Keys of This Blood (84 page)

Sometime before 7000
B.C.
, a vast revolution changed the Caucasians' way of life and ushered them on to their destiny. From being simple food gatherers, they became food producers. The earliest farming communities known to us existed in that area. They discovered and learned the early techniques of crop rotation and stock breeding. Human procreation
became a source and a cause of blessings in the new society. More hands were the key to tilling more soil. Some of the oldest and most frequently found relics from this period are figurines of a goddess whose most distinctive traits—distended belly, large breasts—emphasized female fertility.

The sequel is easy to understand. More soil—more land—meant outward expansion. According as the population increased with every generation—each thirty years or so—more land was tamed and more was needed. Anthropologists speculate that the population would have expanded outward by thirty or forty miles with each new generation. It may have been much faster, however; for by 6500
B.C.
, Caucasian farming methods had reached Greece. And by 3500
B.C.
, they were practiced as far west as the Orkney Islands, off Scotland.

Mount Elbrus and the Caucasus range, which blocked the east and south, determined that part of Caucasian expansion and conquest would be northward into the Russian heartland; and then westward as far as Galway Bay and the Atlantic and—give or take a millennium or two—on as far as the eastern rim of the Pacific Ocean.

Constantly on the go, the Caucasian people superimposed themselves and their language where they went. The basic linguistic unity of “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals” is scarcely violated by the Asianic origin of Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian. Even languages such as Basque and Albanian, which seem so alien to modern Western languages, are offsprings of the original Caucasian mother tongue.

In the millennium of their first great expansion, their constant migration and the tyranny of distance meant inevitably that whole groups of Caucasian peoples became separate and lived apart. Dialects of the original language developed—Slavonic, Teutonic, Celtic and Italic, for example. By sometime around 3000
B.C.
, whole areas were distinguished one from another by different languages—the dialects of the original Caucasian.

One newly developed language in particular—Old Slavonic, spoken by people who were called Slavs—held sway some hundreds of miles eastward from the Elbe River into the Russian heartland, southward as far as the Peloponnesus in Greece, and southeastward into what is today the Ukraine; and of course, it remained in the original steppe lands between the Black Sea and the Caspian. To describe themselves, as historiographer Iwo C. Pogonowski points out, Slavs said that they were people “who communicated by word of mouth” (
slovo
= the spoken word), as distinct from people of unintelligible language or those who were dumb and speechless.

Long before Athens reached for the glory that was Greece, the Caucasian populations of eastern Europe had subdivided into Baits and Germans to the north, with Slavs covering the remaining portion of central and eastern Europe. Once the Caucasians had taken possession of the vast landmass, only small pockets of racially different peoples established themselves within the Caucasian domain—the Asianic Estonians on the Baltic, and the Asianic Finns in Finland by the first century
A.D.
, for example, and the Magyars in Hungary about the ninth century
A.D.
The South Semitic peoples, inflamed by Islam, tried for a thousand years, from about 600
A.D.
, to subdue the Caucasians and occupy their lands; but, in the end, even that bloody enterprise was ended.

The Slavs formed closely knit communities. They lived by their agriculture and traded with surrounding communities. They had a communal system of self-government that depended for its stability on the consensus reached among themselves. And they laid great store by the agreements they hammered out in frank discussions as among equals. The practice of the
sobor
—the communal gathering where all decisions affecting the community were reached by consensus—was typically Slav. The principle was not of the majoritarian one-man, one-vote variety. Rather, the principle was
sobornost
, the feeling and thinking consensus of the
sobor
's participants.

By about 700
A.D.
, two powerful Slav kingdoms emerged. One was centered in the area between modern Poland's two rivers, the Oder and the Vistula. The other, calling itself Rus, was centered in Kiev. Both were considered integral parts of that “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals” of which John Paul II and Mikhail Gorbachev speak so passionately and persistently today; and both were part of that “one family” about which both of these leaders speak. From Poland's Oder River to Russia's Dnieper River, the entire area was considered the traditional homeland of the Slavs. There, the different and definitive traits of Polishness and Russianness were molded out of the lineage and the language of their common Caucasian heritage.

A tradition of Polish folklore tells us that a man named Lech—one of three brothers of the Piast family, which belonged to the tribe of Polanians, or Polanie—was fatefully led one day by a white eagle to a place near its aerie. There, at a site called Gniezno—a name that means “nest” or “cradle”—Lech founded his new kingdom of Polania, which would be ruled by the Piast dynasty for four hundred years.

What seems undoubted in this tradition is that the founder of the Piast
dynasty was what we call today an ordinary man of the people, living on the land of the Poles. The white eagle he is said to have followed is still the official emblem of Poland; and the dynasty he is said to have founded came to symbolize the tradition of Poles in their unity as a people in unbroken continuity on the land of their ancestors.

It was of that ancient and enduring tradition that Pope John Paul reminded the world when he spoke at Gniezno in 1979. “Here,” he said, “… I greet with veneration the
nest
of Piast, the origin of the history of our motherland and the cradle of the Church…. We are a people he [God] claims for his own. All together, we form also the royal race of the Piasts.”

The historical record tells us that sometime around the year 840
A.D.
, the leader of the Polanian Slavs—a man of the Piast family whose name was in fact Chrosciszko—founded the Piast dynasty and that he formed its kingdom mainly by the union of his Polanians with five other tribes: Vistulans, Polabians, Silesians, Mazovians and Cassubians, or East Pomeranians. The members of that kingdom called themselves
Polacy
.

For the first hundred years of its existence, Poland was a ragged patch of territory, a hazardous enterprise from the beginning. Lacking any effective natural land barriers for its borders, separated only by vast forests from the normal trade and migration routes, the territory and nation of Poland, with its capital city at Gniezno, was in a precarious position. Situated in the middle of the Slav peoples, the inhabitants of the “Polish fields”—
pola
means exactly that: fields—were an obvious target for greedy neighbors. And from the beginning such neighbors were plentiful—mainly German, Slav and Asianic tribes on the search for fresh territory.

To Poland's immediate south lay the Slav kingdom of Great Moravia. To its east, the duchy of Kiev bristled with warlike intent. To its north and west were the Baits and the Germans. Within that first century, one part of Great Moravia disappeared into the German empire, and the rest was overrun by invading Magyars. To Poland's east, the Ruthenian Slavs constituted a new threat.

By the time Poland made it into the second century of its uncertain existence as a nation, two different but authentic Christian traditions had taken hold in most of Europe. Except for a large portion of Scandinavia and the territory until recently called Prussia, Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals was known as Christendom. “Europe,” as Hilaire Belloc wrote, “was the Faith, and the Faith was Europe.”

Although one as far as religion went, Christendom nonetheless was divided into two distinct portions following two distinct traditions. The
line of division fell roughly along the meridian that separates the European landmass into east and west, running from Finland in the far north, stretching southward along the Elbe River in today's Germany to the Adriatic Sea around the heel of Italy.

Europe east of that line was the territory mainly of the Slav peoples. Their formative religious and cultural tradition stemmed from the most glorious and most long-lived empire ever fashioned by man—the Byzantine empire of the Greeks—whose capital, Constantinople, was perched strategically on the connecting water lane between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, that is to say, between the European and Asian landmasses.

Europe west of that line was populated in the main by Nordic, Germanic and Romance peoples. Their formative religious and cultural tradition sprang from the Roman and Latinate mind. During the first thousand years of Christian papal Rome as a visible power among men—from 400 to 1400
A.D.
—the Roman papacy and its ecclesiastical structure, the Church, were the fashioners of that Western culture and tradition.

Poland found itself in a peculiar position. Geographically, it was already the
plaque tournante
of inner-European political stability and power balance. While most of its territory lay in the western region, it straddled the east-west division. It stood as an open gateway into the heart of Russia in one direction, and into the lands of the west in the other. Moreover, it was the vital middle ground between northern and southern Europe. Given the fact that both Rome and Constantinople were vibrant and expansionist in every sense—religiously, culturally, politically and territorially—neutrality was not an option. Poland had to chose between east and west, or be overrun.

It was Poland's fifth Piast king, Mieszko I (921-992), who made the choice. He was a Slav leader of a Slav people, and the most natural thing would have been for him to turn eastward, to ally himself with what certainly seemed the superior power of Constantinople, and to opt for that Christian tradition as an inevitable part of the bargain. But Mieszko did not.

In the year 965, Mieszko married Roman Catholic Princess Dubrovka from Roman Catholic Bohemia. Clearly, however, his decision went much farther than a simple political alliance. In fact, it went farther even than his own baptism, in the year 966. For not only did he set about the conversion of Poland to Christianity. By a solemn pact—the Piast Pact of 990
A.D.
—he made the entire nation and state of Poland over to the ownership of the Holy See of Peter, in the person of Pope John XV.

Mieszko's act was one of those fateful decisions made by key people of history under the pressure of concrete events, and according to their understanding of the issues at stake. Their problem is usually an immediate one. Their choice is practical. But the effect of what they do decides the fate and fortunes of unborn generations. Mieszko's decision was of this kind.

We have every reason to believe that Mieszko foresaw at least in outline what consequences would follow his choice. Any examination of the circumstances in which he made the donation consecrated in the Piast Pact convinces one that it was done primarily for religious and spiritual reasons. By an act of such enormous improbability as the Piast Pact, Mieszko was saying in effect that only Christ could assure the Poles of safety; that not only was the Roman See the center of the world, but its titular head was as well the titular overlord of the world; and that the Petrine authority of the Pope was God's authority. The Rome of the Popes was where the Poles would look for inspiration, leadership and authority.

Predictably, not everyone agreed with Mieszko. As always in known cases of mass conversion, there remained a solid core of the original religion—the paganism Poland's Slavs had brought with them in their long trek from beneath the shadows of Mount Elbrus in the steppe lands between the Black and Caspian seas. The supreme god of the Caucasians, represented for them by towering Mount Elbrus, had traveled outward with them over all of Europe, metamorphosing into Wodan of the Germanic peoples, Odin of the Norsemen, Zeus of the Greeks, Jupiter of the Latins, Perun of the Russians.

We do not know what name the pre-Christian Poles gave him; but by 1038, less than fifty years after Mieszko's Piast Pact, the tribal cult of that pagan god erupted against conversion to Christianity. So virulent was the revolt that historians have called it a return to paganism. That it was not. But it was a costly cleansing of the Poles as a people; and, for a time, most of what had been achieved in the first few decades of Polish Christianity was destroyed in a last flick of the old serpent's tail as it protested eviction from its long-held position among the Poles.

When it was over—and it was over quickly—by Polish choice and by Polish armed force, Poland was securely lodged in the West as Europe's eastern anchor. It shared that western commonwealth of the peoples in territories now called France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Austria, Germany, the five Scandinavian countries, England and Ireland. All were directly and exclusively formed by the missionizing emissaries of the Roman Church and its head, the Bishop of Rome. For, attributed to him and claimed by him were not only the spiritual and
religious regulation of those peoples, but also supervision of all sociocultural and political structures. As spiritual leader and political overlord, the Pope was the preeminent—often disputed, but persevering—keystone in that portion of ancient Europe.

The peoples living there—even the xenophobic natives of England—could and did circulate throughout their lands with relative ease. The peoples of that western territory shared the same holy days, cultural symbols, educational sources (mainly Greco-Roman), food, living habits and social and political structures. Intermarriage was common. Trade, commerce, banking, the arts, moral standards and laws, the sciences, such as they were—all these strategies of living were homogeneous at least in their broad lines.