Note 1211 — Chapter XV · —Mountain Barriers And Their Passes

Where mountains fail to check, they deflect the historical movement. The wall of the Carpathians, bulwark of Central Europe, split the westward moving Slav hordes in the 6th century, diverting one southward up the Danube Valley to the Eastern Alps, and turning one northward along the German lowlands.1211 The northward expansion of the Romans, rebuffed by the high double wall of the Central Alps, was bent to the westward over the Maritime, Cottine and Savoy Alps, where the barrier offered the shortest and easiest transmontane routes. Hence Germany received the elements of Mediterranean culture indirectly through Gaul, second-hand and late. The ancient Helvetians, moving southward from northern Switzerland into Gaul, took a route skirting the western base of the Alps by the gap at Geneva, and thus threatened Roman Provincia. Cæsar's campaigns into northern Gaul were given direction by the massive Central Plateau of France.1212 The rugged and infertile area of the Catskills long retarded the westward movement in colonial New York and deflected it northward through the Mohawk depression, which therefore had its long thin line of settlements when the neighboring Catskills were still a "bare spot."