History of Europe: Difference between revisions
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The origins
Neanderthals settled Europe long before the emergence of modern humans, Homo sapiens. The earliest appearance of modern people in Europe has been dated to 35,000 B.C. Evidence of permanent settlement dates from 7,000 B.C.
The first well-known civilization in Europe was that of the Minoans and Achaeans in the island of Crete and in nearby Greece, starting at the beginning of the 2nd millennium B.C. Around the same time, the Celts spread over most of the interior as far as Spain and later Turkey. As they did not practice a written language, knowledge of them is piecemeal. The Romans encountered them and recorded a great deal about them; these records and the results of archaeological digs form our primary understanding of this extremely influential culture. The Celts posed a formidable, if disorganized, competition to the Roman state, that later colonized and conquered much of the southern portion of Europe.
The Greeks
At the end of the Bronze Age the older Greek kingdoms collapsed and a brilliant new civilization grew up in their place. The Hellenic civilization took the form of a collection of city-states (the most important being Athens and Sparta), many having vastly differing types of government and cultures, including what are more or less unprecendented developments in various governmental forms, philosophy, science, politics, sports, theater and music. The Hellenic city-states founded a large number of colonies on the shores of the Mediterranean sea, especially in Turkey, Sicily and Southern Italy, but in the 4th century B.C. their internal wars made them an easy prey for king Philip II of Macedonia. The campaigns of his son Alexander the Great spread Greek culture into Persia, Egypt and India, but also favoured contact with the older learnings of those countries, opening up a new period of developments, known as Hellenism.
Rome
Much of Greek learning was assimilated by the nascent Roman state as it expanded outward from Italy, taking advantage of its enemies' inability to unite: the only real challenge to Roman ascent came from the Phoenician colony of Carthage, but its defeat in the end of the 3rd century B.C. marked the start of Roman hegemony. First governed by kings, then a senatorial republic (see Roman republic), Rome finally became an empire at the end of the 1st century B.C., under Augustus and his authoritarian successors. The Roman Empire had its centre in the Mediterranean sea, controlling all the countries on its shores; the northern border was marked by the Rhine and Danube rivers; under emperor Trajan (2nd century A.D.) the empire reached its maximum expansion, including England, Rumania and parts of Mesopotamia. The empire brought peace, civilizations and an efficient centralized government to the subject territories, but in the 3rd century A.D. a series of civil wars undermined its economical and social strength. In the 4th century, emperors Diocletian and Costantine were able to slow down the decline process by making the empire officially Christian (which caused the Roman Catholic Church to become an important institution) and splitting the empire into a Western and an Eastern part.
Upper Middle-Ages
Western Europe emerged as the site of a distinct civilization after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century, as barbaric invasions separated it from the rest of the Mediterranean, where the Byzantine (i.e. the Eastern Roman Empire) survived for another millennium. In the 7th century the Arab expansion brought Islamic cultures on the southern mediterranean shores (from Turkey to Sicily and Spain), further enlarging the differences between the various mediterranean civilizations. Huge amounts of technology and learning were lost, trade languished and people returned to local agrarian communities. Feudalism replaced the centralized roman administration. The only institution surviving the collapse of the empire was the Church, which preserved part of the roman cultural inheritance and remained the only source of learning at least until the 13th century; the bishop of Rome, known as the Pope became the leader of western church (in the east his supremacy was never accepted).
The first substantial new development was the appearance of the Holy Roman Empire around 800 AD, as Charlemagne, king of the Franks submitted Germany, large parts of Italy and chunks of surrounding countries; he received substantial help by an alliance with the Pope, who wanted to cut the remaining ties with the Byzantine Empire; in this way the domains of the Pope became an independent state in central Italy.
The subsequent period, ending around 1000 A.D., saw the further growth of feudalism, which weakened the empire, and the development of the Church as a major power.
Lower Middle-Ages
The first signs of rebirth of western civilization began to appear in the 11th century, as trade started again in Italy, leading to the economical and cultural growth of independent city states such as Venice and Florence; at the same time, nation-states began to take form in places such as France, England and Spain, although the process of their formation (usually marked by the contrast between the king, the feudal lords and the church) actually took several centuries. Instead the empire, essentially based in Germany and Italy further fragmented into a miryad of feudal principates or small city states, whose subjection to the emperor was only formal.
One of the largest catastrophes to have hit Europe was the Black Death. There were numerous incidences, but the most severe in the mid-1300s is estimated to have killed a third of Europe's population. (? keep it ?)
Renaissance and Reformation
In the 15th century, at the end of the Middle Ages, powerful nation-states had appeared. Instead, the church was losing much of his power because of corruption, internal contrasts, and the spread of culture leading to the Art, philosophy, science and technology improvements of the Renaissance era.
The new national states were constantly in a state of political flux and war. In particular, after Martin Luther started the Reformation in 1518, wars of politics and religion ravaged the continent: the schism in the dominant Christian Roman Catholic Church was to have major political, social and cultural implications for Europe. The split between catholicism and protestantism was particularly pronounced in England (where the king Henry VIII severed ties with Rome and proclaimed himself head of the church), and in Germany (where the reformation united the various protestant princes against the catholic Absburg emperors).
Colonial expansion
The numerous wars did not prevent the new states from exploring and conquering wide portions of the world, particularly in the newly discovered America. In the early 16th century Spain and Portugal, who led the way of geographical exploration, were the first states to set up colonies in South America and trade stations on the shores of Africa and Asia, but they were soon followed by France, England and the Netherlands.
Colonial expansion proceeded in the following centuries (with some drawbacks, such as the American Revolution and the independence wars of most south-american colonies). Spain had control of a great deal of South America and the Philippines, Britain took the whole Australia, New Zealand, India and large parts of Africa and North America, France had Canada and part of India (both lost to England in 1763), Indochina and large parts of Africa, the Netherlands gained Indonesia and islands in the Caribbean, Portugal obtained Brazil and several territories in Africa and Asia; at later times, also powers like Germany, Belgium, Italy, Russia, the U.S.A. and Japan acquired some colonies.
The 17th and 18th century
Thirty Years War ... Enlightenment, Invention of the printing press ... History of Science and Technology ... Industrial Revolution ...
The French Revolution and Napoleon
At the end of the 18th century the refusal of the king Louis XVI (endorsed by the nobility and the clergy) to share its political powers with the so-called Third State led to the 1789 French Revolution, a significant attempt to create a new form of government based on the principles of Liberte', Egalite', Fraternite' (freedom, equality, brotherhood). The king was executed, France was proclaimed a Republic and a sort of democratic government was established. In the subsequent turmoil (associated with the coalition of most european monarchies waging war against republican France) general Napoleon Bonaparte took power. In the many wars of the Napoleonic Era, he repeatedly defeated Austria, (whose emperor was forced to resign the title of emperor of the Holy Roman Empire), Russia, England, Prussia and other powers. After being proclaimed french emperor in 1804, he was finally defeated in 1815 at Waterloo.
The 19th century
After the defeat of revolutionary France, other powers tried to restore the situation which existed before 1789. Their efforts were unable to stop the spread of revolutionary movements: middle-classes had been deeply influenced by the ideals of democracy of french revolution; on the other hand, the Industrial Revolution brought important economical and social changes, and the lower classes started to be influenced by Socialist, Communist and Anarchic ideas, especially those summarized by Marx in the Manifesto of the Communist Party. Further instability came from the formation of several nationalist movements (in Germany, Italy, Poland etc.), reclaiming national unification and/or liberation from foreign rule. As a result, the period between 1815 and 1871 saw a large number of revolutionary attempts and independence wars: even if the revolutionaries were often defeated, in 1871 most european states had become constitutional (rather than absolute) monarchies, and Germany and Italy had developed into nation-states.
Early 20th century: the World Wars
After the relatively peaceful belle epoque, the rivalry between european powers exploded in 1914, when the World War I started. On one side were Germany, Austria and Turkey (the Central empires), while on the other side ther was the Entente, i.e. the alliance of France, Britain and Russia, which were joined by Italy in 1915 and by the United States in 1917. Despite the defeat of Russia in 1917 (the war was one of the major causes of the Russian Revolution, leading to the formation of communist Soviet Union), the Entente finally prevailed at the end of 1918.
In the Versailles peace treaty the winners imposed hard conditions on Germany and decided to form a number of new national states (such as Poland, Czech-slovakia, Yugoslavia) in eastern Europe, also with the aim of preventing the diffusion of communism from Russia. In the following decades, the fear of communist revolutions and the Great recession led to the formation of Fascist or Nazi governments in Italy (1922), Germany (1933), Spain (after a war ended in 1939) and other countries such as Hungary.
After allying with Italy and Japan, and after signing a non-aggression pact with the russian leader Josip Stalin, the german nazi Adolf Hitler, started the Word War II in September 1939. After initial successes (mainly the conquering of Poland, France and the Balkans before 1941) Germany made its first mistake in 1941 by attacking Russia before England was defeated: despite initial successes, the german army was stopped close to Moscow in december 1941, and one year later it suffered a decisive defeat in the battle of Stalingrad. Meanwhile, Japan had attacked the United States, forcing them to enter the war on the side of England and Russia. Anglo-american forces invaded of Italy in 1943 and France in 1944. In the spring of 1945 Germany itself was invaded both by russian and anglo-americans and surrendered. The last axis power, Japan, surrendered in august 1945, after two atomic bombs destroyed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Late 20th century: cold war
WWI and especially WWII ended the pre-eminent position of western Europe. The map of Europe was redrawn and divided as it became the principal zone of contention in the Cold War between the two newly emergent world-powers, the capitalistic United States and the communist Soviet Union. The U.S.A. claimed western Europe (Britain, France, Italy, Western Germany, Spain etc.) under their influence sphere, establishing the NATO alliance as a protection against a possible soviet invasion; Soviet Union claimed the eastern Europe (Poland, Czech-slovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Eastern Germany) and formed the Warsaw Pact. This situation lasted until 1989, when the weakening of the Soviet Union lifted the Steel curtain between the two enemy block and soviet satellites were free to remove communist regimes (and the two Germanies were able to re-unify); in 1991 also the Soviet Union collapsed, splitting into several states (the main one remaining the Russian Federation) and removing communists from the government.
After the end of WWII, western Europe slowly began a process of politicial and economic integration, desiring to unite Europe and prevent another war. This process resulted eventually in the development of organizations such as the EU, a process which is continuing today. See also the history of the European Union.
- History of Post-Roman Europe
- Vikings
- The Middle Ages
- The Holy Roman Empire