History of Europe

For links to the history of individual countries in Europe see the end of this article.

The origins Neanderthals settled Europe long before the emergence of modern humans, Homo sapiens. The earliest appearance of modern people in Europe has been dated to 35,000 B.C[?]. Evidence of permanent settlement dates from 7,000 B.C.

The first well-known civilization in Europe was that of the Minoans of the island of Crete and the Achaeans in the adjacent parts of Greece, starting at the beginning of the 2nd millennium B.C. Around the same time, the Celts spread over most of the interior as far as Iberic Peninsula (in our days Spain and Portugal), and later Anatolia. As they did not use a written language, knowledge of them is piecemeal. The Romans encountered them and recorded a great deal about them; these records and the results of archaeological digs form our primary understanding of this extremely influential culture. The Celts posed a formidable, if disorganized, competition to the Roman state, that later colonized and conquered much of the southern portion of Europe.

The Greeks At the end of the Bronze Age the older Greek kingdoms collapsed and a brilliant new civilization grew up in their place. The Hellenic civilization took the form of a collection of city-states (the most important being Athens and Sparta), many having vastly differing types of government and cultures, including what are more-or-less unprecedented developments in various governmental forms, philosophy, science, politics, sports, theater and music. The Hellenic city-states founded a large number of colonies on the shores of the Black Sea and all over the Mediterranean sea, Asia Minor, Sicily and Southern Italy, but in the 4th century B.C. their internal wars made them an easy prey for king Philip II of Macedonia. The campaigns of his son Alexander the Great spread Greek culture into Persia, Egypt and India, but also favoured contact with the older learnings of those countries, opening up a new period of developments, known as Hellenism.

Rome Much of Greek learning was assimilated by the nascent Roman state as it expanded outward from Italy, taking advantage of its enemies' inability to unite: the only real challenge to Roman ascent came from the Phoenician colony of Carthage, but its defeat in the end of the 3rd century B.C. marked the start of Roman hegemony. First governed by kings, then as a senatorial republic (see Roman republic), Rome finally became an empire at the end of the 1st century B.C., under Augustus and his authoritarian successors. The Roman Empire had its centre in the Mediterranean Sea, controlling all the countries on its shores; the northern border was marked by the Rhine and Danube rivers; under emperor Trajan (2nd century A.D.) the empire reached its maximum expansion, including England, Rumania and parts of Mesopotamia. The empire brought peace, civilization and an efficient centralized government to the subject territories, but in the 3rd century A.D. a series of civil wars undermined its economic and social strength. In the 4th century, the emperors Diocletian and Constantine were able to slow down the process of decline by splitting the empire into a Western and an Eastern part. Whereas Diocletian severely persecuted Christianity, Constantine declared an official end to state-sponsored persecution of Christians in 324 with the Edict of Milan[?], thus setting the stage for the empire to later become officially Christian in about 380 (which would cause the Church to become an important institution).

Early Middle Ages Western Europe emerged as the site of a distinct civilization after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century, as barbarian invasions separated it from the rest of the Mediterranean, where the Eastern Roman Empire (a.k.a. Byzantine Empire) survived for another millennium. In the 7th century the Arab expansion brought Islamic cultures to the southern Mediterranean shores (from Turkey to Sicily and Spain), further enlarging the differences between the various Mediterranean civilizations. Huge amounts of technology and learning were lost, trade languished and people returned to local agrarian communities. Feudalism replaced the centralized Roman administration. The only institution surviving the collapse of the Roman Empire was the Church, which preserved part of the Roman cultural inheritance and remained the only source of learning at least until the 13th century; the bishop of Rome, known as the Pope, became the leader of the western church (in the east his supremacy was never accepted).

The Holy Roman Empire emerged around 800 AD, as Charlemagne, king of the Franks, subdued western Germany, large parts of Italy and chunks of surrounding countries; he received substantial help from an alliance with the Pope, who wanted to cut the remaining ties with the Byzantine Empire; in this way the domains of the Pope became an independent state in central Italy.

The subsequent period, ending around 1000 A.D., saw the further growth of feudalism, which weakened the Holy Roman Empire and the development of the Church as a major power.

Later Middle Ages Early signs of the rebirth of western civilization began to appear in the 11th century as trade started again in Italy, leading to the economic and cultural growth of independent city states such as Venice and Florence; at the same time, nation-states began to take form in places such as France, England and Spain, although the process of their formation (usually marked by rivalry between the monarchy, the aristocratic feudal lords and the church) actually took several centuries. On the other hand, the Holy Roman Empire, essentially based in Germany and Italy, further fragmented into a myriad of feudal principalities or small city states, whose subjection to the emperor was only formal.

One of the largest catastrophes to have hit Europe was the Black Death. There were numerous outbreaks, but the most severe in the mid-1300s is estimated to have killed a third of Europe's population. (? keep it ?)

The conventional end of the Middle Ages is usually associated with the fall of Constantinople and of the Byzantine Empire to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. The Turks made the city (with the new name of Istanbul) the capital of their Ottoman Empire, which lasted until 1919 and also included Egypt, Syria and most of the Balkans.

Renaissance and Reformation In the 15th century, at the end of the Middle Ages, powerful nation states[?] had appeared. Contrariwise, the Church was losing much of its power because of corruption, internal conflicts, and the spread of culture leading to the artistic, philosophical, scientific and technological improvements of the Renaissance era.

The new national states were frequently in a state of political flux and war. In particular, after Martin Luther started the Reformation in 1518, wars of politics and religion ravaged the continent: the schism of the dominant western church was to have major political, social and cultural implications for Europe. What became the split between Catholicism and Protestantism was particularly pronounced in England (where the king Henry VIII severed ties with Rome and proclaimed himself head of the church), and in Germany (where the Reformation united the various Protestant princes against the Catholic Hapsburg emperors).

Colonial expansion The numerous wars did not prevent the new states from exploring and conquering wide portions of the world, particularly in Asia (Siberia) and in the newly-discovered America. In the early 16th century Spain and Portugal, who led the way in geographical exploration, were the first states to set up colonies in South America and trade stations on the shores of Africa and Asia, but they were soon followed by France, England and the Netherlands.

Colonial expansion proceeded in the following centuries (with some setbacks, such as the American Revolution and the wars of independence in many South American colonies). Spain had control of a great deal of South America and the Philippines; Britain took the whole of Australia, New Zealand, and India, and large parts of Africa and North America; France held proto-Canada and part of India (both lost to England in 1763), Indochina and large parts of Africa; the Netherlands gained the East Indies (later known as Indonesia) and islands in the Caribbean; Portugal obtained Brazil and several territories in Africa and Asia; and later, powers like Germany, Belgium, Italy, Russia, the U.S.A. and Japan acquired further colonies.

The 16th, 17th and 18th century Concise Overview of the Period:

France: Wars of Religion/Bourbon Dynasty

Scotland: Mary Queen of Scots

England: Absolutism and Constitutionalism

Commercial Revolution

International Law

The French Revolution and Napoleon At the end of the 18th century the refusal of the king Louis XVI (endorsed by the nobility and the clergy) to share his political powers with the so-called Third Estate led to the 1789 French Revolution, a significant attempt to create a new form of government based on the principles of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité (freedom, equality and brotherhood). The king was executed, France was proclaimed a Republic and a sort of democratic government was established. In the subsequent turmoil (associated with the coalition of most European monarchies waging war against republican France) general Napoleon Bonaparte took power. In the many wars of the Napoleonic Era, he repeatedly defeated Austria (whose emperor was forced to resign the title of Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire), Russia, England, Prussia and other powers. After being proclaimed French emperor in 1804, he was finally defeated in 1815 at Waterloo.

The 19th century After the defeat of revolutionary France, the other great powers tried to restore the situation which existed before 1789. Their efforts were unable to stop the spread of revolutionary movements: the middle classes had been deeply influenced by the ideals of democracy of the French revolution; on the other hand, the Industrial Revolution brought important economical and social changes, and the lower classes started to be influenced by Socialist, Communist and Anarchistic ideas, especially those summarized by Karl Marx in the Manifesto of the Communist Party[?]. Further instability came from the formation of several nationalist movements (in Germany, Italy, Poland etc.), seeking national unification and/or liberation from foreign rule. As a result, the period between 1815 and 1871 saw a large number of revolutionary attempts and independence wars: even if the revolutionaries were often defeated, in 1871 most European states had become constitutional (rather than absolute) monarchies, and Germany and Italy had developed into nation states.

Early 20th century: the World Wars After the relatively peaceful belle epoque, the rivalry between European powers exploded in 1914, when World War I started. On one side were Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Turkey (the Central Powers), while on the other side stood Serbia and the Triple Entente[?] - the loose alliance of France, Britain and Russia, which were joined by Italy in 1915 and by the United States in 1917. Despite the defeat of Russia in 1917 (the war was one of the major causes of the Russian Revolution, leading to the formation of the communist Soviet Union), the Entente finally prevailed at the end of 1918.

In the Treaty of Versailles (1919) the winners imposed hard conditions on Germany and decided to form a number of new national states (such as Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia) in eastern Europe out of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire, with the aim of supporting national self-determination. In the following decades, the fear of Communism and the economic Depression post-1929 led to the rise of extreme governments - Fascist or Nazi - in Italy (1922), Germany (1933), Spain (after a civil war ending in 1939) and other countries such as Hungary.

Realising the impossibility of communism in one isolated country, the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin planned wars in Europe and Asia. In the 1930s he supported the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany. In September 1939 they together divided Poland - the start of the invasion marks the beginning of World War II. In 1940 Stalin trained his forces in extreme conditions by attacking Finland (Winter War). Attack in less extreme conditions against a weakened Europe was planned to begin in July 1941. Some weeks earlier Germany declared war on the Soviet Union. Despite enormous losses the Soviet Union survived. With good diplomacy (making alliances with the U.S.A. and the rest of world by proving communism preferable to Nazism) and endless internal resources, the Soviet Union contrived to defend itself (up to battle of Stalingrad in 1942) and then to conquer half of Europe. Allied forces won in North Africa and invaded Italy in 1943 and France in 1944. In the spring of 1945 the Soviets and the other Allies invaded Germany itself in the east and the west respectively; Hitler committed suicide and Germany surrendered in early May. The last Axis power, Japan, surrendered in August 1945, after two atomic bombs destroyed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Late 20th century: the Cold War World War I and especially World War II ended the pre-eminent position of western Europe. The map of Europe was redrawn and divided as it became the principal zone of contention in the Cold War between the two newly emergent world powers, the capitalistic United States and the communist Soviet Union. The U.S.A. placed western Europe (Britain, France, Italy, West Germany, Spain etc.) under their sphere of influence, establishing the NATO alliance as a protection against a possible Soviet invasion; the Soviet Union claimed eastern Europe (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, East Germany) and formed the Warsaw Pact. Europe was divided by a "Iron Curtain". This situation lasted until 1989, when the weakening of the Soviet Union led to glasnost and the ending of the division of Europe - Soviet satellites were free to remove Communist regimes (and the two Germanies were able to re-unify). In 1991 the Soviet Union itself collapsed, splitting into several states (the main one remaining the Russian Federation) and removing communists from most governments.

After the end of World War II, western Europe slowly began a process of political and economic integration, desiring to unite Europe and prevent another war. This process resulted eventually in the development of organisations such as the European Union, a process which continues today (2003). See also the History of the European Union.

Histories of present-day territories

• History of Albania
• History of Andorra
• History of Austria
• History of Belarus
• History of Belgium
• History of Bosnia and Herzegovina
• History of Bulgaria
• History of Croatia
• History of the Czech Republic
• History of Cyprus
• History of Denmark
• History of Estonia
• History of Finland
• History of France
• History of Germany
• History of Greece
• History of Hungary
• History of Iceland
• History of Ireland
• History of Italy
• History of Latvia
• History of Liechtenstein
• History of Lithuania
• History of Luxembourg
• History of Malta
• History of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia
• History of Moldova
• History of Monaco
• History of the Netherlands
• History of Norway
• History of Poland
• History of Portugal
• History of Romania
• History of Russia
• History of Slovakia
• History of San Marino
• History of Slovenia
• History of Spain
• History of Sweden
• History of Switzerland
• History of Turkey
• History of Ukraine
• History of the United Kingdom
• History of the Vatican City
• History of Yugoslavia

* Iceland is culturally and politically European, but geographically part of no continent. Iceland is member of the EFTA, and EEA, not of the EU.

* Greenland is politically European (i.e., belonging to Denmark), but it is geographically part of no continent. Greenland left the EEC in 1982.

** Although a small portion of Turkey's territory is in the continent of Europe, it is not clear whether Turkey is culturally European. Some say it is, and some not. Turkey is currently in talks to join the EU.

History of Europe/Towns - populations of cities in 1700 and 1800.