A. Prehistoric and Ancient Times
Modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) first appeared in Europe during the late Paleolithic Era (the Old Stone Age).
Hunters and gatherers, they left behind notable examples of art, dating from 25,000 to 10,000 years ago, that have been found in more than 200 caves, mostly in Spain and France. Some 10,000 years ago, at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch—the most recent of the Ice Ages—the climate began to improve and gradually approached that of the present. In time, Neolithic (New Stone Age) people developed agricultural economies that replaced hunting. During the 6th millennium BC, farming spread over most of western Europe. Some of these Neolithic cultures, beginning about 5000 BC, erected huge stone monuments (megaliths) either as grave structures or as memorials of notable events. Early Neolithic development was especially intense in the Danube and Balkan areas, in the so-called Starcevo (near Belgrade in present-day Serbia) and Danubian cultures. In the southern Balkans the Sesklo culture (in Thessaly, ancient Greece) had developed complex proto-urban forms by 5000 BC. This in turn led to the Dimini culture (also in Thessaly), which was characterized by fortified villages. Excavations in the Balkans have shown that copper was in use in that area about 4000 BC, during the Vinca culture (4500?-3000? BC). By this time, trade, especially in amber from the Baltic, was becoming more and more important. In central Europe (Bohemia, in what is now the Czech Republic) large deposits of copper and tin facilitated a bronze technology during the 3rd millennium BC. Typical royal or aristocratic burials of this period were covered by barrows or tumuli, but by the late 2nd millennium BC a change occurred; cremation then became common, and burial by urn (in urnfields) became the established custom.
1. Arrival of Indo-Europeans
Research has not clearly determined where the Indo-European languages, spoken on much of the modern continent, originated. Some scholars believe that the kurgan (barrow) culture that began north of the Black Sea about 2500 BC was early Indo-European. According to this theory, these Indo-Europeans spread to the Balkans, which they invaded, introducing horses to the region, about 2200 BC; then they spread to the rest of Europe. Therefore, the Middle Bronze Age peoples of the Balkans and central Europe may have spoken Indo-European languages. Except for the civilizations on Crete and in Greece during the 2nd millennium BC, most of Bronze Age Europe was preliterate.
The first major civilization to mature in Europe was that of Crete during the 2nd millennium BC. Called the Minoan Culture after the legendary King Minos, this Bronze Age society controlled the Aegean by 1600 BC (see Aegean Civilization). The date of the arrival of the first Indo-European invaders in Greece is controversial. Many scholars agree on approximately 1900 BC. By 1400 BC these Greeks, called Mycenaeans for their principal city, Mycenae, had conquered the Minoan realms. Mycenaean civilization had commercial contacts with the Middle East as well as Britain (for tin). After 1200 BC, however, Mycenaean society was almost totally destroyed. This was due to widespread fighting among the Mycenaean Greeks, with earthquakes probably causing additional damage. In the Greek Dark Age that followed, the Greeks learned to fashion tools and weapons of iron and the Iron Age began in Greece.
2. Iron Age Cultures
Elsewhere in Europe the population had begun to increase rapidly in the late Bronze Age.
By the early Iron Age, beginning about 1000 BC, the tribes of the central European urnfield culture were expanding along the principal river routes, giving rise to such major groupings as the Celts and the Slavs, as well as Italic-speakers and Illyrians. In northern Italy the Villanovan Culture (about 1000-700 BC) became of major importance, and the similar Hallstatt Culture (8th century BC to 5th century BC) spread with the Celts through much of western Europe between the 7th and 4th centuries BC. The Celts were also identified with the La Tène Culture (450?-58 BC), which owed much to the Hallstatt. The Germanic Peoples began to expand from southern Scandinavia and the Baltic by 500 BC.
3. Supremacy of Greece
By 800 BC Greek civilization began to reemerge after the shock of the Dorian invasion, but in a form different from that of the Mycenaean one. This was due in considerable degree to the Phoenicians, who had been establishing trading posts in the Mediterranean and spreading elements of Middle Eastern civilization westward. From them the Greeks took the Phoenician alphabet, to which they added full vowels. In the 8th century BC the Greek city-states began to expand by means of colonization, especially in southern Italy, and by the following century Hellenic civilization was reaching maturity. Greek colonies had then been founded throughout the Mediterranean region, and the growth of trade among these settlements and with other peoples resulted in the spread of Greek culture. Most of these new Greek cities, although virtually independent, were bound by a common culture. They were aware of their Hellenic heritage and considered other peoples barbarians. Most ethnic groups in the western Mediterranean, including the Etruscans, who had supplanted the Villanovans, eagerly adopted an overlay of Greek culture. Most major urban centers in the area, Greek or not, progressed from monarchies to aristocracies to commercial oligarchies (plutocracies).
By the 5th century BC some Greek centers, such as Athens, had developed into democracies. At that time Greece came to be threatened by the expanding Persian Empire, founded in the previous century. All of Asia Minor was soon conquered by the Persians, and in 490 BC they attacked Greece. After the Persians had been decisively repelled (479 BC), democratic Athens emerged as the major power in the Greek world. An Athenian empire was established in the Aegean, hastening the economic and cultural integration of the region, and the 5th century BC became the golden age of classical Greek civilization. Athenian expansionist policies and old economic and political rivalries, however, caused the suicidal Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC), in which much of Greece was devastated, and wars among the Greek cities continued in the following century.
Macedonia, to the north of Greece, had not originally been part of the Greek world. By the 4th century BC, however, its ruling class had become Hellenized. Under Philip II, Macedonia conquered much of Greece, and his son, Alexander the Great, added the Persian Empire to these realms. After Alexander's death, his successors divided the empire, with the result that the centers of gravity during the following period (known as Hellenistic) shifted to such cities as Alexandria in Egypt and Antioch in Syria. Both Macedonia and Greece were ultimately conquered by Rome during the 2nd century BC.
4. Ascendancy of Rome
Unlike Greece, Italy in the early Iron Age was fragmented among many ethnic and linguistic groups. Grafted onto earlier Neolithic cultures were several groups of Indo-Europeans who infiltrated northern Italy late in the 2nd millennium BC and subsequently spread through the peninsula. The most numerous of these groups was the Italic. A major Iron Age culture, that of the Villanovans, developed in the north and had an impact on surrounding regions. Probably during the 10th century BC the Etruscans, or at least their ruling class, migrated from Asia Minor. They settled in central and northern Italy and created a composite civilization consisting of Villanovan and eastern elements. To this was added a thick overlay of Greek civilization, including the alphabet, absorbed from the Greek colonies in the south.
About this time—the traditional date is 753 BC—Rome was founded on the Tiber River. The Romans were a Latin people belonging to the Italic group. At first a primitive village, Rome was occupied and civilized by the Etruscans until the end of the 6th century BC. After that the Romans began a conquest of the surrounding area, and by the early 4th century BC they had taken the important Etruscan city of Veii. After a temporary setback caused by invading Gauls (a tribe of the Celts), the Romans continued to absorb large parts of Italy; by the beginning of the 3rd century BC most of central and northern Italy had become Roman. Unlike the Greeks, the Romans tied together their domains by roads and granted full or partial citizenship to settlements outside Rome, a policy that eventually led to a more or less uniform language (Latin) and culture.
a. Further Expansion
In the so-called Pyrrhic War (280-271 BC) Rome gained control of Greek southern Italy and, by absorbing that area, became partly Hellenized. The conquest put Rome in direct rivalry with Carthage, an old Phoenician colony in North Africa, for control of the western Mediterranean. Ensuing wars with Carthage (see Punic Wars) gained Rome Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, and Spain, and North Africa fell into the Roman sphere of influence. By the middle of the 2nd century BC Carthage had been eliminated, and Rome had gained control over Macedonia and Greece as well. In the next century the Mediterranean could be correctly called a Roman lake. The Romans cleared the seas of pirates and spread roads throughout the region, making communications easy and fostering cultural unity. This Romano-Hellenistic cultural amalgam was bilingual, with Latin dominant in the West and Greek in the East.
b. The Roman Empire
After a period of civil wars and strife, Rome was transformed from a republic to an empire under Emperor Augustus around the beginning of the Christian era. During the following 200 years the level of prosperity in the Mediterranean reached a high point that in many ways was not equaled again for a millennium and a half. The Roman Empire assimilated many groups of people into its civilization; moreover, in AD 212 nearly every freeborn man within its confines became a Roman citizen. Such a concept of universal citizenship was unique in the ancient world. Beyond the borders of the empire certain elements of Greco-Roman culture also influenced Celtic and Germanic tribes.
The 3rd century AD was a time of dissolution, after which Emperor Diocletian reconstituted the empire. Many of his economic and social reforms anticipated the Middle Ages, and his administrative changes ended the primacy of Italy. Under Constantine the Great in the 4th century, Constantinople (see Istanbul) replaced Rome as the capital, and Christianity was—in effect, if not officially—made the state religion. After the Western Roman Empire fell to invading Germanic groups in the 5th century, giving place to a series of Germanic kingdoms, the church in many ways preserved the Roman heritage. So thorough had been the Romanization of the empire that to this day languages of Latin derivation are spoken in France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, parts of Switzerland, and Romania.
5. The Great Migrations
As civilization was being consolidated in the Mediterranean region, great changes were taking place elsewhere in Europe. The Bronze and Iron Age cultures of the outer regions consisted mainly of pastoral and agricultural communities, much less stable than the Greco-Roman settlements. Migrations from poorer to richer areas were continuous, and the movement of one people or tribe in turn dislocated other peoples, often causing chain reactions. The prime movers in these changes during the last centuries BC and the first centuries AD were the Germanic tribes. These peoples had occupied parts of southern Scandinavia and northern Germany at the end of the Bronze Age. During the Iron Age they began to migrate southward, perhaps because of a deteriorating climate. In the 2nd century BC two Germanic tribes, the Cimbri and Teutons, reached what is now Provence, but they were eventually repelled by the Romans. The Suevi were more successful and occupied part of modern Germany. The Celtic tribes of that region were pushed westward to be conquered many years later by the Romans under Julius Caesar. Roman expansion into Germanic territories was permanently halted in AD 9, when Germanic troops under Arminius (Hermann) smashed the Roman legions at the Teutoburg Forest. Consequently, Rome occupied only a buffer zone east of the Rhine and north of the Danube.
By AD 150 migrations and consequent dislocations of peoples again intensified, threatening the imperial borders. Emperor Marcus Aurelius successfully battled the Marcomanni and Quadi, as well as the non-Germanic Iazyges, and it is indicative of the period that he spent most of his reign fighting invading tribes. By the beginning of the 3rd century AD the Alamanni had penetrated to the northern Roman frontier, and in the east the Goths began their infiltration of the Balkan Peninsula. After their defeat by imperial troops, the Goths were made mercenaries of Rome.
During the second half of the 3rd century, Germanic groups, including the Franks, entered the empire. Great efforts were then made to strengthen internal defenses. Under Emperor Aurelian Rome itself was surrounded by a wall, Dacia was abandoned, and more and more Germanic mercenaries were recruited to fight for the Romans. Rome weathered the crisis of the 3rd century only by means of Diocletian's restructuring of the empire, which was done primarily to deal with the Germanic tribes more efficiently. After the middle of the 4th century the situation appeared to be under control, but then a new people, the Huns, invaded Europe from Central Asia and caused a new series of chain reactions. The Goths were pushed into the Balkans, where they defeated the Romans at Adrianople in 378. In 410 the Visigoths under Alaric sacked Rome itself, sending shock waves throughout the empire. Shortly afterward the Vandals penetrated to Roman North Africa and established a kingdom there. The Huns under Attila were finally defeated by a Roman-led Visigoth army in 451, but four years later Rome was sacked again—this time by the Vandals. Britain, Gaul, and Spain were by now occupied by Germanic tribes. The end for the Western Empire came in 476, when Germanic mercenaries in Italy deposed Emperor Romulus Augustulus and made their chief, Odoacer, king of Italy.
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