History of Europe

Paleolithic and Mesolithic

The Paleolithic ("Old Stone Age") and Mesolithic ("Middle of Stone Age") eras in Europe were defined by a hunter-gatherer way of life and an increasingly sophisticated stone-tool repertoire. Kostenki 14, an individual who lived in the Don River basin around 37,000 years ago, is among the earliest Europeans whose genome carries an ancestry signature recognizable in contemporary populations of the continent.^[1] The Last Glacial Maximum, roughly 27,000 to 19,000 years ago, pushed populations into southern refugia and may have reduced the human population of Europe to as few as 20,000 people.^[2][3][4] The Western Hunter-Gatherers, who would later dominate the continent and form one of the three distinct ancestral components of modern Europeans, probably later expanded from southeastern Europe.^[5][6] By the late Mesolithic, coastal foraging societies such as the Ertebølle culture of southern Scandinavia (c. 5,400–3,950 BCE) counted among the most elaborate hunter-gatherer communities in Europe, combining specialized fishing and hunting kits, pottery, shell-midden settlements, and a mix of year-round and seasonal occupation that gave them a semi-sedentary character even as many inland groups retained a more mobile, microlith-based way of life.^[7]

Neolithic and Copper Age

Neolithic Europe emerged in the 7th millennium BC as the first permanent settlements - with houses, wells, granaries, and defensive structures - appeared in the Balkans. These settlements are linked to Early European Farmers migrating from Anatolia,^[8] the second (after the earlier Mesolithic Western hunter-gatherers) of Europe's three main indigenous peoples.^[9] An archaeological site in the Balkans has the world's oldest securely dated evidence of high-temperature copper smelting (c. 5000 BC).^[10][11] Solnitsata (c. 4700–4200 BC) - believed to be the oldest urban center in Europe^[12][13] - and the Varna culture (c. 4550–4100 BC) flourished. Europe's third main indigenous population, the Yamnaya pastoralists,^[14] began expanding into Southeast Europe around 4200 BC but the main Indo-European migration came c. 3300–2600 BC,^[15] after which Indo-European languages spread across the continent.

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  Varna necropolis artefacts, Bulgaria, c. 4500 BC
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  Menga Dolmen, Spain, c. 3700 BC
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  Stonehenge, Britain, c. 2500 BC

Bronze Age

The first well-known literate civilization in Europe was the Minoan civilization that arose on the island of Crete and flourished from approximately the 27th century BC to the 15th century BC.^[16]

The Minoans were replaced by the Mycenaean civilization which flourished during the period roughly between 1600 BC, when Helladic culture in mainland Greece was transformed under influences from Minoan Crete, and 1100 BC. The major Mycenaean cities were Mycenae and Tiryns in Argolis, Pylos in Messenia, Athens in Attica, Thebes and Orchomenus in Boeotia, and Iolkos in Thessaly. In Crete, the Mycenaeans occupied Knossos. Mycenaean settlement sites also appeared in Epirus,^[17][18] Macedonia,^[19][20] on islands in the Aegean Sea, on the coast of Asia Minor, the Levant,^[21] Cyprus^[22] and Italy.^[23][24] Mycenaean artefacts have been found well outside the limits of the Mycenean world.

Quite unlike the Minoans, whose society benefited from trade, the Mycenaeans advanced through conquest. Mycenaean civilization was dominated by a warrior aristocracy. Around 1400 BC, the Mycenaeans extended their control to Crete, the centre of the Minoan civilization. The Mycenaean civilization perished with the collapse of Bronze-Age civilization on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. The collapse has been variously attributed to Dorian invasion, natural disasters and/or climate change.^[25] Whatever the causes, the Mycenaean civilization had disappeared after LH III C, when the sites of Mycenae and Tiryns were again destroyed. This end, during the last years of the 12th century BC, occurred after a slow decline of the Mycenaean civilization, which lasted many years before dying out. The beginning of the 11th century BC opened a new context, that of the protogeometric, the beginning of the geometric period, the Greek Dark Ages of traditional historiography.

The Bronze Age collapse may be seen in the context of technological history that saw the slow spread of ironworking technology from present-day Bulgaria and Romania in the 13th and the 12th centuries BC.^[26]

The Tumulus culture and the following Urnfield culture of central Europe were part of the origin of the Roman and Greek cultures.^[27]

Iron Age

Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece (also "Hellenic civilisation") was a group of several hundred relatively independent but culturally and linguistically related city-states ("poleis") - including Athens, Sparta, Thebes, Corinth, and Syracuse - distinguished by remarkable accomplishments in architecture, philosophy, mathematics, sports, theatre and music. Athens governed itself with a form of direct democracy and by the late 4th century BC as many as half of the over one thousand existing Greek cities might have been democracies.^[31] Athens was the home of Socrates,^[32] Plato, the Platonic Academy, Aristotle and the Peripatetic school. The Hellenic city-states established colonies on the shores of the Black Sea (Greek Crimea and Pontic Greeks) and the Mediterranean Sea (Anatolia, Sicily, and Southern Italy) and also fought a half century of wars with the Persian Empire.^[33]

Hellenic infighting left Greek city states vulnerable, and Philip II of Macedon (r. 359–336 BC) united the Greek city states under his control. His son, Alexander the Great (r. 336–323 BC), conquered Egypt and Persia and going as far off as India. During the Hellenistic period (323-30 BC) following the death of Alexander and the wars between his generals, the resulting Ptolemaic, Seleucid, and Macedonian kingdoms spread Greek culture to regions as far away as Bactria.^[34]

Ancient Rome

Beginning in the 3rd century BC, the Roman Republic began expanding outward from Italy, defeating and absorbing Hellenistic states and assimilating Greek culture. The most serious challenge to Roman ascent came from the Phoenician colony of Carthage, and its defeats in the three Punic Wars marked the start of Roman hegemony. First governed by kings, then as a senatorial republic (the Roman Republic), Rome was transformed into an empire at the end of the 1st century BC after Julius Caesar's (r. 49–44 BC) military seizure of power ended republican rule, enabling Augustus (27 BC–AD 14) and his authoritarian successors. During the reign of the early emperors, Christianity emerged in the Roman province of Judaea as a movement centered on the 1st-century Jewish preacher and religious leader Jesus of Nazareth and spread through the empire's cities over the following centuries despite periodic persecution. During the two-century Pax Romana, the Roman Empire became the only state in history to encircle the entire Mediterranean, spanning three continents from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf.

In the 3rd century, barbarian invasions and a series of civil wars undermined the Empire. The emperors Diocletian (r. 284–305) and Constantine (r. 306–337) were able to slow down the process of decline by splitting the empire into a Western part and an Eastern part with the capital in the Greek city of Byzantium, renamed Nova Roma in 330 (marking the conventional start of the Byzantine Empire) and later as Constantinople ("City of Constantine"). Constantine declared an official end to state-sponsored persecution of Christians in 313^[35] and convened the council^[36] that standardized the doctrines ("Nicene Christianity") still followed by most Christian churches today. Theodosius I (r. 379–395) made Nicene Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire in 381.^[37]

The Roman Empire was repeatedly attacked by Hunnic, Germanic, Slavic and other "barbarian" tribes (see: Migration Period), and in 476 the Western part fell when the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire surrendered to a barbarian king

• 
  Europe in the year 301 BC
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  The Roman Republic and its neighbours in 58 BC
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  The Roman Empire at its greatest extent in 117 AD, under the emperor Trajan

Early Middle Ages

After the fall of Rome, Western Europe fragmented into warring kingdoms^[39][40] that continued to struggle with the destructive trends of late antiquity: depopulation, deurbanization,^[41] and barbarian invasions.^[42] As the remnants of Roman governance disappeared^[43] and the supply of Egyptian papyrus ended,^[44] much of Greco-Roman culture was all but lost in the western part of the old empire^[38] and parchment became the dominant writing material.^[45] Parchment's far higher cost deepened the Rome-based Latin Church's monopoly on literacy^[46] - already entrenched by the collapse of the municipal schools and civic offices that rewarded literate civil officials - and left the Church as the primary source of institutional continuity, legal memory, and administrative expertise for the turbulent post-Roman kingdoms of Western Europe.^[47][48][49] The Visigoths and Lombards abandoned Arianism for Nicene Christianity and the pagan Anglo-Saxons, Thuringians, and Bavarians converted to Christianity between the late 6th and mid-8th centuries but the Umayyad conquest of the Visigothic Kingdom in Iberia (711–720s) - the most organized and legally sophisticated Germanic Latin Christian kingdom of the era - left the Kingdom of the Franks ("Francia"), Kingdom of the Lombards (on the Italian Peninsula) and petty Anglo-Saxon kingdoms (in the British Isles) as the only significant Latin Christian realms. Within these three realms, however, the cultural influence of the Latin Church^[50] - including its prohibitions on cousin marriage, polygamy, and remarriage within kin groups - ran longest and cut deepest, gradually eroding the extended clans and kinship groups that had long organized Western European society.^[51]

The change in the character of the Constantinople-based Eastern Roman Empire ("Byzantine Empire") was gradual but by the 7th century Latin titles and usages had been officially replaced with Greek versions.^[52] During most of its existence, the Empire was one of the most powerful economic, cultural, and military forces in Europe and Constantinople was Europe's largest and wealthiest city.^[53] During the period of the Byzantine Papacy (537–752), the bishops of Rome required Byzantine approval of their elevation, and many bishops were selected from among the apocrisiarii, ambassadors from the Latin Church to the Byzantine court in Constantinople.^[54] In less than a century, the Empire survived a siege of its capital by the Persians and Avars (626), lost Syria (639) and Egypt (642) to the Umayyad Caliphate, survived another siege this time by the Umayyads (674-678), lost the Balkans (681) to the First Bulgarian Empire, lost all of North Africa (by 709) to the Umayyads, and then survived a 2nd siege by the Umayyads (717 to 718).^[55][56] From the 650s onward, the Mediterranean became a battleground between Arab and Byzantine naval forces, with both sides launching raids and counterraids against islands and coastal settlements and engaging in a naval arms race.^[57][58] In the latter part of the Arab–Byzantine wars, the Republic of Venice^[59][60] emerged as an important ally of the Byzantines.^[61]

The Latin Church pivoted from the Byzantine Papacy to the Frankish Papacy (756–857) when Pope Stephen II (r. 752–757) became the first bishop of Rome to ever cross the Alps and appealed in person to Frankish leadership for military aid against the Lombards,^[62][63][64] resulting in the creation of the Papal States in Italy under the direct sovereign rule of the bishops of Rome for the next 1000 years. In 800, Pope Leo III (r. 795-816) crowned Charlemagne (r. 768-814), the King of the Franks, as the first western "Roman" emperor in over 300 years, a direct provocation to the Byzantines who considered themselves to be the Roman Empire.^[65] After the Christianization of the First Bulgarian Empire (c. 864) and with key support from Byzantine scholars, the early Cyrillic alphabet, purpose-built for Slavic phonology, was developed there. An increasing rivalry between the Greek East and Latin West was then expressed in an intense missionary competition among the Slavs through the 9th and 10th centuries, in which Cyrillic played an important role. While Moravia (c. 863), Bohemia (c. 884) Croatia (by 900), and Poland (966) were drawn into the Latin West, the Serbs (c. 870) and Kievan Rus' (988) embraced Cyrillic and instead linked themselves with the Greek East.

Charlemagne's empire - most of modern France, the Low Countries, western Germany, northern and central Italy, northwestern Hungary, and a strip of northeastern Spain^[66] - was partitioned in 843 into West Francia, which developed into the Kingdom of France, and East Francia. The small Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were united into the Kingdom of England in the early 10th century. East Francia developed into the Holy Roman Empire, conventionally dated from the imperial coronation of Otto the Great in 962.

From the 8th until the 11th centuries, Muslims,^[67][68] Vikings^[69][70] and Magyars^[71] raided and invaded from the south, north, and east and slavery was a major economic activity. Norse raiders seized captives from the British Isles and from central and eastern Europe,^[72] and from Frankish territories,^[73] making Viking-ruled Dublin the largest slave market in Western Europe and establishing river-based trading routes that linked the Baltic to the Black Sea.^[74] By about 1000 AD, however, chattel slavery had mostly died out in Western Europe, replaced by serfdom, where humans could no longer be bought, sold, or traded individually but could, depending on the area, be sold together with land. Slavery lingered longer in England and in areas linked to the Muslim world.^[75]

High Middle Ages

With the exception of a large invasion by the Mongols in the 13th century, barbarian incursions into Europe had otherwise largely ended by 1000 AD and Magyars (Hungarians)^[76] and Scandinavians (Denmark, Norway and Sweden) had converted to Latin Christianity.

The second half of the 11th century saw a rapid and radical transformation in the character of the Latin Church. In 1046 the Holy Roman Emperor Henry III (r. 1046–1056) deposed Pope Gregory VI (r. 1045–1046) - who had purchased the papacy^[77] - along with two other claimants, beginning the process of freeing the papacy from the control of the local Roman nobility.^[78][79] Pope Leo IX (r. 1049–1054), a German,^[80] recruited an international circle of radical reformers^[81][82] who helped him create an "itinerant papacy" that moved from city to city^[83] to hold church councils, consecrate cathedrals, and negotiate with secular rulers.^[84][85] After centuries of growing rivalry, Leo's dynamic papacy also precipitated the East–West Schism (also "Great Schism") that split the Latin Church from the Eastern Orthodox Church of the Byzantine Empire in 1054.^[86] One of Leo's reformist successors, Pope Nicholas II (r. 1059–1061), and his influential advisor Cardinal Hildebrand of Sovana,^[87] issued the papal bull In nomine Domini (1059), which stripped the Holy Roman Emperor of his traditional role in appointing popes and established the College of Cardinals as the sole electors.^[88] After Cardinal Hildebrand was himself elected Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073–1085), he worked both to improve the moral integrity and independence of Church clergy (including making celibacy mandatory)^[89] and to establish the total freedom of the Church from secular interference ("libertas ecclesiae"). By challenging the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV's (r. 1084–1105) right to appoint church officials, Gregory began the Investiture Controversy, a struggle for supremacy between the Church and the secular monarchies of Europe.^[90][91]

In 1095 the Byzantine emperor requested military support in his Empire's conflict with the Seljuk Empire.^[92] In response, Pope Urban II (r. 1088-1099) spread a message of holy war across Europe.^[93][94] The ensuing Crusades^[95] led to the foundation of small Catholic states in the Levant, which lasted for two centuries until their final outpost, Acre, fell to the Mamluk Sultanate.^[96] Even as the later Crusades were failing,^[97] however, the "Reconquista" - a series of military campaigns by northern Iberian Christian polities against Muslim-ruled al-Andalus - was slowly reversing the 8th century Muslim conquest of the Visigothic Kingdom.^[98][99]

Along with the existing Republic of Venice,^[100][101] new Italian city-state maritime republics like Genoa^[102] and Pisa (from c. 1000), and Florence (from 1115), thrived on expanding trade, led a commercial revolution, and made Italy the most productive region of Europe in the Middle Ages.^[103][104] Pope Alexander III (r. 1159–1181) strongly backed the 1167-1168 alliance of these northern Italian cities,^[105] which defeated the Holy Roman Empire at the Battle of Legnano (1176) and won their effective independence from the Empire in the Peace of Constance (1183).^[106] After capturing the son of the Holy Roman Emperor at the Battle of Fossalta (1249), Bologna’s Liber Paradisus purchased the freedom of nearly 6,000 serfs in 1256, the first abolition of serfdom in Europe. Florence passed laws in the 1290s to align itself with the Catholic Church against the Empire and ensure that the city's merchant and artisan guilds controlled the government.

Across northern and central Europe, the amount of agriculture taking place during the "great clearances" and the number of towns grew simultaneously. Central Europe saw some three thousand new towns founded between the eleventh century and the early fourteenth.^[107] By 1250, the robust population increase greatly benefited the economy, reaching levels it would not see again in some areas until the 19th century.^[108] Beginning in the 13th century, the Hanseatic League, a commercial and defensive network of merchant guilds and market towns in Central and Northern Europe, grew to dominate maritime trade in the Baltic and North seas in the following century. Historical demographers estimate that sustained growth during the High Middle Ages - enabled by a thriving north-south "bipolar urban network"^[109] - pushed Europe’s population beyond the peak levels reached during the era of the Roman Empire.^[110]

The oldest university currently in continuous operation in the world^[111][112] appeared in the late 12th century in northern Italy (the University of Bologna^[113]) and two more were established in the early 13th century in France (the University of Paris) and England (the University of Oxford). These new institutions were a foundation for many of Europe's future achievements, especially in science.^[114][115] Initially, they were key participants in the rediscovery of the works of Aristotle, which led Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) and other thinkers to develop the philosophy of scholasticism.^[116]

After conquering the fractured principalities of the former Kievan Rus' and the Kipchak-Cuman Confederation, Mongol armies invaded Central Europe in 1241, defeating a Polish-Moravian force at Legnica and crushing the Hungarians at Mohi^[117] before withdrawing.^[118] The conquered regions became known as the Golden Horde (also "Kipchak Khanate").^[119][120] The adjacent Russian principalities had a vassalage relationship with the Khanate for the next 200 years.^[121][122]

Late Middle Ages

Centuries of European prosperity and growth unraveled during the crisis of the late Middle Ages.^[123] The Great Famine of 1315–1317 caused extreme levels of crime, disease, mass death, and even cannibalism and infanticide.^[124] The Black Death (1346-1353) killed people in a matter of days, reducing the population of some areas by half as many survivors fled:

The Black Death touched every aspect of life, hastening a process of social, economic, and cultural transformation already underway.... Fields were abandoned, workplaces stood idle, international trade was suspended. Traditional bonds of kinship, village, and even religion were broken amid the horrors of death, flight, and failed expectations. "People cared no more for dead men than we care for dead goats," wrote one survivor.^[125]

Popular uprisings, including the Jacquerie (1358) and the Peasants' Revolt (1381), shook both France and England, while the prestige and unity of the Catholic Church suffered long-term damage from the Avignon Papacy (1309–1376) and the Western Schism (1378–1417).

Despite these crises, a great effort to rediscover and revive the cultural achievements of classical antiquity began in 14th-century Florence, spreading across Italy and Europe and - in the process - transforming art, architecture, and literature. Renaissance humanists, including several 15th- and 16th-century popes,^[126] perceived their repossession of a lost past as a rebirth of civilization.^[127]

The Byzantine Empire - the last remnant of the even older Roman Empire - fell in 1453 when massive cannons of the Ottoman Empire finally breached the walls of Constantinople, ending eleven centuries of Byzantine civilization in Eastern Europe.

• 
  Detail of a portrait of Cardinal Hugh of Saint-Cher (wearing spectacles), painted by Tommaso da Modena in 1352. Tommaso trained in Venice and worked mostly in Northern Italy.
• 
  The Holy Roman Empire was a limited elective monarchy composed of hundreds of state-like entities.

Printing

From a single print shop in the Free City of Mainz, a free imperial city-state in the Holy Roman Empire, around 1440, printing had spread to about 270 cities in Central, Western and Eastern Europe and had already produced more than 20 million volumes by the end of the 15th century.^[132][131] By the 16th century, the manuscript culture of the Middle Ages, where facts were few and far between, had begun to give way to a printing culture^[133] where living scholars could compare their own observations with those of other (living) scholars,^[134] transforming how knowledge was created, preserved and disseminated.

Exploration, epidemics and colonies

Following explorations of the coast of Africa led by the Kingdom of Portugal’s Prince Henry the Navigator (1394–1460) seeking an eastern maritime route to India and Spanish-funded voyages to the West, the two nations signed the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), granting Africa and the East to Portugal while Spain claimed the Atlantic and everything beyond it.^[135] The Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama completed the first recorded trip directly from Europe to the Indian subcontinent (1497-1499). The Florentine Amerigo Vespucci's Mundus Novus letter, published in 1503 and repeatedly reprinted, provided the first explicit articulation in print that the lands discovered by European navigators to the West were not the edges of Asia, but rather an entirely different continent (a "New World").^[136] Between 1519 and 1522, the Magellan–Elcano expedition achieved the first circumnavigation of Earth in history,^[137] including the first crossing of the Pacific by a European expedition, revealing the vast scale of that ocean.^[138] The encounter with continents that were completely unknown to the ancients had a profound impact on European intellectual life^[139][140] and specifically undermined the authority of Claudius Ptolemy, the 2nd-century Alexandrian scholar whose geographic and astronomical models had long been considered infallible.^[141]

Portugal forged the first global empire, but by the late 16th century, the Hispanic Monarchy (incorporating Portugal from 1580 to 1640) had become the world’s largest empire, with silver from its American colonies accounting for at least twenty percent of its total revenue.^[143][144] Epidemics of smallpox^[145] and other Eurasian diseases^[146] swept the Americas subsequent to European contact,^[147][148] killing between 10 million and 100 million people,^[149] up to 95% of the indigenous population of the Americas.^[150] While Spain dominated the Americas and controlled the Philippines, in the 17th and 18th centuries Spanish dominance was challenged by Britain, France and the Netherlands.^[151] Britain seized control of Australasia, India, and large portions of North America. With a plantation economy fueled by slave labor, Saint-Domingue - the "Pearl of the Antilles" - was the richest colony in the 18th-century French empire, producing about 40 percent of all the sugar and 60 percent of all the coffee consumed in Europe, more than all of Britain's West Indian colonies combined.^[152] Europe's colonial plantation economies were sustained by the Atlantic slave trade, which forcibly transported 12 million enslaved Africans to the Americas between the 16th and 19th centuries.^[153][154]

The diffusion of New World crops during the Columbian exchange reshaped Europe. Maize arrived first and spread swiftly through the Mediterranean and Balkans in the 16th century. The potato spread far more slowly in northern Europe starting in the 18th century. The higher and more reliable caloric yield per acre of both crops altered the peasant diet and contributed to the retreat of recurrent famine^[155] and to European population growth and urbanization.^[156][157]

Reformation

Sparked by the German priest Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses (1517)^[158] and spread by the new movable type printing press in vernacular languages (i.e. not Latin),^[159] the Protestant Reformation was a religious and political challenge to the Catholic Church. In 1527, mutinous troops of the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Charles V - many of them fervent Protestant converts - sacked Rome, imprisoned Pope Clement VII, humiliated the Church, and decimated Rome’s population, which plummeted from over 55,000 to barely 10,000 through a combination of massacre, starvation, and plague. As the movement branched into Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Anglicanism, it triggered the Catholic Counter-Reformation, reshaped Europe’s political landscape and exploded into nearly two centuries of religious wars. States were also torn apart internally by religious strife fostered by their external enemies, a fate suffered by France between 1562 and 1598.

During the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), entire regions of the German states and, to a lesser extent, the Low Countries, the Crown of Bohemia and northern parts of Italy were scavenged bare by foraging armies, causing widespread famine, while bankrupting many of the states involved. Between one-fourth and one-third of the German population perished from direct military causes or from disease and starvation^{[161][162][163][164]} as social order disintegrated. Between 4 and 8 million people died due to the war, the vast majority being civilians,^[165][166] making it the most devastating European conflict until the 20th century. The Peace of Westphalia ending the war guaranteed the right to practice Catholicism, Lutheranism and Calvinism as well as the independence of the religiously tolerant Dutch Republic, which established a safe haven for European Jews.^[167]

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  The Second Defenestration of Prague (1618) began the Bohemian Revolt and the Thirty Years’ War (contemporary woodcut).
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  Europe after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

Scientific Revolution

• 
  Galileo Galilei reported in the Starry Messenger (1610) that he saw at least ten times more stars through a telescope than are visible to unaided vision.^[168]
• 
  Newton's cannonball: Whether a cannonball is a terrestrial or celestial object depends only on how fast it is going, from A Treatise of the System of the World (1728).^[169]

Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei’s (1564–1642) early 17th-century telescopic observations began the transformation^[170] of what had been a narrowly technical revision of classical astronomy^[171] into an increasingly aggressive challenge to traditional cosmology and the long-standing synthesis of Aristotelian physics and Christian theology. English mathematical physicist Isaac Newton’s (1643–1727) Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) dissolved the ancient boundary between the celestial and the terrestrial by showing how a single mathematical law - the law of universal gravitation - ruled both realms, the first great unification of physics.

The upheaval of the Scientific Revolution ended the medieval view of natural philosophy as the servant (or "handmaiden") of theology.^[172][173] As natural philosophy continued to grow in power, self-confidence and independence during the 17th century, the intellectual attitude of educated people shifted from fides quaerens intellectum toward a mode of understanding increasingly detached from religion.^[174][175] The "New Science" that emerged by the end of the century broke sharply with the natural philosophy that had preceded it,^{[176][177][178]} departed from previous Greek conceptions and traditions,^{[179][180][181][182]} was more mechanistic in its worldview and more integrated with mathematics,^{[180][183][184]} and was obsessed with the acquisition and interpretation of new evidence.^[185]

Great powers

During the 1640s and 1650s, England endured civil war (1642–1651), the Spanish Empire fractured from simultaneous revolts in Portugal (1640–1668) and Catalonia (1640–1659), and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth faced near-extinction from a Cossack rebellion (1648–1657), the Polish–Russian War (1654–1667) and Swedish invasion (1655–1660).^{[186][187][188][189]} The Ottoman Empire’s second and last attempt to capture the Habsburg capital of Vienna (1683)^[190] - broken by the largest cavalry charge in history led by the king of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth^[191][192] - resulted in the loss of Hungary to the Habsburgs (1699) and marked the end of the empire's expansion into Europe.

Largely spared from the devastation of the Thirty Years' War, France was the leading European power at the end of the 17th century. No European state exceeded it in population or could match its wealth and professional army.^[193] England, however, had surpassed Italy to have the most productive economy in the world and the Glorious Revolution (1688) - which subjected the English crown to Parliament - sparked a Financial Revolution that made the country into a more creditworthy borrower than its absolutist rivals on the Continent whose unchecked monarchs were considered poorer credit risks by lenders.^[194] These economic and financial advantages over France were tested in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), in which a pan-European coalition^[195] united to oppose France, Britain^[196] won the strategic ports of Gibraltar and Minorca, and the country was set on a course towards "maritime, commercial, and financial supremacy."^[197]

The decline of the previously powerful Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Ottoman Empire and Kingdom of Sweden was mirrored by the ascent of three centralized, absolutist monarchies: the Habsburg monarchy ("Austria"), the Tsardom of Russia (Russian Empire after 1721) and Brandenburg–Prussia (Kingdom of Prussia after 1701). Following the administrative and military models of France's Louis XIV the "Sun King" (r. 1643–1715),^[198] these states built the strong armies and large bureaucracies that the escalating costs of gunpowder warfare demanded^[199] and expanded at the expense of their neighbors. Sweden yielded territory to Russia and the Tsar of Russia became Emperor Peter the Great (r. Russia 1682–1725) of the Russian Empire in 1721^[200] while Catherine the Great's (r. 1762–1796) reforms caused the Empire to develop into a major European power.^[201][202] Frederick the Great (r. Prussia 1740–1786) improved the Prussian army and took Silesia from Austria (1740-1742).^{[203][204][205][206]} Finally, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was carved up between the three rising powers (1772–1795).

The five great powers of Europe that emerged in the 18th century - Austria, France, Prussia, Russia, and the United Kingdom^[207] - formed the Concert of Europe that dominated European politics in the 19th century and up to World War I.

Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment (also "Age of Reason" or simply "the Enlightenment") was a period of intellectual and cultural flourishing that emerged in the late 17th century in Western Europe^[208][209] and reached its peak in the 18th century as its ideas spread more widely across Europe.^[210] Characterized by an emphasis on reason, empirical evidence, and the scientific method, the Enlightenment promoted ideals of individual liberty, religious tolerance, progress, and natural rights. Its thinkers advocated for constitutional government, the separation of church and state, and the application of rational principles to social and political reform.^{[211][212][213]} The movement was characterized by the widespread circulation of ideas through new institutions: scientific academies, literary salons, coffeehouses, Masonic lodges, and an expanding print culture of books, journals, and pamphlets. The ideas of the Enlightenment undermined the authority of the monarchy and religious officials and paved the way for the political revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. A variety of 19th-century movements, including liberalism, socialism,^[214] and neoclassicism, trace their intellectual heritage to the Enlightenment.^[215]

French Revolution

The French Revolution was a decade of political and social upheaval in France and Europe at the end of the 18th century. After France's costly intervention in the American Revolutionary War and repeated failed attempts, in 1789 King Louis XVI (r. 1774–1792) summoned the Estates-General – a representative body comprising the medieval "estates" of clergy, nobility and commoners – to help solve France's fiscal crisis. The Third Estate, joined by some members of the other two, declared itself a National Assembly. When the King used soldiers to lock them out of their meeting place, they instead met in a nearby indoor tennis court and swore the Tennis Court Oath to stay united until a constitution was established. After the storming of the Bastille on 14 July, the Assembly passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,^[225] abolished feudalism, sought complete control over the Catholic Church in France, banned guilds and approved France's first written constitution, briefly turning France into a constitutional monarchy. The French Revolutionary Army's unexpected victory over an Austro-Prussian invasion emboldened the newly assembled National Convention to abolish the monarchy and make France a republic in 1792. The Convention created the Committee of Public Safety^[226] and mandated national conscription (the levée en masse)^[227] in 1793, and abolished colonial slavery in 1794.

Coalition Wars (1792–1815)

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▸ First Coalition (1792–97): 1 Valmy (1792)
▸ Second Coalition (1798–1802): 2 The Pyramids (1798), 3 The Nile (1798), 4 18 Brumaire (1799) & 5 Marengo (1800)
▸ Third Coalition (1803–06): 6 Trafalgar (1805) & 7 Austerlitz (1805)
▸ Fourth Coalition (1806–07): 8 Fall of Berlin (1806)
▸ Peninsular War: 9 Bailén (1808)
▸ Fifth Coalition (1809): 10 Aspern–Essling (1809)
▸ French invasion of Russia (1812): 11 Fire of Moscow (1812)
▸ Sixth Coalition (1812–14): 12 Leipzig (1813) & 4 Fall of Paris (1814)
▸ Seventh Coalition (1815): 13 Waterloo (1815)

Following the French general Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1796 invasion of Italy and the 1798 French invasion of Switzerland, a network of satellite states replaced previous regimes.^[228] In 1799 during the War of the Second Coalition, Napoleon abandoned a French army in Egypt, returned to Paris, overthrew the leadership of the Republic^{[229][230][231]} and then crowned himself Emperor in 1804. Despite crushing victories at Austerlitz (1805) and Jena (1806) ending both the third and fourth coalitions, however, his empire later collapsed following an invasion of Russia, a disastrous retreat from Moscow (1812) and a decisive defeat at Leipzig (1813).

French politics were permanently polarized after the Revolution – new names were given, "left" and "right", for the supporters and opponents of the principles of the Revolution. French-controlled areas abolished feudal privileges and seigneurial dues, liberalised property laws, ended the guilds of merchants and craftsmen to facilitate entrepreneurship, reduced trade barriers, legalised divorce, closed the Jewish ghettos and emancipated Jewish populations, and introduced the metric system.^[232][233] The popular historian Andrew Roberts argues that "meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education, sound finances, and so on-were protected, consolidated, codified, and geographically extended by Napoleon during his 16 years of power."^[234] Italy^[235] and Switzerland^[236] both experienced radical change but Germany was also deeply impacted by the dissolution of the thousand-year-old Holy Roman Empire. Its replacement by the Confederation of the Rhine fueled German nationalism,^{[237][238][239]} with far-reaching consequences.

Concert of Europe

At the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), the great European powers agreed to massive territorial changes in Central and Eastern Europe and to maintain a European balance of power, initially intended to be managed with regular meetings between them (the "Congress System").

Beginning with uprisings in Sicily and France, the revolutions of 1848 became the most widespread revolutionary wave in European history.^[240][241] In Paris, street fighting forced the abdication of the king and the proclamation of the French Second Republic (1848-1852), a fast collapse of a great power monarchy that emboldened both liberals and nationalists and encouraged demands for both constitutions and nation states.^[242] While Denmark transitioned peacefully to a constitutional monarchy and Sardinia-Piedmont secured the Statuto Albertino (later the constitution of a united Italy), conservative^[243] reaction triumphed almost everywhere else. In France, the Second Republic curdled into authoritarian rule and then the Second French Empire (1852–1870). Most consequentially, the King of Prussia's rejection of the crown of a "German Empire" offered by the Frankfurt National Assembly – the first freely elected parliament for all German states – suggested to Germans that parliamentary liberalism was incapable of achieving a German nation state, a lesson with far-reaching consequences for Europe.^[244]

Governments increasingly took control of both education and marriage away from churches, abolished taxes and tithes for the support of established religions, and excluded bishops from legislative bodies. In France, hostility to the Catholic Church became a major issue and in Germany in the 1870s there was a fierce Kulturkampf (culture war) against Catholics.^[245] Notwithstanding these conflicts and tensions, however, the last decades of the long 19th century – sometimes known as the Belle Époque (1871–1914) – were characterised by unusual political stability in Western and Central Europe. With the notable exception of Russia, all of Europe's major powers had become constitutional monarchies or republics. An upper-class gentleman could travel through much of Western Europe without a passport and even reside abroad with minimal bureaucratic regulation. For many Europeans, transnational, class-based affiliations were as important as national identities, particularly among aristocrats.^[246]

The Franco-Prussian War (1871) that ended a French empire and created a German one also left behind an enmity between France and Germany because of the loss of Alsace-Lorraine. The new German Empire (1871–1918) industrialised rapidly and sought to overtake Britain to become Europe's leading industrial power. In 1882, Otto von Bismarck, the architect of the unification of Germany and chancellor of the Empire, drove the creation of the Triple Alliance, a military alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy. In 1907, France, Russia and Britain formed the Triple Entente.^[247][248]

Nationalism

The most revolutionary political force in 19th-century Europe was nationalism, which emerged initially among the South Slavs and Greeks in the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire. The success of the anti-Ottoman Serbian Revolution (1804–1817) was followed by the Greek War of Independence (1821–1829), which became a cause for European 'philhellenes' who viewed the Greek conflict as a civilizational battle to free the Greek "cradle of Europe" from a foreign occupier.^[249] Closer to the heartland of the Empire, the anti-Ottoman Bulgarian insurrection of 1876, and the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878) that followed led to the re-establishment of Bulgaria in 1878.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire had the advantage of size and a large army but rising nationalism acted as a powerful centrifugal force that strained the multi-ethnic fabric of the Empire, fostering internal dissent and demands for self-determination that progressively undermined the stability of Habsburg rule.^[250] In the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, Hungarian nationalists battled Austria only finally losing when Russia sent some 200,000 troops to restore Habsburg rule. Russia also crushed large nationalist revolts in Congress Poland in 1830 and 1863–64 and attempted to "Russify" Polish language, culture and religion.

French conquests of smaller German and Italian states during the Napoleonic Wars encouraged 19th century demands for national unity.^[251] Italian unification (also known as the "Risorgimento") was the consolidation of the seven states of the Italian Peninsula into the Kingdom of Italy in the 1860s, culminating with the end of the Papal States in 1870.^[252] Von Bismarck, the Minister President of Prussia in the 1860s leveraged German nationalism and a series of short, decisive wars – including the Franco-Prussian War, which toppled the Second French Empire – to consolidate dozens of German states into the powerful German Empire in 1871.

Under the influence of Spanish nationalism, Spain's 18th century Castilian-centric assimilation policies towards Catalan-speaking territories (Catalonia, Valencia, the Balearic Islands, part of Aragon) and other national minorities^{[253][254][255]} accelerated in the 19th century.^{[256][257][258][259]}

Nationalism stimulated the emergence of national educational systems that prioritized the study of national heritage, national language, and patriotic identity over historical accuracy. Compulsory elementary education became standard in Germany and then across Western Europe and then was extended to girls. By the 1890s, strong movements emerged in some countries, including France and Germany, to extend compulsory education to the secondary level.^[260][261]

Emigration

Pushed by both poverty and the displacement of peasant farming and artisan manufacturing, 20% of Europe's rapidly growing population - 65 million people - emigrated between 1815 and 1939, primarily to the United States, Argentina, Canada and Brazil:^[262][263]

More information Destination, Years ...

Destination	Years	Arrivals
United States	1821–1932	32,244,000[262]
Argentina	1856–1932	6,405,000[262]
Canada	1831–1932	5,206,000[262]
Brazil	1818–1932	4,431,000[262]
In 1800, less than 1% of the world population consisted of overseas Europeans and their descendants but by the eve of World War I 38% of the world's total population was of European ancestry.[264]

Close

New Imperialism

The Scramble for Africa was the colonisation of Africa from the mid-1870s to World War I by seven Western European powers (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom) enabled by new technologies including steamships, railways and telegraphs. The United Kingdom combined naval supremacy and economic and other influence to build a global empire – the largest empire in human history (comprising more than 25% of all land on the planet in 1920) – on which "the sun never set".^[265]

World War I

At the beginning of the 20th century two rival alliances of European great powers – the Triple Alliance of the German Empire, Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and Kingdom of Italy and the Triple Entente of the French Republic, Russian Empire and United Kingdom (Great Britain) – opposed each other and were committed to come to the aid of their alliance partners. In 1914, Austria-Hungary threatened the Kingdom of Serbia. In response, Russia mobilized to threaten Austria.^[266] Germany then mobilized to threaten Russia and preemptively strike France through Belgium while Britain declared war after Germany violated Belgian neutrality.^[267]

Modern armies with machine guns and massive artillery fought indecisively for 3 years from fortified and static trenches on the Western Front. Single battles like Verdun and the Somme killed hundreds of thousands. Russia collapsed in the February Revolution of 1917 and Germany claimed victory on the Eastern Front. The October Revolution brought the Bolsheviks to power, leading to the creation of the Soviet Union. With American entry into the war in 1917, and the failure of Germany's spring 1918 offensive, Germany had run out of manpower. Germany's allies, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, surrendered and dissolved, followed by Germany.^[268][269] Over 65 million European soldiers were mobilised from 1914 to 1918; 20 million soldiers and civilians died.^[270]

The world war was settled by the victors at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919. The Treaty of Versailles significantly reduced Germany’s military power and required the nation to accept responsibility for the conflict and pay extensive financial reparations. The conference also created the League of Nations and transferred German and Ottoman territories to the control of Allied powers, chiefly Britain and France, as "mandates".^[271][272] The collapse of the Russian Empire in the First World War enabled the major powers to reestablish an independent Second Polish Republic, which survived until 1939, as well as an independent Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and, briefly, independent Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan.^[273] Independent nations of Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia were also created in central Europe from the defunct Austro-Hungarian and German empires. Multiple nations were required to sign minority rights treaties.^[274]

Interwar period

The Allied victory in the First World War seemed to mark the triumph of liberalism. Historian Martin Blinkhorn argues that the liberal themes were ascendant in terms of "cultural pluralism, religious and ethnic toleration, national self-determination, free-market economics, representative and responsible government, free trade, unionism, and the peaceful settlement of international disputes through a new body, the League of Nations."^[275] However, as early as 1917, the emerging liberal order was being challenged by the new communist movement. Communist revolts were beaten back everywhere else, but succeeded in Russia.^[276] During the 1920s, Italy's democratic institutions were dismantled and it became a totalitarian state.

After the Wall Street crash of 1929, most of the world sank into a Great Depression; prices and profits fell and unemployment soared. The worst hit sectors included heavy industry, export-oriented agriculture, mining and lumbering, and construction. World trade fell by two-thirds.^[277][278]

Authoritarian regimes ended democracies in the 1920s and 1930s in Portugal, Lithuania, Poland, Austria and Greece. A German fascist party began to transform Germany into a totalitarian state in 1933 and allied with the Empire of Japan in the Anti-Comintern Pact in 1936. The League of Nations failed to resolve any major crises and by 1937 it was largely ignored.^[279] Supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, Nationalist rebels overthrew the Second Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939).^[280] With acquiescence from Britain and France, Nazi Germany annexed part of Czechoslovakia in 1938, and then occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia, signed the "Pact of Steel" alliance with Fascist Italy and made a non-aggression treaty with the Soviet Union in 1939. By 1940, there were only four liberal democracies left on the European continent: France, Finland, Switzerland and Sweden.^[281]

World War II

The German Führer Adolf Hitler launched the Second World War with invasions of Poland (1939), Denmark (1940), Norway (1940), the Netherlands (1940), and France (1940). Britain defeated Germany's air attacks in the Battle of Britain (1940). The invasion of the Soviet Union began in June 1941. The German Wehrmacht was stopped close to Moscow in December 1941.^[282]

Over the next year the Germans started to suffer a series of defeats. War raged between the Axis Powers (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the Empire of Japan) and the Allied Forces (British Empire, Soviet Union, and the United States). The Allied Forces won in North Africa, invaded Italy in 1943, and liberated France in 1944. In 1945 Germany itself was invaded from the east by the Soviet Union and from the west by the other Allies. The Soviet Red Army conquered the Reichstag in the Battle of Berlin and Germany surrendered.^[283]

World War II was the deadliest conflict in human history, causing between 60 and 75 million deaths, the majority of whom were civilians (approximately 38 to 55 million).^[284] The period was also marked by systematic genocide. In 1942–45, separately from the war-related deaths, the Nazis killed over 11 million civilians identified through IBM-enabled censuses, including the majority of the Jews and Gypsies of Europe, millions of Polish and Soviet Slavs, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, disabled people, and political enemies. Meanwhile, in the 1930s the Soviet system of forced labour, expulsions and allegedly engineered famine had a similar death toll. Millions of civilians were affected by forced population transfers.^[285]

Cold War

Europe was divided into spheres of influence between the victors of World War II, and soon became the principal arena of the Cold War between the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The United States donated about $20 billion in Marshall Plan grants and other funding to Western Europe, 1945 to 1951.^[287] The Soviet Union, concentrating on its own recovery, seized and transferred most of Germany's industrial plants and exacted war reparations from, and imposed unfair trading arrangements on, eastern European countries under its control.^[288]

The United States and the majority of European liberal democracies established the NATO military alliance in 1949. With the aim of uniting and defending Western Europe, first steps toward economic and political integration began with the Council of Europe (1949–), the European Coal and Steel Community (1952–2002) and European Economic Community (1958–1993). The Soviet Union and its satellites established the Warsaw Pact in 1955. The Warsaw Pact had a much larger ground force, but the American-French-British nuclear umbrellas protected NATO.

The peak period of European decolonization occurred in the two decades following World War II. During this window, European colonial powers began a rapid withdrawal from their overseas territories, starting with major Asian nations like India (1947) and Indonesia (1949). In the "Year of Africa" (1960), 17 African nations gained independence in a single year.

After decades of economic growth and an increase in the standard of living of its working class,^[289] Western Europe experienced industrial decline, oil-fueled inflation and recession in the 1970s. Germany and Sweden sought to create a social consensus behind a gradual restructuring while Britain implemented aggressive austerity and privatization.^[290]

Western Europe's remaining military dictatorships all collapsed in quick succession in the 1970s. In Portugal's 1974 Carnation Revolution, military officers overthrew the decades-old Estado Novo regime, beginning a transition to democracy. Later that year, Greece's military junta collapsed over its role in the Cyprus crisis, restoring civilian rule in the period known as the Metapolitefsi. The death of Spain's caudillo in 1975 set off a top-down transition in Spain led by reformist politicians and King Juan Carlos I that replaced the old regime with a constitutional monarchy.

Post–Cold War era

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev repudiated the Brezhnev Doctrine in the late 1980s and refused to intervene militarily against Solidarność-led democratic reforms in Poland (1989), which led rapidly to fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of Communist governments outside the Soviet Union and the end of the Iron Curtain that had divided Europe since the end of World War II. In 1990 the Federal Republic of Germany absorbed East Germany. In 1991, the Soviet Union itself split into fifteen independent states. The most violent dissolution occurred in Yugoslavia.

In 1993, the Maastricht Treaty established the European Union, succeeding the EEC. The neutral countries of Austria, Finland and Sweden joined the EU in 1995, and those that did not join were tied into the EU's economic market via the European Economic Area and Schengen Agreement, which lifted border controls between member states.^[291] The euro was created in 1999 and replaced all previous currencies in participating states in 2002, forming the eurozone. In 2004, the EU gained 10 new members. (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which had been part of the Soviet Union; Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia, five former-communist countries; Malta, and the divided island of Cyprus.) These were followed by Bulgaria and Romania in 2007. Public opinion in the EU turned against further enlargement,^[292] partially due to what was seen as over-eager expansion including Turkey gaining candidate status, and a European Constitution was rejected by voters in 2005.

Russia engaged in a war with Georgia in 2008.

Touched off by the Great Recession and the 2008 financial crisis, which caused government borrowing costs to soar, the decade-long euro area crisis (2009-2018) was intensified by the structural inability of the most impacted countries to devalue their shared currency and further aggravated by a continent-wide pivot toward austerity - imposed on debtor nations like Greece as a condition for bailouts but also adopted voluntarily by creditor nations (including Germany and the United Kingdom) - resulting in widespread social unrest and the anti-austerity movement. In a referendum in the United Kingdom on the country's membership in the European Union in 2016, 52% of voters voted to leave the EU, leading to the complex Brexit separation process and negotiations, which led to political and economic changes for both the UK and the remaining European Union countries. After the UK left the EU in 2020 and the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, the aspirations of a geographically and economically diminished European Union to act as a third global superpower appeared increasingly unrealistic.^[293] Albania, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, and Ukraine are in accession negotiations to join the European Union, while Bosnia and Herzegovina and Georgia are candidate countries and Kosovo is a potential candidate country. In Turkey, although it has candidate country status, accession negotiations have been frozen.

Beginning the largest and deadliest war in Europe since World War II, Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, vastly escalating an ongoing conflict that had started with the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea and separatist fighting in Donbas.^{[294][295][296]} In response, Finland and Sweden became members of NATO in 2023 and in 2024.^[297][298]