let us return to the description of the Viking phenomenon and see what happened.
The sagas and the poetry of the Skalds [6] appeared - compare the pleiad of Arab poets before Mohammed's preaching and in his time. Or Homer and Hesiod on the eve of Hellenic colonization, Alcaeus and Sappho at its height. The departure of energetic young men from their homes - "men of long will [7]" in Mongolia under Genghis Khan's grandfathers, and even in his youth. The steppe campaigns were similar to those of the sea, the analogy is unmistakable.
The change of religion was a war between the older deities, the "vans," and the new ones, the "ases”. This phenomenon is characteristic of all phases of ethnic upheaval. The cult of the "ases" - deities of vicious, dissolute, bullying, thieves, sworn criminals, villains [8] - lasted until the acceptance of Christianity, i.e. during the whole epoch of the Viking campaigns, but also after the forced christening in Scandinavia two-faith beliefs were flourishing for a long time[9].
Finally, art. The ancient animal style had degenerated by the eighth century and been replaced by a new one - by representations of zoomorphic demons and dragons[10]. Yes, the renewal was full and spontaneous, but after all it is a consequence of the explosion of ethnogenesis, or passionariy push.
14. THE VIKINGS AND THE FEUDAL LORDS
The comparison of the Viking era, the Reconquista in Spain with the feudal revolution in France allows us to clarify the location of the axis of the passionary impulse, which passed from Norway, through Paris to Asturias and Portugal. There the "Christian world" was born, part of which was entirely pagan at birth. "The "Christian world" is as conventional a name as the "Muslim world”. The vast majority of the population of Western Europe was baptized, but had no idea of the essence of the new religion, since prayers and praise of God were allowed only in three languages-Jewish, Greek, and Latin-which the laity naturally did not know. Moreover, at the end of the 10th century the Anglo-Saxon cleric Elfric made it clear that secular people could not understand the "secret meaning" of the books of the Bible, and the desire to read them did not correspond to the mission which God had assigned to the class of knights - men of war. In the eighth century there was already a vast literature in Old English [11]. It was so easy to translate the Gospels.
In the Christian Church and therefore in the Carolingian Empire there was a different opinion, reflected in the decrees of the Synod of Frankfurt in 794: "Let no one think that one should pray in three languages only"[12], but this was before the Schism and feudal revolution, hence before the phase transition from incubation to rising which changed the face of Western Europe and created a "Christian world" in which the study of Christian doctrine was forbidden.
Once again, let us note that words are deceptive. Turning into terms, they acquire a new meaning. For example, the passionate upheaval of the ninth century. - The phenomenon of nature and has nothing to do with the spread of Christianity - a cultural phenomenon.
Now a few words about the Vikings, about whom there are so many false judgments, that it is necessary to avoid misunderstandings. There was no overpopulation in Scandinavia in the ninth century, as there are still many free fiords, although there were more people. The formation there was primitive communal, and the konungs were elected tribal leaders. Until the ninth century, the Scandinavians could barely defend their land against the onslaught of the Lapps, until they drove them to the far north, on the tundra. Vikings were called those people who did not want to live in a tribe and obey its laws. The word "Viking" had an offensive connotation then, like the modern "pirate, bandit"[13]. When a young man left his family and joined a Viking party, he was mourned as a dead man. And indeed, it was not easy to survive the distant campaigns and constant fighting. That said, the Vikings had no more courage than those left behind at home. The courage of southern peoples often exceeds that of northern peoples, but this is not passionalism, but a different behavioral trait, not aggressiveness, but the ability to react appropriately, usually manifested in self-defense.
The Vikings were afraid of death like all humans, but hid this fear from each other by eating intoxicating fly agarics before the battle [14]. The Arabs of their day rushed into battle sober, but the Vikings, indomitable in their intoxication, were mowing down Arabs, Franks and Celts alike. They especially valued berserks (like bears), i.e., men who were able to become insane before a fight and crush the enemy with great force. After the seizures berserkers fell into a deep depression until the next nervous breakdown. Berserkers were not tolerated under normal circumstances. They were forced to leave their villages and retreat into mountain caves, where they were wary of going. But in the Viking detachments berserks found a use for themselves. In other words, passionarity makes even not very brave people fierce. So the Vikings were people of a somewhat different stock from other Scandinavians. Having a high degree of passionarity, they were intolerant of the less-passionate Norwegians, who preferred to sit at home and fish for herring. Therefore, the passionate part of the population split off from the bulk of the people and died in foreign lands. On the other hand, the Norwegian and Danish passionary warriors spread the glory of their fury throughout Europe and forced its inhabitants to defend themselves. But the later Carolingians and their retinue showed no ability to organize defense, which caused legitimate resentment among their subjects. Then individual enterprising "comrades" (comitas (lat.), i.e., count), such as Ed, count of Paris, led those who were willing and able to defend themselves. The population preferred to have vigorous rulers and refused to submit to legitimate monarchs. The feudal lords seized power in Europe.
Enough has been written about what feudal lords were. We need only note that the people who received the benefices and fiefs that became hereditary in the ninth century were selected by the early Carolingians for their business qualities. Before feudalism became a formation, and before it was legally formalized, Charles Martel and Pepin the Short required intelligent assistants, and they worked only for pay. "Nullum officio sine beneficio."[15] It made sense to send only energetic, enterprising and courageous men to dangerous tasks during wars, who were willing to risk their lives for good pay. So, the first cadres of feudal lords were composed of passionaries. Until the IX c. their number was insignificant, and here arises an important question: were they the remains of the II c. rise, i.e. a legacy of the Great Migration of Peoples, or was it the incubation period of a new passionary explosion, when the newly born passionarii already had time to express themselves? Most likely it can be seen as a superimposition of a new impulse to an old, incomplete process, like it was in the eastern part of the Roman Empire in the III-IV centuries, when Byzantium was born. This can already be seen from the fact that there was a change in ethnic dominance. In the ninth century, the first medieval "nations" appeared in Europe! (As C. Marx says in "Chronological Extracts"[16]).
Map. Eastern Europe in the tenth and first half of the eleventh centuries (before 1054) (180 KB)
Карта. Восточная Европа в XЧпервой половине XI вв. (до 1054 г.) (180 KB)
http://gumilevica.kulichki.net/maps/args04.html
15. THE BIRTH OF EUROPE
At the dissolution of Charlemagne's empire, his grandsons met at Verdun in 843 and were named: Charles, King of the French, and Louis, King of the Germans. Prior to that, all their subjects had been "Romans of the Germanic Nation," that is, Germanic by birth, legally registered as Romans. The latter was not new. After all, there were Gallo-Romans, Spanish-Romans, illiro-Romans, etc., but the fact that a community of a new type, combining unity of origin and language, was preferred to a legal form, shows that a new ethnic dominant, i.e. the principle on which people of a new kind began to unite into collectives, had appeared. Therefore, one can and should consider the fragmentation of the Western European super-ethnos not into communities, not into tribes, not into polities, but into "nations". [17] as a local variant of the ethnogenetic process.
The ethnic heterogeneity of Europe, caused by the consequences of the Great Migration of Peoples, at the moment of the passionary impulse favored the survival of the passionaries, and thereby the growth of the passionary tension.
Medieval "nations" did not go back to the ancient tribes of the Germans, Celtic clans, Italic municipalities, although they drew people from the descendants of these ethnic groups. If the ancient traditions had not died out, a new super-ethnic unity could not have emerged. But the old ethnic systems could no longer keep in their midst the born-again passionaries, who, wielding the sword and spear, were looking for a "career and fortune" for themselves, not for their tribesmen. And the tribesmen were powerless to halt this process, because due to ethnic heterogeneity it was easy for a passionary to find a liege lord who needed not obedient subjects, but brave comrades-in-arms. They did not need, like the Scandinavians, to sail across the sea, but simply crossed the border of their domain to gain freedom, risk, and hope for good fortune.
In order to prevent the upheaval that swept Western Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries from turning into a "Brownian motion" leading to senseless manslaughter, an ethnic dominant and an associated social organization with sufficient ideological content were needed. At the dawn of the passionary ascent there were several dominants. They were expressed in religious systems, partly preserved from ancient times, partly adopted anew. The Scandinavians believed in the gods of Valhalla, the Slavs in the eternal struggle of Belbog with Chernobog, the Burgundians were Aryans, the Franks were Catholics, the Celts were Orthodox, as they were converted by Egyptian missionaries who passed through Rome. Many feudal lords did not believe in anything but their own whims and benefits, and among the peasants and nobility, as early as the 11th century, the secret cult of Satan, led by the priests-extremists, flourished. Clerics were as passionate as feudal lords and merchants.
It was these "free atoms", detached from their ethnic groups, which cemented together the most dissimilar and seemingly incompatible traditions. The barons adopted from the Hungarians the ancient in Asia, but new in Europe, tactics of attacking heavy cavalry, a Sarmatian invention. The peasants borrowed from the Celts long bows that shot at 450 meters, and the well-hardened arrowheads pierced primitive leather jackets and even chainmail. Clerics traveled to Cordoba to study Hebrew and Greek with Jewish rabbis in the service of the Spanish caliphs, at the same time learning theology in ways that were foreign to Eastern Christian orthodoxy. Merchants wandered between Arab Muslims and Slavic pagans, getting rich from the fur and silk trade. And all of them did not tie their destinies to their native villages, but to the thrones of kings who could protect and enrich them.
However, these "free atoms" did not fly beyond the geographical region bounded to the north, west and south by the seas, and to the east by an invisible boundary - the positive isotherm of January. The cold winters of Eastern Europe frightened rather than beckoned them. They considered it possible to travel there, but undesirable to settle.
Thus, a new super-ethnos emerged in the conditions of landscape diversity, but monolithic geographical region due to the activity of several generations of passionaries, who appeared in this territory and reshaped not only the political, but also the ethnic map of Europe. The new super-ethnic unity had to find a name, so that vague feelings, clothed in words, would take possession of the consciousness of its members. And it began to call itself "Christian World”.
And again, note the chronological coincidence of the rise of passionarity in Scandinavia, West Germany, Northern France and northwestern Spain, i.e. on an axis oriented from northeast to southwest. There was no gene transfer from Scandinavia to Asturias and vice versa, nor were there any cultural borrowings. The cause of the passionary upsurge lay here, too, outside the visible history of men, hence in the realm of natural history. Italy was outside the range of the emerged passionarity. Therefore, at the beginning of the tenth century, when Northern Europe was boiling and fighting: who, like the French, against the oppressors - Carolingians and Germans; who, like the Germans, against the pagans - Hungarians and Slavs; who, like the Asturians, against Muslims, and very successfully (at Samora in 900 was defeated Emir of Toledo), in Southern France and Italy "all estates were seized by thirst for pleasure”... People thought only of sensual pleasures, of food, drink, outward splendor, beautiful women; the higher goods had lost all value to these pampered and morally rude people... The imperial power had disappeared, the papal power existed in name only. The only link between men was the calculation of profit, selfishness governed all actions, and the clergy gave themselves over to sensual passions equally with the laity. There were scarcely any people who led such a life as the church demanded: religiosity was limited to the performance of rituals; there was no trace of moral order in the monasteries.[18]
The Northerners responded to this moral rot by organizing the monastic order of Clunius, which set itself the goal of restoring the former piety of the Benedictines, and succeeded!
Somewhat differently affected the decline of passionarity in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, where the population was ethnically monolithic. Here there was a constant war with the Vikings and the Celts. Contrary to reason, but in accordance with the element of passionarity, the Anglo-Saxons managed to suffer several terrible defeats, attributed to the treachery of the nobles and the promiscuity of the warriors. England was first conquered by the Danes, and then raided by the Welsh and Scots, which could only happen because of the weak resistance of the conquered. The most complete mixing of passionate ethnic substrata, merged into a single new ethnos, took place in France, which came to the fore in Western Europe. And since England and Italy were outside the range of the passionary push, they were the victims of this rise. In the ninth century, England was invaded by the Franco-Normans, Italy by the Saxons, Francons and Swabians. But the imported charge of passionarity influenced the ethnogenesis of these countries in the same way as that which arose naturally, only with a slight chronological lag.
As we have already noted, the areal of the passionary impulse coincided neither with the areal of the formation of feudal formation, nor with the areal of Christian culture. In Italy and England, where passionarity was imported, feudal institutions emerged later. The movements of the passionary Scandinavians, the Vikings, took place against the background of the primitive communal system, and the Scandinavians retained elements of the tribal system until the late Middle Ages. Neither Spain, Norway, nor Poland knew serfdom for their peasants, though they had other feudal institutions, such as the inheritance of titles, chivalry, and charters for towns. But in spite of local differences, the ethnic groups of Western Europe were united not by political but by ideological ties - Catholicism, which conquered the Western Slavs and Scandinavians in the 10th century. In the 11th century, when the second (acmatic) phase of ethnogenesis began, it was obvious to contemporaries. And, as members of the "Christian world," they set out on a colonial expansion, the first crusade.
And here, despite the differences in languages and mores, in the presence of lingering enmity based on long-standing ethnic accounts, with different political objectives, the French, Germans, Normans, Italians, Swedes and Spaniards felt themselves to be "their own" in relation to "strangers" - the Arabs and Greeks. The super-ethnos not only formed, but also realized itself.
16. ON THE EVE OF THE GREAT SCHISM
Byzantium as a political unity lost its territory very quickly in the Western Roman Empire, but as a cultural unity it kept its influence until the IX century. 843 and 867 can be considered as a crucial date, or more correctly, the period between these years. And here is why. Goths and Lombards, who conquered Italy and Spain, were Arian, and the local population - Volohi (the name of Latin-speaking Europeans) - Orthodox. Although as ethnic groups they had nothing in common with the Greeks, but the church as a cultural complex kept them as part of the Byzantine super-ethnos. The Franks and Anglo-Saxons, who joined this system, also accepted Orthodoxy from the Roman throne, which ensured its victory over Arianism.
And so, despite the fact that neither Gaul nor Britain could be reached by the tentacles of Byzantine diplomacy, the charm of the flourishing phase culture turned Western Europe into a province with Constantinople as its capital. Even if during the two centuries of the acmatic phase of ethnogenesis Byzantium let thousands of Slavs through its fortified border along the Danube and populated the Balkan Peninsula, even if Nestorians and Monophysites submitted to the Arabs, even if the crazy emperor with a cut-off nose returns to the throne with the help of hostile Bulgarians - the city walls are standing, monks teach the congregation prayers before icons, and Justinian II loses power again, but this time together with life. Valor, art, and justice triumph in every turmoil.
But suddenly they falter too. No, not from a blow from outside, but from the emperor's unexpected claims. Leo III Isaurus, who had just heroically defeated the Arabian fleet (717), raised his hand against the shrine of art - the icons - in 726. It was a breakdown of the ethnic psyche and the stereotype of behavior that sustained the cultural tradition-the heart of the Byzantine ethnos. Relying on the Malo-Asian soldiery, the Isaurian emperors tried to take away from their people what that people lived and suffered, fought and prayed for. They made the lives of their subjects insultingly meaningless, and they denied them respect and love.
And then the allure of Byzantine culture disappeared. The western regions, which had their kings, remained faithful to Orthodoxy, thereby losing contact with Constantinople, which from the capital of the Christian world became the principal city of the kingdom of Asia Minor - Byzantium, whose confines were limited to those fortresses, where there were garrisons loyal to their stratagems. Thus began the fracture of Byzantine ethnogenesis, as indicated by the history of culture, art and religion.
Iconoclasm was essentially an ideological framing of the monarchical revolution. It was not by chance that Pope Gregory II (715-731) regarded the policy of Leo III as seeking to combine the emperor and the priest, which was in direct violation of the Eastern Christian worldview. The emperor was only a parishioner of the Sophia cathedral, and his voice reflected only his personal opinion, which was itself subject to verification by the council.
Leo III understood this and sought support in the canon. In 726 iconoclasm was proclaimed an imperial policy, in 730 iconoclasm (atheism, freethinking), was condemned, and in 754 the council of iconoclasm was held in Chalcedon under Constantine V.
But this was an assembly of sycophants, not an Ecumenical Council in which both clergy and laity were supposed to participate. The people of the Byzantine Empire spoke out quite clearly. Monks, women, intellectuals, sailors-all loved and valued the image of God on icons, the countenance rather than the countenance, i.e., insight rather than portrait. The historian Zonara called Constantine V "not a Christian, not a Hellenist, not a Jew, but an aggregate of all kinds of impiety." And simple people, not wisely, have accepted the version about the Jewish origin of iconoclasm "[19].
For some time iconoclasts kept up briskly and even won victories over Arabs and Bulgars, using ethnic inertia of patriotism and the means saved up before them. But in the IX century setbacks began: in 806 Harun-ar-Rashid devastated Asia Minor, in 811 the Bulgarians defeated the Byzantine army and killed the Emperor Nikifir, and in 813 came to the walls of Constantinople. In 810. Byzantium lost Venice and Dalmatia and lost authority in the West, where in 800. Charles of France restored the Western Roman Empire, but the iconoclastic disputes that ran from 726 to 843 also affected the West. And since Rome was within the Byzantine Empire, its flock shared the fate of the church culture of the East, including the iconoclastic controversy.
Iconoclasm was weaker in the West than in the East. Its representatives were Claudius, bishop of Turin, and Agobard, bishop of Lyon, both Spaniards, enemies of Judaism and admirers of the works of Bl. Augustine[20]. They were opposed to iconoclasm by popes and kings, as well as by the masses. But here is the important point: in the VIII century these disputes were rather weak, but in the IX century they became lively and even when the subject of the dispute disappeared with the restoration of iconoclasm, the activity of the Westerners found an outlet in the church schism of 867 and the mutual anathemas of Pope Nicholas I and Patriarch Photius. The difference between the "ages" of the Greeks and the "Franks" was quite evident here: Byzantium had entered the inertial phase of ethnogenesis, while in the West there was a rise in passionarity due to the inertia that was gaining momentum.
The opponents of the Byzantine iconoclasts found themselves in a difficult position. They had to arrange for prelates to receive a theological education and learn Greek and Hebrew, and they did not want to send their young men to Constantinople. Therefore, young men preparing for a spiritual career were sent to Cordoba and Seville, where Jewish rabbis, under the patronage of the Arab caliphs, taught languages and philosophy to those who wished. The teachers did not, of course, attract students to Judaism, much less Talmudic Judaism, but they instilled in their listeners skepticism about the basic tenets of Christianity: the doctrine of the trinity of the Godhead and the Deity of Christ. 21] Those who returned home continued to maintain friendships with Jews who lived in southern France and Italy and who were wealthy enough to occupy a place of honor in society. At the same time, the Jews were well educated and translated Arabic authors for their Christian friends. On the basis of ethno-cultural contacts and religious indifferentism, the view emerged and spread that all three faiths were equal and that the criterion for the truth of a judgment was reason, i.e. the justification of the thesis at the level of the science of his time. This judgment formed the basis of scholasticism from John Scotus Erigena to Abelard and beyond. In other words, we see here an ethnocultural chimera or a combination of the three components at the super-ethnic level.
In the East, there was the reverse process, characteristic of the emergence from the fracture and the establishment of the inertial phase of ethnogenesis. What was superfluous was discarded and what was crystallized in the burning of the past struggle spread. The surplus was the rationalism of the iconoclasts, while the crystals were orthodoxy and art, which retained their significance as a means of communicating between the world of the low and the world of the high. Persecuted in the capital, the iconoclasts fled to the outskirts: to Chersonesos, Dalmatia and the Danube. There they spread Orthodoxy among the Khazars and the Slavs, preparing these ethnic groups for future baptism. They paved the way for Cyril and Methodius, who completed the conversion of the Slavs and part of the Khazars in the IX century. Over 300 years, from VIII to IX centuries, the two Christian worldviews diverged so much that the Greeks and "Latins" ceased to see each other as co-religionists, because at the seventh Ecumenical Council, the East found peace, and the West began to rush around looking for a solution.
This is where we must stop, and here is why. Our task was relatively simple. We traced the divergence of the "ancient" (Helleno-Roman) super-ethnos into Byzantine and "European" (Romano-Germanic) super-ethnos. At the same time, we consciously neglected the influences of foreign super-ethnoses: Muslim (Arab-Berber) and Eurasian (Hungarians), because these influences did not shift the main line of ethnogenesis. A synchronic approach was sufficient to achieve understanding, but in the transition to the Crusades era, everything changes and the former methodology does not meet the requirements of the task.
The problem of contact at the super-ethnic level comes to the fore, which requires a diachronic approach. Along with divergence, ethnic integration appears and negative processes, previously not described anywhere, become important. To solve the set tasks, another scale is needed, i.e. greater approximation, and this inevitably narrows the chronological framework of the study by about 5 times. Therefore, instead of a thousand years of ethnic history in front of us will be an episode in the IX-XI centuries. But we do not need more, because from the 14th century came the era of the formation of modern European nations, and this is a completely new topic.
The task we have set ourselves is solved. The transition from the "Roman world" (Pax Romana) to the "Christian world" (Chretiente) has a gap of 500 years (from IV to IX century). It turns out that this gap in ethnic history is filled by ethnic contacts in the west and the flowering of Byzantium in the east of the former Roman Empire. Since that time, the "Western Christian" and "Eastern Christian" super-ethnos have never been united. But already since the 11th century, i.e. since the actual schism, the charming temptations of antiquity began to penetrate into Europe by extremely tortuous paths. And it was more often to the detriment of Western Christians.
17 LACK OF CORRESPONDENCE
The era described is portrayed lopsidedly, but this is done deliberately. In essence, in the 11th century was the transition from the phase of the rise of the passionate tensions of a super-ethnic system into the acmatic phase - the phase of overheating of human passions. And this process is always uneven. In the Middle Ages, peasants and urban artisans gravitated toward the neighborhood of exuberant passionaries. They were reasonably conservative, avoided technical improvements, courageously defended their rights as enshrined in charters, and preferred defensive wars to offensive ones. Their ideal was the domination of mediocrity, but this ideal was unattainable.
Passionaries were born everywhere, including among the peasants and townspeople, and there was nowhere to put them, because sending them to the Crusades was unaffordable for many, and not everyone sought it, because there were also many interesting things at home, such as heresies and the fight against them.
So was the situation in the ruling classes. The nobles were required to serve in the army, and so in peacetime they were trained to the hilt, as nowadays honored masters of sport; without this they risked ruin in the first skirmish. The priests were taught to read and write, which was difficult for them, especially because it was Latin and not their mother tongue. In short, most people had so little time that they did not participate in the development of either technology or education, with the consequence that the productive forces hardly developed, and production relations tended to stabilize.
So at the expense of what factor did so many events take place: wars, coups, the emergence of heresies, and finally, the Crusades? After all, people who voluntarily took part in them often went to their certain deaths!
The difficulty here is imaginary. The spontaneous process of the development of productive forces stands several orders of magnitude higher than the logic of events at the personal and even ethnic level. These events are zigzags on the curve of human progress. They merge when we consider social history as a whole, but when we consider ethnic history they are clearly visible. For our statement of the problem are important because each sect was an ephemeral sub-ethnos, and the leaders of movements and heresiarchs were as it were free atoms, breaking out of their ethnosystems through increased passionarity, which drew them to death more often than to victory. As we have seen, they did not choose their destiny consciously, but submitted to the urges that fascinated them apart from their will. This is the phase of passional overheating.
But the choice of this or that fascination was no longer free. To invent a completely new one is exceptionally difficult. Rarely does one possess such ability. It is more convenient to choose a dominant from what has already been invented, and here we are entering the sphere of ethno-cultural contacts. This sphere is familiar to us, and now we can move from theoretical considerations to historical and ethnographic facts in order to give them a constructive, necessary interpretation for the topic.
All listed super-ethnoses were in constant contact with each other, and the energy, which created and supported their existence, flowed from one to another, as a liquid in communicating vessels. This flow was done sometimes in the form of military clashes, sometimes in the form of cultural borrowing, and sometimes as a sermon of faith or transplantation of their way of life, thoughts, feelings into a foreign environment.
But not only that, within the super-ethnoses themselves there was not even a shadow of conscious unity. Emperors fought with popes, the French with the English, Castilian kings with rebellious counts, Italian cities with each other, cities of Flanders with bishops, peasants with feudal lords, and even the Catholic Church was not monolithic: scholastics, disciples of Pierre Abelard, argued with mystics, followers of Bernard of Clairvaux, and the monks of Clunius with the licentiousness of bishops. But all these struggles were a form of dialectical unity. For the passionate figures of the Middle Ages, struggle was the meaning of life, and consequently, the opponent was vital. If he, being defeated, disappeared, the victor found a new one, and the process continued. It was very painful, but it excluded the disease of indifference that struck the aged Byzantium in XII century. For while destructive passions were boiling there, Byzantium was invincible, but when peace reigned there, death crept up.
Map. Political panorama of the XYXI centuries (199 KB)
http://gumilevica.kulichki.net/maps/args05.html
But the conflict in the Muslim world was even worse. It has not yet reached the time of zero passionarity, as in Constantinople, but passionate energy "changed its sign", negative, (not everywhere, of course), and reigns lie as a principle of action[22]. Instead of dialectical eternal struggle (Western Europe) and weakening of the rhythms of life processes (Byzantium) here began to occur annihilation at the antagonistic contradictions, and from the East this contagion spread to Italy and France, where the Albigoy wars began. And only the Mongols of the twelfth century had not yet learned the poison of the anti-system, (destructive belief systems).
NOTES
[1] See: History of Norway. М. ,1980. С. 122.
[2] Kendrick N.D.A History of The Vikings. London, 1930. P. 22; Sholding H. Viking Anliquities In Great Britain and Ireland. Pt. 1. Oslo, 1940. P. 10.
[3] Sawier P.H.. The Age of the Vikings.London,1962.P.194.
[4] See: Gurevich A.Ya. MOSCOW, 1966, P.136-137.
[5] See: Ibid. С. 140.
[6] See: Ibid. С. 146.
[7] See: History of foreign Asian countries in the Middle Ages. М., 1970. С.207-209.
[8] See: Gurevich L.Ya.Uzakaz.soc. P.166-167.
[9] See: Ibid. С. 166-169.
[10] See Ibid. С. 141-145.
[11] See: A tale about the beginning of Slavic written language. М., 1981. С. 28.
[12] Ibid. С. 26.
[13] See: Magidovich I.P., Magidovich V.I. History of the discovery and exploration of Europe. М., 1970. С. 1 13.
[14] The methods of chemical stimulation were used even in Central Asia; the Basmachi before the attack rubbed the nostrils of the horses with opium, and they themselves were stoned with anasha, which dulled the sense of fear.
[15] No service without gratitude (lat. ).
[16] Archives of Marx and Engels. Т. V. М., 1938. Chronological extracts.
[17] The modern meaning of the term "nation" should not be confused with the medieval meaning, since the terms are often reinterpreted. But this is a philological problem to which we will not devote time and space.
[18] Weber G. V. General History, Moscow, 1893, p. 606.
[19] See Chicherov I.S. Byzantine historical works: Theophanes' Chronographia, Nicephorus' Breviary. М., 1980. С. 142.
[20] See: Arseniev I. From Charlemagne to the Reformation. VOL.1 M., 1909. С.12-24.
[21] See:Ibid. p.144-145.
[22] See: Gumilev L.N. Ethnogenesis and the Earth's Biosphere. Л., 1989.
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