Early European History

The Papacy, victorious in the long struggle with the Holy Roman Empire, reached during the thirteenth century the height of its temporal power. The popes at this time were the g...

The history of the Greeks and Romans ought not to be studied only in their political development and the biographies of their great statesmen and warriors. We must also know som...

Most European nations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries accepted the principle of absolutism in government. Absolutism was as popular then as democracy is to-day. The...

The conquest of Italy made Rome one of the five leading states of the Mediterranean world. In the East there were the kingdoms of Macedonia, Syria, and Egypt, which had inherite...

The twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which in western Europe saw the rise of national states out of the chaos of feudalism and the development of cities, may be regarded as the...

The map of western Europe, that is, of Europe west of the great Russian plain and the Balkan peninsula, shows this part of the continent at present divided into no less than thi...

A preceding chapter dealt with the Christian Church in the East and West during the early Middle Ages. We learned something about its organization, belief, and worship, about th...

There was also a geographical Renaissance. The revival of the exploring spirit led to the discovery of ocean routes to the Far East and the Americas. In consequence, commerce wa...

We are not to suppose that the settlement of Germans within the Roman Empire ended with the deposition of Romulus Augustulus, near the close of the fifth century. The following...

The continent of Asia, projecting its huge bulk southwestward between the seas, gradually narrows into the smaller continent of Europe. The boundary between the two regions is n...

The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, covering the later period of the Middle Ages, are commonly known as those of the Renaissance. This French word means Rebirth or Revival....

A preceding chapter has traced the early history of Christianity. We there saw how the new religion appeared in the Orient, how it spread rapidly over the Roman Empire, how it e...

The shape of Italy is determined by the course of the Apennines. Branching off from the Alps at the gulf of Genoa, these mountains cross the peninsula in an easterly direction,...

From the East we return once more to the West, from Asia to Europe, from Arabia to Scandinavia. We have now to deal with the raids and settlements of the Norsemen or Northmen. L...

Civilization has always had its home in the city. [1] The statement applies as well to medieval times as to the present day. Nothing marks more strongly the backwardness of the...

The ninth century in western Europe was, as we have learned, [1] a period of violence, disorder, and even anarchy. Charlemagne for a time had arrested the disintegration of soci...

Arabia, a vast peninsula between the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean, and the Red Sea, forms the link between Asia and Africa. It is connected with Asia by the arid plains extend...

The period of two hundred and eleven years, between the accession of Augustus and the death of Marcus Aurelius, is known as the Early Empire. As we shall now learn, it was a tim...

The history of the Greeks for many centuries had been uneventful--a history of their uninterrupted expansion over barbarian lands. But now the time was approaching when the inde...

The land of Macedonia, lying to the north of Greece, for a long time had been an inconspicuous part of the ancient world. Its people, though only partially civilized, were Greek...

The period called the Later Empire covers the two hundred and fifteen years from the accession of Commodus to the final division of the Roman world at the death of Theodosius. I...

Our present knowledge of the Orient has been gained within recent times. Less than a century ago no one could read the written records of the Egyptians and Babylonians. The deci...

Ancient history begins in the East--in Asia and in that part of Africa called Egypt, which the peoples of antiquity always regarded as belonging to Asia. If we look at a physica...

The series of military expeditions, undertaken by the Christians of Europe for the purpose of recovering the Holy Land from the Moslems, have received the name of crusades. In t...

The Germans were an Indo-European people, as were their neighbors, the Celts of Gaul and Britain. They had lived for many centuries in the wild districts of central Europe north...

The Roman Empire in the West moved rapidly to its "fall" in 476 A.D., at the hands of the Germanic invaders. The Roman Empire in the East, though threatened by enemies from with...

History is the narrative of what civilized man has done. It deals with those social groups called states and nations. Just as biography describes the life of individuals, so his...

The extensive steppes in the middle and north of Asia have formed, for thousands of years, the abode of nomadic peoples belonging to the Yellow race. In prehistoric times they s...

Shakespeare, William. _Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, King John, Richard the Second, Henry the Fourth,_ parts i and ii, _Henry the Fifth, Henry the Sixth_, par...