Influences of Geographic Environment, Ellen Churchill Semple [classic novels for teens .txt] 📗
- Author: Ellen Churchill Semple
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It is more often the case, however, that the scant resources, small number, and divided political condition of the mountain tribes make such conquest impossible. Their depredations provoke reprisals from the stronger states of the plain, who bring the mountain region under subjection, merely to police their frontier. Strabo makes it clear that the Romans, having secured certain passes over the Alps, neglected the conquest of the ranges, till the increase of Roman colonies along the piedmont rim excited the cupidity of the mountaineers. Muscovite dominion was extended over the Caucasus, both in order to check the persistent raids of its tribes into the Russian plains, and to secure control of its passes. The state of Kashmir, guided by a purely local policy, for years tried to conquer the robber tribes on its northwestern frontier, merely to protect its own border provinces. Then the British authorities of the Indian Empire began the same process, but from a radically different motive. They saw the Gilgit and Hunza valleys, like the Chitral to the west, as highways through a mountain transit land, whose opposite approaches were held by the Russians.1376
Such conquests, whatever be their motive, profit the vanquished in the end more than the victor. They result in the systematic and intelligent development of the mountain resources, and the maintenance of ampler social and economic relations between highland and lowland through the construction of roads, which must always represent the reach of the governing authority. The conquest of mountain peoples means always expensive and protracted campaigns. The invader has always two enemies to fight, Nature and the armed foe. There is a saying in India that "In Gilgit a small army is annihilated and a large army starves to death." Hunger is king in high altitudes, and comes always to the defense of mountain independence. Moreover, the inaccessibility of such districts, the difficulty of maintaining lines of communication, ignorance of by-paths and trails which forever offer strategic opportunities to the natives or escape at a crisis, all serve to protract the war. The independent spirit of the mountaineer, his endurance of hardships, his mastery of mountain tactics, and his obstinate resistance after repeated defeat, give always a touch of heroism to highland warfare. Consequently, history abounds in examples of unconquered mountain peoples, or of long sustained resistance, like that which for sixty years under the heroic leadership of Kadi Mulah and Shamyl used up the treasure and troops of Russia in the impregnable defiles of the Caucasus. In the end, however, the highland tribes succumb to numbers and the road-making engineer.
Political dismemberment, lack of cohesion due to the presence of physical barriers impeding intercourse, is the inherent weakness of mountain peoples. Political consolidation is never voluntary. It is always forced upon them from without, either by foreign conquest or by the constant menace of such conquest, which compels the mountain clans to combine for common defense of their freedom. The combination thus made is reluctant, loose, easily broken, generally short-lived. It becomes close and permanent only under a constant pressure from without, and then assumes a form allowing to the constituent parts the greatest possible measure of independence. The Swiss canton and commune are the result of a segregating environment; the Swiss Republic is the result of threatened encroachments by the surrounding states. It owed its first genuine federal constitution to Napoleon.
A report on the situation in the Caucasus, addressed to Czar Nicholas in 1829, contains an epitome of the history of mountain peoples. It runs as follows: "The Circassians bar out Russia from the south, and may at their pleasure open or close the passage to the nations of Asia. At present their intestine dissensions, fostered by Russia, hinder them from uniting under one leader; but it must not be forgotten that, according to traditions religiously preserved among them, the sway of their ancestors extended as far as to the Black Sea. * * * The imagination is appalled at the consequence which their union under one leader might have for Russia, which has no other bulwark against their ravages than a military line, too extensive to be very strong."1377 Here we have the whole story—a mountain people pillaging the lowlands, exercising a dangerous and embarrassing control over the passes, and thereby calling down upon themselves conquest from without; weakened by a contracting territory within the highlands and a shrinking area of plunder without, doomed to eventual defeat by the yet more ominous weakness of political dismemberment.
Mountain tribes are always like a pack of hounds on the leash, each straining in a different direction. Wall-like barriers, holding them apart for centuries, make them almost incapable of concerted action, and restive under any authority but their own. Clan and tribal societies, feudal and republican rule, always on a small scale, characterize mountain sociology. All these are attended by an exaggerated individualism and its inevitable concomitant, the blood feud. Mountain policy tends to diminish the power of the central authority to the vanishing point, giving individualism full scope. Social and economic retardation, caused by extreme isolation and encouraged by protected location, tend to keep the social body small and loosely organized. Every aspect of environment makes against social integration.
The broken relief of ancient Greece produced the small city state; but in the rugged mountains of Arcadia the principle of physical and political subdivision went farther. Here, for four centuries after the first Olympiad, the population, poorest and rudest of all Greece, was split up into petty hill villages, each independent of the other.1378 The need of resisting Spartan aggression led for the first time, in 371 B.C., to the formation of a commune Arcadum, a coalescence of all the fractional groups constituting the Arcadian folk;1379 but even this union, effected only by the masterly manipulation of the Theban Epaminondas, proved short-lived and incomplete. What was true of the Arcadian villages was true of the city states of Greece. The geography of the land instilled into them the principle of political aloofness, except when menaced by foreign conquest. Cooperation is efficient only when it springs from a habit of mind. Greek union against the Persians was very imperfect; and against the Roman, the feeble leagues were wholly ineffective. The influence of this dismembering environment still persists. As ancient Greece was a complex of city states, modern Greece is a complex of separate districts, each of which holds chief place in the minds of its citizens, and unconsciously but steadily operates against the growth of a national spirit in the modern sense.1380
A mountain environment encourages political disunion in several forms. Sometimes it favors the survival of a turbulent feudal nobility, based upon clan organization, as among the medieval Scotch, who were not less rebellious toward their own kings than toward the English conquerors.1381 Feudal rule seems congenial to the mountaineer, whose conservative nature, born of isolation, clings to hereditary chiefs and a long established order. Feudal communities and dwarf republics exist side by side in the northern Caucasus,1382 attended by that primitive assertion of individual right, the blood feud.1383 Often the two forms of government are combined, but the feudal element is generally only a dwindling survival from a remote past. The little Republic of Andorra, which for a thousand years has preserved its existence in the protection of a high Pyrenean valley, is a self-governing community, organized strictly along the lines of a Tyrolese or Swiss commune; but the two viguiers or agents, who in some matters outrank the president, are official appointments tracing back to feudal days, when Andorra was a seigneurie of the Comté of Urgel.1384 Tyrol offers a striking parallel to this. In its local affairs it has in effect a republican form of government, enjoying as high degree of autonomy as any Swiss canton; but the great Brenner route, which could confer both power and wealth on its possessor, made the Tyrol an object of conquest to the feudal nobles of the early Middle Ages. Their hereditary dominion is now vested in the archdukes of Austria, to whom the Tyrolese have shown unfailing fidelity, but from whom they have exacted complete recognition of their rights.1385
Tyrol's neighbor Switzerland illustrates the pure form of commune, canton and republic, which is the logical result of a rugged mountain relief. Here commune and canton are the real units of government. In the federal power at Bern the Swiss peasant takes little interest, often not even knowing the name of the national president. In the highest ranges a canton coincides with a mountain-rimmed valley—Valais with the basin of the upper Rhone, Glarus with the upper Linth, Uri with the Reuss, Graubünden with the upper Rhine, to which is joined by many pass routes the sparsely peopled Engadine, Ticino with the drainage basin of upper Lake Maggiore, Unterwalden with the southern drainage valleys of Lake Lucerne. Where the mountains are lower, or where passes connect valleys of high levels, cantonal boundaries may overstep geographical barriers. A commune generally consists of the villages strung along a narrow lateral valley, isolated and sufficient unto itself politically. A close parallel to the Alpine commune is found among the Kabyles of the Atlas Mountains. Their political structure is based upon the Jemaa or commune, a small sovereign republic whose independence is fiercely defended. It enjoys complete local autonomy, is governed by an assembly of all the adult male inhabitants, and grants this body the usual functions except the administration of justice, which, characteristically, is replaced by blood feuds as the inalienable right of the individual. Romans, Arabs, Turks and French have in turn exercised over these mountain Berbers only nominal control, except when their internal dissensions made them vulnerable.1386
The mountains, by the segregating power of their ridges and ranges, first produce these little independent communities, and then, throwing around them strong protecting arms, enfold them in an embrace which long provides security to them in their weakness. These minute mountain states, therefore, tend to reflect in their size the isolation of their environment, and indirectly the weakness of the surrounding nations. The original Swiss Eidgenossensschaft of the four forest cantons, embedded in the high Alps, braced against a mountain wall, held its own against the feeble feudal states of Austria and Germany. The rugged relief of Graubünden and the spirit of freedom cradled there enabled its peasants in the Middle Ages to overthrow the feudal lords, and to establish a federal republic. This typical mountain state
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