{"id":153,"date":"2026-05-01T14:41:38","date_gmt":"2026-05-01T14:41:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/front-matter\/introduction\/"},"modified":"2026-05-01T14:47:54","modified_gmt":"2026-05-01T14:47:54","slug":"introduction","status":"publish","type":"front-matter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/front-matter\/introduction\/","title":{"raw":"Introduction","rendered":"Introduction"},"content":{"raw":"Once upon a time, this course was titled, \u201cWestern Civilization.\u201d Today we use the much more accurate term European History. However, before we get into that history, it is important to understand that change. First, we need to start by asking hat is \u201cWestern Civilization\u201d? Furthermore, who or what is part of it? Like all ideas, the concept of Western Civilization itself has a history, one that coalesced in college textbooks and curriculums for the first time in the United States in the 1920s. In many ways, the very idea of Western Civilization is a \u201cloaded\u201d one, separating one branch of civilization from others as if they were distinct, even unrelated. Thus, before examining the events of Europe\u2019s history, it is important to unpack the history of the concept of Western Civilization.\r\n

Where is the West?<\/h2>\r\nThe most obvious question to start with is \u201cwest of what\u201d? A follow up would be, where is \u201cthe east\u201d? Terms used in present-day geopolitics regularly refer to an east and west, as in \u201cFar East,\u201d and \u201cMiddle East,\u201d as well as in \u201cWestern\u201d ideas or attitudes. In modern usage then \u201cthe West\u201d refers to Europe. After all, if the area including T\u00fcrkiye, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Israel, and Egypt is somewhere called the \u201cMiddle\u201d or \u201cNear\u201d East, doesn't that imply that it is just to the east of something else?\r\n\r\nIn fact, we get the original distinction between east and west from ancient Greece. Greece is the center-point: east of the Balkan Peninsula was east, west of the Balkans was west, and the Greeks were at the center of their self-understood world. Likewise, the sea that both separated and united the Greeks and their neighbors, including the Egyptians and the Persians, is still called the Mediterranean, which means \u201csea in the middle of the earth\u201d (albeit in Latin, not Greek\u2014we get the word from a later \"Western\" civilization, the Romans). The ancient civilizations clustered around the Mediterranean treated it as the center of the world itself, their major trade route to one another and a major source of their food as well.\r\n\r\nTo the Greeks, there were two kinds of people: Greeks and barbarians (the Greek word is barbaros<\/em>). Supposedly, the word barbarian came from Greeks mocking the sound of non-Greek languages: \u201cbar-bar-bar-bar.\u201d The Greeks traded with all of their neighbors and knew perfectly well that the Persians and the Egyptians and the Phoenicians, among others, were not their inferiors in learning, art, or political organization, but the fact remains that they were not Greek, either. Thus, one of the core themes of Western Civilization is that right from its inception\u2014of the east being east of Greece and the west being west of Greece, and of the world being divided between Greeks and barbarians\u2014there was an idea of who was central and superior, and who was out on the periphery and inferior, or at least not part of the best version of civilization.\r\n\r\nThe Greeks themselves did not have a concept of \u201cWestern Civilization,\u201d just Greek versus barbarian, which included the other peoples who inhabited Europe. Likewise, the Greeks did not invent \u201ccivilization\u201d itself; they inherited things like agriculture and writing from their neighbors. Neither was there ever a united Greek empire: there was a great Greek civilization when Alexander the Great conquered what he thought was most of the world, stretching from Greece itself through Egypt, the Middle East, as far as western India, but it collapsed into feuding kingdoms after he died. Thus, while later cultures came to look to the Greeks as their intellectual and cultural ancestors, the Greeks themselves did not set out to found \u201cWestern Civilization\u201d itself.\r\n

Mesopotamia and Civilization<\/h2>\r\n\u201cThe West\u201d as a concept is rooted in the geography of Greece, but \u201ccivilization\u201d is not. The word is linked to the Latin word for city, civitas<\/em>, and it suggests a way of life centering on the products of an urbanized culture. Likewise, as noted above with the Greeks, civilization was usually seen as the opposite of barbarism, and historically it was nomadic, non-urbanized peoples who were most likely to be labeled as \u201cbarbarians.\u201d For the sake of historical analysis, however, we can set aside the pejorative distinction between civilization and barbarism and instead consider civilization as a set of essential technological advances and examine how those technologies altered human life on an enormous scale. That process began in the Middle East thousands of years before the first cities of ancient Greece existed.\r\n\r\nThe most ancient human civilizations arose in the Fertile Crescent, an area stretching from present-day Palestine and Israel through southern T\u00fcrkiye and into Iraq. Closely related, and lying within the Fertile Crescent, is the region of Mesopotamia, which is the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in present-day Iraq. In these areas, people first invented the most crucial technology necessary for the development of civilization: agriculture. The Mesopotamians also invented other things that are central to civilization, including towns and cities, the earliest writing systems, mathematics, engineering, and both organized religion and complex political systems. Similar advances happened in key regions across the globe, including China, India, and Mesoamerica, but it happened first in Mesopotamia, and it was from Mesopotamia that civilization spread to the rest of western Eurasia.\r\n

Greece and Rome<\/h2>\r\nEven if we do not attribute the idea of Western Civilization to the Greeks, we do need to acknowledge their importance. Alexander the Great was one of the most famous and important military leaders in history, a man who started conquering \u201cthe world\u201d when he was eighteen years old. When he died his empire fell apart, in part because he did not say which of his generals was to take over after his death. Nevertheless, the empires he left behind were united in important ways, using Greek as one of their languages, employing Greek architecture in their buildings, putting on plays in the Greek style, and of course, trading with one another. This period in history is called the Hellenistic Age. The people who were part of that age were European, Middle Eastern, and North African, people who worshiped both Greeks gods and the gods of their own regions, spoke all kinds of different languages, and lived as part of a hybrid culture. Hellenistic civilization demonstrates the fact that Western Civilization has always been a blend of different peoples, not a single encompassing group or language or religion.\r\n\r\nPerhaps the most important empire in the ancient history of Western Civilization was ancient Rome. Over the course of roughly five centuries, the Romans expanded from the city of Rome in the middle of the Italian peninsula to rule an empire that stretched from Britain to Spain and from North Africa to Persia (present-day Iran). Through both incredible engineering, the hard work of Roman citizens, and later subjects, and the massive use of slave labor, they built remarkable buildings and created infrastructure like roads and aqueducts that survive to the present day.\r\n\r\nThe Romans\u2014sometimes grudgingly\u2014acknowledged Greece as a cultural model. Roman architecture used Greek shapes and forms, the Roman gods shared many similarities with the Greek pantheon, and educated Romans spoke and read Greek so that they could read the works of the great Greek poets, playwrights, and philosophers. Thus, the Romans deliberately adopted an older set of ideas and considered themselves part of an ongoing civilization that blended Greek and Roman values. Like the Greeks before them, they also divided civilization itself in a stark binary: there was Greco-Roman culture on the one hand and barbarism on the other, although they reluctantly acknowledged the civilized character of Persia at times.\r\n\r\nThe Romans were largely successful at assimilating the people they conquered. They united their provinces using three major cultural elements. The first was the Latin language, which is the precursor of all of the major languages spoken in Southern Europe today (French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, etc.). Second was Roman Law, which is the basis of most forms of law still in use today in Europe. Third was the Roman form of government. Along with those factors, the Romans promoted Greek and Roman science, learning, and literature across their empire. In many ways, the Romans believed that they were bringing civilization itself everywhere they went, and because they made the connection between Greek civilization and their own, they played a significant role in inventing the idea of Western Civilization as something that was ongoing.\r\n\r\nHowever, the Romans themselves did not use the term \u201cWestern Civilization\u201d and as their empire expanded, even the connection between Roman identity and Europe itself weakened. During the period that the empire was at its height, the bulk of the population and wealth was in the east, concentrated in Egypt, Anatolia (the region corresponding to the present-day nation of T\u00fcrkiye) and the Middle East. This shift to the east culminated in the move of the capital of the empire from the city of Rome to the Greek town of Byzantium, where it at first was known as Nova Roma but later renamed Constantinople in honor of the emperor who ordered the move: Constantine. Thus, while the Greco-Roman legacy was certainly a major factor in the development of the idea<\/em> of Western Civilization much later, \u201cRoman\u201d was certainly not the same thing as \u201cwestern\u201d at the time.\r\n

The Middle Ages and Christianity<\/h2>\r\nAnother stage in the development of the idea of Western Civilization came about after Rome ceased to exist as a united empire, during the era known as the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages were the period between the political decline of Rome\u2014which happened around 476 CE\u2014and the Renaissance\u2014which started around 1300 CE. During the Middle Ages, another concept that has come to be a core component of Western Civilization arose among Europeans. However, it expanded beyond the connection to Roman and Greek accomplishments and focused instead on religion. The Roman Empire had started to become Christian in the early fourth century CE when the emperor Constantine made it illegal to persecute someone based on religion. As the Christian faith continued to spread, many Europeans in the Middle Ages came to believe that despite the fact that they spoke different languages and had different rulers, they were united as part of \u201cChristendom.\u201d\r\n\r\nChristianity played an important role in the history of Europe and the development of the idea of Western Civilization. It inspired amazing art and music and was at the heart of scholarship and learning for centuries. However, it also justified the aggressive expansion of European kingdoms. Europeans truly believed that members of other religions were infidels (meaning \"those who are unfaithful,\" which included Jews and Muslims, but also Christians who deviated from official orthodoxy) or pagans (those who worshiped false gods) who should either convert or be exterminated. Despite the fact that Muslims and Jews worshiped the same God and shared much of the same sacred literature, medieval Europeans had absolutely no qualms about invading Muslim lands and committing atrocities in the name of their religion. Likewise, medieval antisemitism\u2014prejudice and hatred directed against Jews\u2014eventually drove many Jews from Europe itself to take shelter in the Muslim kingdoms and empires of the Middle East and North Africa. Historically, it was much safer and more comfortable for Jews to live in places like the Muslim-ruled Ottoman Empire than in most of Christian Europe.\r\n\r\nA major irony of the idea that Western Civilization is somehow inherently Christian is that Islam is unquestionably just as \u201cWestern.\u201d Islam\u2019s point of origin, the Arabian Peninsula, is geographically very close to that of both Judaism and Christianity. Its holy writings are also closely aligned to Jewish and Christian values and thought. The connections were not just religious in nature. Islamic kingdoms and empires were part of the networks of trade, scholarship, and exchange that linked together the entire greater Mediterranean region. Thus, despite the fervor of European crusaders, it would be profoundly misleading to separate Islamic states and cultures from the rest of Western Civilization.\r\n

The Renaissance and European Expansion<\/h2>\r\nPerhaps the most crucial development in the idea of Western Civilization in the pre-modern period was the Renaissance. The idea of the \u201cMiddle Ages\u201d was invented by thinkers during the Renaissance, which started around 1300 CE. The great thinkers and artists of the period claimed to be moving away from the ignorance and darkness of the Middle Ages\u2014which they also described as the \u201cDark Ages\u201d\u2014and returning to the greatness of the Romans and Greeks. People like Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Christine de Pizan, and Petrarch proudly connected their work to that of the Romans and Greeks, claiming that there was an unbroken chain of ideas, virtues, and accomplishments stretching back more than a thousand years to people like Alexander the Great, Plato, and Socrates.\r\n\r\nAnd so, during the Renaissance, educated people in Europe based their own philosophies and outlooks on Plato and Aristotle, as well as that of other Greek thinkers. They directly connected their art to its inspiration from Greek and Roman forms. Additionally, the scientific discoveries of the Renaissance were inspired by the same spirit of inquiry that Greek scientists and Roman engineers had cultivated. In this way, Renaissance thinkers proudly linked together their own era to that of the Greeks and Romans, thus strengthening the concept of Western Civilization as an ongoing enterprise.\r\n\r\nIn the process of reviving the ideas of the Greeks and Romans, Renaissance thinkers created a new program of education known as \u201chumanistic\u201d education. Celebrating the inherent goodness and potentialities of humankind, humanistic education saw in the study of classical literature a source of inspiration for not just knowledge, but also morality and virtue. Combining the practical study of languages, history, mathematics, and rhetoric\u2014among other subjects\u2014with the cultivation of an ethical code, the humanists ultimately devised a curriculum meant to create well-rounded, virtuous individuals. That program of education remained intact into the twentieth century, with the study of the \u201cclassics \u2014Greek and Roman literature\u2014remaining a hallmark of elite education until it began to be displaced by the more specialized disciplinary studies of the modern university system that was born near the end of the nineteenth century.\r\n\r\nIt was not Renaissance ideas, however, that had the greatest impact on the globe at the time. Instead, it was European soldiers, colonists, and most consequentially, diseases. The first people from Eurasia since prehistory to travel to the Americas and remain\u2014an earlier Viking colony did not survive\u2014were European explorers who, entirely by accident, \u201cdiscovered\u201d the Americas at the end of the fifteenth century CE. It bears emphasis that the \u201cdiscovery\u201d of the Americas is a misnomer: millions of people already lived there, as their ancestors had for thousands of years. However, geography had left them ill-prepared for the arrival of the newcomers. With the European colonists came an onslaught of epidemics to which the native peoples of the Americas had no resistance, and within a few generations the immense majority \u2014 perhaps as many as 90 percent\u2014 of Indigenous Americans perished as a result. This catastrophic event, the greatest demographic collapse in world history, is remembered as the \u201cGreat Dying.\u201d The subsequent conquest of the Americas by Europeans and their descendants was thus made vastly easier. Europeans suddenly had access to an astonishing wealth of land and natural resources. Wealth that they extracted in large part by enslaving Indigenous Americans and soon, Africans.\r\n\r\nDue largely to the European conquest of the Americas and the exploitation of American resources and enslaved people, in the following centuries Europe went from a region of little economic and military power and importance to one of the most formidable. Following the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of Central and South America, the other major European states embarked on their own imperialistic ventures in the following centuries. \u201cTrade empires\u201d emerged over the course of the seventeenth century, first and foremost those of the Dutch and English, which established the precedent that profit and territorial control were mutually reinforcing priorities for European states. Driven by that conjoined motive, European states established huge, and growing, global empires. By 1800, roughly 35 percent of the surface of the world was controlled by Europeans or their descendants.\r\n

The Modern Era<\/h2>\r\nMost of the world, however, was off limits to large-scale European expansion. Not only were there prosperous and sophisticated kingdoms in many regions of Africa, but\u2014in an ironic reversal of the impact of European diseases on Americans\u2014African diseases ensured that would-be European explorers and conquerors were initially unable to penetrate beyond the coasts of most of Africa south of the Sahara. Meanwhile, the enormous and powerful empires and kingdoms of China, Japan, Southeast Asia, and South Asia (i.e. India) largely regarded Europeans as incidental trading partners of relatively little importance. The Middle East was dominated by two powerful and \u201cwestern\u201d empires of its own: Persia and the Ottoman Empire.\r\n\r\nThe explosion of European power, one that coincided with the fruition of the idea that Western Civilization was both distinct from and better<\/em> than other branches of civilization, came as a result of a development in technology: the Industrial Revolution. Starting in Great Britain in the middle of the eighteenth century, Europeans learned how to exploit fossil fuels in the form of coal to harness hitherto unimaginable amounts of energy. That energy underwrote a vast and dramatic expansion of European technology, wealth, and military power, this time built on the backs not of outright slaves, but of workers paid subsistence wages.\r\n\r\nOver the course of the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution underwrote and enabled the transformation of Europe from regional powerhouse to global hegemon. By the early twentieth century, Europe and the American nations founded by the descendants of Europeans controlled roughly 85 percent of the globe. Europeans either forced foreign states to concede to their economic demands and political influence, as in China and the Ottoman Empire, or simply conquered and controlled regions directly, as in India and Africa. None of this would have been possible without the technological revolution wrought by industrialism.\r\n\r\nTo Europeans and North Americans, however, the reason that they had come to enjoy such wealth and power was not because of a (temporary) monopoly of industrial technology. Instead, it was the inevitable result of their inherent biological and cultural superiority. The idea that the human species was divided into biologically distinct races was not entirely invented in the nineteenth century, but it became the predominant outlook and acquired all the trappings of a \u201cscience\u201d over the course of the 1800s. By the year 1900, almost any person of European descent would have claimed to be part of a distinct, superior \u201crace\u201d whose global dominance was simply part of their collective birthright. Likewise, for the first time, the idea of \u201cthe West\u201d started emerging among certain philosophers, although at the time the concept excluded all of eastern Europe, not just non-European regions and continents.\r\n\r\nThe conceit that the West represented the leading edge of human development arrived at its zenith in the first half of the twentieth century. The European powers themselves fell upon one another in the First World War in the name of expanding, or at least preserving, their share of global dominance. Soon after, the new ideology of fascism put racial superiority at the very center of their worldviews. The Second World War was the direct result of those ideologies, when racial warfare was unleashed for the first time not just on external peoples Europeans had already classified as \u201cinferior,\u201d but on European ethnicities that fascists now considered inferior races in their own right, most notably the Jews. The bloodbath that followed resulted in approximately 60 million deaths, including the 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust.\r\n

Western Civilization Is Reinvented<\/h2>\r\nIt was against the backdrop of this descent into what Europeans and Americans frequently called \u201cbarbarism\u201d\u2014the old antithesis of the \u201ctrue\u201d civilization that started with the Greeks\u2014that the history of Western Civilization first came into being as a textbook topic and soon, a mainstay of college curriculums. Prominent scholars in the United States, especially historians, came to believe that the best way to defend the elements of civilization with which they most strongly identified, including certain concepts of rationality and political equality, was to describe all of human existence as an ascent from primitive savagery into enlightenment, an ascent that may not have strictly speaking started in Europe, but which they felt enjoyed its greatest success there. The early proponents of the \u201cWestern Civ\u201d concept spoke and wrote explicitly of European civilization as an unbroken ladder of ideas, technologies, and cultural achievements that led to the present. Along the way, of course, they included the United States as both a product of those European achievements and, in the twentieth century, as one of the staunchest defenders of that legacy.\r\n\r\nThat first generation of historians of Western Civilization succeeded in crafting what was to be the core of history curriculums for most of the twentieth century in American colleges, universities, and high schools. The narrative in the introduction in this book follows a traditional Western Civilization curriculum\u2019s basic contours: it starts with Greece, goes through Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, then on to the growth in European power leading up to the recent past. The traditional story, however, usually made a distinction between Western Civilization as the site of progress, and the rest of the world\u2014usually referred to as the \u201cOrient,\u201d until textbooks started changing their terms in the 1980s\u2014which was normally characterized as lagging behind. Outside of the West, went the narrative, there was despotism, stagnation, and corruption, so it was almost inevitable that the West would eventually achieve global dominance.\r\n\r\nThis was, in hindsight, a somewhat surprising conclusion given when the narrative was invented. The West\u2019s self-understanding as the most \u201ccivilized\u201d culture had imploded with the world wars, but the inventors of Western Civilization as a concept were determined to not only rescue its legacy from that implosion, but to celebrate it as the only<\/em> major historical legacy of relevance to the present. In doing so, they reinforced many of the intellectual dividing lines created centuries earlier: there was true civilization opposed by barbarians, there was an ongoing and unbroken legacy of achievement and progress, and most importantly, only people who were born in or descended from people born in Europe had played a significant historical role. The entire history of most of humankind was not just irrelevant to the narrative of European or American history, it was irrelevant to the history of the modern world for everyone<\/em>. In other words, Africans and Asians, to say nothing of the people of the Pacific or Indigenous Americans, could have little of relevance to learn from their own history. And yet, this astonishing conclusion was born from a culture that had unleashed the most horrific destruction ever witnessed by the human species.\r\n

The West: The Problems of the Concept<\/h2>\r\nToday, the terms \u201cThe West\u201d and \u201cWestern\u201d remain prevalent in journalism, politics, and casual language alike. However, rarely are they considered in much depth. To pick one particularly glaring example, Russia under the regime of its dictatorial president Vladimir Putin is usually described in terms of its opposition to the West, which is understood to mean the United States and Western Europe. Those countries correspond fairly neatly to the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which was originally created to limit the expansion of the Soviet Union during the Cold War that followed World War II. Is Russia, however, \u201cEastern\u201d? As of the 2020s, it is in close political alliance with China, as well as other American political adversaries like Iran, but Russian cultural history is unquestionably linked more closely to Europe than to East Asia or the Middle East, and most contemporary Russians consider themselves Europeans.\r\n\r\nWhen we consider the fact that the very term \u201cthe West\u201d was not used in earnest until the later part of the nineteenth century, and then it generally only included European countries west of Poland, and when we reflect on the historical connections between nominally Western and (Middle) Eastern developments in the history of ideas, commerce, politics, and religion, it is clear that the very concept of the West is empirically (i.e. factually) questionable, even if most people today have at least a vague sense of what it is supposed to mean. None of this is to suggest that the idea is useless or should necessarily be abandoned, but it is<\/em> to suggest that the concept should be subject to scrutiny even if we conclude that it remains useful for historical or political analysis.\r\n\r\nThe other obvious problem with the idea of the West is its appropriation by the contemporary far-right, which openly celebrates a neo-fascist form of politics tied to western chauvinism. The risk of studying the history of western civilization without applying a critical and thoughtful lens to the idea is that it may implicitly endorse the outdated and inaccurate concepts of western exceptionalism and triumphalism that came of age in the late 1800s and which continue to inspire racist and anti-democratic politics in the present. To be clear, the immense majority of people who use the idea of the West in academia, journalism, politics, or even casual conversation do not accept cultural chauvinism or racism, but it is impossible to disentangle the concept from its abuses over the last two centuries and should, therefore, be \u201cunpacked\u201d in a deliberate, thoughtful, and focused manner whenever possible. This is a major reason why this course is now known as European history, in an attempt to distance the material from that chauvinistic perspective.\r\n

This Textbook<\/h2>\r\nEurope: A Concise History<\/em> is a two-volume account of the region\u2019s development from the Greeks to the modern day. Volume 1 covers from the ancient period through the Reformation. Volume 2 takes us from the Reformation to the modern period. This book is an adaptation of the Portland Community College textbook Western Civilization: A Concise History<\/em> and was written by Dr. Christopher Brooks and originally appeared in three volumes. I have adapted the book to cover the time period covered by the Palomar Community College course Hist 105 European History through the Reformation. This new Volume 1 incorporates elements of Volume 2 as originally written by Christopher Brooks. While the new Volume 2 has also been expanded to include all of the original Volume 3. I have also added new material and edited some sections for greater clarity. Europe: A Concise History<\/em> is intended to serve as the main textbook for a single semester or term class and is designed to be accessible to students who do not possess prior knowledge of the region or its history.\r\n\r\nRevisions for Version 2.0 of the textbook were supported by a grant from Open Oregon, a state-run consortium that supports Open Educational Resources. Revisions for Version 3.0 were supported by a grant from PCC\u2019s OER Steering Committee. Version 4.0 has been made possible by a grant from the California Community College Chancellor\u2019s Office. This current version was updated and edited by Travis Ritt of Palomar College with the support of the 2024 California Community College Chancellor\u2019s Office (CCCCO) OER Grant. As such, people are welcome to engage in the 5Rs of OER. They may retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute this textbook so long as they adhere to the following conditions: that they do so for non-commercial purposes, that they assign the same licensing conditions to any revised versions as have been applied to the original work, and that they acknowledge Christopher Brooks as the original author. Western Civilization: A Concise History<\/em>\u00a0by Portland Community College is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.\r\n\r\nI would like to wholeheartedly thank Dr. Brooks, Portland Community College, and Open Oregon for their work in this area of open educational resources.\r\n

The following changes were made to this book as a whole:<\/h2>\r\nReformatted the entire document to one space after a period instead of 2.\r\n\r\nThroughout I have edited sentences for greater clarity and flow.\r\n\r\nThe focus of the book has been shifted from the concept of Western Civilization to purely European History\r\n

The following changes were made to specific chapters:<\/h2>\r\nChapter 1 (formerly Chapters 1-3 (Vol 1)<\/strong>\r\n\r\nThese chapters have been summarized to create a new Chapter 1\r\n\r\nThese original chapters are more world history rather than European but are important to include in an abbreviated manner to create a solid foundation.\r\n\r\nChapter 2 (formerly Chapter 4)<\/strong>\r\n\r\nNew introduction to the chapter\r\n\r\nAdditional material on women added\r\n\r\nAdded the concept of Eunomia to Spartan identity\r\n\r\nAdded material to the development of Athenian governance\r\n\r\nChapter 3 (formerly Chapter 5)<\/strong>\r\n\r\nAdded a longer section on successions disputes in Persia\r\n\r\nAdded to the section on Zoroastrianism\r\n\r\nCreated a new section on the two battles that defined the Persian War\r\n\r\nAdded more detail to the Peloponnesian War\r\n\r\nChapter 4 (formerly Chapter 6)<\/strong>\r\n\r\nCreated a new section on Greek religion\r\n\r\nChapter 5 (formerly Chapter 7)<\/strong>\r\n\r\nAdded more to the rise and death of Philip II of Macedon\r\n\r\nAdded more to the leadership of Alexander the Great\r\n\r\nExpanded the section on Ptolemaic Egypt\r\n\r\nExpanded definition and examples of Hellenism\r\n\r\nProvided additional nuance to the Library of Alexandria\r\n\r\nChapter 6 (formerly Chapter 8)<\/strong>\r\n\r\nProvided more background to the rise of Rome\r\n\r\nAdditions for the Etruscans and Celts\r\n\r\nAdded section on the meaning of Caesar\r\n\r\nChapter 7: (formerly Chapter 9)<\/strong>\r\n\r\nWrote a new introduction\r\n\r\nSection on Germanic culture added\r\n\r\nChapter 8 (formerly Chapter 10)<\/strong>\r\n\r\nPresented more depth and context to the Battle of Milvian Bridge and Rome\u2019s move towards Christianity\r\n\r\nElaborated on Constantine\u2019s role in the development of Roman Christianity\r\n\r\nAdded in a warning of how to use religious texts as a historian\r\n\r\nExpanded on a historical interpretation of the Gospels\r\n\r\nClarified that the type of monasticism where monks live alone is called hermetic monasticism and added the concept of cenobitic monasticism\r\n\r\nRemoved the note referring to Germanic peoples as barbarians and replaced throughout with the phrase, Germanic peoples\r\n\r\nReframed the \"Invasions\" section to reflect ideas in modern scholarship of a transition to Germanic authority\r\n\r\nChapter 9 (formerly Chapter 11)<\/strong>\r\n\r\nReplaced the image of Hagia Sophia with one taken by Travis Ritt\r\n\r\nExcept where it is used to show Roman disdain for the \u201cother\u201d in the Christian period, the word pagan has been replaced with polytheist\r\n\r\nMoved discussion on currency into earlier section concerning the imperial economy\r\n\r\nFormer Chapter 12 Islam<\/strong> has been eliminated since this text is now being used for a European history course, rather than the original \u201cWestern Civilization\u201d\r\n\r\nChapter 10 (formerly Chapter 13)<\/strong>\r\n\r\nModified usage from Roman Church to Roman Catholic Church and deleted explanation of why only the term Roman was being used.\r\n\r\nChanged the sacraments from list format into a paragraph\r\n\r\nGave a more nuanced definition of feudalism\r\n\r\nAdded more on the disintegration of the Carolingian empire\r\n\r\nReplaced the specific term Norse with the more general term Scandinavian when talking about the Vikings in general\r\n\r\nDeleted the conclusion\r\n\r\nChapters 1-7 from Volume 2 have been moved to Volume 1 to cover the COR\u00a0<\/strong>\r\n\r\nChapter 11 (formerly Chapter 1 volume 2)<\/strong>\r\n\r\nPresented more nuance to the understanding of the Crusades as well as what Alexius wanted from the west\r\n\r\nChanged terminology from Latin Principalities to Crusader States as the earlier term more specifically relates to the time after the Fourth Crusade\r\n\r\nEliminated mention of the Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba during the Second Crusade as it no longer existed\r\n\r\nReplaced Reconquest with Reconquista<\/em> throughout\r\n\r\nMade the direct link between the conquest of Granada to the funding for the expedition of Christopher Columbus\r\n\r\nDeleted the subsections \u201cThe Middle East after the Caliphates\u201d and \u201cThe Turkic Migrations and Ottoman Origins\u201d as they do not fit the current textbook\r\n\r\nUpdated life expectancy numbers\r\n\r\nChapter 12 (formerly Chapter 2 volume 2)<\/strong>\r\n\r\nIncorporated both the Mongol and Khanate sections into their importance to the political formation of Russia and deleted as a standalone section\r\n\r\nUpdated plague section to include yersinia pestis<\/em>, the etymology of bubonic and why it was called the Black Death\r\n\r\nAdded in the change of diets of Europeans following the Black Death\r\n\r\nClarified the claims to the French throne that led to the 100 Years War\r\n\r\nClarified the nature of the English raids during the 100 Years War\r\n\r\nIncluded the importance of John of Bedford in the 100 Years War and added to the analysis of the end of the war\r\n\r\nProvided more nuanced introduction of Clement V and added more detail to the return of the Papacy to Rome\r\n\r\nRefined the conclusion\r\n\r\nChapter 13 (formerly Chapter 3 volume 2)<\/strong>\r\n\r\nAttributions added for 2 images not in the original edition. Image of Lorenzo Monaco removed because attribution could not be found. Image of Florence Cathedral replaced with one that has an attribution.\r\n\r\nAdded a reasoning to start using the term Italy, rather than the more accurate geographical term Italian Peninsula.\r\n\r\nPresented an alternative interpretation of The Prince.\u00a0<\/em>\r\n\r\nChapter 14: \u00a0(formerly Chapter 4 volume 2)<\/strong>\r\n\r\nDeleted the Ottoman and Safavid section as it is not relevant to European history in the context of this course\r\n\r\nAdded to and corrected the success of Louis XI of France.\r\n\r\nChapter 15 (formerly Chapter 5 volume 2)<\/strong>\r\nAdded more context to the decline of Venetian maritime importance\r\n\r\nChanged from Montezuma to Moctezuma\r\n\r\nChapter 16: \u00a0(formerly Chapter 6 volume 2)\r\n\r\nAdded the concept of the reprobate to Calvinism\r\n\r\nAdded more nuance to the beginning of the\u00a0 English Reformation\r\n\r\nConverted the Effects of the Reformation section into paragraphs rather than bullet points\r\n\r\nAdded a paragraph on the effects of the Protestant Revolution on the Eastern Orthodox Church\r\n\r\nChapter 17: \u00a0(formerly Chapter 7 volume 2)<\/strong>\r\n\r\nReplaced the pixilated image titled The Spanish Fury with a clear image of the same\r\n\r\nIntroduced the concept of constitutional monarchy in the conclusion\r\n\r\nTravis Ritt, PhD, Oceanside, California, April 2026","rendered":"

Once upon a time, this course was titled, \u201cWestern Civilization.\u201d Today we use the much more accurate term European History. However, before we get into that history, it is important to understand that change. First, we need to start by asking hat is \u201cWestern Civilization\u201d? Furthermore, who or what is part of it? Like all ideas, the concept of Western Civilization itself has a history, one that coalesced in college textbooks and curriculums for the first time in the United States in the 1920s. In many ways, the very idea of Western Civilization is a \u201cloaded\u201d one, separating one branch of civilization from others as if they were distinct, even unrelated. Thus, before examining the events of Europe\u2019s history, it is important to unpack the history of the concept of Western Civilization.<\/p>\n

Where is the West?<\/h2>\n

The most obvious question to start with is \u201cwest of what\u201d? A follow up would be, where is \u201cthe east\u201d? Terms used in present-day geopolitics regularly refer to an east and west, as in \u201cFar East,\u201d and \u201cMiddle East,\u201d as well as in \u201cWestern\u201d ideas or attitudes. In modern usage then \u201cthe West\u201d refers to Europe. After all, if the area including T\u00fcrkiye, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Israel, and Egypt is somewhere called the \u201cMiddle\u201d or \u201cNear\u201d East, doesn’t that imply that it is just to the east of something else?<\/p>\n

In fact, we get the original distinction between east and west from ancient Greece. Greece is the center-point: east of the Balkan Peninsula was east, west of the Balkans was west, and the Greeks were at the center of their self-understood world. Likewise, the sea that both separated and united the Greeks and their neighbors, including the Egyptians and the Persians, is still called the Mediterranean, which means \u201csea in the middle of the earth\u201d (albeit in Latin, not Greek\u2014we get the word from a later “Western” civilization, the Romans). The ancient civilizations clustered around the Mediterranean treated it as the center of the world itself, their major trade route to one another and a major source of their food as well.<\/p>\n

To the Greeks, there were two kinds of people: Greeks and barbarians (the Greek word is barbaros<\/em>). Supposedly, the word barbarian came from Greeks mocking the sound of non-Greek languages: \u201cbar-bar-bar-bar.\u201d The Greeks traded with all of their neighbors and knew perfectly well that the Persians and the Egyptians and the Phoenicians, among others, were not their inferiors in learning, art, or political organization, but the fact remains that they were not Greek, either. Thus, one of the core themes of Western Civilization is that right from its inception\u2014of the east being east of Greece and the west being west of Greece, and of the world being divided between Greeks and barbarians\u2014there was an idea of who was central and superior, and who was out on the periphery and inferior, or at least not part of the best version of civilization.<\/p>\n

The Greeks themselves did not have a concept of \u201cWestern Civilization,\u201d just Greek versus barbarian, which included the other peoples who inhabited Europe. Likewise, the Greeks did not invent \u201ccivilization\u201d itself; they inherited things like agriculture and writing from their neighbors. Neither was there ever a united Greek empire: there was a great Greek civilization when Alexander the Great conquered what he thought was most of the world, stretching from Greece itself through Egypt, the Middle East, as far as western India, but it collapsed into feuding kingdoms after he died. Thus, while later cultures came to look to the Greeks as their intellectual and cultural ancestors, the Greeks themselves did not set out to found \u201cWestern Civilization\u201d itself.<\/p>\n

Mesopotamia and Civilization<\/h2>\n

\u201cThe West\u201d as a concept is rooted in the geography of Greece, but \u201ccivilization\u201d is not. The word is linked to the Latin word for city, civitas<\/em>, and it suggests a way of life centering on the products of an urbanized culture. Likewise, as noted above with the Greeks, civilization was usually seen as the opposite of barbarism, and historically it was nomadic, non-urbanized peoples who were most likely to be labeled as \u201cbarbarians.\u201d For the sake of historical analysis, however, we can set aside the pejorative distinction between civilization and barbarism and instead consider civilization as a set of essential technological advances and examine how those technologies altered human life on an enormous scale. That process began in the Middle East thousands of years before the first cities of ancient Greece existed.<\/p>\n

The most ancient human civilizations arose in the Fertile Crescent, an area stretching from present-day Palestine and Israel through southern T\u00fcrkiye and into Iraq. Closely related, and lying within the Fertile Crescent, is the region of Mesopotamia, which is the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in present-day Iraq. In these areas, people first invented the most crucial technology necessary for the development of civilization: agriculture. The Mesopotamians also invented other things that are central to civilization, including towns and cities, the earliest writing systems, mathematics, engineering, and both organized religion and complex political systems. Similar advances happened in key regions across the globe, including China, India, and Mesoamerica, but it happened first in Mesopotamia, and it was from Mesopotamia that civilization spread to the rest of western Eurasia.<\/p>\n

Greece and Rome<\/h2>\n

Even if we do not attribute the idea of Western Civilization to the Greeks, we do need to acknowledge their importance. Alexander the Great was one of the most famous and important military leaders in history, a man who started conquering \u201cthe world\u201d when he was eighteen years old. When he died his empire fell apart, in part because he did not say which of his generals was to take over after his death. Nevertheless, the empires he left behind were united in important ways, using Greek as one of their languages, employing Greek architecture in their buildings, putting on plays in the Greek style, and of course, trading with one another. This period in history is called the Hellenistic Age. The people who were part of that age were European, Middle Eastern, and North African, people who worshiped both Greeks gods and the gods of their own regions, spoke all kinds of different languages, and lived as part of a hybrid culture. Hellenistic civilization demonstrates the fact that Western Civilization has always been a blend of different peoples, not a single encompassing group or language or religion.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most important empire in the ancient history of Western Civilization was ancient Rome. Over the course of roughly five centuries, the Romans expanded from the city of Rome in the middle of the Italian peninsula to rule an empire that stretched from Britain to Spain and from North Africa to Persia (present-day Iran). Through both incredible engineering, the hard work of Roman citizens, and later subjects, and the massive use of slave labor, they built remarkable buildings and created infrastructure like roads and aqueducts that survive to the present day.<\/p>\n

The Romans\u2014sometimes grudgingly\u2014acknowledged Greece as a cultural model. Roman architecture used Greek shapes and forms, the Roman gods shared many similarities with the Greek pantheon, and educated Romans spoke and read Greek so that they could read the works of the great Greek poets, playwrights, and philosophers. Thus, the Romans deliberately adopted an older set of ideas and considered themselves part of an ongoing civilization that blended Greek and Roman values. Like the Greeks before them, they also divided civilization itself in a stark binary: there was Greco-Roman culture on the one hand and barbarism on the other, although they reluctantly acknowledged the civilized character of Persia at times.<\/p>\n

The Romans were largely successful at assimilating the people they conquered. They united their provinces using three major cultural elements. The first was the Latin language, which is the precursor of all of the major languages spoken in Southern Europe today (French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, etc.). Second was Roman Law, which is the basis of most forms of law still in use today in Europe. Third was the Roman form of government. Along with those factors, the Romans promoted Greek and Roman science, learning, and literature across their empire. In many ways, the Romans believed that they were bringing civilization itself everywhere they went, and because they made the connection between Greek civilization and their own, they played a significant role in inventing the idea of Western Civilization as something that was ongoing.<\/p>\n

However, the Romans themselves did not use the term \u201cWestern Civilization\u201d and as their empire expanded, even the connection between Roman identity and Europe itself weakened. During the period that the empire was at its height, the bulk of the population and wealth was in the east, concentrated in Egypt, Anatolia (the region corresponding to the present-day nation of T\u00fcrkiye) and the Middle East. This shift to the east culminated in the move of the capital of the empire from the city of Rome to the Greek town of Byzantium, where it at first was known as Nova Roma but later renamed Constantinople in honor of the emperor who ordered the move: Constantine. Thus, while the Greco-Roman legacy was certainly a major factor in the development of the idea<\/em> of Western Civilization much later, \u201cRoman\u201d was certainly not the same thing as \u201cwestern\u201d at the time.<\/p>\n

The Middle Ages and Christianity<\/h2>\n

Another stage in the development of the idea of Western Civilization came about after Rome ceased to exist as a united empire, during the era known as the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages were the period between the political decline of Rome\u2014which happened around 476 CE\u2014and the Renaissance\u2014which started around 1300 CE. During the Middle Ages, another concept that has come to be a core component of Western Civilization arose among Europeans. However, it expanded beyond the connection to Roman and Greek accomplishments and focused instead on religion. The Roman Empire had started to become Christian in the early fourth century CE when the emperor Constantine made it illegal to persecute someone based on religion. As the Christian faith continued to spread, many Europeans in the Middle Ages came to believe that despite the fact that they spoke different languages and had different rulers, they were united as part of \u201cChristendom.\u201d<\/p>\n

Christianity played an important role in the history of Europe and the development of the idea of Western Civilization. It inspired amazing art and music and was at the heart of scholarship and learning for centuries. However, it also justified the aggressive expansion of European kingdoms. Europeans truly believed that members of other religions were infidels (meaning “those who are unfaithful,” which included Jews and Muslims, but also Christians who deviated from official orthodoxy) or pagans (those who worshiped false gods) who should either convert or be exterminated. Despite the fact that Muslims and Jews worshiped the same God and shared much of the same sacred literature, medieval Europeans had absolutely no qualms about invading Muslim lands and committing atrocities in the name of their religion. Likewise, medieval antisemitism\u2014prejudice and hatred directed against Jews\u2014eventually drove many Jews from Europe itself to take shelter in the Muslim kingdoms and empires of the Middle East and North Africa. Historically, it was much safer and more comfortable for Jews to live in places like the Muslim-ruled Ottoman Empire than in most of Christian Europe.<\/p>\n

A major irony of the idea that Western Civilization is somehow inherently Christian is that Islam is unquestionably just as \u201cWestern.\u201d Islam\u2019s point of origin, the Arabian Peninsula, is geographically very close to that of both Judaism and Christianity. Its holy writings are also closely aligned to Jewish and Christian values and thought. The connections were not just religious in nature. Islamic kingdoms and empires were part of the networks of trade, scholarship, and exchange that linked together the entire greater Mediterranean region. Thus, despite the fervor of European crusaders, it would be profoundly misleading to separate Islamic states and cultures from the rest of Western Civilization.<\/p>\n

The Renaissance and European Expansion<\/h2>\n

Perhaps the most crucial development in the idea of Western Civilization in the pre-modern period was the Renaissance. The idea of the \u201cMiddle Ages\u201d was invented by thinkers during the Renaissance, which started around 1300 CE. The great thinkers and artists of the period claimed to be moving away from the ignorance and darkness of the Middle Ages\u2014which they also described as the \u201cDark Ages\u201d\u2014and returning to the greatness of the Romans and Greeks. People like Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Christine de Pizan, and Petrarch proudly connected their work to that of the Romans and Greeks, claiming that there was an unbroken chain of ideas, virtues, and accomplishments stretching back more than a thousand years to people like Alexander the Great, Plato, and Socrates.<\/p>\n

And so, during the Renaissance, educated people in Europe based their own philosophies and outlooks on Plato and Aristotle, as well as that of other Greek thinkers. They directly connected their art to its inspiration from Greek and Roman forms. Additionally, the scientific discoveries of the Renaissance were inspired by the same spirit of inquiry that Greek scientists and Roman engineers had cultivated. In this way, Renaissance thinkers proudly linked together their own era to that of the Greeks and Romans, thus strengthening the concept of Western Civilization as an ongoing enterprise.<\/p>\n

In the process of reviving the ideas of the Greeks and Romans, Renaissance thinkers created a new program of education known as \u201chumanistic\u201d education. Celebrating the inherent goodness and potentialities of humankind, humanistic education saw in the study of classical literature a source of inspiration for not just knowledge, but also morality and virtue. Combining the practical study of languages, history, mathematics, and rhetoric\u2014among other subjects\u2014with the cultivation of an ethical code, the humanists ultimately devised a curriculum meant to create well-rounded, virtuous individuals. That program of education remained intact into the twentieth century, with the study of the \u201cclassics \u2014Greek and Roman literature\u2014remaining a hallmark of elite education until it began to be displaced by the more specialized disciplinary studies of the modern university system that was born near the end of the nineteenth century.<\/p>\n

It was not Renaissance ideas, however, that had the greatest impact on the globe at the time. Instead, it was European soldiers, colonists, and most consequentially, diseases. The first people from Eurasia since prehistory to travel to the Americas and remain\u2014an earlier Viking colony did not survive\u2014were European explorers who, entirely by accident, \u201cdiscovered\u201d the Americas at the end of the fifteenth century CE. It bears emphasis that the \u201cdiscovery\u201d of the Americas is a misnomer: millions of people already lived there, as their ancestors had for thousands of years. However, geography had left them ill-prepared for the arrival of the newcomers. With the European colonists came an onslaught of epidemics to which the native peoples of the Americas had no resistance, and within a few generations the immense majority \u2014 perhaps as many as 90 percent\u2014 of Indigenous Americans perished as a result. This catastrophic event, the greatest demographic collapse in world history, is remembered as the \u201cGreat Dying.\u201d The subsequent conquest of the Americas by Europeans and their descendants was thus made vastly easier. Europeans suddenly had access to an astonishing wealth of land and natural resources. Wealth that they extracted in large part by enslaving Indigenous Americans and soon, Africans.<\/p>\n

Due largely to the European conquest of the Americas and the exploitation of American resources and enslaved people, in the following centuries Europe went from a region of little economic and military power and importance to one of the most formidable. Following the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of Central and South America, the other major European states embarked on their own imperialistic ventures in the following centuries. \u201cTrade empires\u201d emerged over the course of the seventeenth century, first and foremost those of the Dutch and English, which established the precedent that profit and territorial control were mutually reinforcing priorities for European states. Driven by that conjoined motive, European states established huge, and growing, global empires. By 1800, roughly 35 percent of the surface of the world was controlled by Europeans or their descendants.<\/p>\n

The Modern Era<\/h2>\n

Most of the world, however, was off limits to large-scale European expansion. Not only were there prosperous and sophisticated kingdoms in many regions of Africa, but\u2014in an ironic reversal of the impact of European diseases on Americans\u2014African diseases ensured that would-be European explorers and conquerors were initially unable to penetrate beyond the coasts of most of Africa south of the Sahara. Meanwhile, the enormous and powerful empires and kingdoms of China, Japan, Southeast Asia, and South Asia (i.e. India) largely regarded Europeans as incidental trading partners of relatively little importance. The Middle East was dominated by two powerful and \u201cwestern\u201d empires of its own: Persia and the Ottoman Empire.<\/p>\n

The explosion of European power, one that coincided with the fruition of the idea that Western Civilization was both distinct from and better<\/em> than other branches of civilization, came as a result of a development in technology: the Industrial Revolution. Starting in Great Britain in the middle of the eighteenth century, Europeans learned how to exploit fossil fuels in the form of coal to harness hitherto unimaginable amounts of energy. That energy underwrote a vast and dramatic expansion of European technology, wealth, and military power, this time built on the backs not of outright slaves, but of workers paid subsistence wages.<\/p>\n

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution underwrote and enabled the transformation of Europe from regional powerhouse to global hegemon. By the early twentieth century, Europe and the American nations founded by the descendants of Europeans controlled roughly 85 percent of the globe. Europeans either forced foreign states to concede to their economic demands and political influence, as in China and the Ottoman Empire, or simply conquered and controlled regions directly, as in India and Africa. None of this would have been possible without the technological revolution wrought by industrialism.<\/p>\n

To Europeans and North Americans, however, the reason that they had come to enjoy such wealth and power was not because of a (temporary) monopoly of industrial technology. Instead, it was the inevitable result of their inherent biological and cultural superiority. The idea that the human species was divided into biologically distinct races was not entirely invented in the nineteenth century, but it became the predominant outlook and acquired all the trappings of a \u201cscience\u201d over the course of the 1800s. By the year 1900, almost any person of European descent would have claimed to be part of a distinct, superior \u201crace\u201d whose global dominance was simply part of their collective birthright. Likewise, for the first time, the idea of \u201cthe West\u201d started emerging among certain philosophers, although at the time the concept excluded all of eastern Europe, not just non-European regions and continents.<\/p>\n

The conceit that the West represented the leading edge of human development arrived at its zenith in the first half of the twentieth century. The European powers themselves fell upon one another in the First World War in the name of expanding, or at least preserving, their share of global dominance. Soon after, the new ideology of fascism put racial superiority at the very center of their worldviews. The Second World War was the direct result of those ideologies, when racial warfare was unleashed for the first time not just on external peoples Europeans had already classified as \u201cinferior,\u201d but on European ethnicities that fascists now considered inferior races in their own right, most notably the Jews. The bloodbath that followed resulted in approximately 60 million deaths, including the 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust.<\/p>\n

Western Civilization Is Reinvented<\/h2>\n

It was against the backdrop of this descent into what Europeans and Americans frequently called \u201cbarbarism\u201d\u2014the old antithesis of the \u201ctrue\u201d civilization that started with the Greeks\u2014that the history of Western Civilization first came into being as a textbook topic and soon, a mainstay of college curriculums. Prominent scholars in the United States, especially historians, came to believe that the best way to defend the elements of civilization with which they most strongly identified, including certain concepts of rationality and political equality, was to describe all of human existence as an ascent from primitive savagery into enlightenment, an ascent that may not have strictly speaking started in Europe, but which they felt enjoyed its greatest success there. The early proponents of the \u201cWestern Civ\u201d concept spoke and wrote explicitly of European civilization as an unbroken ladder of ideas, technologies, and cultural achievements that led to the present. Along the way, of course, they included the United States as both a product of those European achievements and, in the twentieth century, as one of the staunchest defenders of that legacy.<\/p>\n

That first generation of historians of Western Civilization succeeded in crafting what was to be the core of history curriculums for most of the twentieth century in American colleges, universities, and high schools. The narrative in the introduction in this book follows a traditional Western Civilization curriculum\u2019s basic contours: it starts with Greece, goes through Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, then on to the growth in European power leading up to the recent past. The traditional story, however, usually made a distinction between Western Civilization as the site of progress, and the rest of the world\u2014usually referred to as the \u201cOrient,\u201d until textbooks started changing their terms in the 1980s\u2014which was normally characterized as lagging behind. Outside of the West, went the narrative, there was despotism, stagnation, and corruption, so it was almost inevitable that the West would eventually achieve global dominance.<\/p>\n

This was, in hindsight, a somewhat surprising conclusion given when the narrative was invented. The West\u2019s self-understanding as the most \u201ccivilized\u201d culture had imploded with the world wars, but the inventors of Western Civilization as a concept were determined to not only rescue its legacy from that implosion, but to celebrate it as the only<\/em> major historical legacy of relevance to the present. In doing so, they reinforced many of the intellectual dividing lines created centuries earlier: there was true civilization opposed by barbarians, there was an ongoing and unbroken legacy of achievement and progress, and most importantly, only people who were born in or descended from people born in Europe had played a significant historical role. The entire history of most of humankind was not just irrelevant to the narrative of European or American history, it was irrelevant to the history of the modern world for everyone<\/em>. In other words, Africans and Asians, to say nothing of the people of the Pacific or Indigenous Americans, could have little of relevance to learn from their own history. And yet, this astonishing conclusion was born from a culture that had unleashed the most horrific destruction ever witnessed by the human species.<\/p>\n

The West: The Problems of the Concept<\/h2>\n

Today, the terms \u201cThe West\u201d and \u201cWestern\u201d remain prevalent in journalism, politics, and casual language alike. However, rarely are they considered in much depth. To pick one particularly glaring example, Russia under the regime of its dictatorial president Vladimir Putin is usually described in terms of its opposition to the West, which is understood to mean the United States and Western Europe. Those countries correspond fairly neatly to the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which was originally created to limit the expansion of the Soviet Union during the Cold War that followed World War II. Is Russia, however, \u201cEastern\u201d? As of the 2020s, it is in close political alliance with China, as well as other American political adversaries like Iran, but Russian cultural history is unquestionably linked more closely to Europe than to East Asia or the Middle East, and most contemporary Russians consider themselves Europeans.<\/p>\n

When we consider the fact that the very term \u201cthe West\u201d was not used in earnest until the later part of the nineteenth century, and then it generally only included European countries west of Poland, and when we reflect on the historical connections between nominally Western and (Middle) Eastern developments in the history of ideas, commerce, politics, and religion, it is clear that the very concept of the West is empirically (i.e. factually) questionable, even if most people today have at least a vague sense of what it is supposed to mean. None of this is to suggest that the idea is useless or should necessarily be abandoned, but it is<\/em> to suggest that the concept should be subject to scrutiny even if we conclude that it remains useful for historical or political analysis.<\/p>\n

The other obvious problem with the idea of the West is its appropriation by the contemporary far-right, which openly celebrates a neo-fascist form of politics tied to western chauvinism. The risk of studying the history of western civilization without applying a critical and thoughtful lens to the idea is that it may implicitly endorse the outdated and inaccurate concepts of western exceptionalism and triumphalism that came of age in the late 1800s and which continue to inspire racist and anti-democratic politics in the present. To be clear, the immense majority of people who use the idea of the West in academia, journalism, politics, or even casual conversation do not accept cultural chauvinism or racism, but it is impossible to disentangle the concept from its abuses over the last two centuries and should, therefore, be \u201cunpacked\u201d in a deliberate, thoughtful, and focused manner whenever possible. This is a major reason why this course is now known as European history, in an attempt to distance the material from that chauvinistic perspective.<\/p>\n

This Textbook<\/h2>\n

Europe: A Concise History<\/em> is a two-volume account of the region\u2019s development from the Greeks to the modern day. Volume 1 covers from the ancient period through the Reformation. Volume 2 takes us from the Reformation to the modern period. This book is an adaptation of the Portland Community College textbook Western Civilization: A Concise History<\/em> and was written by Dr. Christopher Brooks and originally appeared in three volumes. I have adapted the book to cover the time period covered by the Palomar Community College course Hist 105 European History through the Reformation. This new Volume 1 incorporates elements of Volume 2 as originally written by Christopher Brooks. While the new Volume 2 has also been expanded to include all of the original Volume 3. I have also added new material and edited some sections for greater clarity. Europe: A Concise History<\/em> is intended to serve as the main textbook for a single semester or term class and is designed to be accessible to students who do not possess prior knowledge of the region or its history.<\/p>\n

Revisions for Version 2.0 of the textbook were supported by a grant from Open Oregon, a state-run consortium that supports Open Educational Resources. Revisions for Version 3.0 were supported by a grant from PCC\u2019s OER Steering Committee. Version 4.0 has been made possible by a grant from the California Community College Chancellor\u2019s Office. This current version was updated and edited by Travis Ritt of Palomar College with the support of the 2024 California Community College Chancellor\u2019s Office (CCCCO) OER Grant. As such, people are welcome to engage in the 5Rs of OER. They may retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute this textbook so long as they adhere to the following conditions: that they do so for non-commercial purposes, that they assign the same licensing conditions to any revised versions as have been applied to the original work, and that they acknowledge Christopher Brooks as the original author. Western Civilization: A Concise History<\/em>\u00a0by Portland Community College is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.<\/p>\n

I would like to wholeheartedly thank Dr. Brooks, Portland Community College, and Open Oregon for their work in this area of open educational resources.<\/p>\n

The following changes were made to this book as a whole:<\/h2>\n

Reformatted the entire document to one space after a period instead of 2.<\/p>\n

Throughout I have edited sentences for greater clarity and flow.<\/p>\n

The focus of the book has been shifted from the concept of Western Civilization to purely European History<\/p>\n

The following changes were made to specific chapters:<\/h2>\n

Chapter 1 (formerly Chapters 1-3 (Vol 1)<\/strong><\/p>\n

These chapters have been summarized to create a new Chapter 1<\/p>\n

These original chapters are more world history rather than European but are important to include in an abbreviated manner to create a solid foundation.<\/p>\n

Chapter 2 (formerly Chapter 4)<\/strong><\/p>\n

New introduction to the chapter<\/p>\n

Additional material on women added<\/p>\n

Added the concept of Eunomia to Spartan identity<\/p>\n

Added material to the development of Athenian governance<\/p>\n

Chapter 3 (formerly Chapter 5)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Added a longer section on successions disputes in Persia<\/p>\n

Added to the section on Zoroastrianism<\/p>\n

Created a new section on the two battles that defined the Persian War<\/p>\n

Added more detail to the Peloponnesian War<\/p>\n

Chapter 4 (formerly Chapter 6)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Created a new section on Greek religion<\/p>\n

Chapter 5 (formerly Chapter 7)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Added more to the rise and death of Philip II of Macedon<\/p>\n

Added more to the leadership of Alexander the Great<\/p>\n

Expanded the section on Ptolemaic Egypt<\/p>\n

Expanded definition and examples of Hellenism<\/p>\n

Provided additional nuance to the Library of Alexandria<\/p>\n

Chapter 6 (formerly Chapter 8)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Provided more background to the rise of Rome<\/p>\n

Additions for the Etruscans and Celts<\/p>\n

Added section on the meaning of Caesar<\/p>\n

Chapter 7: (formerly Chapter 9)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Wrote a new introduction<\/p>\n

Section on Germanic culture added<\/p>\n

Chapter 8 (formerly Chapter 10)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Presented more depth and context to the Battle of Milvian Bridge and Rome\u2019s move towards Christianity<\/p>\n

Elaborated on Constantine\u2019s role in the development of Roman Christianity<\/p>\n

Added in a warning of how to use religious texts as a historian<\/p>\n

Expanded on a historical interpretation of the Gospels<\/p>\n

Clarified that the type of monasticism where monks live alone is called hermetic monasticism and added the concept of cenobitic monasticism<\/p>\n

Removed the note referring to Germanic peoples as barbarians and replaced throughout with the phrase, Germanic peoples<\/p>\n

Reframed the “Invasions” section to reflect ideas in modern scholarship of a transition to Germanic authority<\/p>\n

Chapter 9 (formerly Chapter 11)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Replaced the image of Hagia Sophia with one taken by Travis Ritt<\/p>\n

Except where it is used to show Roman disdain for the \u201cother\u201d in the Christian period, the word pagan has been replaced with polytheist<\/p>\n

Moved discussion on currency into earlier section concerning the imperial economy<\/p>\n

Former Chapter 12 Islam<\/strong> has been eliminated since this text is now being used for a European history course, rather than the original \u201cWestern Civilization\u201d<\/p>\n

Chapter 10 (formerly Chapter 13)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Modified usage from Roman Church to Roman Catholic Church and deleted explanation of why only the term Roman was being used.<\/p>\n

Changed the sacraments from list format into a paragraph<\/p>\n

Gave a more nuanced definition of feudalism<\/p>\n

Added more on the disintegration of the Carolingian empire<\/p>\n

Replaced the specific term Norse with the more general term Scandinavian when talking about the Vikings in general<\/p>\n

Deleted the conclusion<\/p>\n

Chapters 1-7 from Volume 2 have been moved to Volume 1 to cover the COR\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Chapter 11 (formerly Chapter 1 volume 2)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Presented more nuance to the understanding of the Crusades as well as what Alexius wanted from the west<\/p>\n

Changed terminology from Latin Principalities to Crusader States as the earlier term more specifically relates to the time after the Fourth Crusade<\/p>\n

Eliminated mention of the Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba during the Second Crusade as it no longer existed<\/p>\n

Replaced Reconquest with Reconquista<\/em> throughout<\/p>\n

Made the direct link between the conquest of Granada to the funding for the expedition of Christopher Columbus<\/p>\n

Deleted the subsections \u201cThe Middle East after the Caliphates\u201d and \u201cThe Turkic Migrations and Ottoman Origins\u201d as they do not fit the current textbook<\/p>\n

Updated life expectancy numbers<\/p>\n

Chapter 12 (formerly Chapter 2 volume 2)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Incorporated both the Mongol and Khanate sections into their importance to the political formation of Russia and deleted as a standalone section<\/p>\n

Updated plague section to include yersinia pestis<\/em>, the etymology of bubonic and why it was called the Black Death<\/p>\n

Added in the change of diets of Europeans following the Black Death<\/p>\n

Clarified the claims to the French throne that led to the 100 Years War<\/p>\n

Clarified the nature of the English raids during the 100 Years War<\/p>\n

Included the importance of John of Bedford in the 100 Years War and added to the analysis of the end of the war<\/p>\n

Provided more nuanced introduction of Clement V and added more detail to the return of the Papacy to Rome<\/p>\n

Refined the conclusion<\/p>\n

Chapter 13 (formerly Chapter 3 volume 2)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Attributions added for 2 images not in the original edition. Image of Lorenzo Monaco removed because attribution could not be found. Image of Florence Cathedral replaced with one that has an attribution.<\/p>\n

Added a reasoning to start using the term Italy, rather than the more accurate geographical term Italian Peninsula.<\/p>\n

Presented an alternative interpretation of The Prince.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Chapter 14: \u00a0(formerly Chapter 4 volume 2)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Deleted the Ottoman and Safavid section as it is not relevant to European history in the context of this course<\/p>\n

Added to and corrected the success of Louis XI of France.<\/p>\n

Chapter 15 (formerly Chapter 5 volume 2)<\/strong>
\nAdded more context to the decline of Venetian maritime importance<\/p>\n

Changed from Montezuma to Moctezuma<\/p>\n

Chapter 16: \u00a0(formerly Chapter 6 volume 2)<\/p>\n

Added the concept of the reprobate to Calvinism<\/p>\n

Added more nuance to the beginning of the\u00a0 English Reformation<\/p>\n

Converted the Effects of the Reformation section into paragraphs rather than bullet points<\/p>\n

Added a paragraph on the effects of the Protestant Revolution on the Eastern Orthodox Church<\/p>\n

Chapter 17: \u00a0(formerly Chapter 7 volume 2)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Replaced the pixilated image titled The Spanish Fury with a clear image of the same<\/p>\n

Introduced the concept of constitutional monarchy in the conclusion<\/p>\n

Travis Ritt, PhD, Oceanside, California, April 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"menu_order":1,"template":"","meta":{"pb_show_title":"on","pb_short_title":"","pb_subtitle":"","pb_authors":[],"pb_section_license":""},"front-matter-type":[13],"contributor":[],"license":[],"class_list":["post-153","front-matter","type-front-matter","status-publish","hentry","front-matter-type-introduction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/front-matter\/153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/front-matter"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/front-matter"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/35"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/front-matter\/153\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":188,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/front-matter\/153\/revisions\/188"}],"metadata":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/front-matter\/153\/metadata\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"front-matter-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/front-matter-type?post=153"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=153"},{"taxonomy":"license","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/license?post=153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}