4&5: for the "End and the Beginning Again", full version

First, in the V-VI centuries, there was complete chaos in Western Europe - the Roman Empire, which fell from its own weight, fell prey to the small clumps of Germans and Slavs who infiltrated it.

Chapter Four And then in Europe...  The Franks

Now let us look at how ethnogenesis began in Western Europe. After the Roman Empire fell, the Germans went west, and the Slavs went east, but that's not the point. What were the numbers of those tribes who invaded the Roman Empire? The Vandals, for example, were only 20,000 men, one division. They conquered all of North Africa. Well, they were finished off pretty quickly there - the population was not in favor of them, it was difficult for the Balts to take root on the border of the Sahara, and after pirating for about a hundred years, they were conquered and exterminated by the Byzantines. 

The Visigoths were four times as numerous – 80,000 - they took over half of France, all of Spain, except in the northwest corner where the Sveves were entrenched. They drove out the Vandals. Can you imagine: 80,000 people in an area that stretches from modern Poitiers and Orleans to Gibraltar. So, they were a tiny fraction of the local population there. They did, however, hold rather high positions. Kings were from their midst and nobles too. But one had to get married. Besides, if one has a wife and children, one must have servants, and these are all from the local population. A house with a wife, children, and servants is a single system. In general, the Visigoths, being absorbed into these systems, lost their strength of resistance and were very quickly defeated - first by the Franks in the north, then by the Arabs in the south - and as a result, lost their independence.  And in such miserable condition was the whole of Europe, which in the eighth century was the object of attack by all the neighbors who wished for it.

The Germans, who had taken over the Roman Empire and settled there, were extremely uncomfortable, even though they were masters of the situation. Most of the Latin-speaking population (they were called Welski or Volohi) hated them, thought they were savages, boorish and drunkards, and treated them very badly. The victorious Germans - Franks, Burgundians, Goths - considered their Latin-speaking subjects as cowards, sycophants, intrigants and could not tolerate them either. In such a situation, naturally, there was no unity in Western Europe. And those tribes and peoples who had had the least time to make progress, (and progress at this time was considered decay of society), that swept across this vast peninsula were the winners. And those that were more or less backward still retained some strength and fighting ability, basic honesty and loyalty to their leaders. Such were the Franks. They lived in the lower reaches of the Rhine, in the middle of nowhere, so when all the others had time to break down, the Franks retained some fighting ability and strength. The Frankish leader Clovis first conquered the area between the Marne and the Loire, where Paris is today, then drove the Goths beyond the Pyrenees into Spain, and subdued the Alemannes in the Middle Rhine and the Burgundians whom he did not conquer definitively but made dependent on him.

But courage is hard to retain. It is easier to be corrupt and frivolous than to be loyal and brave and sacrifice your life for your country. And so, the Franks suffered a common fate. They fomented such decay that they caught up with the rest of the Germanic tribes. The descendants of Chlodwig had strife within each other, and as always happens with decay, the weakest part, the men, began to fall to pieces. But then the women also began to fall apart.

The end and the beginning of the beginning of the king's bed. They killed the children of their rivals. They poisoned the pretenders to the bed of the king and in general exterminated each other in every way. Fredegonde was killed, Brunnhilde was taken prisoner, blaming her for the deaths of four kings and forty-eight princes, a huge number of people, completely innocent of anything. And so, she was tortured for three days and then tied to a wild horse and let loose in a field.

So Western Europe posed no danger at this time. As I said, the Arabs with negligible forces, with no cavalry, were able to go from Gibraltar to the Loire from 711 to 732 with almost no resistance.

Even worse for Europe were the steppe nomads. In the 6th century, when the Great Turkic Kaganate was being created, a small handful of Turanians (Chion tribe) living between the Aral Sea and the Yaik River (now the Ural River) fled from the Turks. They could only flee to the west. The Turanians marched first over the Don, putting everybody into fear, because they declared themselves great conquerors from the east, and all the locals believed them; then, when the deception was exposed, it was too late. Then they fled beyond the Dnieper and crossed the Carpathian Mountains, fearing that the Turks would catch them there too, and captured the middle course of the Danube, the country of Pannonia.

They were a people known in the literature as Avars, but in Russian as Obras. There were very few of them: the detachment that came there first was about 20 thousand men, and another 10 thousand who caught up with them. Thus, if the men were 30 thousand, so the total population did not exceed 120-150 thousand people. This is a paltry population, the population of one medium-sized city. And yet with their raids they devastated Germany, almost all Lorraine, that is the eastern part of France, they invaded Italy and the Balkan Peninsula, and even the walls of Constantinople.

We are not interested in these conquerors. They had no particular strength, as we can see. The weakness of the resistance shown by the Europeans of that time is indicative. They could be dealt with as anyone pleased.   But all this was going on until about the year 700, to be more exact, between 596 and 730. And then there were people who resisted. They were the early Carolingians, Charles Martel, his son Pepin the Short, and Pepin's son Charlemagne. They gathered people they could rely on, and they called them by a word we know well: "comrade" ("comrade" in Latin is comitus, hence "committee"; in German the word translates as "count" and in French it is comte). These "comrades" made up the king's retinue.

But it is very difficult to rule a country that is completely incapable of either self-defense or self-government, a country that could hardly even pay taxes, because the peasants did so little to feed themselves and their families, and in general they did not want to work - it would be taken away anyway, it was pointless. To make the peasants work, we had to create some conditions for them.

And then these "comrades", i.e. earls, were assigned settlements, which they had to guard with their own means, for which they received an unprecedented thing in antiquity - a beneficiary, that is, a salary ("beneficiary" means "beneficence"). If he served, say, a certain district, he had the right to collect a tax from the inhabitants and to take it for himself so that he could use the money to feed himself, his family and his army and protect the inhabitants; he was interested in this. Sometimes he was given a sidewalk toll, sometimes the revenue from some town that was listed in the royal treasury.

This is how the feudal lords came into being.

And here we have to be clear, because according to the sociological school, feudalism emerged much earlier. And this is correct. Feudalism and feudal lords of this or that country are not always the same concepts. Feudalism is a mode of production in which the working peasant is the master of the means of production, but pays a rent to his or her own people to its feudal owner. Such feudalism began in Rome, in the Roman possessions - Gaul, Spain, Britain - back in the III century, when it became clear that it was not profitable to keep slaves in prisons or special ergasteria (factories), but more profitable to turn them into colonists, that is, to settle them on land, let them do their work, but only pay them.

Feudalism as a formation appeared then and since then (since the 3rd century), and certainly since the 4th century it existed (here one can argue about the difference in the decades, but it does not matter for us). But the fact is that at the beginning of the period, the feudal lords which are known from literature - these lavish feudal lords with plumes, coats of arms, armor, big swords, gloves with which they slapped one another's faces and then poked one another with spears - these feudal lords did not yet exist, although feudal relations did exist. And knights, too, trace their lineage back to the "comrades" of Charlemagne. They naturally also made use of the economic system which preceded them. For what does a man in service want? To be paid for his service. Well, you pay him this way, fine, but if the king had given him money directly from the treasury, he

wouldn't have agreed to that either, he wouldn't have cared.

In terms of ethnogenesis, where did the Carolingians recruit these people from?

Were they remnant bogatyrs of the Great Migration era, or future knights and barons? It must be said that apparently in this watershed era there were both. But here they, just like the Muhajirs under Mohammed, united around Charlemagne, and even created a cycle of poems and ballads about the Knights of the Round Table or peers of France. The Knights of the Round Table grouped themselves around the mythical King Arthur, while the peers of France grouped themselves around Charlemagne. The King was first among equals, he feasted with them, he marched with them, and treason was punished not by the King himself but by God, who helped the right one defeat the wrong one in a duel; thus, they lived as one strong and good band who headed the country.

Charlemagne got his nickname for the huge number of victories he won. But when you count all his victories, you come to the idea that the situation is more or less constant: the Germans beat the Germans. And then there are so many victories! But when they are not with the Germans, then immediately their victories are over. Charlemagne tried to reconquer part of Spain from the Arabs, and made a campaign across the Pyrenees, but on the way back his whole army was massacred by the Basques. After that, the Arabs occupied the territory again.

In a second campaign he captured Barcelona and the territory now called Catalonia - the Arabs did not deem it worthy of conquest. The Arabs took Barcelona sometime later, plundered it, and then left it again. This was many years after the campaigns of Charlemagne had several more victories over the Avars, but it came down to the fact that Charlemagne's whole vast empire was at war with one small Avar and then they managed to break up the fortified Avar camps west of the Danube.  To the east the Franks they no longer passed. Nevertheless, Charlemagne was crowned emperor in 800.

What Charlemagne did, broke very quickly, because in order to recruit the right number of "comrades", that is, earls, and to put the warlords, dukes, at their head, and to supply them with enough privates, that is, barons (baro in Saxon means "man"), all the passionate forces of Europe at the time had to be gathered, and it was small and extended only from Elba to the Pyrenees and from the Alps to about Nor-Manda. Britain was not part of it - the Celts were there.  But they did not consider themselves part of the European world.

Counts were gathered from all the Germanic tribes and from all the Gallo-Roman survivors, and they invited as many outsiders as they could; if they had any good prisoners, they brought them along as well. The Arabs, for example, when taken prisoner, were invited to be baptized and counted as "comrades". Why? Because there are not enough people. But nothing came out of this mess, because ethnos is not just a socially organized unit. It cannot be socially organized.  It must also have its own natural roots and forms.

The French and the Germans

Charlemagne died in 814, and under his son Louis the Pious feuds began, which ended by 841 with the total breakup of the empire. On what principle was the empire divided? Territorially. The western part, which today forms the greater part of France, was Romanized. They spoke a corrupted Latin, which we think of as the French language today. The eastern part was Germanic-speaking, spoken in different German dialects, one of which we now study in school. The Germans understood each other from the fifth to the tenth century. The future French understood each other more easily. But above all, the two were two wings of the same empire and could not stand each other. The Germans said we were brave, heroic conquerors; we could not read or write, of course, but what was that to real men, much less beautiful women? Men should fight and women should give birth to as many children as possible and bring them up, because it would take a long time to fight and most of them would be slaughtered anyway. That was the meaning of their lives and they drank a lot and often.

But the Westerners preserved the remnants of their Roman culture and said: "What is there to talk about with these chillies, they are a wild people, of course they have courage, but we are not in bad shape either, and in general it is unpleasant even to breathe the same air with them. I'd rather go to my matron and talk to her about Sidonia Apollinaria or Lucian, and even if I don't know anything about it, my grandfather knew it all the same (as many of us now say: "I don't know French, but my grandmother knew it well", and they said about the same thing about Latin). And anyway, how can you live with the Germans?"

And in the middle, between the Rhone, the Rhine and the Alps, a third tribe, quite unlike any other, settled: the Burgundians. The Burgundians were the most cultured of all the Germanic tribes. They were very tall and had red beards, never cut their beards, wore their hair rather thick and drank a lot of alcohol; they were also very good-natured and learned; they were Germanic in their old Roman way. In addition, they were Aryan (one of the branches of the early Christian Church) and thus stood out among the others. They were then forced to convert to Catholicism, but they did so with great reluctance and stood out as something special.

Thus, three different breeds of people were formed. And they distinguished one another beautifully. If you come from China or Persia, all the Europeans looked alike to you, but as soon as you lived there, you would see that they were different. And because they were different, they wanted to be different, and the empire was one: from the Elbe to the Ebro River in Spain and half of Italy; the Byzantine Greeks took over the other half. In such a diverse country, governance had to be unified. But who would be in charge was unclear.

Charles had three sons, and they fought among themselves. First two, Louis the German and Charles the Bald, attacked his older brother, Lothair, who had the title of emperor, and defeated him at the Battle of Fontane. This happened in 841, which is the year Europe was born. I will explain why.

Lothar escaped, but what is strange and the chroniclers also note this: normally after a big battle the victors would kill the wounded warriors, but here they were saying "why are we fighting, we are still insiders, we have different principles, you defended Lothar who was for the unity of the Empire, which we don't want, but we are not strangers anyway". And we carried water to our wounded enemies. The war, as you can see, suddenly took on characteristics that were uncharacteristic of the wars of the time.

And it ended up that two years later in the city of Strasbourg Charles and Louis read an oath to each other, with Louis reading in French to the soldiers of Charles and Charles in German to the soldiers of Louis. The oath was that they would divide the country in two,

Germans separately, the French (the first time that word was uttered) would also be separately. Before that there were no French and Germans. There were Welski, and in the east there were all sorts of German tribes called Teutons. And here it has already been said that the Germans and the French are different Franks. The Franks were on both sides, for the Franks is the name of that Germanic tribe that led the whole empire, and that empire collapsed.

Vikings

Almost simultaneously with the French and the Germans, two other peoples were created: the Asturians - the future Spaniards, the progenitors of several Spanish ethnic groups - and the Vikings. The Vikings were young people who did not want to live at home, but wanted to engage in all kinds of hooliganism. And so, the homesteaders (hewdings), believing there was a great threat to their own well-being, drove unwanted Viking brothers and children out of the house and threatened that they would kill them. 

And then these same guys created gangs, made fortified settlements called "vik" (hence, according to one hypothesis, the word "Viking"), and then, feeling that such a settlement, fortified by paling or earthen ramparts, was not worth taking by their own relatives, they boarded the boats and saved their lives by fleeing. They rode on all the northern seas. The Vikings acted like pirates: they would sail to an empty beach, land, pillage what they could and sail back. Their fury was unbelievable. But it must be said that this rage had nothing to do with their national character.

The Scandinavians are a quiet people and did not display much courage and fighting ability until the ninth century. But they wanted to win so much that they used biostimulants. Vodka was not available (they did not know how to make it), so they took mushrooms, dried them, then tore them apart, swallowed, and drank water. This biostimulant deprived people of fear, so without any fear they went on the attack with such fury that they were victorious.

I have one opponent whose mental capacity I have a special interest in. He wrote that feudalism was created and that is why they became so powerful, but what does that have to do with flyswatters? First of all, the Vikings didn't create feudalism and secondly, changing social systems from, say, slavery to feudalism, doesn't make people more capable of fighting. If you are a coward and a trash, you will remain one under any formation. That was not the point.

It did not occur to him, my opponent, that biostimulation is a very important ethnographic trait. During my youth, the Basmachi used to attack the machine-gun, stoned on hash and rubbed opium on the faces of their horses: the horses went to the machine-gun, the Basmachi went to the machine-gun, two men out of a hundred would come and win.

So, they use biostimulants, and very often. But the question is, when is there a need to do it? That's when the incentive came up. And it created a reputation for the Vikings as being exceptionally fearless, efficient and very courageous warriors, which in fact they were not.

In addition to sailing the North Seas, they skirted Gibraltar, pillaged the coasts of Spain, sailed the Mediterranean, crushed the shores of France and Italy, and encountered the Arabs here. And the Arabs and their allies, especially the Berbers, are a people really brave, really courageous, they did not need any drugs, and they chased these Vikings across the Mediterranean Sea. The Vikings began to be hired to serve in Byzantium, because it is much better to serve the boss and get paid than to act at your own risk and fear in the presence of a strong enemy.

So, these mercenaries had a name you probably know: the Greeks called them varangs, and in Russian it would sound like varyag. That's what the word "Varang" is. It is not the name of any ethnic group or any linguistic group, but the name of a profession. (What I am saying now is not something I made up. It is reported in an exceptionally valuable, published at the beginning of our century, monograph by Academician V. G. Vasilievsky, who researched this question in depth).

Besides Spain, France, and Italy, the Vikings reached Britain, briefly captured Ireland, Greenland, and reached North America. According to the latest information Scandinavian runes have been found in Paraguay and Bolivia; in other words, they spread along the whole of the American coast. And almost nowhere have they left real traces: their descendants, their culture. Only archaeologists have found isolated objects and remains of buildings. The Vikings managed to establish themselves in very few places. In Northern England, Southern Scotland and on the southern shore of the Channel they were given the country they had devastated to settle, and their descendants still live there. This is Normandy. In Britain, they became commoners, although they kept their Norwegian language until the twentieth century, and only thanks to radio and television have now forgotten it. But in Normandy they became French, and much faster, because the French, who formed around the city of Paris, were exceptionally brave and desperate people.

Feudal Revolution

Soon after Charlemagne's death, under his son, a social - feudal - revolution began alongside ethnic diversion. It saved Europe from two powerful opponents: the Scandinavian Vikings and the Arabs. The Arabs managed to take almost all of Spain and part of southern France. The Vikings plundered the entire coast, and the Arabs from the banks of the Danube plundered the interior. European peasants, untrained in warfare, could not resist.   And then the dukes, earls and barons, whose names we do not know, suddenly began to resist very intensely and courageously the attacks of both Saracens and Vikings and Aurors; they hated the Greeks, despised the Italians, who lived their last crumbs and who had no such temple, sailed to the British Isles, where also were remnants of the Great Migration of Nations - Angles and Saxons, already lost the ability to defend against the same Vikings and Normans. But in the center of Europe, these future feudal lords, for all the troubles of their character, proved to be very useful warriors, because they continued to co-opt into their midst people who were smart, brave, loyal, and able to resist. They were constantly renewing their ranks.

The deal ended when the Vikings came to the mouth of the Seine, plundered everything they could, marched on to the city of Paris and decided to sack it. Paris was not a very big city at the time, but it was quite conspicuous. The Parisians, of course, rushed to the churches to pray for the saints to save them from the fury of the Normans, but they happened to have a clever count - Ed. He said, "The saints will help us if we don't forget ourselves”. So, he got a bunch of his boys together and started sending everyone up the walls to defend themselves, with wives and kids who were older carrying water and food and those who cried out: "I'm not going, I have myocarditis, here's a doctor's note," he immediately grabbed with the help of his boys and dragged to the wall: "You'll stand and with myocarditis, nothing!" The result was absolutely stunning, the Normans took to storming Paris in earnest - but they couldn't take it!

Charles the Simpleton, King of the Carolingian Dynasty and descendant of Charlemagne, showed up with an army and stood and left, afraid to mingle with the Normans. And Ed shouted: "Don't you dare leave the walls, I'll give you, I'll show you!" And Paris stood firm. It made a big impression on everyone. And even though there was no telephone, no radio, no telegraph nor mail, people got news by word of mouth just as we did. And everyone came to the conclusion: "That would be such a king for us”. And they refused to submit to the legitimate dynasty and proclaimed Ed king of France. But history repeated itself 90 years later, in 888, when Hugo Capet, also Count of Paris, was proclaimed King of France, similarly for his energy and personal qualities. And the Carolingians were refused obedience. The latter was caught in the city of Lancet and imprisoned where he died.

What is this? This is another version of a revolt of passionaries, based on garrisonous and sub-passionary people, against an outdated system, a system that has lost its passionarity. And note this fact: the descendants of Louis the Pious, both French and German, were exceptionally mediocre. Why, then, did the French and Germans support such kings? They didn't support the kings; they just put them up as a banner, as a slogan, as an ideogram, as a symbol, as a badge to fight for when defending their independence. In the end it did not matter what ritual words they uttered as they went into battle - "for Charles" or "for Louis", "for the damned! They went for themselves, for their sanctities and their descendants.

So, it was in the IX century. that Western Europe began to crystallize as we know it. And it is characterized by something that no one else in the world knows - the national principle. Natio in Latin literally means "birth”. Birth, language and territory are what is combined in this term. But this understanding was characteristic only of Western Europeans and nowhere else, because a person who lived in China, or Mongolia, or the Arab Caliphate was guided by entirely different principles of defining "our own" and "foreigners”. Thus, "nazio" is equivalent to our term "ethnos" and not at all equivalent to our modern concept of "nation”. So, there should be no confusion: nations of the modern type were created only under capitalism, while back then they were called that, but they were essentially ethnoses.

Two Indicators

And now let us summarize. We have considered several variants of the initial phase of ethnogenesis - the phase of the rise, we have touched different epochs and countries. So, let's ask ourselves: what do Byzantium before Constantine, Muslims at the time of the first Caliphs, Chinese in the Tang Dynasty, and Europeans in the early feudal era have in common? And the difference in behavioral patterns between them is enormous!

What are they in common? Two things we have in common are the attitude of society toward man, and the attitude of the human community toward nature.

These are the two indicators that will be important to us.

How do we uncover ethnic relations? Only by examining modifications and changes in social relations.  History describes social relations, history is our guiding thread, Ariadne's thread, which helps us get out of the labyrinth. That is why we need to know history.

What can we say for this formative phase of ethnogenesis? Society (whether Arabs, Mongols, ancient Jews, Byzantines, Franks) tells man one thing: "Be what you have to be!” In this hierarchical system, if you're a king, be a king; if you're a minister, be a minister; if you're a knight, be a knight and stay there, do your job; if you're a servant, be a servant; if you're a peasant, be a peasant and pay taxes.

Don't go anywhere, because in this strong hierarchical system that makes up the consortium, each person has his place. If they start fighting each other for warm seats rather than pursuing one common goal, they will all die. And if that happens, they die, and in those cases where they survive, the same imperative applies.

Okay. What if, say, the king is not fit for his purpose? Overthrow him; there's nothing to be messed with! And if a minister proves to be stupid and unsatisfactory? Cut off his head! And if a knight or a rider is cowardly and undisciplined? Take away his horse, his arms, and cast him out, so that his scent is not to be smelled! And if the peasant doesn't pay his tax? "Well, we'll force that," they said, "we can do that”. In general, everyone had to be in his place. A collective with such a social imperative made a very coherent ethnic machine, which either broke down or developed further and entered another phase, the Acmatic one. We will not discuss it now, since it will be dealt with in a separate chapter.  In the meantime, let us ask another important question: how is the era of the rise reflected in nature?

As I said, the Arabs and their era of ascent had no effect on the desert, because the Arab passionaries left the desert rather quickly and went about their military affairs. Europeans, too, were busy shaping their ethnoses into small but resistant social groups during the Ascendancy, and so they were not generally concerned with the humiliation of animals and forests. Nature rested. The rare population which was left after all the soldiers' uprisings, the ruin of the Roman provinces and Roman administration, the barbarian campaigns which were also very few, had a limited influence on nature and the forests grew in Europe. Dorst describes it very well in his book Before Nature Dies. So, 2/5 of France has been forested over the years, wild animals, migratory and native birds, rabbits have multiplied, of course, so the country, depopulated, emasculated by civilization, has turned back into an earthly paradise. And here it turned out that it made sense to defend it, because to live in it was good, and the enemies were everywhere.

What was happening in Byzantium at this time? In Byzantium, it was basically the same process - it was not about nature, and besides, in Syria, in Asia Minor, around Constantinople, there was such a stable, millennia-old anthropogenic landscape that it seemed silly to make any changes in it. Any progress could only do harm, not good.

"Stop!" - Professor V. V. Pokrzyszewski, who deals with the problem of urbanization, would have to tell me. What about the construction of the city of Constantinople? After all, Rome caused colossal damage to the entire Mediterranean. Constantinople was half the size of Rome, but it was also big, between 900,000 and 1 million inhabitants. In principle, it would seem to be the same... But here's the paradox. This city did not cause any harm to nature, although it was surrounded by a long wall. The wall required a lot of stone and a lot of work. This city had great buildings like the cathedral of St. Sophia (a small copy of it we had in Leningrad, on the corner of Zhukovsky Street and Greek Avenue - the Greek Cathedral). There were beautiful palaces, baths, a hippodrome there, and people didn't live in an apartment crisis; they lived in small cottages surrounded by gardens. Constantinople was a garden city, and when I argued with V. V. Pokrzyszewski that it's not urbanization that's bad for nature, but people of a certain kind, and I gave him Constantinople as an example, he said knowingly: "Well, it was a garden city, wasn't it?" And I said, "And who stops you in Moscow from planting trees and shrubs”?

Thus, a system was created in Byzantium that didn't violate the biocenoses left from antiquity, but only supplemented them by building a magnificent city, which generally lived on its own resources and imported from faraway lands. What did the people of Constantinople lack? - we ask as economists and geographers.  They had plenty of fruit and grapes in their gardens, so they had their own wine. In addition, many had estates nearby, with goats - meat, milk and again vineyards. Bread was needed. But since Constantinople and other cities were well developed arts and crafts, items which are stored in the best museums in Europe, the Greeks took them for sale in Olbia,  Chersonese and Theodosia, and from the lower reaches of the Dnieper and the Don carried a huge amount of bread (grain) from the Sarmatians and fed their entire population. Bread was also brought from Egypt, because there was no dam there yet, and therefore the fertile Nile spilled and left fertilizer on the fields. The crops were fabulous, and the Egyptians had nowhere to put their bread, but they worked and worked by inertia, because they saw in it the meaning of life. Luxury goods were brought in from China. For example, there was no silk of their own, but they needed it very much, because there were lice, and silk underwear saves you from lice. So, they bought silk. The Chinese were very reluctant to give it and change it, but even gave it away for free, as a tribute to their nomadic rivals. The Greeks gave them beautiful things: bowls, incrustations, swords, necklaces, bracelets for women. After all, women need beautiful things, they love them. Therefore, the steppe warriors gladly beat the Chinese, took silk from them and exchanged it with the Greeks for gifts for their wives, so that the Greeks received silk material in general at similar prices. The passional shock in Byzantium also took a huge toll on human life and cultural monuments, but for nature it proved to be salutary.

Thus, the outburst of passionarity is a necessary condition for the beginning of ethnogenesis, but the characteristics of this process are different. They depend on the level of technology, which either develops or does not, if there are no metals and clay, as on the islands of Polynesia. The primary power structure is very important. It can be maintained or changed. Cultures are the most conservative and stable, so that new ethnic groups inherit the knowledge and skills of the old ones that are passing into oblivion. This often creates the illusion that progress is uninterrupted, but we must remember that it is also subject to the laws of dialectics, or, as they were called in antiquity, vicissitudes.

Chapter Five: The Akmatic (overheating) Phase.  The Social Imperative

In the previous chapter we described the rise of passionarity, but did not answer the question: why does this rise end? It would seem that if passionarity as a trait appeared and is transferred by the usual sexual way, by transmission of the corresponding trait to offspring, and passionarians, due to their increased propensity for activity, naturally leave large amounts of offspring, not always legal and often most diverse, then it would seem that the number of passions in this region should grow and accumulate, until they do great, progressive things.

However, nothing of the sort works out. After a certain point, a red line, the passionaries break the original imperative of behavior. They stop working for the common cause, and begin to fight for themselves. And at first, these, say, feudal lords, or some Byzantine merchants, or Arab conquerors motivate it this way: "We fulfill all obligations to our social form - whether the Caliphate, the Byzantine Empire, the French or English kingdoms. We do all that is required of us, and our strength remains." So, the imperative changes. It no longer sounds like, "Don't be what you're supposed to be, but be yourself!" This means that some vigilante, a spearman, a squire, no longer wants to be just the squire or spearman of his count or duke, but also Romuald or some Anguerrand; he wants to have his name and glorify it! The artist begins to put his signature on the paintings, "I did it, not someone else." Yes, of course, it all goes to the common good, decorating the city with wonderful sculpture, but "respect me too!" The preacher not only retells the words of the Bible or Aristotle without footnotes, twisting as he sees fit, not claiming to be someone else's holy words, no, he says, "And I think so-and-so about it," and immediately his name becomes known. And since such people turn out to be in quite large numbers, they naturally begin to get in each other's way. They begin to push, crowd, push each other with their elbows in all directions and demand more space for themselves.

Therefore, the increased passionarity of the ethnic or, even more so, of the super-ethnic system brings a positive result, in other words, success, only if there is a socio-cultural dominant-symbol, for which it is worth to suffer and die. It is desirable to have only one dominant: if there are two or three of them, then they overlap and thus quench the differently directed passionate impulses, as it happens with algebraic addition of different vectors.   But even without such interference, anarchy can arise due to the egoist actions of strongly passionate individuals. It is very difficult to subdue or intimidate them; sometimes it is easier just to kill them.

Subpassionaries

It is pertinent here to address the role of subpassionarians, who, in the first phase of ethnogeonazation, actually had no place in the system. At all times there are people who aspire to nothing, who only want to drink and eat, sleep somewhere on planks behind the fence, and make it their life's goal. In the first period of ethnogenesis nobody needs them because in a system that sets itself great goals, strives for an ideal, understanding it as a distant projection - what are such people for? No boss can rely on them. They can betray at any moment or simply not carry out orders. They are not valued and they are not cherished. This was the case in the violent, though constructive, time of the rise. And here, when several centers emerge in the same system, fighting among themselves for dominance, then each of the initiative passionarians becomes in need of his own special gang. And he finds an opportunity to use sub-passionarians as servants, concubines, mercenaries and, finally, wandering soldiers-landsknecht. They are recruited in the simplest way - they give the rogue a gold coin and say: "Sweetheart, take this, go and tell everyone that our Duke is a good Duke". And this is enough for this good duke to gather so many supporters that he can make a great bloody mess.

Of course, these are bad soldiers, but where to get good ones? All the passionarii were already either attached to someone, or had put themselves forward as candidates for a high place; the passionarii found use as professional warriors for princes, counts, emirs and sultans. Sub-passionarians, on the other hand, acted primarily as their armed servants. And the sub-passionarians were even more profitable, because they did not risk their lives very much, and after the battle they could maraud, run around, search in the pockets of the dead, or rob the civilian population - they could do it, as they could be thieves, beggars, hired soldiers or vagabonds. In the acmative phase, such people are not valued enough so let them starve to death, if not hung "high and short" (the French medieval legal formulation). However, these operations siphon off from ethno-social systems the strength that could be used to solve pressing problems. The change in the collective's attitude toward sub-passionarians shows one example of how collective behavior in an ethnos changes, from phase to phase – in the modulation of the biosphere.

And in terms of geography, it is not the ways in which the peasants are exploited that are important to us, but precisely the nature of the behavior of the entire collective-ethnos.

Altered stereotype of behavior

And here it is necessary to say a few words about ethics. Ethics deals with the attitude of being to the proper, so a special form of it is developed during every phase of ethnogenesis. Of course, there are social ethics and social morality - we all know that - but this is not what we are going to talk about now, but the influence of phases of ethnogenesis on ethical systems. In the phase of ascent, when the imperative: "Be what you have to be!” - ethics consisted in the unconditional subordination of the individual to the principles of the system. A violation of the principles of the system was seen as a crime punishable without reserve. Doing well meant doing what was right; doing bad meant failing to do what was right.

In the Acmatic phase, when everyone said, "I want to be myself”! I do what I'm supposed to do; I serve the state 40 days a year in the war, and on the other days I'm free to do whatever I want, “I have my own fantasy!" - Here a different ethic emerged.

In order to realize his fantasies, some baron, for example, needed the strong support of his environment. This meant that he had to recruit people who were personally dependent on him. But he was no less dependent on them. If he employed footmen, Landsknecks, riflemen to protect his house, or spearmen to attack the enemy, then of course they all depended on him to do what he demanded of them because he paid them.

A system of mutual obligation and self-help, of collective responsibility in a circle, was established. Each person was responsible for his small group to which he belonged directly, and for the big group to which he belonged indirectly as a member of a small one; thus, he was responsible for himself, his baron, his duchy and his country. And likewise, the king, duke, count, or baron had a duty of care to his vassals.   Of course, this was not always respected, but in such cases, it was allowed to break one's vassal oath. If the liege lord did not treat his vassal carefully enough, the vassal had the right to leave him. The duties were reciprocal.

There was only one legislation in which this ethic is recorded and survives: the Yassa of Genghis Khan. It has survived, translated from Persian into Russian. About three-quarters of the laws there are aimed at punishing people who do not help a comrade. For example, if a Mongolian rides across the steppe and meets someone who is thirsty and does not let him drink - the death penalty; if he rides in formation and the comrade riding in front dropped his quiver of arrows, well it broke off, and those in the back did not pick up and give it back - the death penalty; in mild cases - exile to Siberia (Mongols also exiled to Siberia).

This ethic still exists to this day as a relic form. For example, no expedition in harsh conditions can work without such an ethic based on mutual assistance. I had to read in newspapers that some tourists crossed a river in Altai and one fell into the water, and the others did not pull him out, because everyone thought, "It was him who fell, not me, why should I go in, I am not obliged". So, this too is ethics, but of a completely different type. According to Yasa's ethics, a man was obliged to climb in and help out, and if he didn't, he would have been tried not in 24 hours, but in half an hour, and would have been executed for not helping a comrade. Not all laws have preserved this form of ethics, though it was present in a bandit gang, in some regiment of cavalry or infantry, in an expedition, as I have said, - everywhere and always where men are in danger. It is the only form of behavior that can save one's life.

The presence of such ethics played a special role in the acmatic phase. It largely conditioned the influx of fresh forces of the young generation of passionarians into the already existing consortia and sub-ethnoses.

In a situation where war was a daily occurrence, everyone who wanted to live not only for something, but also for the sake of something (and there were plenty of them), needed companions and wanted to be sure that they would not be betrayed. Therefore, it was necessary to make a choice. Of course, the social aspect had a certain importance in the choice of supporters. But it is unlikely to be decisive, because in the Acmatic phase, the heredity of titles and ranks was very conditional.

In Europe, for example, one had to perform a feat to enter the class of the feudal lords, to become a nobleman or even to have a title. The children of earls naturally became earls, but if a count had one earldom and five children, one person would inherit, whereas the others received nothing, so they were called viscounts, second-rate earls. But this did not suit them, because they had no material advantages. And besides, imagine a Passionarity from the people. Passionarity is a natural trait, genetically transmitted, and there are very pretty ladies in all walks of life. Passionarians who occupy a high position do not yawn and leave offspring everywhere. Passionarians come from all walks of life - townspeople, peasants, slaves, (even slaves). They are not satisfied with their social situation; they are looking for a way out.

In France, for example, this way out existed until the 17th century, before Richelieu, who decreed to count who were noblemen and who were not, because noblemen made themselves known to anyone who wanted to enter the royal service to make their career there. Nobody checked, because sometimes there was no need to, it was thought that if a man wanted to, why should he not be recognized as a nobleman, what difference does it make? Yes, of course, the tax cannot be taken from him, but he serves. And then he is likely to be killed soon, because his service is mostly military, so then there is no need to make a mess. Any passionarian could declare himself a nobleman, and the number of "feudal lords" grew enormously. This caused a perfect Brownian motion, which is called "feudal fragmentation”.

The very principle of feudalism - the economic principle - does not at all imply a huge number of outrages. They may or may not be; it has nothing to do with economic conditions. But where does the desire to smash your neighbor in the face, for example, and then kill him in a duel come from? That would be of no profit, it would be a great risk, because the neighbor could also kill you. But in eleventh- and fourteenth-century Europe, there were too many people who were willing to take that risk. The results by the twelfth century were as follows.

In Germany, the servicemen's armorers turned into burghers - robber knights. Freerich Barbarossa had to hang them. 

In France, Brittany, Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Aquitaine, Toulouse, Languedoc and Flanders, not to mention Burgundy and Lorraine. And Provence did not even recognize the Catholic Church, as the Albigensians were greatly feared there (more about them below).

In England there was constant warfare with the Celts, and the Anglo-Saxon population fled beyond the borders of the island from the French kings (Plantagenets) and their feudal army.

In Italy, Venice was at war with Genoa, Florence with Pisa, Milan with Romagna and, worst of all, the popes with the empires.

Passionary overheating

In the face of growing feudal anarchy, clever rulers found a major dominant. They proposed to direct the energy of the system outward, to the Holy Land. The spontaneous crusades of 1095-1099 had their "prelude" in Spain from 1063-1064, where the knights of the Duchy of Aquitaine and the Count of Toulouse went, and later the Burgundian and Norman knights rushed there as well.

The slogan of the first colonial expansion was "Liberation of the Holy Sepulchre. Of course, the slogan could have been chosen better for its time. But the pope proclaimed that it was necessary to save Palestine, the Holy Land, from the hands of infidels. Everyone shouted, "This is what God wants!" - and off they went. But it was only a slogan. They went because they wanted to go. And they would have gone anywhere else, with any other slogan, because they had a lot of inner energy.

Proof of this was the Normans' conquest of Sicily in 1072 and their invasion of Orthodox Epirus in 1081 which ended in defeat in 1085. But most telling - and also with the Pope's blessing - was the conquest of England in 1066 by Duke Willhelm of Normandy. After all, the English kingdom, though Christian, was a relic of the Great Migration era and not part of the European super-ethnos. So, they conquered it.

The Crusades began, first, with the mass pogroms of Jews in the Prine regions. This had no effect on the later successes or failures of military action in Palestine. Then the same devastation was planned for Constantinople when the crusaders of the First Crusade arrived there. But Alexei Comnenus, who was in command there at the time, was a man of business. He surrounded the crusaders with mercenary Pechenegs units and deprived them of provisions. The crusaders raised their paws and said that they agreed to submit to the emperor, ready to take a lien vassal oath to him, but that he would feed them and not hurt them. The emperor sent all the crusaders to Asia Minor, saying: "You came to fight the Muslims, so fight the Turks there".

The first blow of the crusaders was such that they overpowered the Seljuk cavalry. And since the Muslims least expected such a blow, the crusader army managed to reach Jerusalem and even take it. On the way they captured Edessa in Mesopotamia. But of the 110,000 Europeans who crossed the Hellespont, about 20,000 made it to Jerusalem. Such were the losses!

Every event can be accomplished if the cost is not considered. For example, you could pay 50 rubles for a box of matches, when you have no matches and you really want a smoke. The first crusade was just as much of a waste. It only succeeded because the Muslims in Palestine never expected such an outrageous thing to happen. They did not prevent the Christian pilgrims from visiting the Holy Sepulchre and praying. On the contrary, they protected them; they respected them very much. They regarded Jesus and Mariam as prophets equal to Muhammad. Both the Injil Sherif (Holy Gospel) and the Koran Sherif (Holy Koran) were considered equal books. There was no persecution for the faith. There was no reason for such an invasion of Christians, except for the internal process of passional overheating that swept Western Europe in the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries.

Feudal Europe for a hundred years (1093-1192) threw to Palestine its bravest knights, its best fleet, its most reliable allies - the Armenians - and even concluded alliances with the Ishmaelites; even Jerusalem, wrested from the Fatimids, was recaptured by Sal-ud-Din, a Kurd under whose leadership the Turks fought, whether bought at the market or arriving with their families and flocks. The Persian historian Rawandi wrote in an essay dedicated to the Sultan of Rum (Asia Minor), Ghiyas al-Din Qai Khusrau (1192-1196): "Praise be to Allah... in the lands of the Arabs, Persians, Byzantines, and Russians, the word belongs to the Turks, whose fear of sabers lives firmly in their hearts."

The results of the crusades were very disappointing. Edessa fell in 1144 and was recaptured by the Muslims in 1146. Crusader incursions into Egypt in 1163 and 1167 were repulsed. The Second and Third Crusades of 1147-1149 and 1189-1192 failed. The finest knights of Europe fell to the Seljuk Turkmens. The cities of Palestine and Lebanon were put on the defensive. Crusader garrisons were only able to keep them because the Venetians and Genoese brought arms and provisions by sea.

It was the same in the Maghreb, in the west of the Arab world. At Alarcos in 1195, the Berber Almohads crushed the knightly army of Castile, where knights from all over Europe had flocked. This collision is described by L. Feuchtwanger in his novel The Spanish Ballad, where the Arab historian Musa (a fictitious character, but Ibn Khaldun's thoughts) gives a prediction: the Christian world is young and can afford the luxury of suffering individual defeats, and the Muslim world is old and only prolongs its existence.  

The Arabs had already lost their youthful fervor by the end of the twelfth century.

We should not think that an excess of passionarity guarantees military success. Let us remember that it leads to the disorganization that comes from the development of individualism. When everyone wants to be himself or herself, it is almost impossible to organize a significant mass of such people.

Here is an example

When in 1204 the crusaders took and sacked Constantinople and then rushed on Bulgaria, in 1205 the Cumans attacked the camp of the Latins near Adrianople, faked flight, ambushed the emperor Balduin and took him prisoner, slaughtering many of the brave knights. The Bulgarian king imprisoned the Latin emperor in a tower in Tarnovo, where he died. The Latin attack on Orthodoxy was stopped just as much by the Turks as by their pressure on Islam, even though the Turks were neither Christians nor Muslims. But where the Turks were not present, in the Baltic basin, the Germans, the Danes and the Swedes were a complete success. The resistance of the Polabian Slavs was broken by the Germans, a fortress was built in the mouth of the Dvina River (1201); Estonia was conquered by the Danes, Finland - by the Swedes. Next in line were the Prussians, Lithuanians and Russians, but these "successes" came in the 13th century, when the balance of power changed.

Strange! The Cumans were in the homeostasis phase, and the feudal Western Europe was in the Acmatic phase. It seemed that Europeans should go from victory to victory, while the Kipchaks perished, in the best case - heroically, like Dakots, Seminoles and Comanches. But the opposite happened. Why?

The trouble in Europe was that this new dominance - the Crusades - overlapped with an old dominance - the dispute between popes and emperors, and it is impossible to say which side was worse. Pope John XII was a Satanist; so was Emperor Henry IV. The arbitrariness of the imperial officials was not inferior to the bribery and sacrilege of the prelates. The persecution of heretics was carried out equally by both. The Guelphs fought the Ghibellines, the Capetites against the Plantagenets, the Albigensians against the Catholics, and the cities against the feudal lords until the end of the 13th century. The constant warfare on the home front was detrimental to success on the foreign fronts. An excess of passivity was as harmful as a lack of it. And excess energy was so great that a contemporary of the Crusades, Usama ibn Munkiz, wrote in The Book of Exhortation: "The Franks, may Allah forsake them, have none of the virtues inherent in men, except courage. It is true that the same ibn-Munqyz believed that lions are no less brave, but they are beasts.

The Acmatic phase of the Western European super-ethnos. Crusades

Thus, the crusades have stalled because of the passionarial overheating of the ethno-social system, which makes a purposeful coordination of forces impracticable.

My explanation of the causes of the crusades and their failure is original. And the approach to ethnic history as a natural phenomenon of the formation of the biosphere is original.

Catholic historians saw the Crusades as the result of religious enthusiasm, Protestant historians as the result of papal self-interest, Enlighteners as the result of the madness of uneducated people, and economists as the result of the crisis of the feudal economy of Western Europe.

All of these approaches to the subject, individually or even taken together, are obvious and valid, but insufficient to explain the phenomenon for one very simple reason. European historians see the Crusades as a universal phenomenon, and this is wrong. If we compare the known phases of ethnogenesis, we find that when the phase of the rise of passionarity turns into an acmatic one, the urge to expand the area is as steady as boiling water at 100 degrees Celsius and normal pressure.

And what happened after that in Western Europe? When the surplus of passionaries (those free atoms which create a kind of Brownian motion) was removed and disappeared, what stood out were the passionaries who remained in place and who quickly and quietly began to consolidate their power. Then they needed slogans around which they could unite their adherents, and for this they needed ideologists who were themselves passionate and were willing to support any duke, palatine or king, if he gave them the opportunity to express their ideas. It was no longer a question of simply interpreting scripture, but of making their own points of view. These ideologues were called either scholastics, if they were teaching at a university and the authorities were not angry with them, or heresiarchs, founders of heresies, if they were kicked out of the university and the authorities were angry with them for some reason. Thus, the difference between them.  It’s the reason why each of these representatives of medieval thought expressed whatever he or she wanted, while still referring, of course, to the Bible, which is voluminous - one can always find a corresponding quotation.

It has to be said that in those days, quotations were not always given in scholastic or heretical works. They just said that the Bible said so-and-so, and then the preacher said what he wanted to say. The merit of university scholasticism is that it introduced the system of footnotes, which we still use today. If you are referring to the Bible, then give the chapter and verse numbers - everything in the Bible is numbered. Otherwise, the reference was disregarded.

As a result of the work of ideologues, the nature of the confrontation in Western Europe has changed enormously. Different agendas emerged: agendas that could be understood by those sub-passionarians who stuck to their leaders, by those passionarians who stuck to different kings or princes, or by those harmonicists who found it advantageous to support one movement or another. The programs were very diverse. Sometimes they were religious, sometimes social, sometimes dynastic, but all found their adherents, the passionaries, who sought the application of their excessive energy.

Thus, another crusade arose within France itself. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, an anti-papal movement, not even Christian, emerged in France and Italy: the Albigensians, or Cathars. This ideological doctrine was dualistic, based on a rejection of life as such and religiously outside the bounds of Catholicism. It was on this ideological foundation that the first great confrontation in France took place. The Albigensians behaved so defiantly that a crusade was organized against them. Neither is crusading for nothing, but the Albigensians could not help but slaughter the papal legate, Ambassador Petro de Castelnau. He had been sent from Rome to Toulouse, failed to agree and was killed on his way back. Well, after the blood had flowed, all the knights of Northern France, who dreamed of finding some business, but did not go to Palestine because, first, travel was expensive, and second, they were no longer needed there, rushed to exterminate these very Albigensians.

The Albigensians were incredibly mixed in the south of France with the local Catholics. And because they believed that the whole created world was evil, and all means were allowed against evil, including lies, they could lie as if they were the most faithful Catholics, but in fact, they secretly observed their Albigoyan rites. And it was impossible to tell them apart. But this did not stop the war, for there was essentially a clash between Northern France and Southern France.

The head of Northern France, King Philip Augustus of Paris, did not officially participate in the crusade against the Albigensians, because he was excommunicated for his sins (and his sins were indeed boorish, repulsive); he himself could not wear the cross and go on the crusade, but he gave money for it.

His rival, Count Raymond of Toulouse, was just a count, but he had as much possessions as the French king and much more wealth, and he was a Catholic, not an Albigonian at all. Nevertheless, an excommunicated heretic supported the Crusaders and a Catholic supported heretics. As you can see, it was not a matter of slogans, but of trying to defeat each other.

Why, one might ask? Why did a religious point that could have been discussed in the office or not discussed at all - a matter of conscience, who cares who believes what - suddenly become the main point. Obviously, there was such a drive for action that it could have spilled out on any occasion, and it poured out - in the forms of a religious war.  The North won. Toulouse was destroyed, Lyon occupied, all the castles of the Albigensians - most of whom were feudal lords - taken and destroyed. Culture, the rich Provençal culture, was trampled by the northern knights, who imposed rough manners among the Parisians (Paris was then a savage city compared to Toulouse, Marseilles, Lyons). Well, we won, all right. It would seem that we could calm down. But we want to fight, and if we want, we will find a reason.

The Hundred Years War and Ethnogenesis

A new problem was put forward. The question of the right of succession to the throne. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, the direct dynasty of the Capetings in France ended. King Philip IV “the Beautiful” had all three sons dead and was left with one granddaughter, the eldest son's daughter, Jeanne. She was given in marriage to the King of Navarre, and she turned out to be the heir to the French throne. But the French peers said: "It is not good for lilies to spin", that is, it is not good to have a woman on the throne, and they chose the king's closest male relative - Philip VI Valois. Well, what do we, it would seem, care about that? But we do! The question of succession was the cause of the Hundred Years' War.   Because these very dead three brothers had a sister, Isabella, whom the French king married off to the English king Edward II Plantagenet (Plantagenet is a French surname, originating in Western France, from Angers). Their son Edward III was, in potency, King of France and England at the same time. So, he declared, "And because I am heir to the French crown, give me that crown!"

At this time, England already had a parliament that was very stingy about giving money for all sorts of royal activities. You can't go to war without money. But here, for some reason, Parliament appropriated large sums for a seemingly hopeless war. The fact is that England at the time had 3 million people and France had 22 million. France was much richer, and the French were no weaker than the English, their organization and culture were even better than in England, and yet the war still went on, and it lasted more than a hundred years, which is why it was called the Hundred Years War.

Let's look for the reasons for this war. Economic reasons? Well, let's say there were. The English wanted to sell their wool to the Flemish merchants and the Flemish merchants wanted to buy it duty free. Well, all right, that's all right, but why go to war with those who didn't sell any wool and had no income from it: some riflemen on the English-Welsh border? They didn't care about the income of the City merchants, and yet they went and formed just the most murderous force; not merchants, no, merchants traded, they didn't go to the front, but archers did. What for?

If the French Court, for example, benefited from hegemony over Flanders, the peasants of the Auvergne and the banks of the Loire, or the petty barons and clergy of all those places, did not care about Flanders at all. But they did fight, and how!

Let us examine the traditions which determined the character of this war. England was conquered in the 6th century by the Anglo-Saxons, before that it was called Britain. The Anglo-Saxons took over the eastern part of the island, with the Celts remaining in Wallis, now called Wales, and Cornwallis. Some of the Irish Celts moved to Scotland and took over the northern part of the English domain, the so-called Lothian. That is, there was a clash of two ethnic groups, two cultures and two religious’ systems, because the Anglo-Saxons were pagans, while the Celts were Orthodox, who had adopted Christianity from Egypt. Then when the Anglo-Saxons adopted Christianity from Rome, that is, they became Catholics, in contrast to the Celtic Orthodox, the war still went on. And then there was the invasion of the Norwegian and Danish Vikings, who invaded England, tried to hold it, and terribly offended the Anglo-Saxons.

It all ended in 1066 when William the Conqueror conquered England, and he was of Norwegian descent, but his ancestors had lived in northern France for 100 years. He forgot his Norwegian and spoke French. He brought a great many French knights with him and placed them in the court and administration. For the ethnic aspect does not show itself in the form of a particular social order, or the creation of new social institutions, but in who gets along in a given order ... So here, William and his descendants of the Norman dynasty helped the French. And when the dynasty broke up in the twelfth century, the Frenchman Henri Plantagenet became king of England. He was a natural Frenchman, but he became King of England, and he dragged his French through everything, and so did his descendants. One can imagine how the English hated the French with a fierce hatred! A stranger - and yet the boss, and yet blasphemed, and yet behaves ugly, and nothing can be done! And when the same Plantagenets told the English to go and beat the French, the English went with enthusiasm.

The English army was also strong because of another ethnic collision. I have already mentioned the Welsh Celts. They resisted the Anglo-Saxons fiercely, because the Anglo-Saxons, who came with the wave of the Great Migration, were exceptionally cruel to the Celts, and they hated them with a fierce hatred. And when the Anglo-Saxons were defeated by the French, the Celts said: "Well, these are better. However, whoever crushed the Anglo-Saxons, we would still support them. With the arrival of the French the war between the Celts and the Anglo-Saxons did not end, but somehow became weaker and by the end of the 13th century it came to a halt. Edward Ist entered Wales to subdue it.

This was a completely unfeasible venture because the English king's heavy knight cavalry was victorious in all open confrontations, but the Welsh had dug themselves bunker holes under the moss. There are many hills covered with moss and heather. They made secret crawls, sat in these holes all day long, and there was no way to find them.   Then, when the English, weary from the day's search, pitched their tents and went to bed, the Welsh, who had slept through the day, would come out and shoot their long bows at the tents and kill the sleeping English. They tried to beat the Welsh, of course, but the Welsh ran away. And those who were caught had no mercy.

It was a war that would go on for as long as it lasted. Eventually both sides got tired of it and a compromise was proposed. The Welsh told Edward: "We will accept a sovereign from you (by feudal law he had to give them a sovereign who would himself obey him), but he must be born in Wales, be of noble birth and know not a word of English or French. Thoth said: "All right," and told the clan chiefs to come to him. They came. He brought out his two-week-old son and said, "Here you go. He was born in Wales two weeks ago, he's of noble birth - my son; and he doesn't know a word of English or French." The Welsh agreed to take him in. This benefited both, because the Welsh retained their ethnic characteristics, even their language, to this day.

And the Welsh had an art that no one in Europe knew: they shot with long bows - compound, glued, very tight. They could shoot an arrow at a distance of 450 meters with great killing power. And they taught that to Anglo-Saxon archers, but the best archers in the English army were, of course, Welsh. They reached almost half the level of East Asian military technology, because from a Mongolian arrow it flew at 700 meters, and at 450, it would pierce through any armor. Well, all the same, somehow Europe was already reaching for Asia and catching up with it.

Besides, the Welsh got the opportunity to send their young men who wanted glory and booty to the very lucrative French war. And the English kings got infantry that included fine archers who shot three times faster than the French crossbowmen (the crossbow is a tight-firing mechanism). When war broke out, to everyone's surprise, the English were hugely successful, conquering parts of western France and even Brittany. As we can see, the occasion for the Hundred Years' War was purely fictitious, far-fetched. It would seem that the French could say: "Well, you are the grandson of our Iron King, sit on our throne in Paris and rule. All the more so because Edward III's mother tongue was French. Nor was his wife English, she was Flemish. He could have governed both nations from Paris. No, he did not! The French and the English wanted to fight each other, and, as we see, they found reasons for doing so. Besides, having taken almost all of Southwestern France from the Plantagenets, the French kings failed to occupy the strip along the Bay of Biscay with the city of Bordeaux, which had long been the capital of the English kings, indeed their residence: they preferred to live in Bordeaux rather than in London.

In London, under the charter of the municipality of London, that is the city community, no nobleman had the right to spend the night in the city, not even the King who, when he came to his own capital, had to settle his affairs before sunset and then he went to a country palace, built especially for that purpose - he is a nobleman. The king had no right to spend the night in his own capital. Such were the customs. And Bordeaux is plural for "brothel." It was more fun to live there, and that's why English kings preferred to live in Bordeaux.

But they only managed to do so because that part of what is now France, along the Garonne and up to the Pyrenees, was not inhabited by the French but by Gasconians, Basques who didn't know a word of French and who hated the French. They treated them as the Celts did the Anglo-Saxons, and were therefore willing to help the English with pleasure. Not because they liked the English, they didn't care about the English, but with the help of the English they could hit the French, and they did. Similarly, Scotland was hanging on the tail of the English king. The Scottish Celts, as I said, took over Lothian, inhabited in part by Normans, in part even by North Saxons and Jutes.

They formed a complex, composite ethnos that quarreled greatly with the English. They could not tolerate each other and believed that, generally speaking, it was only necessary to seize a good moment, for the English to seize Scotland and for the Scots to plunder northern England. The Scots did the latter frequently and very quickly, though they had no cavalry, but the infantry in skirts marched super-fast and plundered for nothing. Of course, the skirt did not enhance their fighting qualities, but at least it gave an incentive to get more cloth than they had. The only material they had for clothing was sheep's wool. The Scots are a pastoral people, not an agricultural people. And you can't raise many sheep on those heather hills, so their country was very poor and needed plunder as a trade. 

As we can see, all the passionate peoples in this period, the period of passionary overheating, were no longer champions of the positive ideals they had before, but opponents of their neighbors, and they acted with terrible energy, but no longer under the slogan "for what", but "against what". Ethnicity was paramount.

Indeed, how could French feudal lords unite with English feudal lords? No way! They were at war with each other. With the Spanish, perhaps? When the Black Prince tried to help Pedro the Cruel to take the throne of Castile, half of the Spanish feudal lords sided with the English Black Prince and the other half with the French Connetable du Gueclain and won. They all fought each other, even the Castilian feudals themselves. Aragon is also a feudal country. Subordinate to the Aragonese kings, the Catalans competed with the French feudal lords for the right to plunder in the western part of the Middle Sea.

The Germanic kingdom had disintegrated by the 14th century, the Germans were only killing each other (as is usual with Germans victories over their own) and therefore posed no threat to their neighbors in the 13th and 14th centuries. Because of this the French kings were able to draw Burgundy away from them. At that time, it was still considered Germany.

As for the Provençal, although they submitted to the French king, when Louis the Holy was taken prisoner by the Muslims during the Crusade, they rang the bells in Marseilles, served solemn masses and sang "Te Deum laudamus" - "Thee, God, we praise" - for this French king had finally been taken prisoner.

As we can see, the vector has changed, the direction of activity has changed. Increased individualism in the countries of Western Europe led to the fact that everyone was able, using the Zionists who joined it, make up one gang or another and fight for themselves, including kings, English and French.

But here, of course, they may object to me: after all, the English are a nation, the French are a nation, at this time they had already formed, they fought against each other. The Gascons, the Bretons, the Provencals fought for their national rights, so did the Scots. But when that Hundred Years' War was over, when the English feudal lords were thrown into the sea and the English were at home, do you think they calmed down? No, they immediately started a new war for 30 years, the War of the Scarlet and White Rose. Some feudal lords hung a white rose on their shield - they were the Earls of York and Neville, others a scarlet rose - they were the Suffolks and Lancasters - and began to kill each other, attracting archers, spearmen, volunteers, hunters. And those went and killed each other so that England, by and large, was deserted. And the nature of this war was clear to the people of the time - in the last decisive battle, when the White Rose defeated the Scarlet Rose at Tukesbury, the future King of England Edward IV shouted to his warriors: "Spare the commoners, beat the nobles!" Why? Because all the passionate people had already managed to get coats of arms and declared themselves nobles, and he had to reduce the number of passionaries in his kingdom. Otherwise, he could not rule it, because every passionarius was already working for himself.

That was the state of affairs in Western Europe, and it lasted a long time.

France was saved by Joan of Arc. That's what all the French think, and rightly so. But how did she save her? The fact is that the French were divided into two classes at the time. A united France, roughly within its present borders, contained two French ethnic groups, the North-Eastern and the South-Western. At first (during the first half of the Hundred Years' War), the southwestern French - the inhabitants of Aquitaine between the Loire and the Pyrenees - supported the Plantagenets, that is, the English, against the hated Parisians. And the inhabitants of Northeastern France supported Paris and the national banner of Charles the Wise against the English and the traitorous Aquitanians. In the second period of the war, the opposite was true. Joan of Arc uttered two words, "Beautiful France," and won. But even in the first period of the war, France was victorious because the French king had a brilliant general, Bertrand du Gueclain, and he was neither a southern nor a northern Frenchman, but a Breton, a Celtic. He was a master of guerrilla warfare. Twice he was captured by the English, and twice he was released for a ransom equal to the king's. Money was collected and ransomed. He was a man of exceptional courage.

You will say he was a traitor to his people, a renegade who had gone to serve the French king, he might as well have served the English one. No, he was a Breton and he remained a Breton. When, after the score against the English, Bertrand du Goulain became Consétablé of France, second only to the King, he was suddenly ordered to put down the rebellion of his countrymen, the Bretons. He refused. The king declared that if he refused to carry out the missions entrusted to him, he would be deprived of the title of connetable.  

Du Gueclain threw the sword of the Connetable, a sign of his dignity, got on his horse and rode off to Spain. They ran after him to beg him to stay. After all, he was the national hero of France! But they didn't have time to bring him back, because on the way he clashed with some brigands and defeated them, but they killed him in the clash. The ethnic principle, as you see, was observed here too.

Brittany occupied an intermediate place in this catastrophe between England and France. There were pro-English and pro-French parties, though it would be much more accurate to say anti-English and anti-French, because both fought for their Brittany and for their Bretonians, not for the English or the French. The Blois were the opponents of the English, the Montfort were the opponents of the French, and although both were of French origin, their troops consisted of Bretonians, because the Bretonians were also a very passionate ethnic group at that time.

The ensuing decline of passionarity was inevitable, as the loss of passionarians in the bloodshed was not compensated by natural growth. The result of this period was summed up in the fifteenth century: France was united by Louis XI, who killed all the feudal chieftains, re-subdued Burgundy and created a unified kingdom in which, as they said after him, "One faith, one law, one king".

Riot of the mind and heart in Byzantium

The situation in Byzantium was somewhat different. The Byzantine passionary overheating was not accompanied by territorial divergence. The territorial disintegration was replaced by an ideological one. This happened in the following way. After Constantine's decree, Orthodox Christianity became the official religion. The goal of the years-long struggle was achieved, the persecution was shifted from Christians to pagans.

But passionarity continued to grow, passionarians wanted to act, and there was nowhere else to act. So this trait began to manifest itself in a very ugly way. It began with Constantine. Constantine said that, of course, he allowed the church. He allows councils to meet, discussing everything, but as emperor he wants to be present at these councils to make sure there is no disorder against the part of the state. And he is a heathen, so he must not be allowed in. He was given the rank of deacon, the lowest rank in the hierarchy of the Church, so that the Emperor of the whole Roman Empire could be admitted to a Council on this basis.

Constantine was a practical man who said, "I don't care, all right”. And the African Christians, the most fervent, said, "Not at all. Why should the Emperor care about the Church? We are on our own. In civil matters we obey him, and let him stay out of our way." This was shouted by the deacon of the Carthaginian church, Donatus, so his followers were called Donatists. Since the moderates were, as always, in the majority, Donatus' program failed and created the first schism in the Christian church.

The Donatists declared that the new, all too happy order did not suit them - there was no more martyrdom, so there was no way to be saved in the afterlife - so they formed groups or gangs that would go around the roads near Carthage, catch a traveler, surround him and say: "Kill us in the name of Christ". He would say, "No way! Are you crazy for me to kill people, get away from me?" - "Uh-uh!" they said to him. - This won't be enough. We'll make a cutlet out of you if you don't kill us in the name of Christ!" And there was nothing for him to do but to take a club from their hands and beat them on the vertex, and they obediently fell down and died, thinking they were going to heaven.

Less tragically ugly forms this increased passionarity under a certain confessional dominance took in Egypt. There they didn't demand to be killed, but said, "No, we will give up all the life that attracts us. We want everything. We want these delicious dates, we want this sweet wine, we want these lovely women, we want to enjoy poetry, and yet it is all sinful! That's it! Let us go into the desert!" They would go to Tiberias, to Upper Egypt, and sit there on a very lean diet - a piece of bread and a little water, to kill their flesh, to suppress their desires. They even buried half of themselves in the ground to avoid temptations, if there were any.

This is how monasticism and ascesis were born. Was it bad or good? I would say from our geographical point of view, from the point of view of nature preservation, it was very good because if those scary, rabid passionaries were allowed loose on nature or on people, they would do a lot of damage. It's scary to think about! And this real weakening of the passionarity of the whole system saved Byzantium from complete collapse, although it did not save it from incomplete collapse.

The passionary upsurge took away the Transcaucasia, which belonged to Byzantium, Syria and Mesopotamia, all of Africa and Sicily. It was impossible to hold these lands, only Asia Minor and the southern part of the Balkan Peninsula were held (the northern part of the Balkans was also lost - the Slavs captured it). The southern part of the Balkan Peninsula, a relatively small territory which naturally had fewer passionaries, could organize them into a system of defense.

Those who did not sit in Thebaid immediately developed a storm of activity which did not benefit them or the Church, or the Byzantine Empire, or anyone at all. For example, in Alexandria there was a presbyter, a priest named Arius, a very educated man, who said that in the Trinity there is God the Father and God the Son, so the father is earlier, the son later, the son less than the father. "Ahhhh!" they said to him. - What are you? Are you blaspheming the Lord our God? Father and Son are just names we give in our poor language, and they are equal." Well, it would seem that we argued and parted ways”. No! A wild scramble, internecine warfare, arrests, denunciations, and whispers.

The first emperors were converted to Arianism and began to persecute the opponents of Arius. Then Emperor Theodosius found himself connected - by acquaintance, of course - with the opponents of Arius and supported the Orthodox, who defeated the Arians. But Arianism spread among the Goths, Vandals, Burgundians - the Germanic tribes in general, that is, the Germans and Romans found themselves of different faith, all because of an abstract dispute.

But when the Arians were done away with, one would think it could calm down. It did not! There was an argument about whether Christ had one body or two: a divine and a human body, or just one divine body? There was no discussion about Christ having only one body, a human body. Paul of Samosata had such an idea, but it was not discussed. And then there was a dispute: The Virgin Mary, who is she - the Virgin Mary or the Holy Virgin? The majority of them were for the opinion that Christ had two bodies and that there was no need to make such a noise, but in 449 some Egyptian monks arrived to Ephesus wearing camel's hair frocks with big axes under their belts and ropes, running around Ephesus shouting: "If anyone admits that Our Lord has two bodies, we will cut him in two! This council was called the Ephesian Robbery.

The session of the council began, the monks stormed in, broke the scribes' fingers, had the metropolitan chased under the table and kicked, and the guards were dispersed. The nightmare was such that it was necessary to rebuild the entire Council and move it closer to the capital, to Chalcedon, to select representatives using special lists of deputies and to surround the building with troops. This council made a decision which is still the basis of the Christian church, but this decision caused the fall of Egypt and Syria, which went to the Arabs in the 7th century. All these are the costs of the passionate upsurge. There was no question of  any "benefits”.

But, on the other hand, in the Western Roman Empire, where there was no such upheaval, they, became easy prey to the barbarians, I repeat, amazingly easy. The Eastern Empire, which included the Balkan Peninsula, Asia Minor, and Syria and Egypt, held on, kept most of its borders with little loss - Syria was lost, Egypt and Africa, but even there the Christian Church got all its rights under the Arab Caliphs. The caliphs had to tolerate the independence of this church, because it was monophysitic, that is, it recognized the one body in Christ and therefore did not depend on the enemy of the Arabs - Constantinople. That is, Byzantium was harmed by the excess of passionarity, but was also benefited.

Most importantly, we need to understand that in the history of ethnic groups, unlike in the history of the social state, harm and benefit have no meaning. These concepts do not appear at all, just as in physics the concepts of positive and negative charges do not mean that one is better and the other worse. Ethnogenesis is a natural phenomenon that we observe when we study history as a statistical process. And in all these religious disputes, if anyone won, it was the pagan philosophers whom the Christians, fighting among themselves, had left unattended in Athens. The philosophy of Plato and Aristotle was quietly taught there, while the passions of the Christians burned. And when Justinian put things in order (he kicked out the Nestorians, made a deal with the Monophysites because his own wife Theodora supported them), he got rid of the Greek philosophers too, finished off the ancient pagan wisdom, and closed the Athenian Academy. As you can see, the decline of passionarity stopping its rise for culture, played a very unfortunate role.

Let us look briefly at the outcome of the Acmatic phase in the Arab Caliphate from the Pamirs to the Pyrenees. There, hereditary feudalism did not exist; it was an official feudalism: the position one held was what one was considered as. The highest position anyone could attain, not belonging to the lineage of a pro-rok or caliph, was that of emir; that is, any Muslim could become emir, regardless of his origin.

Not only that, but the harems were all mixed up, and nobody knew their grandmothers and grandfathers - they had no idea who was who. But since they were born in Arab harems, they were considered Arabs and had all the rights. But moreover, every Persian, Turkmen, Armenian, Syrian, Berber, and Kurd who declared that he wanted to embrace the faith of Islam, was entitled to any position to which he might aspire, and naturally everyone aspired to become an emir.

The result was quite positive at first. The whole vast Muslim state, from Arabia to the Pamirs in the east and to the Loire in the west, was ruled by emirs appointed by the Caliph. And the emirs, of course, each tried to provide themselves with as much independence as possible, according to the imperative "Be yourself!" That is, everyone tried to be not just a commissioner of the Caliph, but also Abu Bekr, Abdarrahman, Sayyid, or anyone else. Therefore, the colossal country, conquered by the first caliphs in the first period of ethnogenesis, already in the second half of the VIII century began to quickly split into pieces, because emirs, not breaking the oath or respecting the caliph at all, simply did not give him money, which they collected from their area. They kept the money for themselves.

They had great respect for the Caliph. They obeyed him, but the money is such a necessary thing, why send him? And then they read the hutba, that is, prayers for the ruler in the mosque, but not in the name of the Caliph, who sat in Baghdad, but in their own name, and they managed to pass their positions to their loved ones. The closest ones were children, and they had many children: since they held such positions, they had harems, so they could always choose a suitable child and make him happy. This is how the states of the Maghreb emerged, (in the West).  In the Maghreb, the Idrisids and Fatimids, the Umayyads in Spain; this is how the Tahirids, the Safarids, the Samanids, the Gurids, etc. emerged in the East. Syria and Egypt, seemingly so close to the capital, but also separated.

So, the passionarity of the Arabs first created and then exploded the socio-political system of the Caliphate. Instead of strengthening their state, the passionary overheating stimulated internal wars, in which the passionarians died just as they did in conquest campaigns. As a result, by the 10th century the Arabs in their homeland had become an oppressed ethnic group, and the true masters of the country were the Turkmens in the east and the Berbers and Tuaregs in the west.

.