Many small friends who like history can be said to be backwards in China's historical dynasties and story lines, but they have no understanding of world history. Especially the friends who like to watch European and American dramas feel that the historical timeline of Europe is very confusing and complicated, and there are countless question marks: one Henry I, one Louis I, one Germany is called Brandenburg, one is called Prussia, one is Viking, one is what German barbarian invasion...
So, starting today, we will systematically talk about the history of Europe and those amazing legends and stories, together spanning classical times, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Great Discoveries of Geography, the Industrial Revolution, the World Wars...
The history of the East and the West is compared to the timeline
The most important opening of European history is the ancient Rome, which inherited the Greek civilization. If the philosophical brilliance of Greek civilization is the controversy of a hundred schools of thought in the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States of China, and the source of European thought and culture, then Rome is like the Qin and Han dynasties in China, which laid the basic political and legal formulation and historical development trend for Europe.
It should be known that the feudal etiquette and emperor system of foreign Confucianism and internal law established by the Qin and Han dynasties in China have been constantly improved and developed around the rules and veins set at this time for more than two thousand years from the Han to the Qing.
The same is true of Europe, after the collapse of Rome, the European countries also began to develop around the Christian theology and aristocratic system left over from Rome, each forming its own culture, and many european continental countries have always regarded "rebuilding the glory of the Roman Empire" as the ultimate goal of national struggle.
Then we will officially approach the beginning of European history - the Roman world!
The origin of Rome - the time of the monarchy
In the origin story of the Roman Latin people, there are very strong myths and legends like the origin of the Chinese people. In China, it was the Yellow Emperor and the Yan Emperor, with the help of the Kunlun Immortals, who defeated Xuan You in the Battle of Chalu and ruled the Central Plains, and the Chinese nation began to form.
The origin of Rome is that after the Greeks defeated Troy with a wooden horse, the Trojan hero Aeneas led the remnants to escape, and after hardships came to the Latin Plain of the Italian Peninsula, established the kingdom of Longa, became the king, and his descendants ruled the Latinum Plain.
The "Trojan Horse Scheme" of the Trojan War
By the time of the 15th king, Numitor, he was usurped by his younger brother Amurius, executed all of Numitor's sons, and sent Numitor's daughter Sylvia to be a priestess, preventing her from marrying and having children.
However, when the kind Sylvia was a priestess, she was adored by ares the god of war because of her beautiful appearance and pure heart, and after the combination of one person and one god, she gave birth to twins.
Amurius was furious when he learned of this, and ordered his servants to throw their two children into the Tiber and drown. But the servant took pity on the two weeping babies, and left them only on the bank of the river, hoping that some well-meaning man would pass by and adopt the two babies.
Not long after the servants left, the cries of the children alarmed a she-wolf who had come to the river to drink water, and the she-wolf not only did not harm the two children, but instead fed them with milk. Coincidentally, at this time, a shepherd just happened to pass by here, very surprised by the magical scene he saw, and thought that it must be the result of the blessing of the gods, so the shepherd took the two babies home.
The two babies grew up under the care of him and his wife and gave them names— Romulus and Remus.
Roman mythology of Romulus and Remus, who grew up eating wolf's milk
After the adults Romulus and Remus learned their true identities by chance, their deep hatred prompted the brothers to gather many citizens who were dissatisfied with Amurius's rule and launched a rebellion to regain the throne.
After the victory, the two brothers decided to build a new city on the tiber river where the she-wolf fed them. However, the two had a dispute over what to name the new city, and both sides wanted to name the new city after themselves, and each did not give in. As a result, a scuffle ensued between the two brothers, in which Remus was killed by Romulus.
Since then, Romulus's name has been given the name of the new city, Rome, and Romulus has also established a series of political systems such as the Senate and the National Assembly. In 753 BC, Rome was officially built, and Romulus became the first king of Rome.
By 510 BC, until the overthrow of The Proud Man, the seventh king of Rome, Tarquin, there were seven kings who ruled Rome, a period known as the Age of Monarchy.
Of course, legends belong to legends, history belongs to history, and under the historical research of many contemporary scholars, it is believed that of the seven kings in the era of kings, only the seventh king, Takwon the Younger, is indeed his person, while the first six, including the legendary Romulus, have their own existence. However, European scholars in ancient times were convinced of it, just as the ancient history of the mainland did not deny the existence of the Yellow Emperor and the Yan Emperor.
The mother river of Rome, the Tiber
In the late monarchical era, with the stability of the country and the development of productive forces, the Roman citizens began to divide, the rich began to become aristocrats, and the bankrupt people could only live on the nobility, and even became slaves. Thus a large number of citizens became the private finances of the nobility, resulting in a shortage of soldiers in Rome, and fewer and fewer citizens paying taxes to the state, while the nobility became richer and richer.
After the ascension of the sixth king, Servius, a series of reforms were carried out according to the situation in Rome at that time, disrupting the previously established tribal assemblies based on blood relations, and instead establishing new tribes based on the region where the citizens were located, expanding the scope of Roman citizens. A census of citizens' property was then carried out, dividing citizens into five classes according to the amount of property, each with different obligations and the provision of different numbers of hundreds, guaranteeing Rome's military resources and taxes, and creating the Council of Senturelia in favor of the nobility as a new citizens' assembly, alleviating the contradictions between the king and the nobility.
This is the famous Servius reform, which historians generally define as the true founding of Rome. Because after the reform, Rome officially got rid of the primitive blood clan system and established a real class state, and the hierarchical aristocracy became the source of the feudal hierarchy in Western Europe in the future.
Although Severus's reforms made rome's political system more mature, they also contributed to the expansion of the power of the nobility, monopolizing the Senate and many civil service positions.
During the reign of the seventh king, the "Proud", Tarquin, began to seek to strengthen the king's power to weaken the power of the nobles, resulting in tensions between the king and the nobles, and Tarquin's rogue son, Setus, raped the wife of the nobleman Lucius at this time. This incident led directly to the senate nobles calling on all Latins to revolt, driving out the Tarquin family and formally abolishing the monarchy.
The rise of Rome – the Republican Era
After overthrowing the king, Rome created two consuls as supreme heads of state, two equal in power, for a one-year term.
The venue of the Roman Senate
The selection of the consul was made by the former consul who nominated two nobles from the Senate, who were then elected by the Council of Sentoria and approved by the Senate, and the Senate acted as its advisory body, and important matters needed to be negotiated and approved by the nobles of the Senate before they could be carried out.
Moreover, the nobles of the Senate were of a lifelong system, the consuls were also elected from the Senate, and the right to interpret the law was completely up to the nobility. Therefore, the Roman republic was actually a noble republic, and the power of the commoners was difficult to guarantee, but the soldiers and taxes were provided by the commoners.
Therefore, in order to protect their rights, the civilians repeatedly launched civilian evacuation campaigns when Rome was in danger of foreign invasions. In other words: if we are not given power, we will move away, and you nobles will fight the war yourself!
This trick was tried and tested, and the nobles were forced to make concessions to the commoners again and again, and the commoners also won many powers for themselves, such as the establishment of a special public defender who spoke out for the commoners, the power was almost equal to that of the consuls, and the commoners were not allowed to become slaves because of the debt problem.
One of the more famous is that the nobles set up the "Twelve Bronze Table Law" in the square, and carved the law word by word. In this way, the nobles could not interpret the law in court at will, and the trial case could only be based on the legal provisions engraved on the square. And this became the original blueprint for roman law and The laws of European countries.
Twelve bronze watches erected on the Roman Forum
The commoners were no longer slaves to the nobles, so the new question arose: the commoners could not become slaves, so who would work for the nobles?
There is only one answer: the enslavement of other peoples.
So Rome began to move towards external expansion, and the commoners supported the expansion plans of the nobles in order to obtain more land and wealth.
Rome first defeated the neighboring Idararians through three wars of love, completely controlling the entire Latin Plain, and through three Samonet Wars, defeated the Greek colonial city-states in southern Italy. By 272 BC, the last Greek colonial city-state, Talindun, had surrendered, and Rome had ruled the entire Italian peninsula except for the Alps.
With the completion of the conquest of Italy, a large number of slaves and wealth poured into the city of Rome, and the Romans tasted the sweetness and could not control the pace of continuing the conquest. In addition, there is a more important reason for this: that is, the Italian peninsula is mountainous and belongs to the Mediterranean climate, the region is small and not suitable for growing food crops, and with the sharp increase in population, it can only continue to trade through the sea, using wine and olive oil to Exchange for food in Egypt, Syria and other regions across the Mediterranean.
But the Mediterranean trade routes were not something you could take, as the western Mediterranean was dominated by Carthage in North Africa, where its power was booming, and in the eastern Mediterranean, Macedonia and anticolic after the dissolution of Alexander's empire had monopolized maritime trade.
The hegemon of the western Mediterranean, Carthage, and the rising Rome
Among them, the most conflict with Rome was Carthage, because Carthage had established commercial bases and colonies on many islands in western Italy at that time, so if Rome wanted to gain the right to speak in the Mediterranean, it must first break through the blockade of Carthage. Between 264 B.C. and 146 B.C., the two sides began a war that lasted for more than 100 years, and after three major wars, Rome finally won.
Because the Romans despised the Carthaginians as "Punics", this war of supremacy was called the "Punic War".
During the Second Punic War, the famous Carthaginian general Hannibal made an expedition to Italy and nearly destroyed Rome. However, the Roman general Szibbio came to a move to "encircle Wei to save Zhao", when Hannibal stormed the city of Rome, crossed the sea to land in North Africa to force the city of Carthage, Hannibal was urgently recalled, and finally lost to Szibio in the battle of Zama, which was also the first defeat in Hannibal's life, and also marked the end of Carthaginian history. Finally, carthage was destroyed in 146 AD and became a roman province.
While fighting Carthage, Rome fought three Macedonian wars with Macedonia in the east, and the Syrian War with Seleucus, completing the conquest of the eastern Mediterranean.
At this point, Rome has achieved the supremacy of the Mediterranean, and it is completely possible to walk sideways in the Mediterranean, and no one dares to say no. However, the war in Rome was not over.
Hannibal, known as one of the four gods of war in the West
It is said that where there is oppression, there is resistance.
In the areas conquered by Rome, the Romans did not treat these conquered peoples equally, but divided their attitude towards Rome into different hierarchies, gave them very little power, and plundered these conquered peoples as slaves, which led to the dissatisfaction of many conquered areas, especially the Malsi on the Italian peninsula and the descendants of Greek colonists.
So in 91 BC, other non-Latins on the Italian peninsula formed an alliance against Rome, and followed the Roman political system to establish the Italian Alliance, so in 91 BC, the Allied Wars broke out, and at the same time, uprisings against Roman rule broke out in Pontus and Greek city-states in West Asia.
In order to cope with this sudden change, the Roman citizen soldiers alone could not cope with so many wars, and finally, at the behest of the Senate, Malleus, who was a soldier by military background, was elected consul and reformed the Roman military system, establishing a conscription system and mercenaries, requiring soldiers to serve for sixteen years, supported by the state during their service, and distributed to the land after discharge.
This military reform completely changed the Roman republican system, because before that, Rome had temporarily gathered young people when it was necessary to fight, and dry food and weapons were prepared by itself, and after the war, they were disbanded and returned home, and the soldiers belonged to the state completely.
This change led to the soldier becoming a professional soldier, serving for sixteen years, at any time at the disposal of the general. Although this satisfies the needs of war, at the same time, the power of the general has also increased, and the army has invisibly become his personal property, creating capital conditions for the future dictatorship of the general.
Moreover, Malleus also invented the joint system, unified the weapons equipped between different branches of the army, and also introduced the training method of the gladiatorial school into the army training, strengthened the training of soldiers, and greatly improved the military strength, and the Roman corps with strong combat effectiveness was officially born.
Legions of the Roman Wing Formation
Malleus's military reforms not only ensured Rome's victory in the Allied wars, but after the war, the shortcomings began to appear, and the Senate was also worried about Malleus's growing power, so in 88 BC they relieved Malleus of his command, appointed Sulla as consul and commanded troops to West Asia to quell the rebellion in Pontus.
Before Sulla's army had left Italy, Malleus, who was far away in North Africa, staged a coup d'état under his own men in the city of Rome and ordered Sulla's removal. And Sulla was not a soft persimmon, and then led the army to turn around and attack the city of Rome, setting a precedent for the Romans to fight the Romans.
A 5-year civil war ensued between the two sides, culminating in Sulla's defeat of Malleus. The victorious Sulla was far stronger than Malleus, and directly established a personal military dictatorship in Rome through the strength of his own military power.
After Sulla's death, the Roman nobles thought that Roman power could be restored to the same level as the Senate had been, and it so happened that the largest slave revolt in Roman history, the Spartacus Revolt, broke out.
The story about Spartacus has been adapted into a number of film and television dramas and novel works, and everyone may have learned about this macho man from film and television dramas. Originally a slave of the Gladiatorial Academy, Spartacus led 70 gladiatorial slaves to revolt due to dissatisfaction with oppression, but unexpectedly developed into an uprising army of more than 120,000 people. The rebel army swept across the Entire Italian Peninsula, from south to north and from north to south, and countless Roman nobles were slaughtered.
The Spartacus Revolt swept across the Italian peninsula
At this time, the panicked Senate could only delegate power to the military nobility. This is similar to the Yellow Turban Uprising at the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, when the imperial court was powerless to suppress it, so it had to give orders to local officials and gentry to recruit their own troops to suppress the Yellow Turban Army.
Of course, the day the Yellow Turban Army was suppressed was the time when the masses rose. Rome was no exception, and just after the suppression of the Spartacus Revolt, three tyrants were born on the stage of Roman history — Pompey, Crassus and Caesar. After the war, the three formed a secret alliance in order to divide up power and fight against the Senate together, which is the famous "first three-headed alliance" in history.
Just as the Senate was declining and could no longer threaten their rule, the contradictions between the three began to intensify. By 53 BC, Crassus had died in the Parthian War, and only two males remained on the three ends.
The year after Crassus's death, Caesar set out for Gaul, the region of present-day France. After Caesar had led his troops away, the Senate fell to Pompey and declared Caesar a roman enemy. And so a new civil war broke out.
As a famous military wizard in Western history, Caesar not only had outstanding leadership ability, but also had superior strategy and wisdom, if put into Chinese history, it is completely Cao Cao-like figure, and the Senate and Pompey are completely unable to withstand Caesar's attack.
And after Pompey's defeat and exile from Egypt, Caesar went to Egypt in pursuit of Pompey, and met the famous Cleopatra VII, which is the background of the beginning of the story of the movie "Cleopatra".
Caesar and Cleopatra in the movie Cleopatra
After Caesar's complete victory in the civil war, he was appointed consul for life by the Senate, monopolizing power, and in fact Rome was already an imperial system in the guise of republicanism. But before Caesar could claim the throne, he was assassinated by the republican faction in the Senate.
After Caesar's death, his generals Antony, Rebida, and Octavian, Caesar's adopted son (who was also Caesar's nephew and grandson), began a new round of contention for power. At the same time as they fought among themselves, the status of the Senate was enhanced, and the three had to suspend the struggle and turn to an alliance to fight together against the Senate, known in history as the "Last Three-Headed Alliance".
The fate of the three of them was the same as that of the first three-headed alliance, and when the Senate could not threaten their position, sooner or later the alliance would break down, and a new round of civil war would begin again.
The most powerful of the three of them, Anthony, like Yuan Shao at the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, was the most favored one at that time, but Antony had great military achievements and prestige, but lacked political acumen, and later fell in love with Cleopatra, indulging in beauty.
The shrewd Octavian took control of the Senate, which had the flavor of "blackmailing the Son of Heaven to order the princes". He first joined forces with Rebida to defeat Antony's main force, and then deprived Rebida of his military power through political means, and finally in 31 BC, he completely defeated Antony, and also destroyed Ptolemaic Egypt, turning Egypt into a Roman province.
Octavian, the founder of the Roman Empire
In 27 BC, the Senate gave Octavian the title of "Augustus", officially establishing the system of heads of state, marking Rome's official entry from the republican era into the imperial era.
The Glory and Decline of Rome – The Age of Empires
After Octavian, his adopted son Tiberius succeeded to the throne, successively through Caligula, Claudius, nero, a total of four emperors, known as the Claudius Dynasty.
In the first three emperors of the Claudius dynasty, the continuous improvement of the Roman political system, the improvement of the life of the Romans, and more importantly, the continuous strengthening of the power of the emperor, the weakening of the privileges of the Senate, and the development trend towards the Chinese emperor's autocratic dictatorship. But when the fourth emperor, Nero, ascended the throne, he became the first tyrant in Roman history.
Nero was cruel and fierce, debauched, ignored the government, and even set fire to the city of Rome in order to build a new palace, and Nero also imposed this charge on the Christians who were forming and growing at that time, and hunted and persecuted Christians. So, in the history of Christianity, Nero was portrayed as a satan-like demonic figure.
Of course, Nero's perverse behavior caused widespread discontent among all classes in Rome, and revolts were set off everywhere, and even the Guards around him began to declare a crusade against Nero. Eventually, the rebellious Nero committed suicide on the outskirts of Rome, ending the Claudius dynasty.
After Nero's death, the provincial legions in various places supported the emperor and fought each other, falling into the era of warlord division, forming the so-called "era of the four emperors". As a result, Emperor Weber, of the Eastern Provincial Legion, won the victory, established the Flavian dynasty in 69 AD, and ordered the construction of the Roman Amphitheatre to begin.
Roman landmark in Italy, the Colosseum of Ancient Rome
However, the Flavis dynasty was extreme, and after only 27 years, it took three emperors to perish. The Senate elected Nerva as emperor, inaugurating the most prosperous Antonian dynasty in Roman history. Because this dynasty had a total of six monarchs, the first five: Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antony, and Aurelius were called the Five Wise Men of Rome.
Among them, the second emperor, Trajan, was known as the "Emperor Wu of Rome", and during his reign, Trajan actively expanded the outside world, pushing the territory of Rome to the extreme: from Mesopotamia in the east to the Atlantic Ocean in the west, to the British Isles in the north, and to North Africa in the south.
However, although the territory is large, it is difficult to last, and after Hadrian took the throne, he had to stop external expansion, turn to attack and defend, devote himself to internal affairs, and also build the Great Wall on the northern border and Britain, of which the British Hadrian's Wall was built during this period, and also became the general scope and standard of the dividing line between England and Scotland in the future.
After the reign of Trajan and Hadrian, by the time of Antony, Rome was at its peak, so the dynasty was also given the name of Antony.
However, while the territory of the Roman state was flourishing, great changes were taking place in the steppes to the east and north. That is, the Huns in the far east could not resist the attack of the Han Dynasty, and the Northern Xiongnu began to move west, and the Whip of God whipped all the way from the east to the west.
The Roman Empire and the surrounding barbarians
In the late Antonian dynasty, a large number of Germanic barbarians in northern Rome, such as Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals, and Franks, could not resist the invasion of the Huns, and began to flee to Rome, burning and looting on the Roman border.
After the assassination of the last emperor of the Antony Dynasty, Commodus, for tyranny, Rome fell into civil war again, during which although there was a brief unified Severus dynasty, but soon Rome quickly entered the most chaotic - "Thirty Tyrants".
Finally, after more than a hundred years of chaos, in 284 AD, Diocletian swept away the civil unrest and carried out a major reform of Rome, implementing a system of four emperors and co-governance. It was to divide the entire Roman Empire into two, to govern the eastern part of Rome by himself, and to hand over the west to his good friend Maximian, both of whom were called "Augustus", and under the two of them were each looking for a deputy emperor called "Caesar" to take charge of a part of the region.
Moreover, in order to solve the problem of the Germanic barbarians, Diocletian began to reform the military, recruit the barbarians into the army, and implement a policy of edicts. However, this policy laid the foundation for the subsequent demise of Western Rome.
After the abdication of Diocletian and Maximian, Rome fought for the throne, and in the end, a generation of famous emperors, Constantine I, won the victory, abolished the four-emperor co-rule system, and moved the capital from Rome to Byzantium, named Constantinople, called New Rome.
The division of the Roman Empire
Moreover, Constantine made concessions to Christians in response to the growing Christianity, issued the Edict of Milan in 313 AD, recognizing the legitimacy of Christianity, and in 323 convened the first great religious assembly in the history of Christianity in Nicaea, unified the right to interpret the Bible within Christianity, and formulated the "Nicaea Creed", which became a doctrine that Christians must abide by. Because of Constantine's contribution to Christianity, Constantine is also known as the First Emperor by Christians.
More than 50 years after Constantine's death, the Roman Emperor Theodosius I officially enshrined Christianity as the state religion, and since then Christian doctrine has become the core of the values of the European people, just like the influence of Chinese Confucianism on Chinese history, deeply engraved into the marrow of thought.
In 395 AD, on his deathbed, Theodosius I divided Rome in two and handed it over to two sons, and the Roman Empire was once again divided. Moreover, at this time, the Western Roman slave revolts were frequent, the external Huns gained a foothold in the Po River Valley, established the Hun Empire, and the nightmare of Europe, attila the Hun king, began to rise.
The Eastern Roman Empire, because of its commercial prosperity and fewer slave revolts, was able to withstand the invasion of barbarians and Huns, while the Western Roman Empire was under internal and external attacks, and the last Western Roman Emperor, Romulus, was deposed by the Germanic barbarian mercenary leader Odoac in 476 AD, and Western Rome was destroyed.
The situation in Europe after the fall of the Western Romans
The Germanic barbarians officially entered the historical stage in Western Europe, and some Lehragian states such as the Ostrogothic Kingdom, the Visigothic Kingdom, the Burgundian Kingdom, the Frankish Kingdom, etc. began to be established on the ruins of Western Rome, and history also entered the medieval period.
The only remaining Eastern Roman Empire, as historians call it, the Byzantine Empire, could only curl up in the border between Asia and Europe to continue the last vestiges of the Roman Empire.