Class 4: Before Europe (4)
The ancestors will help you, or they will hurt you.
Your kin relationships extend
to the dead members of your family as well,
and so you're supposed to continue to do
certain rituals in their direction,
which is not really so strange if you think about it.
At the end, very important was the end of life.
The end of life is something that had to be
very carefully met, very carefully looked after,
because if not then the dead are angry,
or the dead are irritated and the dead
don't do the things that they're supposed to do,
instead they do other things,
which is a very fruitful source, by the way,
for our own culture.
And probably more fruitful all the time.
The, if death is not handled properly,
then the dead are unquiet, and how,
what's an improper death?
If you're drowned, if you commit suicide,
if you're hanged, all these things,
if you die during childbirth,
if you die on your wedding day, which frankly, I get it.
I mean, that's, that does seem like bad news.
And if you're not cremated properly, right?
So religions have ways of physically handling death,
not just narratively, but physically,
and so cremation is what's supposed to follow.
The female unquiet death, unquiet dead,
this is still quite popular in the Czech lands
like if you're have anything to do with Czech culture
you'll have heard of these creatures, Rusalki.
Rusalki are water spirits or meadow spirits
that, again, like a lot of,
actually like a lot of pagan stuff
this shows up in Tolkien, things like this.
Like, if you know about Slavic paganism
and then you reread Tolkien,
there'll be a lot of things which pop out at you.
But they sing you, or they lure you into the marshes,
the Rusalki, so they're very beautiful
and they're very attractive
and they know how to draw you in, and then you drown.
The, or sometimes they tickle you to death.
I don't know what to make of that,
but that's a possibility too.
The male unquiet dead are, it's an easy one,
what's from Eastern Europe, still with us?
Yeah. - [Student] Is it vampire?
- Yes, vampires.
The male, a male unquiet dead is a vampire, right?
So, and you know what vampires do.
The vampires, they come back,
they feed on the blood of the living,
they take the souls away, they start with the family, right?
So when Bram Stoker brought the vampire
into Victorian culture he was working with
an actually existing pagan tradition.
And the reason why, so it appears, and this is now,
again, this is not from historical evidence
'cause we don't have it, but it's from,
it's actually from archeological evidence.
It appears that when the Slavs did convert to Christianity,
which, again, don't worry,
we're gonna talk more about it in the next lecture,
but when they did convert to Christianity,
there was a vampire crisis, which you can imagine, right?
Because suddenly nobody was being,
like even if you do convert, and remember conversion,
like when conversion is presented retrospectively,
it's like boom, like the leader dunked himself in the water
and suddenly everybody was Christian
and you know, that's it.
But it actually takes generations or centuries
and there's usually lots of backtracking
and rebellion and so on.
And even if you convert, it's a pretty dramatic thing.
And it's very unlikely that you will instantly get rid of
all of your previous convictions, right?
And when the convictions are very high stake convictions,
oh, sorry for the pun, it was not intended,
but when the convictions are very,
like when they're very significant convictions,
like will my loved ones come back after death or not,
you may want to hedge your bets a little bit.
So when the Christians came the Christians said
no, no don't cremate, inhume, bury.
Right, bury.
But that's not a proper way to die, right?
That's not a proper way for,
and so the way that the Slavs handled this
was to keep, in order to keep the male dead down,
they put stakes through the bodies
so that the vampires couldn't come,
just in case, just in case, right?
And so hence the notion that the way to stop a vampire
is to put a stake through the heart, right?
So these, you know, these things
are very old and very interesting.
All right.
So how do we get then from no written language
to written language?
How do we get from paganism to Christianity?
I'm gonna talk about the details of this next time,
but what I want you to see now is that
the Slavic world was being prepared
for conversion to Christianity somewhere else.
The first Slavic state is the Grand Duchy of Moravia,
which is first mentioned in the year 822,
and the first Slavic state, so Moravia is now in the middle,
the northern part of what's the Czech Republic.
And it was being contested between Byzantium
and Western Christianity.
So Byzantium, the Byzantine Empire, sent missionaries
and these missionaries were Slavs,
because remember there were Slavic languages are spoken
all over Europe until you get to Central Europe.
It's a huge amount of territory
where people speak Slavic languages.
So there were a couple of men,
you might have heard of them, Cyril and Methodius,
who were Slavic speakers,
from probably what's now Macedonia.
They were sent north to Moravia to convert the Czechs.
And in order to convert them, you know,
their tool was a written language, right?
So as Slavic speakers, they generated a Slavic language,
which we now call Old Church Slavonic,
and they translated some of the Bible into this language,
passages of the Bible, and brought them with them.
And so in the attempt to convert the Czechs,
which fails, eventually it fails, but the attempt
to convert the Czechs generates this language,
and this language is accepted by the Pope,
for a while anyway, as a third legitimate language
aside from Greek and Latin.
So Cyril and Methodius, it's a long story, but they fail.
Cyril never leaves Rome, he's buried in the basement
of a little church called San Clemente,
which if you visit like lots of people from the Balkans
leave their candles there.
Cyril never leaves Rome,
Methodius does get back to the Slavs,
but he fails to convert the Czechs.
But, and he dies in Moravia.
But here's the interesting thing,
just as a spoken language is there when you arrive
and it's there after you die,
if you can create a written language,
it's also gonna be there after you die.
So Cyril and Methodius die, but Church Slavonic goes on,
the written language goes on, it's taken on,
it's taken up in Bulgaria by people actually
who are trying to set themselves up
as rival to the Byzantines, it's taken up in Bulgaria.
The Tsars, as they call themselves, of Bulgaria, support it.
In Bulgaria, this language shifts to a different alphabet.
The original alphabet was called Glagolitic,
but the new alphabet was called Cyrillic.
Not because Cyril invented it, he didn't,
it was, he was dead, it was named after Cyril.
So Cyrillic, which is gonna be familiar to all of you.
If it's not familiar, some of the words on the sheet
are written in Cyrillic, like I wrote, what did I write?
Oh, I wrote Slovo, I wrote Slovian,
I wrote Nimecy, Nimechchyna.
That's Cyrillic, right?
That's Cyrillic as it was invented,
more or less as it was invented, circa 893, right?
So you can, if you invent a language, it can last,
and if you invent an alphabet, right,
that can really endure.
I mean, so the people in Bulgaria who set down Cyrillic,
if they picked this up, they could read it, right?
They could read it.
So that's something which was there
before the conversion happens, and it's very important
that it's there before the conversion happens
because when Kyiv converts to Christianity
this civilizational package, Old Church Slavonic,
which is a Slavic written language, the Cyrillic alphabet,
which allows you to write things down,
is going to be available with Eastern Christianity.
And so, you know, not that things
don't change along the way,
but here we are more than a thousand years later,
and it's still, it's an Eastern Christian country
using the Cyrillic alphabet.
Okay, so that is all generated for different reasons,
and those different reasons have to do
not just with Byzantium wanting to convert people.
I mean that's normal, you would expect that,
but it also has to do with a competition,
which we'll talk more about next time,
between the Byzantines and the Western Christians.
So this whole, in this, in our class,
we're generally residing in this trajectory
which goes Greece, Byzantium, Kyiv, right?
But there is this other trajectory, which is real.
And the other trajectory there is Greece, Rome,
and then the creation of this new model state,
this new model state, which has become,
gonna become very important in the world,
where church and state are sort of separated,
where the states are Christian
but the Pope is not in charge.
That model of state.
And the first important model of that state
is founded by the Franks, who we'll talk more about,
but the Franks are the ones who essentially establish
the political version of Western Christianity.
The Franks are the ones who stop Islam
at the Battle of Poitiers.
This is like the kind of thing, so Poitiers is 722,
so this is really, so I'm not sure to wrote that down.
When I say before Europe, one of the things I mean is
before the Classical world,
which is a Mediterranean world and a Black Sea world
becomes a world which is north of the Mediterranean.
The Classical world is just as much about Africa
and what we now think of as the Near East
as it is about the European coast.
And insofar as it's about Europe, it's about the coast,
the northern coast of the Mediterranean,
the northern coast of the Black Sea.
It's not about most of what we think of as Europe.
So before Europe also means before it gets established
that north of the Mediterranean
people are going to be Christians, not Muslims,
and one of the ways that gets established
is at the Battle of Poitiers in 722
when the Muslims are stopped.
In our part of the world at about the same time,
it'll be the Khazars who stop, in the Caucasus,
who stop Muslim armies.
Another way that Europe becomes Europe
is not just that Islam is stopped,
but that Christianity spreads northward, right?
Christianity spreads northward.
The Franks, the other thing that they do
is that they provoke the people
who we remember as the Vikings.
Okay, so much as I'd like to,
I can't completely keep Western Europe outta the story,
because the West Europeans do do some important things
like Poitiers and like provoking the Vikings.
So it's, the Vikings like if you just have
a cartoon image of the Vikings,
the Vikings come and they destroy, right?
Like they're just there to take the gold from the churches.
But the Vikings were responding to
the emergence of the Franks as a power.
And they responded to the dominance of the Franks on land
by their superior naval technology, right?
The way that they fought and the way that they sailed
was a response to the power of the Franks.
This is how history works.
You run into somebody else who's strong in one way,
you become strong in a different way.
So the Viking Age, which begins in the eighth century,
is a response to the power of the Franks.
And the Viking Age, although it includes North America
and Greenland and Iceland and of course Scandinavia
and of course Normandy, the north of France,
