7: for the "End and the Beginning Again", full version
Passional Fractures - - Mechanism of the Fracture
So far in the book we are going through the theoretical stages in the rise and fall of ethnicity. Each chapter explains one series of the stages, which are actually stages of human excess energy, which can be summarize as the will toward action. Excess energy (and we are calling it passion), cause people to DO SOMETHING. We are not saying if that something is constructive or destructive. Both can happen.
Finally the built up energy is so intense that it has to be destructive. That is the stage in this chapter called the “fracture phase”. Then in each chapter Gumilev goes through a series of examples of different civilizations in that particular energy stage. All these examples are in different timings, depending on the culture. So he is jumping around through the centuries, not at all chronologically ordered. That could appear confusing. But the examples are to demonstrate the theory, not to lay out the chronology of any one continent.
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The Acmatic phase of ethnogenesis is short-lived. Passionarity, like fire, both warms and burns. It overheats in the Acmatic phase, and gives way to temporary recessions, when governments manage to restore some order. But the next outburst of passionarity breaks the established norms, and the region once again becomes an arena of competition between passionate and desperate individuals, able to find supporters among sub-passionarians - roving soldiers, horse-dealers, free gunners, and Landsknecks who value their lives less than their will, their booty.
When such people are transported out of the country, to Palestine, Mexico, or Siberia, the passionate level decreases, the people feel better, and the government can coordinate the country's resources and use them to defeat its neighbors. On the surface, this decline in passionate tension seems to be progress, as the successes are followed by a genuine decline in the energy level. This rather superficial observation is confirmed in the subsequent development of culture. With low passionarity and sufficient ability, people are self-discovering themselves in areas unrelated to risk: the arts, science, teaching and technical inventions. In the previous phase, they would have fought for their ideals with swords, but now they lecture on the classics and do experiments on gravitation theory, like Newton and Galileo. And others burn women declared witches, like Sprenger and Institoris, and scientists, like Calvin. And then it gets worse.
The decline in the passionarity of ethnic systems is slow. In a declining system there are still for a long time passionate individuals who disturb their fellow tribesmen with unfulfilled aspirations. They get in the way and are gotten rid of. Gradually the level of the "golden mediocrity" of Augustus, the strong power of the bazilevs of the Macedonian dynasty, and the orderliness of the great Cardinal Richelieu are approaching. But the process of this "pacification" is long and painful.
The first half of this phase was called the "Renaissance" in Europe, although it was in fact a degeneration; the second half was called the "Reformation", which was not only a restructuring of outmoded attitudes, but also the cause of terrible bloodshed and a halt in the development of the sciences and arts for many decades. But passion is cooled by the blood of martyrs and victims. On the sites of the fires again grows a sprout of first grasses, then bushes and finally oaks. This change of phases of ethnogenesis is so significant that special attention should be paid to it, if only because the stereotype of behavior, norms of morality and ideals, i.e. distant projections, for which people should live, are changing. Thus, for example, in the former "Christian world" the "religion of progress" prevailed and the super-ethnos turned into a "civilization”.
We have already seen how the ethnic system reacts sensitively to changes in the level of passionarial tension by the example of the transition from the ascetic to the Acmatic phase. The transition from the Acmatic phase to the Fracture is no exception.
After the Acmatic phase, the character of the ethnogenic process changes dramatically. This phenomenon was noted even before my time, although it was not explained because passionarity was unknown to the author of this observation, Arnold Toynbee. He noted that from time to time there comes what he called a "breakdown" (Russian for "breakdown") in what he saw as a social development, after which the development continues, but in a displaced form. The sign of the vector changes, and sometimes the system falls apart into two or three systems or more, where differences increase, and inherited similarities do not disappear, but recede into the background.
In Romano-Germanic Europe, the phase of rupture fell in the 14th century. It started small: in 1307, French King Philip IV arrested the Templars on spurious charges, and executed them in 1314. In 1309, the papal throne was transferred to Avignon, under the control of the French crown. The dignity of the Church and chivalry was violated, and the idea of a papal monarchy gave way to the political calculations of selfish kings. But this was still just a harbinger of the storm.
The real breakdown was the "Great Schism" (1370-1415) - the division of the church into three camps, led by three popes who cursed each other. Finally, in 1410, Balthasar Cossa, a former pirate, a greedy, dissolute, cruel man without a shred of conscience or sincere faith, was elevated to the papacy. He was deposed by the Council of Constance (1415), from which he fled to Austria, and died in Italy (1421) as a cardinal (we omit the details of this detective biography). It is characteristic of the era that society's attitude toward the pre-stupor was humane, but toward sincere scholars, fighters for the faith, was ruthless.
Thus, the Western Christian church in the 14th and 15th centuries was ravaged by popes and cardinals who turned it into a source of revenue, and defended by professors such as Wycliffe at Oxford, Jerson at the Sorbonne, and Jan Hus in Prague. The majority of Europe's population became either indifferent to religion or took part in "Black Masses," sacrilegious orgiastic mysteries: they preferred Satan to Christ. What is the mechanism of the subversion described here?
The medieval Catholic Church (as a subsystem of the super-ethnos) required a lot of passionate energy with a strictly defined dominance in order to function properly. Excess energy was thrown out of Europe in the "crusades," which gave the super-ethnos the necessary stability.
A decrease in the level of passionarity led to the replacement of the leading blocks of the subsystem by either harmonious individuals (skurfers) or sub-passionarians, who penetrated to high positions thanks to nepotism (kinship). There was not enough energy to maintain the system, and it began to malfunction. Selling indulgences was more profitable and easier than war for the Holy Sepulchre, the study of theology, missionaryism and asceticism. Egoistic ethics had dictated a new stereotype of behavior, and this, in turn, had led to a simplification of the system, with the passionaries being pushed to the fringes of the social arena.
Simplification of the system always leads to the release of free energy. Since the ways beyond the borders of super-ethnos were barred, unsuccessful warriors and travelers had to turn to intellectual activity, creativity, and reformation (this period of the 16th century is usually called the "High Renaissance"). But since the joys of creativity are not available to everyone, and passionarity is a population phenomenon, wherever there were "weaknesses", people showed themselves by taking up arms. The first example was the Slavs. The tradition that St. Methodius brought to Bohemia did not die; it revived in the early 15th century.
The Passionary Breakdown in Bohemia
In Europe, the passionary upheaval began in the Czech Republic, on the fringe of the Christian world. Why in the Czech Republic? Bohemia was on the sidelines and took no active part in the war between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. They supported the popes, but did not quarrel with the emperors, trying to be away from all these German quarrels and squabbles, because Czechs, after all, are Slavs, and German affairs were not as close to them as the Germans themselves. The Poles were even further away from that, they watched the Germans slaughtering each other rather passively. So, they kept the initial charge of passionarity, it had not yet been squandered, and its level here was relatively low from the very beginning. While in Germany during the Hohenstaufen period, passionarity was very strong, the Czechs remained silent, fought small wars with the Hungarians, with the Austrians, and then unsuccessfully: Rudolf of Habsburg defeated the Czech king Przemysl II, and crushed his entire cavalry. This did not matter to the Czechs, as the king was a foreigner and a staunch Westerner, i.e. by education, upbringing, and culture he was a real German, even though he bore a Slavic name. The Czechs then chose Duke Charles of Luxembourg as their king. It is difficult to say whether he was German or French. He was not interested in it himself, because Luxembourg was a marginal region, the frontier between the French and the Germans, and one could ignore such a question there. Charles was offered the throne of Bohemia, he agreed, took good care of his Czech subjects, and built them a sumptuous university, one of the best in Europe. That's where it all came from.
The fact is that in medieval universities the life of students and professors was along the lines of internal self-organization. They lived as one group, one corporation, and were organized into nations (landed estates). Voting in the Academic Council was by nation, students wore badges and cockades also by nation, they drank according to their nation and fought according to their nation. And the division by nation was established by the Academic Council. And in Prague, there were four nations: the Bavarians, Saxons, Poles and Czechs, that is, two purely German nations - the Upper German and Lower German, and the Poles were Germans of the Livonian Order, but not Poles, because the Polish nobility at that time poisoned hares, drank vodka and honey and did not really strive to study at the universities. Thus, three nations were German, and one Czech, i.e. Czech was in the minority.
Charles was very concerned about his Czechs, and tried to create the conditions for them to feel at ease at his own university, so the rector was still a Czech. Even when the king died and was succeeded by the drunkard Wenceslas, this policy continued even then, and the rector was the theology professor Jan Hus, a Czech who taught very well in Czech and translated Latin texts into Czech. He said: "We are Czechs, we are in our own country, what do Germans have to do with it? And half of Prague's population was German. In Kutenberg (Kutna Hora), a rich mine close to Prague - there were German miners, and in the big cities of the Bohemian kingdom Germans sat there. The Czechs made up the petty nobility and the peasantry, while the burghers and the large nobility were divided into the Czech nobility and the German nobility. And so it was with the university that the squabble between the Czechs and the Germans began. Added to this was another point: Hus, a very pious and sincere man, decided that it was time to finally correct the outrages that were going on in the church. For example, if a catholic priest had committed a criminal offence, he must be tried on general grounds, not excused under the guise of a clerical court, where everything is bought for a fee; Hus also condemned the indulgences, because he thought that sins could not be paid for; he condemned a whole series of such abuses. This affair ended tragically when a council was convened in Constance. It was convened to dismiss Pope John XXIII. This pope was a real robber, who had managed to get on the papal throne. The matter came to light, and it was decided to depose him after all.
Jan Hus was summoned there as well, to try them both at the same time - the first for criminal offences and for cheating, the second for heresy. The result was this. Pope John, when he saw that a happy ending was not possible, fled from Constance with the money and spent the rest of his life peacefully in Italy, while Hus - who had been given a Letter of Protection before the Council - was sentenced to death by a majority of one vote - and that one vote was that of the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund, brother of Wenceslaus of Bohemia (1415).
The phase of the breaking of the behavioral stereotype, called the Renaissance, is characterized by the text of the Emperor Sigismund's Letter of Protection to Master Jan Hus and its subsequent violation by the Emperor himself. Both the magister and the emperor were men of the phase of the breakdown, but with different dominants.
Therefore, the motivations for their actions are worthy of attention.
Sigismund, hearing the final result, turned pale and trembled as if he had to pronounce a verdict on himself: he knew that Huss's freedom and life depended on him. A sepulchral silence fell in the shadow of the temple as the last speech was delivered and Sigismund was asked: "Your Majesty the Emperor! What will be your final decision: for or against the teaching of Hus? Do you recognize him as a heretic who deserves death...?"
The questioner answered in an agitated voice: "I continue to maintain that Hus is a heretic and rightly deserves death by burning, if he does not renounce..."
Then Hus courageously asked: "Your imperial majesty, can you already do this in humiliation of your crown and German honor? Do you already destroy your charter of protection, signed and sealed by you, and take this crime and treachery upon your head? It is not my life that is at stake, but your honest name..."
"I did promise you, heretic, safe passage, but only this way, and this you have received. I did not promise you a return journey”... Your claim is without merit. You have been condemned by the majority of the Council, was Sigismund's reply.
Everyone was so fired up that they broke tables and threw pieces of them around. In the midst of this commotion, the king withdrew. Hus could have left, too, if he had wanted to. He, however, returned to his prison. When no one was in the temple, Hus's adversaries beheld him. They ordered the alarm to be sounded and the city gates to be guarded so that he could not flee the city. When they entered the prison, however, they found Hus kneeling and praying earnestly. The guards did not even lock the prison doors and admired the nobility of Huss's soul.
If it had been a quiet time, all the Czechs sympathetic to Hus would have scratched their heads and said, "Look what the Germans are doing to our people," and gone off to drink beer. But it was a tumultuous time, and an uprising broke out in Bohemia: "How? Our professor! Who burned him?" - "The Germans." - "Beat the Germans!" And after all, if it hadn't happened to Hus, something else would have happened that would have caused the massacre. The Czechs could not see the Germans. They were sick of the Germans, at the university, in the squares, in their shopping life, on the hunt, whenever they met them. Yet it took four years to recover from the execution of Hus, so the uprising in Prague was certainly not just the result of outrage at the innocent death of a professor who had been tricked and tortured. It was an explosion of accumulated passionarity, its realization at a moment of collision with the already wasted and diminished passionarity of the Germans.
The students rose up and demanded that all three German nations together have the same number of votes as the Czechs, because the university is Czech. In doing so, the Czech students smacked the German students. There were fights outside the university as well. Supporters of the Germans and of Emperor Sigismund were walking down the street, they were attacked and beaten to death. A crowd of Czechs broke into the town hall and all the Catholic deputies - German officials - were thrown out of the window - a sure death, high up there. After that, the inhabitants of Prague said to the Germans: "We do not know you, we do not recognize the Pope, the Pope is the Antichrist, but our faith is the true Christ”. And we know the true rites: there, with the Russians and Greeks, they give communion both to the laity and priests from the chalice, and you give the laymen a wafer, and from the chalice only the priests can drink. This is not good. The Germans, the emperor and the pope declared, of course, that it was all horrible heresy and the Czechs should be punished... "Ah," said the Czechs, "punish!" And so, it went...
From 1419 to 1438 there was a war that consisted of endless raids. Bohemia alone fought against the entire German Empire and even clashed with Poland, although the Poles tried to maintain neutrality. The Czechs had a cup on their banner from which they wanted to receive communion in the form of bread and wine, and the Catholics had a Latin cross on their banner, both attributes of the Christian religion. As a matter of fact, in neighboring Poland, there were the Orthodox, who used the communion cup, and there were the Catholic Poles, who had their Latin cross, so long and elongated, but both of them lived splendidly in peace, so obviously religious slogans were not the reason for this incredibly cruel war, which killed over half the Czech population and a little less in the neighboring German countries, accordingly. The important thing is that Czechs beat back all the crusades which were directed against Prague, they themselves invaded Bavaria, Brandenburg, Saxony, and reached the Baltic Sea: using a new tactic of riding on carts, which they apparently borrowed from the Mongols through the Hungarian Polovtsians. The way of defending from carts, the way of building a camp from carts is purely nomadic. Jan Žižka had fought in the Polish army, so he knew oriental customs superbly; he introduced this new tactic, against which the knightly heavy cavalry was powerless.
The result was that little Bohemia, supported neither by Moravia, which remained Catholic, nor by Hungary, nor by Poland, which had chosen Catholicism, held out against all Germany, that is, against almost all united Europe. Only the French and the English did not take part in the Hussite crusades; the French were betraying their savior Joan of Arc at this time, and the English were burning her, so they had no time. But one little Bohemia held out against all, so the passionate level among the Czechs was much higher than that of the Germans at this time.
But the Czechs immediately divided, as all strong passionarians do, and beat each other. In 1420 there were three million Czechs. After the Battle of White Mountain (1618) only 800 thousand Czechs remained. Why? The Hussites were divided into three parties: the extreme Taborites, who did not want to recognize either church or priesthood at all; the "orphans", or supporters of Jan Žižka (after his death they called themselves "orphans"), who recognized the church, but categorically denied any clergy and compromises with the Germans; the Utraquists (chasniki), who fought for the Orthodoxy as it was in the East - in Byzantium and Russia.
The Utrakvists were ready for any compromise, just to find some way to exist without the Germans. This was the population of Prague. And there were other, smaller parties, like the Adamites, who ran around naked like Adam, robbed travelers and recognized nothing at all. They were intercepted and burned or hanged by Jan Žižka, the leader of the Hussites. They all plundered terribly. In 1434 three parties fought each other, the battle of Lipany, in which the Czechs defeated and killed them. This reduced the passionate forces in Bohemia, and subdued the terrible atrocities that were going on in this poor little country. It is shocking to read, for example, about how the German miners of Kutenberg threw captured Czech Hussites into mines and watched them die there with shattered legs and arms. And when Žižka captured them and they were on their knees begging for mercy, they were given no mercy. Žižka did not like to spare the Germans. This unjustified cruelty, which reached the point of mutual extermination, is ethnically very revealing.
Remember the Battle of Fontanay in 841 (We have already talked about that when we looked at the Ascent Phase.) There, the Germans and the French carried water to their wounded enemies after the battle stating that they were from different parties, but belonged to the same people. This is exactly the kind of behavior that points to super-ethnic cohesion. It is not for nothing that we said that the year 841 is the year of the birth of the "Christian world," for nothing of the kind had ever happened before in the wars in Europe. The fact is that within any super-ethnos, of course, wars take place, blood is shed, atrocities are committed, but, due to the war itself, they never turn into mutual extermination - people remember that although they fight not with their street neighbors, but also not with total strangers, not with "savages”.
All this is true, but the Germans and Czechs also belonged to the same "Christian world" in the 15th century! What is the reason for this change in behavior? Of course, we can say that the super-ethnos is one, but the Czechs are Slavs and the Germans are Germans. Well, all right. And what about the Poles, who aren't Slavs? Slavs, and it didn't prevent them from seeing in Ukrainians and Belarusians (also Slavs) not even people, but simply "cattle", i.e. to perceive them equally with the cattle. And also, not by accident - the super-ethnoses were different, and in the contact at the level of super-ethnos, the differences are so great that the alien seems to be unnatural.
It appears that the Germans and Czechs in the 15th century for some reason lost the feeling of a super-ethnic unity, began to feel as alien as the Germans and the Russians, and began to treat each other accordingly, especially during the war, which was immediately noticeable. Indeed, the Hussite wars were the first outbreak that showed that a new process, divergence, was beginning in the super-ethnos. It was not without reason that Hus said: "I am a goose, and a swan will come after me. And this swan came a hundred years later. His name was Martin Luther, and he also preached only some improvements in the norms of religion, more precisely - the cult.
The Passionary Breakdown in Germany
In 1517. Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the church door in Wittenberg, on which he considered himself in disagreement with the Catholic Church. If in our day, in the 20th century, someone had nailed the thesis to a door somewhere in London: "I do not agree with the English constitution and parliamentary resolution," he would have been told, "Well, go home”. And that would have been the end of it. But that was the Middle Ages - the "scary" era. Everyone said, "How is it that this monk doesn't agree with what we, the whole Christian world, believe”?
Let's break down what his arguments are, have a debate, he has the right to hear objections. And we did. And who did you think would preside over this debate? Emperor Charles V Habsburg, who "never set the sun": he was Emperor of Germany, ruler of the Netherlands - that was his hereditary domain, he also had the Kingdom of Spain, the Spanish dominions in America, the Philippines, the Kingdom of Naples, Milan in Lombardy. He was the chairman of this discourse. Next to him sat the papal legate, a theologian, who had to argue with the insolent monk. On the right side of the religious and secular authorities were all the magnates of the German Empire and ambassadors from neighboring Catholic states; on the left were the clerics.
They brought Luther in and said: "Argue! Defend your theses." He mingled. Charles looked at him and said: "I thought he was a man... and he's a cunt. Well, all right, tomorrow bring him to renunciation and let him go. What's there to talk to him about?" But Luther had changed his mind overnight, and when they brought him in the next day to recant, he said: "I'm standing here and I can't do otherwise." And he went to make some very strong arguments. He convinced half of the assembly. They decided to arrest him - it happened. The Duke of Saxony managed to save him, gave him horsemen and an escort, took him to one of his castles and hid him there. Luther's ideas went all over Europe, while he himself sat quietly translating the Bible to occupy his spare time, which he now had plenty of. From here went the split of the super-ethnic field:
"The Edict of Worms" of 1521.
Clearly, it was obviously not about what Luther was saying. The vast majority of Europeans were illiterate, and those who were literate also did not have much time to read and study all these principles, to weigh the arguments, to compare what was right: following Tradition or Scripture. To do this, one had to know Scripture well, and it is thick, and it is also in Latin - it is difficult to read. How should one understand transubstantiation at Mass? Or predestination? Which doctrine of salvation is more correct? Lord, there's no time! And yet, all of Europe was divided into Protestants and Catholics, because each person, without knowing what they were for, knew exactly who they were against. And besides, without exception, from Northern Norway to Southern Spain, everyone was dissatisfied with the system of Catholic medieval thought that had been adjusted to the boom period, and that worked very well during the Acmatic phase.
Reformation as an indicator of fracture
A new behavioral imperative - the reactive imperative of the fracture phase - has clearly surfaced. Its wording is simple: "We are tired of the greats! Let us live!" And now they needed something else, because the old system did not fit the accumulated level of knowledge, the wasted level of valor and courage, the established economic relations, the borrowings and mores of everyday life, nothing at all.
Reforms were essentially necessary for both sides, and all could be peacefully negotiated. But the trick is that nobody wanted to negotiate. The essentially equal reformers were not only the unhappy Jan Hus, and his happy follower Luther, not only the terrible Calvin, who converted to his Calvinist faith all of Geneva and half of Southern France, not only the dreamer Zwingli, not only the scoundrel and swindler John of Leiden, who, after proclaiming the "kingdom of Zion," drenched with blood the city of Münster that believed him, but also such Catholic figures as Savonarola, the true believing Dominican friar, who said: "Stop painting prostitutes in churches in the guise of saints; artists are mischievous, but how should we pray? "
Savonarola ended his days at the stake, taking into oblivion many works of original art because he had decided to fight against pornography that was inappropriate in churches. So was Ignatius Loyola, a Spanish officer wounded in the leg, who decided to fight the Reformation with the same means the Reformation had used against the Catholic Church, that is to say, to educate sacrificial people and to teach them Catholicism. Teach! The Dominican order is a learned order. The Dominicans taught themselves, they sat and crammed Latin, Augustine, Scripture - complicated things; cards were forbidden to them, all entertainment was forbidden, so they, poor people, invented dice - dominoes, no one bothered to forbid it, and played in their spare time.
The Franciscans were a poor order. They did not learn anything, they girt their faithful cassock with a rope, went around and preached to the masses the teachings of the Catholic Church - as they came up. But the preaching of neither could compete with ordinary secular schooling, so Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, made it his mission to teach children Catholicism, so they would not fall for Protestantism, would not protest. At first, he could not enthuse anyone, they listened to him, but stepped back and went about their business. Within two decades he had six sincere and loyal supporters. Only six people agreed to join the order he founded, and he died, leaving an order of six brothers. But already his successor, the Portuguese Francis Xavier, was able to expand the work of his teacher widely, so that the order included many monks who devoted themselves to school education. They began to teach children, and in fact in a number of countries, notably Spain, partly in France and in Italy, they succeeded in halting the development of Protestantism.
The fracture phase in the Western European super-ethnos. - Reformation and Counter-Reformation (1571-1648).
Of course, Loyola was an unremarkable man, although he let the Reformation movement run not on the principle of breaking, but on the principle of preservation, restoration - that is also remaking. But why exactly did Spain give itself to him almost unhindered? Let us look into it.
It must be said that Europe in this terrible period of passionate overheating was lucky compared to other super-ethnic entities. Firstly, it was on the edge of a continent, surrounded by seas on all sides. It experienced no outside intrusions or such interventions that would have disrupted the processes. In addition, Christopher Columbus proved to be a very useful man at this time. He discovered America in time. Of course, if he had not done it, Cabot or someone else would have done it. The fact is that America, which was already known to exist, and even the Indians were brought to prove the existence of people there, before the 16th century, no one was interested. And here those Spanish hidalgoes, that is poor noblemen who have provided kings of Castile and Portugal a victory over Moslems, but which had only a cloak, a sword and, at best, a horse, appeared without business. Very well. All of them and went to America, and there they found a use for themselves.
And in Spain there were the quiet, quiet people, the least anxious to argue with their superiors, and so they accepted the new confession that the Catholic Church offered under the guise of restoring the old one.
I will not elaborate further on the subjects of Germany and Spain. I will only say that the dispute begun by Luther ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, when Germany lost 75% of its population in thirty years of continuous warfare. Before the war began, Germany had 16 million people; at the end of the war, 4 million.
It is understood that here people died not so much in battles. In battles armed people take care of themselves, they do not go out of their way and do not let the enemy close to them; in any war. The unfortunate civilian population perished, which was plundered in every way by soldiers of all armies, because at that time the war was feeding more war. Such were the events of this terrible era. Every country in Europe participated in its own way.
The Passionary Fault in England
A little later than in other countries, the tide began to turn in England. The explanation for this lag is simple: the British Isles lay outside the band through which the ninth-century thrust passed. First the Norwegian and Danish Vikings came to the island, took over the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, kept them in their power for a long time, and, of course, dispersed their gene pool through the population. Then England was invaded by the Normans, who were French Norwegians. These repeated the same operation. And finally, when the Norman dynasty came to an end, a relative of the late Queen Mathilde, Henri Plantagenet (we mentioned him), was brought from Poitiers in the twelfth century. This Frenchman brought along a host of his countrymen because he loved France and his French possessions more than the England he inherited. But who refuses when given the crown! Then, naturally, there was a new introduction of passionarity into the mass of the English population.
As a result, England was a country with a level of passionarity no less than its neighbors - Northern Germany or France, but it happened later than in France and Germany - in the late 16th - early 17th centuries. Therefore, England, where there was the terrible Hundred Years War, which took a lot of lives and the Thirty Years War of the Scarlet and White Rose, a hundred years later recovered, and there was again a huge number of passionaries.
Passionarity, which in England was first the property of the feudal lords and was brought to the country by the Norman knights, the Angevin barons, the Vikings, quite naturally as a result of accidental connections went to the yeomen - free peasants (there were no non-free in the XV century, they were bred), to the clan members in Scotland, to the townspeople. And in the sixteenth century, England was as swollen with passionarity as it had been a hundred years before. Then came the English corsairs under Queen Elizabeth.
I must say that this passionate moment largely determines the politics of England itself as a power against the backdrop of the European concert of political powers.
The strongest country of the 16th century was Spain, which had vast territories in America, sent annual caravans across the Atlantic with gold in gallions, so the Spanish kings were the richest people in terms of gold. The English had no gold and nowhere to get it: the gold-bearing places which the Spaniards had taken possession of were already occupied, and the places where the English could settle were unpromising in terms of fast riches. Consequently, the most profitable and easiest thing to do was to plunder the Spaniards.
And the English did so with real passion, enthusiasm and not without success. Corsairs like Walter Raleigh, Francis Drake, Frobisher, and Gawkins ravaged Spanish coastal towns, annihilating the local population, and seizing caravans of gold. They even managed to circle Cape Horn and enter the Pacific Ocean, where the Spaniards would not have expected an attack, and to plunder Spanish cities.
This in turn influenced public opinion in England because these lucky men who returned with lots of gold made friends and through them, they turned the mood of English society (in this case not so much the ethnos, but society) against Spain, because it was profitable to plunder the Spaniards. Of course, there had to be some ideological basis for this. The basis was simple: Spaniards are Catholic, therefore we will convert to Protestantism. And Protestantism triumphed in England, although before that Queen Mary, nicknamed Bloody, Elizabeth's sister, was a zealous supporter of Spain. Mary was not supported, and the Catholics were isolated. Conversely, Elizabeth, who executed as many people as her sister, supported, was called "The Virgin Queen." Oh, it was a good queen, for she was taking part in pirate enterprises, contributing and earning her profits. That's how England began to get rich.
But from England, too, these campaigns were taking a large number of people away, and since piracy was carried on by people close to the royal court, and they were quickly dying, naturally the party supporting the king was weakening. On the contrary, the parliamentary party strengthened. And parliament sought to limit the king's power, which in the Middle Ages, when kings were at war in France and needed money, succeeded quite effectively.
Under the English constitution, parliament determines the amount of taxes. Without parliament, not a single farthing could be collected from any Englishman. And parliament began to refuse subsidies to the king. This led to conflict and the king started a revolution against parliament, that is, against the constitution, against the basic law of his country.
His name was Charles I. He wanted to be a sovereign like the kings of Europe. And who supported him? Free wealthy yeoman peasants, poor knights, and some Anglo-Catholics. Who opposed him? The rich of the City, a great number of the poor who were hired to serve for money, and the Protestants, up to and including the extreme sectarians.
The fate of the English Revolution is known to all - the king lost, was defeated, fled to Scotland, where he was from. The Scots sold him for money, because the Scots are very stingy people, love money, and the king was beheaded in 1649. But the victory was not won by the masses nor by the capital of the wealthy men of the City; it was the enthusiasm of a small group of sectarian fanatics, the Independents, who rejected all church, Catholic and Protestant. This group was led by the poor landowner Oliver Cromwell.
His assessment is very interesting. He said: "We cannot defeat the king because knights fight for him, who fight for honor, and all the trash we hire for money fights for us. Those who fight for honor will beat those who fight for money, because mercenaries want to make money and stay alive. That is their real aim, not to win. There is no winning with them. So, he picked Protestant fanatics, Independents who hated the Church so much they would sacrifice their lives to defeat it.
These men were called "iron-headed" or "round-headed" because they had their hair cut in a circle, while the king's supporters wore their hair long. And they defeated knights and “swarmers” and won decisive battles, such as Naseby. They did not surrender, they did not concede, they did not spare anyone, and their slogan was simple: "Believe in God and keep your powder dry!" When victory was won, it was Cromwell, against the wishes of most of Parliament, who insisted that the King be beheaded for high treason. And after this he was declared Lord Protector of the English Republic (England was then a republic), a de facto dictator with powers that not even the despotic king he had deposed, because Cromwell had the real power - his iron-clad men.
It would seem that after the war the army should be disbanded - let them go home and mind their own business - but these ironclads categorically refused to disperse for two reasons, and both of them were extremely weighty. "First," they said, "as soon as we disperse, the peasants will crush us one by one and spare not one. Indeed, they had done so much in England that this prediction was like the truth. And secondly, they asked the reasonable question, "What are we going to do?
We know how to pray and kill, but we know nothing else. And so, Cromwell kept them, and because of this he reigned quietly (I should say ruled, but he did reign). But this bunch of fanatical passionaries was still very alien to the wider English ethnos, to all its factions. When Cromwell died, his son Richard, a very cheerful man, a good-natured drunkard who hated his father's fanatics and was friends with the surviving royalists; they roamed London, writing poetry, drinking wine and generally enjoying themselves as the golden youth knows how to do. Richard held the office of Lord Protector for a time, but then he said: "I'm fed up with it all, I'd rather drink than sit in this parliament of yours, in chanceries." And he resigned the post himself. This is the behavior of a man not at all passionate, but, from our point of view, very nice.
General Lambert, a supporter of the Ironborn and their leader, who had been overthrown by General Monk, who commanded a corps in Scotland, seized power. Monk wanted to hold on and did so in the simplest way possible: he invited the heir to the throne, Charles II Stuart, to return. The king returned, people strewn his way with flowers and everyone said, "Thank God it's over.
But where did English passionarity go? If it remained, it must have continued to shake the country; if it disappeared, why, indeed? After all, it did not disappear during the Hundred Years' War, it did not disappear during the War of the Scarlet and White Rose. Obviously. it could not have disappeared during the Revolutionary Wars either, although there were terrible losses on both sides, but, as we know, they are compensated for, although not entirely. And this is where colonization played a decisive role. The new order of the Stuarts, and after they were kicked out, of the Hanoverian dynasty, was designed to establish an order in England in which people too rebellious, with too pronounced an individuality, were generally not needed at all, so they were encouraged to go wherever they wanted, and America was there.
In the early seventeenth century, even before the Revolution, a group of persecuted Puritans in England sailed there on the Mayflower and founded the colony of New England. After that, all the losers began to move to America and establish colonies there. Catholics founded the colony of Maryland, named for Mary the Bloody; Elizabethan supporters founded Virginia (virgo means "virgin," virgin queen); Stuart supporters founded the Carolinas; Hanoverian supporters founded Georgia (the king was named George); Baptists founded Massachusetts; Quakers founded Pennsylvania; all groups who found themselves persecuted in England went there.
And it seemed that if in England they fought and fought each other for slogans, they should continue to fight in America. Nothing of the sort - it just took off. They went to war with the Indians, the French and the Spaniards, but not among themselves. In the second generation they didn't care who was Quaker, who was Catholic, who was Royalist, who was Republican - it didn't matter. But the war with the Indians interested them all enormously. The brightest example was the quiet Massachusetts Baptists, who offered to pay for the shooting of the Indians. They paid a premium for the scalp they brought in, like a wolf's tail. Humane, humane... True, it ended badly for them, because when the colonies began to secede from England, the British mobilized the Indians, and the Indians were happy to shoot almost all the Massachusetts Baptists. But nevertheless, the practice of scalp prizes was introduced and used until the nineteenth century.
Thus, there was a tremendous outflow to America of the passionate part of the English ethnos. These people were then called "dissidents" in English, meaning "heretics. They were evicted to America, and there they organized the 13 colonies that would become the United States of America.
To finish with the American problem, the colonists didn't want to separate from England, which sent them away, which persecuted them, which tied their teachers to a pillar, and threw mud on the mob; where they were sent to the galleys, or to the prisons, or to the stocks. Nevertheless, they did not want to separate from England at all. They only demanded equal rights with the English, that is, representation in Parliament, and agreed to pay all the taxes which the English pay. And why should they not pay - they had plenty of money.
But the English, because of their traditionalism, said: "No, we have a certain number of counties that send a certain number of deputies to parliament, and there is no need to change that. Once you've gone, that's where you live. "Yes," say the colonists, "but according to your English laws an Englishman can only pay taxes that his representative votes for, and we have no representative; so you can't charge us any taxes.
We don't have a representative, so you can't tax us." The English say, "Yes, but we protect you from the French, from the Spanish, from the Indians.
The colonists reply: "So what! You have a duty to protect us, we are your country, and we can only pay what our deputies vote for, give us a seat in Parliament!"
The English thought and thought and thought and said, "All right, don't pay, only we'll impose a small tax on the maintenance of the navy-one pence of duty per pound of tea."
And the tea, which should have cost two pence a pound, became three. This phrase, "Tea costs three pence a pound," became the password for the rebels on the day of the famous "Boston Tea Party." The fact that tea became three pence a pound meant, "Beat the English!"
Thus, in order to preserve their ethnic patterns of behavior, the American colonists had to secede politically, and the British had to accept the loss of their richest colony simply because they could not transcend their customs, their habits, their traditions. For no member of an ethnos can think how to act differently from what he has been accustomed to since childhood.
Passionary Fracture in Italy
Apart from England, there was another country in Europe that also received an injection of passionarity. This was Italy, a country beautiful in climate, in landscapes, in the gifts of nature and utterly defenseless. So, it was invaded by the Byzantine Greeks, who were very passive, and by the Arabs and Berbers, who were also quite energetic. They held the southern part of Italy in their hands for a long time. Then the Germanic emperors Otto I, Otto II, Otto III, Otto IV, followed the weakened Lombards, then the successive kings of the Franconian dynasty who wanted to become emperors: Henry II, Conrad, Henry III, Henry IV, Henry V; then the German king: Friedrich Barbarossa, his son Henry VI, then Friedrich II, Manfred, Conradin. In general, these were all hot passionate Germans from places that had been affected by the passionate push; their cohorts in beautiful Italy were dispersing their gene pool through the population.
No time was wasted by the desperate French, who tried with all their might to knock the Germans out. From Normandy came the Normans, who combined the Norwegian passionarity with the French. They conquered in the 11th century, first Sicily, kicking out the Muslims, then Southern Italy, kicking out the Greeks, creating a Norman or rather Norman kingdom in Sicily and Naples - it was then called simply "Kingdom of Sicily and Naples". Charles of Anjou defeated Manfred and Conradin, seized the territory and the French held out for a long time until they were driven out by the Spanish in 1282, during the so-called "Sicilian parties".
It was like this: a Frenchman, under the pretext of searching for weapons, got under the skirts of a Sicilian woman, she screamed, the Sicilians killed the Frenchman - they are jealous people - and after that shouted: "Beat the Frenchman! - and killed all the French, and then they got wildly frightened, "What's in it for us?" - and invited the King of Aragon, who came with a fleet and defended Sicily against the repression of the French. But the Aragonese did not yawn about women either. In short, Italy had a powerful imported passionate gene pool.
It manifested itself in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries, that is, during the darkest Middle Ages. At this time Italians demonstrated absolutely dizzying tendencies. The inhabitants of what were then very small and weak cities - Venice, Genoa, Pisa, Livorno, Florence - suddenly threw themselves into desperate financial operations, trading on the Mediterranean Sea and serving the kings of Europe, thanks to which they developed both jurisprudence and the science of diplomacy. As a result, these cities quickly became extremely wealthy centers with all kinds of possessions and people.
Passionate Italians traveled to faraway lands like Marco Polo to China. Many of them made their way to France, England, Sweden, becoming ministers and advisers to kings there. These passionaries were experienced tricksters! When they returned, they enriched their own cities. It was not without reason that Dante wrote in one of the songs of Inferno: "Be proud, Fiorenza, of your share of the majestic. Thou art above the earth and the sea, thou shalt wing it. And Hell itself is filled with your glory." He went on to describe those crooks and scoundrels whom Florence had given away to the world and who had enriched Florence through their activities.
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the scope of their activities began to wane. In Italy there was a clear expression of a passionate decline. The wealthy lords sat in their palazzos, watched the behavior of their wives and daughters, married them off, and behaved rather passively toward neighboring cities. The activity that had destroyed and burned Italy during the Guelphic and Ghibelline wars was replaced by petty intrigue; war became the work of the condottieri, mercenary soldiers who sold their sword and were very protective of their lives. They most often fought like this, to preserve their lives even at the cost of not winning, because they were paid not for the victory, but for the time they spent in military service. In this they resembled very much the English lumpen who served Cromwell.
There was a battle in Italy at this time in which not a single man died, only one was captured by the other side because he fell off his horse drunk. He was picked up. And this was in the very epoch when France was being burned by the Hundred Years' War, when Spain was surviving the last remnants of the Muslims, in Germany "fist law" ruled, that is, passionarity was boiling there.
In Italy, passionarity began to cool down, and as it cooled down, left magnificent crystals which we call Early Renaissance art or humanism. But how many humanists were there? The famous historian Auguste Minier calculated that during the hundred years of the Quattrocento, that is, during the fifteenth century, there were fifteen humanists and about the same number of good artists in Italy, and the country's population was over ten million. That is, these humanists in no way reflected the ethnic processes of Italy; they were their "waste” residue.
In the 16th century the situation changed somewhat: there were few humanists and they concentrated on preparing for publication (printing had already been introduced) of the manuscripts they had collected in Byzantium, which had been devastated by the Turks. Having learned Greek, they translated these manuscripts into Latin and began to publish them in such sumptuous editions, with such good philological analysis and at a level that is inaccessible to any publisher in the world today; these were the Alds and Elsevier publishers. The Aldes published large volumes, mainly of the Holy Fathers, Christian readings. The Elseviers published small, elegant books for general reading.
There were fewer artists, though they got better. Such names as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael belong to this time; Benvenuto Cellini is a man of the same time.
He was an incredibly passionate figure: a very talented writer, an excellent sculptor, a desperate brawler; he was constantly being arrested for some murders committed at night in the street. But when German troops came to plunder Rome and were led by the Constable of Bourbon, a renegade who had passed from the French king to the German emperor, Benvenuto Cellini took part in defending Rome. He personally pointed the cannon that killed the Connetable of Bourbon, of which he was very proud. And afterwards, when he was in France, he spoke about it everywhere with great pleasure, because in France the murder of a renegade, a traitor, was valued very highly. But there were fewer and fewer men like Cellini. French troops invaded Italy and occupied Italian cities almost without resistance. From 1494 to 1559, the French, who often took Florence and all of Italy, including Naples, met with resistance, not from Italians, but from Spaniards or Germans, who drove them out and in turn conquered the land.
Now, let's generalize and try to make a broader picture.
What was the outcome of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation? The whole conflict, as we know, ended in compromise, not victory for one side or the other.
The Passionary Breakdown in France
The most telling example is France, where Henry IV of France was put on the throne, a very energetic, cheerful, passionate man, and at the same time extremely practical. Henry knew that the Huguenots, the party to which he belonged, could not ensure his triumph in France because most of France was Catholic. With the extreme Catholics, members of the League who supported Guise, he could not of course come to an agreement - they would not compromise, but the vast majority of the population said: "We are of course Catholic, but we are politicians, politics is more important to us, and if the king changes his religion, we will support him. He replied, "Paris is worth a mass," and became a Catholic. All of a sudden everything was quiet and peaceful. Henry was supported by the vast majority of France.
That was the end of the tragedy, but at the expense of what energy was it? After all, after the incredible massacre in the 16th century, it suddenly turned out that Huguenots and Catholics can get along very peacefully with each other, and there are still Protestants in France, but no one is even interested in who is Protestant or who is Catholic.
By the way, the Catholic faith did not prevent France from fighting on the side of Protestant Sweden against the Habsburgs: the Spanish and the Austrians in the Thirty Years' War. As we can see, the slogans that were inscribed on the banners did not reflect the essence of the matter; they were rather indicators that determined this or that direction of ethnogenetic processes.
The Role of Confessions in the French Fracture Phase
To grasp this very essence of the matter, we need to understand what was the principle behind the division? In history school, we were taught simply that Catholics were feudal lords and Huguenots were the bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie fought the feudal lords. But when I was preparing for my state exam and I read some literature on this subject, I suddenly saw, when I was still a student, that these Huguenots were bourgeois! At their head are the Queen of Navarre and the King of Navarre, Admiral Coligny, the Prince of Conde, Marshal Bassompierre-all Huguenots! Gascon barons like d'Artagnan, was already a Catholic, but his grandfathers were Huguenots; Breton clan chiefs, what a bourgeoisie! The Highlanders of the Cevennes (Southern France) are the wildest peasants - they are all Huguenots. But there was of course the bourgeoisie as well. La Rochelle and Nantes at the mouth of the Loire, wonderful market towns, were Huguenot. But on the other hand, the largest bourgeois center in France, Paris was Catholic, Angers was Catholic, Lille was Catholic, Rouen was Catholic. The Dukes of Guise are Catholic, the peasants of the center of France are overwhelmingly Catholic.
That is, the principle of class is not upheld in any way.
Look at neighboring countries of the Reformation, such as the Netherlands. The Calvinists and Geuze are the impoverished nobility there. But the Catholics in the big cities of southern Flanders (modern Belgium) are the bourgeoisie. Italian merchants, for example, remained Catholic; Spanish merchants, too. The nobility: South French were Huguenots, North French were Catholics. In Sweden and Denmark, kings and the whole mass of the population converted to Protestantism with terrific ease. Even the Livonian Order, which was composed of monk brothers, converted to the Protestant faith; these monk knights declared that they were now all feudal lords, barons; they submitted to Poland partly, Sweden partly - in short, they renounced Catholicism with terrific ease. And next to them, Bavaria, also a feudal country, defended Catholicism with wild fury. But try to put all this on the ethnic map and see at once the principle by which this war was built, fueled by a passionate tension that had already begun to subside.
Take France itself. The north-west is populated by Celts; the Celts hate Paris, and in Paris are Catholics, hence the Huguenots in Vendée. The southwest is populated by Gasconians; Gasconians hate Paris - Huguenots. In the south, the Provençal people live; they are rather lukewarm toward Paris by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries - and Provence is not actively involved in the religious wars. In the Cevennes, the savage Highlanders, who do not even speak French, but some dialect, are here the basis of the Huguenots. The central part of France, conquered a thousand years before by the Franks, is entirely Catholic.
There is no social system here; the system here seems to have been purely psychological. Two psychological patterns emerged which proved incompatible with each other.
Byzantine Passionary Fracture
Golden Byzantium was split along the same confessional lines. The Nestorians left their homeland for China and Mongolia, the Monophysites for Africa and the Armenian mountains, and the remaining Orthodox also split into iconoclasts. The Acmatic phase in Byzantium was in the fourth and sixth centuries. So, the fracture falls in the 7th-8th centuries.
Byzantium was already small at this time. It covered Asia Minor, Greece, small parts of Italy and Sicily, and part of the Balkan Peninsula. This was Byzantium in the narrow sense of the word, but here too, cause for division was found, though the strict forms of Orthodoxy seemed to have nothing to argue about, and everything was set in place, the system was rigid, orthodox, and yet they found something to disagree about. The Greeks loved to paint icons. They were great artists and their tradition of great art goes back to Ancient Egypt and the Middle East. People hung icons in churches and in their homes and prayed to them, finding comfort and satisfaction in it.
Minor Asians are Oriental, so they tended to think more in abstract categories. They said that we should pray to a god-spirit, not to an appearance, an image. They were told, "Yes, the image just helps us concentrate." "Yeah," they said, "concentrate?! You pray to the board, not to the spirit." Word for word... Emperor Leo III of the Isaurian dynasty, a native of the mountainous regions of Cilicia, summed up the controversy in 718. "We are certainly Orthodox people," he said, "but icons cannot be prayed to; if you want to paint, paint secular images, not icons”. And he ordered to tear down the most beautiful icon of the Mother of God, which the inhabitants of Constantinople greatly revered. But when the soldier tried to take down the icon, the parishioners, women mostly, knocked the ladder out from under him and he crashed.
And so, it began. Militant, brave, beautiful organizers, the Malo-Asiatic emperors demanded that there be no icons and that people pray to abstract ideas. The Isaurians believed that icons were idolatrous. The inhabitants of the European part of the empire - Greeks, Slavs, Albanians - said: "How! To destroy our holy icons? What an outrage!" But the government had all the power, the army and finances, the bureaucratic apparatus in its hands. The monks of the Studia monastery and all lovers of fine art opposed them. In his essay "The Tragedy of Iconoclasm", M. Y. Sozumov shows the contrasts in outlook between the Minor Asians and the Greeks. The iconoclasts regarded the veneration of icons as idolatrous, claiming that icons were the materialization of a primordial reality and the representation of the supersensible world: the link with the prototype is not natural, but through divine energy. And they accused the iconoclasts of a Manichean tendency - the denial of matter's communion with the Divine.
Later, at the end of the crisis under Theophilus, an even more extreme, non-Christian movement emerged in Asia Minor - Pavlikianism. The Peacockians regarded all matter as the work of Satan, plundered monasteries and cities, and sold captive young men and women to the Arabs. This is how they fought the material world.
This war took a great many lives and cost Byzantium great losses, because the rivals prevented each other from resisting external enemies: Arabs, Bulgarians, Western Europeans, Berbers, who meanwhile captured Sicily; nevertheless, the internal war went on. Only it ended a little faster in Byzantium than in Europe, because the Byzantine masses were smaller, and in 842 iconoclasm was abolished. All these disputes were extinguished, and the fourth phase of ethnogenesis began here, the inertial phase, about which we will talk ahead.
I've just talked about Byzantium's transition to the inertial phase as a matter of course. This is not true, or rather, not entirely true. The likelihood is of moving from one state to another, but in ethnogenesis, as in every natural phenomenon, the probability of the state is not yet predetermined. There is usually a short period of depression, a binge of sub-passionarians, (destruction), in a superstorm. It is necessary to survive it in order to enter the inertial phase. In Byzantium Basil Macedonian, in Rome - Octavian Augustus, in Ancient China - Liu Ban (founder of the Han dynasty), in France - Louis XI, but in the Arab Caliphate attempts of caliphs Mamun (813-833), Mutawakkil (killed in 861) and Muhammad (died in 870) to restore order ended with tragic failures. In fact, as early as the 10th century, the Abbasid caliphate of Baghdad was no longer ethnically Arab, though it remained so in language.
The weakening and humiliation of a world power like the Baghdad Caliphate has been interpreted in many different ways. From an ethnological perspective, we have already talked about it, and the problem is clear: polygamy and the importation of slaves from Asia, Africa and even Europe created an ethnic heterogeneity in the Arab countries, which required a huge expenditure of energy, i.e. a high level of passionate tension, to keep it within the system.
But even this did not help, because the children of Georgian, Polovtsian, Greek and African women inherited the passionarity of their Arab father and the tastes of their mothers, often making them enemies of one another. When the passionarity declined in the phase of the kink, this was exacerbated and the strongest ethnic monoliths, such as the Deylemites who captured Baghdad in 955, proved to be the most powerful.
Thus, the Arabs of the 10th-13th centuries were unlucky, although it was not their fault.
The phase of fracture is an age-old disease of the ethnos, which must be overcome in order to gain immunity. Ethnic collisions in the preceding, Acmatic, and subsequent, inertial phases do not have such severe consequences, because they are not accompanied by such drastic changes in the level of passionarity, it’s not in peril, and the ethnic field is not split in these phases.
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