*One of the most influential civilisations in the history of Europe was the Roman Empire.

*The City of Rome was founded in 753 BC.  He served as the first of Rome’s seven kings.  The last king was deposed in or about 509 BC, and the Roman Republic was founded.

*Eventually the city-state of Rome spread out and conquered the other peoples of the Italian Peninsula, and from there began to dominate the rest of Europe. 

*With no-one left to fight, the Romans turned to civil war, and in the mid-first century BC, the greatest leader of the civil wars was Julius Caesar.  However, he seemed too powerful to many, and he was murdered on the Ides (15) of March, 44 BC.

*A new civil war began, and Caesar’s adopted son, Octavian (later Augustus Caesar), eventually won control of Rome and between 27 BC and 23 BC completed the process of turning the republic into an empire, with himself as emperor, or Caesar, a name that has since come to mean ‘emperor’ in many languages.

*Over the next few centuries, the Roman Empire, already large when it was a republic, expanded until it controlled most of Southern and Central Europe, most of Britain, North Africa, Asia Minor, the Middle East, and even the shores of the Black Sea.

*Early in the Roman Empire, Christianity appeared.  It was seen as subversive and probably even unpatriotic and dangerous, because by refusing to worship the gods of Rome, they invited catastrophe on the empire.  They were at times persecuted, and often used for scapegoats, but were never crushed completely.

*Eventually Christianity became so widespread that it was recognised as an official religion of the Empire in 313 AD by Emperor Constantine I.  It was later made the only acceptable religion in 380 by Emperor Theodosius I.

*The late 400s AD saw a number of invasion of the Roman Empire from Northern Europe, mostly by Germanic tribes, called Goths.  In 476 BC, a Gothic King, Odovacer, deposed the last Roman Emperor.  However, the Roman Empire remained in the east, around Constantinople, until it was taken over by the Turks in 1453.

*With the power of the empire destroyed, the Catholic Church stepped in to fill the power vacuum.  The old Roman provinces became diocese, the roles of the old governors were filled by Catholic bishops, and quietly the Catholic Church took over Europe.

*The period that followed (476-1453) is sometimes called the Dark Ages or the Middle Ages.

*During most of this period, especially the Early Middle Ages, Europe was a feudal society.  Under feudalism, a large stretch of land was owned by one king or great lord.  In return for military service and taxes, he would allow lesser lords to manage parts of his land; they in turn might grant parts of that to minor lords or even knights.  In short, feudalism was a series of overlapping obligations—the minor lords had to support their liege lords, but in return, their overlords also had to protect them, and paid them off to begin with by giving them land for their support.  At the bottom, of course, were serfs, who were almost like slaves, and tied to the land, unable to leave it.  They worked for protection, and because they had no other choice.

*On 31 October 1517, a monk named Martin Luther nailed a list of 95 Theses (statements or arguments) to the church door in Wittenberg.  In these he condemned the sale of indulgences, and questioned the authority of the pope and other church practises.  This was the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.

*During this period, national governments were fairly weak, although in the 1600s, Louis XIV built an absolute monarchy—almost a dictatorship—in France.

*The French kings became so powerful, and oppressed their people so much that the French revolted in 1789.  They set up a republic and in 1793, executed King Louis XVI with the guillotine.  There were also attacks against the church (which had also been rich and powerful, and which had been seen as supporting the king and the nobles), and even statues of saints within churches were beheaded.  They even re-created the calendar (with ten-day weeks and new names for the months) and changed the official way to count large numbers.

*Eventually the wave of beheadings, known as the Reign Terror, would take up many common people, too, and probably killed between 18,000 and 40,000 people in 1793-1794 (including 1,300 in July 1794).

*The nations around France were almost all ruled by kings, and were not comfortable with the notion of executing them.  The French Republic ended up at war with most of the nations around them.  However, France won many of these wars, as they went to fight for Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.  However, as the Republic’s internal politics grew more and more chaotic, a strong leader arose who eventually crowned himself emperor in 1804:  Napoleon Bonaparte.

*Napoleon was one of the greatest generals in history, and between the years 1799 & 1815 he conquered (and then lost) most of Europe (but never Britain), either ruling it outright, setting his brothers and other relatives up as kings in his place, or bullying the existing rulers into serving him.

*Napoleon took the metric system with him throughout Europe.

*In 1812, Napoleon invaded Russia, and was defeated by the size of the place, the severity of the winter, and the Russian policy of scorched earth.  He was forced to retreat in December 1812, having lost 98% of his army.

*In 1814, with almost all of Europe allied against him, Napoleon was forced to surrender.  He was exiled to the Island of Elba, but returned in 1815, and the French people rose up to support him.  All Europe rose against him again, and he was defeated for the last time at Waterloo, then exiled to St. Helena.

*The nineteenth century was a period of tremendous nationalism—indeed, nationalism had fuelled the French Revolution as well, but it also inspired those who fought against French occupation.  This was particularly the case in Germany, which was not yet one country.

*In Germany, more and more people began to identify themselves as part of a German nation, with a common language, common customs, and a common identity.

*Eventually a notion of Germany as a country of German-speaking peoples became more and more concrete, although its boundaries were not what they are today.

*Under Bismarck (and King Wilhelm I), the German state of Prussia Prussia engaged in three wars in 1864 (against Denmark), 1866 (against Austria), and 1870-71 (against France, to regain Alsace-Lorraine, taken from the Holy Roman Empire by Louis XIV).  In the process, Prussia either conquered the rest of Germany or convinced it to ally with Prussia, and, in 1871, to unify under Wilhelm I, now Kaiser of the Germans (all except Liechtenstein).

*Italy was also not a unified state until the late 19th century. Much of it was made up of republics or small kingdoms, and much of it was part of the Papal States—which were not always governed kindly or well.

*However, many Italians wanted their own country, and between 1820 and 1870 a series of revolutions overthrew various local lords and eventually united Italy in 1870.

*During the mid to late 1800s, Europe conquered the rest of the world (which is part of the reason they did not all fight each other between 1815 and 1914).  Britain and France got the most colonies overseas, and became incredibly wealthy doing so, as they could extract raw materials and cheap labour from them, and use them as captive markets for their own finished products.

*Germany and Italy did not get much, and a generation later, they would yearn for a ‘place in the sun.’

*The early twentieth century saw Europe try to destroy itself in the First World War.  Nationalism (both its arrogant form and its nation-state building form), militarism, and a desire for glory led Europe into a terrible war that destroyed ancient empires.

*The Great War, as it was called at the time, was characterised by the use of new technology.  The most important were machine guns, poison gas, U-boats, and, to a much lesser extent, aircraft.

*Eventually, America was provoked into joining the War, and tilted the balance in the Allies’ favour, and Germany lost in 1918.  Its borders were reduced, it was forced to pay crippling reparations, and it was forced to sign a clause in the peace treaty (the Treaty of Versailles) admitting that the entire war was Germany’s fault.

*Towards the end of WWI, Russia was in such bad shape (some soldiers were sent into battle without guns, being told to pick them up from dead men once they had the chance) that the workers, led by a vanguard of dedicated communist revolutionaries (with Lenin at their head) overthrew the Tsar of Russia in 1917, and killed him and all his family in 1918 after a period of imprisonment.

*Russia fell into a period of civil war, between monarchists, republicans, communists, and Ukrainian nationalists.  Russia also suffered a loss in World War I, surrendering much of their land, and then another loss to the newly independent Poland.  In the end, the Bolsheviks (a faction of the Communists) won, with Vladimir Lenin as their leader.  He died in 1924, and the Communist Party was taken over by Stalin, who ruled until 1953.

*The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (as Russia and its dependent territories were now called) took over industry, collectivised the farms (by force when necessary), and instituted a totalitarian government with a command economy.  Dissenters could be imprisoned in gulags or killed, and often were, as the secret police—the NKVD and later the KGB were everywhere.  Among those killed were many of the officers in the army, who Stalin feared were plotting against him (which left the USSR unprepared for WWII).  Overall, Stalin ruled through a secret police state, and through terror.  While he ruled the USSR, perhaps as many as 20 million people died from his purges, and from famines brought on by poor economic planning.  As Stalin himself said, ‘the death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.’

*The late 1920s and 1930s saw a worldwide depression, which hit all the US and Europe, but got Germany particularly hard.  There, money became so worthless that marks had to be printed in billion-mark denominations, and people needed wheelbarrows to haul their daily wages.

*The Depression, combined with fears of Communist uprisings across Europe (which were seen as very possible) led to the rise of Fascist governments in Italy, Germany, Hungary, Spain (following the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), and Portugal.

*Extreme nationalism, racism, and militarism are the major underpinnings of fascism; so fascist leaders told their peoples that they were the greatest nations on Earth, and planned to build or rebuild their glory (this worked particularly well in Italy, where Mussolini offered to restore the glory that was Rome, and in Germany, which felt cheated at the end of WWII).

*Hitler also used the Jews as a scapegoat, blaming them for the problems of the Aryan race, and eventually offered a ‘final solution’ to the ‘Jewish question,’ by killing about 6 million of them, along with about 5 million other ‘social deviants’ in the Holocaust.

*In the name of nationalism, Hitler annexed Austria and demanded (and got) the return of the Sudentenland.  This was permitted by Britain and France as part of the policy of appeasement, which was expected to provide ‘peace in our time.’

*In 1939, Hitler tried again, invading Poland on 1 September.  He doubted anyone would stop him, partly because he had already signed the secret Nazi-Soviet Pact, in which Germany and the USSR would jointly invade and then split Poland (and the Baltic Republics).  However, Britain and France declared war on Hitler this time (but did not send Poland much real help).

*From there, the rest of the world was next.  After a period of preparation, during which he claimed he wanted peace, Hitler began to move again.  On 9 April 1940 the Germans conquered Denmark and invaded Norway, which was betrayed by one of its own, Vidkun Quisling.  On 10 May, the Nazis invaded the Low Countries.  Luxembourg fell in a day, the Netherlands in five days, and Belgium in three weeks.  On 14 June, the Germans captured Paris.

*The British and French also had a new and powerful ally.  On 22 June 1941, Hitler, now that he had knocked France out of the war and had Britain isolated on their island, thought he could take the Soviet Union.  Initially it worked.  The Red Army was poorly trained, poorly led (partly because Stalin had killed so many of his generals in his purges), and for the moment easily defeated.  In fact, Russia shouldered most of the burden during the war, losing 50 men for every one that America lost.

*On Sunday morning at 7 o’clock, the Japanese launched an attack on the US Naval base at Pearl Harbour just outside Honolulu, Hawaii and the United States Congress declared war on Japan on 8 December 1941.  On 11 December 1941, Germany and Italy, to help their ally Japan, declared war on the United States. 

*Germany was defeated, and on 7 May 1945, Admiral Karl Dönitz offered Germany’s unconditional surrender.  This is known as V-E Day.

*After the War, the leaders of Britain, France, the USA, and the USSR met at Potsdam in Germany to work out who would control what after the war.  Stalin had occupied most of Eastern Europe, and promised to hold free elections there.  No-one believed him, but he had a massive army, and there was not much that could be done about it.  The French and Soviets wanted to keep Germany down, so it was split into East and West Germany.

*After World War II, Europe would be divided into the western nations that more or less favoured the United States, and the Eastern Bloc that was largely dominated by the Soviet Union.  Most of the western nations eventually joined the USA and Canada in NATO, a mutual defence treaty, while most of the Eastern Bloc was forced to sign the Warsaw Pact, which did the same for them.

*The theoretical dividing line between the two sides was called the Iron Curtain.

*This face-off between the east and the west, in which neither side directly attacked the other, but in which both competed fiercely, was known as the Cold War, and it dominated world politics from 1945 until 1991, and made the world fear it might be destroyed by nuclear war, at least after 1949, when the USSR tested its first atomic bomb.

*Many people in communist countries tried to flee to the west, which usually resulted in death if they were caught.  To try to stop this, East Germany built the Berlin Wall around West Berlin in 1961—most of it went up overnight on 13 August.  The rest of the country’s border was fortified as well.

*Eventually public dissatisfaction and their inability to provide for their people while keeping up with US military spending led to many of the Eastern Bloc nations relaxing their border restrictions, and in 1989, East Germany removed the Berlin Wall.  On 3 October 1990, Germany re-united.

*The same forces led to a coup in the Soviet Union by the military (who feared the same thing might happen there), which failed, and, in fact, weakened the government so that in 1991 the USSR collapsed into 15 republics.  The Cold War was over.