À La Mort Subite (Sudden Death) is one of the most celebrated cafes in Brussels and was a regular haunt of Jacques Brel, Belgium’s most influential cultural export. Singing theatrically in French, chain smoking and vulnerable, Brel sold millions of records, influencing many English-language singers, including David Bowie, Scott Walker and Neil Hannon. A product of this bilingual country, Brel was the quintessential Bruxellois, a son of this fascinating city which lies on the cultural fault-line that divides the Germanic and Latin worlds. Sitting in À La Mort Subite , with its heavy northern Teutonic beer list and subtle French classic dishes, that sense of being on the border of two great civilisations is impossible to escape.

Europe, or at least western Europe, is the fusion of the Germanic and the Latin worlds. The result of the fifth-century Visigoth invasion of western Europe, it is the place where the German tribes and the Roman Empire collided. This Germano-Latin mix, the basis of what we term western Christendom, has been one of the world’s most potent and consequential cultural hybrids. The German and the Latin worlds have defined Europe, fuelling the great European maritime expansion, while imposing on the rest of the world ideologies manufactured and refined in the Germano-Roman world. Missionary Christianity, along with capitalism, mercantilism and socialism, are all products of Germano-Roman DNA.

Along the way, ancient cultural divisions between the Visigoths and the Romans simmered beneath the surface. Language and cultural demarcations never entirely disappeared. Within Christendom, the cultural divide erupted with the Reformation. Sectarian boundaries were redrawn more or less along the frontiers of the old western Roman Empire. The Goths became Protestants, the Latins remained Roman. Over the subsequent centuries, western Europe evolved from observant Christianity to the Enlightenment and towards secularism.........

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