By 1300 the ethnographical map of Europe was more or less what it is today. The wandering of the nations had ceased three hundred years earlier. The last incursion of the nomads from central Asia was that of the Mongols. It only remained for the invasion of south-eastern Europe by the Ottoman Turks to complete the modern picture.
Since the collapse of the Roman Empire the peoples of Europe had been so mobile and there had been so much mingling of the blood of conquerors and conquered, of migrants and their hosts, that already by the fourteenth century it is both difficult and unhistorical to talk of the races of Europe. The only safe and practical approach is to describe the main language groups, for it was community of language which often became the basis of the formation of political and cultural units.
In 1300, as at the beginning of the Christian era and as today, the great majority of the inahbitants of Europe spoke languages of the Indo-European group. Spanish, Welsh, Dutch, Lithuanian, Serbian and Greek, different as they may seem, are all of this family. The languages of the Romance peoples, of the Celts, Teutons, Balts, Slavs, Albanians and Greeks have a common basic accidence and syntax, and a vocabulary which in its essentials has a common origin.
One of the oldest of Indo-European languages is Albanian, the direct descendant of ancient Illyrian. Though Albania did not exist as a state in 1300 the language was spoken over a wide area in the south-western Balkans by descendants of the Illyrians who had survived Roman, Slav and Byzantine conquests in the precipitous valleys of the rivers which flow into the southern Adriatic. They were nominally subject to Serbian, Bulgarian or Greek rulers, but in fact lived a life of primitive independence. The Greek-speaking peoples also had lived in their present home for well over two thousand years and at the beginning of this period Greek was spoken and written all round the coasts and in the islands of the Aegean Sea, in Greece, southern Macedonia and Thrace, in Crete and Cyprus as well as in the coastal parts of Asia Minor, and in parts of Southern Italy. Closely allied philologically within the Indo-European family was the group of languages derived from Latin, the Romance languages, which were spoken in those parts of the former Roman empire which had been thoroughly Romanized: Italy, Sicily, Spain, Portugal and France. There had survived too in south-eastern Europe among the people who had adopted Latin or who were descended from Roman colonists and legionaries, pockets of pastoral people commonly known as Vlachs who still spoke dialects that were basically Latin. The Vlachs constituted considerable groups in Macedonia, Croatia, Serbia and Bulgaria. Being shepherds they were mobile and were already migrating across the Danube into Transylvania, Walachia (to which they gave their name) and Moldavia, where, it may well be, they found descendants of the Romanized Dacians who also had preserved their Vlach or Rumanian language.
The westernmost of the Indo-European groups was that of the Celts. The Celtic languages, which on the eve of the Christian era had extended over nearly half of Europe, had been swamped in large areas of Spain, Switzerland, the Rhineland, France, and the British Isles by the invasion of Latin and Teutonic speech, but Celtic was still the living language of Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, Ireland, the Isle of Man and the western parts of Scotland.
In the north-eastern half of Europe also the Indo-European element predominated. In this area there were three important branches of the family: Teutonic, Baltic and Slavonic, all fairly closely akin. The Teutonic languages were spread over a wide area and had assumed a variety of local forms: Icelandic, English, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish, low German (including Flemish and Dutch), southern or 'high' German, and various German dialects spoken in Luxemburg, Alsace and Switzerland. The Baltic language group is one of the oldest branches of the Indo-Germanic family. Its members were Old Prussian, Lithuanian and Latvian. The first was already being suppressed by the German speech of the Teutonic knights who had conquered Prussia in the thirteenth century, but it did not finally disappear until the seventeenth. The Slavonic group of languages covered a larger part of Europe than any other, though by 1300 the eastward flowing tide of German conquest and colonization was already killing Slavonic speech in north-east Germany, in Pomerania and in the towns of Silesia. Nevertheless Slavonic was still dominant in the kingdoms of Poland and Bohemia (where it is called Czech), in Lusatia and northern Hungary (Slovak), in Volhynia, Podlesia and Galicia and in the Russian principalities. Southern forms of Slavonic were the speech of the Slovenes of Carniola, of the Croats, Serbs, Bosnians, Montenegrins, Bulgarians and of most of the inhabitants of Macedonia.
Though most of Europe in the later Middle Ages was inhabited by people enjoying a common Indo-European kinship of language and to some indefinable extent of race, a large part of it was already the home of peoples of very different origin and speech. These had all come, some perhaps ten thousand years earlier, some very recently, from that part of Asia which lies between the Ural and Altai mountains. The oldest inhabitants of Europe stemming from this Uralic origin are the so-called Finno-Ugrians. It seems that their remote ancestors had crossed into eastern and northern Europe soon after the land had become habitable after the last retreat of the ice, some 11,000 years before Christ. They had settled, very sparsely, in eastern, northern and central Russia and in Lapland and northern Scandinavia. In the early Middle Ages the east-Slavonic tribes had diminished Finnish territory by their settlement in central and eastern Russia so that by 1300 the Finnish peoples were confined to the east-Baltic areas of Finland, Estonia and Livonia, and to large ethnic islands in northern and eastern Russia. Early in the ninth century a group of Finno-Ugrian tribes, later known as the Magyars, had wandered off from their home in eastern Russia, stayed for a time on the north coast of the Black Sea, and thence had crossed the Carpathians into the Hungarian plain, where they ultimately settled down amid the Slavonic peoples they found there. These Magyars, speaking their Finno-Ugrian language, retained their identity in the multiracial Hungarian state which they built up in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
Also ultimately of Uralic origin, and therefore very remotely akin to the Finns and Magyars, were the Turkish-speaking inhabitants of southern Russia, the accumulation of many layers of invading Turkic nomads: Huns, Khazars, Pechenegs, Cumans (whom the Russians called Polovtsians) and on the top of them the latest arrivals from Asia, the Mongols of the Golden Horde, who in 1300 were directly or indirectly the overlords of most of Russia. On the doorstep of Europe in Asia Minor were other Turkish tribes under the upstart chief Osman who were soon to renew that Asiatic assault on Europe from which the Arabs had desisted in the eighth century.
Three smaller ethnic groups remain to be mentioned to complete the picture. First, everywhere in the Spanish peninsula but dominating the south-east corner were the Muslim descendants of the successive waves of invaders from Africa: the Semitic Arabs, the Berbers and the Moors. Secondly, over a large area on both sides of the western Pyrenees, much more extensive than it is today, dwelt the Basques. whose language is pre-Indo-European, and is therefore the most ancient in Europe. Thirdly, and of great importance were the Semitic, Hebrew-speaking Jews, of whom there were two distinct branches: the Sephardic Jews of Hebrew descent living in all the countries of western and central Europe except England, whence Edward I had recently expelled them, and the east European Jews, the Ashkenazi, of mixed Hebrew, Khazar and Slav descent, whose homes were mostly in southern and western Russia.
Linguistic boundaries corresponded even less precisely with political boundaries at this time than they do today. There were many isolated pockets of alien speech, such as those of Germans in northern Italy, Transylvania, Slovakia and Little Poland, of Cumans in central Hungary, of Armenians in Galicia in southern Poland, and the Finnish speaking Mordvinians and Cheremesh in Russia.
It has also to be remembered that almost no European vernacular language was yet standardized. Northern, southern and south- western Englishmen still spoke dialects which could be mutually unintelligible. In France the Langue d'Oil and the Langue d'Oc were as different as High and Low German; the varieties of Italian and Sicilian were (and are still) numerous, and none had the precedence until Dante gave it to Tuscan. It was to be one of the most important cultural features of the centuries discussed in this book that in England, France and Italy one of the dialects was emerging as the national language.
Against the multiplicity of vernaculars it is necessary to set the existence of Latin. Latin was still a living language in western Europe. The language of the Bible and of the ritual of the Church, Latin was learned by all clergy, although for many in a fairly rudimentary form, and was currently written and spoken by all educated men. It was the language of administration, of practically all high-level diplomacy, as well as of serious literary composition. Since it was a living language it had departed considerably from classical norms and, when spoken, it varied somewhat in pronunciation from one area to another. But, unlike the vernaculars, it was sometimes systematically taught and bound the literate together. In similar fashion, though on a smaller scale, Greek acted as a link in eastern Europe.