Skip to content
— CH. 1 · INTRODUCTION —

Europe

~8 min read · Ch. 1 of 8
8 sections
  • Europe covers roughly 10,186,000 square kilometres, just 2 percent of Earth's surface, which makes it the second-smallest continent under the seven-continent model. Yet this modest landmass sits at the centre of how a large part of the world tells its own story. It shares the vast plate of Eurasia with Asia, and the still larger Afro-Eurasia with Africa too. So where exactly does it end? The dividing line has been redrawn for more than two thousand years, and even now it follows mountains and rivers rather than any national border. A continent this small holds about fifty sovereign states, one of which alone spans 39 percent of it. Its name reaches back to a Phoenician princess in Greek myth. Over the chapters ahead, listen for how a watershed of rivers became a cultural frontier, how warm Atlantic water keeps the place habitable, and how the same ground produced both world wars and the long effort to bind itself together afterward.

  • Anaximander, writing in the 6th century BCE, placed the boundary between Asia and Europe along the Phasis River, the modern Rioni in Georgia. Herodotus in the following century kept that line, while noting some preferred the River Don. The first recorded use of the name as a geographic term appears even earlier, in the Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo, pointing to the western shore of the Aegean Sea. The Roman-era authors Posidonius, Strabo, and Ptolemy settled on the Tanais, the modern Don River, as the divide, and that convention survived into the Middle Ages. Philip Johan von Strahlenberg broke with the classical Don boundary in 1725, drawing a new line along the Volga and then north along the Ural Mountains. He proposed that mountain ranges, not only waterways, could separate continents, and the Russian Empire endorsed the idea. Not everyone agreed. Voltaire, writing in 1760 about Peter the Great, dismissed the whole question by claiming neither Russia, Scandinavia, northern Germany, nor Poland were fully part of Europe. The modern geographer Halford Mackinder saw little validity in the Urals as a continental edge. In 1958 the Soviet Geographical Society formally recommended a textbook boundary from Baydaratskaya Bay along the eastern foot of the Urals, placing the Caucasus entirely in Asia and the Urals entirely in Europe.

  • Homo erectus georgicus, living roughly 1.8 million years ago in Georgia, is the earliest hominin discovered in Europe. Neanderthal man, named after the Neandertal valley in Germany, appeared around 150,000 years ago and vanished from the fossil record about 40,000 years ago, their final refuge the Iberian Peninsula. Modern humans seem to have reached Europe around 43,000 to 40,000 years ago, though some evidence points to Homo sapiens arriving as early as 54,000 years ago. The European Neolithic, marked by crops, livestock, and pottery, began around 7000 BCE in Greece and the Balkans, probably shaped by farming in Anatolia and the Near East. Giant stone monuments rose across the west and south, from the Megalithic Temples of Malta to Stonehenge. Today's native European populations descend largely from three distinct lineages. Mesolithic hunter-gatherers came first, tied to the Paleolithic Epigravettian culture. Neolithic Early European Farmers migrated from Anatolia about 9,000 years ago. Yamnaya Steppe herders expanded from the Pontic-Caspian steppe of Ukraine and southern Russia roughly 5,000 years ago, in the context of Indo-European migrations.

  • In 508 BCE, Cleisthenes instituted the world's first democratic system of government in Athens. Ancient Greece is treated as the founding culture of Western civilisation, and its city-state, the polis, was the basic political unit of the classical age. Greece generated philosophy under Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato, history through Herodotus and Thucydides, medicine with Hippocrates and Galen, and science with Pythagoras, Euclid, and Archimedes. The Greco-Persian Wars of the 5th century BCE checked the Achaemenid Persian advance into Europe. The fifty years of peace that followed are remembered as the Golden Age of Athens. Rome inherited and expanded that world, leaving its mark on law, language, engineering, and government. By 200 BCE Rome had conquered Italy, then over two centuries took Greece, Hispania, the North African coast, much of the Middle East, Gaul, and Britannia. The Roman Republic ended in 27 BCE when Augustus proclaimed the empire, opening the pax romana, two centuries of unusual peace and stability. Constantine I legalised Christianity in 313 CE and moved the capital to Byzantium, renamed Constantinople in 330 CE. Christianity became the empire's sole official religion in 380 CE, and Theodosius outlawed pagan worship in 391 to 392 CE.

  • The term Europe is first used for a cultural sphere in the Carolingian Renaissance of the 9th century, designating the reach of the Western Church against both the Eastern Orthodox churches and the Islamic world. Europa figures often in the letters of Charlemagne's court scholar, Alcuin. A Frankish king of the Carolingian dynasty, Charlemagne had conquered most of Western Europe and was anointed Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope in 800. The Holy Roman Empire itself was founded in 962, later centred on the German principalities of central Europe. As the name shifted from pure geography to culture, its eastern borders began to bend around cultural questions in lands under Byzantine, Ottoman, and Russian influence. The same logic was never applied to the Americas, despite their conquest and settlement by European states. Instead the idea of Western civilisation emerged to group Europe together with those colonies. Martin W. Lewis and Karen Wigen argue that splitting Eurasia into a small Europe and a vast Asia produces a false sense of parity, a residue of Eurocentrism. In their words, China and India are each comparable to the entire European landmass, not to a single European country.

  • The Great Famine of 1315 to 1317 was the first crisis to strike Europe in the late Middle Ages, and between 1348 and 1420 the losses grew heaviest. The Black Death devastated the continent in the mid-14th century, killing an estimated 25 million people in Europe, a third of the population at the time. It pushed people to live for the moment, as Giovanni Boccaccio illustrated in The Decameron of 1353, and it dealt a serious blow to the Roman Catholic Church. More than 100 plague epidemics swept across Europe before the disease faded by the 18th century. The Church's authority was already strained. An East-West Schism in 1054 split the old Roman Empire religiously, and the Western Schism of the mid-14th century left two rival popes, one in Avignon and one in Rome, for forty years until 1417. From Florence rose the Renaissance, drawing on classical Greek and Arabic knowledge recovered from monastic libraries and often translated through Latin. The Medici family of Florentine bankers and the popes in Rome funded artists such as Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci. In 1517 the German theologian Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the church door, attacking the sale of indulgences. He was excommunicated in 1520, and the Thirty Years' War of 1618 to 1648 later killed between 25 and 40 percent of Germany's population.

  • Christopher Columbus reached the New World in 1492, the same year the fall of Granada ended over seven centuries of Islamic rule in the south-western Iberian Peninsula. Spain and Portugal, the greatest naval powers of the age, led the way outward. Vasco da Gama opened the ocean route to the East in 1498, linking the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The Portuguese-born explorer Ferdinand Magellan sailed westward to Asia in a Spanish expedition, and the first circumnavigation of the globe was completed by the Spaniard Juan Sebastian Elcano between 1519 and 1522. France, the Netherlands, and England followed in building colonial empires across Africa, the Americas, and Asia. Between the 16th and 20th centuries, European powers colonised the Americas, almost all of Africa and Oceania, and most of Asia. The figures of the Scientific Revolution gathered in the same span. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Isaac Newton reshaped the understanding of the natural world across the 16th and 17th centuries. According to Peter Barrett, it is widely accepted that modern science arose in the Europe of the 17th century. The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain at the end of the 18th century and spread outward, driving rapid urban growth, a new working class, the first laws on child labour, and the abolition of slavery. Europe's population climbed from about 100 million in 1700 to 400 million by 1900, while 70 million people left the continent in 19th-century migrations to colonies abroad and the United States.

  • Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated by the Yugoslav nationalist Gavrilo Princip, and the First World War followed between 1914 and 1918. Over 60 million European soldiers were mobilised, and the war left more than 16 million dead. Russia fell into revolution, replacing the Tsarist monarchy with the communist Soviet Union and granting independence to Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The Treaty of Versailles ended the war in 1919, placing full responsibility on Germany. Economic instability and the Wall Street crash of 1929 brought the Great Depression, helping place Adolf Hitler in power. Germany invaded Poland on the 1st of September 1939, and France and the United Kingdom declared war on the 3rd of September. More than 40 million people in Europe died in the Second World War, including between 11 and 17 million during the Holocaust, while the Soviet Union alone lost around 27 million. After the war the map was redrawn at the Yalta Conference and split into two blocs, divided by what Winston Churchill called an Iron Curtain. NATO formed in the West and the Warsaw Pact in the East. The Berlin Wall, built in 1961, fell in 1989, and the Cold War ended. European integration grew alongside this. The Council of Europe was founded in 1949 after a speech by Churchill, and the Treaty of Rome in 1957 established the European Economic Community among six states. That body became the European Union in 1993, which introduced the euro and expanded to 28 countries between 2004 and 2013. The United Kingdom withdrew on the 31st of January 2020, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine on the 24th of February 2022 marked the largest refugee crisis in Europe since the Second World War.

Common questions

How big is Europe and why is it called the second-smallest continent?

Europe covers approximately 10,186,000 square kilometres, about 2 percent of Earth's surface and 6.8 percent of its land area. Under the seven-continent model this makes it the second-smallest continent.

Where is the boundary between Europe and Asia?

Europe is commonly separated from Asia by the watershed of the Ural Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian Sea, the Greater Caucasus, the Black Sea, and the Turkish straits. In 1725 Philip Johan von Strahlenberg first proposed using the Ural Mountains as part of the divide.

Where does the name Europe come from?

In classical Greek mythology, Europa was a Phoenician princess. One view derives her name from the Ancient Greek elements eurus, meaning wide or broad, and ops, meaning eye or face, giving a sense of wide-gazing.

How many countries are in Europe and which is the largest?

Europe is divided into about fifty sovereign states. Russia is the largest and most populous, spanning 39 percent of the continent and comprising 15 percent of its population.

Why does Europe have a milder climate than other regions at the same latitude?

Warm Atlantic currents, especially the Gulf Stream, carry warm water from the Gulf of Mexico across the Atlantic to Europe, producing a temperate climate. The Gulf Stream is nicknamed Europe's central heating because it makes the continent warmer and wetter than it would otherwise be.

How did the European Union form and which countries have left or joined?

The Treaty of Rome in 1957 established the European Economic Community among six Western European states, which became the European Union in 1993 and introduced the euro. The EU expanded to 28 countries between 2004 and 2013, and the United Kingdom withdrew on the 31st of January 2020.

All sources

231 references cited across the entry

  1. 1webGDP PPP, current pricesInternational Monetary Fund — 2022
  2. 2webGDP Nominal, current pricesInternational Monetary Fund — 2022
  3. 3webNominal GDP per capitaInternational Monetary Fund — 2022
  4. 4webReportsJanuary 2011
  5. 6encyclopediaEurope
  6. 8bookNational Geographic Atlas of the WorldNational Geographic — 1999
  7. 9harvnbLewis, Wigen (1997)Lewis, Wigen — 1997
  8. 10bookAncient Greece: Birthplace of DemocracyKim Covert — Capstone — 2011
  9. 13bookIndo-European Poetry and MythM. L. West — OUP Oxford — 2007
  10. 14bookThe Rape of Europa: The Intriguing History of Titian's MasterpieceCharles FitzRoy — Bloomsbury Publishing — 2015
  11. 17journalKadmos and Europa, and the PhoeniciansRobert Beekes — 2004
  12. 19journalWhere is the Middle East?Davidson, Roderic H. — 1960
  13. 20encyclopediaEurope
  14. 22webEurope – NounPrinceton University
  15. 24bookGenesis and the Jewish antiquities of Flavius JosephusThomas W. Franxman — Pontificium Institutum Biblicum — 1979
  16. 27bookThe Idea of Europe From Antiquity to the European UnionJ. G. A. Pocock — Cambridge University Press — 2002
  17. 28bookCrisis in Western EducationChristopher Dawson et al. — CUA Press — 2010
  18. 30bookDas Nord-und Ostliche Theil von Europa und AsiaPhilipp Johann von Strahlenberg — 1730
  19. 31bookEurope: A HistoryNorman Davies — Oxford University Press — 1996
  20. 36webPhysical GeographyOrlenok V. — 1998
  21. 37bookFlora Europaea, Volume 1: Lycopodiaceae to PlatanaceaeT.G. Tutin et al. — Cambridge University Press — 1990
  22. 38bookFlora Europaea, Volume 1: Psilotaceae to PlatanaceaeThomas Gaskell Tutin — Cambridge University Press — 1993
  23. 39magazineQuaternary Period6 January 2017
  24. 41journalA new skull of early Homo from Dmanisi, GeorgiaA. Vekua et al. — 2002
  25. 43webBones reveal Neanderthal child was eaten by a giant birdAshley Strickland — 10 October 2018
  26. 45journalMy work digging up the shelters of our ancestorsNic Fleming — 2022
  27. 46journalThe genome sequence of a 45,000-year-old modern human from western SiberiaQiaomei Fu — 23 October 2014
  28. 47journalA new chronostratigraphic framework for the Upper Palaeolithic of Riparo Mochi (Italy)Katerina Douka — 2012
  29. 48citationIn the Shadow of Olympus: The Emergence of MacedonE.N. Borza — Princeton University Press — 1992
  30. 49bookThe Oxford Companion to ArchaeologyChris Scarre — Oxford University Press — 1996
  31. 50encyclopediaEuropean MegalithicSpringer — 2001
  32. 51journalPalaeogenomics of Upper Palaeolithic to Neolithic European hunter-gatherersPosth et al. — 2023
  33. 53journalMassive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in EuropeWolfgang Haak et al. — 11 June 2015
  34. 55webAncient GreeceBritish Museum
  35. 56webPeriods – School of ArchaeologyUniversity of Oxford
  36. 57citationAn Introduction to Urban GeographyJohn R. Short — Routledge — 1987
  37. 59citationDemocracy: the unfinished journey 508 BCE – 1993 CEJohn Dunn — Oxford University Press — 1994
  38. 60bookA History of Greek Mathematics, Volume IThomas Little Heath — Dover Publications — 1981
  39. 61bookA History of Greek Mathematics, Volume IIThomas Little Heath — Dover publications — 1981
  40. 63bookThe Penguin Atlas of Medieval HistoryColin McEvedy — Penguin Books — 1961
  41. 64bookTheodosius: The Empire at BayStephen Williams et al. — Routledge — 2005
  42. 65bookA History of Greek LiteratureMoses Hadas — Columbia University Press — 1950
  43. 66harvnbLaiou, Morisson (2007) p. 130–131Laiou, Morisson — 2007
  44. 67bookIslam in Russia: The Politics of Identity and SecurityShireen Hunter — M.E. Sharpe — 2004
  45. 68bookThe Essential World HistoryWilliam J. Duiker et al. — Cengage Learning — 2010
  46. 69bookEli Heckscher, International Trade, And Economic HistoryRonald Findlay — MIT Press — 2006
  47. 70bookThe Byzantine EmpireRobert Browning — CUA Press — 1992
  48. 72bookCity of Man's Desire: A Novel of ConstantinopleCornelia Golna — Go-Bos Press — 2004
  49. 73bookMagill's Guide to Military History: A-CorJohn Powell — Salem Press — 2001
  50. 74bookHistory of the World Christian Movement: Volume 1: Earliest Christianity To 1453Dale T. Irvin — Continuum International Publishing Group — 2002
  51. 75bookEastern Europe: An Introduction to the People, Lands, and CultureRichard C. Frucht — ABC-CLIO — 2004
  52. 76bookThe Essential World HistoryWilliam J. Duiker et al. — Cengage Learning — 2010
  53. 77bookNew Glory: Expanding America's Global SupremacyRalph Peters — Sentinel — 2006
  54. 78bookChroniclesRockford Institute — 2005
  55. 79bookThe course of the Russian historyVasily Klyuchevsky — "Myslʹ — 1987
  56. 80bookA Short History of the MongolsGeorge Lane — Bloomsbury Publishing — 25 January 2018
  57. 81bookThe Crisis of Medieval Russia 1200–1304John Fennell — Routledge — 13 October 2014
  58. 82bookThe Horde: How the Mongols Changed the WorldMarie Favereau — Harvard University Press — 20 April 2021
  59. 83bookA Dictionary of World HistoryThomas Edmund Farnsworth Wright — Oxford University Press — 2015
  60. 84bookA History of Russia: Medieval, Modern, Contemporary, C. 882–1996Paul Dukes — Duke University Press — 1998
  61. 92bookThe Civilisation of the Renaissance in ItalyJacob Burckhardt — Penguin — 1990
  62. 93bookEarly RenaissanceMichael Levey — Penguin Books — 1967
  63. 94bookHigh RenaissanceMichael Levey — Penguin — 1971
  64. 95bookPenguin History of EuropeJohn Morris Roberts — Penguin — 1997
  65. 96bookSpain's Road to Empire: The Making of a World Power, 1492–1763Henry Kamen
  66. 98bookJesus Never Existed: An Introduction to the Ultimate HeresyKenneth Humphreys
  67. 100webThe Seventeenth-Century DeclineThe Library of Iberian resources online
  68. 102bookAfter the Deluge; Poland-Lithuania and the Second Northern War, 1655–1660Robert I. Frost — Cambridge University Press — 2004
  69. 103bookThe Partitions of Poland 1772, 1793, 1795Jerzy Lukowski — Routledge — 2014
  70. 108journalThe American Revolution as an Aftermath of the Great War for the Empire, 1754–1763Lawrence Henry Gipson — 1950
  71. 109bookThe Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political ThoughtMark Goldie et al. — Cambridge University Press — 2006
  72. 110bookThe Philosophy of the EnlightenmentErnst Cassirer — Princeton University Press — 1979
  73. 111bookCitizens: A Chronicle of the French RevolutionSimon Schama — Knopf — 1989
  74. 112bookThe Penguin Atlas of Modern HistoryColin McEvedy — Penguin Books — 1972
  75. 113bookNapoleon Bonaparte and the legacy of the French RevolutionMartyn Lyons — St. Martin's Press — 1994
  76. 114bookNapoleon and the Transformation of Europe (European History in Perspective)Alexander Grab — Palgrave MacMillan — 2003
  77. 115bookEurope: A HistoryNorman Davies — Oxford University Press — 1996
  78. 117bookA shortened history of EnglandGeorge Macaulay Trevelyan — Penguin Books — 1988
  79. 118bookHistory of Trade UnionismSidney Webb — AMS Press — 1976
  80. 120bookEnglish Social HistoryGeorge Macaulay Trevelyan — Longmans, Green — 1942
  81. 128bookThe Age of CatastropheHeinrich August Winkler — Yale University Press — 2015
  82. 129bookAccounting for War: Soviet Production, Employment, and the Defence Burden, 1940–1945Mark Harrison — Cambridge University Press — 2002
  83. 131bookA companion to Russian historyAbbott Gleason — Wiley-Blackwell — 2009
  84. 132bookRussia and the Russians: a historyGeoffrey A. Hosking — Harvard University Press — 2001
  85. 133newsFourth of Serbia's Population DeadPierre Loti — 1918-06-30
  86. 136newsSerbia and Austria28 July 1918
  87. 138bookThe Age of Extremes: A history of the world, 1914–1991Eric Hobsbawm — Vintage — 1995
  88. 140bookThe Origins of the Second World WarA. J. P. Taylor — Simon & Schuster — 1996
  89. 141webThe Winter War – When the Finns Humiliated the RussiansIvano Massari — War History Online — 18 August 2015
  90. 144newsLeaders mourn Soviet wartime deadBBC News — 9 May 2005
  91. 148journalPostwar Population Transfers in Europe: A SurveyJoseph B. Schechtman — 1953
  92. 151newsUK leaves the European UnionBBC News — 1 February 2020
  93. 154newsWhy Europe worksSimon Cuper — 23 May 2014
  94. 156webEuropean ClimateWorld Book, Inc
  95. 157journalPresent and future Köppen-Geiger climate classification maps at 1-km resolutionHylke E. Beck et al. — 30 October 2018
  96. 158encyclopediaEurope2007
  97. 159webGeology map of EuropeUniversity of Southampton — 1967
  98. 160bookGlobal Forest Resources Assessment 2025FAO — FAO — 2025
  99. 161webHistory and geographySave America's Forest Funds
  100. 164newsEuropean bison on 'genetic brink'Matt Walker — BBC News — 4 August 2009
  101. 165journalNettle-feeding nymphalid butterflies: temperature, development and distributionS. Bryant et al. — 1997
  102. 169newsBloomberg.comJosh Fineman — Bloomberg News — 15 September 2009
  103. 170webGlobal Wealth Stages a Strong ComebackPr-inside.com — 10 June 2010
  104. 171webThe World Bank DataBankWorld Bank
  105. 175bookIndustrialism: A Dictionary of SociologyScott, John — Oxford University Press — 2005
  106. 176webThe Origins of the Industrial Revolution in EnglandSteven Kreis — The History Guide — 11 October 2006
  107. 177bookRethinking International Organisation: Deregulation and Global GovernanceBarbara Emadi-Coffin — Routledge — 2002
  108. 179webMarshall PlanUS Department of State Office of the historian
  109. 181webEU data confirms eurozone's first recessionEUbusiness.com — 8 January 2009
  110. 183newsFive Threats to the Common CurrencyStefan Schultz — 11 February 2010
  111. 188webWorld Population Prospects: The 2022 RevisionUnited Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division
  112. 197citationWord migration report 2022.International Organization for Migration (IOM) — 2021
  113. 198webEurope: Population and Migration in 2005Migration Information Source — June 2006
  114. 202journalThe Columbian Mosaic in Colonial AmericaJames Axtell — September–October 1991
  115. 203journalWork in progress: Indirect passage from Europe Transmigration via the UK, 1836–1914N.J. Evans — 2001
  116. 206journalClassification Trends among Contemporary Filipino Crania Using Fordisc 3.1Go MC, Jones AR, Algee-Hewitt B, Dudzik B, Hughes C — University of Florida Press — 2019
  117. 208webIN EUROPE
  118. 209webGlobal religious landscapeAnalysis — Pewforum.org — 19 December 2011
  119. 212bookReligion in an Expanding EuropeTimothy A. Byrnes et al. — Cambridge University Press — 2006
  120. 213bookEurope in Crisis: Intellectuals and the European Idea, 1917–1957Mark Hewitson et al. — Berghahn Books — 2012
  121. 214bookOrthodoxy and IslamArchimandrite Nikodemos Anagnostopoulos — Taylor & Francis — 2017
  122. 216citation5 facts about the Muslim population in EuropeConrad Hackett — 29 November 2017
  123. 217journalPersistent Antimarket Culture: A Legacy of the Pale of Settlement after the HolocaustIrena Grosfeld et al. — American Economic Association — August 2013
  124. 218webJewish Population of Europe in 1933: Population Data by CountryUnited States Holocaust Memorial Museum
  125. 220webThe continuing decline of Europe's Jewish populationMichael Lipka — Pew Research Center — 9 February 2015
  126. 221webThe World's Cities in 2016United Nations — 2016
  127. 225bookSport, Representation and Evolving Identities in EuropePhilip Dine et al. — Peter Lang — 2010
  128. 227webReplacement Migration: Is it a solution for Russia?Anatoly Vishnevsky — United Nations Population Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs — 15 August 2000
  129. 231encyclopediaEurope
  130. 232encyclopediaEurope