*The earliest known humans probably arrived in Europe about 35,000 BC; the first permanent settlements were in the southern Balkans about 7,000 BC.  The first people in Europe were probably not Indo-Europeans.

*Indo-European people arrived in Europe about 3,500 BC, where they conquered or mixed with the local cultures.  The Indo-Europeans probably brought horses with them, and may have brought copper tools with them as well—this is certainly the period when those first show up in Europe.  These advanced technologies are probably part of the reason the Indo-Europeans came to dominate Europe.
 
*The earliest major culture of Europe was that of the Minoans, on Crete.  It flourished from about 3,500 BC to 1,450 BC.  It was the first culture to have a written language in Europe. 

*The nearby early Greek culture borrowed parts of this writing system to make their own.  This was the civilisation that (in myth) fought the Trojan War.

*These civilisations declined before or around 1,000 BC, partly due to natural disasters such as volcanoes, partly due to invaders from the sea, and partly due to the creation of iron weapons, which accompanied a period of debilitating warfare.

*Greece began to recover from this Dark Age about 800 AD.  At this time they adopted the Phoenician alphabet and began to change it for their own use—this is the basis of all modern European alphabets.

*The ancient Greeks did not create a unified state; they spent centuries as independent or loosely confederated city-states (most of them democratic in form), each with its own culture, customs, and army.  Warfare was seen as one of the highest duties a citizen could perform, and the Greek hoplites were among the best soldiers in the world. 

*For a brief period in the late 300s BC, especially 352-323 BC (especially 334-323) Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great created a Greek empire that spread across Greece, Asia Minor, and much of the Middle East and South Asia, reaching as far as India.  However, Alexander died of fever in 323, and three of his generals split the empire between them.

*Eventually the Greeks and the kingdoms that followed Alexander’s reign made war against one another, and the warfare among the ancient Greeks left them easy prey to a new culture rising in Europe, that of Rome.

*At least according to legend, the City of Rome was founded by (and named after) Romulus in 753 BC. 

*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 still 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.

*Eventually the empire grew so large that it was thought one man could not run it, and it was divided into eastern and western empires.  This did not last long, as the co-emperors of the empires tended to fight one another, but it did result in the capital of the Roman Empire being moved to New Rome, at the old city of Byzantium, by Emperor Constantine I in 324; in his honour, it was often called Constantinople.

*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 invasions 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 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), because without the Roman Empire to provide order, a great deal of obvious culture and power vanished, along with a great deal of knowledge, and it was certainly a period of violence and danger.  However, the Catholic Church preserved much of this information in written records (along with providing a continuity of authority) so some view the designation of Dark Ages as inaccurate and even offensive.

*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.

*Between 771 and 814, Charles the Great, or Charlemagne, a king of the Franks, a Germanic Tribe, conquered most of what is now France, Germany, the Low Countries, and Northern Italy.  In 800, he was crowned Emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III, and ever afterwards, some of his heirs would call themselves the Holy Roman Emperors until 1806.  Charlemagne died in 814, and his empire was divided among his three sons, but the part that would become Germany, Switzerland, Northern Italy, and Austria remained the Holy Roman Empire (which was not Holy, Roman, or an Empire).

*South of Charlemagne’s kingdom, Moslem invaders known as Moors had taken over Spain between 711 and 732 AD (they were only kept out of France by Charles Martel, Charlemagne’s grandfather).  The Spanish would spend the next 760 years trying to retake their country in what they called the Reconquista (reconquest).  The Moslems also began attacking the Eastern Roman Empire.

*The 9th and 10th centuries saw Viking raids across Europe, and Vikings essentially set up their own kingdoms in Great Britain, Northern France (where they were called northmen or Normans), Sicily, and along the major rivers of Russia.  They also discovered Iceland, Greenland, and North America.

*About the same time, the Moslems of Arabia began to attack the Eastern Roman Empire, and the emperor called on the Pope for help, which was tricky, because in 1054, Pope Leo IX and Patriarch Michael I excommunicated one another and all their followers (thus dividing Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy).  Nonetheless, Pope Urban II agreed, and called on the Christian kings of Europe to defend the Roman Empire from the invaders, and to re-take the Holy Land, which had already been conquered.

*The Crusades took place periodically between 1095 and 1271.  The most successful were the earliest, and they did set up new Christian kingdoms in the Middle East, most of which lasted about 200 years.  The Crusaders were rarely kind to the local populace, and even today, the Crusades are seen by some Middle Easterners as an offence by the West against the Middle East (despite the fact that the Moslems began the process by attacking the Christian kingdoms and the Eastern Roman Empire in the first place—the Crusades were defensive wars, albeit often cruel ones).

*The Crusades were the result of the intense religiosity of Europeans at the time, of the intense militarism of feudal society, which was based entirely on ties of military obligations between knights and lords, and on the tremendous power of the Catholic Church, which was seen as the supreme authority over the world in the Early and High Middle Ages.  During the High Middle Ages, however, many kings and lords began to assert themselves against the authority of the Pope, and to define more power for themselves within their own nations.  In some ways, this was the start of nationalism in Europe (which had previously seen itself as a culturally united Christendom).

*In some countries, the lesser lords also began to assert their rights.  In England, in 1215, the barons forced King John to sign the Magna Carta, recognising certain basic rights of Englishmen, including trial by jury, and essentially created the basis of Parliament by claiming that the lords had the right, if they acted together, to overrule a decision by the king.

*As countries became stronger and developed a greater sense of identity, they made war upon one another, usually due to dynastic claims to lands and titles.  One of the greatest of these wars was the Hundred Years’ War, in which the King of England claimed that he was the rightful heir to the late King of France, and went to war to take possession of the lands that were rightfully his.  The War lasted from 1337 to 1453, and during it, England took control of most of France, but eventually lost it.

*There were some exceptions to the tendency of state governments to grow stronger and most centralised.  Italy remained a series of city-states and small kingdoms (along with the Papal States) and the Holy Roman Empire, saw more and more power lost by the Emperor to the electors, lesser lords, and the free cities.  France, Spain, and especially England grew more centralised, the Empire and Italy became less so.

*The Late Middle Ages would also be characterised by terrible death caused by 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.

*This was a time of learning and culture, as well.  The city-states of Italy had vast trading networks, and often traded through Constantinople for goods from China, such as silk and spices—many of which had first been experienced during the Crusades.  As they grew wealthier, they began a rebirth of arts, science, and technology called the Renaissance in the 1300s, which would slowly spread to the rest of Europe.  Along with this rebirth, there was also a rediscovery of old knowledge.

*The Middle Ages themselves would come to a close and the modern era would begin in the 1400s.  Some date the end of the Middle Ages to the Fall of Constantinople on 29 May, 1453, when the Eastern Roman Empire was finally defeated by the Moslems.  They called Constantinople Istanbul, but kept it as the capital of the Ottoman Empire until 1923 (and the name change was only made official in 1930).  This cut off European trade routes to Asia, and prompted the Age of Exploration. 

*1453 was the end of the Eastern Roman Empire, although the people there called themselves Romanians, and the name stuck to some of the last lands held by the Empire.

*The Age of Exploration also became possible with the completion of the Reconquista in 1492.  In that year, Spain drove the last Moors from Grenada, and Spain (mostly) occupied its present boundaries under a strong monarchy.  With nothing left to fight at home, some Spaniards went on into Africa, but many would follow Columbus to the New World. 

*In 1494 the Pope divided the world between Spain and Portugal in the Treaty of Tordesillas.

*In 1498, the Portuguese, also free from Moslem control, discovered a route around Africa to Asia.  The Modern World had arrived.