History of Europe

• 1. Introduction

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  Around 48,000 years ago, the first early European modern humans left their bones in the fossil record, sharing the continent with the last Neanderthals, who were pushed back into the southern half of the Iberian Peninsula. From those Paleolithic hunters to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the history of Europe stretches across an almost unimaginable span. Historians carve it into four traditional periods: prehistoric Europe before about 800 BC, classical antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the modern era since about AD 1500. But that tidy scaffold hides a wilder story. Who built Stonehenge, and where did Europe's people actually come from? Why did one emperor's death in distant Mongolia spare the continent from total conquest? How did a German printing press in 1439 unravel a thousand-year way of thinking? And how did a single revolution in 1789 convince every later revolutionary that the world could be remade? These are the questions that lie beneath the surface of a continent forever reinventing itself.

• 2. Three Bloodlines

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  The modern indigenous populations of Europe descend largely from three distinct lineages, a fact that rewrites any simple idea of a single native people. The first were Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, a derivative of the Cro-Magnon population who had survived the ice. The second were Early European Farmers who migrated from Anatolia during the Neolithic Revolution, carrying settled agriculture that spread slowly from the southeast toward the north and west. The third were Yamnaya pastoralists, who expanded into Europe in the context of the Indo-European expansion.

  The Indo-European migrations began around 4200 BC, moving through the areas around the Black Sea and the Balkan peninsula. Over the next 3000 years, Indo-European languages spread across the continent. In the same window, the Varna culture evolved in the 5th millennium BC. Between 4700 and 4200 BC, a settlement called Solnitsata, believed to be the oldest prehistoric town in Europe, flourished.

  The later Neolithic brought early metallurgy, copper-based tools and weapons, and the building of megalithic structures, of which Stonehenge is the famous example. Evidence of permanent settlement reaches back to the 8th millennium BC in the Balkans. The Neolithic arrived in Central Europe in the 6th millennium BC and parts of Northern Europe in the 5th and 4th millenniums BC. The stage was set for Europe's first literate civilizations to rise out of the sea.

• 3. Palaces And Conquest

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  On the island of Crete, the Minoan civilization arose as the first well-known literate civilization in Europe, flourishing from roughly the 27th century BC to the 15th century BC. The Minoans built a society that benefited from trade. Then they were replaced by the Mycenaeans, whose Helladic culture on mainland Greece was transformed under Minoan influences around 1600 BC and lasted until about 1100 BC.

  The major Mycenaean cities tell a map of early power: Mycenae and Tiryns in Argolis, Pylos in Messenia, Athens in Attica, Thebes and Orchomenus in Boeotia, and Iolkos in Thessaly. Quite unlike the trade-loving Minoans, the Mycenaeans advanced through conquest, dominated by a warrior aristocracy. Around 1400 BC they extended their control to Crete itself, occupying Knossos, the center of the Minoan world.

  The Mycenaean civilization perished with the collapse of Bronze-Age civilization on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. The collapse is commonly attributed to the Dorian invasion, though theories of natural disasters and climate change have been advanced. After the sites of Mycenae and Tiryns were destroyed again in the last years of the 12th century BC, the lights went out. What followed was the protogeometric period, the Greek Dark Ages of traditional historiography. Ironworking technology was already creeping in from present-day Bulgaria and Romania in the 13th and 12th centuries BC, and from that slow spread the worlds of Greece and Rome would grow.

• 4. Greece And Rome

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  Athens governed itself with a form of direct democracy, and by the late 4th century BC as many as half of the more than one thousand existing Greek cities might have been democracies. Ancient Greece was a loose collection of culturally and linguistically related city-states, the poleis, including Athens, Sparta, Thebes, Corinth, and Syracuse. Athens was the home of Socrates, Plato, the Platonic Academy, Aristotle, and the Peripatetic school. The Hellenic city-states planted colonies along the Black Sea and Mediterranean and fought half a century of wars with the Persian Empire.

  Philip II of Macedon united the divided Greek city-states under his control. His son, Alexander the Great, invaded Persia, toppled it, pushed into Egypt, and reached as far as India, opening the Hellenistic period. After Alexander died, his empire split among his generals, the Diadochi, who fought the Wars of the Diadochi. By the early 2nd century BC only three major kingdoms remained: Ptolemaic Egypt, the Seleucid Empire, and Macedonia, spreading Greek culture as far as Bactria.

  Much of Greek learning was absorbed by the rising Roman state as it expanded out of Italy. The only serious challenge came from the Phoenician colony of Carthage, whose defeats in the three Punic Wars marked the start of Roman hegemony. Rome moved from kings to a senatorial republic, then became an empire under Augustus at the end of the 1st century BC. Under the emperor Trajan in the 2nd century AD, the empire reached its maximum, controlling approximately 5,900,000 square kilometers of land. The Pax Romana ended in the 3rd century, when a series of civil wars undermined Rome's strength, and the long unwinding began.

• 5. Faith And Fracture

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  In 313, the emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, declaring the legality of Christianity and ending state-sponsored persecution of Christians. This set the stage for the Church to become the state church of the Roman Empire around 380. Constantine also shifted the capital from Rome to the Greek town of Byzantium, which he renamed Nova Roma and which later became Constantinople, the city of Constantine.

  Theodosius I, who made Christianity the official religion, was the last emperor to preside over a united Roman Empire until his death in 395. The empire split into the Western Roman Empire centred in Ravenna and the Eastern Roman Empire centred in Constantinople. In 476, the Western part finally fell when Romulus Augustus, the last emperor, surrendered to the Germanic king Odoacer.

  The Catholic Church became the primary source of institutional continuity, legal memory, and administrative expertise for the post-Roman kingdoms of Western Europe. As Roman governance contracted and Egyptian papyrus grew scarce, parchment became the dominant writing material, and its far higher cost reinforced a clerical monopoly on literacy. The Visigoths, Anglo-Saxons, Lombards, Frisians, Thuringians, and Bavarians all converted to Catholicism between 550 and 750 AD. Then the Umayyad conquest of the Visigothic Kingdom in Iberia left the Franks, the Lombards, and petty Anglo-Saxon kingdoms as the only significant Catholic realms remaining. Out of that narrowed Christian world, a new empire was about to rise in the west.

• 6. Crowns And Schisms

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  Around 800, Charlemagne, King of the Franks and part of the Carolingian dynasty, was crowned Emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III. His empire, based in modern France, the Low Countries and Germany, expanded into Hungary, Italy, Bohemia, Lower Saxony and Spain, helped by an alliance with a Pope who wanted aid against the Lombards. His death began the end of the dynasty, which collapsed entirely by 888, and that fragmentation of power has been called a critical starting point for the formation of states in Europe.

  To the east, Bulgaria was established in 681 and became the first Slavic country. The Bulgarian Empire created the Cyrillic script during the 9th century at the Preslav Literary School and enjoyed a Golden Age under emperor Simeon I the Great, who reigned from 893 to 927. Great Moravia and Kievan Rus also emerged among the Slavic peoples in the 9th century, and in the 10th century Poland, the Kingdom of Hungary, and the Kingdom of Croatia took shape.

  In 1054, the East-West Schism split the Catholic Church of the Latin West from the Eastern Orthodox Church of the Byzantine Empire. Five years later, the papal bull In nomine Domini of 1059 stripped the Holy Roman Emperor of his traditional role in appointing popes. The Roman Church now sought the freedom of the church, libertas ecclesiae, as a fully autonomous power, and made celibacy mandatory for priests. The next chapter of Christendom's ambition would be written far away, in the Levant.

• 7. Crusades And Catastrophe

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  The Seljuk Empire's decisive defeat of the Byzantine army at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, which included the capture of the emperor, was a long-term strategic catastrophe that undermined Byzantine authority in Anatolia. In 1095, the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos requested military support against the Seljuks, and Pope Urban II answered. Across late 1095 and through 1096, Urban personally spread his message of holy war across France, with bishops and legates doing the same in Germany and Italy. The enthusiasm far exceeded what either the Pope or Alexios expected.

  The Crusades founded small Catholic states in the Levant that lasted two centuries, until their final outpost, Acre, fell to the Mamluk Sultanate. Meanwhile the Reconquista, a series of campaigns by northern Iberian Christian polities against Muslim-ruled al-Andalus, slowly reversed the 8th-century conquest. European population rose rapidly through the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries. Italian city-state republics like Genoa from 1099 and Florence from 1115 thrived on trade and made Italy the richest region of Europe. The oldest university in continuous operation in the world appeared in the 11th century at the University of Bologna, followed by the University of Paris and the University of Oxford in the 12th century.

  The armies of the Mongol Empire, the largest contiguous empire in human history, invaded Europe in the 13th century under Batu Khan. One Mongol force defeated a combined European army at the Battle of Legnica in Poland in 1241. Two days later, another crushed a larger Hungarian army at the Battle of Mohi and killed half of Hungary's population. Mongolian records indicate Batu Khan planned a complete conquest, beginning with a winter attack on Austria, Italy and Germany, when he was recalled to Mongolia upon the death of Great Khan Ogedei at the end of 1241. Most historians believe only that death prevented the complete conquest of Europe.

  Around 1300, centuries of prosperity halted. The Great Famine of 1315-1317 and the Black Death killed people in a matter of days, reducing the population of some areas by half. One survivor wrote, "People cared no more for dead men than we care for dead goats." Labor grew scarce, survivors were better paid, and peasants shed some burdens of feudalism, even as France and England saw risings like the Jacquerie and the Peasants' Revolt. The end of the Middle Ages is usually marked by the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, who made the city the capital of an empire that lasted until 1922.

• 8. Print And Discovery

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  Around 1439 in Mainz, the movable type printing press appeared, building on paper that had reached Europe from China by way of the Arabs. The technology spread across the continent at dazzling speed. By 1500, over 200 cities in Europe had presses that printed between 8 and 20 million books, ending the manuscript culture of the Middle Ages. Nicolaus Copernicus published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, challenging a view of the heavens that had prevailed in Europe for over a millennium, while Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince influenced later absolutism and realpolitik.

  The growth of the Ottoman Empire severed trade with the east and forced Western Europe to seek new routes. Columbus traveled to the Americas in 1492, and Vasco da Gama circumnavigated India and Africa in 1498, both efforts to get around Ottoman barriers. Portugal led exploration along the African coast in search of a sea route to India, followed by Spain, and the two divided the world by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. They made the first direct European diplomatic contacts with Southeast Asian states in 1511, China in 1513, and Japan in 1542. In 1552, Russian tsar Ivan the Terrible conquered the Khanate of Kazan and the Astrakhan Khanate, beginning a steady eastward push into Siberia.

  Sparked by Martin Luther's Ninety-five Theses in 1517 and spread by the printing press in vernacular languages, the Protestant Reformation challenged the papacy and the Catholic hierarchy. It branched into Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Anglicanism, triggered the Catholic Counter-Reformation, and exploded into nearly two centuries of religious wars. The most destructive was the Thirty Years' War, fought between 1618 and 1648 across Germany and neighbouring areas. Between one-fourth and one-third of the German population perished from military causes, disease, starvation, and postponed births. The Peace of Westphalia ended it, guaranteeing the right to practice Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism.

  By 1500, American silver would eventually account for one-fifth of Spain's total budget, and the wealth of colonies reshaped Europe's economy. The Portuguese forged the first global empire, and the crown of Castile became the most powerful empire in the world during the 16th and early 17th centuries before British, French, Dutch and Swedish efforts challenged it. The French colony of Saint-Domingue grew into one of the richest European colonies of the 18th century, running on a plantation economy fueled by slave labor; its cash crops made up thirty percent of total French trade and its sugar exports represented forty percent of the Atlantic market.

  Galileo Galilei's early 17th-century telescopic observations turned Copernicus's technical revision of astronomy into an aggressive challenge to traditional cosmology and the synthesis of Aristotelian physics and Christian theology. The Scientific Revolution ended the medieval view of natural philosophy as the handmaiden of theology. The New Science that emerged by the end of the century was more mechanistic, more integrated with mathematics, and obsessed with new evidence. Meanwhile absolutist monarchs built powerful centralized states: Louis XIV, who ruled France from 1643 to 1715, Peter the Great in Russia from 1682 to 1725, Maria Theresa over the Habsburg lands from 1740 to 1780, and Frederick the Great in Prussia from 1740 to 1786.

  The Age of Enlightenment, emerging in the late 17th century, emphasized reason, empirical evidence, and the scientific method, and promoted individual liberty, religious tolerance, progress, and natural rights. Its ideas spread through scientific academies, literary salons, coffeehouses, Masonic lodges, and an expanding print culture, undermining the authority of monarchs and religious officials. In 1789 France fell into revolution. The people of Paris stormed the Bastille prison on the 14th of July 1789, the assembly passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and on the 21st of January 1793 King Louis XVI was guillotined for treason. Under Maximilien de Robespierre, the Committee of Public Safety launched the Reign of Terror, during which up to 40,000 people were executed in Paris, until the coup of 9 Thermidor on the 27th of July 1794 overthrew the regime and Robespierre was executed.

  On 18 Brumaire, the 9th of November 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte overthrew the government and replaced it with the Consulate, which he dominated. France's most successful general in the Revolutionary wars, he restored the Church, kept taxes low, centralized power in Paris, and crowned himself Emperor in 1804. On the 2nd of December 1805 he defeated a numerically superior Austro-Russian army at Austerlitz, forcing Austria out of the coalition and dissolving the Holy Roman Empire.

  On the 12th of June 1812, Napoleon invaded Russia with a Grande Armee of nearly 700,000 troops. After victories at Smolensk and Borodino he occupied Moscow, only to find it burned by the retreating Russian army. On the march back his army was harassed by Cossacks and ravaged by disease and starvation. Only 20,000 of his men survived the campaign. Defeated by a seven-nation army at the Battle of Leipzig in October 1813, he was exiled to Elba, returned to France on the 1st of March 1815, and was finally defeated at the Battle of Waterloo on the 18th of June 1815, then exiled to Saint Helena. The historian Andrew Roberts finds that the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, from 1793 to 1815, caused 4 million deaths, of whom 1 million were civilians.

  The Industrial Revolution began in England and Scotland in the mid-18th century with the mechanisation of textiles, new iron-making techniques, and the increased use of coal. The steam engine and powered machinery drove dramatic increases in production capacity, and the effects spread through Western Europe and North America across the 19th century. Nationalism became one of the most significant political forces in history. Otto von Bismarck achieved German unification in 1870, the Risorgimento consolidated the Kingdom of Italy in 1860, and the Serbian revolution of 1804 to 1817 founded the modern Principality of Serbia. The Greek War of Independence ran from 1821 to roughly 1830, and the April Uprising of 1876 led to the re-establishment of Bulgaria in 1878. Nationalism is typically listed among the top causes of the First World War, the conflict into which Austria's attempt to crush Serbia in 1914 would finally drag the continent.