Europe

The Cold War

1,947 CE – 1,991 CE

Two nuclear-armed blocs avoid direct war for forty-four years.

World War II

1,939 CE – 1,945 CE

The deadliest conflict in history, including the Holocaust and the first use of nuclear weapons.

World War I

1,914 CE – 1,918 CE

Industrial warfare kills around seventeen million people and destroys four empires.

Napoleon

1,799 CE – 1,815 CE

He conquers most of Europe, exports the revolution's legal code, and loses at Waterloo.

The French Revolution

1,789 CE – 1,799 CE

A monarchy falls, a republic is declared, and the terror that follows shapes every revolution after it.

The Industrial Revolution

1,760 CE – 1,900 CE

Steam, coal and factories change how humans live more than anything since farming.

The Enlightenment

1,650 CE – 1,800 CE

Reason, evidence and rights become organising ideas — Descartes, Newton, Voltaire, Rousseau.

Magellan's expedition circles the globe

1,519 CE – 1,522 CE

The first circumnavigation. Magellan himself was killed in the Philippines partway through.

The Reformation

1,517 CE – 1,648 CE

Luther splits western Christianity, and Europe spends a century and a half fighting about it.

Columbus crosses the Atlantic

1,492 CE

Contact between hemispheres begins, along with the deadliest exchange of disease in human history.

Gutenberg's press

1,440 CE

Movable type in Europe makes books cheap, and makes it very hard to control what people read.

The Renaissance

1,400 CE – 1,600 CE

A rediscovery of classical learning and an explosion in art, anatomy and engineering.

The Black Death

1,347 CE – 1,351 CE

Bubonic plague kills perhaps a third to a half of Europe in four years, and remakes its economy.

The Hundred Years' War

1,337 CE – 1,453 CE

England and France fight on and off for more than a century. Joan of Arc appears near the end of it.

Magna Carta

1,215 CE

English barons force the king to accept that he is not above the law.

The Crusades

1,095 CE – 1,291 CE

Two centuries of European campaigns in the eastern Mediterranean.

Norse settlement in Newfoundland

1,000 CE

Europeans reach the Americas roughly five centuries before Columbus, and do not stay.

The Empire of Charlemagne

800 CE – 888 CE

A Frankish king is crowned emperor, briefly reuniting much of western Europe.

The Vikings

793 CE – 1,066 CE

Scandinavian raiders, traders and settlers reach Baghdad, Newfoundland and everywhere between.

Germanic tribes move

200 CE – 500 CE

Goths, Vandals, Angles, Saxons and others move into and across the Roman world.

European Union and the euro