EUROPEAN EXCEPTIONALISM: A DIFFERENT PATH 39(410); and the Sassanian empire after Qadisiya (637) and Nehawand
(642). Also Aztec Mexico and Inca Peru.
Europe, in contrast, did not have all its eggs in one basket.* In the
thirteenth century the Mongol invaders from the Asian steppe made
short work of the Slavic and Khazar kingdoms of what is now Russia
and Ukraine, but they still had to cut their way through an array of cen
tral European states, including the new kingdoms of their predecessors
in invasion—the Poles, Lithuanians, Germans, Hungarians, and Bul
gare—before they could even begin to confront the successor states of
the Roman empire. This they might well have done had they not been
distracted by troubles back home; but they would have paid dearly for
further gains, especially in forested areas. Shortly thereafter the Turks,
who had established themselves in Anatolia, began to expand into Eu
rope, conquering the Balkans, then the lower Danube Valley, and get
ting twice to the walls of Vienna, capital of Germany's eastern march.
In the course of these advances, they subdued the Serbs, the Bulgars,
the Croats, the Slovenes, the Albanians, the Hungarians, and sundry
other peoples of that confused and quarrelsome palimpsest. But that
was it; by the time they got to Vienna, they had reached the limit of
their resources.^1
Part of the brittleness of these empires, of course, derived from their
exploitative, surplus-sucking character and the indifference of subjects
to the identity of their rulers: one despot was the same as the next; one
foreign clan as arrogant and predatory as another. Why should the in
habitants of Persia care what happened to Darius at the hands of
Alexander? Or what happened nine hundred years later to the Sassan
ian monarchy at the hands of the Arabs? Why should the tired, op
pressed Roman "citizens" of the last days of empire care whether Rome
fell? Or the subject tribes of Mexico, for that matter, care what hap
pened to Moctezuma? The classical Greeks (-5th century), who saw
* Already in late Roman times, Germanic tribes fought as allies alongside imperial
forces to repel later invaders: thus Salian Franks, Visigoths, and others, with the Roman
general Aetius against Attila's Huns at the so-called Battle of Chalons (somewhere near
Troyes) in 451. Attila and his Huns have come down in European tradition as quin
tessential symbols of barbarism and savagery. But today's Turks do not feel that way:
Attila is one of their favorite names.
t When they got to Vienna the second time, in 1683, the Turks found themselves fac
ing not only Germans but the Poles of Sobieski. Europeans could work together when
they thought they faced a common enemy. That this was a last gasp is shown by the
rapid Ottoman retreat thereafter. In a short sixteen years, they left Hungary and pulled
back to Bosnia and Serbia, thus giving up the middle Danube Valley to Christian set-
dement (Treaty of Karlowitz).