Modern European History

John R. Barber

• Publisher: Collins Reference
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780062115089
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Advanced Placement

The Age of Modern Europe; The Industrial Revolution; The Ancien Regime and Its Critics; The Despots and the High Enlightenment; The French Revolution and the Reign of Terror; The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire; The Attempt to Restore the Acien Regime; The Age of European Revolution; The New Nationalism; The Industrial Nation States; The Industrializing States; The Culture of Industrial Europe; The Great War and the Russian Revolution; The Formation of the Soviet Union; The Rise of Fascism; The European Democracies; The Second World War; Cold War Europe; Eastern Europe since 1953; The Cold Wars and After; Western Europe and the European Community since the 1950's; Modern and Ultra-Modern Europe in the 1990's.

Also includes Chronology of History, Maps, Charts, Tables, Full Index, and Bibliography.

CHAPTER 1

Early Modern Europe: The Foundations for World Supremacy (Mid-1400s-Late 1600s)

1450:	Johannes Gutenberg invents the moveable-type printing press.
1500:	Erasmus criticizes Catholic Church hypocrisy with his work, In Praise of Folly.
1508-1512:	Michelangelo paints Biblical scenes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome.
1513:	Machiavelli writes The Prince, advocating governance in the interest of state power without regard for morality.
1517:	Martin Luther launches the Protestant Reformation with his call for a debate on Church practices and beliefs.
1520-1521:	Ferdinand Magellan makes the first voyage around the world.
1643-1715:	Louis XIV reigns as “The Sun King” in France.
1649:	Cromwell leads an English Parliamentary revolt that climaxes with the execution of King Charles I.

Although European Civilization began to emerge in the 300s C.E., the people who developed this way of life over the next one thousand years did not think of their homeland as Europe or of themselves as European. Maps used during these ten centuries listed the area north of the Mediterranean Sea as “Europe,” but the people who wrote about their place in the world referred to their region as “Christendom,” Christ’s kingdom on earth, inhabited, of course, by Christians. Others in Europe who thought about such matters probably had this same attitude.

The people of Christendom belonged to the Roman Catholic Church. They thought that their faith would spread, taking in the many Christians of the Eastern Orthodox Church that predominated in Greece and the region northeast of the Mediterranean. Roman Catholics believed that from Christendom their church ultimately would reach out to enfold the entire human race.

By the 1300s, however, Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians became more sharply divided, and more distant Christian groups were shrinking in size, losses caused in part by people turning to Islam. Even in Europe, the secular grip of Roman Catholic leaders weakened, and the increasingly powerful monarchical states began to overshadow the church. The idea of Christendom lost its hold on the civilization north of the Mediterranean in the 1400s and 1500s, and people in this region became selfconsciously European. This sense of being a European Civilization emerged as societies on this continent became more secular and modern. Christendom had not taken in the world. As the Early Modern era dawned, however, Europe began to conquer the globe.

This chapter briefly reviews the origins of European Civilization and describes in greater detail the history of the Early Modern era, the years from the 1450s to the latter 1600s when Europeans completed the foundations for the following three hundred years of Modern Europe’s world power.

THE ORIGINS OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

European civilization began to emerge north of the Mediterranean Sea in the 300s C.E. The cultures of the Ancient Mediterranean world that had developed during the preceding five thousand years strongly influenced early European life. This heritage included contributions from the first human civilizations that appeared in the region of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the locale of present-day Iraq. Ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans shaped European culture even more directly. The Romans ensured this ancient influence on European civilization by joining all the societies that surrounded the vast Mediterranean Sea and much of Europe into a single imperial state during the reigns of Caesar (49-44 B.C.E.) and Augustus (44 B.C.E-14 C.E.).

Western Romans becoming Europeans

Roman emperors allowed the varied societies within their realm to keep their differing ways of life, so long as their beliefs and practices did not threaten imperial authority. This tolerance also extended to religion. The Jews of Palestine could worship as they did before the Romans came, once the imperial legions had brutally forced them into political submission. When Christianity began to rise as a new faith in the 100s C.E., first among Jews then among other peoples of the empire, the Romans also allowed this religion to flourish, except when insecure times made Christian pacifism and opposition to emperor worship seem a threat. The periods of harsh persecution of Christians ended with formal imperial tolerance of the faith in 313 C.E. and acceptance of Christianity as the state religion in 392. This development strengthened the hold of Christianity on the region in which European civilization was then emerging.

Ancient Germans also exercised a powerful shaping influence in the early history of European civilization. In the 200s C.E., German tribes began to leave their original north European homeland (where modern Germany, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden are located) and move to the northwestern frontiers of the Roman Empire. Romans viewed these illiterate people, typically clothed in bark or crude fur wraps, as barbarians. German kings and aristocrats, however, sometimes dressed in colorful, luxurious garments and organized ceremonial events that deeply impressed the Romans. Germanic hair and clothing styles even gained popularity within the empire. Roman cultural leaders, moreover, sometimes wrote in praise of the primitive virtues of these “savages” from the north. Still, the Roman government generally resisted the movement of the Germans into the empire. The attempts to stop or at least slow the infiltration of Germans failed. They came in ever greater numbers, and their presence sped the modification of Roman (Latin) culture, especially after massive German invasions began in the 370s. The western part of the Roman Empire assimilated these newcomers, and that part of the realm developed a culture that blended Latin, German, and Christian influences. This three-part amalgam became European civilization in the 300s and 400s.

THE EUROPEAN MIDDLE AGES

During the first five hundred years of the European Middle Ages (the medieval era overall lasted from about the 400s to 1400s C.E.), a multitude of German tribal kingdoms emerged in the western portion of the Roman Empire. Roman emperors continued to rule an Eastern Mediterranean state, centering on Constantinople, until the 1400s, but the western imperial realm no longer existed. Germanic kingdoms in this European region remained weak, and in many parts of the continent government hardly existed at all. European countries did not always have clearly defined borders in the feudal phase of the Middle Ages (late 800s to 1000s). In the feudal era, European urban life also virtually ended. Cities shrank drastically in size, and little if any trade took place within them. They became simply local administrative centers in which secular and religious officials struggled to meet little more than the most fundamental community needs such as keeping roads passable, maintaining the jails, and feeding people during hard times. A high level of violence and warfare added to the woes of Europeans during these founding centuries of their civilization.

The High Middle Ages

Political recovery, then, came quickly in England and more slowly in France. Intermittently, significant political power centers also appeared in Germany. The popes who led the western Christian church (the Roman Catholic Church), furthermore, became very effective monarchs with authority that touched all of Europe but was especially strong in Italy. This political recovery that began in the early 1000s continued throughout the High Middle Ages (mid-1000s to latter 1200s). Conditions in this era improved markedly in other ways. Violence subsided, agriculture rebounded, town life began to revive, population increased, and an impressive cultural revival occurred.

The Late Middle Ages

Europeans suffered many hardships in the Late Middle Ages (1300s and 1400s). Even though people accomplished and experienced much that they and others since have viewed very favorably, this period of history is remembered mostly as a time of troubles. In this era, crop failures, hunger, long and destructive wars, a century of economic depression, and brutal sieges of disease struck Europe.

A duel plague (bubonic and pneumonic) began to sweep through Europe in 1348. This extremely devastating pandemic perhaps took as much as one-third of the European population within two years. For several centuries, the plagues returned to Europe time after time. The diseases became less deadly over the years but still killed huge numbers of people in some regions even in the mid-1600s. The death toll in the 1300s was so great that it took nearly two hundred years for population levels to return to the point they had reached in 1300.

Wars, especially the series of battles between France and England known as the Hundred Years War (1337-1453), also cost many lives, especially among the noble warriors. Warfare caused civilian casualties too, but its greater effect was the suffering that resulted from the destruction and economic burdens that came with these military actions. In addition to the hardships that war brought to the peasants, they continued to suffer from food shortages caused by a multitude of poor crop years. Even when bread, the most important foodstuff, was available, common people had great difficulty in getting adequate money to pay for necessities. When food shortages and inadequate pay caused increased numbers of peasants to flee the farms and head to the cities, new rules in some regions denied their right to move. Such circumstances drove the peasants to rebellion in northwestern Europe in the 1320s, in France in 1358 (a revolt called “the Jacquerie”), and in England in 1381. John Ball and Wat Tyler, who led the English peasants’ revolt, intended to kill all the nobles.

The Catholic Church, one of the leading unifying institutions of European civilization throughout the Middle Ages, became divided at the top in the 1300s as two, then three, rival popes appeared, a result in part of the papacy’s involvement in the monarchical rivalries of the time. One effect of this “Great Schism,” or split in the Church, was increased criticism of the papacy and the growth of movements and ideas that would permanently divide the Church in the 1500s. John Wycliffe in England and Jan Hus in Bohemia were the most important spokesmen for new Christian beliefs that threatened to undermine the authority of the clergy in the Late Middle Ages. For his challenge to the Church, Hus was called before a Catholic council in 1415, condemned as a heretic, and burned at the stake.

Even in these troubled times, rulers of the great European states continued to build stronger centralized governments with increasingly powerful armies and navies. The kings of Spain, France, and England had the ability by the mid-1400s to make their authority over their subjects felt as never before. They also had greatly increased the potential to exercise influence beyond their borders in Europe and in the larger world.

In spite of the gains in governmental strength in the latter Middle Ages, non-European powers— especially Arabic, Mongolian, and Turkic—overshadowed and threatened Europe as they had for almost a thousand years. New directions taken by the Europeans in the High Middle Ages, however, ensured that their relative weakness among global competitors would end. From the 1100s to 1400s, Europeans accomplished a shift in outlook, technology, military abilities, and political organization that set the stage for Europe to achieve world supremacy in the Modern era (1400s to the present).

THE RISE TO MODERNITY

The surge in the strength of Europe that completed the shift to global power came about in the Early Modern period (mid-1400s to latter 1600s), especially because of changes that occurred during movements known as the Renaissance and Reformation.

The Renaissance

An active effort to bring back to life the ancient culture of “classical” Greece and Rome began in Italy during the 1300s. This movement to accomplish a rebirth—a Renaissance—of the human-centered ideas and arts of antiquity lasted from about the mid-1300s to the mid-1600s and gradually spread from Italy northward across Europe. Renaissance leaders not only emphasized human affairs in the natural world and focused on the “humanist” Greek and Roman civilizations, they also exhibited a more secular and individualistic outlook than had people of preceding generations. Such attitudes gave Renaissance thinkers a negative opinion of the Middle Ages with its emphasis on the “other” world of spiritual matters.

Humanism in Italy

Renaissance humanists concentrated on restoring and building on what they thought of as the values of ancient Greece and Rome. One of the specific steps they took to accomplish this goal was the effort to find and preserve ancient writings, structures, and artifacts. They hoped to use this recovered heritage to teach people of their own times how to advance toward replacing a medieval way of life with a new one. For many humanists, this new thinking and acting would include living in a way that was more true to original Christian teachings.

Certain Renaissance thinkers, however, believed in living without holding to Christian principles. Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), for example, in his work titled The Prince (1513), rejected the idea that Christian morality should guide rulers; instead, he argued that circumstances at times required government leaders to ignore ethics and do anything to preserve the state and its citizenry. Other currents within the humanist movement simply had no relationship to religion. In Florence, Italy, in the 1300s and 1400s, wealthy business leaders rose to power who were devoted to applying ancient political values to their governance of the city. This era of “civic humanism” in Florence climaxed in the 1400s, when members of the famous Medici family dominated city life.

The New Art and Architecture of the Italian Renaissance

Florentine civic humanists believed not only in ruling in a way true to the spirit of ancient humanists, but also in supporting the development of new forms of art and architecture that agreed with Greco-Roman artistic principles. The rich ...