I recently came across this thought-provoking map captioned, “This is how I divide Europe,” and I was struck by how closely it aligns with my own fundamental understanding of the continent’s historic ethnic landscape—though not without a few adjustments.
In my view, southern France and Corsica belong firmly within the broader European, Mediterranean, and Latin world rather than being separated from it. I also agree that the Hungarians occupy a category all their own, though I have always referred to them as Magyar rather than Aryan—Turanian when I want to impress the ladies.
What struck me most, however, was not the map’s divisions but the deeper thread connecting them. Maps of ethnicity can tell us much about Europe’s diversity, but they often obscure the civilizational framework within which those peoples developed.
Whether Latin, Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, Greek, Magyar, or Nordic, Europe’s peoples largely developed within the common civilizational framework of Christendom. While ethnic and regional differences were real, they existed within a broader religious and cultural inheritance that gave Europe much of its historical character.
Looking at maps such as this one, I see less a collection of competing ethnic groups and more the many branches of a civilization that, despite its diversity, once understood itself as part of a greater whole. The presence of historic Islamic communities in parts of the Balkans does not alter the fact that Christianity was the principal force that shaped Europe’s civilizational character.
Europe’s story is therefore one of many peoples and one civilization.
~ By Giovanni di Napoli, July 10th, Feast of Santa Rufina and Santa Seconda
