European history begins in Greece sometime between 1200 and 800 BC.  These approximate dates by no means mark the beginning of human civilization in Europe, where various cultures had arisen during the millennia of prehistory (see \TAegean civilization\t; \TEuropean prehistory\t).  However, neither these cultures nor the older adjacent civilizations of Egypt and the Near East influenced European development to the extent that Greek civilization did.  The ancient Greeks were the first to pose the questions that would continue to trouble European minds and the first to seek rational explanations for what they observed.

CLASSICAL CIVILIZATIONS

The early Greeks were among thousands of Indo-Europeans who swarmed into Western Europe from central Asia.  Beginning after 1200 BC the nomadic \TDorians\t settled in the mountainous peninsula of Greece and its offshore islands and developed a wide variety of new ways of living from the sea and by trade. Separated by the mountains and by the water, the Greek cities developed as separate \Lcity-state\ls.  Although they shared a common language and history, their diversity often produced rivalries and wars.  The story of one of these conflicts, the famous \TTrojan War\t, was told in the epic poem the \TIliad\t and its sequel, the \TOdyssey\t.

The Greek City-States

By the 5th century BC two Greek city-states, \TAthens\t and \TSparta\t, dominated their smaller and less wealthy neighbors.  Sparta had gradually become the most powerful state on the \TPeloponnesus\t by conquering neighboring peoples.  Its citizens lived a rigidly disciplined life.  A public assembly gave adult male citizens a slight voice in government, but a council of magistrates (the \Tephors\t) retained most powers, and Sparta's two kings provided military leadership.  Agricultural and military interests dominated Sparta.

Athens was a much more diverse society, with farmers, artisans, merchants, seafarers and other groups enjoying a sense of freedom that was lacking in Sparta.  Like Sparta, however, Athens had a large slave population.  By the 5th century BC the majority of the male citizens had succeeded in taking control of the city's government, which they called \Tdemocracy\t, meaning "rule by the people." The entire citizen body could gather for trials and to make decisions about war or peace.  Many public positions were filled by a lottery, and most Athenian citizens served at least once on the city's governing council.

The free exchange of ideas necessary to make this system work also encouraged poetry, art, and philosophy.  In the 5th and 4th centuries BC the religious festivals of Athens brought forth notable dramas by the playwrights \TAeschylus\t, \TAristophanes\t, \TEuripides\t, and \TSophocles\t.  One of the greatest figures in Athens was the philosopher \TSocrates\t, whose ideas and manner of teaching were recorded by his student and disciple \TPlato\t.  Socrates, who held that the most important human activity is the search for truth, was accused of impiety, or teaching disrespect for the gods of Athens, and condemned to death in 399 BC.

The free intellectual climate in which Athenian democracy flourished had helped bring philosophy and drama into being, but the trial of Socrates showed that rule by the majority could be abused.  Plato, saddened by the death of his teacher, concluded that only a government by the wise could be just. One of Plato's students, \TAristotle\t, summarized the arguments for each of the forms of government represented in the Greek city-states.  Aristotle warned that only a mixed government could provide a guarantee against either the tyranny of one or the tyranny of many.

Arguments over politics were not confined to philosophers, however.  The rivalry between Athens and Sparta, although put aside twice to defend Greece against Persian invasions (see \TPersian Wars\t), led to the \TPeloponnesian War\t (431-404 BC) and to Athens's downfall.

Alexander the Great

While the Greeks continued to fight one another, the kingdom of \TMacedonia\t, to the north, made ready to attack.  \TPhilip II\t of Macedonia founded a great army and subdued the Greeks at the Battle of \TChaeronea\t (338 BC).  Philip's son, the Greek-educated \TAlexander the Great\t, subsequently led an expanded Greek and Macedonian army against the Persian empire.  Within a few short years these troops crushed the Persian king \TDarius III\t and swept across the plains of Anatolia, reaching as far east as India.  Alexander died in 323 BC at the age of 33, and his empire soon crumbled away.  His conquests, however, ushered in the \THellenistic Age\t;  Greek culture and small communities of Greeks were scattered throughout the Mediterranean basin and the Near East.

The Roman Republic

To the west another people, similar to the Greeks in origin and institutions, was shaping an empire that was to be more durable.  Founded, according to tradition, in the 8th century BC, \TRome\t had abolished (c.510 BC) its monarchy, which succeeded that of the \TEtruscans\t.  As in Athens, the wealthy families (known in Rome as the patricians) who ruled the early city slowly gave way to pressures from the majority, which had originally been excluded from the government.  In the republic the basic political institution was the Roman \TSenate\t, in which only the patricians could serve.  The plebeians, or commoners, gathered in a popular assembly, but they eventually exerted their greatest influence through the election of officials called \Ttribunes\t who could veto the acts of the Senate. Disputes between plebeians and patricians led to an agreement (c.450-449 BC) by which the city's laws were posted on 12 tablets for public inspection.  This solution helped create a tradition of solving public problems through law.

In the 5th century BC Rome was no more than a city perched on the seven hills overlooking the Tiber River;  two centuries later Roman armies had conquered the neighboring \TLatins\t as well as the Greeks who had settled in the southern part of the Italian peninsula.  By offering citizenship or privileged treatment to those peoples who would cooperate with them, the Romans were able to unify the entire peninsula by 270 BC and create a state that extended far beyond the city walls.  Rome's expansion continued in wars with the north African city of \TCarthage\t (the \TPunic Wars\t) and with Macedonia.  By 30 BC, Roman rule extended into Spain and parts of north Africa, including Egypt.

\TRoman law\t made it possible to unify the varied peoples conquered by the Roman armies.  Roman jurists taught that above local customs and laws was a natural or universal law.  \TCicero\t (106-43 BC), the most eminent of these legal philosophers, identified \Tnatural law\t with the ideal truths proclaimed by Socrates and Plato and claimed that it could be understood by all reasonable human beings and applied to all peoples.  Thanks to this theory Roman administrators could feel justified in overruling local customs and in imposing their own laws.

Like its laws, Rome's political institutions also evolved over the years.  The expansion of Roman territory sharpened internal conflicts, and after a prolonged civil war the general Julius \Tcaesar\t took command.  His rise to power marked an end to the political power of the Senate and the Roman citizen and doomed the republican form of government, which had become increasingly aristocratic.  Caesar's enemies assassinated him in 44 BC.  Although Caesar himself had refused the title of emperor, his successors, beginning with \TAugustus\t and \TTiberius\t, ruled for life and passed their authority on to their heirs.

For all its violence and turmoil, the century of transition from the republic to the empire (c.70 BC-c.  AD 70) witnessed great creative achievements by Roman writers employing the Latin language.  The poet \TVergil\t attempted to emulate the Greek epics with his Aeneid, and \THorace\t and \TOvid\t brought deft wit to their poetry.  The historians \TLivy\t and \TTacitus\t and the philosopher \TSeneca\t carried on Cicero's tradition of combining scholarship with an active public career.

The Roman Empire

At its height, in the 2d century AD, the Roman Empire extended from Britain and northern Europe along the Danube into Anatolia and as far as the rivers of Mesopotamia.  It included more people and territory than any previous empire.  The empire centered on the Mediterranean, however;  the most populous areas were close to the sea, which was also the principal highway.  In Africa and Anatolia Roman control was less secure beyond the narrow belt of settlements clinging to the sea, and nomads pressed on the empire's outer edges.  Beginning in the 3d century AD, \TGermanic peoples\t increased their pressure on the western and northern parts of the empire.  Some Germanic tribes were admitted to the frontier districts of the empire as buffers against more violent tribes beyond.  In addition, various Germanic tribes were recruited for service in the Roman army, but their service masked the fact that they had not completely absorbed Roman culture and laws.  Increasingly, this subtly altered army intervened in the selection of emperors. Meanwhile, successive waves of barbarian tribes attacked the empire in force.

Faced with mounting disorder, Emperor \TDiocletian\t (r.  284-305) divided the empire into halves for easier administration.  His partition officially recognized the profound cultural differences that had gradually developed in the later empire. Imperial soldiers had transformed Italy, Spain, \TGaul\t (now France), and the central Danube plain (modern day Romania) provinces where Latin was spoken and Roman customs prevailed. But in Greece, Egypt, and the eastern provinces, Roman garrisons remained a minority among the Greek-speaking majority.  They maintained an uneasy peace, which was punctuated by occasional wars with the Persians or unsuccessful revolts such as the rising by the \TJews\t in Judea in AD 66-70.

Early Christianity

In the East a new religion, \TChristianity\t, arose out of the Jewish tradition.  \TJesus Christ\t gave a new meaning to the Jewish prophecies that had predicted a Messiah.  Some Jewish sects interpreted these scriptures to mean that the Messiah would lead the Jews to political freedom;  accordingly, they resisted Roman rule.  Jesus, however, insisted that the promised kingdom would not be an earthly one.  Urging submission and love of friend and enemy alike, Jesus rejected the Pharisees' narrow interpretation of Jewish laws.  The new religion based on Christ's teachings won numerous converts, although they were persecuted by both Jews and Romans.  The apostle Saint \TPaul\t, spokesman for the new sect, traveled throughout Anatolia and Greece and to Rome itself.

As Roman administration and military power weakened, Christianity increasingly became the bond that united the citizens of the Roman world.  In 325, Emperor \TConstantine I\t, a recent convert to Christianity, summoned an ecumenical church council at Nicaea (see \TNicaea, councils of\t) to settle questions of Christian doctrine.  Constantine made Christianity virtually the official religion of the empire.  In 330 he also created a second capital--on the site of an ancient Greek city, \TByzantium\t.  This capital, Constantinople (modern \TIstanbul\t), remained the nucleus of the Greek-dominated half of the empire, later called the \TByzantine Empire\t, for centuries.

Constantine's move was, in fact, a retreat from Italy and Gaul. The movements of the Germanic tribes--\TFranks\t, \TGoths\t, \TVandals\t, and others--proved to be more than the empire's mercenary army could contain.  In 410, Rome itself was sacked by the Visigoths, and in 455 a second assault by the Vandals nearly destroyed the city.  Finally, in 476 the barbarian king, \TOdoacer\t, captured the western emperor Romulus Augustulus (r. 475-76) at Ravenna and did not bother to name even a puppet emperor;  the title of emperor in the West had become an empty prize.

THE MIDDLE AGES

The one thousand or so years following the fall of Rome is generally known as the \TMiddle Ages\t.  During this long period, Europe changed greatly.  For the first three centuries Western Europe was divided among the Germanic tribes.  The Vandals eventually settled across the Mediterranean in North Africa; the Visigoths, in Spain.  Italy became the home of the \TLombards\t, who gave their name to the plains along the Po River. Across the Alps the Franks settled in the old Roman province of Gaul, while the Angles and Saxons (see \TAnglo-Saxons\t) crossed the channel into England.  Other tribes, such as the Suevi and the Burgundians, also ruled small areas in Western Europe for a time.

Growth of the Christian Church

The various peoples of Europe slowly accepted Christianity.  In about 496, the Frankish king \TClovis\t was converted, and his people followed his example.  A century later a mission from Rome led by \TAugustine of Canterbury\t converted the Anglo-Saxon king of Kent.

The division of the Roman Empire into Greek and Latin halves was reflected in the church.  In the larger cities where important congregations of Christians clustered, a bishop, or patriarch, was chosen to guide the community.  The bishops of Rome, pointing to Saint \TPeter\t as their predecessor, soon claimed to be first among equals.  This claim was not accepted by the principal bishops of the East.  In Constantinople the Byzantine emperors, in keeping with Constantine's self-appointed role as guardian of the faith, assumed the right to appoint the chief figure of the Eastern church, the patriarch.  In return, the close identity between \Tchurch and state\t lent an almost religious aura to emperors.

In Latin Christendom the church successfully resisted the claims of the state.  Although Byzantine emperors reconquered Italy and North Africa in the 6th century, the popes in Rome remained virtually independent.  The Latin church produced its own theology.  In the 4th and early 5th centuries Saint \TJerome\t translated the Bible into Latin (the Vulgate), and Saint Augustine, in his classic, The City of God, argued that the power of God was above that of any state.  It was the bishops of Rome who sent missionaries into northern Europe, and it was the Latin church and its version of Christianity that won the allegiance of the new barbarian kingdoms.

Muslim and Other Invaders

The sundering of the ancient world was completed when a new set of conquerors, the \TArabs\t, spilled out of the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century into Anatolia and North Africa with a new religion, \TIslam\t.  The founder of the new Muslim faith, \TMuhammad\t, whose teachings were embodied in the Koran, asserted that the one true god, Allah, had sent him to complete the work of the great prophets, Moses and Jesus.  United by the message of Muhammad, the Arabs put aside their quarrels and sent armies virtually to the gates of Constantinople.  By 700 the Arabs had conquered all of North Africa;  in 711 they crossed into Spain. At Tours in 732 or 733 scarcely a hundred miles from \TParis\t, the Franks finally stopped the Arab armies and eventually drove them back over the Pyrenees.  The Mediterranean, which had once linked all the civilized world, now separated Muslim civilization from its Byzantine rival and from the cruder culture of the Germanic and Latin peoples of Western Europe.

After their conversion to Christianity, the Franks rapidly became the mainstay of Latin culture, especially under the dynasty of the \TCarolingians\t.  The Franks defended the popes by crushing other Germanic tribes, including the Lombards in Italy, and by converting many of the Germans who lived east of the Rhine River.  In 800 the Frankish king \TCharlemagne\t revived the idea of a western empire;  a grateful pope crowned him emperor.  Charlemagne's empire proved to be short-lived. Following the death (840) of his son, Emperor \TLouis I\t, the latter's sons partitioned the empire by the Treaty of Verdun (843;  see \TVerdun, Treaty of\t) and later (870) by the Treaty of Mersen.  In the 9th century new attacks by other tribes further disrupted the fragile civilization.  From the east \TMagyars\t swept into the Danube plains.  To the north sea-borne Germanic peoples known as the \TVikings\t attacked Ireland, virtually destroyed the Christian kingdoms of England, seized the peninsula of Normandy from the Franks, and even sailed up the Seine as far as Paris.  The Vikings also marched overland into Russia, roaming as far south as \TKiev\t.

The Structure of Medieval Society

In the centuries from the Muslim advance until the Christianization of the last wave of nomadic invaders, European life underwent significant changes.  Trade routes were disrupted, and as a consequence the older cities and towns declined.  The new settlers, like their predecessors in late Roman times, were not interested in the cities (except as objects for plunder).  As they dispersed across the countryside with their cattle and families, the newcomers settled among the subdued peasants.  In a time of increasing violence, when there was no centralized empire capable of maintaining peace, the strongest lord, baron, or count at the local level was in a position to collect taxes or demand a portion of the crop and livestock from the peasants and lesser landowners.  If a more powerful lord was able to seize this land, he would reassign it to his followers, and, in a predominantly agricultural society, ownership of land was the source of wealth and power.

Strong ties of kinship and personal loyalty bound the members of the warrior elite together.  In exchange for a grant of land or for promises of protection the lesser warriors (the vassals) pledged their loyalty to a more powerful lord.  This personal relationship, the lord-vassal arrangement, formed the basis of feudal society and government.  At its best \Tfeudalism\t provided a system of decentralized power;  despite inequities and periodic violence it provided a degree of order.

Feudal oaths and ties applied only to the nobles who owned land.  The peasants were serfs, tied to the land they worked but did not own and subject to the laws of the local count or duke.  The peasants' huts were usually clustered near the lord's house, called the manor.  The surrounding fields were farmed in strips that were periodically reassigned, but a certain fraction of the land was reserved for the lord and his family.  In addition, some grazing land, the commons, was set aside for everyone's use.  Though practices might vary from place to place, this system of farming, known as \Tmanorialism\t, came to characterize almost all of Europe's settled areas. Under the manorial system greatly improved methods of farming were devised.  European farmers discovered that by allowing as much as a third of their land to lie fallow and by rotating crops they could greatly increase their production.  New harnesses and plows were developed.  On the land worked by many but owned by few, the manorial system produced a surplus that enabled the population of Europe to grow while supporting both the clergy and the nobility.

Western Christendom

A German king, Otto of Saxony, attempted to restore a united Christian empire in Europe.  Crowned by the pope as Emperor \TOtto I\t in 962, he ruled a domain that little resembled the old Roman Empire.  This \THoly Roman Empire\t, as it came to be called, was limited to Italy and Germany.  The claims of the emperors were challenged by the French kingdom, which had emerged west of the Rhine, by the various German nobles who held their fiefdoms from the emperor, and even by the very church that the empire ostensibly upheld.

It was not the empire but the church which dominated Europe and provided it with unity in the years after 1000.  The structure of the modern \TRoman Catholic Church\t was built in these years. The long dispute with the Eastern church (see \TOrthodox church\t) culminated in 1054 with open schism.  At this same time, in the West, the primacy of Rome was strengthened when the monastery at \TCluny\t, in France, freed itself from the control of French feudal lords by refusing to recognize any authority but Rome.

To guarantee its independence the church decreed that future popes would be elected only by the cardinals.  In 1075 Pope \TGregory VII\t (Hildebrand) took steps to impose the \Tpapacy\t's leadership upon all of Christian Europe.  He attempted to end the practice of lay investiture, under which feudal kings and the emperor were accustomed to placing their own vassals in high church positions.  Gregory regarded lay investiture as a source of corruption and as a usurpation of the church's rightful powers.  In Germany, however, the bishops and monasteries owned considerable land, which Holy Roman Emperor \THenry IV\t wanted to keep in the hands of his loyal vassals. When Henry attempted to fill these ecclesiastical posts, Gregory excommunicated him and forced him to repent publicly before admitting him back into the church.  The \Tinvestiture controversy\t dragged on until 1122.  Even though the church emerged victorious, the rivalry between emperor and pope continued.

Nothing showed the renewed power of the church better than the call for a war to liberate the Holy Lands from Muslim control. In 1071 the Byzantine Empire lost most of Anatolia to the SELJUKs, a Turkish group that had swept out of Asia in the 9th century, along with the Magyars and other central Asiatic peoples.  Unlike previous Muslim rulers who had been tolerant of Christian worshipers, the Seljuk Turks cut the pilgrimage routes to Jerusalem.  The Byzantines appealed for aid to the Western branch of Christendom.  In 1095 Pope \TUrban II\t urged the knights of France and Germany, always eager to take up arms, to reconquer Jerusalem and Palestine.

The \TCrusades\t, as these religious wars were known, lasted for about two centuries.  Although they succeeded in capturing Jerusalem for a short period, the Crusaders failed to keep the city.  Militant Christians not only attacked Muslims in the East, but they also conducted general warfare against unbelievers.  German knights formed the Teutonic Order (see \TTeutonic Knights\t), which expanded German settlement eastward along the Baltic and converted Slavic settlers (see \TSlavs\t) by the sword.  The small Christian kingdoms of northern Spain and Portugal slowly pushed Muslim settlers back toward North Africa, a process that was not completed until 1492.

In 1215 Pope \TInnocent III\t summoned a great conference, the Fourth \TLateran council\t, which fixed many of the doctrines of the Catholic church.  A decade earlier the Fourth Crusade, diverted from its mission to the Holy Land, had seized (and sacked) the city of Constantinople (see \TConstantinople, Latin Empire of\t).  The patriarch of the Eastern church therefore attended Innocent's conference, although the two wings of Christendom were not united.  For all the power displayed by Pope Innocent, the church at the height of its authority in the 13th century was beginning to lose ground.  But a great civilization had been created under the church's influence. Cathedrals were built, universities founded.  The works of the Greek philosopher Aristotle were rediscovered through contact with Islam.  The great medieval scholar Thomas \TAquinas\t, along with other scholastic philosophers (see \Tscholasticism\t), sought to reconcile the Aristotelian scheme of science and reason with Christian theology.

The Loosening of Feudal Ties

The 14th century saw not only the decline of church authority but the destruction of European unity.  No longer fighting in distant wars, Europeans fought one another.  The papacy itself was divided with a line of rival popes in Avignon competing with Rome for the allegiance of the faithful.  The century was also punctuated by terrible suffering.  In 1348 \Tbubonic plague\t (the "Black Death") struck, possibly brought back to Europe from the East by returning merchants.  Europe's population, which had been growing steadily since 1000, was decimated and did not again reach the level attained in 1348 until after 1500.  With this depopulation, labor became scarce and hence more expensive;  peasants, particularly in England and France, could get better terms.  Runaways became common as the old attachment of medieval serfs to their masters and their manors was weakened.  Rents were increasingly fixed, or paid with money that was dropping in value;  thus, a peasant's debt to his landlord lessened as the price for his labor rose.  All the ties that had bound feudal society together now began to loosen.

The Rise of National Monarchies

In various countries strong monarchies arose, and Europeans gradually began to perceive new national ties binding the people of each country together.  England and France provide an early illustration of this process.  Ever since 1066, when a Norman duke, William the Conqueror, invaded England and established himself as King \TWilliam I\t, the authority and domains of the French and English monarchs had overlapped.  One of William's descendants, \THenry II\t (r.  1154-89), increased his continental holdings greatly through marriage to \TEleanor of Aquitaine\t.  The English monarchs were unable to maintain a firm hold on this vast domain, however;  and the \THundred Years' War\t, fought intermittently between 1337 and 1453, was largely an attempt to settle the disputes over English-held lands in France.  The English, using the longbow, scored crushing victories at \TCrecy\t (1346) and \TAgincourt\t (1415).  French resistance stiffened, however, partly due to the efforts of \TJoan of Arc\t, and the English finally withdrew.

English and French monarchs used the emotions generated by the Hundred Years' War to unify their countries and to strengthen their own positions at the expense of the great nobles.  In England, however, the kings were forced to make concessions when they summoned \TParliament\t to raise money.  Both monarchies received support from the townspeople, especially the merchants, who were heavily taxed by local lords but received little in return.

To the east, the rulers of \TLithuania\t and \TMoscow\t were also strengthening their control over large areas.  In the 14th century the Grand Duchy of Lithuania expanded its territories by conquest and by the marriage (1386) of its ruler, Ladislaus \TJagello\t, to \TJadwiga\t, queen of Poland.  A more lasting consolidation began during the following century as the neighboring Grand Duchy of Moscow emerged from two centuries of domination by the Khanate of the \TGolden Horde\t.  \TIvan III\t annexed vast territories, including some formerly held by Lithuania, establishing Moscow as the center of an expanded state.  Ivan, who is considered one of Russia's earliest state-builders, in 1472 married Sophia, the niece of the last Byzantine emperor.  He thus established the authority of Russia's rulers as the protectors of eastern Orthodox Christianity.

National monarchies were also being established on the Iberian Peninsula.  Here the crusade against the Muslims had never stopped, and by the 1400s the Spanish were having considerable success.  The marriage (1469) of \TFerdinand II\t of Aragon and \TIsabella I\t of Castile paved the way for the unification of Spain, and the last Muslim stronghold, \TGranada\t, was overcome in 1492.

Beginning of Overseas Expansion

During the wars to reconquer the Muslim parts of Iberia, the Portuguese and, to some extent, the Spanish had launched attacks on the North African coast.  The Portuguese extended their forays down the Atlantic coast;  each expedition went beyond its predecessor as it explored and charted the coast. In 1497 the Portuguese explorer Vasco da \TGama\t rounded the Cape of Good Hope and sailed into the Indian Ocean.  Soon Portuguese merchants were returning with spices and other goods coveted by Europe.

Isabella and Ferdinand also hoped to establish a trade monopoly;  in 1492 they hired an Italian sea captain, Christopher \TColumbus\t, to seek a new route to the East Indies. In his four voyages Columbus did not find a passage to the Orient, but he discovered the Western Hemisphere.  Soon Spanish explorers were charting the New World.  In 1513 Vasco Nunez de \TBalboa\t crossed the Isthmus of Panama and discovered the Pacific Ocean.  Another expedition (1519-22), led by Ferdinand \TMagellan\t, found a stormy passage around South America to the Pacific;  the expedition then sailed around the world--the first known to do so.  In a search for gold, Hernan \Tcortes\t seized (1519-21) the Aztec kingdom of Mexico, and Francisco \TPizarro\t invaded (1532) the Inca empire in Peru.  Before this age of \Texploration\t was over, England, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark had joined Spain and Portugal in the rush for overseas expansion.

EARLY MODERN EUROPE

The discovery of new worlds, the expansion of trade, and the consequent growth of cities spurred the economy and excited the imagination of Europeans.

The Renaissance

A reborn interest in classical literature also produced a momentous change in outlook, leading gradually to a new concept of humanity and a new style of literature.  The medieval church had preached that even the best pleasures of earthly life were but pale reflections of the life to come, if not deadly snares set by the devil.  Without directly denying the tenets of Christianity, the new European intellectuals insisted that their predecessors had emphasized the negative side of God's creation and had forgotten that human beings reflected (however imperfectly) the glory of God.  Poets, philosophers, painters, and sculptors now proclaimed the joys of human existence in a great outburst of creativity known as the \TRenaissance\t.

This new attitude first appeared in the 14th century in the prosperous cities of northern Italy.  There poets and scholars found kindred spirits in the classical writers.  Although well versed in Latin and Greek, Italian poets, led by \TDante Alighieri\t, \TPetrarch\t, and Giovanni \TBoccaccio\t, turned to their own language and wrote on worldly themes.

A similar change in spirit was reflected in the visual arts of the Renaissance as artists began to free their creations from medieval traditions.  They worked to win praise (and clients) for themselves.  Wealthy merchants and princes replaced the church as the main source of patronage;  their vanity (no longer regarded as sinful) created a new genre, the portrait. Painters signed their work, another innovation that signaled the increasing importance of the individual.  A new sense of realism was evident as both painters and sculptors tried to render their subjects in proportion and in perspective.  An interest in anatomy, reflected in the notebooks of \TLeonardo da Vinci\t and in the drawings of \TMichelangelo\t, helped artists to depict the human body more accurately.

Renaissance ideas and art forms spread north of the Alps.  Hans \THolbein\t the Younger, and Albrecht \TDurer\t perfected portrait painting, while Desiderius \TErasmus\t of Rotterdam won recognition as a great scholar.  In England the Renaissance culminated in the poetry and plays of William \TShakespeare\t.

The study of nature and the universe also attracted first-rate minds.  In the 16th century the Polish astronomer Nicolaus \TCopernicus\t theorized that the earth moved around the sun. Confirmation of this daring thesis came from the work of Johannes \TKepler\t, who reduced the mysterious movements of the visible planets to mathematical formulas.  His contemporary, \TGalileo Galilei\t, developed the modern science of physics with his studies of matter and motion and was also one of the first to use the telescope.  In the 17th century the study of human physiology was advanced when William \THarvey\t demonstrated the heart's role in circulating blood through the body.  And in 1687, Sir Isaac \TNewton\t unified existing knowledge about planetary and earthly motion with his theory of universal gravitation.

The Reformation

Although most Europeans might have been unaware of the discovery of new worlds and unable to read the new poetry, they were not likely to miss the significance of new religious disputes.  In 1517 an obscure German monk, Martin \TLuther\t, nailed a list of 95 theses against the church doctrine and practice of \Tindulgences\t, or pardons, onto a cathedral door in Wittenberg, an act that ushered in the movement known as the \TReformation\t.  Long tortured by doubts about his own salvation and angered at the church's sale of indulgences, Luther had concluded that neither the pope nor anyone else could grant forgiveness.  Luther became convinced that salvation could be obtained only through faith--a complete surrender of the will to God.

Luther was excommunicated and labeled a heretic.  But his protest aroused many of his contemporaries who felt that the church was in need of reform.  Throughout northern Europe kings and territorial princes, conscious of their own growing power, resented the distant pope's claims of authority as well as the drainage of wealth to Rome.  Holy Roman Emperor \TCharles V\t was unable to suppress Luther's teachings because many of the powerful German princes converted to the new Lutheran sect and united to protect it.

There were other critics of the church.  John \TCalvin\t, a Frenchman who settled permanently in Geneva in 1541, agreed with Luther that faith was essential for salvation, but whereas Luther emphasized the free will of the believer, Calvin held that only the chosen few or the "elect" were predestined by God to find salvation.  A virtuous life would be God's sign of selection but could not in itself lead to salvation.  In Geneva, Calvin insisted that the church, composed of God's saints, should rule.  The lives of Geneva's citizens were regulated down to minute details.  The Reformation did not in the beginning bring freedom of religion or toleration.

From Geneva and the Lutheran principalities the new ideas of the reformers spread throughout Europe.  In Sweden, Norway, and Denmark Luther's doctrines were quickly accepted, and Lutheran state religions were established.  In the Netherlands and Scotland and in many of the cities of France and Switzerland, Calvinism won converts.

The English Reformation owed more to the self-interest of the Tudor monarch \THenry VIII\t than to any theologian.  England had recently recovered from the Wars of the \TRoses\t (1455-85), which were fought over rival claims to the throne, and Henry was determined that his country be spared further disorders.  But he had no heirs.  When Henry decided to divorce his queen, \TCatherine of Aragon\t, he was unable to persuade the pope to rescind the original dispensation that had permitted him to marry his brother's widow.  Henry made the momentous decision to break with Rome, and in 1533 he took a new wife, Anne \TBoleyn\t.

No theological dispute separated Henry from the pope;  indeed, Henry had even published a small book defending orthodoxy.  His decision to create a national church, coming at a time when many groups in English society chafed under papal authority, was an important factor in a long chain of events that eventually transformed England and Scotland into Protestant lands (see \TEngland, Church of\t;  \TScotland, Church of\t).

Protestant gains in Europe did not go unchallenged.  In the face of growing defections, the Roman Catholic church brought forth its own \TCounter-Reformation\t.  To spread Catholic doctrine new religious orders were organized, most notably the Society of Jesus (the \TJesuits\t), which was founded by Saint \TIgnatius Loyola\t and in 1540 received papal approval.  In addition, a new Roman, or Universal, \TInquisition\t was established to uphold Catholic teachings.  The Council of \TTrent\t (1545-47, 1551-52, 1562-63) brought about important reforms in both doctrine and church organization.

Wars of Religion

Nowhere were Catholic reforms hailed more enthusiastically than in Spain, where King \TPhilip II\t resolved to lead a Catholic crusade to stamp out Protestant heresy.  Philip ruled (1556-98) not only Spain but also the Netherlands and the Spanish empire in the New World and, from 1580, Portugal and its empire.

Philip launched his first attacks on Protestantism in the Netherlands where his Dutch subjects had turned to Calvinism; soon a lengthy war (1568-1648;  see \TDutch Revolt\t) was underway. In 1588 Philip sent his great fleet, the \TSpanish Armada\t, against Queen \TElizabeth I\t in an unsuccessful attempt to conquer Protestant England.  But neither the Dutch nor the English could be converted by force.

The religious wars became most ferocious in France, where fighting had broken out in 1562.  In Paris the \TSaint Bartholomew's Day Massacre\t (1572) of thousands of Protestants started a particularly bloody civil war (see \TReligion, Wars of\t).  In 1589 a Protestant prince took the French throne as \THenry IV\t and subsequently announced his conversion to Catholicism in order to placate Catholics and prevent further bloodshed.  The founder of the \TBourbon\t dynasty, Henry granted political rights and some religious freedom to the Protestant minority in the Edict of Nantes (see \TNantes, Edict of\t), issued in 1598.

In Central Europe religious peace had been kept since the Peace of Augsburg (1555;  see \TAugsburg, Peace of\t), whereby Lutheran and Catholic princes had agreed that each ruler would determine the religion of his territory.  This compromise eventually deteriorated, however;  fighting broke out in 1618 and continued until 1648.

The \TThirty Years' War\t, involving in various phases almost all of the great powers, differed from earlier religious struggles to the extent that political motives overrode religious ones. In addition to religion, the issues included control of the Holy Roman Empire and the settling of international boundary disputes.  The French monarch, \TLouis XIII\t, and his chief minister, Cardinal \TRichelieu\t, fearing the power of the Catholic \THabsburg\t dynasty, aided the Protestant cause.  The Peace of Westphalia (1648;  see \TWestphalia, Peace of\t) concluded a period of violent civil and religious warfare and ended the Catholic attempt to convert Protestants by force.  In Germany and Austria it left the Habsburg dynasty in control of the imperial throne, but it confirmed the rights of Calvinist and Lutheran princes to rule their own territory and decide on its religion. The peace treaty also recognized the independence of the Dutch, a major defeat for the Spanish.  The war and the diplomatic negotiations at the peace conference marked the beginnings of the modern international state system.

Religion also played an important role in the bitter \TEnglish Civil War\t.  The \TStuart\t monarchs had attempted to suppress the militant Puritan minority that sought to introduce Calvinist practices within the Church of England (see \TPuritanism\t).  Some Puritans left England to establish colonies in North America, but most remained in England.  They had been alienated by the king's assertions of royal prerogative, and in 1642 fighting broke out between supporters of the king and of Parliament. During this war, King \TCharles I\t was beheaded.  After a short military dictatorship under Oliver \TCromwell\t (who in 1649-50 ruthlessly suppressed rebellion in Catholic Ireland), the Stuart dynasty was restored in 1660.  However, \TJames II\t, a Catholic king with autocratic pretensions, provoked Protestant opposition and was ousted in the bloodless \TGlorious Revolution\t of 1688.  Parliamentary supremacy was assured, the rights of individuals were guaranteed by a \TBill of Rights\t, and a measure of religious toleration was introduced.  These events had great importance for the later development of parliamentary government and \Tliberalism\t in all of Europe.

The Age of Absolutism

In France, which emerged from the Thirty Years' War as the strongest European nation, \TLouis XIV\t was determined to assert the power he had inherited.  His finance minister, Jean Baptiste \TColbert\t, encouraged French commerce and skillfully raised tax revenues, which Louis used to build a powerful army.

In the course of his extraordinary reign (1643-1715), Louis launched four wars against his Dutch, Spanish, and Austrian neighbors.  In 1600, when the Spanish king died without heirs, Louis XIV claimed the throne for one of his own relatives. French ambitions were checked, however, by a coalition of nations (see \TSpanish Succession, War of the\t).  The Peace of Utrecht (1713-14;  see \TUtrecht, Peace of\t) placed a Bourbon king on the Spanish throne, but it gave to the English strategic military outposts and important trade concessions in the Spanish empire.

War was not Louis's sole claim to fame.  In his lavish lifestyle, patronage of the arts, and mastery of government, Louis XIV set an example of a divine-right, absolute monarchy (see \Tdivine right\t), which all Europe tried to imitate.  To serve his expanded court and reflect his power, Louis had one of the largest palaces in Europe built at Versailles (see \TVersailles, Palace of\t).  There France's best artists and musicians performed for him, and the playwright \TMoliere\t wrote comedies to amuse him.  The influence of Louis's tastes on art and courtly life led flatterers to call him the Sun King;  from Versailles new ideas and fashions radiated throughout Europe.

Eastern Europe

In Eastern Europe wars and economic conditions furthered the rise of absolute monarchies.  The northern tier of states--Prussia, Poland, Russia--occupied uneasy positions on a great plain that stretched from the Elbe River into central Asia.  Without natural frontiers or mountain barriers the region had long been a highway for invaders or nomads.  To the south, Austria was threatened by the \TOttoman Empire\t.  As late as 1683 a Turkish army had invaded Austria and camped at the gates of \TVienna\t.  Although the Habsburg rulers of Austria finally abandoned their attempt to curb the Protestant princes of northern Germany, they tightened their grip on the Danube River basin.  A fierce competition for power forced the rulers of Russia, Prussia, and Austria to perfect the techniques of absolutism.

Throughout Eastern Europe towns and cities were few;  in the absence of growing trade and a strong middle class the landed aristocrats were very powerful.  While Western Europe's feudal society was dissolving, serfdom continued east of the Elbe and large estates were the rule.  Where a monarchy was too weak to break the power of the nobles, as in Poland, it tempted invasion and conquest.

In both Russia and the newer state of Prussia strong rulers emerged.  \TPeter I\t, who ruled Russia from 1689 to 1725, modernized his army and crushed the power of his nobles.  After studying western techniques firsthand, Peter introduced new industries and strengthened the military power of the \TRomanov\t dynasty.  Even more remarkable was the steady increase in the power of \TPrussia\t.

The \THohenzollern\t family was but one of many minor German princely families in 1417 when it ruled only the little state of \TBrandenburg\t.  Elector \TFrederick William\t (r.  1640-88) grouped a number of districts, including Prussia, under one administration.  Living frugally, he invested his tax revenues in the army.  A century later his successors had merged these territories with new ones that they had inherited or conquered and had formed a large and centralized state with a powerful standing army.  In 1740 the Prussian king \TFrederick II\t invaded one of the richest provinces of the Austrian monarchs, \TSilesia\t, and provoked two major wars involving all the great powers (the War of the \TAustrian Succession\t, 1740-48;  and the \TSeven Years' War\t, 1756-63).  In 1795, after repeated attacks had whittled away at Poland, its neighbors, Prussia, Russia, and Austria, partitioned what was left, and the independent state of Poland disappeared from the map for many years (see \TPoland, Partitions of\t).

The Enlightenment

The age of absolutism was also an age of great intellectual achievement.  The discoveries of Newton seemed to reveal a marvelous natural order, which science could verify with mathematical precision.  Faith in science and human reason became the hallmark of a remarkable group of European thinkers and writers.

France was at the center of this intellectual movement known as the \TEnlightenment\t, but its representatives could be found in other countries as well--Jeremy \TBentham\t and Adam \TSmith\t in Britain, Gottfried Wilhelm von \TLeibniz\t in Germany.  The French philosophers, or philosophes, \TDiderot\t, \TMontesquieu\t, and \TVoltaire\t popularized the new knowledge.  Diderot, for example, compiled one of the first comprehensive encyclopedias.

Although the philosophes seldom agreed on political or intellectual problems, they shared a common belief that humanity could make progress by the use of reason.  These writers deplored restrictions on the free flow of information and fought censorship.  Their faith in natural law and human reason led many of them to assert that all humans had been born with natural rights.

In the view of John \TLocke\t, Jean Jacques \TRousseau\t, and American thinkers such as Thomas \TJefferson\t, the proper function of government was to safeguard those rights.  The revolt of the American colonists in 1776 and the subsequent establishment of constitutional self-government reinforced these liberal ideas. Few European thinkers became revolutionaries, but in their challenge to intolerance, censorship, and the abuses of power, the philosophes undermined unthinking obedience to absolute governments.

MODERN EUROPE

Two great events, the cataclysmic \TFrench Revolution\t (1789-1815) and the more evolutionary \TIndustrial Revolution\t, which began in England in the mid-18th century, ushered in a new, fully modern era in Europe.

The French Revolution

The costly wars of the 18th century, including the American Revolution, which France had supported, left the coffers of the French monarchy empty.  King \TLouis XVI\t was unable to increase his revenues--largely because France's aristocrats, who were exempt from most taxes, refused to support tax reform until the king agreed to summon the \TStates-General\t in 1789.  This body, the nearest equivalent in France to the English Parliament, had not met since 1614.  When it convened in 1789, the nobles attempted to dominate it at the expense of the commoners.  The ensuing stalemate was broken only when the commoners boldly declared that they were the real representatives of the people and, calling themselves the National Assembly, swore to remain in session until they had drafted a constitution for France.

This legal crisis occurred during a period of acute distress. The previous year's harvest had been poor;  wheat was scarce, and the price of bread, high.  The presence of soldiers alarmed the citizens of Paris, and on July 14, 1789, a crowd stormed the \TBastille\t, an old fortress and prison, to demand weapons for their own defense.  Alarmed by these events, Louis XVI ordered the nobility and clergy to join the National Assembly, which soon abolished all privileges and tax exemptions.  Equality of rights was embodied in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which guaranteed French citizens freedom of thought, religion, and expression and proclaimed that the source of all power was the will and consent of the people.

Fear of the unruly crowds, however, led the authors of the new constitution of 1791 to limit the right to vote to wealthier taxpayers.  The monarch was given a veto power over the new legislative assembly, but Louis XVI was dissatisfied with the results of the revolution.  At the first opportunity he and his queen, \TMarie Antoinette\t, tried to escape.  Captured at Varennes, near the border, they were brought back to Paris as prisoners.

In April 1792, after the Austrian emperor had issued a proclamation that seemed to threaten an invasion, the French legislative assembly declared war (see \TFrench Revolutionary Wars\t).  The revolution now entered a more radical phase.  In August angry crowds attacked the palace and massacred the guards.

The \TJacobins\t, a militant faction favoring republican government, seized power and replaced the constitution of 1791 with one giving the vote to all adult men.  The war itself created a state of emergency.  In 1793 the king and queen were beheaded.  A Committee of Public Safety, led by the Jacobin Maximilien \TRobespierre\t, suspended the constitution and assumed dictatorial powers.  A reign of terror ensued in which thousands of French people lost their lives.  Victories by the French armies restored calm, however, and Robespierre himself was executed.

From 1795 to 1799 France experimented with a form of cabinet government called the \TDirectory\t.  In 1799 a brilliant young general, Napoleon Bonaparte, who had been responsible for many of the republic's victories, overthrew the Directory and established a military dictatorship, the \TConsulate\t, which was nominally republican.  Bonaparte brought stability to France, but for the next 15 years Europe was engulfed in the \TNapoleonic Wars\t.

Revolutionary France had implemented universal military conscription--the first nation in Europe to do so.  Bonaparte, who in 1804 had himself crowned emperor as \TNapoleon I\t, gave his huge armies inspired leadership.  In seven years he conquered all of Europe from Spain to the Russian border with Prussia. However, the British, with their great navy, remained unconquered, and the Spaniards continued to mount guerrilla attacks.

In 1812, Napoleon invaded Russia, stirring up the latent patriotism of its people;  a severe Russian winter forced him to retreat, and Napoleon lost most of his army.  A new European alliance, nurtured by British money and diplomacy, sprang up; the French troops were defeated in Germany and Spain;  and in 1814 Napoleon abdicated.  The victorious powers--Britain, Russia, Austria, and Prussia--set about drafting a peace treaty in Vienna in 1814.  Their efforts were interrupted when Napoleon returned from exile and raised a new army, but allied forces under the British general the duke of \TWellington\t crushed the French at Waterloo in 1815 (see \TWaterloo, Battle of\t), ending the Napoleonic Wars.

The Beginnings of Liberal Nationalism

The Congress of Vienna (1814-15;  see \TVienna, Congress of\t) faced the problem of rebuilding Europe;  it created a new balance of power by strengthening the states that had fought France.  The peacemakers restored the Bourbon dynasty to the French throne, created a \TGerman Confederation\t to replace the defunct Holy Roman Empire, enlarged Prussia, and gave additional Polish territory to the Russian tsar.  They set up a system of regular consultation among the major powers (see \Tcongress system\t) and expected that any threat to peace by one or two nations would be checked by the others.  In fact, no war involving all five major powers (Britain, France, Prussia, Austria, and Russia) occurred until a hundred years later.

The peace treaty created new problems, however, by failing to take into account the changes brought about by the revolutionary era.  With the exception of Britain, all the victors in the Napoleonic wars were autocratic monarchies (see \THoly Alliance\t).  Each of the eastern empires had reason to fear the latent nationalism of its subject peoples.  As a result of the partitions of Poland each of these states contained a sizable Polish minority.  In addition to Poles, the Austrian Empire also comprised Czechs and Slovaks, Italians, Hungarians, and Croats.

The Austrian foreign minister Klemens Furst von \TMetternich\t, whose empire was most vulnerable to nationalist uprisings, led the peacemakers in opposing changes in the status quo.  In Metternich's eyes liberalism and nationalism went together as threats to the Austrian empire.  Thus, in 1821, when the Greeks revolted against the Turks, Metternich supported Austria's ancient enemy, the Ottoman Empire.  In Italy similar rebellions were also crushed.

France and England faced pressure for change, too.  In 1830 the \TJuly Revolution\t occurred in Paris.  The revolutionary leaders, remembering the violence of the earlier revolution, replaced the Bourbon king \TCharles X\t with \TLouis-Philippe\t, who promised to obey the constitution and to respect the principles of the revolution of 1789.  Although the vote was extended, it was not given to the common people.  In England, where constitutional government had existed since 1688, liberals likewise mistrusted the lower classes.  In 1832, Parliament passed a \TReform Act\t that redistributed parliamentary seats more equitably and extended the franchise--but only to the middle classes.

In most of Europe there were no concessions of any kind.  In 1848, however, following a severe winter, revolutions erupted all across the continent (see \TRevolutions of\t 1848).  Beginning in Italy, where nationalists rose against Austrian rule, disturbances spread to all the major capitals--Vienna, Berlin, and Paris.

A second republic was proclaimed in Paris, and for a brief moment it seemed as if the autocrats of Prussia and Austria would either be forced to accept constitutions limiting their power or be deposed.  Revolutionary gains did not last long, however.  In the Austrian Empire the various nationalist groups refused to cooperate with one another.  Austrian and Prussian soldiers soon suppressed the revolutionaries in their respective countries.

In France a nephew of Napoleon I was elected president of the Second Republic.  As the revolutionary fervor subsided, he declared himself emperor as \TNapoleon III\t.  By 1850 the surge of revolutionary upheaval had ended, and conservatives were back in power in most European countries.

The Industrial Revolution

Despite the failures of the liberals and nationalists, Europe was undergoing revolutionary changes in its economic life.  The modern \Tfactory system\t originated in England in the mid-18th century but did not become prevalent on the continent until the mid-19th century or later.  By clustering workers under one roof and harnessing new sources of power, factory owners were able to increase the workers' productivity.  The term Industrial Revolution is somewhat misleading, however, because it covers not one but a series of gradual economic changes.

Throughout the 18th century, especially in Britain, farming improved.  New plows, scientific breeding of livestock, and crop rotation all increased food production and reduced the number of people needed to work the land.  At the same time, Britain's population was increasing, thus providing a large supply of labor and a growing domestic market.  Success in war brought Britain an overseas empire (see \TBritish Empire\t);  trade with India, the Orient, and North America was profitable;  and British merchants accumulated capital.  The country was thus well-supplied with the basic requirements for the first great industry, textiles.

New machinery made the mass production of cheap textiles feasible.  Power looms and shuttles were soon installed along water courses where mills could provide energy.  The perfection of the \Tsteam engine\t not only made relocation of factories away from streams possible but also revolutionized transportation; the railroad opened new markets and lowered shipping costs.

On the continent Germany and Belgium took the lead in establishing new industry.  Important deposits of coal in the \TRhineland\t helped spur the production of steel and other metals, and a huge industrial complex soon spanned the region.  By the end of the 19th century its advantage in natural resources had helped to make Germany the most powerful state in Europe.

National Unification

In the last half of the 19th century, the modern nations of Italy and Germany were established on the wreckage of the liberal nationalist movement.  Using the tools of war and skillful diplomacy, their leaders succeeded where the liberal revolutionaries of 1848 had failed.

As prime minister of the Italian kingdom of \TSardinia\t, ruled by the \TSavoy\t dynasty, Camillo di \TCavour\t played upon the traditional rivalry between France and Austria to enlist French help for Italian unification.  In 1859, Austria was defeated, and two years later Italian patriots of the \TRisorgimento\t recognized the king of Sardinia, \TVictor Emmanuel II\t, as king of Italy under a constitutional monarchy.  Soon most of the \TPapal States\t were annexed;  and in 1870 the Italian government seized the city of Rome except for the pope's enclave, \TVatican City\t.

To the north, the Prussian aristocrat Otto von \TBismarck\t used Prussia's industrial and military strength to build a united German nation.  The French tried to prevent the union, but the \TFranco-Prussian War\t (1870-71) destroyed the army of Napoleon III and led to his overthrow and the establishment of the Third Republic of France.  The Prussian king \TWilliam I\t was proclaimed German emperor in 1871, and Germany became a federation under Prussian domination.

For the next quarter of a century Europe remained at peace. Along with nationalism, democracy seemed to gain ground.  In both France's Third Republic and the new German Empire, adult male suffrage was proclaimed.  Political parties gained in importance.  In Britain the right to vote was extended again in 1867, although it still did not reach all adult men.  Even the Austrian and Russian empires seemed to soften their opposition to reform.  The Russian Empire abolished serfdom in 1861, and in 1867 the Austrian emperor recognized the Magyar nobles of Hungary as the equals of the German-speaking aristocracy, creating the Dual Monarchy of \TAustria-Hungary\t.

Early Socialist Stirrings

In the industrialized cities of western Europe, however, these piecemeal reforms did not seem adequate.  Since 1848, European workers had questioned whether the extension of the ballot was enough to ensure majority rule.  Karl \TMarx\t, in the Communist Manifesto (1848) and in other writings, best expressed the socialist critique of capitalism and the liberal governments that were coming to power.  According to Marx, middle-class leaders cried for liberal reforms in order to promote their industries and businesses.  Their control of new forms of wealth guaranteed political power for the middle class, while the new factory system increased the misery and exploitation of the workers.  Marx predicted that capitalist businesses would grow in scale, intensifying the class struggle between the workers (the \Tproletariat\t) and the middle class (the \Tbourgeoisie\t).  Eventually, a successful revolution would end in working class triumph and the establishment of \Tsocialism\t.

Every West European country soon had a socialist party, and most adopted Marx's views on the fundamental injustices of capitalism.  But the extension of the vote led many of these parties to moderate their stance.  Though most parties continued to speak of revolution, many favored postponing it until some distant future.  As the 19th century drew to a close, what worried these socialist leaders most was the threat of war.

Imperialism and the Threat of War

Though Europe remained at peace from 1871 until 1914, there were numerous war scares.  Neither France nor Germany seemed able to forget the Franco-Prussian War, which had deprived France of most of two valued provinces, Alsace and Lorraine. French patriots wanted \TAlsace-Lorraine\t returned, and many sought revenge, as well.

Bismarck, who guided Germany's foreign policy until 1890, negotiated an alliance with Austria in 1879;  the agreement was later expanded to include the new nation of Italy in a \TTriple Alliance\t, thus isolating France.  Bismarck also negotiated a separate treaty with Russia.

Britain and France continued to compete for empire.  In 1830, France began its conquest of Algeria and soon expanded its overseas holdings into West Africa and Southeast Asia (see \TFrench colonial empire\t).  The British, who had formally incorporated India into their empire in 1858, felt that French gains threatened their colonies in South Africa.  Britain and France raced to claim the remaining portions of Africa, the former taking Egypt and the Sudan, the latter Tunisia.  In 1898, French and British troops nearly clashed in eastern Africa, in the \TFashoda Incident\t, but the two governments reached a compromise instead.

In the meantime, France and Russia had formed (1893-94) a military alliance soon after the expiration (1890) of the Russo-German treaty.  Germany now had potential enemies on both frontiers.  In addition, Emperor \TWilliam II\t of Germany antagonized the British by his decision to build a powerful navy.  In 1904 the British and French came to an understanding--the Entente Cordiale--that resolved many of their differences over rival colonial interests, and in 1907 an agreement between Britain and Russia completed the anti-German coalition known as the \TTriple Entente\t.

When France attempted to add Morocco to its African empire, the German government objected.  Two war scares, the \TMoroccan crises\t of 1905-06 and 1911, resulted.  An international diplomatic conference established a French protectorate over most of Morocco, but tensions remained high.  Meanwhile two short wars (see \TBalkan Wars\t) broke out in the Balkan peninsula, where Austria and Russia each had a special interest.

World War I

In the end it was a Balkan dispute that led to \TWorld War I\t. \TSerbia\t had achieved independence from Turkey in 1878, but many Serbian nationalists remained dissatisfied because the hated Austrian Empire continued to exert control over a large Serbian minority.  In 1914 the Austrian archduke \TFranz Ferdinand\t was assassinated at Sarajevo by a Serbian nationalist.

The enraged Austrian government submitted an ultimatum to Serbia demanding punishment for the nationalists and further concessions.  This action alarmed the Russians, who in turn threatened the Austrians by mobilizing their huge, but inefficient, army.  Germany was committed by the Triple Alliance agreement to back Austria, and the German mobilization in its turn put the French army on notice.  Feeling trapped between the Russian and French armies, Germany tried to gain an advantage by striking first;  it attacked France through neutral Belgium, prompting Britain to declare war and join its French and Russian allies.

Thus began the bloodiest and costliest war that human history had yet witnessed.  Fundamentally, its cause was the bellicose nationalism that found expression not only in the fatal pistol shot but also in the arms race, the alliance system, and the imprudent acts of governments in the final days of peace.

After the initial German attack had faltered, a war of attrition developed.  To maintain their positions both sides dug trenches, and soon Europe was scarred by two fortified lines running from the English Channel to Switzerland.  The application of science made warfare more deadly than ever before;  poison gas was tried, and the horrible efficiency of the new machine gun was proven.  While the western front stabilized, German and Austrian armies pushed the Russian army back into its own territory.  Italy, which had refused to join its former allies, Austria and Germany, declared war on them in 1915 and 1916 respectively, thus opening a new front on the Austrian-Italian border.  Other rivalries led to fighting in the Balkans and the Middle East, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire having joined the \TCentral Powers\t.

The war entered its decisive stage in 1917.  Both sides were wearied by bloodletting.  In Germany the British naval blockade created shortages of essential supplies.  Military defeat helped produce a revolution in Russia, and on the western front there was a widespread mutiny in the French army.  The surrender of the Russians in 1917 freed large numbers of German troops for duty against Britain and France.  Germany made effective use of its improved submarines in establishing its own blockade of British ports, but the use of this weapon against American ships proved to be a damaging tactic. President Woodrow \TWilson\t had warned the German government that the United States would defend its right to trade, and in April 1917 the Americans joined the Allies.  The German high command decided to gamble on one last offensive, while hoping that the submarines would cut off enough supplies to paralyze the Allies.  But with the arrival of American reinforcements, the German attack was stopped, and an exhausted Germany sued for peace in 1918.

The victors, led by Wilson, gathered in Paris to draft a peace treaty.  Notable by their absence were the civilian German leaders who had replaced the emperor in the closing days of the war.  Wilson arrived in Paris determined to create a new international agreement that would prevent future wars, and one of the most important accomplishments of the \TParis Peace Conference\t was the creation of the \TLeague of Nations\t.  The treaty with Germany, signed at the Palace of Versailles, obligated the Germans to pay \Treparations\t, or damages, to the Allies.  It also limited the German army to 100,000 troops. The Rhineland, near the French border, was to be under allied control for 15 years, and no German soldiers could be stationed there.  Alsace-Lorraine was to be returned to France, and Poland regained its independence.

The Versailles treaty was a controversial agreement.  The U.S. Senate refused to ratify the treaty because it called upon the United States to join the League of Nations, and many Americans wanted to avoid future foreign entanglements.  The League was crippled from the outset by the failure of the United States to join.  The Germans resented many of the clauses in the treaty, particularly those which implied that Germany alone was responsible for having started the war.

World War I caused great destruction:  about 10 million people were killed, and property worth millions of dollars was destroyed.  The war destroyed the hopes and much of the idealism of an entire generation, undermining the confidence that had emerged in the 19th century in a liberal, humane, European-centered civilization.  In addition, all three great empires of Eastern Europe were dismantled.  Almost all of Austria's former provinces were absorbed in the newly independent nations of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Poland.  The German Empire, which had toppled with William II, was replaced by the \TWeimar Republic\t.  And in Russia a great revolution was under way (see \TRussian Revolutions of\t 1917).

The Russian Revolutions of 1917

In March (N.S.) 1917, Russian workers in Moscow and Petrograd (now Leningrad), staggering from repeated defeats and suffering from food shortages, protested with strikes and riots, which succeeded in overthrowing the tsar.  A group of prominent Russians formed an emergency government, but on November 7 (N.S.) it was ousted by a vigorous minority, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Ilich \TLenin\t (see \TBolsheviks and Mensheviks\t). The success of the Bolsheviks was due largely to public dissatisfaction with the war and the minority party's willingness to use force.  The Communists (as they soon called themselves, reviving a name that Marx had originally used) moved quickly, while the moderates remained indecisive.  The Bolsheviks immediately took Russia out of the European war, surrendering large stretches of territory to the Central Powers, especially the Germans, as their price for peace. Civil war broke out inside Russia, and the Allied powers sent troops to aid the anti-Bolshevik forces.  These "White Russian" armies, which were led by soldiers and aristocrats linked to the old regime, were unpopular, however, and the Bolsheviks soon regained control.

Once firmly in power the Communist government set about changing the economy.  Industry was nationalized, and committees of workers began to manage the factories.  Farm lands were distributed to the peasants.  Foreign-owned businesses were confiscated, and Russia's foreign debts were repudiated.  Years of warfare and upheaval had left chaos, however, and Lenin was forced to modify his plans to build a socialist economy.  In 1921 the Soviet government announced a \TNew Economic Policy\t, which kept control of industry and banking in government hands but permitted peasants to sell crops for cash and allowed small businesses and foreign investors to operate for a profit.  In 1922 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (the \TUSSR\t, or Soviet Union) was formally created. Under Lenin the new Soviet state relied upon a rigidly disciplined Communist party to furnish government officials and a secret police to wipe out opposition.

Following Lenin's death in 1924, two rivals, Joseph \TStalin\t and Leon \TTrotsky\t, maneuvered for power.  As party secretary, Stalin came to exercise huge powers, and he easily pushed Trotsky aside.  Under Stalin a series of Five-Year Plans, intended to modernize the nation at all costs, was launched in 1928.  State planning commissions devised projects for erecting huge dams, electric power stations, and heavy industry.  Peasant ownership of farms was declared contrary to socialism, and large collective farms were created to replace individual holdings. Many peasants bitterly resisted this policy, but the government did not hesitate to execute thousands of them, especially the more prosperous \Tkulaks\t.  The inefficiency of the new collective farms and the widespread opposition to them led to serious shortages and even famine, but the government persisted. Inside the Communist party itself Stalin continued to clean house--even some veterans of the revolution and old comrades were accused of disloyalty and brought to trial--until all voices of dissent were silenced (see \TGreat Purge\t).

The Rise of Fascism

In Western Europe, too, dictatorial governments came to power during the two decades following World War I.  In 1919-22 the democratically elected Italian government was unable to stem the disruption of daily life by the strikes and the fear resulting from occasional outbreaks of violence.  Borrowing the rhetoric and the methods of the extreme left, an ex-socialist, Benito \TMussolini\t, formed the Fascist party (see \Tfascism\t), which promised drastic social reforms and an end to disorder.  Once in power Mussolini's Fascists quickly eliminated all opposition.  Labor union leaders and business executives were replaced with Fascist appointees;  although private ownership continued, the economy was placed under government control, with unions forbidden to strike.  The Fascists took complete control of the state, making military service compulsory, permitting only one party, and reducing the king to a figurehead.  The Italian parliament ceased to function.  The Fascists also monopolized the communications network of Italy, arresting, executing, or exiling any democrats who continued to speak out.  This total control of communications, along with the indoctrination and censorship that accompanied it, was soon to be familiar throughout much of Europe as the hallmark of \Ttotalitarianism\t.

In Germany, too, the collapse of a legal government was accompanied by violence and a skillful use of propaganda.  In 1929 the American stock market crashed, and the great \TDepression of the\t 1930s soon spread to Europe.  Banks that owed money to Americans ran out of funds and collapsed;  factories closed for lack of capital, and unemployment rose.  Merchants sold less, tax revenues fell, and European governments dismissed public employees to balance their budgets.  Nowhere was the situation more serious than in Germany, where the inability of one cabinet after another to solve these problems played into the hands of extremists.  In the 1928 elections Adolf \THitler\t's party, the National Socialists, or Nazis (see \Tnazism\t), won only 12 seats;  by 1932 it was the largest party in the country;  and in 1933 it won control of the government.

Hitler's regime succeeded in winning support because it was able to provide jobs and because it provided an expression of German anger over the treaty that had ended World War I. Thousands of Germans cheered as their Fuhrer, or leader, announced that the German army would be rebuilt (contrary to the peace treaty of 1919) and given modern weapons.  This rearmament program, in turn, created factory jobs and stimulated the economy.  Thus many Germans applauded the achievements of the new regime.

Public opinion was also mobilized by Nazi propaganda.  Hitler appealed to German patriotism by promising to build a \TThird Reich\t, in the tradition of the two earlier empires, and by laying the blame for Germany's troubles on various groups, particularly Germany's Jewish minority.  After silencing the major opposition parties, the Nazis reorganized the \TReichstag\t, and in 1935 this puppet assembly approved the so-called Nuremberg Laws, which deprived German Jews of their citizenship and exposed them to persecution.

In 1936, Hitler again violated the Treaty of Versailles by sending his army into the Rhineland (which formed the border with France).  Weakened by the depression and fearful of war, the British and French did nothing.  The British economy, suffering from competition with Japan, the United States, and Germany, had never fully readjusted to the changes brought about by World War I.  When Italy launched an unprovoked war against Ethiopia in 1935, the British government did little to check Mussolini despite the threat to the Suez Canal.

In the face of Hitler's and Mussolini's threats, both France and Great Britain looked to the United States for support.  But the American public was preoccupied with its economic troubles, and most Americans preferred to leave European problems to the Europeans.  Throughout the Western democracies public opinion was deeply divided and confused.  The British government headed by Neville \TChamberlain\t pursued a course of appeasement, a policy that took German grievances at face value and attempted to satisfy Hitler's many claims without war.  Fearing the possibility of fighting a war alone against the more populous and now rearmed Germany, successive French governments felt that they had no choice but to follow Britain's lead.

New evidence of the dictators' willingness to wage war came in 1936 with the outbreak of the bitter \TSpanish Civil War\t.  The efforts of a democratically elected republican government to reform Spain's backward economy had provoked a revolt by the army.  Hitler and Mussolini supplied the rebels with money, modern equipment, and even troops.  France leaned toward active support for the Spanish government, but Britain would not agree.  While the democracies remained neutral, Italy and Germany violated international law with impunity and helped the Spanish general Francisco \TFranco\t to create an authoritarian government.

World War II

In 1938 Hitler annexed Austria.  Britain and France protested but did not feel strong enough to do more.  Later in that same year Hitler demanded a section of Czechoslovakia--the \TSudetenland\t, which bordered on Germany.  At the \TMunich Conference\t, held in September 1938 to discuss the issue, Chamberlain and the French prime minister, Edouard \TDaladier\t, were in attendance;  the Czechs were not given a voice. Unwilling to threaten war, Chamberlain agreed to withdraw British support for the Czech position in exchange for Hitler's promise that this would be Germany's last demand for a revision of the boundary lines fixed in 1919.  Yet in March 1939, despite this promise, Hitler annexed all of Czechoslovakia. And later that year Europe was rocked by German demands for Polish territory.  Even more stunning was the sudden announcement that Germany and the \TUSSR\t had signed a "nonaggression pact" (Aug.  23, 1939), pledging not to go to war with one another (see \TNazi-Soviet Pact\t).  On Sept.  1, 1939, Germany attacked Poland without warning.  Britain and France declared war immediately.

World War II became truly global when Japan, already at war with China, made a major strike in the Pacific.  Encouraged by military alliances with Germany and Italy and believing that war was inevitable, Japan attacked the U.S.  naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on Dec.  7, 1941.  The United States entered the war immediately, committing troops to both the European and the Pacific theaters.

In Europe Hitler's armies won easy initial victories.  France fell in 1940 in less than two months' fighting.  Like Napoleon I before him, however, Hitler was unable to subdue Britain--not even with heavy air strikes.  At first Hitler's rash decision to invade the Soviet Union in 1941 seemed to pay off.  German armies (attacking in violation of the nonaggression pact of 1939) drove to the very outskirts of Moscow and Leningrad.  As in Napoleon's day, however, the brutal Russian winter proved to be too much for the invaders;  aided by U.S.  and British supplies, the \TUSSR\t counterattacked in 1942.  Late in that same year, Anglo-American forces took the offensive in North Africa (where the Germans had nearly captured Egypt and the Suez Canal) and then in 1943 leapfrogged to Sicily and Italy.  The decisive breakthrough came in 1944 with the Normandy Invasion of France.  Soon the huge Allied armies pushed the Germans back across the Rhine.  In the east the Soviet Red Army also entered Germany.  Victory in both the Pacific and Europe came in 1945. \TJoel\t COLTON AND \TMalcolm\t \TRichardson\t

EUROPE IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

The war ended with Soviet troops occupying most of eastern Europe. Communist governments on the Soviet model were installed in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet-controlled zone of Germany.

Communism and the \TUSSR\t

The question of the extent to which Russia can be said to be part of Europe remained as doubtful as ever after it became a Communist state.  Communism or Marxist socialism, which has spread to every part of the world in the 20th century, is certainly a European creation.  The idea of eradicating poverty and inequality by doing away with private property gained currency among radical reformers in France and other countries during the early 19th century.  The Marxist version of this idea (named for the German philosopher Karl Marx) predicted the inevitable downfall of the capitalist system of private ownership, and its replacement by a worker-dominated socialist system in which the means of production would be publicly owned;  this in turn would eventually give way to a classless communist society.  By the beginning of the 20th century Marxist socialism had achieved a dominant influence in the European labor movement.  Contrary to expectation, however, the first attempt to put it into practice occurred in backward Russia rather than in the industrialized West.  There, under the leadership of V.I.  Lenin, and later of Joseph Stalin, it took the form of a ruthless dictatorship with all the marks of a modern totalitarian state:  political repression, concentration camps, government control over the dissemination of information, and elaborate spectacles glorifying the system. There may be a temptation to connect all this with Russia's tradition of oriental despotism, but the brutal record of the Nazi Holocaust shows that Western nations are capable of equal if not greater barbarism.

The moral and psychological consequences of the two world wars for Europe can hardly be exaggerated.  In the wake of such savagery, the belief in human progress that had characterized European thought since the 17th century lost much of its credibility.  The development of the atomic bomb during World War II--primarily the work of European scientists--and its use by the Americans against Japan raised doubts about the survival of civilization, and even of the human race itself.

The Cold War

No sooner had the Allied coalition achieved victory than a conflict--known as the \Tcold war\t--began to develop between its leading members, the United States and the Soviet Union.  The Americans, suspicious of Communist intentions, were angered by the Soviets' refusal to permit free elections in their Eastern European satellites, and anxious about the future of France, Italy, and Greece, which had strong Communist movements.  In order to counteract Soviet influence, the United States initiated a program of economic and technical assistance to promote the recovery of the war-torn countries of Western Europe.  Known as the \TMarshall Plan\t (for U.S.  secretary of state George C.  Marshall), the program provided more than $12 billion in aid to 17 countries between 1948 and 1952.  In 1949 the United States and 12 Western European nations formed the \TNorth Atlantic Treaty Organization\t (NATO) to provide for common defense against outside aggression, an alliance made formidable by the U.S.  nuclear arsenal.  Other countries were to join NATO later.  The Soviets were resentful of the western powers' unwillingness to recognize their right to have "friendly" governments in the countries on their borders, and alarmed by the emerging (1949) of U.S., British, and French occupation zones to form the pro-American state of West Germany.  A Soviet blockade (1948-49) of the western-occupied portion of Berlin increased east-west tensions, and the \TUSSR\t's development (1949) of its own atomic bomb raised the possibility of a full-scale nuclear war between the two superpowers.

Decolonization

Meanwhile, the great European colonial empires were disintegrating.  During World War II the Japanese had seized British, Dutch, and French possessions in Southeast Asia, damaging European prestige.  The military reverses suffered by the colonial powers encouraged the emergence of nationalist movements among the peoples subject to their rule.  After the war the \TUSSR\t supported Communist rebellions in Asia and Africa, and the once-invincible Europeans now found it difficult to maintain control.  Britain granted independence to India--long its most prized possession--in 1947, and the Netherlands evacuated Indonesia the following year.  The French, supported by the United States, waged a long war against insurgents in Indochina in a vain attempt to reimpose their rule on that country, but finally had to withdraw in 1954.  The Portuguese were involved in similar and equally futile struggles in Angola and Mozambique.  A particularly humiliating episode was the Suez Crisis of 1956, in which British and French forces invaded Egypt--a former British dependency--in retaliation for Egypt's nationalization of the Suez Canal, and were forced to back down under pressure from the Soviet Union and the United States. The longest and most agonizing of these colonial conflicts, however, was the Algerian War (1954-62), a rebellion by Algerian Muslims against French rule that provoked a political crisis in France, leading to the collapse of the Fourth Republic and the return to power of World War II resistance leader Charles de Gaulle.  Under de Gaulle, Algeria and most of France's other African colonies were granted independence. Both Britain and France maintained close post-independence ties with their former possessions, Britain through the Commonwealth of Nations, an international association that replaced the British Empire.

Western European Integration

In Europe itself, the horrors of World War II provoked a reaction against the excesses of nationalism.  The leaders who emerged in the postwar period were interested in some kind of European federation, a united states of Europe in which cooperation could be substituted for the rivalries of the past.

It was these aspirations that led to the formation of the \TEuropean Economic Community\t (EEC, 1957) and the \TEuropean Community\t (EC, 1967).  Initially, the EEC comprised six nations:  Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany, and in the 1960s it was dominated by French president Charles de Gaulle.  Whereas the first generation of Europeanists were anti-Soviet and favored close ties with the United States, de Gaulle opposed U.S.  influence and saw Europe as a community of nations extending east to the Urals.  He severed France's military ties with NATO and blocked British entry into the EEC because of Britain's "special relationship" with Washington.  De Gaulle stepped down in 1969, however, and a new era began for the EC with the admission of Britain, Ireland, and Denmark in 1973;  later Greece, Spain, and Portugal also joined, the wider membership bringing with it greater difficulty in achieving a consensus among the members.

During the 1970s and '80s West Germany, like France, lessened its dependence on the United States, seeking better relations with the \TUSSR\t and rapprochement with its East European neighbors.  As the 20th century approached its end, Western Europe ranked with the United States and Japan as one of the three major commercial and industrial centers of the non-Communist world.

Revolution in Eastern Europe

Among the countries within the Soviet sphere of influence, only Yugoslavia was able to set an independent course in the decades immediately following World War II.  The \TUSSR\t and its European satellites--the Warsaw Treaty nations--intervened militarily in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968) when those countries tried to free themselves of Soviet control.  With the establishment of the Gorbachev regime in Moscow in 1985, however, things began to change.  Poland's independent \TSolidarity\t movement, suppressed in 1981, reemerged as the \TUSSR\t relaxed its grip on Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, and was allowed to form a government in August 1989.  At the same time, Hungary transformed itself into a multiparty democracy and East Germany was convulsed by mass demonstrations demanding change. The rigid Stalinist regimes of Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Bulgaria, deprived of Soviet support, simply melted away in the face of popular uprisings, and the Romanian dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown in bloody revolt.

In the \TUSSR\t itself, Mikhail Gorbachev's liberalizing reforms turned into a real revolution, as nationalist and separatist agitation spread through the Soviet republics, the Communist party was ousted from power, and the cold war came to an end. Germany was reunified, the Baltic countries became independent, and, as the barriers between East and West disappeared, Charles de Gaulle's old idea of a Europe stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals took on a new reality.

Hugh Thomas

Bibliography:  Albrecht-Carrie, Rene, A Diplomatic History of Europe since the Congress of Vienna, rev.  ed.  (1973);  Bloch, Marc, Feudal Society, trans.  by L.A.  Manyon (1961);  Braudel, Fernand, Structures of Everyday Life (1982), The Wheels of Commerce (1983), trans.  by Sian Reynolds, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Centuries, trans.  by Sian Reynolds, 3 vols.  (1982-84), and The Mediterranean and Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans.  by Sian Reynolds, 2 vols., 2d ed.  (1976);  Burckhardt, Jakob, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans.  by S.G.C.  Middlemore (1944); Cambridge Ancient History, 12 vols.  (1923-39);  Cambridge Medieval History, 9 vols.  (1911-36);  Cambridge Modern History, 13 vols.  (1902-10);  Clough, S.  B., and Rapp, R. T., European Economic History, rev.  ed.  (1975);  Dickens, A. G., The Age of Humanism and Reformation:  Europe in the Fourteenth, Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (1972);  Ferro, Marc, The Great War, trans.  by Nicole Stone (1973);  Fisher, H.  A.  L., History of Europe (1935);  Gibbon, Edward, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 6 vols.  (1776-88); Green, Vivian, Renaissance and Reformation, 2d ed.  (1964); Halevy, Elie, History of the English People in the 19th Century, trans.  by D.A.  Barker and E.I.  Watkin, 6 vols., 2d ed.  (1949-52);  Hughes, H.  Stuart, Contemporary Europe:  A History, 4th ed.  (1976);  Langer, William L., ed., The Rise of Modern Europe, 20 vols.  (1936);  Laqueur, Walter, Europe since Hitler (1970);  Liddel Hart, Basil, A History of the Second World War (1970);  Lopez, Robert, The Birth of Europe (1967); Mayne, Richard, Postwar:  The Dawn of Today's Europe (1983); McNeill, William H., The Rise of the West (1963);  New Cambridge Modern History, 13 vols.  (1957-79);  Palmer, R.  R., The Age of the Democratic Revolution, 2 vols.  (1959-64); Palmer, R.  R., and Colton, Joel, A History of the Modern World, 5th ed.  (1978);  Pirenne, Henri, A History of Europe, 2 vols.  (1956) and Mohammed and Charlemagne, trans.  by Bernard Miall (1968);  Rice, Eugene, The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460-1559 (1970);  Starr, Chester G., A History of the Ancient World, rev.  ed.  (1974);  Strayer, Joseph, ed., Dictionary of the Middle Ages, 12 vols.  (1982-89);  Tierney, Brian, and Painter, Sidney, Western Europe in the Middle Ages, 300-1475, 2d ed.  (1974);  Tocqueville, Alexis de, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans.  by Stuart Gilbert (1955);  Ulam, Adam, The Bolsheviks (1968).

See also:  \TFrance, history of\t;  \TGermany, history of\t;  \TGreat Britain, history of\t;  \TGreece, ancient\t;  \TIreland, history of\t; \TItaly, history of\t;  \TLow Countries, history of the\t;  \TPortugal, history of\t;  \TRome, ancient\t;  \TRussia/Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, history of\t;  \TScandinavia, history of\t;  \TSpain, history of\t.