The History of White People

by Nell Irvin Painter

  Like most ancient and medieval scholars, Pliny divides the earth into three parts—Europe, Asia, and Africa—and begins, as might be expected, with Europe. His Roman Europe, the “nurse of the people who have conquered all nations, and by far the most beautiful region of the earth,” occupies at least half the world. Again as might be expected, he deems his native Italy the best place in the universe, “ruler and second mother of the world” and “the most beautiful of all lands, endowed with all that wins Nature’s crown.” Without a doubt, the gods themselves had chosen Italy to unite and civilize the world, to “become the sole parent of all races throughout the world.”16

  Pliny’s book 7, focusing on humankind generally, includes Scythians and the now better-known Germani. They are cannibals all. The Transalpine tribes of Germany, for example, are depicted as a brutal bunch, practicing “human sacrifice, which is not far short of eating human flesh,” while out to the east, “some Scythian tribes—indeed a large percentage of them—feed on human bodies.” Picking up on his forebears Hippocrates and Herodotus, Pliny locates the Scythian cannibals ten days’ journey north of the river Borysthenes (the Dnieper). Among other uncivilized habits, they drink out of human skulls and use scalps “with the hair attached as napkins [protective material] to cover their chests.” Moving ever farther east and south, thirteen days’ travel beyond the Dnieper, the Sauromatae or Amazons still live, eating only every two days. Next to them can be found the Arimaspi, “a people noted for having one eye in the middle of their forehead.” There are also “certain people” born in Albania with keen-sighted, grayish-green eyes; “bald from childhood, they see more at night than during the day.”17

  Indeed, Pliny’s catalog of humankind includes an amazing number of freakish peoples. In addition to the one-eyed folk, it describes others who grow a foot so big they pull it over their heads for shade from the sun. Still others come into the world with heads like those of dogs. So strong were Pliny’s fantastic notions that over a thousand years later, medieval English texts show these monstrous peoples as illustrating several varieties of mankind. (See figures 2.1–4, Monstrous people: Cyclops, Dog-Head, Sciopod, and Panotii.)

  The thrilling notion that monstrous peoples existed out there in the wide, wide world survived well into Enlightenment science. Carolus Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century father of taxonomy, invented a revolutionary system that laid a durable groundwork for the naming and classifying of plants and animals. Yet even this scientific pioneer included a category of monstrous people in his classic work Systema naturae, and monsters remained part of the accepted scientific view of humanity until Johann Friedrich Blumenbach disproved their existence in his Ph.D. dissertation of 1775. It says a great deal about the intellectual inertia of medieval Western society that the notions to be found in Pliny’s Natural History held on for fifteen hundred years. Eventually, of course, Pliny’s encyclopedia faded into obscurity, as Europeans began to learn more of the world. Meanwhile, a work contemporaneous to Pliny’s passed muster as scientific truth among white race theorists well into our times.

  EARLY IN his illustrious writing career, the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus (56–after 117 CE) wrote a short book entitled De origine et situ Germanorum, known commonly as Germania (98 CE).* A member of the Roman elite from either northern Italy or southeastern France, Tacitus was an accomplished orator and author. His major works, The Histories and The Annals, tell the story of the Roman empire, and his minor works consist of Germania, a biography of his father-in-law, Agricola, and a book on rhetoric entitled Dialogus. With the end of antiquity, Tacitus’s more important works lost currency, but within the history of white people, his reputation rests on Germania, more precisely on a myopic interpretation of Germania’s pronouncements on German endogamy.

  Figs. 2.1–4. Monstrous people: Cyclops, Dog-Head, Sciopod, drawn by Nell Painter from Thomas de Cantimpré Panotii, drawn by Nell Painter, after the Cotton Tiberius MS of the British Library.

  Like Caesar, whose work he echoes, Tacitus draws a line between tamer Gauls west of the Rhine and wild Germani to the east. Recognizing the importance of migration and conquest, Tacitus agrees with Caesar that the term Germania is of recent coinage. Tacitus explains—in phrases now quite confusing—that “since those who first crossed over the Rhine and drove out the Gauls (and now are called the Tungri) were at that time called Germani. Thus the name of a tribe, and not of a people, gradually became dominant, with the result that they were all called Germani, at first by the conquered from the name of the conquerors because of fear, and then, once the name had been devised, also by the Germani themselves.”18 Distinguishing in some mysterious fashion between tribes and peoples, Tacitus is saying here that a tribe called Germani migrated into the territory of people whom the Romans once called Gauls but now call Tungri and conquered them. All of them came to be known as Germani. This garbled explanation may not illuminate what happened, but it does show how migration, conquest, and historical change influence the outlines of an ethnic category.

  For Tacitus, as for “the divine Caesar,” warfare is uppermost in the mind, as barbarian warriors continued to serve widely in armies of the Roman empire. Tacitus also remembers the Gauls of former times as powerful enemies, but now, firmly conquered, they are settled and civilized. Habituated to Roman delicacies like wine, the Gauls have lost their bellicose masculinity and tipped toward effeminacy. Meanwhile, those noble savages, the Germani, largely retain their barbaric vigor by dint of warlike standoffishness, even as cupidity has been drawing them toward the allures of civilization: “They take particular pleasure in the gifts of neighbouring tribes, sent not only by individuals but also by whole communities: choice horses, splendid weapons, ornamental discs and torques; we have now taught them to take money also.”19

  German men constantly bear arms, for warfare represents their coming of age and their citizenship. Whenever they grow sluggish from sustained peace and leisure, privileged young men pick fights. It is through fighting, not trade or politics, that they accumulate prestige and support a large body of free and enslaved retainers. “To drink away the day and night disgraces no one. Brawls are frequent, as is normal among the intoxicated, and seldom end in mere abuse, but more often in slaughter and bloodshed.” Here Tacitus spies weakness and a foolproof means of vanquishing German warlords: “[if] one indulges their drunkenness by supplying as much as they long for, they will as soon succumb to vices as to arms.”20

  Even so, conquest of the Germani is not a likely prospect according to Tacitus, who etches the Roman empire’s political boundaries more deeply than Caesar and highlights the uniqueness of the Germani off on the empire’s far eastern side. Moreover, Germania downplays many differences within German tribes and instead pronounces the liberty and warfare characteristic of all small-scale societies as inherently Germanic traits.21 Thus the failure of the Romans to subdue the Germani flows not from Roman shortcomings but from a particularly German virility. Perhaps their avoidance of the vices of civilization, or their sexual abstinence and its attendant potency, protects them from conquest. These qualities as they appear in Germania—warfare, masculinity, and barbarism—lie at the base of modern ethnogender stereotyping.

  Looking backward, we may find it puzzling that both Tacitus and Caesar critique the effects of Roman civilization. After all, the vast Roman empire lasted some five hundred years and laid the linguistic, legal, architectural, and political foundations of the Western world. How could eminent citizens of this great empire squeeze out admiration for the dirty, bellicose, and funny-looking barbarians to the north? The answer lies in notions of masculinity circulating among a nobility based on military conquest. According to this ideology, peace brings weakness; peace saps virility. The wildness of the Germani recalls a young manhood lost to the Roman empire.

  Long a critic of imperial Rome’s luxury and decadence, Tacitus found in the rough Germani a freedom-loving people embodying the older, better values of Augustinian times. Their homeland may be ug
ly and its climate cruel, but its simple folk possess a certain charm born of freedom, frequently manifested as anarchy and fighting, and the chastity that Caesar also noted.22 To Tacitus, rude German simplicity trumps Roman decadence: “In every home they grow up, naked and filthy, into those long limbs and large bodies that amaze us so. Each child suckles at his own mother’s breasts, not handed over to slave girls and nurses…. Love comes late to the young men, and their virility is not drained thereby. Nor are maidens hurried along.”23

  INTERESTINGLY—AND FOR hardly the last time in history—citified men seem fated to admire tough, virile barbarians. Caesar headed a train of civilized male observers—with Tacitus among the most famous—contrasting the hard with the soft, the strong and the weak, the peaceful and the warlike, all to the detriment of the civilized, dismissed as effeminate. As we see, the seeds of this stereotype—a contrast between civilized French and barbarian Germans—lie in the work of ancient writers, themselves uneasy about the manhood costs of peacetime.

  Later commentators cite Tacitus to prove their claims of German manliness and racial purity. Tacitus, of course, did not speak of race in the modern sense, for that meaning had not been invented. But he did write, “For myself, I agree with the views of those who think that the inhabitants of Germania have not been tainted by any intermarriage with other tribes, but have existed as a distinct and pure people, resembling only themselves. Consequently, they also all have the same physical appearance…fierce blue eyes, tawny hair, bodies that are big but strong only in attack.”24

  And why are the Germani pure? Not out of any furious ethnic pride, but because they live in a place no one else wants, for “who would abandon Asia or Africa or Italy and seek out Germania, with its unlovely landscape and harsh climate, dreary to inhabit and behold, if it were not one’s native land?”25 With the passage of time, Tacitus’s rhetorical question—and its answer—fell away, leaving only the notion of rugged German standoffishness.

  IN TRUTH, it simply is not possible to tie those whom the Romans called Germani to modern Germans securely. Humanity moves around so much that no clear lines of descent trace back over two millennia. Even the efficient Romans lacked solid knowledge of frontiers beyond their own Gallic provinces.

  Caesar notes the ways of migration: Germans who moved into Gaul soon became Belgae, and migrants from Belgium now settled across the Channel belong to the British population.26 Their migrations were part of a much wider phenomenon that marked the first millennium BCE and thereafter. Nomadic and seminomadic tribes, moving east to west under pressure from the Huns, left today’s Turkistan, crossing overland from Asia through Ukraine. In the far west, peoples piled up along the Rhine border of the Roman empire, driving a process so fluid that the tribes fought over territory within themselves and with one another, all the while merging and mingling biologically.

  We may think of pre-unification (i.e., pre-1870) “Germans” as a single linguistic group, but in the time of Caesar and Tacitus, speakers of Germanic languages lived well into what is now Poland and, perhaps, beyond. Roman observers did not mention language as a characteristic of the Germani, focusing rather on cultural patterns and physical appearance. Between language, body, and lifestyle, already the identity of the Germani is rife with incongruities.

  Such confusions eventually plunged Caesar’s term Germani into disuse until the rise of religious and political Pan-German sentiment.27 By the time German-speakers embraced a common name in the eleventh century, that name had morphed into Deutsch. In fact, “German” does not appear in English until the sixteenth century, replacing the French cognate, Alemain.28 Nor has time brought clarity. On the eastern side of what is now the Federal Republic of Germany, controversies still rage over the Germanic or Slavic identity of Wends, Vandals, and various neighboring Germans and Slavs in the eastern German region known as Saxony.29

  One lesson here is that wars and imperial fortunes render political boundaries notoriously prone to dispute; furthermore, cultural boundaries are even harder to pin down. When we speak of “Germany” before the late nineteenth century, we can only mean a cultural idea and a linguistic grouping. But we know now that neither culture (e.g., marriage or burial habits) nor language provides a reliable index to biological descent. Naming does not help either, for we can comfortably reel off a roll call that includes Brandon Riveras, Matthew Feinsteins, and Tamika Washingtons—names that reflect both history and present cultural preference rather than genealogy. White race chauvinists are loath to admit that brown-skinned people speak the English language fluently.

  In terms of naming, the Native American Indian parallel with the ancient Germani once again has bearing. The untamed Germans outside the Roman empire called themselves by an abundance of local names: Marsians, Gambrians, Vandalians, Tungrians, Araviscans, Osians, Treverians, Nervians, Batavians, Vangiones, Tribocians, Nemetes, Ubians, Mattiacians, Cattans, Usipians, Tencterians, Bructerians, Chamavians, Angrivarians, Bructerians, Dulgibinians, Chasuarians, Frisians, Chaucians, Fosians, Cheruscans, Cimbrians, and Suevians (divided into several communities all bearing distinct names: Langobards, Reudignians, Aviones, Angles, Varinians, Eudoses, Suardones Nuithones, Hermondurians, Nariscans, Marcomanians, Quadians. Marsignians, Gothinians, Osians, Burians, Arians, Helvicones, Manimians, Elysians, Naharvalians, Lygians, Gothones, Rugians, Lemovians, and Suiones). The list comes from Tacitus in 98 CE.

  German-speakers who entered Roman society, however, often as mercenary soldiers, adopted Roman usage and called themselves Germani, just as Native Americans within the United States have found reason to evoke a unifying identity as Indians. Beyond Roman reach, the various German-speaking tribes east of the Rhine considered themselves distinct one from another, sharing no sense of common identity or common interest until several centuries after the collapse of the empire.*

  As the Roman empire crumbles, our narrative of people who would later be called “white” moves north. During the so-called Dark Ages between mid-fifth century CE and the fourteenth-century Renaissance, seafaring raiders appeared, perturbing northern societies in a ceaseless quest for plunder. Although much history of these chaotic times has not survived, a key name—Saxon—appears for the first time. It does not denote the people of England, but foreigners: raiders from continental Europe—Scandinavians, Angles, and Jutes, whoever could reach for plunder in Roman Britain. Even the great progenitor of what was later called “Saxon England,” King Alfred (849–99), called his people englisc and himself the king of the Angelcynn.30 Interestingly enough, Irish attacking Britain from the west were called Scotti.31 Insecurity forced the peoples of northern Europe to hunker down, pouring the wealth to be had into cities to the south and east.

  WHILE WARLORDS fought in the west, medieval cities and kingdoms at the edges of Christendom glittered in far-flung, cosmopolitan empires. Trade made the difference, trade in people as well as spices, silk, cotton, dyestuffs, medicines, salt, and, increasingly, sugar. First the seafaring merchants of Pisa, Genoa, and, most gloriously, Venice controlled the Asian trade. After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Venice began to decline. Iberian kingdoms in the far west fattened on trade with Africa and the newly discovered Americas. In Italy and Iberia, wealth and peoples from immense trading networks met and fornicated within polyglot, multicolored, and religiously diverse populations.

  Here was a rich and glorious world built on subjugation. Hundreds of thousands in the Italian and Iberian empires were, in fact, not free, but were objects of an ever-flourishing trade. During Roman and medieval times this traffic in workers had flowed one way, from various peripheries toward the metropoles. The Greco-Roman historian Diodorus Siculus offers a clue. When the Celts discovered they could buy Italian wine even without money—for they had no money—they flooded the market with slaves. A good Celtic bargain exchanged a slave for one amphora of wine holding about seven gallons.32 The various slave trades brought thousands of northern barbarians—Celts, Gauls, Germani—into the centers of weal
th and power, altering those gene pools as surely as did the older flow from the Black Sea. Up in their impoverished, cold, and remote land, ancient Germans saw no such influx from afar. Compared with wealthy centers to the south, German tribal territory remained relatively contained, while the Roman world and its successors blended the descendants of many a hapless barbarian.

  This millennium of Venetian and Iberian hegemony barely appears in American white race history as it jelled over the past two hundred years. Rather, race-chauvinist history depends on Tacitus’s ancient Germani and medieval German heroes called Saxons. The race narrative ignores early European slavery and the mixing it entailed, leading today’s readers to find the idea of white slavery far-fetched. But in the land we now call Europe, most slaves were white, and that fact was unremarkable.

  3

  WHITE SLAVERY

  A notion of freedom lies at the core of the American idea of whiteness. Accordingly, the concept of slavery—at any time, in any society—calls up racial difference, carving a permanent chasm of race between the free and the enslaved. Any good library embodies this logic by housing a literature of African slavery stretching tens of linear feet. This bibliography seems infinite compared with the literature of white slavery, for the American conventions of slavery have blanketed the topic. Slavery in the Roman empire may be recalled primarily through film and historical fiction, but the Vikings of the Dark Ages are hardly remembered as the preeminent slavers they actually were. If we are to understand the peopling of Europe with its great mixing of folk, we must take Vikings—those great movers of people—into account.