We will begin our catalogue of civilizations here, describing the civilization closest to home of which we, dear reader, are a part. This civilization was born within the borders of the Frankish Empire12 , under the Merovingian and Carolingian dynasties, when the Gallo-Roman provincials intermingled and the hitherto West Germanic barbarians settled. These two linguistic groups, bumping into each other along the now abandoned limes romanum along the course of the Rhine, thus gave birth to a civilisation that shaped the face of more than just the European continent. The Germanic conquerors pushed the linguistic frontier westwards, the Germanic Alsatians, Lorrainians, Rhinelanders and Flemings living on its western bank. This line of contact between the Gallo-Roman and West Germanic dialects became the primary axis of our civilization, linking the Eternal City on the Tiber, once the seat of power in Rome, but by then important not as the seat of secular power, but as the seat of ecclesiastical authority, the Roman Pontiff, across the idyllic hills of Tuscany and the fertile plains of Lombardy, before crossing the Alpine passes through Swabia and Lorraine into the Rhineland and Flanders. This core closely overlaps with the countries that later stood at the origin of the precursor of European integration - France , West Germany, Benelux and Italy.

And indeed, the bearers of this civilisation were called Franks by peoples throughout the world: they were called Phrangoi in Constantinople, al-Ifranj among the Arabs, farangi among the Persians, and similar forms in India or Ethiopia. Many also call this civilization Western, which is slightly misleading, since it implies the existence of a kind of unified Eastern civilization, which includes such disparate extremities of the world as Russia, the Islamic lands, India, or China, while the Frankish civilisation has at more in common with Russia than the rest of these extremities have in common with each other.

The final division of the Frankish Empire after the peace of Verdun and Prum eventually led to the division of the empire into a quite distinctly Romanized West Frankish Empire, consisting of the by-then kingdoms of Neustria north of the Loire, Aquitaine south of the Loire, and Septimania in the area later known as the Languedoc, to a distinctly Germanic East Frankish Empire, consisting of the Bavarian, Swabian, Frankish and Saxon duchies, and the Middle Frankish Empire, linking Lorraine (in the valleys of the Maas, Moselle and lower Rhine), Upper and Lower Burgundy between the Rhône and the Alps, the kingdom of Italy, and the Patrimonium Sancti Petri, linking the environs of Rome with the city of Ravenna on the Adriatic coast, which became the basis of the later Papal States.

The fate of the territories of this Middle Frankish Empire changed over the course of history - they were all part of the Holy Roman Empire when it was founded, but during the reign of Napoleon almost all of these territories in turn came under French rule, and from the East Frankish Empire as outlined in the Treaty of Verdun the later outlines of the Confederation of the Rhine dictated by Napoleon can be traced, with the exception of Carinthia and the Ostmark, which remained under Habsburg rule.

From this nucleus, Frankish civilization expanded in all directions. In the south-west, Charlemagne founded the Spanish Marches, which, together with Navarre and Asturias, led a tenacious Reconquista to bring the Iberian Peninsula under the Christian flag and thus annex to Frankish civilisation the specific periphery of La Hispanidad. In the north-west, the British Isles were rejoined with the establishment of the Archbishopric of Canterbury and especially after the victory of William the Conqueror in 1066 at the Battle of Hastings. Northwards into Scandinavia, following the baptism of the descendants of its Viking raiders. Northeastward into the Baltic lands by the sword crusades of the Order of the Teutonic Knights against the Baltic, Polabian, and Finnic tribes. Eastward by the adoption of Latin Christianity by the kingdoms of the Intermarium: Poland, Hungary and Croatia, which later, in the face of the Ottoman threat, would become the true antemurale Christianitatis, the bastion of Christianity. Southeastwards into the Levant during the Crusades, where Crusader states were established in Jerusalem, Tripoli, Antioch, Edessa, Cilicia and Cyprus, and later on other Greek islands during the Frankokratia, notably Rhodes. At the time of its creation Outremer, literally Overseas, was the only periphery of Frankish civilization that did not directly border in any way with the other areas belonging to it. However, since the fleets of Italian city-states such as Venice, Pisa, and Genoa dominated the waves of the Mediterranean, this was no obstacle. The Outremer was thus indeed a frontier society par excellence, their subjects belonging to other civilizations: there were Armenians, Antiochian Greeks (Rūm), Maronites, Syriac Christians, Muslims and Jews, as well as settlers from France and Italy.

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Today the only remnant of this crusader Outremer is Malta, perhaps the Lebanese Maronites3 . And southward to the by-then Rhomaic Mezzogiorno in southern Italy, where the Norman Hautevilles founded the Sicilian kingdoms, also to Sardinia, and even to the short-lived Norman kingdom of Africa sprawling over the territory of the eponymous former Roman province

The eastern frontier of Frankish civilization separates it from that of the Russian civilisation, namely with Finland, Estonia and Latvia on its western side and the Russian Federation on its eastern side, with no significant ethnic enclaves on either side. The border of these civilizations continues through Belarus, which is mostly on its eastern side, but the Polish community around Hrodna (polonicé Grodno) belongs inherently to the Frankish civilization, as do their compatriots around Vilnius (polonicé Wilno). The eastern Frankish civilization continues further along the Bug River, along the Polish-Belarusian and Polish-Ukrainian borders on the Wolyń section, but the Greek-Catholic former Austro-Hungarian kingdom of Galicia (Halyč) with its metropolis Lviv (polonicé Lwów, teutonicé Lemberg) and the northeastern edge of Hungary's Subcarpathian Ruthenia, where the indigenous population has retained a Ruthenian ethnic identity, also belong to the Frankish civilization. The civilisational frontier continues on through Romania, with the entire historical regions of Maramures, Bihor (Crisana) and Banat, as well as Transylvania, historically belonging to the Frankish civilization, while the bearers of the Frankish civilizational identity were mainly the Hungarians and the ethnographic group of Székelys in eastern Transylvania, as well as the Transylvanian Saxons. Most of the ethnic Romanians in the Carpathian Basin today profess Orthodox Christianity, although historically the northern part of their settlement was affiliated to the Greek Catholic Church, which, however, under the communist yoke, was almost entirely merged with the Orthodox Church.

Historically, the civilisational frontier continued along the Danube and Sava rivers, separating Serbia in the narrower sense from Vojvodina and Bosnia from Slavonia and Croatia proper4, but nowadays the civilisational frontier is mainly associated with the ethnic frontier: with Hungarians (and other ethnic groups in the Banat who settled there under the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and Croats on the western side and Serbs and Bosniaks on the eastern side. Montenegro is now firmly part of the Orthodox Balkans, although in the early Middle Ages, under the name of Zeta, it was considering converting to the Catholic faith.

What is the Frankish civilization's own worldview? Oswald Spengler does not hesitate to claim Goethe's Faust as the primary archetype of this civilisation5. Carroll Quigley defines this civilisation with a self-consciousness that is "optimistic, moderate, hierarchical, democratic, individualistic, yet social and dynamic6.

In the search for the roots of this civilisation, one hears on every side the thesis of the three sources of our civilisation, the three pillars that gave birth to this civilisation. These are Rome, Athens and Jerusalem7 , which symbolically embody the combination of Roman law, Greek (rational) philosophy and the monotheistic Jewish religion.

On closer inspection, we come to see that the Roman and Greek elements merge into a common ancient element, with different emphases, the difference between Greek and Roman being in effect the difference between Spengler's Kultur and Zivilisation, between organic creativity and mechanical efficiency.

With such a simple definition, the contribution of the hitherto barbarians behind the limes romanus to the common ethos of Frankish civilization is quite overlooked. They are, of course, the Germanic tribes with their quite proper idea of freedom.

As Franz Borkenau writes, at the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire, Europe was divided into roughly three cultural areas: the declining Roman West, the centre of a cultural cyclone; the West Germanic tribes, soon to be culturally disrupted by contact with the crumbling, dying Roman civilisation8; and the Irish-Northern area, the harbour of a living barbarian culture of heroic moralism. As David Richardson summarizes, much historical evidence points to the source of the distinctive Western traits of individualism and radical free will 9. Their origins are in the Irish-Northern culture of the early Christian centuries, or, in short, in the Irish monastic culture. These first manifested themselves in the doctrine of Pelagianism with the fullness of individual responsibility10.

Toynbee understood this Irish and Scandinavian element as abortive attempts to create an independent civilization. In fact, it became one of the key elements that stood at the birth of Frankish civilization. It is true that the various historical elements that make up any civilisation are initially more or less independent of each other11 .

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