History of Europe

From prehistoric to modern times, Europe has been occupied by numerous peoples and nations. The following summary will emphasize only those events, developments, trends, and individuals that have been responsible for decisive transitions or transformations in Europe through the ages. The history sections of the articles on European countries contain more detailed data on the genesis, growth, and present state of continental civilization. These sections also refer the reader to a wide range of articles dealing with broader aspects of European history. Moreover, a number of articles contain references to other related entries on continental affairs. Further reading on specific periods of European history will provide greater understanding of the continent’s development.

Prehistoric and Ancient Times

Modern humans (Homo sapiens) first appeared in Europe during the late Paleolithic Era (the Old Stone Age). Hunters and gatherers, they left behind notable examples of art, dating from approximately 32,000 to 10,000 years ago, that have been found in more than 200 caves, mostly in Spain and France (see Cave Dwellers). Some 10,000 years ago, at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch—the most recent of the Ice Ages—the climate began to improve and gradually approached that of the present. In time, Neolithic (New Stone Age) people developed agricultural economies that replaced hunting. During the 6th millennium bc, farming spread over most of western Europe. Some of these Neolithic cultures, beginning about 5000 bc, erected huge stone monuments (megaliths) either as grave structures or as memorials of notable events. Early Neolithic development was especially intense in the Danube and Balkan areas, in the so-called StarÄ?evo (near Belgrade in present-day Serbia) and Danubian cultures. In the southern Balkans the Sesklo culture (in Thessaly, ancient Greece) had developed complex proto-urban forms by 5000 bc. This in turn led to the Dimini culture (also in Thessaly), which was characterized by fortified villages. Excavations in the Balkans have shown that copper was in use in that area about 4000 bc, during the VinÄ?a culture (4500?-3000? bc). By this time, trade, especially in amber from the Baltic, was becoming more and more important. In central Europe (Bohemia, in what is now the Czech Republic) large deposits of copper and tin facilitated a bronze technology during the 3rd millennium bc. Typical royal or aristocratic burials of this period were covered by barrows or tumuli, but by the late 2nd millennium bc a change occurred; cremation then became common, and burial by urn (in urnfields) became the established custom.

Arrival of Indo-Europeans

Research has not clearly determined where the Indo-European languages, spoken on much of the modern continent, originated. Some scholars believe that the kurgan (barrow) culture that began north of the Black Sea about 2500 bc was early Indo-European. According to this theory, these Indo-Europeans spread to the Balkans, which they invaded, introducing horses to the region, about 2200 bc; then they spread to the rest of Europe. Therefore, the Middle Bronze Age peoples of the Balkans and central Europe may have spoken Indo-European languages. Except for the civilizations on Crete and in Greece during the 2nd millennium bc, most of Bronze Age Europe was preliterate.

The first major civilization to mature in Europe was that of Crete during the 2nd millennium bc. Called the Minoan Culture after the legendary King Minos, this Bronze Age society controlled the Aegean by 1600 bc (see Aegean Civilization). The date of the arrival of the first Indo-European invaders in Greece is controversial. Many scholars agree on approximately 1900 bc. By 1400 bc these Greeks, called Mycenaeans for their principal city, Mycenae, had conquered the Minoan realms. Mycenaean civilization had commercial contacts with the Middle East as well as Britain (for tin). After 1200 bc, however, Mycenaean society was almost totally destroyed. This was due to widespread fighting among the Mycenaean Greeks, with earthquakes probably causing additional damage. In the Greek Dark Age that followed, the Greeks learned to fashion tools and weapons of iron and the Iron Age began in Greece.

Iron Age Cultures

Elsewhere in Europe the population had begun to increase rapidly in the late Bronze Age. By the early Iron Age, beginning about 1000 bc, the tribes of the central European urnfield culture were expanding along the principal river routes, giving rise to such major groupings as the Celts and the Slavs, as well as Italic-speakers and Illyrians. In northern Italy the Villanovan Culture (about 1000-700 bc) became of major importance, and the similar Hallstatt Culture (8th century bc to 5th century bc) spread with the Celts through much of western Europe between the 7th and 4th centuries bc. The Celts were also identified with the La Tène Culture (450?-58 bc), which owed much to the Hallstatt. The Germanic Peoples began to expand from southern Scandinavia and the Baltic by 500 bc.

Supremacy of Greece

By 800 bc Greek civilization began to reemerge after the shock of the Dorian invasion, but in a form different from that of the Mycenaean one. This was due in considerable degree to the Phoenicians, who had been establishing trading posts in the Mediterranean and spreading elements of Middle Eastern civilization westward. From them the Greeks took the Phoenician alphabet, to which they added full vowels. In the 8th century bc the Greek city-states began to expand by means of colonization, especially in southern Italy, and by the following century Hellenic civilization was reaching maturity. Greek colonies had then been founded throughout the Mediterranean region, and the growth of trade among these settlements and with other peoples resulted in the spread of Greek culture. Most of these new Greek cities, although virtually independent, were bound by a common culture. They were aware of their Hellenic heritage and considered other peoples barbarians. Most ethnic groups in the western Mediterranean, including the Etruscans, who had supplanted the Villanovans, eagerly adopted an overlay of Greek culture. Most major urban centers in the area, Greek or not, progressed from monarchies to aristocracies to commercial oligarchies (plutocracies).

By the 5th century bc some Greek centers, such as Athens, had developed into democracies. At that time Greece came to be threatened by the expanding Persian Empire, founded in the previous century. All of Asia Minor was soon conquered by the Persians, and in 490 bc they attacked Greece. After the Persians had been decisively repelled (479 bc), democratic Athens emerged as the major power in the Greek world. An Athenian empire was established in the Aegean, hastening the economic and cultural integration of the region, and the 5th century bc became the golden age of classical Greek civilization. Athenian expansionist policies and old economic and political rivalries, however, caused the suicidal Peloponnesian War (431-404 bc), in which much of Greece was devastated, and wars among the Greek cities continued in the following century.

Macedonia, to the north of Greece, had not originally been part of the Greek world. By the 4th century bc, however, its ruling class had become Hellenized. Under Philip II, Macedonia conquered much of Greece, and his son, Alexander the Great, added the Persian Empire to these realms. After Alexander’s death, his successors divided the empire, with the result that the centers of gravity during the following period (known as Hellenistic) shifted to such cities as Alexandria in Egypt and Antioch in Syria. Both Macedonia and Greece were ultimately conquered by Rome during the 2nd century bc.

Ascendancy of Rome

Unlike Greece, Italy in the early Iron Age was fragmented among many ethnic and linguistic groups. Grafted onto earlier Neolithic cultures were several groups of Indo-Europeans who infiltrated northern Italy late in the 2nd millennium bc and subsequently spread through the peninsula. The most numerous of these groups was the Italic. A major Iron Age culture, that of the Villanovans, developed in the north and had an impact on surrounding regions. Probably during the 10th century bc the Etruscans, or at least their ruling class, migrated from Asia Minor. They settled in central and northern Italy and created a composite civilization consisting of Villanovan and eastern elements. To this was added a thick overlay of Greek civilization, including the alphabet, absorbed from the Greek colonies in the south.

About this time—the traditional date is 753 bc—Rome was founded on the Tiber River. The Romans were a Latin people belonging to the Italic group. At first a primitive village, Rome was occupied and civilized by the Etruscans until the end of the 6th century bc. After that the Romans began a conquest of the surrounding area, and by the early 4th century bc they had taken the important Etruscan city of Veii. After a temporary setback caused by invading Gauls (a tribe of the Celts), the Romans continued to absorb large parts of Italy; by the beginning of the 3rd century bc most of central and northern Italy had become Roman. Unlike the Greeks, the Romans tied together their domains by roads and granted full or partial citizenship to settlements outside Rome, a policy that eventually led to a more or less uniform language (Latin) and culture.

Further Expansion

In the so-called Pyrrhic War (280-271 bc) Rome gained control of Greek southern Italy and, by absorbing that area, became partly Hellenized. The conquest put Rome in direct rivalry with Carthage, an old Phoenician colony in North Africa, for control of the western Mediterranean. Ensuing wars with Carthage (see Punic Wars) gained Rome Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, and Spain, and North Africa fell into the Roman sphere of influence. By the middle of the 2nd century bc Carthage had been eliminated, and Rome had gained control over Macedonia and Greece as well. In the next century the Mediterranean could be correctly called a Roman lake. The Romans cleared the seas of pirates and spread roads throughout the region, making communications easy and fostering cultural unity. This Romano-Hellenistic cultural amalgam was bilingual, with Latin dominant in the West and Greek in the East.

The Roman Empire

After a period of civil wars and strife, Rome was transformed from a republic to an empire under Emperor Augustus around the beginning of the Christian era. During the following 200 years the level of prosperity in the Mediterranean reached a high point that in many ways was not equaled again for a millennium and a half. The Roman Empire assimilated many groups of people into its civilization; moreover, in ad 212 nearly every freeborn man within its confines became a Roman citizen. Such a concept of universal citizenship was unique in the ancient world. Beyond the borders of the empire certain elements of Greco-Roman culture also influenced Celtic and Germanic tribes.

The 3rd century ad was a time of dissolution, after which Emperor Diocletian reconstituted the empire. Many of his economic and social reforms anticipated the Middle Ages, and his administrative changes ended the primacy of Italy. Under Constantine the Great in the 4th century, Constantinople (see İstanbul) replaced Rome as the capital, and Christianity was—in effect, if not officially—made the state religion. After the Western Roman Empire fell to invading Germanic groups in the 5th century, giving place to a series of Germanic kingdoms, the church in many ways preserved the Roman heritage. So thorough had been the Romanization of the empire that to this day languages of Latin derivation are spoken in France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, parts of Switzerland, and Romania.

The Great Migrations

As civilization was being consolidated in the Mediterranean region, great changes were taking place elsewhere in Europe. The Bronze and Iron Age cultures of the outer regions consisted mainly of pastoral and agricultural communities, much less stable than the Greco-Roman settlements. Migrations from poorer to richer areas were continuous, and the movement of one people or tribe in turn dislocated other peoples, often causing chain reactions. The prime movers in these changes during the last centuries bc and the first centuries ad were the Germanic tribes. These peoples had occupied parts of southern Scandinavia and northern Germany at the end of the Bronze Age. During the Iron Age they began to migrate southward, perhaps because of a deteriorating climate. In the 2nd century bc two Germanic tribes, the Cimbri and Teutons, reached what is now Provence, but they were eventually repelled by the Romans. The Suevi were more successful and occupied part of modern Germany. The Celtic tribes of that region were pushed westward to be conquered many years later by the Romans under Julius Caesar. Roman expansion into Germanic territories was permanently halted in ad 9, when Germanic troops under Arminius (Hermann) smashed the Roman legions at the Teutoburg Forest. Consequently, Rome occupied only a buffer zone east of the Rhine and north of the Danube.

By ad 150 migrations and consequent dislocations of peoples again intensified, threatening the imperial borders. Emperor Marcus Aurelius successfully battled the Marcomanni and Quadi, as well as the non-Germanic Iazyges, and it is indicative of the period that he spent most of his reign fighting invading tribes. By the beginning of the 3rd century ad the Alamanni had penetrated to the northern Roman frontier, and in the east the Goths began their infiltration of the Balkan Peninsula. After their defeat by imperial troops, the Goths were made mercenaries of Rome.

During the second half of the 3rd century, Germanic groups, including the Franks, entered the empire. Great efforts were then made to strengthen internal defenses. Under Emperor Aurelian Rome itself was surrounded by a wall, Dacia was abandoned, and more and more Germanic mercenaries were recruited to fight for the Romans. Rome weathered the crisis of the 3rd century only by means of Diocletian’s restructuring of the empire, which was done primarily to deal with the Germanic tribes more efficiently. After the middle of the 4th century the situation appeared to be under control, but then a new people, the Huns, invaded Europe from Central Asia and caused a new series of chain reactions. The Goths were pushed into the Balkans, where they defeated the Romans at Adrianople in 378. In 410 the Visigoths under Alaric sacked Rome itself, sending shock waves throughout the empire. Shortly afterward the Vandals penetrated to Roman North Africa and established a kingdom there. The Huns under Attila were finally defeated by a Roman-led Visigoth army in 451, but four years later Rome was sacked again—this time by the Vandals. Britain, Gaul, and Spain were by now occupied by Germanic tribes. The end for the Western Empire came in 476, when Germanic mercenaries in Italy deposed Emperor Romulus Augustulus and made their chief, Odoacer, king of Italy.

Early Middle Ages

When Romulus Augustulus was deposed in 476, he had no designated heir, and when Zeno, the Eastern emperor, was told that there was no immediate reason to appoint a successor, the suggestion seemed reasonable. In law, in theory, and in people’s hearts the empire was indivisible and unconquerable. Many emperors’ reigns had been short, many had ended violently, and the belligerent Germanic peoples had been a fact of Roman political life for more than a century. No one at the time could have known that Romulus Augustulus, who ironically bore the name of Rome’s legendary founder, was to be the last Roman emperor in the West and that an age had come to an end.

The Roman-Germanic Conflict

At the close of the 4th century the Germanic peoples to the north and east of the Roman Empire had begun to move west and south. The Romans called them barbarians, but they were by no means savages. They lived primarily an agricultural and pastoral life, and like all pastoral peoples, they had a long history of migrations.

In face of the Germanic migration, Rome, troubled with serious economic dislocation, pursued a policy of pragmatic accommodation. Much land, which the overextended empire could well afford to lose, was immediately given up to them, but the emperors were determined to defend vital strategic points, such as the Mediterranean seaports, on which southern Europe was dependent for its lifeblood of African grain. By the mid-5th century, however, the Germanic groups were in political control of the Western Empire. Gaul came under the sway of the Franks in the early 5th century; Italy had become a Gothic kingdom at the invitation of the emperor; the Visigoths held Spain by 507; and the Vandals had conquered the agriculturally rich provinces of North Africa by 428.

The Germanic tribes wanted land and treasure, but they also wanted to live as Romans, and what is conventionally thought of as the barbarization of the Western Empire should just as firmly be considered the Romanization of the barbarians. The essential conflict between the two peoples was religious.

The western Germans were pagans who worshiped a pantheon of sky gods and nature deities. The eastern Germans had already been converted to Christianity by the intense missionary activity of Bishop Ulfilas, a follower of the doctrine of Arianism, which maintained that Christ was fully human and not divine by nature. In 380 this doctrine was condemned as heretical. Thus, it was less as enemies of Roman political control than as bearers of a rival version of Christianity that the Germanic peoples were hated and feared.

The Origins of Church Power

The religious opposition to the Arian and pagan invaders gave a new meaning to the church and papacy during this period. Church governance had been organized much like the Roman provincial administration: Control was in the hands of independent local bishops. Three bishops, however—located at Alexandria, Antioch, and Rome—held positions comparable to those of provincial governors, supervising not only their own cities’ congregations but also those of the neighboring territories. The three were figures of great prestige, and each was granted the honorific title of pope (“father�). The pope at Rome had the additional claim to prestige of being the direct heir of Saint Peter, who was considered the first bishop of Rome. It was due, initially, to a series of activist Roman popes that the papacy grew in influence, but even more important was the compromise, paralysis, and ultimate collapse of Roman government in the West. As political authority disintegrated, the bishops stood firm for what they saw as the truth and the ancient order, and the only representative of that order in Rome was no longer the emperor or the Senate but the pope, holder of the chair of Saint Peter.

The Byzantine Empire

A Roman emperor still reigned in the East, however, and his successors would continue to rule for another thousand years. Constantinople was now the ruling city of the Roman provinces of the eastern Mediterranean, even though the empire was so transformed in its character that modern historians have called it Byzantine rather than Roman.

The essential elements of Byzantinism were all present in the reign of the great 6th-century emperor Justinian. The tendency throughout Roman history of the empire to become a military autocracy was decisively broken during his reign. The government became entirely professional and civilian, centered on the palace and, most important, on the emperor himself. Roman law was codified into a systematic digest. Finance and tax collection were centralized. Justinian’s religious policy also contributed to centralization. In an age of intense religious conflict and questioning of doctrine, the Byzantine Roman Empire became the Orthodox empire, and the religion of the emperor became the official state religion.

In the early years of his reign, Justinian embarked on the attempt to reconquer the Arian West. The Vandal kingdom of Africa fell quickly, as did Visigothic Spain and much of Italy. Under continual pressure from Sassanid Persia, however, the empire lost its military hold on Spain, which reemerged as a Visigothic kingdom, now entirely Byzantine in culture and political organization. In Italy, the imperial forces withdrew to the Adriatic stronghold of Ravenna and to Sicily, leaving the rest of the peninsula to the invading Lombards. The Balkans were entirely overrun by Avars and Slavic Peoples.

In effect, Justinian’s western conquests gave medieval Europe its characteristic cultural pattern. The Mediterranean coast and Spain became severed from the economically and culturally underdeveloped north. They were now in effect part of the Middle East, a development consummated in the 7th century, when North Africa, Spain, and parts of southern France fell to Muslim armies.

The Rise of the Franks

In the north, European history from the 5th through the 9th century was dominated by a group of western German tribes called collectively the Franks. Unlike the eastern Germans, the Franks were converted from their ancient paganism directly to Catholic Christianity, without an intervening period of Arianism. The conversion began decisively for the Salian Franks after their warrior chief, Clovis, was baptized as a Christian, along with many of his followers, in 496. Clovis, a descendant of Merovech or Merowig (reigned 448-458) and thus part of the sacrosanct ruling family of the Salian Franks, was the first king of the Merovingian dynasty. Through his many military victories against other peoples and the success of a long series of complex family vendettas characteristic of Frankish culture, he became supreme ruler of all the Franks.

At Clovis’s death, under the customary law of the Salian Franks, the lands under his control were divided among his four sons. They would, in turn, leave their lands to whatever male heirs they had, so that the whole era of Merovingian rule was characterized by alternate periods of fragmentation and consolidation, depending on the numbers and abilities of the sons.

The era came to an end in the 8th century. The last Merovingian kings have won from history the name of rois fainéants (“slothful kings�). Power was more and more to be found in the office of palace mayor and not in the hands of the king himself, until in 751, King Childeric III and his only son were imprisoned. Their long hair (symbolic among their people of royalty) was shorn, and the Arnulfing palace mayor, Pepin, son of the great warrior Charles Martel, proclaimed himself king of the Franks, the first of the Carolingians to assume the royal title.

The Carolingian coup d’état would never have occurred without the active intervention of the pope. In a series of letters written in the 740s between Pepin and the pope, in which Pepin inquired about the propriety of his own state, where all power was not in the hands of the monarch, the pope responded by citing the biblical precedent of David, anointed by the prophet Samuel while King Saul was still alive. The pope, moreover, followed the precedent and anointed Pepin, as he would continue to anoint his descendants, in a ritual of royal consecration.

Charlemagne

The greatest of the Carolingian kings was Charlemagne, even in his own time a figure of myth and legend. His reign marked the culmination of Frankish development. Under his rule the Franks, by a series of military conquests, became masters of the West and guarantors of papal power in Italy. He defeated the Lombards in Italy, the Frisians in the north, the Saxons in the east, annexed the duchy of Bavaria, and pushed the Moors out of southern France. He proceeded to consolidate his power over this vast territory by tying members of the landholding class to one another and to himself by special oaths of loyalty, which at times were rewarded by grants of land from newly conquered territory. This policy—the first major example of the growing ties of personal dependence connected with political power called feudalism—not only gave Charlemagne a ready supply of warriors but also helped make him, as it were, omnipresent in his own territory. The vassals of the king, his closest dependents, and their vassals in turn became surrogates of the king himself.

Inseparable from military and political consolidation was the growth of Charlemagne’s sense of Christian mission. He founded monastic houses in border territories. These served as pioneer establishments, bringing forests and marshlands under cultivation and Christian control. They also provided centers for missionary and educational activity, for the expansion of Christianity required a trained clergy, a standardized rite, and the production of useful books. The key was education, and the practical work of founding and staffing monastic and cathedral schools demanded outside help. Charlemagne found it in Rome and in the Lombard lands of Italy, where the ancient educational traditions had never entirely died. The major contribution to the Carolingian educational reform was Anglo-Irish, however, for the great monastic houses of England and Ireland were rich in books and skill, and Charlemagne’s foremost adviser was English scholar Alcuin.

The kingdom of the Franks, as a result, integrated Europe in territory and culture as it had not been since the Roman Empire. On Christmas day in the year 800, Charlemagne went to mass in Saint Peter’s Cathedral in Rome. As he rose from prayer—so the story goes—the pope placed a crown on his head, adored him, and he was acclaimed as imperator et augustus by the people. Charlemagne was thus crowned emperor not merely of the Franks but of Rome. The power of the new state (which came to be called the Holy Roman Empire), the organization of the church, the ancient traditions of Rome—all had become indistinguishable.

New Invasions

The last years of Charlemagne’s reign were marked by political tensions that continued into the reigns of his descendants. Europe during the later 9th and 10th centuries was a scene of renewed political disintegration and one more series of cataclysmic invasions, this time from the Scandinavian Vikings out of the north and the Asian Magyars west across the Danube plains. Borderlands were withdrawn from cultivation, trade was disrupted, and travel even over short distances became dangerous.

Throughout this period several important tendencies are discernible. Europe experienced another great wave of political fragmentation, and if the forces of political centralization were weak, the same cannot be said for the power of local landholding families. This was also the time of ascendancy of the Benedictine monastic houses, themselves great landholders embedded in the network of feudal alliances. Finally, the papacy became a secular power in its own right, exercising direct political control of much of central and northern Italy. It gradually elaborated the machinery of central authority over the regional churches and monastic houses, and, by expanded diplomacy and, above all, by the administration of justice, it also accumulated substantial secular and political power throughout Europe.

Renaissance and Reformation

Europe in the 1470s

In the 15th century, at the end of the Middle Ages, powerful nation states had appeared, built by the New Monarchs who had centralized power in France, England, and Spain. 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 nation states were frequently in a state of political flux and war. In particular, after Martin Luther started the Reformation in 1517, 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).

Unlike Western Europe, the countries of Central Europe, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Hungary, resolved religious questions by adopting religious tolerance. Central Europe was already split between Eastern and Western Christianity. Now it became divided between Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox and Jews.

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 15th century, Portugal led the way in geographical exploration, followed by Spain in early 16th century, 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, the Caribbean and the Philippines; Britain took the whole of Australia and New Zealand, most of India, and large parts of Africa and North America; France held parts of Canada and India (nearly all of which was lost to Britain in 1763), Indochina and large parts of Africa; the Netherlands gained the East Indies (now Indonesia) and islands in the Caribbean; Portugal obtained Brazil and several territories in Africa and Asia; and later, powers such as Germany, Belgium, Italy and Russia acquired further colonies.

Early Modern period: 16th, 17th and 18th century

The Reformation had profound effects on the unity of Europe. Not only were nations divided one from another by their religious orientation, but some states were torn apart internally by religious strife, avidly fostered by their external enemies. France suffered this fate in the 16th century in the series of conflicts known as the French Wars of Religion, which ended in the triumph of the Bourbon Dynasty. England avoided this fate for a while and settled down under Elizabeth to a moderate Anglicanism. Germany, divided into numerous small states under the theoretical framework of the Holy Roman Empire, was also divided along internally drawn sectarian lines, until the Thirty Years’ War seemed to see religion replaced by nationalism as the motor of European conflict.

Throughout the early part of this period, capitalism was replacing feudalism as the principal form of economic organization, at least in the western half of Europe. The expanding colonial frontiers resulted in a Commercial Revolution. The period is noted for the rise of modern science and the application of its findings to technological improvements, which culminated in the Industrial Revolution. New forms of trade and expanding horizons made new developments in international law necessary.

After the Treaty of Westphalia which ended the Thirty Years War, Absolutism became the norm of the continent, while parts of Europe experimented with constitutions foreshadowed by the English Civil War and particularly the Glorious Revolution. European military conflict did not cease, but had less disruptive effects on the lives of Europeans. In the advanced north-west, the Enlightenment gave a philosophical underpinning to the new outlook, and the continued spread of literacy, made possible by the printing press, created new secular forces in thought.

Eastern Europe was an arena of conflict for domination between Sweden, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire. This period saw a gradual decline of these three powers which were eventually replaced by new enlightened absolutist monarchies, Russia, Prussia and Austria. By the turn of the 19th century they became new powers, having divided Poland between them, with Sweden and Turkey having experienced substantial territorial losses to Russia and Austria respectively. Numerous Polish Jews emigrated to Western Europe, founding Jewish communities in places where they had been expelled from during the Middle Ages.

The English Civil War

The English Civil War was a battle between King Charles I and Parliament. Under Elizabeth I and James I England had become a relatively prosperous state. However, the acession of Charles I would see great changes.

The first and foremost cause of the English Civil War was religion. Elizabeth had established the Anglican Church in 1559 and had deliberately avoided controversial issues, such as Catholic-style relics in churches and ceremonial vestments in order to keep the peace. James had allowed the Elizabethan Church to continue. However, when Charles became King in 1625 he allowed an Arminian style of Anglicanism, which seemed like a slide back toward Catholicism and popery. Charles’ marriage to the French Catholic princess Henrietta Maria seemed to confirm this slide.

Charles could never seem to get along with Parliaments, and unproductive sessions in 1625, 1626, 1628 and 1629 resulted in Charles’s closure of Parliament for 11 years — called by his opponents the 11 Years Tyranny. Neither King or Parliament could agree over his (really his favourite minister the 1st Duke of Buckingham’s) very expensive wars against Spain and France. Therefore, as Charles relied on Parliament for money, he spent carefully and ruthlessly enforced prerogative taxation, the most contentious of which was Ship Money.

Buckingham was murdered in 1628 and Charles’s new ministers were Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford and William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury. Wentworth became Lord Deputy of Ireland in 1633 to ensure the colony became more profitable. Laud however started the Bishops Wars when in 1637 he tried to introduce the English Prayer Book in Scotland, and so the Scots invaded England in 1640.

Charles was forced to call Parliament to raise money for an army. However Parliament wanted its grievances addressed and was furious at not being referred to for 11 years. The Petition of Right, pushed through Parliament by the main opposition leader, John Pym, forced Charles to agree that the English people had rights and liberties and that he had been undermining them. Strafford was executed on 12 May 1641, and Laud was to follow him to the scaffold in 1645. Charles attempted to arrest Pym and five other members in February 1642 after they attempted to impeach the Queen, claiming that Henrietta had been attempting to control Charles and impose a French style tyranny on them.

The King and his family left London in May 1642 and the Queen and her children sailed for France. The raising of the royal standard at Nottingham started war. Charles’s side were called the Cavaliers; Parliament’s side were the Roundheads. In spite of initial successes, Charles’s defeat was assured by 1644, when Pym signed an agreement with the Scots. Charles was defeated and captured at Marston Moor in 1647, but he fled to the Isle of Wight and enlisted the help of the Scots, as Parliament had reneged on their agreement. However, his hopes came to naught when the Roundheads defeated them at Naseby.

Pym had since died and the Grandees in the New Model Army and Parliament including Oliver Cromwell, faced with Charles’s perceived duplicity, reluctantly came to the conclusion that they would have to kill him. Charles was brought to trial by a special court in January 1649, he was found guilty by fifty nine Commissioners (Judges) of high treason and executed the same month. With the abolition of the Monarchy Britain entered a period known as the English Commonwealth, Government by a Council of State with a Rump Parliament as the legislator. Real power rested with the Grandees of the New Model Army and in 1653 Oliver Cromwell became Lord Protector of the Protectorate. After Cromwell died in 1658 his son Richard Cromwell inherited the title of Lord Protector but not the power. After a short return of the Commonwealth, the English Interregnum came to an end with the English Restoration of the Monarchy under the son of Charles I, King Charles II of England.

The French Revolution

By 1789 France was on the verge of crisis, but revolution was not obvious before this time. Its causes were royal absolutism, ideas of the Enlightenment (embodied particularly in the person of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a French philosopher), and the American war of independence. King Louis XVI’s absolute refusal to give up power resulted in the storming of the Bastille in Paris on 14 July 1789. Louis was forced to call the Estates-General, the French Parliament, which had last been called in 1614. This comprised of the three estates – the clergy (First Estate), the nobility (Second Estate) and the commons (Third Estate). The parliament issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man, demanding an end to the feudal system. The Tennis Court Oath of 1790 led to the drafting of a constitution by the Third Estate for a constitutional monarchy, which the King ignored. As the famine which had plagued France deepened, hundreds of Parisians marched on the royal chateau at Versailles, demanding bread. Louis was hunting at this time, and his hated Austrian wife, Marie-Antoinette, fled. Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité (Liberty, Equality and Fraternity) became the catchcry of the revolution. Word has it that when Louis saw this march on Versailles, he asked one of his ministers, “Is it a revolt?". This minister replied, “No Sire, it is a revolution.” Louis failed to respond and increased violence led the King and Queen, with the royal children, attempting to flee to Austria. They got as far as Varennes, in northern France, before they were discovered and were forced to return to Paris. (The King’s side portrait was on all currency. Due to his prominent nose, he was recognized by a commoner.) The Duke of Brunswick, the brother of Marie-Antoinette, issued the ‘Brunswick Manifesto’, threatening war against the French revolutionaries if the Queen and the royal family were injured in any way. In 1791 the Committee of Public Safety, led by the sans-culotte formed the French Republic, headed by the lawyer Maximilien Robespierre. Over 40 000 Parisians were executed by the newly invented guillotine, in an effort to rid France of all aristocrats. Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were to share their fate in 1793, or Year II of the Republic. Robespierre was eventually conspired against and guillotined in 1794. Austria and France went to war after the deaths of Louis and Marie-Antoinette, but the Austrians were defeated. It is important to note that the French Revolution was also a revolt against the Catholic Church. Church property was seized, many clergy were killed and Papal authority was challenged. Never again would the Catholic Church have as much influence on France.

Napoleonic Wars

The revolutionary period ended when General Napoleon Bonaparte seized control of the government in 1799. Although he began as a defender of the Revolution against aggression from Austria and Britain, he conquered half Europe before finally being defeated and deposed by the powers allied against him.

Congress of Vienna

The Congress of Vienna was a conference between ambassadors from the major powers in Europe. It was held in Vienna from 1 October 1814, to 9 June 1815. The discussions continued despite Napoleon’s return and the Congress’s Final Act was signed nine days before his final defeat at Waterloo. The Congress was concerned with determining the entire shape of Europe after the Napoleonic wars, with the exception of the terms of peace with France, which had already been decided by the Treaty of Paris in May 1814.

The Congress’s principal results, apart from its confirmation of France’s loss of the territories annexed in 1795 - 1810, were the enlargement of Russia, (which gained most of the Duchy of Warsaw) and Prussia, which acquired Westphalia and the northern Rhineland. Germany was consolidated from the ~300 states of the Holy Roman Empire (dissolved in 1806) into 39 states. These states were formed into a loose German Confederation under the leadership of Prussia and Austria.

Representatives at the Congress agreed to numerous other territorial changes. Norway was transferred from Denmark to Sweden. Austria gained Lombardy-Venetia in Northern Italy, while much of the rest of North-Central Italy went to Habsburg dynasts (The Grand Duchy of Tuscany, the Duchy of Modena, and the Duchy of Parma). The Pope was restored to the Papal States. The Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia was restored to its mainland possessions, and also gained control of the Republic of Genoa. In Southern Italy the Bourbon Ferdinand IV was restored to the throne. A large United Kingdom of the Netherlands was created for the Prince of Orange, including both the old United Provinces and the formerly Austrian-ruled territories in the Southern Netherlands.

There were other, less important territorial adjustments, including significant territorial gains for the German Kingdoms of Hanover and Bavaria, and the Portuguese rights to the Territory of Olivenza were recognized.

The countries involved with the Congress also agreed to meet at intervals and this led to the establishment of the “Congress system". This system was frequently criticized by 19th century historians for ignoring national and liberal impulses associated with the French Revolution. However, in the twentieth century many historians began to admire the work of the statesmen at the Congress of Vienna, whose work appeared to have prevented another large-scale European war for nearly one hundred years (1818-1914).

The 19th century

After the defeat of revolutionary France, the other great powers tried to restore the situation which existed before 1789. However, 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, the Industrial Revolution brought important economical and social changes, 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), and the preference of the new capitalists became Liberalism (a term which then, politically, meant something different from the modern usage). 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 though the revolutionaries were often defeated, most European states had become constitutional (rather than absolute) monarchies by 1871, and Germany and Italy had developed into nation states.

The political dynamics of Europe changed three times over the 19th century - once after the Congress of Vienna, and again after the Crimean War. In 1815 at the Congress of Vienna, the major powers of Europe managed to produce a peaceful balance of power among the empires after the Napoleonic wars (despite the occurrence of internal revolutionary movements). But the peace would only last until the Ottoman Empire had declined enough to become a target for the others. (See history of the Balkans#Rise of Independence.) This instigated the Crimean War in 1854 and began a tenser period of minor clashes among the globe-spanning empires of Europe that set the stage for the first World War. It changed a third time with the end of the various wars that turned the Kingdom of Sardinia and the Kingdom of Prussia into the Italian and German nation-states, significantly changing the balance of power in Europe.

Early 20th century: the World Wars

After the relative peace of most of the 19th Century, the rivalry between European powers exploded in 1914, when World War I started. On one side were Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy and Turkey (the Central Powers/Triple Alliance), while on the other side stood Serbia and the Triple Entente - the loose coalition 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 in the autumn of 1918.

In the Treaty of Versailles (1919) the winners imposed hard conditions on Germany and recognized the new states (such as Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia) created in central Europe out of the defunct German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, supposedly on the basis of national self-determination. In the following decades, fear of Communism and the economic Depression of 1929-1933 led to the rise of extreme governments - Fascist or National Socialist - in Italy (1922), Germany (1933), Spain (after a civil war ending in 1939) and other countries such as Hungary.

After allying with Mussolini’s Italy in the “Pact of Steel” and signing a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, the German dictator Adolf Hitler started World War II in September 1939 following a military build-up throughout the late 1930s. After initial successes (mainly the conquest of western Poland, much of Scandinavia, France and the Balkans before 1941) the Axis powers began to over-extend themselves in 1941. Hitler’s ideological foes were the Communists in Russia but because of the German failure to defeat Britain and the Italian failures in North Africa and the Mediterranean the Axis forces were split between garrisoning western Europe and Scandinavia and also attacking Africa. Thus, the attack on the Soviet Union which had partitioned central Europe together with Germany in 1939-1940, was not pressed with sufficient strength. Despite initial successes, the German army was stopped close to Moscow in December 1941. Over the next year the tide was turned and the Germans started to suffer a series of defeats, for example in the siege of Stalingrad and at Kursk. Meanwhile, Japan (allied to Germany and Italy since September 1940) attacked the British in south-east Asia and the United States in Hawaii on December 7, 1941; Germany then completed its over-extension by declaring war on the United States. War raged between the Axis Powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan) and the Allied Forces (British Empire, Soviet Union, and the United States). Allied Forces won in North Africa, invaded Italy in 1943, and invaded occupied France in 1944. In the spring of 1945 Germany itself was invaded from the east by Russia and from the west by the other Allies respectively; Hitler committed suicide and Germany surrendered in early May ending the war in Europe.

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 at the Yalta Conference and divided as it became the principal zone of contention in the Cold War between the two power blocs, the capitalistic Western_countries and the communist Soviet Union. The U.S. and Western Europe (Britain, France, Italy, West Germany, etc.) established the NATO alliance as a protection against a possible Soviet invasion. Later, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, East Germany) established the Warsaw Pact as a protection against a possible U.S. invasion.

Meanwhile, 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 organizations such as the European Union and the Council of Europe.

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev initiated perestroika and glasnost, which weakened Soviet influence in Eastern Europe. Soviet-supported governments collapsed, and West Germany absorbed East Germany by 1990. In 1991 the Soviet Union itself collapsed, splitting into fifteen states, with the Russian Federation taking the Soviet Union’s seat on the United Nations Security Council.

The most violent breakup happened in Yugoslavia, in the Balkans. Four (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Macedonia) out of six Yugoslav republics declared independence and for most of them a violent war ensued, in some parts lasting until 1995. The remaining two republics formed a new Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, under the direction of Slobodan Milošević. Milošević presided over the Kosovo War, and was overthrown after his government was weakened by NATO airstrikes against Yugoslavia. Following the ouster of Milošević, the country changed its name to Serbia and Montenegro as a move to placate the frictions between the two federal units and claimed to be instituting a Western-style democracy.

In the post-Cold War era, NATO and the EU have been gradually admitting most of the former members of the Warsaw Pact.

The Treaty of Rome signing ceremony.

Early 21st century: the European Union

The process of European integration was slow due to the reluctance of most nation states to give up their sovereignty. However, the process began to accelerate in the early 21st century. Whereas the European Union started out as a loose economic alliance among European nations, the European Union took further steps to more closely integrate the member states, and make the EU into a more supranational organisation.

At the turn of the century, nations within the European Union had created a free trade zone and eliminated most travel barriers across their borders. A new common currency for Europe, the Euro, was established electronically in 1999, officially tying all of the currencies of each participating nation to each other. The new currency was put into circulation in 2002 and most of the old currencies were phased out. However, not all EU member states have decided to join the Euro project, including the United Kingdom, Denmark and Sweden.

As of 2005, the European Union is in the process of ratifying a new constitution, inducting additional member states (most of them in central Europe) and to consolidate various treaties. However, the creation of the constitution has been controversial, it is seen by many eurosceptics as a step towards a single EU state. There has been disagreement as member states wrangle over how much voting power each will have in EU, taxes, and the standards to which new member states must be held before they are admitted.