Anaximander placed the boundary between Asia and Europe along the Phasis River (the modern Rioni River on the territory of Georgia) in the Caucasus, a convention still followed by Herodotus in the 5th century BCE. As a name for a part of the known world, it is first used in the 6th century BCE by Anaximander and Hecataeus. Spain, for example, has territories south of the Mediterranean Sea—namely, Ceuta and Melilla—which are parts of Africa and share a border with Morocco. Turkey is generally considered a transcontinental country divided entirely by water, while Russia and Kazakhstan are only partly divided by waterways. Cartographer Herman Moll suggested in 1715 Europe was bounded by a series of partly joined waterways directed towards the Turkish straits, and the Irtysh River draining into the upper part of the Ob River and the Arctic Ocean.
- A year later, England tried unsuccessfully to invade Spain, allowing Philip II of Spain to maintain his dominant war capacity in Europe.
- Anaximander placed the boundary between Asia and Europe along the Phasis River (the modern Rioni River on the territory of Georgia) in the Caucasus, a convention still followed by Herodotus in the 5th century BCE.
- The Treaty of Rome in 1957 established the European Economic Community between six Western European states with the goal of a unified economic policy and common market.
- However, most geographers in the Soviet Union favoured the boundary along the Caucasus crest, and this became the common convention in the later 20th century, although the Kuma–Manych boundary remained in use in some 20th-century maps.
The Italian Renaissance spread across many Western European countries, adapting to local contexts and giving rise to distinct national expressions. The culture of Europe consists of a range of national and regional cultures, which form the central roots of the wider Western civilisation, and together commonly reference ancient Greece and ancient Rome, particularly through their Christian successors, as crucial and shared roots. 10,186,000 square kilometres (3,933,000 sq mi), or 2% of Earth’s surface (6.8% of Earth’s land area), making it the second-smallest continent (using the seven-continent model).
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Consequently, when the American Revolutionary War turned into a global war between 1778 and 1783, Britain found itself opposed by a strong coalition of European powers, and lacking any substantial ally. According to Peter Barrett, “It is widely accepted that ‘modern science’ arose in the Europe of the 17th century (towards the end of the Renaissance), introducing a new understanding of the natural world.” The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) crippled the Holy Roman Empire and devastated much of Germany, killing between 25 and 40 percent of its population. The plunder of the empires of the Americas allowed Spain to finance religious persecution in Europe for over a century.
Europe lies mainly in the temperate climate zone of the northern hemisphere, where the prevailing wind direction is from the west. The former is a land unto itself in the northern ocean that is counted as part of Europe, while the latter are upland areas that were once joined to the mainland until rising sea levels cut them off. The southern regions are more mountainous, while moving north the terrain descends from the high Alps, Pyrenees and Carpathians, through hilly uplands, into broad, low northern plains, which are vast in the east. Its maritime borders consist of the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west and the Mediterranean, Black and Caspian Seas to the south.Land relief in Europe shows great variation within relatively small areas. Between 2004 and 2013, more Central European countries began joining, expanding the EU to 28 European countries and once more making Europe a major economical and political centre of power.
Europass
Most of the older geology of western Europe existed as part of the ancient microcontinent Avalonia. The northern plain contains the old geological continent of Baltica and so may be regarded geologically as the “main continent”, while peripheral highlands and mountainous regions in the south and west constitute fragments from various other geological continents. Europe’s most significant feature is the dichotomy between highland and mountainous Southern Europe and a vast, partially underwater, northern plain ranging from Ireland in the west to the Ural Mountains in the east. Finally and very soon afterwards, Laurasia itself split up again, into Laurentia (North America) and the Eurasian continent.
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The term “continent” usually implies the physical geography of a large land mass completely or almost completely surrounded by water at its borders. Islands are generally grouped with the nearest continental landmass, hence Iceland is considered to be part of Europe, while the nearby island of Greenland is usually assigned to North America, although politically belonging to Denmark. Most major world languages use words derived from Eurṓpē or Europa to refer to the continent. There have been attempts to connect Eurṓpē to a Semitic term for west, this being either Akkadian erebu meaning ‘to go down, set’ (said of the sun) or Phoenician ‘ereb ‘evening, west’, which is at the origin of Arabic maghreb and Hebrew ma’arav.
Constantinople was the largest and wealthiest city in Europe from the 9th to the 12th centuries, with a population of approximately 400,000. In the Iberian Peninsula, the Reconquista concluded with the fall of Granada in 1492, ending over seven centuries of Islamic rule in the south-western peninsula. To the east, Kievan Rus’ expanded from its capital in Kiev to become the largest state in Europe by the 10th century. The Umayyads were then defeated by the Frankish leader Charles Martel at the Battle of Poitiers in 732, which ended their northward advance. Between 711 and 720, most of the lands of the Visigothic Kingdom of Iberia were brought under Muslim rule—save for small areas in the northwest (Asturias) and largely Basque regions in the Pyrenees. While the Roman empire in the west continued to decline, Roman traditions and the Roman state remained strong in the predominantly Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire, also known as the Byzantine Empire.
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The spacious eastern steppes and, to the west and north, primeval forests as yet only marginally touched by human occupancy further underlined environmental contrasts. Yet the peninsular and insular western extremity of the continent, thrusting toward the North Atlantic Ocean, provides—thanks to its latitude and its physical geography—a relatively genial human habitat, and the long processes of human history came to mark off the region as the home of a distinctive civilization. Europe, second smallest of the world’s continents, composed of the westward-projecting peninsulas of Eurasia (the great landmass that it shares with Asia) and occupying nearly one-fifteenth of the world’s total land area.
The Gulf Stream not only carries warm water to Europe’s coast but also warms up the prevailing westerly winds that blow across the continent from the Atlantic Ocean. Further east, the Nogai Horde and Kazakh Khanate frequently raided the Slavic-speaking areas of contemporary Russia and Ukraine for hundreds of years, until the Russian expansion and conquest of most of northern Eurasia (i.e. Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Siberia). In the remote regions of north-western Iberia and the middle Pyrenees the power of the Muslims in the south was scarcely felt.
Soon after, the Spanish and Portuguese began establishing large global empires in the Americas, Asia, Africa and Oceania. The plague had a devastating effect on Europe’s social structure; it induced people to live for the moment as illustrated by Giovanni Boccaccio in The Decameron (1353). The state was consolidated under Ivan III the Great and Ivan the Terrible, steadily expanding to the east and south over the next centuries.
This English disaster also allowed the Spanish fleet to retain its capability to wage war for the next decades. A year later, England tried unsuccessfully to invade Spain, allowing Philip II of Spain to maintain his dominant war capacity in Europe. France, the Netherlands and England soon followed in building large colonial empires with vast holdings in Africa, the Americas and Asia.
- Voltaire, writing in 1760 about Peter the Great’s efforts to make Russia more European, ignored the whole boundary question with his claim that neither Russia, Scandinavia, northern Germany, nor Poland were fully part of Europe.
- After the Second World War the economy of the UK was in a state of ruin, and continued to suffer relative economic decline in the following decades.
- The 1745 atlas published by the Russian Academy of Sciences has the boundary follow the Don beyond Kalach as far as Serafimovich before cutting north towards Arkhangelsk, while other 18th- to 19th-century mapmakers such as John Cary followed Strahlenberg’s prescription.
h and 19th centuries
According to a population projection of the UN Population Division, Europe’s population may fall to between 680 and 720 million people by 2050, which would be 7% of the world population at that time. The western states moved to link their economies together, providing the basis for the EU and increasing cross border trade. The European Union, a political entity composed of 27 European states, comprises the largest single economic area in the world. The least democratic countries in Europe are Belarus, Russia, and Turkey in 2024 according to the V-Dem Democracy indices.
Happy 20 years anniversary, Europass!
Most countries that are part of the European Union use the same coin. This way all people in the European Unioncan get important information in their own languageand understand it. In every country of the European Unionpeople speak their own language.The European Union protects the right of peopleto communicate in their own language. The Schengen Area was made in 1985.Today 25 out of the 27 countries of the European Unionare part of the Schengen Area. Thanks to the Schengen Area, it is now easier for peopleto travel for work or tourism. To become part of the European Union,these countries must workto make all laws and values of the European Unionhappen in them.
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The empire continued to expand under emperors such as Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, who spent time on the Empire’s northern border fighting Germanic, Pictish and Scottish tribes. Greece was followed by Rome, which left its mark on law, politics, language, engineering, architecture, vegas casino app government, and many more key aspects in western civilisation. The Flora Europaea adopted a boundary along the Terek and Kuban rivers, so southwards from the Kuma and the Manych, but still with the Caucasus entirely in Asia. 1773 by a German naturalist, Peter Simon Pallas, as a valley that once connected the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, and subsequently was proposed as a natural boundary between continents. Since then, many modern analytical geographers like Halford Mackinder have declared that they see little validity in the Ural Mountains as a boundary between continents. Voltaire, writing in 1760 about Peter the Great’s efforts to make Russia more European, ignored the whole boundary question with his claim that neither Russia, Scandinavia, northern Germany, nor Poland were fully part of Europe.
An alternative view is that of Robert Beekes, who has argued in favour of a pre-Indo-European origin for the name, explaining that a derivation from eurus would yield a different toponym than Europa. One view is that her name derives from the Ancient Greek elements εὐρύς (eurús) ‘wide, broad’, and ὤψ (ōps, gen. ὠπός, ōpós) ‘eye, face, countenance’, hence their composite Eurṓpē would mean ‘wide-gazing’ or ‘broad of aspect’. The EU economy is the second-largest in the world by nominal GDP and third-largest by PPP-adjusted GDP. Regular popular elections take place every five years within the EU; they are considered the second-largest democratic elections in the world after India’s. A large bloc of countries, the Schengen Area, have also abolished internal border and immigration controls. The Industrial Revolution, which began in Great Britain at the end of the 18th century, gave rise to radical economic, cultural, and social change in Western Europe and eventually the wider world.
The continent’s eastern boundary (north to south) runs along the Ural Mountains and then roughly southwest along the Emba (Zhem) River, terminating at the northern Caspian coast. Europe’s eastern boundary, however, is not a cultural, political, or economic discontinuity on the land comparable, for example, to the insulating significance of the Himalayas, which clearly mark a northern limit to South Asian civilization. A narrow east–west tongue of Eurasian grassland (the steppe) extends westwards from Ukraine and southern Russia and ends in Hungary and traverses into taiga to the north. Another widely endorsed scheme puts the western portion of the Caucasus region in Europe and the eastern part—that is, the bulk of Azerbaijan and small portions of Armenia, Georgia, and Russia’s Caspian Sea coast—in Asia.
Pan and Pfeil (2004) count 87 distinct “peoples of Europe”, of which 33 form the majority population in at least one sovereign state, while the remaining 54 constitute ethnic minorities. This natural decrease in population is reduced by the fact that more people migrate to Europe from other continents than vice versa. This is slightly more than one ninth of the world’s population.v The population density of Europe (the number of people per area) is the second highest of any continent, behind Asia. Nineteen EU countries share the euro as a common currency.Four European countries rank in the top ten of the world’s largest national economies in GDP (PPP). The richer states tend to be in the Northwest and West in general, followed by Central Europe, while most economies of Eastern and Southeastern Europe are still reemerging from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the breakup of Yugoslavia. Others are oriented south–north (Scandinavian Mountains, Dinarides, Carpathians, Apennines) and because the rain falls primarily on the side of mountains that is oriented towards the sea, forests grow well on this side, while on the other side, the conditions are much less favourable.