Why Northern Europe? Victor Davis Hanson answers:
I received a lot of questions the last few weeks about why Mediterranean peoples in Italy and Greece who crafted Western civilization eventually faded before Northern Europeans (tribal barbarians during a thousand years of Greco-Roman civilization), and especially Anglo-American culture.A couple of observations. First, and most obviously, northern Europeans derived their own Western culture only through the classical inheritance. Second, by the 7th century Islam was on the move, and the Mediterranean and Eastern European states were a sort of buffer belt for the next 1,000 years—as the once classical bastions like northern Egypt, Ionia, Greece, Sicily, Cyprus, and Crete were serially overran. Third, geography was turned upside down, as Mare Nostrum became a sort of dead-end pond, while Spain, Portugal, France, England, and Holland had access to the Atlantic, and with it a direct route to India and China, and the Americas. Fourth, England was spared much of the internecine squabbling on the continent, developed a sort of cosmopolitanism and globalized presence as an island and imperial sea-people, and was able to develop a stronger sense of Protestantism, setting the stage for an Anglo-American global ascendancy.