European History Articles

Cheat Sheet / Updated 02-24-2022

European history has had numerous great turns and changes over the centuries with its mighty empires forming, expanding, exploring and warring, and revolutions of all kinds through the centuries, which can split into four major eras. Have a look at the key dates of events that shaped Europe.

Article / Updated 05-16-2019

Ireland has had a vast history of vast invasions, revolutions, wars and conflicts. Take a look at the major periods in Ireland’s history through the ages broken down. Ancient Ireland c. 12000 – 2750 BC Neolithic Ireland 2750 – 600 BC The Bronze Age 700 – 150 BC Arrival of the Celts 430 – 800 Christianity Established The Middle Ages 800 – 900 Viking invasions 1170 – 1270 Norman Ireland 1270 – 1366 English settlement and repression 1370 – 1455 Irish Revival and the Pale 1455 – 1541 Wars of the Roses and Geraldine domination Early Modern Ireland 1532 – 1603 Ireland and the Reformation 1558 – 1647 The Plantations 1649 – 60 Cromwellian Ireland 1660 – 90 Establishment of Protestant supremacy The Modern Age in Ireland 1695 – 1782 Penal Laws and repression 1782 – 1800 Period of Irish parliamentarianism 1800 – 1922 Ireland and Union 1845 – 51 Famine and Emigration 1875 – 1916 Campaign for Home Rule 1916 – 23 Irish Revolution 1921 – 72 Stormont government of Northern Ireland 1922 – 48 Irish Free State 1949 – 2000s The Irish Republic 1960s – 2000s Troubles in Northern Ireland

Cheat Sheet / Updated 03-27-2016

Nostradamus was a sixteenth century physician, astrologer, and prophet whose predictions are still being read, studied, and written about today. Although Nostradamus (who wrote in four-line stanzas called quatrains) believed in his predictions, he was a man of his time who was influenced by the people, events, and ideas of the day.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

Louis XIV was a mere 5 years old when he became King of France in 1643. And because he lived to the ripe old age of 77, he had plenty of time to establish his place in French history. When he was 18, Louis XIV took part in a court entertainment known as a masque, a mixture of dance, drama, and music, which often carried an allegorical message. For his costume, Louis dressed up as the sun and liked the look so much that he adopted the sun as his personal emblem. He became known as the Sun King: the radiant giver of life and warmth around whom the whole world revolves — you get the idea. Versailles Louis engaged the greatest architects of the day, Louis Le Vaux and Jules Hardouin-Mansart, to build him a suitable palace at Versailles. André Le Nôtre designed the grounds, including the Grand Canal outside the windows and a forest studded with glades containing classical statues and fountains. By 1682, Versailles, not Paris, had become the center of power. Louis made the French nobles come to him at Versailles, where no angry local mob could be called on. Versailles was a glittering center of courtly etiquette and the setting for a flowering of French literature and music. It was also a ruthless exercise in absolute monarchy. Fabulously absolute Louis's rule was based on the relatively new idea that the king had absolute power. The French cleric Jacques Bossuet taught that absolute monarchy was all part of God's plan — Louis was so pleased that he made him Bishop of Meaux and tutor to his eldest son, the Dauphin. Louis built up an efficient and loyal new nobility of lawyers and administrators who owed their titles and position to him and not to their family pedigrees. He could also issue a lettre de cachet, which allowed him to send anyone to prison for anything at all without any sort of trial. Absolute monarchy was another term for elegant tyranny. While you're living it up, some of us are starving The other side of Louis XIV's France was not so glittering. Increasing hunger and unrest were evident in France toward the end of the Thirty Years' War, and since France's ingenious system of taxation meant that the people with the least money paid the most, the situation didn't get any better. Tax riots broke out in 1662, and the king's response was to privatize the tax-collection system in what was called the General Tax-Farm, which just meant that unscrupulous characters could raise taxes even higher and pocket the difference. L'eglise c'est moi — I am the Church! Attached to Versailles was a big chapel royal with a very elaborate pew for the king. The courtiers' pews didn't face the altar but faced the king. Louis XIV saw religion as a means of enhancing his own position and prestige. The king insisted on appointing French bishops himself, and he didn't want the Pope interfering in the way that the French Church was run. Louis XIV's most important religious act was to have much wider and more serious consequences. Egged on by his secret new wife, the staunchly anti-Protestant Madame de Maintenon, in 1685 Louis revoked the 1598 Edict of Nantes. That was the edict issued by Louis's grandfather, Henry IV, which allowed French Protestants freedom of worship. Protestant pastors had 15 days to leave the country. The whole Huguenot (French Protestant) community threw some things into a bag and sought refuge in Protestant countries like England and the Netherlands, where they made important contributions to the economic life of their new homelands. Louis was declaring war on Protestant Europe, just when Protestant Europe was entering its period of greatest strength.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

A 19th-century Swiss historian named Jacob Burckhardt coined the term Renaissance (rebirth) for the big changes in thinking and the arts that took place in Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries. The rebirth in question was of the world of the ancients, the Romans, and especially the Greeks. The writings and ideas of these civilizations seemed to offer meanings that were applied to every aspect of life — education, music, politics, painting, religion, even falling in love. Renaissance scholars called this new learning humanism — everything you'll ever need to know about being human. Nowadays, a humanist is someone who doesn't believe you need religion in order to lead a good life and treat other people properly. In the Renaissance, a humanist was someone who studied the ancients in order to understand the human condition and the mind of God. Same word, two very different meanings. Fifteenth-century Italy had all the ingredients for an artist's paradise. Rulers and rich merchants abounded, all with cash to spend and looking for some way of showing off their wealth to everyone else. What better than to get the latest Renaissance painter to come and decorate your reception area? A city didn't even need to have a university to take advantage of the "new learning," as it was called. Venice's Aldine Press produced editions of all the great Greek authors for libraries across Europe. Pope Nicholas V founded the great collection of books that became the magnificent Vatican Library. Later, the new learning would penetrate the universities and take them over. Francesco Petrarch: The man who loved books Historians can't usually date movements and trends like the Renaissance from one event or person, but Francesco Petrarch has a good claim to having started off the Italian Renaissance. Francesco was the poet who developed the sonnet, but his real importance was as an avid book collector. Petrarch didn't just collect them; he used to sit stroking their pages and talking to them. Digging around in attics and cellars in Florence, Petrarch found lots of old Latin manuscripts and was astounded by the purity of their language. The only Latin Petrarch or anyone else knew was the rather clumsy Latin of the Church and universities. Imagine for a moment that the only English you ever heard, the only English that existed, was the language of a firm of chartered accountants, and then you opened an old cupboard and found the complete works of Shakespeare. Soon, not an attic in Italy was safe from scholars prying open old chests and cupboards to see if any ancient documents were inside. Spreading the new learning to the masses In Petrarch's eyes, poetry and literature were for scholars only; his book collection formed the basis for the library of Florence's new university. However, one of Petrarch's followers, a scholar and civil servant called Coluccio Salutati, came up with a more far-reaching idea. Salutati had come across the speeches of the great Roman lawyer Cicero. These documents were all top-quality stuff — lots of rhetorical flourishes and learned allusions — but what interested Salutati was that these were not composed for private reading or scholarly study, but for use in court, to get Cicero's clients off with a caution. Salutati liked that notion and called it negotium — applying your learning to practical life. Salutati became Chancellor of Florence and started writing his diplomatic correspondence in the style of Cicero. Soon, other states started to get interested in the new "humanist" scholarship being pioneered in Florence. Florence soon became a major center of humanist scholarship, thanks to another scholar-Chancellor, Leonardo Bruni. When Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, many Greek scholars ended up in Florence and introduced the Florentines to some of the ancient Greek masters, like Aristotle in the original and the big new discovery, Plato. Forty years later, the whole Jewish population of Spain was kicked out, so now Hebrew scholars headed for Florence, too. The new learning was about to become very practical indeed.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

Historians often date modern history from the 18th century, not just because this period saw the American and French Revolutions, but because at this time a fundamental change took place in the way people thought. Writers of the moment felt that they were emerging from a period of darkness and ignorance into the light of knowledge and reason. The Enlightenment was to have huge consequences, not just for philosophy and science but for politics and the way people were governed — both then and now. The roots of Enlightenment thinking go back long before the 18th century. The humanist scholars of the Renaissance had insisted on going back to the original texts of the ancients rather than simply accepting traditional teachings. By the 17th century, this habit of looking and thinking for oneself had spread to observational science. The 16th-century Polish scientist Nicholas Copernicus had noted that the earth appeared to go around the sun and not vice versa, and a hundred years later, the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei was able to demonstrate from his own observations and from mathematical calculation that Copernicus had been right. This discovery was not welcome news to the Church. Even though Galileo got into trouble with the Inquisition, the Church couldn't reverse the way scientific thinking was going; close observation and deduction with precise mathematical calculation were rapidly replacing faith in the classical authors. Might they even replace faith in God? The Enlightenment in France France produced three thinkers who had a particularly profound impact on European thought: Michel de Montaigne, 1533–1592. Montaigne pointed out that people in other lands had developed perfectly good codes of morality and ethics. Who was to say which set of values was better than any other? And why should anyone impose their values on other people? René Descartes, 1596–1650. Descartes, a philosopher and mathematician, argued that, if you start from the basic point that you know you exist, or, as he put it, 'I think, therefore I am,' you can actually prove the existence of God by applying reason and mathematics. Descartes's ideas (known as Cartesian philosophy) lasted well into the 18th century and formed the basis for the Enlightenment cult of Reason. Blaise Pascal, 1623–1662. The mathematician Pascal agreed with Descartes on the importance of mathematics, but didn't think that you could apply reason and logic to areas of faith and emotion. "The heart has its reasons," he said, "which Reason knows not." The Enlightenment in England This French thinking was all very fine and theoretical, but over the Channel, the English were up against hard practicality. When English politics slid into civil war in the middle of the 17th century, two philosophers in particular tried to work out what the situation might mean: Thomas Hobbes, 1588–1679. Hobbes reckoned that people are pretty brutish, and you need a good strong state, possibly a single ruler with absolute power, to keep them in order. John Locke, 1632–1704. Locke took a rather more optimistic view of human nature and reckoned that people are born equal, with no built-in sense of right and wrong. We are the result of what we observe and experience as we go through life; no one is 'naturally' any better than anyone else. These philosophers' thoughts ran counter to commonly accepted attitudes of 17th-century Europe, when people were born into "better" or "lower" families every day. If Locke and Montaigne were right, then by what right did nobles claim to be of higher birth than peasants? And by what right did they hold their lands and wealth while others, just as well-born as they were, had nothing? The implications of Locke's thinking in particular were enormous and revolutionary.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

Alessandro Farnese became Pope Paul III in 1534 and immediately came face-to-face with the Protestant Reformation. At first sight, Paul looked pretty much like his predecessors: born into a rich Roman family, bishop at 20, cardinal at 25. But then Paul had a midlife crisis and decided that if he was going to be a bishop and a cardinal, he ought to do it properly. So Paul went through the whole ordination process again, but this time for real, actually reading Augustine and Aquinas and saying his prayers as if he meant them. After becoming the Pope, Paul appointed reformers to important positions in the Church and set up a special commission to look into whether changes in the Church were needed. Just about everyone in the Church agreed that reform was necessary, but they had very different ideas about what form these improvements should take. Paul III finally decided to summon a General Council. Arranging this Council took some time because of all the fighting between the emperor and the king of France, but in 1542, Paul spotted a window and grabbed it. The Pope invited all the bishops, archbishops, cardinals, and universities of Europe to send representatives to a Great Church Council to be held at Trent in northern Italy. Some historians call the changes following the Church Council the Catholic Reformation — the Church reforming itself. Others see this event as the time when the Church launched its counter-attack — the Counter-Reformation. The Council had three sessions, with a rather important interruption in the middle: 1545–1547: First session: apologies, minutes, and matters arising. Basically, the Council said that everything the Church said and did was right, but they weren't so sure about whether bishops really ought to visit their bishoprics (a diocese) at least once. 1551–1552: Second session: still on agenda item 3. The Council sorted out the Church's position on Communion, but it still couldn't decide about those bishops and their bishoprics. 1555–1559: No Council: a four-year comfort break. In 1555, Cardinal Carafa (who had been in charge of the Inquisition) became Pope Paul IV. Paul IV thought there had been quite enough hot air spouted at Trent, and he did not reconvene the Council. Paul had a big drive on discipline and ensured that an increasing number of titles ended up on the Church's Index of Banned Books. Paul IV genuinely wanted to reform Church abuses, and just went about it in a different way from Paul III. Paul IV died in 1559, and the reformers breathed a sigh of relief. 1562–1563: Third session: This third session summed everything up in the definitive Tridentine (meaning "from Trent") Decrees: One single, uniform Latin Tridentine Mass for use throughout the world — and every Sunday, too, not just Christmas and Easter. The Tridentine Mass remained unchanged until the 1960s. A new improved translation of the Bible. Bishops should live in their bishoprics and check up on their clergy regularly. And the Vatican will be checking to see that they've done it. Clergy should preach a proper sermon every week — and every diocese must have a seminary to train them in how to do it. (Preaching was the Protestants' trump card; thus, scoring well here was essential.) BANNED: Selling relics, selling indulgences, priests' concubines. The Tridentine Decrees were intended to make Catholicism a much more intense personal experience, instead of just a set of mechanical rituals. The Church started running off a printed Catechism, explaining what Catholics believe in an FAQ style; this text is still in use today. Catholics were to go to Confession more often and really make a clean breast of things. To help people confess, Carlo Borromeo, the charismatic Archbishop of Milan, designed the confessional box, with a screen so you weren't able to see the priest's face clearly and he wasn't able to see the penitant's.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

Although Nostradamus (and many of his adherents) believed he could see the future, Nostradamus was a man of his times who was influenced by the popular concepts and culture of the day. He was a student right before the time when astrology and astronomy were considered core subjects; he studied medicine; and was an apothecary during the plague. The concepts that likely had a profound influence on Nostradamus include: Astrology: This is the study of the movement of stars and planets with the idea that these motions are related to the people and events on Earth. By knowing the charts and positions of these celestial bodies, supporters of astrology believe that future events can be predicted. Alchemy: This secretive study focuses on the process where you're supposed to be able to change any metal into gold to give you material wealth and achieve the ultimate goal — the Philosopher's Stone, a stone that provides immortality. Medicine: Doctors of the time were educated in a mixture of state-of-the-art medicine (looking at body fluids), basic anatomy, some astrology, and folk medicine. But treatments were limited to herbal concoctions and using leeches to bleed out the illness in a patient, who often wasn't much better off for the help. Toward the end of the Renaissance, using observation to investigate how the body worked took hold. Humanism: This is a Renaissance belief that people should focus on all things human, especially exploring their capabilities. Beauty created by people in the form of music, art, and literature was valued specifically because it was a human creation. Humans have a natural dignity and value because they're people. People can realize their potential by using logic and thinking critically about the world rather than relying on faith.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

The Middle Ages in European history have a bad press, as if everyone was barbaric and always burning witches and torturing people. But it was a time when Europeans achieved their most breathtaking achievements in art and architecture, and set in place much of the thinking and ideas we rely on today. Year Event 529 St Benedict founds the monastery of Monte Cassino 711 Muslim invasion of Spain 732 Charles Martel defeats Arabs at Battle of Poitiers 787 Viking raid on Lindisfarne 800 Charlemagne crowned ‘Roman’ emperor in the west 1054 Schism between ‘Catholic’ Roman Church and ‘Orthodox’ Greek Church 1066 Norman conquest of England 1071 Battle of Manzikert: Turks overrun Anatolia 1099 Jerusalem falls to First Crusade 1204 Fourth Crusade sacks Constantinople 1241 Mongols overrun eastern Europe 1337 Start of the Hundred Year’s War AD 313 Edict of Milan: Constantine accepts Christianity AD 395 Roman Empire divides in two AD 410 Rome sacked by Alaric, king of the Visigoths AD 476 Last western Roman emperor deposed 1346 Black Death arrives in western Europe 1309–1417 The Great Schism 1450 Gutenberg’s printing press 1453 Fall of Constantinople 1492 Fall of Granada: Moors expelled from Spain; Columbus lands in the New World

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

A great number of decisive political wars and revolutions took place in the last two centuries; struggles for independence and liberation, industrialisation, nationalism and European integration. Take look at some of the landmark events that changed Europe in Modern history. Year Event 1789 Fall of the Bastille: start of the French Revolution 1804 Napoleon crowned Emperor of France 1815 Battle of Waterloo: Napoleon exiled to St Helena 1829 Greece wins independence from Ottoman Empire 1833 Slavery abolished in British Empire 1848 Revolutions across Europe 1854–6 Crimean War 1860–1 Unification of Italy 1861 Alexander II emancipates Russian serfs 1870–1 Franco-Prussian War; proclamation of German empire 1914–18 First World War 1917 Russian Revolution 1919 Treaty of Versailles 1936–9 Spanish Civil War 1939–45 Second World War 1941 Operation Barbarossa: German invasion of Russia 1949 Formation of NATO 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary; Suez crisis 1957 Treaty of Rome founds the European Economic Community 1975 Democracy restored in Spain 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev in power in Russia 1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall: anti-communist revolutions across eastern Europe 1992 Yugoslavia civil war starts 2002 Adoption of the Euro 2004 European Union enlarges to 25 member states