European Plain

• 1. Introduction

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  The European Plain stretches from the Pyrenees mountains in the west to the Ural Mountains in the east, spanning an almost unbroken corridor of flat land across an entire continent. No mountain range interrupts its path. No natural wall slows an army crossing it. That single geographic fact has shaped the history of Europe for centuries. How did one landform become the breadbasket of a continent, the highway of its invaders, and home to its most consequential battles? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. Vast and Low

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  Most of the Great European Plain sits below 500 feet, or 152 metres, in elevation. That near-universal flatness runs across parts of Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, and Kazakhstan. In Western Europe the plain narrows, mostly within 200 miles across in the northern portion, but it broadens dramatically as it pushes east into Western Russia. The plain is divided by convention into the North European Plain and the East European Plain. That subdivision is historical rather than geomorphological; the Russian portion is also known simply as the Russian Plain, covering almost all of European Russia. Coastlines define three of its edges: the Atlantic's marginal seas to the west and northwest, Arctic seas to the northeast, and the Black Sea to the southeast.

• 3. Rivers and Waters

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  Cutting across the plain are some of Europe's most important rivers. The Loire, the Rhine, and the Vistula flow through the western reaches. Farther east, the Northern Dvina and the Daugava carry water northward into Arctic and Baltic seas, while the Volga, the Don, and the Dnieper drain southward across European Russia. The plain also touches a remarkable collection of large bodies of water: the Baltic Sea, the Bay of Biscay, the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, the English Channel, the Gulf of Bothnia, the North Sea, the Sea of Azov, and the White Sea. Few landforms on Earth are flanked by so many distinct seas. The Białowieża Forest, which straddles the Belarus-Poland border, offers a hint of what the plain's interior once looked like before those rivers fed the farms that replaced the trees.

• 4. A Forest Consumed

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  Before human settlement, the European Plain was largely forested. Clearance over centuries stripped most of that original cover, turning woodland into agricultural land on a continental scale. Białowieża Forest is one of the last and largest remnants of that primeval landscape, surviving on the border between Belarus and Poland. Today the plain is the most agriculturally productive region in Europe. Its ecology falls mainly within the temperate broadleaf and mixed forest biome, though the far eastern portion grades into the Eurasian Steppe ecoregion. Specific ecological zones within it include Atlantic mixed forests, Baltic mixed forests, East European forest steppe, and the Pontic-Caspian steppe. The European Union's Common Agricultural Policy, which governs agricultural production across member states, is heavily shaped by conditions on the plain.

• 5. Highway for Armies

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  France was invaded through the plain three times after 1870. Two of those invasions successfully occupied the country, in 1870 and 1940. The reason is geographic: the large, uninterrupted flatland offers very little natural protection against military movement. Armies can maneuver freely, and neighboring countries are accessible without crossing any mountain barrier. Russia and Poland have faced the same exposure across their own heartlands for just as long. Historically the plain has been the site of countless battles and invasions precisely because open terrain makes aggression easier and defense harder. The plain's role as a geopolitical pressure point has not faded; trade and industry remain concentrated there within the European Union, and it has also grown into a major center for renewable energy production.