Note 342 — Chapter VII · —Geographical Boundaries

Any geographical feature which, like this, presents a practically uninhabitable area, forms a scientific boundary, not only because it holds apart the two neighboring peoples and thereby reduces the contact and friction which might be provocative of hostilities, but also because it lends protection against attack. This motive, as also the zone character of all boundaries, comes out conspicuously in the artificial border wastes surrounding primitive tribes and states in the lower status of civilization. The early German tribes depopulated their borders in a wide girdle, and in this wilderness permitted no neighbors to reside. The width of this zone indicated the valor and glory of the state, but was also valued as a means of protection against unexpected attack.342 Cæsar learned that between the Suevi and Cherusci tribes dwelling near the Rhine "silvam esse ibi, infinita magnitudine quae appelletur Bacenis; hanc longe introrsus pertinere et pro nativo muro objectam Cheruscos ab Suevis Suevosque ab Cheruscis injuriis incursionibusque prohibere."343 The same device appears among the Huns. When Attila was pressing upon the frontier of the Eastern Empire in 448 A.D., his envoys sent to Constantinople demanded that the Romans should not cultivate a belt of territory, a hundred miles wide and three hundred miles long, south of the Danube, but maintain this as a March.344 When King Alfonso I. (751-764 A.D.) of mountain Asturias began the reconquest of Spain from the Saracens, he adopted the same method of holding the foe at arm's length. He seized Old Castile as far as the River Duoro, but the rest of the province south of that stream he converted into a waste boundary by transporting the Christians thence to the north side, and driving the Mohammedans yet farther southward.345 Similarly Xenophon found that the Armenian side of the River Kentrites, which formed the boundary between the Armenian plains and the highlands of Karduchia, was unpeopled and destitute of villages for a breadth of fifteen miles, from fear of the marauding Kurds.346 In the eastern Sudan, especially in that wide territory along the Nile-Congo watershed occupied by the Zandeh, Junker found the frontier wilderness a regular institution owing to the exposure of the border districts in the perennial intertribal feuds.347 The same testimony comes from Barth,348 Boyd Alexander,349 Speke,350 and other explorers in the Sudan and the neighboring parts of equatorial Africa.