*What is history?  It is not just names and dates and facts, although we will learn those.  It is about understanding the past and how the present world has grown from it.

*We can understand the past and the present on several levels:  the individual (one person), the society (relationships between individuals), and the state (the government, with the power to compel allegiance, levy war, collect taxes, et cetera).

*We can also study ideas and ideologies (groups of ideas) to see why individuals, societies, and states do what they do.

*The relationships among all these things form what we call Civilisation, a word that comes from the Latin civis, or townsman—someone living in an organised life in society with others.

*This semester we will particularly study the history of Western Civilisation. That is the history that has come from Europe and, through European and American expansion, spread throughout and dominated the entire world.

*Despite its modern world dominance, Western Civilisation has always been torn between three different traditions within it that do not fit together perfectly:
    -Judeo-Christian morality encourages faith, as well as charity and love for others, working together for the good of all.  From the Jewish tradition comes the idea of being God's chosen people.  From the Christian tradition comes Jesus Christ's final admonition to his disciples:  go ye into all the world.  Europeans followed this dictum and eventually claimed every continent on earth.  The Judeo-Christian moral tradition also says 'Thou Shalt Not Kill.' 
    -Classical (or Greco-Roman) thought emphasises reason, science, democracy, humanism, and the individual—the ancient Greek Protagoras said 'Man is the measure of all things.'  Much of Western civilisation's entertainment comes from ancient Greece, such as athletics, theatre, and even literature.  Classical rationalism also says that you may kill, but only when necessary, and only when permitted--or required--by law.
    -Germanic nationalism, a legacy of the barbarians who conquered Rome, includes a deeply-rooted loyalty to family, clan, and ethnic group, a legacy that accepts and even glorifies violence directed at anyone seen as a threat to the nation.

*In many ways, Western Civilisation has been so influential because it has, especially in Modern History, placed value on things that have traditionally been less important in other times and places,  the classical ideals of rationality, liberty, and individuality, tempered and unified with Christian love, and spread with nationalistic fervour.  In some ways, Modern History can be considered to begin when the individual begins to actively work towards progress and change (which in traditional societies was usually seen as dangerous, and even bad).

*When did Modern History begin?  What came before it?

*Three great historical periods:
    -Ancient history:  about 3200 BC-476 AD.
    -The Middle Ages:  476-1453
    -Modern History:  1453-present

*To appreciate modernity, it is important to understand what came before it, because (even though we have chosen a date for the beginning of Modern History), the fact is that most people did not wake up and say, 'Well, I feel modern today.'

*Pre-modern Europe was made up of diverse nationalities (or ethnic groups), belonging to several major groups:

*Most people in Europe speak Indo-European languages.

*Germanic languages are descendants of the barbarians who overthrew Rome.  They are spoken in Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, parts of Belgium and Luxembourg, Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, and parts of other countries.

*Romance languages are spoken in the remains of the Western Roman Empire:  Italy, France, parts of Switzerland, Belgium, and Luxembourg, Monaco, San Marino, the Vatican City, Andorra, Spain (which has both Castilian and Catalan), Portugal, Romania, Moldova, and parts of other countries, and in the Middle Ages, Latin itself was spoken throughout Europe by the priests and princes of the Catholic Church and by all educated men.

*Slavic languages are spoken in much of Eastern Europe, particularly Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, and parts of other countries.

*The Baltic Languages were once widely spoken around the Baltic Sea, but were mostly wiped out by other Indo-Europeans later.  Only Latvian and Lithuanian survive as important languages today.

*Greek is essentially its own family within Indo-European, and today it is spoken in Greece and Cyprus, and parts of other countries, but in the Middle Ages it was the main language of the Byzantine, or Eastern Roman, Empire.

*Celtic languages were once spoken widely across Europe and even parts of Asia, but for the most part the Celts were defeated by other nations.  Today, Irish Gaelic is probably the most spoken Celtic language, and is the first official language of Ireland.  Welsh is an official language of Wales.  Breton is spoken in parts of France, although it is dying out.  Scottish Gaelic is an official language in Scotland and Manx is on the Island of Man, but neither is widely used today.

*There are also some non-Indo-European languages in Europe.  Finnish and Estonian are closely related to each other, and may be related to Hungarian as part of the Finno-Ugric language family, and possibly even to Turkish and other Turkic languages, if they are all part of the Ural-Altaic family (as some linguists suggest).  In the 1400s, Arabic was also spoken by the Moors of southern Spain.

*Europe also has a linguistic isolate: Basque.  This language is, as far as anyone knows, completely unrelated to any other known language in the world.  It has been postulated that this is the only survivor of the pre-Indo-European peoples who inhabited Europe before the Indo-Europeans arrived in Europe about 3,500 BC (although they would not dominate the continent until about 1,500 BC or so).

*Despite these ethnic differences, most Europeans saw themselves as essentially belonging to the same culture, a culture defined primarily by religion.  With the exception of the Turks who were attacking the Byzantine Empire and the Moors in southern Spain, almost all Mediæval Europeans were Christians, and considered themselves part of Christendom.  Furthermore, most Europeans saw themselves as inheritors of the traditions of the Roman Empire.  However, even these unifying forces were not united.

*With the fall of Rome in 476 AD, the Roman Empire there went into decline, but in 800 AD a Germanic king, Charlemagne, was crowned by the Pope as Emperor of the Romans, and his lands came to be known as the Holy Roman Empire. However, the Holy Roman Empire had a very weak government, offering more symbolism than substance.  Furthermore, in the East, the Byzantine Empire continued to be wealthy and powerful until it came into conflict with Arab and Turkish converts to a new religion, Islam. 

*Even in Europe, religion was not the unifying force it had been.  In 1054 AD, disagreements between the two most influential leaders of Christianity led to the Great Schism between Western (or Roman Catholic) and Eastern (Orthodox) Christianity.

*Nonetheless, the people of Christendom, whatever its divisions, lived fairly similar lives throughout the Middle Ages.

*Society was based on the land, so where a person was born, and in what family, mattered tremendously.  Because your family and your community depended on your contribution to agricultural output, more value was placed on the community than on the individual—loyalty to society was valued above all else. 

*Society was divided into three groups, or estates:  the First Estate (those who pray—church leaders), the Second Estate (those who fight—military and political leaders, which were more or less the same), and the Third Estate (those who work—everyone else, from professionals in the city to farmers in the country), or about 95% of the population).

*Furthermore, you did not question your place in this society, because it was all part of God's Creation, which was organised in a Great Chain of Being, in which every being and living thing had a place, from God to His angels to kings to dukes to knights to farmers to serfs to slaves to animals to bugs to demons on down to Satan himself.   To question this, let alone try to change it, might cause the entire structure of the Universe to collapse.

*Still, changes occurred anyway in the 1300s and 1400s.
 
*The Late Middle Ages were characterised by terrible death caused by the Great Famine of 1315-1317 (or possibly 1322) and the Black Death, which struck for the first time between 1347 and 1350, although it would be back again.  Also known as the Black Plague, this was a Europe-wide (and Asian) pandemic, probably of the bubonic plague (which is spread by fleas on rats).  The Black Death may have killed 25% of the population in many parts of Europe, and it is estimated that in some areas between 30% and 70% of the population were killed.

*One benefit of the tremendous death toll in Europe was that labour suddenly became very valuable, and it was impossible to keep serfs bound to the land.  In the 14th century, most nations’ serfs became free men, able to move around and seek employment, and in this period of tremendous death, labour was in high demand, and wages rose accordingly, until many people who had been poor peasants became landowners themselves, and many who had already been moderately well-off became wealthy (while still being considered part of the Third Estate).

*Furthermore, although warfare had been a fact of life throughout the Middle Ages, it also changed over the course of a thousand years (a fact that would have surprised most Mediæval people).  For centuries after conquering Rome, the Second Estate--military leaders who devoted their lives to learning the arts of war--had made themselves masters of their countries and of the battlefield.  By the 1400s, the best of them were knights in shining armour atop giant warhorses—the products of great investments of time, training, and treasure.  To the common footsoldier, they were nearly untouchable—until the development of three new weapons, all of which became prominent during the Hundred Years War, a long struggle between England and France (1337-1453), which left both countries more strongly unified than any European nation had been since the time of Rome.
    -The Longbow took training and skill to use, but could fire up to ten shots per minute for 180 to 250 yards and were reasonably effective against armour
    -The Pike, which took little training but could pull a mounted knight off his horse, leaving him sprawled in the mud so that if the fall did not kill him a footsoldier with a long dagger could shove it into his armpit to finish him off
    -Gunpowder, which was first used in large cannon, but would eventually be put in smaller guns, took relatively little training to use and was very effective against armour and even stone walls
        --All these things changed warfare forever, and potentially put effective weapons in the hands of everyone

*By the end of the Hundred Years War, a thousand years of slow, almost imperceptible change, had been replaced by rapid, world-shaking changes, of which the most dramatic and symbolic came on the first day of the modern world, the 29th of May, 1453 (a Tuesday).

*On that day, after centuries of fighting, the Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire.  This destroyed one of the last vestiges of the classical world, weakened the Eastern Orthodox Church, changed the balance of power in Eastern Europe, and cut off trade routes between Western Europe and the Far East.

*As warfare consolidated power in the hands of kings, as new technologies and new access to wealth gave opportunities to the common people, and as old trade route were lost, forcing merchants to seek out new ones, the orderly, communal society of Mediæval Christendom was about the break out into a wider world while breaking up within its own boundaries.