The spread of Christianity and the great civilizational fault line in Europe

An earlier post took the main split in Europe to be between the more sedentary farmer regions and the more pastoralist (livestock herding) or agro-pastoralist regions. The focus was on personality or character traits, and how those influence larger-scale social and political organization. A follow-up post looked at how these differences have influenced the history of cultural achievement in Europe.

Subsistence mode is strongly influenced by geography, in this case between the fertile European Plain, where you can thrive by planting crops, and the more hilly and mountainous region to the south and west of it, where you can't plant too much but where pastoralism can flourish. Here's a topographical map showing the Plain, which begins as a somewhat thin strip on the northern edge of the continent in the west and central parts, and then fans out to the south also as you move eastward into northern Germany and the Baltic area (click to enlarge):

I think of that division between the Plain and hill/mountain country as the great civilizational fault line in Europe.

Herders and farmers lead fundamentally different, in many ways opposite, ways of life, and have generally been in an off-and-on state of war against each other ever since pastoralism emerged as a splinter movement from agriculture. In short, pastoralists have mobility and a greater taste for risk on their side, so they make good raiders; farmers can use their sedentary ways to their advantage by building fortifications or other huddling-together defences, and advancing slowly but surely through putting down new settlements.

This clash of civilizations flares up all over the world and throughout history -- the Steppe cowboys of Central Asia vs. the farmers of the East Asian plains, the desert nomads from Arabia vs. the agrarian civilization along the Nile, the Han Chinese rice farmers vs. the Tibetan yak herders, the Tutsi pastoralists vs. the Hutu farmers in Rwanda, etc.

Less remarked on is the European incarnation of this clash. Nisbett & Cohen's book, Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South, applied the basic approach to the United States, contrasting the Celtic pastoralist groups of the hilly and mountainous parts of the South (i.e., excluding low-lying plantations) against the more Anglo farmer groups of the agricultural and industrial North.

But in the European context, it has attracted surprisingly sparse mainstream attention. I haven't previously read about the connections I'm going to draw in this ongoing series (and I read a lot), but perhaps the sources are obscure, not in English, and/or out of academic fashion. My goal is more to get the ideas out there rather than claim originality (which I still hope they are).

Let's move on from personality and social organization to cultural institutions like religion. Here is a map showing the Christianization of Europe from early to late adopters:

Not a bad match with a topographical map, is it? (Remember that Scandinavians live in the low-elevation, farmer-friendly areas in the very south, not in the great mountains of Norway.) Christianity began among pastoralists in hilly/mountain country in the Near East, and quickly spread to other peoples who followed a similar subsistence mode around the Mediterranean.

The interesting part is its spread north of the Mediterranean European coastal areas. It did not simply move northward, or merely take longer to reach the more northern latitudes. Rather, it hit the most pastoralist regions first, including Ireland and its off-shoots in Scotland, which are well north of -- and across a sea from -- such continental areas as what was recently called Czechoslovakia. Moreover, it didn't simply move in a straight line from the continent -- it didn't catch on in England at first and then Ireland and Scotland, but the other way around. The latter countries sent missionaries to convert the English. That's because England's lands are more farmer-friendly, while pastoralism has found greater success in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.

The areas that took the longest to Christianize are in the Plain off to the northeast -- the Finns, the Baltic peoples, and the purer, more northeastern Slavic peoples (i.e., the ones we usually think of as prototypically Slavic, not the hawk-nosed feuding pastoralists of the mountainous Balkan countries, who happen to speak Slavic languages).

The greatest test case is the family of Germanic language speakers. Some were very early adopters -- for example, the Goths who invaded Rome had already been Christians for over a century. The Visigoths went on to rule Spain, first as Arian Christians as they began, but quickly converting to Catholic Christianity by the end of the 6th century. The Lombards, the Burgundians, and the Alamanni, who settled much of what is now northern/central Italy, southern/eastern France, southern Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, were other early adopters. Most important were the early-adopting Franks, who went on to control France and the Rhineland.

Suddenly when you get into the more Plain-influenced regions of Germany in the north, people not only take longer to adopt Christianity, but they bitterly resist conversion until they're militarily defeated by a Christian army. The result of the Christian, Frankish king Charlemagne's victory in the Saxon Wars was a shift -- unwanted by the people -- from Germanic paganism to Christianity in northern Germany. Their Anglo-Saxon relatives in farmer-friendly England also took a little longer to convert, as mentioned before.

The Scandinavians are really part of the broader pattern of reluctance to join the Christian world that you also see among Baltic and (purer) Slavic peoples nearby, all of whom did not convert until centuries into the 2nd millennium. And unlike the eager Germanic speakers from the southern/western part of the continent, the Scandinavians don't appear to have been very enthusiastic during the initial conversion process. Maybe they were thinking, "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em."

In the first post laying out the basic ideas, I drew attention to blond hair as a salient marker for Peoples of the Plain, and whatever personality traits it correlates with. * Without even understanding the reasons why, it is probably no accident that the blondest part of Europe was also the last hold-out against conversion. Lithuanian nobles did not convert until nearly 1400, and the common people even later after that.

I'm going to leave this at drawing a connection rather than trying to explain it. For one thing, I haven't given enough thought to why farmers wouldn't dig Christianity, while (agro-)pastoralists would feel a more natural affinity for it. And for another, it would be wiser to wait until I'm through with the rest of Christianity's history in Europe, to be better able to tie the whole story together.

As you may have noticed, the split among early and late adopters of Christianity looks suspiciously familiar if you know your maps of the Reformation and the Thirty Years War. Or of higher vs. lower levels of religiosity even today. But there are some interesting wrinkles to be pointed out as well, so I'll save that for another post. For now, take note of how deeply rooted these cultural schisms are.

* Pleiotropic effects are common when natural selection makes a quick, large change, as when animals are domesticated. The target of selection is some personality or behavioral trait, but the gene that influences it also influences some random aspect of appearance -- like floppy ears on dogs, or piebald coat patterns on cows.