INTRODUCTION
For most of his life, E. A. Freeman (1823–92) was an independent “man of letters” who published broadly on various historical matters. From 1884 to his death in 1892 he was Regius Professor of Modern History in Oxford. Recent studies have focused on Freeman's approach to universal history, extreme “Whiggish” tendencies, contribution to the professionalization of history and racial views.Footnote 1 But while this recent research has paid much attention to Freeman's thinking on the “unity” of history, it has largely passed over his simultaneous emphasis upon history's ruptures and divisions.Footnote 2
Many of Freeman's contemporaries associated him with the idea of the unity of history—for instance J. B. Bury (1861–1927), in his preface to his famous edition of Edward Gibbon's masterpiece: “Not the least important aspect of the Decline and Fall is its lesson in the unity of history, the favourite theme of Mr. Freeman.”Footnote 3 The idea of unity was indeed one of Edward Freeman's most repeated notions. It was present in his writings from the beginning of his academic career through to his last publication on The History of Sicily (hereafter HOS).Footnote 4 This last publication, despite its impressive size, has been somewhat neglected in contemporary scholarly literature.Footnote 5 Therefore in this essay, HOS will be discussed at length, for it presents, unequivocally, Freeman's intertwining of his idea of the unity of history with his use of periods.
The idea of unity, as Freeman attested, first left its mark on him in 1842, when he was a student at Trinity College, Oxford. This was the year when he heard Thomas Arnold (1795–1842), then professor of modern history, stressing the importance of unity to the perception of history.Footnote 6 Exactly three decades later, Freeman summarized his thinking on this theme in a lecture at Cambridge University.Footnote 7 Here he explained that the historical process was unified and coherent and not limited to particular eras or phenomena. Traditions, and most importantly political institutions, intertwine throughout ancient and modern cultures. The idea of unity came to life through continuities of race, language and religion. For Freeman, there was no such thing as a “dead” race or language or an obsolete civilization: the past was vividly alive in the present. One of the most vital aspects of all this was the apparent abolition of conventional divisions between antiquity, the Middle Ages and modernity, and a related denial of the alleged superiority of certain periods, such as classical antiquity and the Renaissance.Footnote 8 Thus, as will be substantiated further below, Freeman revised historical periodization and embraced a long historical continuum. Subsequent to this argument, Freeman also wished to obliterate the artificial division in the historical curriculum that separated the schools of ancient and modern history.Footnote 9 He urged students to broaden their knowledge and not limit their specialization to a specific period or historical phenomenon.Footnote 10 For Freeman, the idea of the unity of history was intended to eliminate false methodological separation and to foster the study of history “as a whole.”Footnote 11
Yet Freeman did not thereby reject the use of periods. Time and again he adopted periods in order to distinguish between different historical changes. For Freeman, as also for his mentor Arnold and many other Victorian scholars, history was divided into two main periods: antiquity and modernity. For most of these scholars, the watershed between the two was marked in the fourth and fifth centuries AD. The penetration of the Teutonic tribes into the Roman Empire, together with the emergence of Christianity as the sole religion of the empire, signified the transformation of antiquity into modernity. Yet here a great difficulty arises. The very idea of the “unity of history” seems at odds with a division between “antiquity” and “modernity.” How could Freeman argue for a unified historical process and at the same time acknowledge the division between periods?
This article argues that, in most cases, the key to resolving this apparent tension is to be found in Freeman's ideas of race. By “universal history” Freeman actually had in mind a racial continuity that had existed throughout the ages and linked the histories of certain nations or peoples. Within this racial history periods do exist, since certain fundamental political and religious changes—such as the emergence of Christianity and Islam—had occurred, yet the racial factor determines these changes and links the past, present and future. The Aryan race, which was at the centre of Freeman's concerns, had enjoyed one unified history, yet this unified period could be divided into several subdivisions. But the real division in history is primordial as well as innate and separates one race from another. Specifically, throughout almost all its history the Aryan race has waged a constant struggle against the Semitic one—a struggle reaching its apex with the conquests of the Arab tribes. The struggle between Rome and the Teutonic tribes was, for Freeman, a very different affair, the culmination of which was the merging of the tribes into the Roman Empire as opposed to their destruction of it. This very different outcome reflected the fact that the Romans and the Teutonic tribes belonged to the same Aryan race. Nevertheless, the Teutonic invasions of western Europe did give rise to a new period within universal Aryan history—modernity. Yet modernity was not detached from the previous ages of Rome and the Teutonic tribes; it was rather a fusion of Romanism and Teutonism.
Through his idea of race it is possible to explain how Freeman combined the notions of unity and distinct periods. However, as this article also argues, there are some exceptions. Through the adoption of Christianity, nations such as the Magyars, who belonged to the so-called Turanian race, were still able to become part of the Aryan/European sphere and its history. More generally, Freeman identified several exceptional cases in which cultural and political changes could transform racial belonging and “break” the predetermined course of history. Furthermore, in his inner division of Aryan history, Freeman is constantly torn between historical continuum (unity) and historical rupture (periods). The source of this inconsistency, it is argued, was the fact that sometimes Freeman stressed the endurance of Roman heritage within Aryan history, while in other cases he identified its cessation and focused rather on the emergence of the Teutonic kernel. This deep-rooted tension between Roman continuation and Roman “fall” led Freeman to constantly alter his opinion concerning the inner divisions of Aryan history. Therefore, in another contribution of this essay that has been rather neglected in recent research, Freeman devised a unique periodization. He fiercely opposed several fixed historical dates and repeatedly attacked several “imagined” and even “sacred” dates. To use Penelope J. Corfield's argument regarding the mutability of periodization, “old labels and key dates for change regularly become outworn, especially as the accumulating evidence of history changes perspectives upon the past.”Footnote 12 Freeman abolished the time-honoured date of AD 476 as marking the fall of Rome, pointing rather to several inconsistent events as symbolizing the end of antiquity and the beginning of modernity: “So it was with that other event of the latter half of the century [AD 476] in which so many have so strangely seen the end of the Roman Empire, the boundary line between ancient and modern history.”Footnote 13 To a certain extent, especially concerning the history of Europe, Freeman preceded the call to reform periodization of scholars such as Henri Pirenne (1862–1935) and G. Barraclough (1908–84).Footnote 14
THE FLUIDITY OF “RACE”
Before delving into Freeman's historical scheme, a certain clarification is needed. What did Freeman mean by the evocative and multi-layered idea of “race”? It is rather difficult to form a clear comprehensive definition of “race” in Victorian discourse.Footnote 15 Race, even after Darwin, could mean either “lineage” or “type.” As lineage, it usually took its meaning from the idea of a common ancestry of all mankind and an evolving physical differentiation that led to the division of mankind into races.Footnote 16 The purported theory that physical difference separates human beings became prevalent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This injected a prominent physical–biological dimension into the term “race,” evident in the works of naturalists such as Camper and Linnaeus in the eighteenth century and Cuvier and Vogt in the nineteenth. Here one should also note the correlation between race and language that emerged from the eighteenth century. For some scholars, language became an essential part of racial belonging and, especially from the end of the eighteenth century, a range of theories explaining the origins of races and languages appeared. Some viewed race and language as almost synonymous concepts. Other scholars, however, perceived the two as separate. For them, a great difference still existed between the two since one can learn and adopt a particular language and become a member of a community, while race could not be acquired since it is a biological, natural and deterministic criterion.Footnote 17
In an essay on the influence of philology on British scholarship, John Burrow demonstrates the significance of scholars like Bunsen and Müller on the infiltration of this field into the English academic sphere, and especially into the studies of the English scholars of the Altertumwissenschaft. Language, for these scholars, became the key for the understanding of humanity, history and religion.Footnote 18 Freeman, himself, was often engaged with the relation between “race” and “language.”Footnote 19 It seems that over the years, Freeman altered his conception of the relationship between the two notions. As Simon Cook shows, during the 1870s Freeman argued that race merged language and biological inheritance. Consequently, Freeman stressed that the Anglo-Saxon invasion had almost exterminated the autochthonic Britons. Later, in the 1880s, Freeman followed the younger generation of philologists who had begun to insist on separating race and language. At this stage, Freeman argued that the Britons had been adopted, culturally if not racially, into the dominant Anglo-Saxon community.Footnote 20 For Freeman, the expansion of the Anglo-Saxons had not ceased in the ancient past but, as Duncan Bell demonstrates, signified present and future English conquest of new territories, such as America. While these “English entities” formed a natural and integral part of the homeland, Freeman rejected the full territorial and cultural assimilation of other racial groups or colonies into England since this could “endanger” Anglo-Saxon dominance.Footnote 21
Freeman's repetitive use of racial terminology leads many to perceive him as a crudely racist historian. C. J. W. Parker argues that the liberal and racial attitudes of Freeman merged and complied with his political and ideological dogma.Footnote 22 Lake follows this line of argument but also presents the criticism of Freeman's extreme Teutonic notions by his own contemporaries, like the British Australian historian Charles Pearson (1830–94). The latter, as Lake illustrates, argued that his controversy with Freeman turned on the point of whether any continuity had existed between the Romans/Celts and the English or whether the Anglo-Saxons had been the only legitimate ancestors of the nation.Footnote 23
A different interpretation is presented by Morrisroe, who has used Freeman's Comparative Politics (1873) to “rehabilitate” him, rescuing him from his reputation as a simplistic racial and nationalistic historian. Morrisroe claims that Freeman, while employing a notion of race, mainly stressed lingual and institutional factors as constructing Aryan history and supremacy; “race” as “blood,” she argues, was not important for Freeman.Footnote 24 G. A. Bremner and Johnathan Conlin also argue that race denoted a cultural category. However, Freeman did not adopt a biological classification of race (through craniometry and so on) since it could not validate racial purity.Footnote 25
In most cases, as Morrisroe, Bremner and Conlin show, Freeman emphasized cultural and institutional rather than biological supremacy. As Max Müller told Freeman, “Race is built on sand—it may be very learned, but it will not stand a breath of harsh criticism.”Footnote 26 Freeman, following Müller's advice, continued this line of argument in “Race and Language.”Footnote 27 Nevertheless, it must be noted that in other, although less common, incidents, Freeman also stressed “blood” as separating human communities. This is especially evident in his attitudes towards several particular groups: “Blacks,”Footnote 28 JewsFootnote 29 and Native Americans.Footnote 30
In the context of the aims of the present article, the important point is that “race” was a rather “fluid” term. Sometimes, Freeman considered it a fixed and essential criterion that prevented assimilation between communities. However, especially when it suited his argument, Freeman also identified several groups that had integrated into other races and had altered their racial classification. Hence racial belonging could also be mutable. Whether acquired or innate, “race,” for Freeman, derived from an ancient past and was an essential building block of communities as it fused the past with the present. Perhaps, most importantly, “race” signified a certain hierarchy that separated various groups and assigned the Aryans an innate supremacy.
THE RECEPTION OF HISTORICAL UNITY
For many, such as the reverend and historian Mandell Creighton, Freeman was the main representative of the unity theory.Footnote 31 Freeman, nevertheless, admitted that his theory would bear fruit only after a long and laborious process:
I have been told more than once, and in more shapes than one, since I began my work in this chair, that I have been waging a battle which there is no need to wage, seeing it is already won. Nobody, I am told, disputes my doctrine, let me rather say Arnold's doctrine, of the unity of history. I should be very glad to believe this; but I cannot see the signs of it. A little time back that doctrine had certainly not won for itself universal acknowledgement either in Oxford or elsewhere, and I am not vain enough to think that a lecture or two here can have carried this general conviction even throughout Oxford, much less throughout the whole world.Footnote 32
Several posthumous reviews of Freeman's work confirm Freeman's pessimism concerning the future of his doctrine. Frederic Harrison, despite a rather positive assessment of Freeman's work in general, criticized Freeman's own implementation of the unity theory. According to Harrison, although Freeman advocated for continuous historical perception, he himself was mostly engaged with the study of particular periods. Furthermore, unlike Freeman, Harrison did not identify a complete analogy between the present and the past “but a development of the present from the past.”Footnote 33 In response to this article, the medievalist J. H. Round published a harsh criticism of both Freeman and Harrison. However, Round claimed that Harrison did not fully grasp Freeman's theory. Freeman's meaning was not that all periods should be studied equally, but that through meticulous study of specific periods certain tools could be acquired that would enable the historian to delve into less familiar periods.Footnote 34
The observations of other scholars from Freeman's inner circle, such as William Stubbs, J. R. Green and James Bryce, reveals a composite picture regarding the reception of the unity of history even among Freeman's closest colleagues. Stubbs, to begin with, in his 1866 inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History, disapproved of the unity theory. Antiquity was “dead,” while modernity resembled a living organism that was relevant to the present and encompassed practical lessons: “Compared with the study of Ancient History it is like the study of life compared with that of death, the view of the living body compared with that of the skeleton.”Footnote 35 Modernity, Stubbs continued, was a product of two developments: Christianity and the dominance of the German tribes. The world progressed because of the breach that occurred in antiquity. Christianity and the Germanization of Europe did not reflect a negative process. Quite the reverse:
It is Christianity that gives to the modern world its living unity and at the same time cuts it off from the death of the past . . . such an influence so wide in its extension, so deep in its penetration . . . so ancient in the past, and in the future eternal, could by itself account for the unity, the life of modern history.Footnote 36
Ecclesiastical history was intertwined with modern history and symbolized its most prominent manifestation. The second pillar of modernity was the Germanic heritage, described in Stubbs's history of the English Constitution.Footnote 37 These two pillars merged and formed modernity through the establishment of long-lasting religious and political institutions.
Green, in an article reviewing Stubbs's lecture, contested Stubbs's opinion that ancient and modern history ought to be divided.Footnote 38 Green argued that marked periods were merely an artificial invention. In fact, our own connection with antiquity is similar to our linkage with the modern era: “The pre-Christian world is not wholly dead to us, nor is the post-Christian world in necessity wholly living.”Footnote 39 While states such as Germany and England resembled the Christian–Germanic sphere, other states such as Italy and France had preserved many classical Roman features in their institutions and language. Hence Green adopted the idea of unity and applied it to the whole European sphere.
Subsequent to an anonymous review of his second volume of Historical Essays, Freeman complained to James Bryce that the reviewer, probably “a narrow sort of classical man,”Footnote 40 did not comprehend their shared notion of the unity of history. Yet Bryce did not fully accept Freeman's unity:
It is quite true, for instance, that all history ought to be regarded as one, and as far as possible studied as one, but there are limits to this possibility, and for many purposes ancient, medieval, and modern history may be treated of and worked out apart. Admirable service has been done in mediaeval history by men who knew very little either about Athens under Pericles or about Massachusetts under Governor Andrew. Mr Freeman's views are sometimes so broadly expressed on this matter that we feel inclined to ask him whether he finds that his ignorance of the early history of Egypt and Asia Minor—countries which certainly had a great influence on Greece—prevents him from understanding Homer and Herodotus.Footnote 41
Thus Bryce asserted that the division between periods may still possess a certain quality. Freeman, in response, kept on insisting that he and Bryce shared a common view: “As for the unity of history, I can see no difference between what you say in the second paragraph of the article and what I say in the Rede lecture [Given in Cambridge in 1872] . . . I make here just the same limitations which you do.”Footnote 42
Freeman, in any case, perceived the spread of his method as his main task. All those who assured him of his accomplishment defied the practical consequences of the theory. The dissenters from the theory still insisted on separating between antiquity and modernity. Their claim was that the distinction simplified the work of the historian and any attempt to replace the conventional division would be too arduous. Freeman's response to this claim was that every great change in the thinking of mankind was achieved through a laborious effort. The historian, most importantly, should not pledge his affinity to an erroneous system:
It will be found that there is no real convenience in keeping up arrangements which, however much trouble they may save, have the slight inconvenience of being wholly inconsistent with any clear views of the history of the world. Meanwhile there is nothing to be done but to show in every shape and at every opportunity how much is lost by a division which tempts the students of one period to try to begin where there is no beginning, and which tempts the students of another period to make an end where there is no ending.Footnote 43
Students who study a certain period should not restrict their interest to fabricated dates. They need to perceive history as a continuous narrative and abandon false distinctions that, for instance, separate between ancient and medieval authors. Authors of both “types” had written in Latin and preserved the legacy of Rome. Therefore, despite the alleged difference between the authors, they had actually belonged to the same cultural and political sphere.Footnote 44
TEUTONIC “MODERNITY” WITHIN ARYAN HISTORY
While Freeman, Stubbs and Bryce were not in consent concerning the unity theory, they did belong to the same “Teutonic circle.” As designated in contemporary studies, these scholars, as well as German and Scandinavian scholars, became obsessed with the Teutonic origins of their nations.Footnote 45 For Freeman the Teutonic stock, which was part of the Aryan race, was stationed together with the Greeks and the Romans on the highest pedestal of human existence: “Now of all the branches of the Aryan family which have settled in Europe, three have been, at different times and in different ways, the leaders of all the rest. The first were the old Greeks; then the people of Italy, or more truly the one Italian city of Rome; and lastly the Teutonic nations.”Footnote 46 Teutonic supremacy was especially evident in what Freeman and other scholars defined as “modernity.” For Freeman, according to some of his writings, “modernity” had begun with the crossing of the Rhine at the end of December 406. This was not necessarily due to the tribes that crossed (Vandals, Suebi and so on), since those tribes did not leave a long-lasting mark on the continent, but these invasions led other tribes, such as the Franks and the Goths, to act in a much more audacious way against the Romans. This new attitude was represented in the most decisive event of the century, which was the invasion of Italy by Alaric the Goth in AD 410. This event, together with the previous crossing of the Rhine, triggered a chain reaction that eventually culminated in the Teutonic conquest of Gaul and Iberia.Footnote 47 In 1885, in a letter to Bryce, Freeman even used the word “revolution” to describe the magnitude of the changes of this era, writing of “the revolution of 406–419, the beginnings (if any) of modern European history.”Footnote 48 In short, Teutonism ushers in modernity.
In England, the notion that the tribes had paved the way to modern Europe originated mainly in the writings of Thomas Arnold.Footnote 49 For Arnold, only two periods existed in history: antiquity and modernity,Footnote 50 and a real and substantial transformation had occurred in AD 476, when the Western Roman Empire fell and the Germanic tribes inherited the empire's dominions. Arnold, who defined himself as a modern historian, argued that the modern age was the most complete age in history and that no other future age would replace it. As he saw it, “modernity” combined the heritage of Greece, Rome, Christianity and the Teutonic race. Accordingly, in the modern age, when the entire world has already been explored, a new race can no longer emerge and open a new, third age in the history of mankind. Such a situation contrasts with the Roman era, when the tribes east of the Rhine were unknown to the Romans and eventually replaced Rome as the new vital force of modernity.Footnote 51
Here, however, we encounter the same difficulty we have already encountered with Freeman: how could Arnold, who devised the theory of unity, acknowledge a long historical continuum and, at the same time, formulate this straightforward historical periodization? One possible answer is that Arnold's identification of AD 476 as a dramatic watershed actually separated two cycles within one unified Western history: the complete cycle of Greece/Rome and the currently incomplete Teutonic cycle. Thus the unity of history was, for Arnold, composed of two subdivisions or cycles, which “restarted” in 476.Footnote 52
Nevertheless, this explanation contains a rather problematic kernel. Arnold, in his History of Rome, identified the high point of the decadence of Rome with the coronation of Charlemagne.Footnote 53 Freeman himself testified to Arnold's precise date of Roman decline. In one of his first ever published articles, Freeman was unable to place his finger on the exact date of the “fall.” He was, however, certain that the “fall” had occurred long after the “invented” date of 476:
The history of Rome dies away so gradually into the general history of the Middle Ages, that it is hard to say at what point a special Roman history should end. Arnold proposed to carry on his History to the Coronation of Charles the Great. Something may doubtless be said for this point, and something also for other points, both earlier and later . . .Footnote 54
Interestingly enough, when this article was republished in 1873 in Freeman's Historical Essays, he added a new footnote.Footnote 55 In the footnote he confessed that when the article first appeared he was still reluctant to accept the view of Arnold, yet now he had come to terms with him and supported his opinion that with the coronation of Charlemagne a new political entity had arisen. By name it was maybe Roman but in essence it reflected Germanic political characteristics:
I now feel that Arnold was right, and that the Coronation of Charles is the proper ending for a strictly Roman history. Before that point it is impossible to draw any line. The vulgar boundary of AD 476 would shut out Theodoric the Patrician and Belisarius the Consul. But when the Roman Empire practically becomes an appendage to a German kingdom, the old life of Rome is gone. The old memories still go on influencing history in a thousand ways, but the government of Charles was not Roman in the same sense as the government of Theodoric.Footnote 56
This footnote seems to settle the question of when Arnold, and following him Freeman, thought that the Roman Empire had ceased to exist. Nevertheless, it seems that in Arnold's and especially in Freeman's writings the question of these conflicting dates was only partly solved. Later I will probe further into this issue. But at this stage what is important to note is that, whereas Arnold ended his first cycle in the fifth century or with Charlemagne's coronation, he still observed a certain unity of Western history divided into two periods. The division between the two periods was not hermetic. Several ancient elements still flourished in “modernity” and, correspondingly, certain modern aspects had already existed in “antiquity.”Footnote 57 For example, while visiting the Rhine, Arnold wrote in his journal that during antiquity the Teutonic tribes had managed to preserve their distinctiveness in the face of Roman influence. Consequently, in “modernity,” after the Roman “fall,” they became the “regenerating element in modern Europe.”Footnote 58 Freeman, it will be argued, like Arnold, cherished the notion of a unified history separated by periods. For Freeman, the emergence of Teutonic “modernity” singled a very important transformation that was still part of a unified Aryan history.
The term “Aryan,” however, points to a divergence between Arnold and Freeman. In Arnold's case the emphasis was on the unity not of Aryan history but of Western history. In his writings he rarely, if ever, refers to the Teutonic peoples as part of a larger Aryan group. His emphasis is rather on what he called the “moral” links between Rome and the Germanic tribes, while disregarding any physical connections: “We derive scarcely one drop of our blood from Roman fathers; we are in our race strangers to Greece, and strangers to Israel. But morally how much do we derive from all three: in this respect their life is in a manner continued in ours; their influences, to say the least, have not perished.”Footnote 59 Arnold did acknowledge a biological continuation in the case of the Teutonic nations; for example the English descended from tribal Germanic ancestors: “Our English race is the German race; for though our Norman fathers had learned to speak a stranger's language, yet in blood, as we know, they were the Saxons’ brethren: both alike belong to the Teutonic or German stock.”Footnote 60 Freeman, unlike Arnold, also repeatedly accentuated not only Western but also Aryan continuation between Greece/Rome and the tribes. This was a natural, almost predestined, evolution, which signified the progressive kernel of Aryan civilization. According to Freeman, this Aryan endurance was an ultimate proof for his theory of unity.
As a result of this natural Aryan unity, Freeman even averred in his inaugural lecture (1884) that no periods exist within Aryan history. Therefore the real beginning of “modernity” was found in the earliest histories of Aryan Europe. Such a claim, Freeman declared, stood in stark contrast to the view of the German scholar Baron Bunsen, who began modernity with the “call of Abraham,” and to the view of others who identified “modernity” with the French Revolution: “We may well agree to draw a line between ‘ancient’ and ‘modern,’ if we hold our ‘modern’ period to begin with the first beginnings of the recorded history of Aryan Europe . . . There alone can we find a real starting-point; a line drawn at any later time is a mere artificial and unnatural break.”Footnote 61 Freeman thus suddenly presents a completely conflicting notion of “modernity.” If Freeman, indeed, identified “modernity” as equivalent to all Aryan history, then why, as we have previously seen, did he identify “modernity” as beginning in the fifth century AD?
One possible explanation was given by Freeman himself in his inaugural lecture. He clarified here that he was obliged to follow certain rules of general history and adopt the “conservative” periodization that associated modernity with the wandering of the tribes.Footnote 62 In short, due to constraints of the historical profession he was “forced” into a different opinion. This, I argue, is only a partial explanation, since for Freeman the wandering of the tribes was not at all artificial. He identified two substantial developments that had transformed Europe from the fifth century: the dissemination of Orthodox Christianity among the pagans and the planting of the Teutonic institutions as the foundation for the modern European states. Both of these developments had originated in antiquity; however, their adoption among the European Aryan nations occurred in modernity.
“Modernity” was not detached from antiquity, but rather founded upon it and fused Greek/Roman and Teutonic civilizations. Thus Rome had maybe changed but had not ceased to exist. This converged with Freeman's notion of the Teutonic dominance in modernity. The Germanic tribes were the ones who received and carried on the torch from the Romans and the Greeks: “As the Roman everywhere carried Greece with him, so the Teuton everywhere carried Rome with him.”Footnote 63 The tribes also passed this legacy into the future and they were the direct ancestors of the European Aryan powers and the moving force of modern history. Hence the transformation from antiquity to modernity was possible because the Teutons, like the Romans and Greeks, belonged to the same Aryan race. Therefore, although a dramatic change had been instigated with the migrations of the tribes, the Teutonic tribes just marked another stage of the unified Aryan history.
The important role he ascribed to the Teutonic tribes in the making of modernity fitted into Freeman's vision of the general historical grandeur of the Aryan race. All of the Aryan nations, he held, originated from one primal source. As Freeman confirmed in a letter to the anthropologist E. B. Tylor, “the forms of government of the Aryan nations—I suspect one may safely go beyond the Aryan nations—all spring from a common source, an Urbrunnen [original source].”Footnote 64 The Aryans were unmatched in their elegance and vitality. They were fundamentally superior and the natural inheritors of Europe:
The original [Aryan] unity worked for ages before men knew anything of its being; it bound men together who had no thought whatever of the tie which bound them. The Gaul, the Roman, the Goth, had no knowledge of their original kindred. But that original kindred did its work all the same. It enabled Gaul, Roman and Goth, to be all fused together into one society, a society in which the Hun and the Saracen had no share. First and foremost, then among the common possessions of civilized Europe, we must place the common possession of Aryan blood and speech. Throughout Europe that which is Aryan is the rule; that which is not Aryan is the exception.Footnote 65
Freeman's perception of a historical, racial and linguistic unity among the Aryans, which excluded other races, such as the Semites, is pivotal in his historical scheme. As will now be discussed, it was especially evident in his view of the history of Sicily. Since antiquity, Sicily had been the conflict zone of the two races that dominated history: the Aryan and the Semitic. This racial battle also signified an almost perpetual geographical strife between the East and the West. Through Sicilian history, one can see how Freeman's idea of race enabled him to adopt a certain longue durée historical unity which also included an internal division into sub-periods.
SICILY—THE HISTORICAL “RACIAL” BATTLEGROUND
Bury, who could be considered Freeman's follower, published in 1892 two extensive reviews of Freeman's HOS.Footnote 66 A short while before the publication of the reviews, he explained to Freeman that, while he himself was not an expert on Sicilian history, nevertheless he felt an urgent need to review the work.Footnote 67 In his reviews, Bury remarked that the history of Sicily had always been regarded as fragmentary and lacking coherence, mainly because the island constantly passed from the possession of one conqueror to the next. Freeman, despite this alleged fragmentation within Sicilian history, argued that Sicily had a unified history: “Mr. Freeman, taking it as his text, created a completely new view of Sicilian history. He showed that Sicily has a drama of her own, and that her history has a unity beyond the mere geographical unity. She is land of historical cycles. Her early history foreshadows her later history.”Footnote 68 According to Bury, the greatest achievement of Freeman in this work was his production of a unified history of Sicily that was not attached to one period but reflected the entire history of the island.
Indeed, in his HOS, Freeman expressed his idea of the “unity of history” in the most explicit way. This unity was primarily established upon race. In antiquity, Carthage and Rome had fought over control of the island. Later, during the Middle Ages, the Saracens conquered the island from Byzantium. Regardless of the date of the invasion, all the Western/Aryan conquers of Sicily were linked to one another through race, as were all the Eastern/Semitic conquers. The Normans signified another version of the Romans or Greeks, while the Saracens represented a new cycle of Carthage. Hence Freeman acknowledged the existence of different periods/rulers in the history of Sicily; yet these periods came under the roof of a unified Aryan or Semitic history:
Look at Sicily, the meeting-place of the nations, the battle-field of creeds and races, where the strife between Aryan and Semitic man has been since fought out in all its fulness. That wonderful cycle of events loses all its historic life, if we look at one fragment of it only; the strife with the Phoenician and the strife with the Saracen each loses half its meaning if either is parted from the other.Footnote 69
In addition to his extensive HOS, another, shorter, book of Freeman's on the island's history was published posthumously. This book's title, The Story of Sicily: Phoenician, Greek and Roman (1892), signified the “racial changes,” from Semitic (Phoenician) to Aryan (Graeco-Roman), which Freeman stressed as defining the history of Sicily.Footnote 70 While in his HOS Freeman's narrative continued until 300 BC, in The Story of Sicily he very briefly concluded with the Saracen conquest of Sicily (tenth and eleventh centuries AD), which marked “a wholly new period in the history of Sicily.”Footnote 71 Although Freeman promised in his last sentence to continue his history of the Saracens in another volume, his death prevented him from doing so. However, his final remarks epitomize his argument concerning Sicilian and even world history. The Saracens gradually tore Sicily from the possession of Rome, Europe and Christianity. Yet, during the eleventh century, Christian Europe retaliated and the Normans regained control of the island. This Christian reconquista, Freeman asserted, exemplified another stage in the eternal struggle between the two distinct races and creeds: “In all this we have the old history of Sicily over again. The old struggle between Europe and Africa, between Greeks and Semites, is fought over again, but it is this time made more keen by the religious opposition between Christendom and Islam.”Footnote 72
Freeman claimed that even though the animosity between the two races had seemed to intensify following the emergence of Islam, the struggle between Semitic and Aryan “dogmas” had already materialized in the beginnings of Sicilian history:
The strife of races was from the beginning made sharper by the strife of creeds . . . On no soil has the strife of West and East, the strife which in its first days took the shape of the strife between Greek and barbarian, been carried on more stoutly. It showed itself in all its fulness as a strife of creeds when it took the shape of the great strife between Christendom and Islam. But it was a strife of creeds long before . . . before Christendom and Islam came into being . . . But in earlier days, before Aryan Europe had adopted that Semitic faith [Christianity] which the Semitic man himself despised, the creed of Aryan Europe was already worth fighting for, and well was it fought for on Sicilian soil. In days when no purer light had yet been given, it was already a crusade to strike a blow for Apollon by the shore of Naxos, for Athene on the island of Ortygia, against the foul and bloody rites of Moloch and Ashtoreth. This calling, as the abiding battle-field of East and West, is the highest aspect of Sicilian history.Footnote 73
The fact that even under different religious beliefs, before the foundation of the two prevalent monotheistic doctrines, the Semites and Aryans were engaged in a struggle proved that there was an essential and innate difference separating the two races. Furthermore, for Freeman, the racial strife in Sicily testified to the general inferiority of the Semites. While the Aryans improved and developed throughout history, the Semites mostly brought decadence and misery:
But nations and cities of the Semitic stock change less in the course of ages than Greeks and Teutons . . . They are set before us as bitter, gloomy, obedient to rulers, harsh to subjects, most ignoble in their panic fears, most savage in their anger, abiding in their purpose, taking no pleasure in joy or grace. We thus see in them the Semitic nature in all its fulness, the nature which never puts forth its full strength till the strength of any other people would have given way.Footnote 74
There were periods when the Semites achieved some worthy accomplishments in Sicily and in general: “At the time when the Phoenician settlements in Sicily and in other parts of Europe were made they were undoubtedly steps in the path of progress.”Footnote 75 The Phoenician civilization through the development of the alphabet also managed to become “more European” in comparison with other barbarian entities. Yet eventually, Freeman commented, “he [the Phoenician] still remained barbarian.”Footnote 76 In short, the inherent brutal nature of the Phoenicians eventually surpassed their achievements.
This racial struggle did not characterize the relations between the Greek “colonists” and the Sikel people, who were the autochthonic inhabitants of Sicily and awarded the island its name. The Sikel and the Greeks, according to Freeman, belonged to the same European sphere and race. Therefore the Sikel were gradually assimilated into the superior Greeks. An utterly different “encounter” came to pass between the English settlers and the Native Americans:
The Sikel was not as the Red Indian. The English settler in America had to deal with savages of another race, another colour, whom no process of war or peace could turn into Englishmen. Their fate was simply to die out before the advance of the more civilized people. The Greek settler in Sicily came across men far beneath him in all political and social advancement, but who were still Europeans like himself, kinsfolk who had simply lagged behind. The Sikel needed not to die out before the Greek; he could himself in course of time become a Greek, and could contribute new elements to the Greek life of Sicily.Footnote 77
Thus racial unity allowed integration and historical continuation between the Sikel and the Greeks. Due to racial differences, a similar assimilation was neither possible between the Phoenician and the Greek inhabitants of Sicily nor between the English and the Native Americans. Concerning the English and the Native Americans, Freeman adopted a racial explanation based on certain physical–biological characteristics. The main advantage of the barbaric people within the Aryan race was their ability to learn and to be integrated into the superior Aryan nations. Freeman even wrote in one of his footnotes that, contrary to the claim of François Guizot, the French historian and statesman who compared the American Indians with the Germanic invaders of Gaul, there is a great difference between the two since “Aryans can at least be taught.”Footnote 78 For Freeman, once the superior English colonized a totally new and alien racial sphere (America) they were destined to annihilate the inferior local races.Footnote 79 Somewhat—if not entirely—similarly, Freeman argued that following the invasion of the British Isles by the Angles and Saxons, the native Celtic tribes had been expelled to the periphery (Wales, Ireland, the Scottish Highlands and so on) by the superior Teutons.Footnote 80 However, unlike the Semites or Native Americans, some of the Celts, being Aryan, had still managed to assimilate into the dominant race.
In an article titled “Carthage,” Freeman had already asserted that many assume that this kingdom “had drunk in something of the spirit of the West, and had almost parted company with the barbaric kingdoms of Asia.”Footnote 81 But in truth, Freeman concluded, Carthage, unlike the great Aryan civilizations of Greece and Rome, had left no substantial legacy to modern Europe.Footnote 82 At this stage in his essay on Carthage, Freeman raised another point. While Carthage had hardly any influence on Europe, other Semitic entities, such as the Saracens and the ancient Hebrews, had contributed to the formation of modern Europe. Their influence, Freeman surprisingly observed, was equal to the impact of Greece and Rome: “It is truly wonderful how, while other Semitic races, the Hebrew and the Arabs, have influenced the world on a scale equal to that of Greece and Rome . . . The Saracen who swept away the younger Carthage has been our master in some things. The Phoenician who founded the elder Carthage has been our master in nothing.”Footnote 83 Freeman's recognition of this Semitic contribution is rather remarkable, especially considering his numerous comments about the foul character of these specific Semitic nations. The above quote, perhaps, testifies that Freeman formed a rather composite and far from monolithic image of the Semites. However, despite this quote, Freeman's common view of Semitic and in particular Muslim history was very negative. This negative perception, as I aim to show, adds another facet to our understanding of how, through race, he reconciled his unity theory with the use of periods.
THE CHRISTIAN–ARYAN SPHERE AND ISLAMIC EMERGENCE
Freeman wrote of a Christian–Aryan unity that had stretched from the Atlantic to Mount Taurus and had remained intact after the arrival of the Germanic tribes.Footnote 84 The main heritage of Rome continued in the Church, where the “successor of the Fisherman still in very truth sits on the throne of Nero, and wields the sceptre of Diocletian.”Footnote 85 The Church was the true successor of the empire in the West. In Byzantium, the emperor was dominant and fought for the sake of the cross, while in the West the emperor was absent, so the Bishop of Rome took his place.Footnote 86 The Church was a positive force and not a negative one. From the fourth century AD, Rome was unified under the Church and not divided by its growing influence, an approach that, in Freeman's eyes, stood in contrast to Gibbon's monumental theory about the destructive force of the Church and the Germanic tribes.Footnote 87
While Christian–Aryan history was defined by progress, law and monogamy, the Muslim East, in contrast, was “stationary, arbitrary, polygamous and Mahometan.”Footnote 88 The Saracens, like their Semitic Phoenician ancestors, retained several periods of fame and glory. The Arabs had succeeded in gaining independence during the course of history. No other nation throughout history was as free as the Arabs, whose holy cities of Mecca and Medina were never under the control of any foreign power.Footnote 89 Furthermore, the first four Caliphs had ruled relatively justly.Footnote 90 However, according to Freeman, this was a rare exception and from the establishment of the Umayyad dynasty “we soon begin to hear of the same crimes, the same oppressions, which disfigure the ordinary current of eastern history.”Footnote 91
Islam, for Freeman, was an opposite racial, ideological and political force to the Christian–Aryan sphere. For that reason, the rise of Islam in the seventh century transformed the Roman Empire and created a “new world order”: “it was indeed a moment for Mahomet and his Saracens to change the face of the earth.”Footnote 92 From then on, another cycle or period of racial strife between “Aryan and Semitic man” had begun and the East, together with parts of the West, “became the possession of men altogether alien and hostile in race, language, manners and religion.”Footnote 93 In short, the Islamic conquest of the seventh century ruined Roman unity. Through this observation, Freeman actually devised a unique periodization for the end of antiquity. This was distinct from the conventional periodization which identified AD 476 as marking the Roman “fall.”Footnote 94
Even more importantly, the status Freeman awarded to the seventh century appears to “shatter” his own theory of historical unity. Freeman, indeed, identified the Muslim conquest as one of the most dramatic events in history. The Muslim conquest was unique since most of the former invasions had been carried out by nations which, like the Romans, were Aryan. For this reason, as explained above, the Teutonic tribes reinvigorated Rome, rather than destroyed it. Following the Muslim invasion, however, Roman unity was lost forever. This event did not mean that Aryan history ceased to exist, but rather denoted the final transformation within Aryan history from Rome to the Teutonic nations. Once again, there were ruptures in time, but they exist under one unified racial history. The Saracen invasion primarily symbolized another stage in the ceaseless struggle between Aryan and Semitic races.
In an article published in 1855, at the beginning of Freeman's career, he already emphasized the differences between the East and the West. The article, entitled “Mahometanism in the East and West,” argued, as would HOS thirty or so years later, that an inherent difference had separated the East from the West since ancient times, long before Muhammad had begun to preach his creed among the tribes of the Arabian peninsula and even prior to Jesus’ wanderings in Galilee and Judea:
The Struggle which for so many centuries arrayed the Christian and the Mahometan against each other, was but the continuation, under altered circumstances, and with altered motives, of a struggle which had been waged for ages before the promulgation of either faith, and whose commencement has to be looked for in times far beyond the reach of authentic history. It is the old internecine war between East and West, between despotism and freedom, between a progressive and a stationary social state.Footnote 95
Perhaps, in this early publication, Freeman's theory of the unity of history was set out in public for the first time. As in various later examples, Freeman spoke of historical unity differentiated by sub-periods. Nevertheless, in this article, the distinction was not between “Semitics” and “Aryans,” but between the despotism of the East and the tolerance of the West. The Western entities were the guardians of ideals and fought against the barbarity and tyranny of the East. In Freeman's age, the main representatives of “eastern despotism” were the Ottomans. The latter were a contemporary, yet worse, version of the Saracens who preceded them.
The identification of the Turks as another expression of Eastern tyranny attests, once again, to how Freeman adopted a certain unity of history within a particular race and divided it into several cycles or periods. However, the main problem was that, according to racial classifications, the Saracens and the Ottomans belonged to distinct races. The Saracens were Semites, while the Ottomans were considered Turanians and formed a distinct racial group. This group had originated in Central Asia and also included the Magyars, Finns and Bulgarians. Hence the unity between the Saracens and Turks was mainly founded on Islam. Possibly, for this reason, Freeman mainly emphasized not race, but the continuous religious inheritance from the Saracens to the Turks. It seems, therefore, that Freeman's theory of racial unity was not generalizable to all cases.
Still, as seen above, a certain Eastern or Asian innate character, which was pre-Islamic, linked the Saracens and later the Turks with the ancient Eastern nations. This “Eastern character” was in many respects very similar to Freeman's idea of racial unity, since it embedded a primal core that distinguished the Asian nations from the Western ones. Through this Asian background, the two races (Semitic and Turanian) joined forces and opposed the West, Christianity and the Aryans. A native Asian connection also existed between the Jews and the Turks. This, Freeman wrote, was the cause of Disraeli's pro-Turkish policy:
But we cannot sacrifice our people, the people of Aryan and Christian Europe, to the most genuine belief in an Asian mystery. We cannot have England or Europe governed by a Hebrew policy . . . Lord Beaconsfield is the active friend of the Turk. The alliance runs through all Europe. Throughout the East, the Turk and the Jew are leagued against the Christian.Footnote 96
Freeman did not only associate the Jews and the Turks on the basis of religion, especially as the common enemies of Christianity, but also recognized them as sharing mutual “blood”: “But blood is stronger than water, and Hebrew rule, is sure to lead to a Hebrew policy. Throughout Europe, the most fiercely Turkish part of the press is largely in Jewish hands. It may be assumed everywhere, with the smallest class of exceptions, that the Jew is the friend of the Turk and the enemy of the Christian.”Footnote 97 The “fluidity” of race is most evident here. Sometimes, in explaining the long historical unity, Freeman promoted biology, while in other cases religion was brought to the forefront. The main point is that the theory of historical unity that connected the Saracens with the Turks was based on both “blood” and religion.
Islam and Christianity had been developed under the Saracen and Roman Empires. Yet later the Turks and the Franks, the new forces of history, continued this religious and racial struggle with even greater zeal:
But the East was to supply a further spectacle, exactly analogous to what had already taken place in the west. What the Roman Empire was to Christianity, that of the Saracen was to Islam, its birthplace, its nursery, the vehicle of its extension to other nations, but not the power which should itself supply its most permanent or its most zealous devotees. When the two creeds waged the fiercest struggle, when the strife was most openly and consciously for the faith of each, when the Cross and the Crescent met in the most deadly conflict for the land held sacred alike by the votaries of both, the warfare was no longer between the Roman and the Saracen, but between their respective disciples, the Frank and the Turk . . .Footnote 98
The strife, which had reached its apex during the Crusades, continued, according to Freeman, until the nineteenth century. The occurrences in Freeman's own era can further explain how and why he defined the Ottomans as a new cycle of Saracen aggression. In contrast to a British foreign policy that supported Ottoman interests, especially in the face of Russian expansion, Freeman defined the Turks and not the Russians as the archenemy. The prime example of this British support was apparent in the Crimean war, in which the British fought alongside the Ottomans against the Russians. Nevertheless, this was not the only case, and, for the most of the nineteenth century, British governments maintained a similar foreign policy. For instance, during the 1870s the Turks fought and massacred insurgents and civilians in Bosnia–Herzegovina and Serbia. In 1876, the Bulgarians joined the mutiny against the Porte, and in response the latter commenced a bloodbath in Bulgarian communities, especially in the city of Batak. Despite this, Britain did not change its official stance towards the Eastern Question and maintained its support of the Porte.Footnote 99
On 8 September 1876, Freeman, following Gladstone's criticism of the Porte,Footnote 100 wrote harsh comments in The Times against Turkish atrocities: “Europe is astounded to find that it has within its confines a race . . . capable of worse things than even the African or the Red Indian . . . the Bulgarian details are a new chapter in human nature—new, that is to say, to those who happen not to be versed in Tartar or Turkish history.”Footnote 101 In his second edition of the The History and Conquests of the Saracens (1876), Freeman, following the news from the Balkans, wrote a whole new preface, which focused on the misdeeds of the Ottomans. Although he originally averred that his book would not include the history of the Ottomans, but that of their Saracen predecessors, most of the preface was dedicated to the former. Through the past history of the Saracens and the current policy of the Turks, Freeman came to the conclusion that the Ottomans and any other Islamic regimes could never be reformed. Furthermore, “Even under the very best Mahometan government, it is impossible that men of other religions than the Mahometan should have real political equality with Mahometans.”Footnote 102
The intertwinement between the developments of Freeman's days and his view of the past is most explicit and can explain Freeman's most renowned saying, that “history is past politics and politics are present history.”Footnote 103 In any case, Freeman did follow the teaching of this saying, since he amalgamated the two spheres, the political and the historical. The Saracens, as illustrated, had separated the East from the West and had formed the division between the two parts of Christendom. Later, and in a similar way, their Ottoman successors became another malicious force that prevented the Eastern Christian lands of Serbia, Greece and so on from uniting with the rest of the Christian world. Thus the theory of the unity of history fitted the proposed linkage between the Saracens and the Ottomans because of the long-term, religious, cultural, political and racial affiliations that were transmitted over the course of history.
Religion and race bonded the Saracens and the Ottomans throughout history. Racial and religious differences prevented these nations from blending into Christian–Aryan Europe: “the Ottoman Turks still remain as they were when they first came, aliens on Aryan and Christian ground.”Footnote 104 However, the other nations of the Turanian race, contrary to the Ottomans, had been fused into Aryan and Christian Europe through religious conversion: “The Bulgarians, originally Turanian conquerors, have been assimilated, by their Slavonic subjects. The Finnish Magyars have received a political and religious assimilation; their kingdom became a member of the commonwealth of Christian Europe, though they still keep their old Turanian language.”Footnote 105 These Turanian nations not only entered the Christian sphere, but became also an integral part of Aryan Europe. In their case, the terms “Aryan,” “European” and “Christian” were almost indistinguishable: “all the nations of Europe belong to the one common Aryan stock. And those which do not, the earlier remnants, the later settlers, have all, with one exception [Turks], been brought more or less thoroughly within the range of Aryan influences. If not European by birth, they have become European by adoption.”Footnote 106 Thus, sometimes, through religious adoption, racial belonging could be transformed. More importantly, these nations did not have one unified racial history divided by periods. Instead of continuing their regular historical course, as part of the Turanian race, they became, through religion, part of the Aryan–Christian nations.
In his HOS, Freeman mentioned another example of a nation that had “transformed” its intrinsic racial classification. Following the “discovery” of Indo-Aryan languages, the Persians were identified as primarily belonging to the Aryans. This had awarded the Persians an innate advantage over the surrounding non-Aryan nations. Yet, over the course of history, following Semitic influences, Persia “switched sides” and became an essential part of the “Eastern” races.Footnote 107 Therefore, like some of the Turanian nations that converted into Aryanism through their adoption of Christianity, Freeman also provided an opposite example of an Aryan nation assimilating into the Eastern sphere.
Predominantly, in relation to the Turanian–Christian nations, Freeman regarded race and language as “fluid,” less-than-binding, concepts. A more fixed definition would have undermined his anti-Ottoman stance. While the comparable element of race and language verified the ancient origins of the Aryans and their unified history, concerning the Turanians such comparability was problematic. In the opening paragraph of Freeman's “Race and Language,” he presented an incident in which several Magyar students came to the Turkish Sultan in a quest to reinitiate the natural racial and linguistic bond between the two nations. This act held symbolical and perhaps political implications. Despite religious and national differences, Hungary, through an alleged native bond, might acknowledge the Porte's regional supremacy. This act, Freeman argued, was a product of the science of philology that stressed the similarities between the Turkish and Hungarian languages.Footnote 108 For Freeman, this example demonstrated the possible vulnerability of the argument about the connection between race and language, since in some cases it could undermine his own political agenda. Freeman's stance against the Ottomans and their control of Christian countries might be weakened if such “artificial” links were to be fostered. Alliances between nations such as Greece and Bulgaria, which confront a common enemy (the Ottomans), could be endangered. While Christianity bonded them, race could set them apart due to the fact that the Greeks were Aryans and the Bulgarians were of Turanian origin.
To conclude, Freeman's clarifications in “Race and Language” were mainly a reflection of the political and national conditions that existed in south-eastern Europe. According to him, these explanations were not required for western Europe but vital for eastern Europe. The difference between the two spheres was that in the West a process of integration had occurred between the locals and the invaders, while in the East this process had been absent. In the West, in many places, the Teutonic element converged with the Roman or the Celtic (they were all Aryan and Christian). However, the Christian Aryan nations of the East, together with the converted Turanian nations, were distinct from the Ottomans and could never merge with them. Following the religious distinction, the rules of “adoption and assimilation,” as named by Freeman, do not apply in eastern Europe. These rules contain the idea that any individual or community can join a certain dominant race and, after several generations, become an integral part of it. The political implication was that these Christian nations must gain full independence from the Ottomans.
CONCLUSION
Freeman altered his notions of race in light of certain political and thematic considerations. In most instances, race was for him the independent variable that governed history. Through race, I have argued, Freeman's use of periods did not necessarily undermine his theory of historical unity. Nevertheless, as his discussion of the Turanian Christian nations testifies, it was not all about race. Religion, in some cases, changed the unified course of racial history. This suggests that, according to Freeman, the Magyars or Bulgarians had retained two totally distinct histories: before and after their conversion to Christianity. Hence the “tension” between his unity of history and periods was not always resolved through race, and with regard to the history of the Christian Turanian nations the “tension” remained unsettled.
Freeman's (and Arnold's) theory of unity was not necessarily a comprehensive and coherent theoretical system that organized all events under one set of definitive rules. Certain discrepancies, as seen above, surface in the idea of the unity. Even within the periodization of Aryan history there were some uncertainties. Freeman named different dates as marking the end of Rome (early fifth century, Muslim invasion, coronation of Charlemagne). In some places, he even dismissed any notion of Roman “fall” and actually embraced a certain Roman continuum. Following these divergent accounts, Freeman could be and was criticized, since sometimes it seems that his views fluctuate and alter from one book to the next. He wavered between two dominant narratives: one stressed Roman–Teutonic continuance while the other emphasized Roman rupture. To a certain extent, Freeman's fluctuation presents another facet of the tension between his unity theory and use of periods.
These divergent dates of Roman decline perhaps resulted from Freeman's observation that the ending line of antiquity was a rather arbitrary or even artificial notion.Footnote 109 Thus the specific dates for the Roman “fall” were less significant and the four centuries between the invasion of the Germanic tribes and AD 800 (coronation) denoted a “transitional stage” from antiquity to modernity. Another alternative is to distinguish between two notions: the end of antiquity and the beginning of modernity. One could argue that they both mark the same period since the end of one is the beginning of the other. I maintain, however, that in Freeman's writings these two concepts did not always converge. He acknowledged that the Teutonic tribes had symbolized the force that commenced modernity. Yet the coming of modernity does not necessarily mean that antiquity ended. The contrary was true; through Christianity the tribes merged into the empire and invigorated it with a new life. Predominantly, this endurance was possible since both the Romans and the Teutonic tribes belonged to the same Aryan race. In relation to the end of antiquity, as illustrated, the real split in the unity of the empire had materialized with the emergence of the Muslims, a foreign racial and religious power. The catalyst initiating the change was perhaps external (Muslims), yet the transformation was completed with Charlemagne. The latter established a German empire that continued the legacy of the Teutonic tribes and was totally detached from the eastern Romans (Byzantium). The political and institutional distinction between the two Christian empires did not signify the termination of their shared Aryan history. Their innate Aryan bond resurfaced with all its vitality when the Aryan nations of eastern and western Europe struggled with the Ottomans. Race thus determined the historical course of the Aryan nations.
