High school and college survey courses on European history seldom take all of Europe as their subject. For the most part, they focus on the Great Powers—Britain, France, Russia, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire in the early modern era, Germany after 1870—and deal glancingly with other parts of the continent. Italy appears in the Renaissance and the Risorgimento; the Dutch Republic flowers in the seventeenth century and then recedes into obscurity again; Poland figures mostly as a problem child or a whipping boy, whether in the seventeenth century, the eighteenth, or the twentieth. Many regions of Europe make cameo appearances as parts of larger empires; we can say that we teach the Balkans because we teach about the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, Belarus because we teach about the Russian one.
The survey course’s conventional focus on a handful of Great Powers is understandable, because it creates a simpler and more coherent narrative for students to follow, and because it supports European history’s traditional role as a course in the foundations of Western civilization. But I question whether this approach supports modern understandings of cultures and identities, or reflects European society as it exists today. The Europe that I know from my travels is a mosaic of cultures with some unifying patterns of experience underlying them, but it is not a bulwark of a monolithic “Western Civilization.” In designing my European history course, I have tried to pose the question of what Europe is and to teach about the whole continent, including at least a brief mention of as many European countries as possible (excluding the micro-states). This essay outlines some of the ways that the less-discussed regions of Europe may be incorporated into a survey course on European history.
Let’s begin with Portugal and with a crucial geographic concept: Europe’s historical orientation to the water. Europe is a small continent that consists of islands and peninsulas, riddled with bays and inlets. Although it is about one-third the size of Africa, its coastline is at least one and a half times as long. Many European countries developed trade routes not only along major rivers such as the Volga, Danube, and Rhine, but also over inland seas such as the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and the Baltic Sea. The latter were enclosed enough to be somewhat safer to navigate than the Atlantic Ocean, yet vast enough to spur sophisticated ship building. Portugal is an example of a European country that had access to no inland sea or major river and thus developed an early orientation to the Atlantic, which Portuguese whalers explored in the later Middle Ages. This became the foundation for a Portuguese commercial and political alliance with England, another Atlantic-oriented European country, and for Portugal’s early engagement with West Africa, Kongo, and Brazil.
Portugal lies on Europe’s western edge; the situation of Armenia raises the question of how we define the eastern edge of the continent. Armenia, like its neighbors Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Turkey, is usually classified as part of West Asia, but its history has sometimes been closely entangled with that of Europe. Armenia was one of the world’s first Christian countries and a cradle of wine production; these traits linked it imaginatively to Europe from the Middle Ages onward. The Caucasus is hard to classify geographically and is probably under-taught in Western history curricula. In 2009, the European Union created the Eastern Partnership with the former Soviet republics of Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan to provide a forum for the discussion of trade and economic issues and to foster democratic government in the Black Sea region. What will come of this remains to be seen, but it’s helpful to mention the region early in a European history course in order to illustrate the challenge of defining Europe’s boundaries.
Europe as we know it—as a definable cultural region—came into being during the Early Middle Ages, in the aftermath of the Roman Empire. The Roman cultural region rimmed the Mediterranean Sea; it included sections of the Middle East and North Africa and excluded roughly the northern half of Europe. (Northern France, England, and the Rhineland were liminal spaces.). Medieval European society married the political institution of monarchy to the (in theory) universal Catholic Church; Hungary and Scandinavia are both good examples of regions that folded themselves into Europe through a symbiotic embrace of Christianity and monarchy. Anders Winroth’s The Conversion of Scandinavia: Vikings, Merchants, and Missionaries in the Remaking of Northern Europe (2012) is an excellent, accessible account of how this process worked in Scandinavia. In Hungary, it was Prince Géza (c. 940-997) and his son Stephen I (c. 975-1038) who embraced Christianity and established a hereditary kingdom. In essence, they converted Hungarian government from a tribal style to the style of a permanent, sedentary state. Stephen I made several other decisions that brought Hungary into the mainstream of European life, including making Latin the official administrative language of the kingdom, adopting the Latin alphabet for writing Hungarian, and imitating the feudal administrative structures of Charlemagne’s and other Frankish kingdoms.
The Christianization of the outlying regions of Europe was not always peaceful or voluntary. Lithuania clung proudly to paganism through most of the Middle Ages; neighboring tribes such as the Letts, Estonians, and Finns were also slow to convert to Christianity. Starting in the twelfth century, the Baltic region became an important focus of Crusader activity, especially by northwestern Europeans, such as the English and the Danes. Religious, economic, and territorial motives mingled in these wars; the story of the Baltic Crusades is really the story of how northeastern Europe became integrated into European society, not just religiously, but also economically and politically. This is an informative podcast on the Baltic Crusades.
Pagan Lithuania attracted Jewish settlers, and Lithuania remained a major center of Jewish life long after the Grand Duchy of Lithuania merged with the Polish monarchy and became Christian in 1386. Poland also had a tradition of religious toleration and general open-mindedness, especially under the leadership of Casimir III (reigned 1333-1370). Jews were treated as a separate estate (like the nobility, townspeople, or peasants) by the Polish-Lithuanian Crown; in a rare concession, Lithuanian Jews got tax exemptions for their synagogues. Yaffa Eliach’s The Once Was a World: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok (1999) is a vivid account of Lithuanian Jewish life. It deals mostly with a later period, up to and including the early twentieth century, but the introduction stretches back into the Middle Ages. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC has a room dedicated to photographs of everyday life in Eishyshok.
The creation of long-distance trading networks was another activity that drew disparate peoples and regions into relation with each other as a European world took shape. The Hanseatic League, which rose to power in the High Middle Ages and sank into decline in the sixteenth century, was an odd duck, not really a state but possessed of some state-like qualities, including a scratch legislature and a propensity to fight wars. Its Baltic expansion can be understood as a form of colonization. The League’s engagement with Norway, in which it situated German merchants in Bergen to trade for Norwegian stockfish and bring Norway into the wider Baltic economy on the Hansa’s terms, is a good example.
While the Renaissance was centered in Italy, extending the story into the Northern Renaissance allows students a peek at the Low Countries around the fifteenth century. This is a perfect opportunity to discuss the ethnically and linguistically—and soon, religiously—complex character of early modern Europe’s composite states. The Burgundian Netherlands were the forerunner of the modern Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg and the home of artists such as Jan van Eyck, Hieronymous Bosch, and—in the sixteenth century—Pieter Brueghel. The career of Erasmus of Rotterdam highlights the Christian character of the Northern Renaissance and the application of humanist scholarship to religious texts.
Another important fifteenth-century development, new monarchy, is often taught with a focus on Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile or on the new Tudor dynasty in England. But there were other early modern monarchs who exemplified the same strategies, such as Gustavus Vasa of Sweden. In 1523, Sweden withdrew from the Danish-dominated Kalmar Union—itself a good example of a composite state—and reestablished an independent Swedish state. As Gustav I, the new king of Sweden proved a capable, even visionary, ruler. He embraced the Protestant Reformation, aligned Lutheranism with the cause of Swedish independence, and confiscated Church lands, creating a nest egg for the brand-new Swedish monarchy. He rationalized taxation, increasing government revenues while winning a reputation as a well-organized, fair-minded reformer. To secure Sweden’s power in European affairs, Gustav pursued a two-pronged strategy: building a modern army, and developing a trading network on the Baltic that could challenge the power of the German-dominated Hanseatic League. Gustav could be ruthless—he demanded loyalty pledges, harshly suppressed pro-Danish and pro-Catholic sentiment, and abolished elective monarchy in favor of hereditary monarchy under the House of Vasa—but he is as celebrated as the founder of modern Sweden as the Tudors are celebrated in England or Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain.
One of the new monarchs’ goals was to sidestep the power of the regionally-based nobility and foster more direct connections between the ruler and the people. This could have advantages for the ruled as well as for the ruler, and an intriguing incident to mention when discussing sixteenth-century politics is Gubec’s Rebellion of 1573 in Croatia and Slovenia. This was a sort of bottom-up effort at achieving the same goal: the peasant rebels hoped to abolish feudalism and put in place peasant officials who would be responsible directly to the Holy Roman Emperor. It was harshly suppressed, but it left an imaginative imprint on the region, inspiring books, films, and historical reenactments.
The Protestant Reformation and all the power politics that unfolded around religion in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe offer a good opportunity to examine a band of countries stretching from Sweden south through the Baltic states, Poland, Czechia, and Hungary to the Balkans. Early modern Sweden, fiercely Lutheran, converted Finland and then Livonia (comprising parts of modern Latvia and Estonia). Swedish rule of Livonia (1611-1710) had important consequences for the Baltic region. In addition to promoting Lutheranism, founding a university in Tartu, and establishing a network of schools that taught much of the population to read, Sweden inadvertently pressed the diverse peoples of the region to coalesce into just a few ethnic and linguistic identities. The Latvian language and ethnic identity are only a few centuries old; they took shape during the era of Swedish rule.
Taking a step back in time, Czechia had been a center of radical religious thought since the late Middle Ages, when Jan Hus (c. 1372-1415), rector of the University of Prague, preached consubstantiation instead of transubstantiation and condemned indulgences. Hus also maintained that “Women were made in the image of God and should fear no man”; women preached in Hussite churches and served in Hussite wars. The Council of Constance, convened by the de facto head of the Holy Roman Empire, executed Hus in 1415, but this only served to fan resentment of the Catholic establishment in Bohemia, and Protestantism spread rapidly. The Peace of Augsburg’s policy of “cuius regio, eius religio” triumphantly failed to bring order to the region, and the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) started with a conflict over Ferdinand II‘s attempt to reimpose Catholic orthodoxy on Bohemia.
Medieval Hungary had based its identity on the conviction that it was, in the words the 15th century Pope Pius II, “the shield of Christianity and the protector of Western civilization.” But between 1490, when King Matthias Corvinus died without issue, and the 1510s, Hungary erupted in internal conflict—nobility vs. monarchy, peasants vs. nobility, and Protestant vs. Catholic—that left it vulnerable to Ottoman conquest. After 1526, when Louis II was killed at the Battle of Mohács, most of Hungary came under Ottoman rule. Despite the Ottomans’ best efforts, they never managed to conquer Austria, so Hungary because the northwesternmost outpost of Muslim rule in Europe. Some areas of Hungary that lay on the Austrian border remained under Habsburg rule, and many Hungarian nobility and well-to-do townsfolk fled to “Upper Hungary”, now Slovakia, leaving Ottoman Hungary as a somewhat depopulated, mostly agrarian realm to be administered by the Balkan Slavs sent there from Istanbul.
In 1686, the Habsburg-led Holy League, a confederation that also included the Papal states, Poland-Lithuania, and Russia, wrested the city of Buda from the Ottomans, and by 1718 all of Hungary was liberated from the Ottoman Empire. Hungary now became an important but somewhat problematic component of the Habsburg Empire: problematic because it was both ethnically and linguistically different (Hungarian rather than German) and religiously different (largely Protestant, in contrast to intensely Catholic Austria). Moreover, Hungary was politically distinct: in contrast to Austria and the Czech lands, it was not and never had been part of the Holy Roman Empire. Historically, Hungary was an important state in its own right, but Austria now treated it in some respects as a colony, pressuring Protestant Hungarians and Slovakians to convert to Catholicism and resettling people of various non-Hungarian nationalities in the regions of Hungary that had been depopulated under Ottoman rule.
Ottoman rule in southeastern Europe lasted significantly longer than Ottoman rule in Hungary, spanning from Süleyman the Magnificent’s conquest of Belgrade in 1521 to the beginning of the 20th century. The Southern Slavic peoples had long dwelt at the border between the Western and Eastern (Byzantine) Roman Empires and, more enduringly, the border between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Most of the region looked east, while Slovenia and Croatia looked west. Ottoman imperialism mainly affected the former; Slovenia lived under the sway of the Habsburgs, and Ottoman expansion pushed Croatia into the arms of the Habsburgs in the 1520s. After Ottoman conquest, a minority of the inhabitants converted to Islam, but most lived as protected religious minorities under the millet system. Albania and Bosnia were the prime targets of the devshirme system, in which Christian boys were taken away from their families, forcibly converted to Islam, and raised to become janissaries, members of an elite corps of soldiers and administrators. For the most part, though, Slavic subjects of the Ottoman Empire were relatively free, and many benefited from the Ottoman Empire’s energetic support of trade and commerce.
One of the concepts that I emphasize when teaching about early modern Europe is internal imperialism—the extent to which many regions of Europe were ruled, colonized, and developed by greater European powers. It may seem like an obvious point, but it’s one that young people often lose sight of, accustomed as they are to envisioning Europeans as being on the dominant end of colonial relationships. There are numerous examples of this, ranging from the familiar, such as England in Ireland and Austria in the Balkans, to the less talked-about, such as Denmark in Norway, Sweden in Finland and the eastern Baltic, and (as Napoleon experienced in childhood) France in Corsica. These relationships were genuinely colonial, typically involving some combination of exploitation of natural resources, integration into an imperial-power-centric economic system, taxation, and religious or linguistic conversion. A complicating factor is that some of the colonized regions did not have strong cultural identities above the village or tribal level before colonization; their cultural identities developed partly in cooperation with colonial powers and partly in opposition to them.
A complementary question, worth teasing at this point in the course, is, what makes a state? On one side of the puzzle coin is Switzerland, which claims a founding date of 1291. By 1882, when French philosopher Ernest Renan famously questioned, “How is Switzerland, which has three languages, two religions, and three or four races, a nation while Tuscany, for example, which is so homogenous, is not one?,” Switzerland’s existence as a state had been formally recognized in several diplomatic contexts, including the Peace of Westphalia and the Congress of Vienna. On the other side of the puzzle coin lie Europe’s late-blooming states, many of them less than half a century old. For example, consider Belarus, whose origin story stretches back through a millennium of rule by, successively, the Kievan Rus, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Russian Empire. It first attempted to become a state in 1918, and this effort quickly failed; it achieved statehood only in 1991.
The Enlightenment is usually taught—understandably—with a focus on its epicenters in France, England, Scotland, and Germany. A discussion of how the Enlightenment affected Portugal, under the leadership of Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, the marques de Pombal (1699-1782), Portugal’s prime minster from 1750 to 1777, makes a useful counterpoint. The marques de Pombal excelled at applying human reason to human problems; his achievements ranged from creating some of the world’s first seismically protected buildings in response to the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 to creating one of the world’s first regional wine appellations in an effort to market Portuguese port. Some of Pombal’s reforms reflected the humanitarian, individualistic spirit of the Enlightenment: he abolished slavery in Portugal and in Portugal’s outposts in India, though not in Portugal’s colonies in Brazil and Africa, and he abolished the Inquisition’s practice of burning heretics alive. But his political vision was a centralizing, autocratic one, and teaching about him can be a useful way to show students that the Enlightenment did not lead automatically and inevitably to democratization.
Enlightenment intellectuals also looked east, as Larry Wolff discusses in his monograph Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (1994). Voltaire was fascinated by Russia under its modernizing tsars, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. In a sense, Voltaire put Russia on Western Europeans’ mental map and explaining its geopolitical importance to them. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), who usually dealt in abstractions, made a rare effort to apply his philosophical ideas to a real-life quandary in his Considerations on the Government of Poland (1772). Poland attracted Rousseau’s interest and concern because he admired its elective monarchy and “Golden Liberty,” a legal tradition that extended a large measure of freedom and equality to all members of the Polish nobility.
The Napoleonic Wars shook the whole continent of Europe. This is a good point at which to check in on the Netherlands and Italy, both regions that spent many years under Napoleonic rule, paving the way for significant political transitions in the nineteenth century. Dutch rebels, inspired by French Revolutionary ideas, proclaimed the Batavian Republic in 1795; it gave way to personal rule by Napoleon’s brother Louis Bonaparte in 1806, but in the long run, Napoleon, fearing that Louis identified too closely with the interests of the Dutch people rather than with Napoleon’s larger project, seized control and annexed the Netherlands to France. After 1815, there was a United Kingdom of the Netherlands—the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg—until Belgium seceded in 1830. In Italy, Napoleon transformed the eighteenth-century patchwork of states into first a patchwork of French-influenced republics and then two sizeable kingdoms, the Kingdom of Italy and the Kingdom of Naples. The Congress of Vienna restored much, but not all, of the pre-Napoleonic order in 1815. By then, however, fundamental questions about republicanism and national sovereignty had been raised throughout the Italian peninsula, paving the way for the Risorgimento. Switzerland offers a good counterpoint, as an example of a state in which Napoleonic rule was profoundly unpopular, in part because it disrupted the decentralized canton structure. It’s also worth taking a look at Spain in the Napoleonic Era—the economic havoc, the loss of most of its overseas empire, and the sharp conservative reaction of Ferdinand VII—if only to explain why Spain slides into the background of the usual master narrative of European history.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was still a European power, but its influence was in retreat. In 1783, Russia had annexed the Crimean Khanate, a long-established Muslim state on the north side of the Black Sea, in territory that is now part of Ukraine. This was widely understood as a Christian victory over Muslims; it meant that Tatar Muslims came under Russian Orthodox rule. Russia and Turkey came to blows several times in the succeeding century, often in the context of local revolts against Ottoman authority, and sometimes with the involvement of Britain, France, or other powers. This was all part of the “Eastern Question,” an old chestnut of European history that might be woven into a modern course with less focus on the anxieties and preferences of the Great Powers and more on the new nations that were coming into being. Greece was recognized as an independent state in 1830, after nearly a decade of warfare; Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro all declared independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1877-78; and Bulgaria was created in 1878 as a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman suzerainty was nominal, however, and Bulgaria declared full independence in 1908. Addressing nationalism in southeastern Europe can balance a discussion of the more frustrated nationalist movements within the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Ireland.
Although the story of Italian unification figures prominently in the European history survey, the story of how Italy developed in the succeeding generations often does not. The crucial point is that the Italian people got a particular kind of compromise: constitutional government, yes, but not under the republic of which Mazzini and Garibaldi had dreamed; rather, it was the government of a constitutional monarchy dedicated to realpolitik and economic development. The “Golden Triangle” in northern Italy prospered, and the country became the site of technological wonders as engineers blasted railway tunnels through the Italian Alps. But southern Italy remained poor, spurring many of its people to emigrate to northern Italy, the United States, or South America. This serves as a good example of the uneven effects of industrialization and “modernity” in late nineteenth-century Europe.
The Russian Revolution was a transformative moment in both Russian and world history, but it was also a crucial moment, in a slightly different way, in the history of the parts of the Russian Empire that sought to break away and form their own nation-states between 1917 and 1920. This includes both the ones that succeeded—Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and reconstituted Poland—and the ones that didn’t, such as Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. The 1937 novel Ali and Nino, by the pseudonymous Kurban Said, is an engaging window onto the situation in the Caucasus in this period; Azerbaijan became the world’s first democratic Muslim state in 1918, only to have its independence crushed two years later by the invading Red Army. The novel raises the perennial question of how Azerbaijan, as well as neighboring Georgia and Armenia, fit into the stream of European history. Complex yet succinct, it has recently been made into a film.
Several regions of Europe had highly distinctive experiences of Nazi occupation and the Holocaust. One interesting case study is Norway, which, as Despina Stratigakos explains in Hitler’s Northern Utopia: Building the New Order in Occupied Norway (2020), was a major focus of Nazi fantasies about the future of its Aryan empire during the 1940-45 occupation. Another country whose wartime experience is useful to address is Greece, which was under Nazi occupation from June 1941 to October 1944 (and until the spring of 1945 on some islands). Greece’s story highlights the economic devastation wrought by Nazi occupation, the use of famine as a weapon of war, and the high incidence of civilian casualties (more than 10% of the population). Because some parts of Greece were occupied by Fascist Italy before they were occupied by Nazi Germany, the story also highlights contrasting Italian and Nazi policies towards Jews. All of this, in turn, brings to life the anxieties about the stability of Greece that underlay the Truman Doctrine. Devin Naar’s Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece (2016) is an intriguing account of how one of the region’s “hybrid identities” developed.
When I reach the post-1945 period, I find it easier to teach a comprehensive history of Europe, in part because there are structures—NATO, the Warsaw Pact, and the European Union—that provide a framework for addressing most, if not all, European states. Consequently, my final thoughts about instilling wide coverage in the European history survey focus less on specific countries and more on two topics—the social welfare state and migration—that I believe should figure strongly in a Modern European History course.
When I talk with students about why they want to study European history, one answer that often emerges is that they associate Europe with the good life—a life that is peaceful and prosperous, yet less ridden with social conflict and flagrant economic inequality than the United States. In short, one of the attractions of Europe is its pioneering embrace of the social welfare state. Teaching about social programs such as health insurance and old age pensions should begin with Bismarck’s Germany, but some of the best developed examples of social welfare states lie in the Nordic countries. Centering Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland in this unit can serve to make a few essential points: that some parts of Europe were very poor, right up the twentieth century; that Europeans perceived the creation of social welfare states as a means of overcoming ingrained social and economic hierarchies; and that conservative politicians’ compromises with labor unions played a role in the process. Finally, I like to point out that the process of creating the Nordic social welfare states began when the countries in question were relatively poor and in some cases also relatively new—extensive programs of social protection were not the laurels of already successful societies, but the building blocks of relatively fragile, yet upwardly mobile, ones.
Migration to, and within, Europe is not a new phenomenon. One example of this is the Romani, or Roma. Of South Asian origin, and originally Hindu though most are now Christian or Muslim, the Romani arrived in the Balkans during the High Middle Ages and subsequently fanned out across much of Europe. It’s a grim history: the Roma were enslaved in some places (in Wallachia and Moldova, until the mid-19th century), expelled from many others, and sometimes harassed or killed in the places in which they resided. Most students today are aware that the Romani were one of the groups that the Nazi regime targeted, but they tend not to have a clear idea of who the Romani are or of how long they have resided in Europe, so it’s helpful to fill in some background.
In Europe: A Cultural History, 3rd ed. (2015), Pieter Rietbergen argues that the concept of Europe emerged, in the Early Middle Ages, in tension with the new religion of Islam, which spread like wildfire across North Africa and Iberia, so that Europeans felt defensive and hemmed in. Bearing this in mind, I try to mention Europe’s relationship with Islam regularly throughout the course. Still, it needs to be spotlighted in the post-World War II period, during which Europe received waves of immigrants from Turkey, South Asia, the Middle East, and North and West Africa. Muslims now make up 5% of Europe’s population. Here is a Pew Research Center article on “Europe’s Growing Muslim Population.”
I’ll end with a few final reading recommendations. Here is a 2018 New York Times article on myths about migration that works well in a European history course, and here is a second New York Times article that deals specifically with migration to Europe. Finally, Norman Davies’ lengthy but engaging tome Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (2012) is a wonderful resource for instructors who want to open students’ eyes to the vivid and turbulent history of some of the lesser-known corners of Europe.
Darcy R. Fryer 