page_title: Europe
section_title: Early modern period
hierarchical_section_title: Europe / History / Early modern period
context_page_description: Europe is a continent located entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere. It comprises the westernmost part of Eurasia and is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and Asia to the east. Europe is commonly considered to be separated from Asia by the watershed of the Ural Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian Sea, the Greater Caucasus, the Black Sea, and the waterways of the Turkish Straits. Although some of this border is over land, Europe is generally accorded the status of a full continent because of its great physical size and the weight of history and tradition.
  Europe covers about 10,180,000 square kilometres, or 2% of the Earth's surface, making it the sixth largest continent. Politically, Europe is divided into about fifty sovereign states, of which Russia is the largest and most populous, spanning 39% of the continent and comprising 15% of its population. Europe had a total population of about 741 million as of 2018.
context_section_description: The Renaissance was a period of cultural change originating in Florence and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The rise of a new humanism was accompanied by the recovery of forgotten classical Greek and Arabic knowledge from monastic libraries, often translated from Arabic into Latin. The Renaissance spread across Europe between the 14th and 16th centuries: it saw the flowering of art, philosophy, music, and the sciences, under the joint patronage of royalty, the nobility, the Roman Catholic Church, and an emerging merchant class. Patrons in Italy, including the Medici family of Florentine bankers and the Popes in Rome, funded prolific quattrocento and cinquecento artists such as Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci.
  Political intrigue within the Church in the mid-14th century caused the Western Schism. During this forty-year period, two popes—one in Avignon and one in Rome—claimed rulership over the Church. Although the schism was eventually healed in 1417, the papacy's spiritual authority had suffered greatly. In the 15th century, Europe started to extend itself beyond its geographic frontiers. Spain and Portugal, the greatest naval powers of the time, took the lead in exploring the world. Exploration reached the Southern Hemisphere in the Atlantic and the Southern tip of Africa. Christopher Columbus reached the New World in 1492, and Vasco da Gama opened the ocean route to the East linking the Atlantic and Indian Oceans in 1498. Ferdinand Magellan reached Asia westward across the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans in the expedition of Magellan-Elcano, resulting in the first circumnavigation of the globe, completed by Juan Sebastián Elcano (1519–22). Soon after, the Spanish and Portuguese began establishing large global empires in the Americas, Asia, Africa and Oceania. France, the Dutch Republic and England soon followed in building large colonial empires with vast holdings in Africa, the Americas, and Asia. Roughly coinciding with the Age of Discovery was the emergence and spread of Protestantism and the Roman Catholic Church's militant reaction to it as manifested through the Counter-Reformation. Thus, religion played a crucial ideological role during the 16th century, with northern European Protestant and southern European Catholic armies slaughtering each other while praying to the same God.
  There was not a single year of peace in Europe during the first half of the 17th century. This was especially true for Habsburg Spain, which began the century at war with the Dutch Republic and subsequently went to war against almost every other European nation. Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715) aspired to make France the leading European power. His expansionist ambitions resulted in numerous wars that positioned nearly all European powers against France and bankrupted the French state but turned France into the most powerful state in Europe. Louis XIV's wars cost France over 1,000,000 battle casualties.
  The 17th century in central and eastern Europe was a period of general decline. Central and Eastern Europe experienced more than 150 famines in a 200-year period between 1501 and 1700. From the Union of Krewo (1385) central and eastern Europe was dominated by Kingdom of Poland and Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Between 1648 and 1655 in the central and eastern Europe ended hegemony of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. From the 15th to 18th centuries, when the disintegrating khanates of the Golden Horde were conquered by Russia, Tatars from the Crimean Khanate frequently raided Eastern Slavic lands to capture slaves. Further east, the Nogai Horde and Kazakh Khanate frequently raided the Slavic-speaking areas of Russia, Ukraine and Poland for hundreds of years, until the Russian expansion and conquest of most of northern Eurasia (i.e. Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Siberia).
  The Renaissance and the New Monarchs marked the start of an Age of Discovery, a period of exploration, invention, and scientific development. Among the great figures of the Western scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries were Copernicus, Kepler, G
caption: The School of Athens by Raphael (1511): Contemporaries such as Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci (centre) are portrayed as classical scholars of the Renaissance.
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